They'll charge less if they can get it out sooner, because they'll have a high profit margin, which will allow them to cut the profit margin before sale to the consumer to get underneath competitors. Let's say they're making 40 cents per gallon on gasoline right now (30 cents per gallon on oil based on current 10% profit margins plus 10 cents per gallon for company-owned refineries). If they can make 80 cents per gallon and undercut competitors by a third, they would absolutely do this.
Standards are often slow to form, and then just as slow to be bought into. Everyone knows that they're needed, but they're too often set aside "just for this one thing."
I think one of the problems is the idea that has become prevalent that "business drives IT." This is taken by many to mean that business decides what IT does, and that IT's rules have to bend to the desires of business whenever they clash. Personally, I think this is asinine, especially because it leads to a completely unnecessary adversarial relationship. I was told once that if IT was going to start telling business what it could and could not do, they'd go back to filing cabinets and typewriters. Not at all realistic, but it shows the frustration levels that are present.
While it's true that without business, there would be no IT, the reverse is also true -- no IT, no business. It has to be a partnership. There are people on our side of the fence that are just as bad, and sometimes worse. Between business managers feeling superior because they fund IT and IT people feeling superior because they support the business applications, the battle of egos can only end up hurting the overall enterprise.
At least some of those cases have been because the farmers knew that they had Monsanto seeds and continued to replant them, including the Canadian farmer who saved essentially only the Monsanto seeds and replanted virtually his entire farm with them, knowing what he had.
I go to great lengths to keep my work and personal lives separate. If work wants to get in touch with me when I'm not on-site, they can call my company-issued Blackberry. Aside from HR, which is not allowed to pass around my contact information, and my manager, who I trust to not pass around the information I allow to him, no one has my home phone number, and no one at all has my personal cell number.
If my friends or family want to get in touch with me when I'm at work, they can call me on my personal cell phone. If they want to send an note, they can use my Gmail account. They don't get my work phone numbers or e-mail address.
If you're in the US, most states mandate at least a couple of 10-minute breaks per day, and even in those states that don't, many employers allow for this. Other than that, do it on your lunch break, or before or after work. There's a lot of time to get on the calendar.
It was rather amusing that two of the most conservative justices were against the ability of the Congress to regulate California's marijuana use even when it never crossed the state border, and as I recall, they cited the Tenth Amendment in their dissent.
Changes to the structure? Yes. Changes to the interpretations? No, those don't always require amendments. If so, views on what constitutes cruel and unusual punishments would never have changed, and we'd still have the same obscenity laws that we had 200+ years ago.
Even as early as 1803, in Marbury v. Madison, the Court established itself as the ultimate arbiter of constitutionality. It did this based on an interpretation of its powers as defined in the Constitution, which did not explicitly provide for the ability to strike down laws as unconstitutional. I do not know if you are arguing that this decision was incorrect, but if you are, it changes the balance of power dramatically. (Incidentally, for those who are not aware, the same decision also limited the Supreme Court's own jurisdiction in what it could take up.)
The decision is not without its critics, then and now (Thomas Jefferson among them), but it has clearly shaped the country in the intervening centuries, and it's difficult to imagine a situation with powerful executive and legislative branches and no judicial branch to be able to review their actions for constitutionality.
There is a serious overstepping of bounds by the Congress, and the Supreme Court has let it go for far too long.
I'm quite familiar with the Constitution. However, I did word that poorly.
There are things considered offensive today that are forbidden to at least a limited extent based on obscenity. You cannot legally provide a copy of Hustler to a child because its material is considered obscene; that limitation is not seen as a violation of the publisher's First Amendment rights.
However, what is considered too obscene for a child today was in some cases considered too obscene for adults in past decades. As society changes, so change the interpretations of the Constitution.
Modafinil (Provigil) is a narcolepsy drug, but it's prescribed off-label for numerous conditions including people who work odd shifts and those who experience difficult-to-diagnose fatigue. Doctors are given significant latitude in most cases for prescribing medication if they believe that it will have a beneficial effect.
