Imagine there are no taxes at all. Walmart is better of than the online retailers because they consolidate shipping, a real cost. Would you suggest taxing Walmart so that the online merchants could compete better?!
Shipping is a cost that has a real-world basis; it reflects the labor and capital necessary to move an item from point A to point B. If the online people have to pay more for shipping, that's because their products cost more to deliver to the consumer. But the B&M stores pay more for taxes for the very artificial reason that the laws don't apply well to online or mailorder businesses; this has no basis in reality and is a purely artificial cost, but they're necessary. And if you've got to charge someone to get the tax revenues it's better to charge all companies equally.
In sum: "shipping tax" = an actual cost and therefore fair
sales tax = an artificial cost which should be spread evenly
The same loophole(s) which allow Internet transactions to go untaxed allow mail-order transactions to go untaxed. Close one and you will almost certainly close the other.
Traditional retailers aren't hurting from mailorder because hardly anyone uses mailorder (compared to the Internet).
Actually, most states DO require that you pay taxes on Internet transactions, but they do not have the ability to enforce these taxes. The federal government could require that people pay these taxes to their states, and it would probably not be a Constitutional violation and the federal government would not necessarily be the ones recieving the money.
First, Linux is certainly not "the last 15% of the market". I love it, but let's not start lying.
Second, OS X doesn't use X. It uses Quartz. QT being a highly graphical thing, most of the code that would need to be ported would probably deal with the video setup, which is completely different in Windows, Mac, and Unix. That's the biggest reason there's no QT for UNIX, I'm sure.
Speaking of which, did anyone else notice that slashdot.com and freshmeat.com actually point to the right sites now? I was shocked. They still didn't get slashdot.net or freshmeat.org, though. I doubt they get many mishits anyway. I wonder how all that came about; IPO money, I suppose (a decent "investment")
This seems to be another instance like the Q3A port. It's not done by Loki; it's distributed by them. Of course, I could be misinterpreting.
(S_Draeker) We're doing Descent3... (davace) Descent3! Yea! (dvogel) isn't that already registered? (blayd) S_Dreaker: I thought Outrage was doing that in house (S_Draeker) Yeah. We're going to sell it like we did with Quake...
SDL hasn't been ported to FreeBSD yet, but I think they said they had something working under the emulation. And more interesting (though less useful), they said someone had tried and succeeded in running some of their games under Solaris x86!
The funniest military thing I've heard of was the gun which shot uranium whose kill radius was larger than its range! They actually trained people to use these! (not telling them, of course, and not using live ammo)
Well, since NVIDIA is actually writing their own drivers (not that this makes them good), I hardly think that's the case. What, do you think Microsoft said, "We will pay you lots of money if you make your drivers closed-source! That'll show those Linux people!" From MS's perspective, closed-source hardware support for Linux is probably about as bad as open-source hardware support for Linux.
This is the part of the X-box that I think might hurt the rest of the PC game industry. All games would be made so that they could play on both a PC and the X-box. Of course, you could have a sliding scale of quality, so that super-wonderful systems were fully exploited, but that will only go so far. If most game writers are targeting an X-box displaying on a TV (even if they have VGA out, most people will use a TV), that would drastically change the type of games that are produced. No more screens full of text, not so many tiny numbers; if there's no way to do it on a TV they wouldn't do it. Games would be designed to be playable at 512xwhatever, and that would limit them a lot.
On the other hand, lots of PC games depend on a resolution of at least 640x480, and without that (through a TV), the x-box might look very bad.
There was an article in a recent Newsweek explaining that Amazon is one of the few net firms that's actually trying to borrow money instead of just selling stock. As a result, they're the only net firm with a credit rating, one which puts them slightly below "Ha! You want us to lend you money?!". The thing is, they think they won't have to pay back their bonds because they're convertible into stock (all except their earliest bonds). They expect their stock price to continue to rise, and then these people will convert the bonds, and they won't have to pay them back! Somehow I doubt their stock price will continue to climb as much as it has, and they will find themselves facing a great deal of debt.
