You, sir, need to learn to read. Hell, the moral of the story was printed right at the end, as it traditionally is in a fable. "There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth.".
There are sexual predators out there, but they are not attacking 20% of our children. The number is much much lower. A high estimate based on sources linked from this article is 3%, and that's before you take into account that 99% of those 3% of kids are going to rebuff any such advances (no source for that last bit; it's paraphrased from one of the linked articles, but they had no source either). Saying the number is 20% is a lie, plain and simple. Nobody sane believes the number is 20%, because any two sets of parents can have a conversation and will likely confirm for each other that none of their children are being successfully sexually solicited. Now what does that say to those parents the next time NCMEC issues a real warning about a real very common threat?
Go back and read the fable again. There *is* a wolf. He comes and eats all the sheep at the end of the story. The threat *was* real. The analogy is practically perfect.
I would say, "How much more mainstream do you want than Slashdot?" After all, we are legion, we bring down servers across the internet merely by visiting them en masse. But then I look at Ron Paul's primary results and slink back to my basement.
What makes you think anywhere close to a majority of us would vote for Ron Paul? Seems like a poor indication of how mainstream Slashdot is.
the PS3 for the bleeding tech PSP integrating HD gamer, and the 360 for the online multiplaying HD gamer who also likes being able to play media from computers/internet/removable USB drives.
You've never used a PS3, have you?
It puts the 360 to shame in that last category. It's not even close. More formats supported, standard ports, standard protocols, memory card readers, arbitrary data discs full of media, 1080p upscaling, a quality remote, practically silent operation... It's really no contest. The 360 is like a joke of a media center box in comparison.
Last time I checked the PS3 was still trailing. In terms of sales since launch it's been roughly on the same level as the 360, until recently when there was an upswing (coincidentally just when they finally realized nobody will pay $600 for the PS3 and cut it). Check vgchartz.com if you don't believe me.
When is the last time you've been to VGChartz?
The PS3 has been outselling the 360 for months worldwide, and as of January it's outselling the 360 in the US too. (Data from your own sited source)
You're also wrong about the PS2. Sales didn't peak until it had been on the market for over two years (peaked at christmas 2002). It was all uphill until then, and it stayed high and flat for a while. (Again, data from your own source)
The dominant power makes increasing economic demands on these outlying states, while providing decreasing benefits to them. In order to quell the dissatisfaction, the dominant power needs to use increasing amounts of force to preserve imperial power.
When we start using our military power to keep our allies in line, you'll have a point. As far as empire building goes, the US is only several decades in, and we haven't even shown significant commitment to it. Our spending is disproportionate to the rest of the world because the world is a pretty peaceful place right now, not because we're "keeping the rebels in line".
In contrast, to MS the 360 was a much higher priority than Toshiba's HD-DVD. MS has been trying to get into our living rooms for over 10 years now. (Bill Gates was already obsessing about it in The Road Ahead and that book was written 13 years ago.) All things being equal they'd prefer Toshiba to win and Sony to lose, of course, but it wasn't important enough to them for them to risk 360's success on.
The only reason Microsoft didn't put HD-DVD in the 360 is because Microsoft collects format royalties. They don't pay them. Their focus is collecting cash every time an American consumer sits down in their living room. The 360 was their most recent attempt, and it failed. They'll give it a last push through Live downloads, and when only a few percent of 360 owners pay for those downloads it will be replaced by the next attempt. In the meantime, they had a year on top of the current-generation console market share list before Nintendo passed them, and maybe another 10 months before they find their rightful spot back at the bottom.
When will companies learn that the American consumer doesn't like pay per use entertainment?
When it even comes close to the cost of living in a city, we'll talk.
And I don't know about everybody else, but my walls are well insulated, as are my windows. And my utilities and appliances are the most efficient models available. And the only reason it is only a lot more expensive to live in the city instead of cripplingly expensive is because my tax dollars go disproportionately to the subsidy of urban infrastructure.
As for the trucking of food... It's not a big deal for them to stop and drop some off on the way to the city from its source. Or are there suddenly farms in the city now?
The only people on the edge of bankruptcy from their mortgage are people who bought outside of their means, and it is a small minority of suburban homeowners. Far smaller than those urban dwellers on the edge of bankruptcy from their credit card debt. The two things are exactly the same problem and have nothing to do with the price of oil at all.
