... is that elections are largely driven by economic fundamentals and (to some degree) random chance.
Amen. The magic words here are "double dip", as I'm sure you know the US unemployment is almost 10% and the economy is not looking so great. What you may or may not have caught is that many European governments are almost bankrupt and probably in worse shape than the US. And as we've learned in the last crisis, people lend from each other so if first someone starts to default then the interest rates go up and credit ratings go down creating more defaults and the house of card crumbles. People are now seriously talking about a collapse that is not just "too big to fail" but also "too big to be saved". All it takes it some of the predictions, not worst case but some of the more gloomy ones and you'll have a huge debt crisis flowing back the other way from Europe to the US. Of course it'll hit us the worst but if the US economy tanks again, the unemployment is past 10% and climbing it will not matter what Obama does. He'll be booted out of office even though it's not his fault because people believe it can't possibly get worse than what they got. Then we'll have President Palin, and then they will find out they were wrong.
If you have professors like I had, they haven't typed up everything they should say in their notes - certainly not in their powerpoint. Very often it's the things he makes a particular effort to point out - that might not be that well reflected in the notes - that you want to take notes of. Like you I mostly prefer to listen rather than take notes, but that's wildly different from person to person. You are probably like me, you hear it once and it sticks. Others have to go over their notes again and again to make it stick by repetition. I've never found teacher's notes to be all that great, they're usually more a list of talking points and not nearly as to the point as I'd like.
If the cores are different, it may be useful. Say a phone has two low power/low speed cores, one core dedicated to the radio, and two cores that have high speed/power. This would make the phone useful. When playing games, it could have one or both high speed cores running, but when just idle and sitting there, it could just be using one low-speed core for the OS and background apps.
Isn't this pretty much the way cell phones already work? One extremely low power standby mode, and one active mode. I seem to remember that was talked about when the Atom was introduced and they said it was way too power hungry in idle mode, that cell phones already had idle power in the <<1 W domain and had specialized on this for years. I'm guessing more cores would only matter between the "simple" active mode and entertainment mode. The limiting capacity will still be the battery, the dual core will just let you use it up much faster.
Well, it pretty much is true. Apple doesn't offer a cheap Mac, never have and probably never will. Particularly their cheapest models - the Mac Mini being the very cheapest - have very crappy hardware value. The reason you buy this is simple, it's the only way to get a genuine Mac that runs OS X and Mac software, unless you're in the very small technical minority who'd be comfortable with a hackintosh. Just to give you an idea, at my favorite price comparison site they now list 262 laptop models. The cheapest Mac - and I mean the cheapest, non-upgraded laptop Apple sells according to the Apple store would rank 155th. The lower half Apple just doesn't want to compete in. Same with the Mac Mini, there are tons of cheap Windows mini-pcs that Apple doesn't compete with at all. If you want to go Mac, the entry price is the Mac Mini. Personally I think it's part of Apple's way of upselling, if you've already decided you want a Mac it's pretty easy to sell you up to a mid range Mac because the low end is really poor bang for the buck and a little more gets you a lot more hardware - of course pushing you up into an even higher price range. As for the optional upgrades, they charge more than IBM did in its day and they were pretty damn pricey.
I'm not running Apple but if I was I'd seriously consider taking a rematch with Microsoft on the mainstream market. Where today the cheapest laptop I can find is 2195,- NOK and Apple's lowest is 8490,- NOK, at least offer a 4-5000 NOK version. Same with the Mini, the cheapest nettop I can find is 2105,- NOK, make say a 4000 NOK version instead of the 5990,- NOK Mac Mini to get people hooked. Make a normal tower with a stylish design for all the people that don't fit the Mini/iMac/Pro niches. Move to take a 15% desktop share instead of 5% making up for the lower margins. Don't go for corporations - they'll always be penny pinchers but go for the home users. Apple has done some great moves to get Apple products into many people's homes, but they've not really leveraged it to increase their Mac sales. The Macs are still staying safely within the niches they escaped to during the 1990s, they've peeked out and regained a little but Apple still doesn't dare bet on them as a volume product, only a high margin niche product. It's a safe strategy - it's much harder to raise prices back up if the numbers don't work out - but it lacks ambition. Then again, they seem to have plenty ambition in other areas...
With grown up OSs that aren't stupid enough to map the physical drive layout to the logical file layout, these hybrid drives are a no brainer, just change the fstab to point/home(/Users for macheads:P) to the hd and / to the ssd. Done! However in Windows you now would have to contend with your drive being divided amongst 2 drive letters and all the registry hell that goes along with it.
Except that your / is full of small files and your/home/[user]/Documents are also full of small files that'd be much better off on a SSD, while all the help files on / that I hardly ever use and media files in your home folder should go on the HDD.
P.S. While the TARDIS tricks you can pull off on "grown up" OSs can be useful, they're hell to make sense of and make very simple questions have very complicated answers. Like for example, do I have the space to copy in these 30 GB of files? Well that depends, you only have 10 GB free on / but it's bigger on the inside and there may even be more disks being mounted somewhere under/home again. So you can copy in a bunch of files to a subdirectory and still have just as much free space, as if you were a magician pouring water into a hankerchief. Windows is simple, you have your drives and the more you put in them the fuller they get which is very straightforward to understand.