NB: I know very little about financial markets, particularly corporate bonds, and I'm just parrotting a Newsweek article. Correct anything!
Yeah, but no one is going to want to be the grunts. Given, people like being the grunts in Quake and Unreal, but then you're at least autonomous. What do you do when the higher-ups decide that you should be sacrificed for the good of the company? Some people might do that, more if they develop long-term relationships with the other people, but I bet most would mutiny and/or effect their own plan.
Liberals are supposed to be against the sales tax because it's regressive. Conservatives are supposed to be against it because it puts a disproportionate burden on small business, and because it is economically inefficient
Ok, I'm not an economist, though I am an economics major (and a liberal), and I don't understand why conservatives would think excise taxes are economically inefficient? I was always under the impression that they are more efficient at least when compared with income taxes, since since they encourage savings and investment (by discouraging consumption) rather than discouraging income, which isn't a good idea (and lessing the effect of the Laffer Curve with which many coservatives are enamored). Why are they supposed to be inefficient?
I also don't quite get the bias against small businesses (waving the bloody shirt, perhaps?). Is it just that all businesses must deal with sales taxes, and that will seem larger for small businesses? As I said, I'm not a conservative and fail to see the reasoning behind the opinions you claim they have.
Why? Because the tax rate, combined with the cost of shipping will make Internet purchases generally more expensive than traditional retail.
If the internet stores can't keep up with the brick and mortars when faced with the exact same tax penalty, that means the brick and mortars are more efficient and the internet stores should die. Is there any particular reason that we should favor Internet stores over local ones? Just because we like technology?
Think of it this way: If they removed all sales taxes, the Internet stores would have to lower their prices to compete, and in many cases they'd go out of business. If they had a choice, I'm sure the brick and mortars would lobby for this, but they know that's not going to happen. They'd like a fair playing field, and if they can only have it this way, they'll take it; is that so wrong?
\me prepares to run and hide from people on Slashdot who will say removing all taxes is the proper way to do things. Yeah, maybe. Let's see you pass that law (I don't agree with you, so don't ask for my help!)
Well, just to chip in, I have read that that's true (Newsweek or something, about 4 years ago). Doesn't mean that it's actually true, but it at least backs it up. The claim is not that bribery is legal in other countries (I sure hope not), but that for instance it is illegal for Americans to bribe Brazilian customs officers. It's illegal for American's to bribe OTHER country's officials.
Of course, this is never, ever enforced, and it happens all the time, even with people/companies that have strong moral stances against bribery, becuase they often cannot get anything done without bribary. This is partially as a result of some governments paying below-poverty-line salaries to such officials expecting that the bribes will make up the difference. There are NGOs working to increase the salaries of these people to try to reduce the amount of bribary necesssary to transact international business.
I don't believe the US making foreign bribery illegal has much impact, since it's never enforced, but I just thought I'd back up the facts of the first guy. Oh yeah, the article I read (maybe it was heard; I know this casts great doubt on my reliability, but sorry!) said that in some countries bribary of foreign government officials was actually tax deductable! (how are you supposed to get a receipt for that?)
Geez, sorry. I'm using someone else's weird trackball, and I thought I had clicked it down and had not. Combined with the fact that Slasdot was actually being responsive, I didn't have time to cancel when I saw that. Maybe +1 should not be default.
While that's generally true, creating your own SPEC files for building X, which doesn't use the generic GNU autoconf/make system and which conditionally installs files (generating an RPM for each server) would be nasty, nasty. I guess changing the SPEC from a 3.3.x X version would be the best way to do it.
Yeah, but the funny part is that your ears are only pseudo-3d also. The way you can tell which direction a sound is coming from is by which ear hears the sound louder and which hears it first. From that it tries to figure out which direction the sound is from. Then you'll tilt your head a little and it can triangulate where the sound is by getting another data point. But with just one listening position, you can't really tell whether something is up or down (your ears aren't up-down symetrical, so you might be able to tell a little). So if your character is standing still, they wouldn't be able to tell whether the monsters were up or down anyway. Perhaps the characters need to bob their heads more.