The intention was always for the Constitution to be a living document, its meaning adapting to the times. This is the reason that there are so few specifics in there, and many of those specifics were intended to set a baseline after which Congress would take over in setting standards.
I read your statement as suggesting that it has become too alive, which may well be the case. Its meanings should be interpreted in the light of the current day; what was offensive 50 years ago is no longer considered offensive, and so no longer a First Amendment violation. This also forms part of the debate over the Second Amendment; even if one believes that there is an individual right, does that right extend to machineguns, which were still more than 70 years away from practicality at the time of the adoption of the Bill of Rights? There are Fourth Amendment issues that the framers wouldn't have dreamed of, such as whether alcohol checkpoints constitute an unreasonable search.
I bring these up not as debate points, but as examples where the classic interpretations of the Constitution have been or are being challenged. There doubtless will be additional questions brought up in the future that we have not considered to date because technology or cultural changes will force a re-examination of the Constitution in light of the situation at that time. But again, that's how it was intended to work.
Observations to support a model may not be immediately apparent, but there can be indirect evidence. Development of a given model may provide a framework for other models, some of which provide opportunity for observational evidence. Observational support for a derivative model may provide indirect support for supporting models. It's certainly not as good as direct support, but absent evidence to the contrary, it's better than essentially only mathematical support, which has caused some theories such as string theory to come under fire.
The airlines looking to put in WiFi are explicitly blocking VoIP traffic using proxies, specifically to save bandwidth that would otherwise be chewed up by people talking. VoIP may not be a major strain on most land links, but it can be much less bursty than web traffic, and since at least some of the systems being examined will use satellites, it will be a more precious resources on the planes.
It's not reasonable, because you generally can't confirm that it is limited only to the building in which you broadcast the signal. You can put up a mechanism to block leakage from the jammer, but at that point, the need for a jammer is obviated, because the signal isn't going to get out anyway.
Comic book movies had a long history of sucking, too, until serious people such as Sam Raimi started to get involved and decided to not just make a good adaptation, but to make a good movie aside from the adaptation.
There are some games that likely would not make good movies no matter what you do. Doom, for example, probably is never going to rate to the level of X-Men or Spiderman. But there are examples where there was a serious attempt which, while falling short of the mark and not parroting the game's plotline, didn't totally suck (Silent Hill, for example). Far Cry might have worked, and Half-Life would probably work well (with the change that Gordon would actually have a voice). But they have to have a crew that is dedicated to and experienced in making good movies.
Extremist? Not really. Sure, he was against gun control in most forms, but he was also pro-union and pro-civil rights. He was not the right-wing nut that some people claim him to be.
One of my favorite stories from him was when, during the Rodney King riots, one or more fellow actors (he would not name them) called and asked if they could borrow one of his guns. He said, no, you can't, but you're welcome to come over to my place until things settle down.
My mistake, then. However, it is still true that Microsoft has been trying to get it moved to a SQL base for quite some time, and still can't get past the performance issues involved. Last I read, it was iffy at best as to whether it there would be any changes from the existing data store architecture in the next version of Exchange, but no one's saying that it won't happen yet.
You are also right about the filesystems. I should have more correctly stated that Microsoft and Oracle have had little success working on a SQL-based filesystem.
There are certainly conceptual problems with it. Microsoft isn't the only company that has tried to come up with a file system built on a database; Oracle has taken stabs at it, too. If the two of them have trouble coming up with something, and the FOSS world hasn't had any significant success, either, then there must be something difficult to it.
Databases have latencies that have to be overcome. Microsoft knows this well from trying to move Exchange to a SQL-based storage mechanism instead of the Jet Engine base they've been using for more than a decade. They have had test builds that work, but performance takes a huge hit, so they haven't done it.
I'm not saying that we will see it, just that we might see it.
That depends on how much they're bringing forward. When including legacy functionality, a tremendous amount of work has to happen to preserve it within a new framework, whereas writing new code that adheres to design goals can be (though not always is) easier to do.
It will be interesting to see how it turns out. I'll be happy just to see them shrink the install size back down to a useful level.
