According to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, we can launch hyrdoponics labs that will feed the nation, energy collecting solar satellites, and a missile defense system.
Who said computer games never taught you anything!
This site http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/ene_oil_con lists the US at 19.7 million barrels a day, and this site http://mwhodges.home.att.net/energy/energy.htm lists a similar figure and pegs our foreign oil daily usage at 10.9 (4 billion in 2003 divided by 365 days).
BTW, 20,799 more of these plants all running at full capacity and we could satisfy our dependency on foreign oil (approx. 10.9 million barrels a day). Assuming there's that much waste to convert.
It's good to see you actually stepped in and saved the poor customer, I've felt compelled to step in and help a clueless store rep out several times but never actually have. One time in Circuit City a guy asked what he needed to dub VHS tapes from his VCR with RCA outs to his computer. The salesman stood there with a look of disbelief as if the guy just asked how to build a cold fusion reactor, and finally started recommending random things.
"Well, you're going to need a new video card for that, and a second sound card, and some sort of converting unit that will convert RCA to S-Video, then combine S-Video and the audio in to a line in, but I'm not sure how to hook that up to the computer hold on..."
It's important to note they were standing just barely out of reach of a Dazzle USB video capture device and similar products.
Re:The un-PC point of view in re: Google IPO
on
Google IPO Swami
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Amortizing stock options expense is a hot debate right now, and the author of the Washington Times article makes it pretty clear which side he is on. While he may not agree with the current methodology, Google is in full compliance with the Financial Accounting Standards Board Statement 123. More information on the debate here:
On the other hand, since this will improve law enforcement's ability to catch speeders, and speeding tickets is one of the yardsticks for insurance costs, if you don't get any tickets you might see rates drop (slightly). Also any technology that improves traffic safety in general should have a long-term positive effect on insurance rates.
Distribution packaging is as easy as --usepkg. I think something should be added to portage to allow cataloging of install CDs, then saying "please insert CD X", but it's almost there. Gentoo's source based distribution doesn't force you to compile everything from scratch, it's just the default option.
The nasty lawsuit has already happened: http://www.percyschmeiser.com/SC%20Hears%20Case.ht m
Summary: A Canadian farmer alleges Monsantos GM seeds blew in to his field, now Monsanto is demanding royalties.
In the new GM world, you no longer buy seeds, but rather you buy licenses to grow certain crops. Once biotech companies control the distribution, they will vertically integrate with large farms and push small farmers out of the market once and for all.
Choice Quote: "This patent makes us more profitable and better farmers," argued Mona Brown, a lawyer with the Canadian Canola Growers Association.
I think one of the main pushes behind this is DirectX. Currently DirectX uses the.X format, that many professional modelling programs don't natively support. Maya 5.01 Unlimited, the latest version available to my knowledge, exports to OBJ, GE2, RTG, VRML2, and RTG. This has people turning to third party apps like Deep Exploration or hacked plug-ins*.
Microsoft wants to be certain that every available 3D modelling program can easily and accurately export to a format that will work directly with the next version of DirectX.
*Some of the export plugins available are homebrewed and don't support important features, or don't convert properly. What should a 3D format support? Polygons only, or NURBS as well? Subdivision surfaces? Camera angles, animation? How much shader information will be stored?
Maybe this has to do with selling licenses for the latest engine? Give the old engine the GPL or a similar license so A) everyone has it and a game based off it isn't new and hip, and B) you can't use that engine in a closed-source game.
It depends how you are deriving the standard deviation whether it makes sense or not. If there are enough call center workers to assume a normal distribution and you apply the empirical rule, someone with failues greater than 0.135% of his peers (upper half of the bell curve where 99.7% of the samples fall inside three sigmas) is probably not up to speed. However, if you apply the conservative Chebyshev rule and replace 99.7% with 89%, I'm not sure it makes sense to fire 5.5% of the employees constantly. Although if you assume a 30% annual turnover rate at call centers maybe that isn't unreasonable.
Note: If you are calculating the standard deviation from the entire call center population you won't get a turnover rate higher than Chebyshev's 5.5%.