Well, that's leaving out the one number-crunching-intensive application that would be really useful on PDA's, etc: voice recognition. Now, the quality of voice recognition isn't too useful at this point, but while it's mostly a novelty on desktops, voice recognition on a PDA would be EXTREMELY useful.
I don't know anything about the algorithms for voice recognition, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of that could be moved into specialized hardware which could run at a much, much lower clock rate, so you probably won't need 1GHZ anytime soon anyway.
I know this is going to vary with the project, but I'm wondering how much manpower it takes to port a "typical" game from Windows to Linux. I suspect it's somwhere greater than zero and less than the amount of effort it took to write the game in the first place, but I just wonder how the time for (re)programming and QA are distributed compared to writing the game in the first place and how you allocate your staff to this (do they each work on a single game or do they move from project to project).
What magical world have you been living in where Console games are cheaper than that?! N64 games pretty much start at $60. The main difference between the PC and Consoles as gaming platforms are the genres of titles available. Try to find a decent fighting game for a PC or a good strategy or Western-style RPG (vs. Asian-style, not cowboy-style) on a console.
I've been checking out Ruby lately, and it's pretty interesting (how come there are no RPMs for this thing? I had to make my own!). But I'm a little turned off by some of the arguments they put forth for the language. Python is really object-oriented. Everything is an object. It could be more OO (unavoidable data hiding, no procedures, etc.), but they make it sound like Python is non-OO or that it was an afterthought, which is hardly the case.
My only other problem is that the stuff looks like Perl. The biggest complaint about Python has got to be the blocking-by-whitespace, but at least for me (and I'm sure lots of other people) once you get over that you love it. I try to write C like that. Unfortunately, leaving out braces and semicolons tends to make C not work too well:)
Ruby may try to remove some of the more, um, bad "other ways to do it" from Perl, which is nice, but it doesn't really make it any more readable at a glance (not as important as being able to read it while staring at it, probably, but still very useful). Python and Eiffel get my praise for being the two languages whose programs I could read before I actually knew how to do anything in the language. They just make sense. I don't think everything should have to be like that, though. Some freedom is good, but having a little guidance is also desirable. Maybe after I've learned Ruby more I'll be able to better judge it. Anybody have comments on how it fares there? Now I just have to figure out how to get a newsreader to display Japanese newsgroups legibly. . .
Those were the words to that song? I have seen the movie 5 times, and I NEVER noticed that first paragraph. Wow, what sick, sick people. I must say that was the best song in the show. It's too bad most people who saw the movie didn't pick up on all the musicals that the songs were based on (One Day More, Oklahoma, Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang, etc.)
Yes, you can. Just edit rpmrc, add a new archflags line and change some of the buildarchtranslate lines (and make a/usr/src/redhat/RPM/i586 directory or something like that). The problem is that Mandrake ships with PGCC, which is a branch off of gcc, specifically aimed at Pentium, K6, on up and with good optimizations for those archs. Red Hat does not ship this, nor do they even have RPMs for it. GCC as it is in RH 6.1 (or so I've heard) doesn't have as much in the way of Pentium-optimizations. I've heard pgcc is a little flaky from various sources, though I've never varified it myself (well, many things were flaky for me when I tried it, but I can't rule out user error), plus Redhat now owns Cygnus, which is in charge of GCC proper, so they'll probably want to use the official version, I'd think.
GCC 2.97 is supposed to have a better pentium backend, so I don't know how that will go. It may finally make sense for them to make i586 and i686 RPMs. Personally, I've recompiled GNOME, X, Python, and whatever new packages I get using GCC 2.97.1 and -march=pentium. It's not worth the days it would take to recompile everything. I'll live if xclock wastes some cycles it might not have.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't say this enough:
Imagine there are no taxes at all. Walmart is better of than the online retailers because they consolidate shipping, a real cost. Would you suggest taxing Walmart so that the online merchants could compete better?!