Vista took that long because they scrapped almost all of their work half-way through, a great example of extraordinarily poor project management. We've seen mention here at Slashdot of the enormous resources poured into just the shutdown screen. They were behind schedule, over budget, and missed their goals to an unacceptable extent, but they had to be able to recoup the investment, so it got pushed out the door.
Meanwhile, Steven Sinofsky was over running the Office 2007 program, which delivered essentially on-time and on-budget, hitting almost all of the goals. (I know a lot of people don't like the interface, but that's a separate point from the project management.) Sinofsky was promoted to oversee Windows development, and inherited the mess left behind by Jim Allchin. The earlier Slashdot article alluding to a complete overhaul of Windows may well be his doing, an attempt to get the focus back where it needs to be in order to not have a fiasco the next time around. We may even finally see the emergence of WFS finally.
I'm curious as to the foundations of this. You state that he had the right to modify the drivers, but did this give him the right to distribute them? And since Daniel lives in Brazil, how does this affect the EULA?
Mind you, I think Creative was a complete asshat over this, but the legal basis still intrigues me.
No, they reran 1871-2005 through the simulator a total of 10,000 times. This is clear not only from the statement that says as much ("Using a comprehensive collection of baseball statistics from 1871 to 2005, we simulated the entire history of baseball 10,000 times in a computer"), but from the mention that the record was set most often in 1894.
It was likely to occur early in the history of baseball, and fell off dramatically after the 1930s. The early years tended to be batting competitions (in some ways like today's) rather than pitching competitions, and a pitcher's repertoire was limited to about a half-dozen pitches, plus whatever grease, oil, jelly, file, sandpaper, thumbtack, or razor blade he could conceal.
It appears that Creative is realizing what they've gotten themselves into. Originally, they'd removed everything that daniel_k had done, but they're relenting on the Audigy Support Pack, which I gather is a separate item. I wonder if they will relent on the other one, as well.
Slashdot Mirror
They'll charge less if they can get it out sooner, because they'll have a high profit margin, which will allow them to cut the profit margin before sale to the consumer to get underneath competitors. Let's say they're making 40 cents per gallon on gasoline right now (30 cents per gallon on oil based on current 10% profit margins plus 10 cents per gallon for company-owned refineries). If they can make 80 cents per gallon and undercut competitors by a third, they would absolutely do this.
Standards are often slow to form, and then just as slow to be bought into. Everyone knows that they're needed, but they're too often set aside "just for this one thing."
I think one of the problems is the idea that has become prevalent that "business drives IT." This is taken by many to mean that business decides what IT does, and that IT's rules have to bend to the desires of business whenever they clash. Personally, I think this is asinine, especially because it leads to a completely unnecessary adversarial relationship. I was told once that if IT was going to start telling business what it could and could not do, they'd go back to filing cabinets and typewriters. Not at all realistic, but it shows the frustration levels that are present.
While it's true that without business, there would be no IT, the reverse is also true -- no IT, no business. It has to be a partnership. There are people on our side of the fence that are just as bad, and sometimes worse. Between business managers feeling superior because they fund IT and IT people feeling superior because they support the business applications, the battle of egos can only end up hurting the overall enterprise.
At least some of those cases have been because the farmers knew that they had Monsanto seeds and continued to replant them, including the Canadian farmer who saved essentially only the Monsanto seeds and replanted virtually his entire farm with them, knowing what he had.
I go to great lengths to keep my work and personal lives separate. If work wants to get in touch with me when I'm not on-site, they can call my company-issued Blackberry. Aside from HR, which is not allowed to pass around my contact information, and my manager, who I trust to not pass around the information I allow to him, no one has my home phone number, and no one at all has my personal cell number.
If my friends or family want to get in touch with me when I'm at work, they can call me on my personal cell phone. If they want to send an note, they can use my Gmail account. They don't get my work phone numbers or e-mail address.
If you're in the US, most states mandate at least a couple of 10-minute breaks per day, and even in those states that don't, many employers allow for this. Other than that, do it on your lunch break, or before or after work. There's a lot of time to get on the calendar.