P.P.S. Your setup describes how most Windows machines are set up in a corporate setting, the apps on C:\ and your profile and/or my documents redirected to the network. Kinda silly to pretend that's not possible.
I'm still not connecting the dots here, in this case it seems they were hit with an injunction issued by the court not just a cease-and-desist letter. It can't be the intended meaning of this ruling that if a user uploads something to a provider, that provider can host the content forever in disregard of all laws. If an user uploaded say kiddie porn, could the provider then just turn around and say "as a policy we don't touch the content, so we refuse"? It's one thing to avoid self-censorship so the hoster doesn't have to take it down because it thinks maybe one of the models looks like she's 17, but there has to be a way for the courts to say "take this down" even though they're held otherwise harmless. I would think this would be that method, but maybe I'm missing something.
In a cinema, the distance to the screen is far enough that this generally isn't a big deal: the rays coming from one point on the screen, by the time they hit your pupil, have diverged along such a narrow angle that they might as well be parallel (as if from an infinitely distant source.) But when you're in a living room with a screen in front of you,
Can't it be true in reverse as well? You appear to see an object coming very close to you, but the focal depth still says it's far away. At least in gimmicks where things would jump out at you from the screen there should be a fairly obvious difference to what the eye would see in reality.
Well, good luck finding something else people have so little clue about yet still have to use or feel a need to use. I know there's lots of things I can't do and would probably make a horrible mess if I tried, so I don't do them. Or at least if I wanted to try I'd find something to teach me the basics. Computers are to many people still Magic, like people looking at a car wondering how the hell it can move without horses pulling it. Not that people are superstitious or anything like that but they've just decided this is so far beyond what they're going to comprehend that they're not going to try along with quantum physics, rocket science and brain surgery. And yet people expect them to use to for stuff like work and such, but since they've already decided they're not going to understand they're going to memorize. So they make their little lists of steps 1 through 8 which all depend on the menus, buttons, dialogs and everything else being the same. And if anything goes remotely wrong, they just seem to go into complete mind blank mode. Sometimes they even seem to have forgotten how to read, instead of reading that the printer is out of paper, they'll try redoing their steps to print one more time. Or five more times, in some cases. I'm sure we've all done some good screwups, but no I've never been that kind of idiot and never will be. The people that make up the best/worst stories are the kind of people who need "Don't hit yourself in the head with this hammer" warning labels, if computers were lethal we'd have a lot of Darwin Award winners.
Even 100 years ago the common language of Europe was nothing. If you put an Englishman and a Frenchman and a German in the same room, most likely none of them would understand a word the other said. Why should they? People could go by their whole lives and never be in contact with a foreigner, they didn't communicate, they didn't travel and international trade was rare except in border areas.
These days my support calls are routed to India and back because it's cheaper than doing it locally. I've been to three other continents and enough countries that 100 years ago I'd be one in a million. And just by ordering from amazon.co.uk I'm engaging in international trade myself. I've studied abroad, I've worked on international projects - in fact many larger companies now dictate that the business language is English for anything official, which means thousands of workplaces per company only open to people that know English. And with increased proficiency in the population, the rules change. I've had classes where the textbooks were only in English, even for educations that have nothing to do with other countries or languages English is turning into a requirement. Kids read Harry Potter in English because they already know English and they don't want to wait for the translation - never mind that the original is generally better anyway. Granted, Norway is small and we're much further along than many other nations but it's no longer diplomats or priests or the aristocracy that learn foreign languages, it's the people. In Europe more than half are now bilingual - probably more than ever before in history. And in the upcoming generation it's pretty much everyone.
No. Double jeopardy has a specific legal meaning, and this is not it. Some forms of private copying may be legal but taxed while others can be illegal under Hadopi, at best you have a conflict between two laws/regulations that need resolving. In any case a tax is not a legal punishment, and double jeopardy means being punished twice by the legal system for the same crime.
Yup, looking at the number of web pages in a given language is rather misleading compared to the true reach of English. I'm Norwegian, of course every local web page is in Norwegian but the vast majority understand English. Same is true for many other nations around the world, together more people understand English than Chinese. At least in the EU things are now aligning far more towards English than before, it's considered by far the most important foreign language to know for non-native speakers while previously French and German were much closer to English. Over the next generation or so it will add many, many millions of secondary speakers as people mostly speak two languages, their native one and English. The rest of the world I don't know so much about, but I suspect English is strengthening its position in favor of French/Spanish/Portugese while Chinese remains a regional language mostly limited to China and surrounding territories.
When hell freezes over. Perfect translation from one language to the other is hopeless for the same reason using a human language as a computer language is hopeless, it's not precise enough. What things actually mean greatly depend not just on words and grammar but also on context and forms of expression. A translation program will never be better than the people who programmed it and will always miss a lot of "well, it's sorta somewhat the same sentence but you lost detail x or it's just not the way a native speaker would express it" and there's a constant stream of subtle changes as the language evolves. There's also a be a huge market for perfect speech recognition, but you can bet that won't be here in ten years either.
