I fail to see why a huge, powerful country feels insecure enough to need nuclear weapons
But what is the source of that power, *in this context*? It's the standing armed forces and the hardware at their disposal, including the nukes.
I'm not saying that they're necessarily required, just pointing out that the sense of security comes from the knowledge that no-one dare fuck with them in a conventional war. Now terrorism, that's proving to be a different matter (and will be further increasing the perceived need for a powerful military, nukes and all)
Out here in the corporate world, believe me when I say that all anyone wants is to get the job done and go home on time for once. If ODF helps that, then great I'm all over it. If ODF doesn't help that, perhaps because my customer doesn't/can't/won't use it, then it is less than nothing to me.
All the fine ideals and long-term goals are nothing if I can't get my job done now. (And believe me, I recognise the need for open standards and open formats; I'm just not willing to sacrifice my already too-short free time to be one of the early adopters)
I was beginning to think I was the only person here who realised that - my spare time is valuable to me yes, but in monetary terms it's free. I get the same amount of money per day/week/month/year whether I spend every night out with friends, watching TV, playing games, researching and building a PC or staring at the wall.
Unless you take unpaid time off work to do stuff, time is not money. (It's actually far more precious, but for an entirely different reason that has nothing to do with cash)
I spend time to save money and vice versa, depending on which I value more in that context. I have a dishwasher, washing machine, etc which cost money to buy and run in order to save time I would otherwise have to spend on household chores. I will spend time researching things in order to save money on the things that I buy - I have bought myself one PC so far in my life. Every subsequent PC has been an upgrade to my current one. It's cheaper than buying a whole new machine but takes a little longer, which is fine by me.
My free time is valuable, but it costs me no money at all.
If you area computer professional, and you build your own computer, then the final cost of the computer you built is far more than off the shelf, once you add in your labor cost. Unless, maybe, you are a burger flipper.
As long as you're not taking time out of contracted, paid-by-the-hour work, your profession is irrelevant.
What you practice is false economy- like my Mom who used to drive and extra 15 mils to save fifteen cents.
That's not the same - driving further actually costs you more money as you burn more fuel, incur more wear and tear on the car, etc. Spending time on research, construction, etc costs me no money as I wouldn't be being paid for the time anyway.
When a member of your IT staff does it, you can fire or even prosecute them, and unless they're really malicious and destroy or poison the data and back ups, you still have the original data.
When an outsourced IT company does it:
a) it may not be illegal in their country of origin b) it may not be covered in the contract you have with them c) even if it is, it may not be covered in whatever deal is made if they're bought out d) there may be no mechanism for (easily) recovering your data in the event of terminating service e) if they go tits up there may be no way at all to recover your data
It's not a question of whether or not trusting mission-critical data or services to a third party is a risk, it's a question of whether it's a sensible or necessary risk to take.
Or stop the (misnamed) DNS Client service, which is what caches DNS info locally. I had to kill it on my XP Pro machine at work to get the machine to honour the hosts file entries I added.
No, "Denied!" is for when someone swipes a power-up you were going for iirc; the "killed within spitting distance of your flag while carrying the enemy flag" is definitely a nice, meaty "Holy Shit!". You had to be *damn* close though, I only remember hearing it a handful of times.
Or for that matter... Wouldn't it be easier for the Russian Mafia to hack your average unsecured windows computer and blow away your data that way?
But why would they?
I'm insignificant, a nobody, and no target at all. A site used by hundreds of thousands or even millions, on the other hand - now that's a target. A well-defended target you'd hope, but a target nonetheless.
or that bandwidth and storage - and indeed everything but ram - is measured base 2 instead of base 10
Surely you have that the wrong way round? I know for a fact hard drive manufacturers quote sizes in base 10 (so giga is 10^9 not 2^30), and I've been told that bandwidth is the same. RAM is definitely base 2.
Generally speaking, once a computer has been manufactured, technology improvements do not alter it.