Yet more trash spewed by urban dwellers who have no idea what it's actually like to live outside a city, and/or no desire to be even reasonably self sufficient...
Perhaps you don't share the same motivations as those of us who choose to live outside of a city, but please don't pretend to understand why things are the way they are starting from a position of disbelief. Suburbs seem impractical to you; Cities seem impractical to us. You have 100% reliance on the local infrastructure, you take for granted the products of rural environments that make your day to day life possible, and you don't value the ability to use an abundance of space to provide some of either of those things for yourself. You think that people wouldn't move to urban areas because they consider their suburban home an investment? What about people who are just now buying new homes in these areas? It's not because it's an investment in terms of dollars. It's because the pursuit of happiness is a core tenet of our society, and the reliance on urban infrastructure designed by the squeekiest wheels of an enormous community doesn't provide the happiness people crave. Yes, we'd rather drive 10 minutes to the grocery store and 30 minutes to work than live in a city. (Neglecting that most urban dwellers spend more than 10 minutes walking to the grocery store, and more than 30 minutes taking public transport to work anyway) It improves our quality of life. When we're *not* driving around we can partake in enjoyable activities that aren't available to city dwellers. Space hungry hobbies. Private outdoor spaces. Quiet. Homes with no shared walls or floors.
Meanwhile, people like you go and proclaim how much of a "tragedy" it is that it takes us so long to get to consumer outlets, and cloistered academics wax intellectual at "TED" about how they know better than everybody about how people should live their lives. You know, based on their limited, insulated world experience, and a technical analysis of the few variables they actually care about out of the subset they're even aware of. You know... When they're not hypocritically living outside of their "ideal" environment themselves.
I'll work for a company for free for five years if they want to give me a $1.7mil "signing bonus". For 15 years if you want to give me $30mil in stock to go with it.
The base salary is almost a joke after the other stuff.
He was almost certainly a full-time, at will employee who agreed to certain reasonable terms when he signed his contract. One of the things this guy was hired for is his reputation, and it is completely reasonable for his employer to expect him maintain that reputation even when he is outside of the workplace. After all, he can't un-write his blog posts when he puts his CNN hat back on. It's also reasonable for an employer to fire somebody who comes in hung-over all the time, etc... There are plenty of reasons an employer should have cause to terminate your employment based on your off-hour activities. Those activities may affect your on-the-job performance.
To be perfectly clear here, they didn't try and prevent him from doing whatever he likes. They just fired him.
I think posting to Slashdot, even in the comments section, would be considered writing "for an outlet". You've written something and made it public.
And of course it's about *what* he wrote. People's opinions of him will reflect on the company he writes for for a living, since they may rightfully assume that his bias has had an influence on their content.
Honestly I think this discussion is going in the direction it is in because we have a generation of people becoming adults after being raised by parents who couldn't say no to them. People have seriously unreasonable expectations of what is owed to them by others. If you think that your last sentence should have influenced a reasonable person to your side in this argument, and not away from it, you're in for a rude awakening when you realize how the real world works.
Compared to Photoshop, GIMP is a model of UI uniformity. Tasks are scattered around all over the place in Photoshop... Sometimes in a menu, sometimes in a toolbar, sometimes in a toolbox... No rhyme or reason to which, it seems, and there are plenty of functions that are only available in one of those three places.
Gimp has the right click menu, with essentially *everything* in it, and then some convenience features to provide more than one way to do things.
You've got a point about all the rest of those things though, even if many of them don't matter for web artists.
What Linux *really* needs is a credible alternative to Illustrator.
How is this insightful? "writing done for a non-CNN outlet" clearly refers to published material. You're not writing for an "outlet", non-CNN or otherwise, when you make a grocery list.
Sure, it's not clear if you analyze just the first few words...
The object doesn't have any additional potential energy simply because it's spinning on the way down. The spin is just some indirection in the conversion process. The only difference it can possibly make is to make the conversion less efficient.
The model with hardware compatibility doesn't use the hardware anymore. It uses the software anyway, because the software adds advertised features that the hardware can't.
You don't have to "do research". It's basically safe to assume that the game you're buying "just works". The list of incompatibilities is really minimal at this point.