Well if you've been here a while as your UID says, you should know it's all about the patents. You check the button in the install process, Canoncial doesn't. With preinstalls it would be the OEM installing it for you, which makes the OEM a lawsuit target. At least in the US the MP3 patents are valid for at least 2 and possibly 7 more years if the submarine patents are recognized. Patents for MPEG2 that's required for DVD reading goes to 2023, H.264 to 2028. That's fine if you're called Linux Mint and doesn't have deep enough pockets that anybody will bother to sue you but if you're a big OEM they might. At least no OEM feels like taking that chance...
I would say there was a "Year of Firefox web browser" and it was 2005. From NetApplication's quarterly numbers it went from 3.66% in 2004 Q4 to 9.00% in 2005 Q4. Of course it did hit 1.0 in november 2004 so it's not surprising it jumped, but really they did manage to make the 1.0 push matter.
Linux has never had a year with 150% growth or even anything close to it. At least on the web browsing desktop it's been very stable at around 1% for years now, some data even suggests it's regressing a bit after the netbook wave that Microsoft quite effectively killed and even that only got the numbers up to 1.1-1.2%. Of course you shouldn't expect people to switch OS as easily as they'd install an alternate browser, but at this rate it's never happening.
Firefox has barely been keeping its market share this year with Chrome taking all the growth, even though Chromium is open source Chrome isn't. It's highly questionable how much Oracle will continue to push and support the OSS solutions they took over from Sun. I'm sure Linux and OSS will continue its success on servers, cell phones and supercomputers but on the desktop I'd say it's highly on the defensive, not the offensive at the moment.
To put it bluntly, it's a bazaar not a commune. For the most part people don't pool their time, take consensus on what the community wants and turn that into an overall plan and direction for the project. It's more that every individual works on what they want - or in the case of employed people, what their employers want - and where the project is going is simply the sum of where the individuals are taking it. That you often have a project leader or core group does not really mean they have much authority to speak on behalf of all the contributors, they're usually free to work on something else or not at all or to continue to voice their dissent. Every time people try talking behalf on everyone it ends up with a lot of "That is not what I want" and "That is not how I want to do it", you can't communicate consensus when there is no consensus. You just live with the disputes until they're so bad things start forking off.
For example, the main competition for open-source actually seems to be pirate-ware. People always consider open-source when faced with actually paying for software. What strategy should open-source take with this? None?
Pretty much. Pirates typically pirate top-of-the-line versions since they're not paying anyway, which makes the feature gap pretty big. It's important that free software is there if you look at the legal alternatives, but OSS isn't going to compete with a "free" Adobe CS5 Master Collection any time soon. The Humble Indie Bundle won't compete with a PC loaded with pirated AAA games. At best you can try positioning yourself to say it's free and legal to try, you can always change your mind and get something else later. That may work for say OpenOffice and maybe a few more, but I don't think you'll see many switching anyway.
I'm a medicinal chemist working on a program to cure Alzheimer's disease, and I thank God for my abilities. I think you presume too much of the Doctor when you deny the existence of miracles.
The human body will fight for its survival just as much as its owner, sometimes beating what looks like impossible odds. Just like some people have extreme allergies, others have extreme resistances. I'll agree that despite modern medicine sometimes the doctor is not the one to thank, but it's a fairly good stretch from there to interference from a supernatural being.
And for what? so they can target various price points within their target markets.
Well, let's say you want to replace the 6950/70 with a single product, what should the price be? They can make it as expensive as the 6950, losing a bunch of profit on the 6970 sales they would have made. Or as expensive as the 6970, but then you'd lose lots of sales that just wouldn't pay what a 6970 costs. You talk as if price points were made up by the industry when they in fact reflect that people have different amounts of disposable cash and put different value on things. There's not a single card that would simultaniously satisfy both markets and be a sound investment for AMD. And if serving each market with its own design costs more, then of course they choose a common design as anything else would be just stupid.
Maybe it's easier to see the point with software and features than hardware and binning. The difference between Photoshop and Photoshop Elements is probably a #ifdef in the source code. Why then should they offer a "crippled" version? Well because some people are interested in paying for the missing features and some aren't. It's reasonable that the people that want CMYK separation pay for CMYK separation and the rest don't need to subsidize them. Those who pay for the 6970 are the ones most willing to pay for performance and so they do. Isn't it completely reasonable and logical they cover more of the R&D tham the 6850 owners?
Question: do you think this is an environmentally sound practice? It isn't very "green" to sell a physical product to the consumer only to restrict its usage to some lesser subset of its full potential.
Actually, the costs in developing two product lines are probably larger both environmentally and economically. That it would be offset by a better design is unlikely, since the difference between the two boards is largely making use of more energy-efficient but slower components. If there was a significant saving to die size, they would do it quite quickly as on this point since the economic and environmental cost are largely aligned.
in reality, if someone does anything even remotely competent, it should be a 1 day process, maximum - after all, using NAT or IPv6 internally should make it even less of an issue.