Shipping is a cost that has a real-world basis; it reflects the labor and capital necessary to move an item from point A to point B. If the online people have to pay more for shipping, that's because their products cost more to deliver to the consumer. But the B&M stores pay more for taxes for the very artificial reason that the laws don't apply well to online or mailorder businesses; this has no basis in reality and is a purely artificial cost, but they're necessary. And if you've got to charge someone to get the tax revenues it's better to charge all companies equally.
In sum:
"shipping tax" = an actual cost and therefore fair
sales tax = an artificial cost which should be spread evenly
The same loophole(s) which allow Internet transactions to go untaxed allow mail-order transactions to go untaxed. Close one and you will almost certainly close the other.
Traditional retailers aren't hurting from mailorder because hardly anyone uses mailorder (compared to the Internet).
Actually, most states DO require that you pay taxes on Internet transactions, but they do not have the ability to enforce these taxes. The federal government could require that people pay these taxes to their states, and it would probably not be a Constitutional violation and the federal government would not necessarily be the ones recieving the money.
First, Linux is certainly not "the last 15% of the market". I love it, but let's not start lying.
Second, OS X doesn't use X. It uses Quartz. QT being a highly graphical thing, most of the code that would need to be ported would probably deal with the video setup, which is completely different in Windows, Mac, and Unix. That's the biggest reason there's no QT for UNIX, I'm sure.
Speaking of which, did anyone else notice that slashdot.com and freshmeat.com actually point to the right sites now? I was shocked. They still didn't get slashdot.net or freshmeat.org, though. I doubt they get many mishits anyway. I wonder how all that came about; IPO money, I suppose (a decent "investment")
This seems to be another instance like the Q3A port. It's not done by Loki; it's distributed by them. Of course, I could be misinterpreting.
(S_Draeker) We're doing Descent3...
(davace) Descent3! Yea!
(dvogel) isn't that already registered?
(blayd) S_Dreaker: I thought Outrage was doing that in house
(S_Draeker) Yeah. We're going to sell it like we did with Quake...
SDL hasn't been ported to FreeBSD yet, but I think they said they had something working under the emulation. And more interesting (though less useful), they said someone had tried and succeeded in running some of their games under Solaris x86!
The funniest military thing I've heard of was the gun which shot uranium whose kill radius was larger than its range! They actually trained people to use these! (not telling them, of course, and not using live ammo)
Well, since NVIDIA is actually writing their own drivers (not that this makes them good), I hardly think that's the case. What, do you think Microsoft said, "We will pay you lots of money if you make your drivers closed-source! That'll show those Linux people!" From MS's perspective, closed-source hardware support for Linux is probably about as bad as open-source hardware support for Linux.
It might very run existing PC games,
This is the part of the X-box that I think might hurt the rest of the PC game industry. All games would be made so that they could play on both a PC and the X-box. Of course, you could have a sliding scale of quality, so that super-wonderful systems were fully exploited, but that will only go so far. If most game writers are targeting an X-box displaying on a TV (even if they have VGA out, most people will use a TV), that would drastically change the type of games that are produced. No more screens full of text, not so many tiny numbers; if there's no way to do it on a TV they wouldn't do it. Games would be designed to be playable at 512xwhatever, and that would limit them a lot.
On the other hand, lots of PC games depend on a resolution of at least 640x480, and without that (through a TV), the x-box might look very bad.
There was an article in a recent Newsweek explaining that Amazon is one of the few net firms that's actually trying to borrow money instead of just selling stock. As a result, they're the only net firm with a credit rating, one which puts them slightly below "Ha! You want us to lend you money?!". The thing is, they think they won't have to pay back their bonds because they're convertible into stock (all except their earliest bonds). They expect their stock price to continue to rise, and then these people will convert the bonds, and they won't have to pay them back! Somehow I doubt their stock price will continue to climb as much as it has, and they will find themselves facing a great deal of debt.