It was rather amusing that two of the most conservative justices were against the ability of the Congress to regulate California's marijuana use even when it never crossed the state border, and as I recall, they cited the Tenth Amendment in their dissent.
Changes to the structure? Yes. Changes to the interpretations? No, those don't always require amendments. If so, views on what constitutes cruel and unusual punishments would never have changed, and we'd still have the same obscenity laws that we had 200+ years ago.
Even as early as 1803, in Marbury v. Madison, the Court established itself as the ultimate arbiter of constitutionality. It did this based on an interpretation of its powers as defined in the Constitution, which did not explicitly provide for the ability to strike down laws as unconstitutional. I do not know if you are arguing that this decision was incorrect, but if you are, it changes the balance of power dramatically. (Incidentally, for those who are not aware, the same decision also limited the Supreme Court's own jurisdiction in what it could take up.)
The decision is not without its critics, then and now (Thomas Jefferson among them), but it has clearly shaped the country in the intervening centuries, and it's difficult to imagine a situation with powerful executive and legislative branches and no judicial branch to be able to review their actions for constitutionality.
There is a serious overstepping of bounds by the Congress, and the Supreme Court has let it go for far too long.
I'm quite familiar with the Constitution. However, I did word that poorly.
There are things considered offensive today that are forbidden to at least a limited extent based on obscenity. You cannot legally provide a copy of Hustler to a child because its material is considered obscene; that limitation is not seen as a violation of the publisher's First Amendment rights.
However, what is considered too obscene for a child today was in some cases considered too obscene for adults in past decades. As society changes, so change the interpretations of the Constitution.
Modafinil (Provigil) is a narcolepsy drug, but it's prescribed off-label for numerous conditions including people who work odd shifts and those who experience difficult-to-diagnose fatigue. Doctors are given significant latitude in most cases for prescribing medication if they believe that it will have a beneficial effect.
The intention was always for the Constitution to be a living document, its meaning adapting to the times. This is the reason that there are so few specifics in there, and many of those specifics were intended to set a baseline after which Congress would take over in setting standards.
I read your statement as suggesting that it has become too alive, which may well be the case. Its meanings should be interpreted in the light of the current day; what was offensive 50 years ago is no longer considered offensive, and so no longer a First Amendment violation. This also forms part of the debate over the Second Amendment; even if one believes that there is an individual right, does that right extend to machineguns, which were still more than 70 years away from practicality at the time of the adoption of the Bill of Rights? There are Fourth Amendment issues that the framers wouldn't have dreamed of, such as whether alcohol checkpoints constitute an unreasonable search.
I bring these up not as debate points, but as examples where the classic interpretations of the Constitution have been or are being challenged. There doubtless will be additional questions brought up in the future that we have not considered to date because technology or cultural changes will force a re-examination of the Constitution in light of the situation at that time. But again, that's how it was intended to work.
Observations to support a model may not be immediately apparent, but there can be indirect evidence. Development of a given model may provide a framework for other models, some of which provide opportunity for observational evidence. Observational support for a derivative model may provide indirect support for supporting models. It's certainly not as good as direct support, but absent evidence to the contrary, it's better than essentially only mathematical support, which has caused some theories such as string theory to come under fire.
The airlines looking to put in WiFi are explicitly blocking VoIP traffic using proxies, specifically to save bandwidth that would otherwise be chewed up by people talking. VoIP may not be a major strain on most land links, but it can be much less bursty than web traffic, and since at least some of the systems being examined will use satellites, it will be a more precious resources on the planes.
It's not reasonable, because you generally can't confirm that it is limited only to the building in which you broadcast the signal. You can put up a mechanism to block leakage from the jammer, but at that point, the need for a jammer is obviated, because the signal isn't going to get out anyway.
Comic book movies had a long history of sucking, too, until serious people such as Sam Raimi started to get involved and decided to not just make a good adaptation, but to make a good movie aside from the adaptation.