I think if you were to estimate the time it takes to change the company fleet of cars from summer to winter tires, you'd budget about ten seconds per car - that's how long it takes in Formula One, right? Companies don't plan to redo their network structure, ever. They do as little as possible as rarely as possible because it's pure cost. What you're looking at is an endless amount of cruft with IPs hard coded all over PCs, routers, configuration files, scripts, scheduled jobs, firewall configurations, stored server information or URLs, documentation, the works. Sure you could blow away millions of dollars on optimizing "network reoganization" process, making the company a world leader in that until someone with the money asks "Why the f*ck are we spending all this money on THIS? What in heaven's name do we get for it?" and you'd better have a better answer "So we can give some IP addresses back to ICANN for free." Otherwise cleaning up all that cruft will be on your project time and project cost, and if you still think you can do it in a day you're a monkey on crack.
Internally computer programs have lots and lots of pointers to memory addresses whether your programming language exposes them to you or not, and a flipped bit in a pointer will almost certainly make it crash. Maybe if you're talking "just outside tolerance limits" kind of error rate, but a CPU that regularly fumbles would be very noticable.
First off, it's not like there has to be a single solution. I think by far the biggest problem is that if your email is spammed once, it's spammed forever. Everybody knows opt-outs do not work, making such requests will only make your address ten times as spammed. If I were to redo my mail setup, no one would get to know my real inbox. Every address I'd use would be an alias - yahoo will give you 500 of these for free - and every mailing list and every site that requires email for registration would get their own alias. If one of them is spammed to hell I'll delete that alias and it will all bounce, it's the most effective "opt-out" possible. Bots that would scrape public bug trackers, mailing list archives and such would have little effect as I'd update my subscription details and the old address would go dead. It wouldn't stop the spam industry, but it would prevent it from spamming me. I don't think the idiots that pay money for V!AgR4 can be saved...
I don't think that's the point, I can apply patches and build a new kernel in relatively short time if everything else is compiled already. I think it's more that there's regular testing that everybody's work merges properly and passes unit testing. It's more than a little frustrating if it's the big merge day and after every developer has checked into the master branch then everything fails.
Example: Allow users direct access to a bug database? It's hard enough to train testers to give you good bug reports. You won't get anything usable from an end user without some severe filtering.
The question is whether you are better off leaving your users to work out their bug corresponence via mailing lists or email and only let a blessed few enter bug reports, or is it better to have the full case history going all the way back to what the customer actually reported along with any logs or screenshots. Or if you just drop it only the floor saying "LALALALA our software is perfect, all problems are PEBCAK problems."
Personally I'm a big fan of wine appdb's "*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***". If enough people are experiencing a problem, you have a problem whether you get anything useful from the logs or not. Don't forget that crappy bug reports and crappy logging often go hand in hand, when the application just goes boom without giving any useful information about why the developer is just as much at fault for making it impossible to debug.
Man, what an ethno-centric, you're the kind that gives Americans a bad reputation.
1) My native language would be very annoying to write on a US keyboard. Try finding the alt codes for æøåÆØÅ if you don't believe me. 2) I know where all the symbols are in my layout, trying to use two layouts is like if I'd randomly switch your keyboard between dvorak and qwerty.
If you're going to use multiple keyboard inputs, you can easily configure a computer to work that way. There's a little keyboard layout hotswitch available if you have more than one layout and it works just fine under both Windows and Linux - probably Mac too. How about trying to find a solution instead of just demanding that the world should revolve around the US and that everyone should switch to a US layout?
Because poor typing skills will lead to you writing less readable code with a lot more shorthand. Shorter variable names, shorter function names, if you don't got good typing skills you'll end up coding using lots of do( x ); where parse( record ); would be far better. You can pretend it doesn't happen, or you can pretend it doesn't matter, but you inevitably drop the "fluff" because it's "slowing you down". I've tried it, it actually requires more typing to write code you'd want to come back to later, all that context that's spinning up in your head telling you what all the variables are and the abbriviations mean will be lost. Being able to type it out quickly and effortlessly without losing the flow of the code you are working on is a big advantage. It's not the typing speed itself though, it's getting to the point where your typing doesn't interfere or slow down your thinking. But when you're typing naturally without thinking that is a highly skilled typer..
Green/clean/renewable/buzzword power is a funny market, I've seen them try something similar here. Basically what happens is that the current pool of power is already a mix with some parts good and bad. All the special offers do is take part of it and charge a premium for it, while the normal power becomes "dirtier". The overall production mix remains the same, the people willing to pay feelgood money are too few to actually increase demand. That and the environmentalists usually are also opposed to the large windmill parks and whatnot disrupting the natural environment, so their demands usually contradict themselves. But then of course an oil crisis will hit, prices will skyrocket and politicians will be blamed for doing nothing. You're just not going to win this one.