NB: I know very little about financial markets, particularly corporate bonds, and I'm just parrotting a Newsweek article. Correct anything!
Yeah, but no one is going to want to be the grunts. Given, people like being the grunts in Quake and Unreal, but then you're at least autonomous. What do you do when the higher-ups decide that you should be sacrificed for the good of the company? Some people might do that, more if they develop long-term relationships with the other people, but I bet most would mutiny and/or effect their own plan.
I don't doubt they're regressive (you're right); I just don't get the other stuff.
Liberals are supposed to be against the sales tax because it's regressive. Conservatives are supposed to be against it because it puts a disproportionate burden on small business, and because it is economically inefficient
Ok, I'm not an economist, though I am an economics major (and a liberal), and I don't understand why conservatives would think excise taxes are economically inefficient? I was always under the impression that they are more efficient at least when compared with income taxes, since since they encourage savings and investment (by discouraging consumption) rather than discouraging income, which isn't a good idea (and lessing the effect of the Laffer Curve with which many coservatives are enamored). Why are they supposed to be inefficient?
I also don't quite get the bias against small businesses (waving the bloody shirt, perhaps?). Is it just that all businesses must deal with sales taxes, and that will seem larger for small businesses? As I said, I'm not a conservative and fail to see the reasoning behind the opinions you claim they have.
Why? Because the tax rate, combined with the cost of shipping will make Internet purchases generally more expensive than traditional retail.
If the internet stores can't keep up with the brick and mortars when faced with the exact same tax penalty, that means the brick and mortars are more efficient and the internet stores should die. Is there any particular reason that we should favor Internet stores over local ones? Just because we like technology?
Think of it this way: If they removed all sales taxes, the Internet stores would have to lower their prices to compete, and in many cases they'd go out of business. If they had a choice, I'm sure the brick and mortars would lobby for this, but they know that's not going to happen. They'd like a fair playing field, and if they can only have it this way, they'll take it; is that so wrong?
\me prepares to run and hide from people on Slashdot who will say removing all taxes is the proper way to do things. Yeah, maybe. Let's see you pass that law (I don't agree with you, so don't ask for my help!)
Well, just to chip in, I have read that that's true (Newsweek or something, about 4 years ago). Doesn't mean that it's actually true, but it at least backs it up. The claim is not that bribery is legal in other countries (I sure hope not), but that for instance it is illegal for Americans to bribe Brazilian customs officers. It's illegal for American's to bribe OTHER country's officials.
Of course, this is never, ever enforced, and it happens all the time, even with people/companies that have strong moral stances against bribery, becuase they often cannot get anything done without bribary. This is partially as a result of some governments paying below-poverty-line salaries to such officials expecting that the bribes will make up the difference. There are NGOs working to increase the salaries of these people to try to reduce the amount of bribary necesssary to transact international business.
I don't believe the US making foreign bribery illegal has much impact, since it's never enforced, but I just thought I'd back up the facts of the first guy. Oh yeah, the article I read (maybe it was heard; I know this casts great doubt on my reliability, but sorry!) said that in some countries bribary of foreign government officials was actually tax deductable! (how are you supposed to get a receipt for that?)
Geez, sorry. I'm using someone else's weird trackball, and I thought I had clicked it down and had not. Combined with the fact that Slasdot was actually being responsive, I didn't have time to cancel when I saw that. Maybe +1 should not be default.
Crap, I think I accidentally moderated this up! I didn't mean to! Posting to remove it.
While that's generally true, creating your own SPEC files for building X, which doesn't use the generic GNU autoconf/make system and which conditionally installs files (generating an RPM for each server) would be nasty, nasty. I guess changing the SPEC from a 3.3.x X version would be the best way to do it.
Yeah, but the funny part is that your ears are only pseudo-3d also. The way you can tell which direction a sound is coming from is by which ear hears the sound louder and which hears it first. From that it tries to figure out which direction the sound is from. Then you'll tilt your head a little and it can triangulate where the sound is by getting another data point. But with just one listening position, you can't really tell whether something is up or down (your ears aren't up-down symetrical, so you might be able to tell a little). So if your character is standing still, they wouldn't be able to tell whether the monsters were up or down anyway. Perhaps the characters need to bob their heads more.