You do realise that he means the definition of supercomputers, and not that ones that have already been built will magically benefit from advances in technology, of course. That is, he means that as general computing speeds increase, so the definition of supercomputer changes. Now that may or may not be correct, but you've definitely misunderstood his point (or have simply chosen to answer it as though you have)
if it means that I have to download 300 GB for a program or a Linux distribution with the same speed of 1 MB/second it would take forever or say a 7 MB web site
Why would increasing hard drive capacity lead to heavier websites? I've been working in the web for 8 years now, and I have never once heard anyone say "Yeah, the page is a bit on the heavy side, but most people have big hard drives now, it'll be ok". The widespread adoption of broadband has lessened the obsession with page weight to a degree, but most of us still keep it in mind.
Why would an individual program be 300GB? Even if you're talking about a game, the size of the actual executables is insignificant compared to the size of the resources - the textures, maps, music, etc. For an OS, yes a lot of it is executables - but not because they're big, because there's so damn many of them. There's so many of them because it does so much; the days of an OS doing nothing but proxying access to the hardware are long gone. Now people expect (nay demand) filesystem browsers, web browsers, clocks, calendars, remote access software, games, dev tools, office software, media players, news clients, email clients - the list goes on and on. You think Vista needs a lot of disk space now, wait until MS is forced to include a competing product or two for each of the things that come with it, all because people demand choice and competition and their own preferred way of doing things. (But I'm starting to get way off topic there, so I'll stop)
We need to see an increase in Internet speeds at affordable prices first before we go overboard with physical storage.
Not everyone uses their PC primarily for downloading things. Some of us actually install stuff from DVD occasionally, or shoot photos or home movies or write music or create art or any of a dozen other uses that would benefit from increased storage space.
In what way is el lobo's post off topic? To be honest offensive is really stretching it too, but a post about educational licensing of MS products attached to a story about educational licensing of MS products is off topic?
know I haven't got mod points for like a year
I haven't had mod points for about 5 years, but you don't hear me whining about it.
and haven't got meta-moderation opportunity for the last four months
What happens when you go to http://slashdot.org/metamod.pl? For a couple of years I got a "permission denied" message, although that changed a couple of years ago.
in spite of constantly positive karma
My karma's been maxed since back when you got a numeric score instead of the silly textual description.
Advocating free software isn't taboo here; what gets a lot of us annoyed is people spouting crap. Sun isn't fully-committed to the GPL? So what? They've never said that they are. You want to advocate free software? Fine - do it by politely explaining the benefits. Don't do it by tearing any company a new one just because they don't fall over themselves to immediately offer up all of their code under your favourite licence. That just helps create the perception that the free software community are a bunch of immature, grasping whiners, which is not the sort of thing most companies are going to want to be associated with.
Actually, I rather think that was his point - that when the average American thinks "non-English speaking country" they tend to think of places like Africa and the Indian subcontinent, forgetting that there are a great many high-tech countries with first languages other than English.
Essentially, yes. The most common condition is that if you download it for free, licence A (typically the GPL) applies, while if you buy a licence from them then licence B applies (typically something that lets you keep the source to your product closed).
How do you verify the accuracy of Slashdot stories?
We don't. You do.:)
The answer was last modified 7 years ago. People have been complaining about this sort of thing for as long as I've been on the site. It's not going to change; they don't care. They are far more focussed on getting stories up quickly than on checking for factual correctness.
Now that's not quite the situation as I understand it. As I see it, Valve legitimately sells it to Bob, who then sells it to Carol. It's that sale that is not legitimate, and it's no fault of Carol - Bob sells it on in the knowledge that he shouldn't and that Carol almost certainly won't be able to use the product.
I think it's wrong of Valve to impose the region-locking, but I think it's even worse of companies to sell the software out-region knowing full well what will happen.
3) The product is sold everywhere at the lowest price 4) The product is sold everywhere at the price the local market will bear but no attempt is made to prevent imports/buying overseas
As others have pointed out, companies feel it is their right to use the global market to their advantage; fair's fair, we should be able to do the same.
I appreciate the problem, but it's not *my* problem. Their profits are not my responsibility - as long as I pay for the products I want, how much I pay is between me and the retailer. The retailer should be free to charge whatever they want to whoever they want.
Rumour has it (rumour as I've not seen them myself) that the boxes in question state in the native language that the key is only valid in the country of purchase.