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... is that elections are largely driven by economic fundamentals and (to some degree) random chance.
Amen. The magic words here are "double dip", as I'm sure you know the US unemployment is almost 10% and the economy is not looking so great. What you may or may not have caught is that many European governments are almost bankrupt and probably in worse shape than the US. And as we've learned in the last crisis, people lend from each other so if first someone starts to default then the interest rates go up and credit ratings go down creating more defaults and the house of card crumbles. People are now seriously talking about a collapse that is not just "too big to fail" but also "too big to be saved". All it takes it some of the predictions, not worst case but some of the more gloomy ones and you'll have a huge debt crisis flowing back the other way from Europe to the US. Of course it'll hit us the worst but if the US economy tanks again, the unemployment is past 10% and climbing it will not matter what Obama does. He'll be booted out of office even though it's not his fault because people believe it can't possibly get worse than what they got. Then we'll have President Palin, and then they will find out they were wrong.
If you have professors like I had, they haven't typed up everything they should say in their notes - certainly not in their powerpoint. Very often it's the things he makes a particular effort to point out - that might not be that well reflected in the notes - that you want to take notes of. Like you I mostly prefer to listen rather than take notes, but that's wildly different from person to person. You are probably like me, you hear it once and it sticks. Others have to go over their notes again and again to make it stick by repetition. I've never found teacher's notes to be all that great, they're usually more a list of talking points and not nearly as to the point as I'd like.
If the cores are different, it may be useful. Say a phone has two low power/low speed cores, one core dedicated to the radio, and two cores that have high speed/power. This would make the phone useful. When playing games, it could have one or both high speed cores running, but when just idle and sitting there, it could just be using one low-speed core for the OS and background apps.
Isn't this pretty much the way cell phones already work? One extremely low power standby mode, and one active mode. I seem to remember that was talked about when the Atom was introduced and they said it was way too power hungry in idle mode, that cell phones already had idle power in the <<1 W domain and had specialized on this for years. I'm guessing more cores would only matter between the "simple" active mode and entertainment mode. The limiting capacity will still be the battery, the dual core will just let you use it up much faster.
Well, it pretty much is true. Apple doesn't offer a cheap Mac, never have and probably never will. Particularly their cheapest models - the Mac Mini being the very cheapest - have very crappy hardware value. The reason you buy this is simple, it's the only way to get a genuine Mac that runs OS X and Mac software, unless you're in the very small technical minority who'd be comfortable with a hackintosh. Just to give you an idea, at my favorite price comparison site they now list 262 laptop models. The cheapest Mac - and I mean the cheapest, non-upgraded laptop Apple sells according to the Apple store would rank 155th. The lower half Apple just doesn't want to compete in. Same with the Mac Mini, there are tons of cheap Windows mini-pcs that Apple doesn't compete with at all. If you want to go Mac, the entry price is the Mac Mini. Personally I think it's part of Apple's way of upselling, if you've already decided you want a Mac it's pretty easy to sell you up to a mid range Mac because the low end is really poor bang for the buck and a little more gets you a lot more hardware - of course pushing you up into an even higher price range. As for the optional upgrades, they charge more than IBM did in its day and they were pretty damn pricey.
I'm not running Apple but if I was I'd seriously consider taking a rematch with Microsoft on the mainstream market. Where today the cheapest laptop I can find is 2195,- NOK and Apple's lowest is 8490,- NOK, at least offer a 4-5000 NOK version. Same with the Mini, the cheapest nettop I can find is 2105,- NOK, make say a 4000 NOK version instead of the 5990,- NOK Mac Mini to get people hooked. Make a normal tower with a stylish design for all the people that don't fit the Mini/iMac/Pro niches. Move to take a 15% desktop share instead of 5% making up for the lower margins. Don't go for corporations - they'll always be penny pinchers but go for the home users. Apple has done some great moves to get Apple products into many people's homes, but they've not really leveraged it to increase their Mac sales. The Macs are still staying safely within the niches they escaped to during the 1990s, they've peeked out and regained a little but Apple still doesn't dare bet on them as a volume product, only a high margin niche product. It's a safe strategy - it's much harder to raise prices back up if the numbers don't work out - but it lacks ambition. Then again, they seem to have plenty ambition in other areas...
With grown up OSs that aren't stupid enough to map the physical drive layout to the logical file layout, these hybrid drives are a no brainer, just change the fstab to point /home(/Users for macheads :P) to the hd and / to the ssd. Done! However in Windows you now would have to contend with your drive being divided amongst 2 drive letters and all the registry hell that goes along with it.
Except that your / is full of small files and your /home/[user]/Documents are also full of small files that'd be much better off on a SSD, while all the help files on / that I hardly ever use and media files in your home folder should go on the HDD.
P.S. While the TARDIS tricks you can pull off on "grown up" OSs can be useful, they're hell to make sense of and make very simple questions have very complicated answers. Like for example, do I have the space to copy in these 30 GB of files? Well that depends, you only have 10 GB free on / but it's bigger on the inside and there may even be more disks being mounted somewhere under /home again. So you can copy in a bunch of files to a subdirectory and still have just as much free space, as if you were a magician pouring water into a hankerchief. Windows is simple, you have your drives and the more you put in them the fuller they get which is very straightforward to understand.