Well, that's leaving out the one number-crunching-intensive application that would be really useful on PDA's, etc: voice recognition. Now, the quality of voice recognition isn't too useful at this point, but while it's mostly a novelty on desktops, voice recognition on a PDA would be EXTREMELY useful.
I don't know anything about the algorithms for voice recognition, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of that could be moved into specialized hardware which could run at a much, much lower clock rate, so you probably won't need 1GHZ anytime soon anyway.
I know this is going to vary with the project, but I'm wondering how much manpower it takes to port a "typical" game from Windows to Linux. I suspect it's somwhere greater than zero and less than the amount of effort it took to write the game in the first place, but I just wonder how the time for (re)programming and QA are distributed compared to writing the game in the first place and how you allocate your staff to this (do they each work on a single game or do they move from project to project).
New PC titles are generally $49.95 US and up.
What magical world have you been living in where Console games are cheaper than that?! N64 games pretty much start at $60. The main difference between the PC and Consoles as gaming platforms are the genres of titles available. Try to find a decent fighting game for a PC or a good strategy or Western-style RPG (vs. Asian-style, not cowboy-style) on a console.
I've been checking out Ruby lately, and it's pretty interesting (how come there are no RPMs for this thing? I had to make my own!). But I'm a little turned off by some of the arguments they put forth for the language. Python is really object-oriented. Everything is an object. It could be more OO (unavoidable data hiding, no procedures, etc.), but they make it sound like Python is non-OO or that it was an afterthought, which is hardly the case.
:)
My only other problem is that the stuff looks like Perl. The biggest complaint about Python has got to be the blocking-by-whitespace, but at least for me (and I'm sure lots of other people) once you get over that you love it. I try to write C like that. Unfortunately, leaving out braces and semicolons tends to make C not work too well
Ruby may try to remove some of the more, um, bad "other ways to do it" from Perl, which is nice, but it doesn't really make it any more readable at a glance (not as important as being able to read it while staring at it, probably, but still very useful). Python and Eiffel get my praise for being the two languages whose programs I could read before I actually knew how to do anything in the language. They just make sense. I don't think everything should have to be like that, though. Some freedom is good, but having a little guidance is also desirable. Maybe after I've learned Ruby more I'll be able to better judge it. Anybody have comments on how it fares there? Now I just have to figure out how to get a newsreader to display Japanese newsgroups legibly. . .
Those were the words to that song? I have seen the movie 5 times, and I NEVER noticed that first paragraph. Wow, what sick, sick people. I must say that was the best song in the show. It's too bad most people who saw the movie didn't pick up on all the musicals that the songs were based on (One Day More, Oklahoma, Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang, etc.)
Yes, you can. Just edit rpmrc, add a new archflags line and change some of the buildarchtranslate lines (and make a /usr/src/redhat/RPM/i586 directory or something like that). The problem is that Mandrake ships with PGCC, which is a branch off of gcc, specifically aimed at Pentium, K6, on up and with good optimizations for those archs. Red Hat does not ship this, nor do they even have RPMs for it. GCC as it is in RH 6.1 (or so I've heard) doesn't have as much in the way of Pentium-optimizations. I've heard pgcc is a little flaky from various sources, though I've never varified it myself (well, many things were flaky for me when I tried it, but I can't rule out user error), plus Redhat now owns Cygnus, which is in charge of GCC proper, so they'll probably want to use the official version, I'd think.
GCC 2.97 is supposed to have a better pentium backend, so I don't know how that will go. It may finally make sense for them to make i586 and i686 RPMs. Personally, I've recompiled GNOME, X, Python, and whatever new packages I get using GCC 2.97.1 and -march=pentium. It's not worth the days it would take to recompile everything. I'll live if xclock wastes some cycles it might not have.