Assuming that's the case, then yes it absolutely is a scam, as the people selling the games know that they won't work overseas.
Outlook is not installed on any computers, and so of course since Windows Desktop Search indexes your Outlook e-mail, and since we didn't have it, everytime a user logs on now, they get two error messages about that it can't find Outlook and can't index your e-mail
Bullshit. I have Windows Desktop Search installed and have never seen a single error about not being able to find Outlook or index my email, and I don't use Outlook either.
Something else is going on, or your users are lying to you, or you are lying to us.
Automatic Updates do not seem to me to be a very good idea -- for users anyway.
For corporate users I agree. For home users I couldn't agree less. Most users don't even really understand why updates are necessary, they simply can't be expected to regularly check for and install them. For them automatic updates make complete sense.
For corporate users, who are more likely to be running custom-built mission-critical software that might be affected by the update, and moreover who have an IT department to take care of this sort of thing for them, then no of course you don't want Windows updating itself other than on the say-so of said IT dept.
Now admittedly I've only played the demo of Bioshock, but it doesn't really seem all that innovative to me. Yes, the plasmids are a nice idea, but they're really just another name for the nano augmentations of Deus Ex, or the psychic powers of System Shock 2. The ressurection chambers, from what I know of them, are straight out of the System Shock games. The storyline I can't really comment on, but a hidden Utopian society gone bad that's technically advanced in some ways but not others is something of a common idea in sci-fi.
I'm not saying that it's not a good game and well executed (and I'll most likely be buying it soon), but so far I'm not aware that it's in any way ground breaking. Of coure, that may be a failing of the demo; despite being a 1.5GB or so download it only lasts about 30 minutes.
On the other hand while I've never played any of the Madden games, I do agree about the Sims - especially the near endless procession of expansions.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, someone's had a sense of humour failure...
I fail to see why a huge, powerful country feels insecure enough to need nuclear weapons
But what is the source of that power, *in this context*? It's the standing armed forces and the hardware at their disposal, including the nukes.
I'm not saying that they're necessarily required, just pointing out that the sense of security comes from the knowledge that no-one dare fuck with them in a conventional war. Now terrorism, that's proving to be a different matter (and will be further increasing the perceived need for a powerful military, nukes and all)
Out here in the corporate world, believe me when I say that all anyone wants is to get the job done and go home on time for once. If ODF helps that, then great I'm all over it. If ODF doesn't help that, perhaps because my customer doesn't/can't/won't use it, then it is less than nothing to me.
All the fine ideals and long-term goals are nothing if I can't get my job done now. (And believe me, I recognise the need for open standards and open formats; I'm just not willing to sacrifice my already too-short free time to be one of the early adopters)
I was beginning to think I was the only person here who realised that - my spare time is valuable to me yes, but in monetary terms it's free. I get the same amount of money per day/week/month/year whether I spend every night out with friends, watching TV, playing games, researching and building a PC or staring at the wall.
Unless you take unpaid time off work to do stuff, time is not money. (It's actually far more precious, but for an entirely different reason that has nothing to do with cash)
I spend time to save money and vice versa, depending on which I value more in that context. I have a dishwasher, washing machine, etc which cost money to buy and run in order to save time I would otherwise have to spend on household chores. I will spend time researching things in order to save money on the things that I buy - I have bought myself one PC so far in my life. Every subsequent PC has been an upgrade to my current one. It's cheaper than buying a whole new machine but takes a little longer, which is fine by me.
My free time is valuable, but it costs me no money at all.
If you area computer professional, and you build your own computer, then the final cost of the computer you built is far more than off the shelf, once you add in your labor cost. Unless, maybe, you are a burger flipper.
As long as you're not taking time out of contracted, paid-by-the-hour work, your profession is irrelevant.
What you practice is false economy- like my Mom who used to drive and extra 15 mils to save fifteen cents.
That's not the same - driving further actually costs you more money as you burn more fuel, incur more wear and tear on the car, etc. Spending time on research, construction, etc costs me no money as I wouldn't be being paid for the time anyway.
When a member of your IT staff does it, you can fire or even prosecute them, and unless they're really malicious and destroy or poison the data and back ups, you still have the original data.