P.P.S. Your setup describes how most Windows machines are set up in a corporate setting, the apps on C:\ and your profile and/or my documents redirected to the network. Kinda silly to pretend that's not possible.
I'm still not connecting the dots here, in this case it seems they were hit with an injunction issued by the court not just a cease-and-desist letter. It can't be the intended meaning of this ruling that if a user uploads something to a provider, that provider can host the content forever in disregard of all laws. If an user uploaded say kiddie porn, could the provider then just turn around and say "as a policy we don't touch the content, so we refuse"? It's one thing to avoid self-censorship so the hoster doesn't have to take it down because it thinks maybe one of the models looks like she's 17, but there has to be a way for the courts to say "take this down" even though they're held otherwise harmless. I would think this would be that method, but maybe I'm missing something.
In a cinema, the distance to the screen is far enough that this generally isn't a big deal: the rays coming from one point on the screen, by the time they hit your pupil, have diverged along such a narrow angle that they might as well be parallel (as if from an infinitely distant source.) But when you're in a living room with a screen in front of you,
Can't it be true in reverse as well? You appear to see an object coming very close to you, but the focal depth still says it's far away. At least in gimmicks where things would jump out at you from the screen there should be a fairly obvious difference to what the eye would see in reality.
Well, good luck finding something else people have so little clue about yet still have to use or feel a need to use. I know there's lots of things I can't do and would probably make a horrible mess if I tried, so I don't do them. Or at least if I wanted to try I'd find something to teach me the basics. Computers are to many people still Magic, like people looking at a car wondering how the hell it can move without horses pulling it. Not that people are superstitious or anything like that but they've just decided this is so far beyond what they're going to comprehend that they're not going to try along with quantum physics, rocket science and brain surgery. And yet people expect them to use to for stuff like work and such, but since they've already decided they're not going to understand they're going to memorize. So they make their little lists of steps 1 through 8 which all depend on the menus, buttons, dialogs and everything else being the same. And if anything goes remotely wrong, they just seem to go into complete mind blank mode. Sometimes they even seem to have forgotten how to read, instead of reading that the printer is out of paper, they'll try redoing their steps to print one more time. Or five more times, in some cases. I'm sure we've all done some good screwups, but no I've never been that kind of idiot and never will be. The people that make up the best/worst stories are the kind of people who need "Don't hit yourself in the head with this hammer" warning labels, if computers were lethal we'd have a lot of Darwin Award winners.
Even 100 years ago the common language of Europe was nothing. If you put an Englishman and a Frenchman and a German in the same room, most likely none of them would understand a word the other said. Why should they? People could go by their whole lives and never be in contact with a foreigner, they didn't communicate, they didn't travel and international trade was rare except in border areas.
These days my support calls are routed to India and back because it's cheaper than doing it locally. I've been to three other continents and enough countries that 100 years ago I'd be one in a million. And just by ordering from amazon.co.uk I'm engaging in international trade myself. I've studied abroad, I've worked on international projects - in fact many larger companies now dictate that the business language is English for anything official, which means thousands of workplaces per company only open to people that know English. And with increased proficiency in the population, the rules change. I've had classes where the textbooks were only in English, even for educations that have nothing to do with other countries or languages English is turning into a requirement. Kids read Harry Potter in English because they already know English and they don't want to wait for the translation - never mind that the original is generally better anyway. Granted, Norway is small and we're much further along than many other nations but it's no longer diplomats or priests or the aristocracy that learn foreign languages, it's the people. In Europe more than half are now bilingual - probably more than ever before in history. And in the upcoming generation it's pretty much everyone.
Sounds to me like double jeopardy.
What do you think?
No. Double jeopardy has a specific legal meaning, and this is not it. Some forms of private copying may be legal but taxed while others can be illegal under Hadopi, at best you have a conflict between two laws/regulations that need resolving. In any case a tax is not a legal punishment, and double jeopardy means being punished twice by the legal system for the same crime.
Yup, looking at the number of web pages in a given language is rather misleading compared to the true reach of English. I'm Norwegian, of course every local web page is in Norwegian but the vast majority understand English. Same is true for many other nations around the world, together more people understand English than Chinese. At least in the EU things are now aligning far more towards English than before, it's considered by far the most important foreign language to know for non-native speakers while previously French and German were much closer to English. Over the next generation or so it will add many, many millions of secondary speakers as people mostly speak two languages, their native one and English. The rest of the world I don't know so much about, but I suspect English is strengthening its position in favor of French/Spanish/Portugese while Chinese remains a regional language mostly limited to China and surrounding territories.