I got in to this last summer. I was looking at building a very similar product to what the Australian company has (IMO the market is much too saturated at this point unless they are hoping to sell two or three models and quit) based on MythTV. I actually had a large set of patches to the MythTV project to make it work better with a remote, put a GUI on some of the command-line steps, etc. Before marketing I posted to the mythtv mailing list and let everyone know, and the lead developer of the project seemed to be pushing for some sort of compensation. I could have brought up the point that HE chose the GPL, but wanting to keep a good relationship with the core developers I asked how he wanted the donations to work. Was I supposed to send the project founder a check in the mail for coming up with the idea? Should I figure out how many lines every single person has contributed to the project since it's inception, get their current mailing addresses and divide a percentage of my revenue between them? Send it to someone's PayPal account and let everyone fight over the money? Well noone could come up with an answer so that's where the donations idea ended.
I'm all in favor of the GPL, I release virtually all of my own software under it, but if you are trying to make money off it you'd have better luck panhandling.
I'd say it's nice that GTK is catching up with some of the QT/KDE features.
Unified dropdown box (editable and non-editable), file selection dialog with custom URLs (think KDE's fish:// samba:// webdav:// etc), menus and toolbars sharing common actions, enhanced right-to-left language support. This is an excellent example of open source software at work. One competitor has cool features, the other competitor integrates those features and noone is crying about patents, copyrighted interfaces, intellectual property or trade secret theft.
I'd like to see KDE take some of the Gnome project's ideas and pursue a more rigid user interface guideline (anyone see kalarm?) as well as support for disabilities (although the default font size after a Gentoo KDE-3.2 compile will please even the blind).
What version of the VPN Client are you using? I'm running kernel 2.6.3 and Cisco VPN Client 4.0.3 (B) here, and don't have any problems. If you're a Cisco VPN user, check out our university LUG's project to create a graphical frontend for the commandline client.
K3b allows you to emulate a floppy disk on CDROM by burning a DOS bootdisk image to CD. When it boots you have A:\ which is the contents of the image file, and if CDROM drivers were loaded you have another drive letter for the the rest of the CD contents. I flashed the BIOS on my laptop from a Linux only environment like this.
There IS a solution... buy an Nvidia card. I remember when ATI cards were considered junk, the only decent thing they had was the All-In-Wonder and the drivers were terrible. Then ATI decides to get competitive and release a GPU that performs marginally better than Nvidia's latest offering in benchmarks, now all the gaming fanboys are raving over ATI. Problem is they STILL don't know how to write proper drivers. Nvidia drivers have always been on top of the game, supporting extensions like XvMC before 90% of the open source drivers were even thinking about it. I'm not getting paid to plug Nvidia, in fact I'd say buy a Matrox G400 (top notch dual-head and 2d acceleration, possibly the most solidly designed video card ever, full open source drivers that do everything and the kitchen sink), but people like 3d acceleration.
The only people who have business knowing what was paid for the license are shareholders and the IRS. Everyone else can choose not to do business with EV1 on moral grounds, or on a potential price hike from the licensing costs.
Just like WebDAV is an extension of HTTP 1.1, Subversion is an extension of the WebDAV protocol. This means that:
* It can run as an Apache module or a standalone server * It can go anywhere HTTP goes (including caching proxies) as it runs entirely over port 80 with WebDAVish calls. * It implements part of the WebDAV protocol, and in the future might fully implement it meaning seamless integration in to software like Macromedia Dreamweaver. * Uses Apache for the authentication, so you can authenticate with any module you find/write.
Right now our WSU Linux User Group is using Subversion for development. Authentication is tied to a PostgreSQL backend that is shared with the Zope/Plone server, so an admin can login to the Member panel and add/remove people from the developer group to give or take Subversion access. A real WebDAV folder is also setup that shares the same authentication method. Now we just have to tie in mail server and ssh authing...
Assuming Apple's cash accounts are properly insured this isn't a threat to them like the person in your story. The analogy would be Apple's danger of bankruptcy, where the debt would be hazardous. The original parent poster made the assumption that's not a concern for the company right now, unless Apple is sending out the message that they are going ultra-conservative? We'll see whether they're jumping back in to a growth phase or getting ready for a hardship.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it was an April 1st joke, but it would be kind of humorous if sites were served up in random languages each time you went to them.
That's not what Microsoft thinks. Have you seen the new ads for their set top box + keyboard that adds dial-up net access to your existing tv?
According to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, we can launch hyrdoponics labs that will feed the nation, energy collecting solar satellites, and a missile defense system.
Who said computer games never taught you anything!