When an outsourced IT company does it:
a) it may not be illegal in their country of origin
b) it may not be covered in the contract you have with them
c) even if it is, it may not be covered in whatever deal is made if they're bought out
d) there may be no mechanism for (easily) recovering your data in the event of terminating service
e) if they go tits up there may be no way at all to recover your data
It's not a question of whether or not trusting mission-critical data or services to a third party is a risk, it's a question of whether it's a sensible or necessary risk to take.
Or stop the (misnamed) DNS Client service, which is what caches DNS info locally. I had to kill it on my XP Pro machine at work to get the machine to honour the hosts file entries I added.
you have the nerve to suggest that resisting arrest is itself bad behavior
Well now, that really depends on why you're being arrested, doesn't it? For that matter it depends on how you're resisting too.
Peaceful protester acting within his legal rights calmly resisting an unlawful arrest? Fine.
Multiple murderer using deadly force to resist arrest? I'd say that's pretty bad behaviour.
Without context, many things lack meaning. This is one of them.
No, "Denied!" is for when someone swipes a power-up you were going for iirc; the "killed within spitting distance of your flag while carrying the enemy flag" is definitely a nice, meaty "Holy Shit!". You had to be *damn* close though, I only remember hearing it a handful of times.
Damnit, now I'm getting all nostalgic for Q3...
If the game is good, it'll be ok, otherwise it won't?
Or am I misreading the summary?
I'm insignificant, a nobody, and no target at all. A site used by hundreds of thousands or even millions, on the other hand - now that's a target. A well-defended target you'd hope, but a target nonetheless.
Surely you have that the wrong way round? I know for a fact hard drive manufacturers quote sizes in base 10 (so giga is 10^9 not 2^30), and I've been told that bandwidth is the same. RAM is definitely base 2.You do realise that he means the definition of supercomputers, and not that ones that have already been built will magically benefit from advances in technology, of course. That is, he means that as general computing speeds increase, so the definition of supercomputer changes. Now that may or may not be correct, but you've definitely misunderstood his point (or have simply chosen to answer it as though you have)
if it means that I have to download 300 GB for a program or a Linux distribution with the same speed of 1 MB/second it would take forever or say a 7 MB web site
Why would increasing hard drive capacity lead to heavier websites? I've been working in the web for 8 years now, and I have never once heard anyone say "Yeah, the page is a bit on the heavy side, but most people have big hard drives now, it'll be ok". The widespread adoption of broadband has lessened the obsession with page weight to a degree, but most of us still keep it in mind.
Why would an individual program be 300GB? Even if you're talking about a game, the size of the actual executables is insignificant compared to the size of the resources - the textures, maps, music, etc. For an OS, yes a lot of it is executables - but not because they're big, because there's so damn many of them. There's so many of them because it does so much; the days of an OS doing nothing but proxying access to the hardware are long gone. Now people expect (nay demand) filesystem browsers, web browsers, clocks, calendars, remote access software, games, dev tools, office software, media players, news clients, email clients - the list goes on and on. You think Vista needs a lot of disk space now, wait until MS is forced to include a competing product or two for each of the things that come with it, all because people demand choice and competition and their own preferred way of doing things. (But I'm starting to get way off topic there, so I'll stop)
We need to see an increase in Internet speeds at affordable prices first before we go overboard with physical storage.
Not everyone uses their PC primarily for downloading things. Some of us actually install stuff from DVD occasionally, or shoot photos or home movies or write music or create art or any of a dozen other uses that would benefit from increased storage space.
In what way is el lobo's post off topic? To be honest offensive is really stretching it too, but a post about educational licensing of MS products attached to a story about educational licensing of MS products is off topic?
know I haven't got mod points for like a year
I haven't had mod points for about 5 years, but you don't hear me whining about it.
and haven't got meta-moderation opportunity for the last four months
What happens when you go to http://slashdot.org/metamod.pl? For a couple of years I got a "permission denied" message, although that changed a couple of years ago.
in spite of constantly positive karma
My karma's been maxed since back when you got a numeric score instead of the silly textual description.