When hell freezes over. Perfect translation from one language to the other is hopeless for the same reason using a human language as a computer language is hopeless, it's not precise enough. What things actually mean greatly depend not just on words and grammar but also on context and forms of expression. A translation program will never be better than the people who programmed it and will always miss a lot of "well, it's sorta somewhat the same sentence but you lost detail x or it's just not the way a native speaker would express it" and there's a constant stream of subtle changes as the language evolves. There's also a be a huge market for perfect speech recognition, but you can bet that won't be here in ten years either.
Well if you've been here a while as your UID says, you should know it's all about the patents. You check the button in the install process, Canoncial doesn't. With preinstalls it would be the OEM installing it for you, which makes the OEM a lawsuit target. At least in the US the MP3 patents are valid for at least 2 and possibly 7 more years if the submarine patents are recognized. Patents for MPEG2 that's required for DVD reading goes to 2023, H.264 to 2028. That's fine if you're called Linux Mint and doesn't have deep enough pockets that anybody will bother to sue you but if you're a big OEM they might. At least no OEM feels like taking that chance...
I would say there was a "Year of Firefox web browser" and it was 2005. From NetApplication's quarterly numbers it went from 3.66% in 2004 Q4 to 9.00% in 2005 Q4. Of course it did hit 1.0 in november 2004 so it's not surprising it jumped, but really they did manage to make the 1.0 push matter.
Linux has never had a year with 150% growth or even anything close to it. At least on the web browsing desktop it's been very stable at around 1% for years now, some data even suggests it's regressing a bit after the netbook wave that Microsoft quite effectively killed and even that only got the numbers up to 1.1-1.2%. Of course you shouldn't expect people to switch OS as easily as they'd install an alternate browser, but at this rate it's never happening.
Firefox has barely been keeping its market share this year with Chrome taking all the growth, even though Chromium is open source Chrome isn't. It's highly questionable how much Oracle will continue to push and support the OSS solutions they took over from Sun. I'm sure Linux and OSS will continue its success on servers, cell phones and supercomputers but on the desktop I'd say it's highly on the defensive, not the offensive at the moment.
To put it bluntly, it's a bazaar not a commune. For the most part people don't pool their time, take consensus on what the community wants and turn that into an overall plan and direction for the project. It's more that every individual works on what they want - or in the case of employed people, what their employers want - and where the project is going is simply the sum of where the individuals are taking it. That you often have a project leader or core group does not really mean they have much authority to speak on behalf of all the contributors, they're usually free to work on something else or not at all or to continue to voice their dissent. Every time people try talking behalf on everyone it ends up with a lot of "That is not what I want" and "That is not how I want to do it", you can't communicate consensus when there is no consensus. You just live with the disputes until they're so bad things start forking off.
For example, the main competition for open-source actually seems to be pirate-ware. People always consider open-source when faced with actually paying for software. What strategy should open-source take with this? None?
Pretty much. Pirates typically pirate top-of-the-line versions since they're not paying anyway, which makes the feature gap pretty big. It's important that free software is there if you look at the legal alternatives, but OSS isn't going to compete with a "free" Adobe CS5 Master Collection any time soon. The Humble Indie Bundle won't compete with a PC loaded with pirated AAA games. At best you can try positioning yourself to say it's free and legal to try, you can always change your mind and get something else later. That may work for say OpenOffice and maybe a few more, but I don't think you'll see many switching anyway.
I'm a medicinal chemist working on a program to cure Alzheimer's disease, and I thank God for my abilities. I think you presume too much of the Doctor when you deny the existence of miracles.
The human body will fight for its survival just as much as its owner, sometimes beating what looks like impossible odds. Just like some people have extreme allergies, others have extreme resistances. I'll agree that despite modern medicine sometimes the doctor is not the one to thank, but it's a fairly good stretch from there to interference from a supernatural being.
And for what? so they can target various price points within their target markets.
Well, let's say you want to replace the 6950/70 with a single product, what should the price be? They can make it as expensive as the 6950, losing a bunch of profit on the 6970 sales they would have made. Or as expensive as the 6970, but then you'd lose lots of sales that just wouldn't pay what a 6970 costs. You talk as if price points were made up by the industry when they in fact reflect that people have different amounts of disposable cash and put different value on things. There's not a single card that would simultaniously satisfy both markets and be a sound investment for AMD. And if serving each market with its own design costs more, then of course they choose a common design as anything else would be just stupid.
Maybe it's easier to see the point with software and features than hardware and binning. The difference between Photoshop and Photoshop Elements is probably a #ifdef in the source code. Why then should they offer a "crippled" version? Well because some people are interested in paying for the missing features and some aren't. It's reasonable that the people that want CMYK separation pay for CMYK separation and the rest don't need to subsidize them. Those who pay for the 6970 are the ones most willing to pay for performance and so they do. Isn't it completely reasonable and logical they cover more of the R&D tham the 6850 owners?
Question: do you think this is an environmentally sound practice? It isn't very "green" to sell a physical product to the consumer only to restrict its usage to some lesser subset of its full potential.