This site http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/ene_oil_con lists the US at 19.7 million barrels a day, and this site http://mwhodges.home.att.net/energy/energy.htm lists a similar figure and pegs our foreign oil daily usage at 10.9 (4 billion in 2003 divided by 365 days).
BTW, 20,799 more of these plants all running at full capacity and we could satisfy our dependency on foreign oil (approx. 10.9 million barrels a day). Assuming there's that much waste to convert.
Will a new RFC be coming out, for Oil over TCP?
It's good to see you actually stepped in and saved the poor customer, I've felt compelled to step in and help a clueless store rep out several times but never actually have. One time in Circuit City a guy asked what he needed to dub VHS tapes from his VCR with RCA outs to his computer. The salesman stood there with a look of disbelief as if the guy just asked how to build a cold fusion reactor, and finally started recommending random things.
"Well, you're going to need a new video card for that, and a second sound card, and some sort of converting unit that will convert RCA to S-Video, then combine S-Video and the audio in to a line in, but I'm not sure how to hook that up to the computer hold on..."
It's important to note they were standing just barely out of reach of a Dazzle USB video capture device and similar products.
Amortizing stock options expense is a hot debate right now, and the author of the Washington Times article makes it pretty clear which side he is on. While he may not agree with the current methodology, Google is in full compliance with the Financial Accounting Standards Board Statement 123. More information on the debate here:
x tFuse/dspShellContent/fuseAction/DISPLAY/numConten tID/52221/numSiteID/7/numTaxonomyTypeID/10/numTaxo nomyID/200.htm
http://www.webcpa.com/AccountingToday/index.cfm/t
On the other hand, since this will improve law enforcement's ability to catch speeders, and speeding tickets is one of the yardsticks for insurance costs, if you don't get any tickets you might see rates drop (slightly). Also any technology that improves traffic safety in general should have a long-term positive effect on insurance rates.
Distribution packaging is as easy as --usepkg. I think something should be added to portage to allow cataloging of install CDs, then saying "please insert CD X", but it's almost there. Gentoo's source based distribution doesn't force you to compile everything from scratch, it's just the default option.
The nasty lawsuit has already happened: http://www.percyschmeiser.com/SC%20Hears%20Case.ht m
Summary: A Canadian farmer alleges Monsantos GM seeds blew in to his field, now Monsanto is demanding royalties.
In the new GM world, you no longer buy seeds, but rather you buy licenses to grow certain crops. Once biotech companies control the distribution, they will vertically integrate with large farms and push small farmers out of the market once and for all.
Choice Quote: "This patent makes us more profitable and better farmers," argued Mona Brown, a lawyer with the Canadian Canola Growers Association.
I think one of the main pushes behind this is DirectX. Currently DirectX uses the .X format, that many professional modelling programs don't natively support. Maya 5.01 Unlimited, the latest version available to my knowledge, exports to OBJ, GE2, RTG, VRML2, and RTG. This has people turning to third party apps like Deep Exploration or hacked plug-ins*.
Microsoft wants to be certain that every available 3D modelling program can easily and accurately export to a format that will work directly with the next version of DirectX.
*Some of the export plugins available are homebrewed and don't support important features, or don't convert properly. What should a 3D format support? Polygons only, or NURBS as well? Subdivision surfaces? Camera angles, animation? How much shader information will be stored?
Maybe this has to do with selling licenses for the latest engine? Give the old engine the GPL or a similar license so A) everyone has it and a game based off it isn't new and hip, and B) you can't use that engine in a closed-source game.
It depends how you are deriving the standard deviation whether it makes sense or not. If there are enough call center workers to assume a normal distribution and you apply the empirical rule, someone with failues greater than 0.135% of his peers (upper half of the bell curve where 99.7% of the samples fall inside three sigmas) is probably not up to speed. However, if you apply the conservative Chebyshev rule and replace 99.7% with 89%, I'm not sure it makes sense to fire 5.5% of the employees constantly. Although if you assume a 30% annual turnover rate at call centers maybe that isn't unreasonable.
Note: If you are calculating the standard deviation from the entire call center population you won't get a turnover rate higher than Chebyshev's 5.5%.
Actually if the pigeons were the communication medium, a denial of service might be a shotgun.
That's why it's dual-licensed under a more commercial, closed source friendly license as well. I'm pretty sure all the bases are covered.