Advocating free software isn't taboo here; what gets a lot of us annoyed is people spouting crap. Sun isn't fully-committed to the GPL? So what? They've never said that they are. You want to advocate free software? Fine - do it by politely explaining the benefits. Don't do it by tearing any company a new one just because they don't fall over themselves to immediately offer up all of their code under your favourite licence. That just helps create the perception that the free software community are a bunch of immature, grasping whiners, which is not the sort of thing most companies are going to want to be associated with.
Actually, I rather think that was his point - that when the average American thinks "non-English speaking country" they tend to think of places like Africa and the Indian subcontinent, forgetting that there are a great many high-tech countries with first languages other than English.
Essentially, yes. The most common condition is that if you download it for free, licence A (typically the GPL) applies, while if you buy a licence from them then licence B applies (typically something that lets you keep the source to your product closed).
Please, Slashdot editors... do at least some basic research before posting stuff like this.
:)
From the FAQ:
How do you verify the accuracy of Slashdot stories?
We don't. You do.
The answer was last modified 7 years ago. People have been complaining about this sort of thing for as long as I've been on the site. It's not going to change; they don't care. They are far more focussed on getting stories up quickly than on checking for factual correctness.
Well that's all well and good, but it's not actually your choice or your country that's being occupied, is it?
It doesn't matter what you would prefer, it matters what the Iraqis would prefer.
Now that's not quite the situation as I understand it. As I see it, Valve legitimately sells it to Bob, who then sells it to Carol. It's that sale that is not legitimate, and it's no fault of Carol - Bob sells it on in the knowledge that he shouldn't and that Carol almost certainly won't be able to use the product.
I think it's wrong of Valve to impose the region-locking, but I think it's even worse of companies to sell the software out-region knowing full well what will happen.
There are other options:
3) The product is sold everywhere at the lowest price
4) The product is sold everywhere at the price the local market will bear but no attempt is made to prevent imports/buying overseas
As others have pointed out, companies feel it is their right to use the global market to their advantage; fair's fair, we should be able to do the same.
I appreciate the problem, but it's not *my* problem. Their profits are not my responsibility - as long as I pay for the products I want, how much I pay is between me and the retailer. The retailer should be free to charge whatever they want to whoever they want.
Rumour has it (rumour as I've not seen them myself) that the boxes in question state in the native language that the key is only valid in the country of purchase.
Assuming that's the case, then yes it absolutely is a scam, as the people selling the games know that they won't work overseas.
Does a broadband subscription in the United Kingdom come with a 12-month commitment, or is it month-to-month?
Both are available, depending on the ISP and the service plan you choose.
Outlook is not installed on any computers, and so of course since Windows Desktop Search indexes your Outlook e-mail, and since we didn't have it, everytime a user logs on now, they get two error messages about that it can't find Outlook and can't index your e-mail
Bullshit. I have Windows Desktop Search installed and have never seen a single error about not being able to find Outlook or index my email, and I don't use Outlook either.
Something else is going on, or your users are lying to you, or you are lying to us.
Automatic Updates do not seem to me to be a very good idea -- for users anyway.
For corporate users I agree. For home users I couldn't agree less. Most users don't even really understand why updates are necessary, they simply can't be expected to regularly check for and install them. For them automatic updates make complete sense.
For corporate users, who are more likely to be running custom-built mission-critical software that might be affected by the update, and moreover who have an IT department to take care of this sort of thing for them, then no of course you don't want Windows updating itself other than on the say-so of said IT dept.
Now admittedly I've only played the demo of Bioshock, but it doesn't really seem all that innovative to me. Yes, the plasmids are a nice idea, but they're really just another name for the nano augmentations of Deus Ex, or the psychic powers of System Shock 2. The ressurection chambers, from what I know of them, are straight out of the System Shock games. The storyline I can't really comment on, but a hidden Utopian society gone bad that's technically advanced in some ways but not others is something of a common idea in sci-fi.
I'm not saying that it's not a good game and well executed (and I'll most likely be buying it soon), but so far I'm not aware that it's in any way ground breaking. Of coure, that may be a failing of the demo; despite being a 1.5GB or so download it only lasts about 30 minutes.
On the other hand while I've never played any of the Madden games, I do agree about the Sims - especially the near endless procession of expansions.