Actually, the costs in developing two product lines are probably larger both environmentally and economically. That it would be offset by a better design is unlikely, since the difference between the two boards is largely making use of more energy-efficient but slower components. If there was a significant saving to die size, they would do it quite quickly as on this point since the economic and environmental cost are largely aligned.
in reality, if someone does anything even remotely competent, it should be a 1 day process, maximum - after all, using NAT or IPv6 internally should make it even less of an issue.
I think if you were to estimate the time it takes to change the company fleet of cars from summer to winter tires, you'd budget about ten seconds per car - that's how long it takes in Formula One, right? Companies don't plan to redo their network structure, ever. They do as little as possible as rarely as possible because it's pure cost. What you're looking at is an endless amount of cruft with IPs hard coded all over PCs, routers, configuration files, scripts, scheduled jobs, firewall configurations, stored server information or URLs, documentation, the works. Sure you could blow away millions of dollars on optimizing "network reoganization" process, making the company a world leader in that until someone with the money asks "Why the f*ck are we spending all this money on THIS? What in heaven's name do we get for it?" and you'd better have a better answer "So we can give some IP addresses back to ICANN for free." Otherwise cleaning up all that cruft will be on your project time and project cost, and if you still think you can do it in a day you're a monkey on crack.
Internally computer programs have lots and lots of pointers to memory addresses whether your programming language exposes them to you or not, and a flipped bit in a pointer will almost certainly make it crash. Maybe if you're talking "just outside tolerance limits" kind of error rate, but a CPU that regularly fumbles would be very noticable.
First off, it's not like there has to be a single solution. I think by far the biggest problem is that if your email is spammed once, it's spammed forever. Everybody knows opt-outs do not work, making such requests will only make your address ten times as spammed. If I were to redo my mail setup, no one would get to know my real inbox. Every address I'd use would be an alias - yahoo will give you 500 of these for free - and every mailing list and every site that requires email for registration would get their own alias. If one of them is spammed to hell I'll delete that alias and it will all bounce, it's the most effective "opt-out" possible. Bots that would scrape public bug trackers, mailing list archives and such would have little effect as I'd update my subscription details and the old address would go dead. It wouldn't stop the spam industry, but it would prevent it from spamming me. I don't think the idiots that pay money for V!AgR4 can be saved...
I don't think that's the point, I can apply patches and build a new kernel in relatively short time if everything else is compiled already. I think it's more that there's regular testing that everybody's work merges properly and passes unit testing. It's more than a little frustrating if it's the big merge day and after every developer has checked into the master branch then everything fails.
Example: Allow users direct access to a bug database? It's hard enough to train testers to give you good bug reports. You won't get anything usable from an end user without some severe filtering.
The question is whether you are better off leaving your users to work out their bug corresponence via mailing lists or email and only let a blessed few enter bug reports, or is it better to have the full case history going all the way back to what the customer actually reported along with any logs or screenshots. Or if you just drop it only the floor saying "LALALALA our software is perfect, all problems are PEBCAK problems."
Personally I'm a big fan of wine appdb's "*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***". If enough people are experiencing a problem, you have a problem whether you get anything useful from the logs or not. Don't forget that crappy bug reports and crappy logging often go hand in hand, when the application just goes boom without giving any useful information about why the developer is just as much at fault for making it impossible to debug.
Man, what an ethno-centric, you're the kind that gives Americans a bad reputation.
1) My native language would be very annoying to write on a US keyboard. Try finding the alt codes for æøåÆØÅ if you don't believe me.
2) I know where all the symbols are in my layout, trying to use two layouts is like if I'd randomly switch your keyboard between dvorak and qwerty.
If you're going to use multiple keyboard inputs, you can easily configure a computer to work that way. There's a little keyboard layout hotswitch available if you have more than one layout and it works just fine under both Windows and Linux - probably Mac too. How about trying to find a solution instead of just demanding that the world should revolve around the US and that everyone should switch to a US layout?
Because poor typing skills will lead to you writing less readable code with a lot more shorthand. Shorter variable names, shorter function names, if you don't got good typing skills you'll end up coding using lots of do( x ); where parse( record ); would be far better. You can pretend it doesn't happen, or you can pretend it doesn't matter, but you inevitably drop the "fluff" because it's "slowing you down". I've tried it, it actually requires more typing to write code you'd want to come back to later, all that context that's spinning up in your head telling you what all the variables are and the abbriviations mean will be lost. Being able to type it out quickly and effortlessly without losing the flow of the code you are working on is a big advantage. It's not the typing speed itself though, it's getting to the point where your typing doesn't interfere or slow down your thinking. But when you're typing naturally without thinking that is a highly skilled typer..
Green/clean/renewable/buzzword power is a funny market, I've seen them try something similar here. Basically what happens is that the current pool of power is already a mix with some parts good and bad. All the special offers do is take part of it and charge a premium for it, while the normal power becomes "dirtier". The overall production mix remains the same, the people willing to pay feelgood money are too few to actually increase demand. That and the environmentalists usually are also opposed to the large windmill parks and whatnot disrupting the natural environment, so their demands usually contradict themselves. But then of course an oil crisis will hit, prices will skyrocket and politicians will be blamed for doing nothing. You're just not going to win this one.