I got in to this last summer. I was looking at building a very similar product to what the Australian company has (IMO the market is much too saturated at this point unless they are hoping to sell two or three models and quit) based on MythTV. I actually had a large set of patches to the MythTV project to make it work better with a remote, put a GUI on some of the command-line steps, etc. Before marketing I posted to the mythtv mailing list and let everyone know, and the lead developer of the project seemed to be pushing for some sort of compensation. I could have brought up the point that HE chose the GPL, but wanting to keep a good relationship with the core developers I asked how he wanted the donations to work. Was I supposed to send the project founder a check in the mail for coming up with the idea? Should I figure out how many lines every single person has contributed to the project since it's inception, get their current mailing addresses and divide a percentage of my revenue between them? Send it to someone's PayPal account and let everyone fight over the money? Well noone could come up with an answer so that's where the donations idea ended.
I'm all in favor of the GPL, I release virtually all of my own software under it, but if you are trying to make money off it you'd have better luck panhandling.
The truth finally comes out... the only people that buy video games today are the video game developers themselves.
I'd say it's nice that GTK is catching up with some of the QT/KDE features.
Unified dropdown box (editable and non-editable), file selection dialog with custom URLs (think KDE's fish:// samba:// webdav:// etc), menus and toolbars sharing common actions, enhanced right-to-left language support. This is an excellent example of open source software at work. One competitor has cool features, the other competitor integrates those features and noone is crying about patents, copyrighted interfaces, intellectual property or trade secret theft.
I'd like to see KDE take some of the Gnome project's ideas and pursue a more rigid user interface guideline (anyone see kalarm?) as well as support for disabilities (although the default font size after a Gentoo KDE-3.2 compile will please even the blind).
What version of the VPN Client are you using? I'm running kernel 2.6.3 and Cisco VPN Client 4.0.3 (B) here, and don't have any problems. If you're a Cisco VPN user, check out our university LUG's project to create a graphical frontend for the commandline client.
http://lug.wsu.edu/wsulug/vpngui/
K3b allows you to emulate a floppy disk on CDROM by burning a DOS bootdisk image to CD. When it boots you have A:\ which is the contents of the image file, and if CDROM drivers were loaded you have another drive letter for the the rest of the CD contents. I flashed the BIOS on my laptop from a Linux only environment like this.
There IS a solution... buy an Nvidia card. I remember when ATI cards were considered junk, the only decent thing they had was the All-In-Wonder and the drivers were terrible. Then ATI decides to get competitive and release a GPU that performs marginally better than Nvidia's latest offering in benchmarks, now all the gaming fanboys are raving over ATI. Problem is they STILL don't know how to write proper drivers. Nvidia drivers have always been on top of the game, supporting extensions like XvMC before 90% of the open source drivers were even thinking about it. I'm not getting paid to plug Nvidia, in fact I'd say buy a Matrox G400 (top notch dual-head and 2d acceleration, possibly the most solidly designed video card ever, full open source drivers that do everything and the kitchen sink), but people like 3d acceleration.
The only people who have business knowing what was paid for the license are shareholders and the IRS. Everyone else can choose not to do business with EV1 on moral grounds, or on a potential price hike from the licensing costs.
Just like WebDAV is an extension of HTTP 1.1, Subversion is an extension of the WebDAV protocol. This means that:
* It can run as an Apache module or a standalone server
* It can go anywhere HTTP goes (including caching proxies) as it runs entirely over port 80 with WebDAVish calls.
* It implements part of the WebDAV protocol, and in the future might fully implement it meaning seamless integration in to software like Macromedia Dreamweaver.
* Uses Apache for the authentication, so you can authenticate with any module you find/write.
Right now our WSU Linux User Group is using Subversion for development. Authentication is tied to a PostgreSQL backend that is shared with the Zope/Plone server, so an admin can login to the Member panel and add/remove people from the developer group to give or take Subversion access. A real WebDAV folder is also setup that shares the same authentication method. Now we just have to tie in mail server and ssh authing...
Assuming Apple's cash accounts are properly insured this isn't a threat to them like the person in your story. The analogy would be Apple's danger of bankruptcy, where the debt would be hazardous. The original parent poster made the assumption that's not a concern for the company right now, unless Apple is sending out the message that they are going ultra-conservative? We'll see whether they're jumping back in to a growth phase or getting ready for a hardship.