There are some games that likely would not make good movies no matter what you do. Doom, for example, probably is never going to rate to the level of X-Men or Spiderman. But there are examples where there was a serious attempt which, while falling short of the mark and not parroting the game's plotline, didn't totally suck (Silent Hill, for example). Far Cry might have worked, and Half-Life would probably work well (with the change that Gordon would actually have a voice). But they have to have a crew that is dedicated to and experienced in making good movies.
Extremist? Not really. Sure, he was against gun control in most forms, but he was also pro-union and pro-civil rights. He was not the right-wing nut that some people claim him to be.
One of my favorite stories from him was when, during the Rodney King riots, one or more fellow actors (he would not name them) called and asked if they could borrow one of his guns. He said, no, you can't, but you're welcome to come over to my place until things settle down.
My mistake, then. However, it is still true that Microsoft has been trying to get it moved to a SQL base for quite some time, and still can't get past the performance issues involved. Last I read, it was iffy at best as to whether it there would be any changes from the existing data store architecture in the next version of Exchange, but no one's saying that it won't happen yet.
You are also right about the filesystems. I should have more correctly stated that Microsoft and Oracle have had little success working on a SQL-based filesystem.
There are certainly conceptual problems with it. Microsoft isn't the only company that has tried to come up with a file system built on a database; Oracle has taken stabs at it, too. If the two of them have trouble coming up with something, and the FOSS world hasn't had any significant success, either, then there must be something difficult to it.
Databases have latencies that have to be overcome. Microsoft knows this well from trying to move Exchange to a SQL-based storage mechanism instead of the Jet Engine base they've been using for more than a decade. They have had test builds that work, but performance takes a huge hit, so they haven't done it.
I'm not saying that we will see it, just that we might see it.
That depends on how much they're bringing forward. When including legacy functionality, a tremendous amount of work has to happen to preserve it within a new framework, whereas writing new code that adheres to design goals can be (though not always is) easier to do.
It will be interesting to see how it turns out. I'll be happy just to see them shrink the install size back down to a useful level.
Vista took that long because they scrapped almost all of their work half-way through, a great example of extraordinarily poor project management. We've seen mention here at Slashdot of the enormous resources poured into just the shutdown screen. They were behind schedule, over budget, and missed their goals to an unacceptable extent, but they had to be able to recoup the investment, so it got pushed out the door.
Meanwhile, Steven Sinofsky was over running the Office 2007 program, which delivered essentially on-time and on-budget, hitting almost all of the goals. (I know a lot of people don't like the interface, but that's a separate point from the project management.) Sinofsky was promoted to oversee Windows development, and inherited the mess left behind by Jim Allchin. The earlier Slashdot article alluding to a complete overhaul of Windows may well be his doing, an attempt to get the focus back where it needs to be in order to not have a fiasco the next time around. We may even finally see the emergence of WFS finally.
I'm curious as to the foundations of this. You state that he had the right to modify the drivers, but did this give him the right to distribute them? And since Daniel lives in Brazil, how does this affect the EULA?
Mind you, I think Creative was a complete asshat over this, but the legal basis still intrigues me.
It's spelled "gnarlyhilite."
No, they reran 1871-2005 through the simulator a total of 10,000 times. This is clear not only from the statement that says as much ("Using a comprehensive collection of baseball statistics from 1871 to 2005, we simulated the entire history of baseball 10,000 times in a computer"), but from the mention that the record was set most often in 1894.
It was likely to occur early in the history of baseball, and fell off dramatically after the 1930s. The early years tended to be batting competitions (in some ways like today's) rather than pitching competitions, and a pitcher's repertoire was limited to about a half-dozen pitches, plus whatever grease, oil, jelly, file, sandpaper, thumbtack, or razor blade he could conceal.
It appears that Creative is realizing what they've gotten themselves into. Originally, they'd removed everything that daniel_k had done, but they're relenting on the Audigy Support Pack, which I gather is a separate item. I wonder if they will relent on the other one, as well.
I did just go look for them myself. The top four returns from a search for daniel_K creative are about Creative deleting his links.
I must go find these.