It's also really, really wrong to assume that the less expensive model is more numerous. It is stocked less, and purchased less. You hardly ever even see it in the store. It basically seems to exist simply to have a low-price version in the print ads. Pretty much everybody seems to buy the 80gb model. I don't see why it matters if it's more numerous though. The people buying it do so with the awareness that it can't play PS2 games (though it can still play PS1 games). It's even easier for them to know what's compatible too. There is literally no question.
I doubt there is anybody having this conversation that hasn't already decided to, or not to buy a PS3. It seems as irrelevant as the existence of the 360 "Arcade".
I find it amusing, though, that you brought Nintendo into the discussion. I've played exactly zero Gamecube games on my Wii, but I still pick up new PS2 titles for my PS3, and the upscaling has caused me to rediscover some of the games I already had. Even though it's less that 100% support, I think Sony still did something right with backwards compatibility that Nintendo missed. I will admit though, that I'd likely have a different take on the situation if I didn't have an HD TV.
You missed the point entirely. The problem isn't technological, it's cultural. I can't say to certain people "Yeah, I'm free then but I have more important things to do than have a meeting with you." And that's essentially what rejecting, re-scheduling a meeting is saying to them in their mind. Without a shared calendar, the other guy may expect that "I'm too busy" really means "Fuck off", but with a shared calendar they essentially have proof.
In terms of profitability, the only success I see on his list is Windows Mobile. I'm not sure what metric you'd use to call it a failure, unless you're counting "usability"... But that's subjective. Any reasonable business person would call it a success. The 360 is currently in third place in week-to-week sales, so it's still too early to call it a "success". Especially since it's lost such an enormous amount of money, while it's competitors (the Wii and the PS3) are currently selling at a profit.
You also seem to be misinformed. Only one PS3 model has lost backwards compatibility. If you want it, just buy the model that has it. Seems simple enough.
However, I can't help but think we'd see double digit percentage productivity gains if such things didn't exist. Shared calendars mean that people can see you're available and book you up solid with meetings, leaving no time to work. There isn't even plausible deniability, because they can see your calendar. You have to schedule fake appointments for yourself to get some time to work.
Yeah, maybe if we were talking about ninjas, but I seriously doubt that your average thug is really going to lurk in the shadow cast by garbage can. Does this happen where you live? Besides, it isn't just about seeing a potential attacker it is about being seen by others in case you are attacked. And what about more innocent things like being seen by a car in a parking lot? I MUCH prefer to drive in the city with lit streets. It makes a huge difference. Ever seen a city block during a blackout?
[...]
You know why? Because people like having the outdoors illuminated... particularly public areas. It is a luxury that we in the so called "first world" can afford.
That's because they aren't very bright.
Sounds like somebody has never left the suburbs in his entire life.
The rest of the world can be quite nice. It'll be OK if you're more than 5 miles away from your mommy for a little while.
Re:So when do we get its successor?
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In Ubuntu, all you have to do is go into the monitor configuration tool and tell it you plugged in a second monitor. It makes you log out and back in, but it does not make you reboot, power off, or any of that stuff. If you want mirroring, the button on your laptop's keyboard should do the trick. It's easier than Windows, but still a bit more work than OSX.
That said, some funky stuff can happen if you have a less popular laptop. Laptop graphics are still fairly poorly supported. This is true in windows too though, where you're dependent on the manufacturer's display driver which never gets updated unless you're using a major brand (more major than Acer, or Sony).
Re:My only suggestion for X
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DPMS + XRandR.
This problem was fixed ages ago. See, now X is perfect for you.
What happens with works that are created by more than one person? That are continually modified by an incoming stream of new people?
Until death is just dumb. It unfairly punishes the creator for dying early (he does have a right to provide for his family, after all), unfairly rewards the creator for living an extra long life, and isn't justified by the theoretical point of copyright in the first place (to encourage creation).
The term should be 14-20 years if registered, and 1 year if not. After that you should be able to renew as many times as you like on a five year interval, and you should be able to assign that right to your heirs. The fee should be large, and per work. The fee should increase exponentially for each renewal. That would make the law uniform amongst individuals, groups, and corporations. It would balance the societal benefits with rewards for the creator.
Slashdot Mirror
You, sir, need to learn to read. Hell, the moral of the story was printed right at the end, as it traditionally is in a fable. "There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth.".
There are sexual predators out there, but they are not attacking 20% of our children. The number is much much lower. A high estimate based on sources linked from this article is 3%, and that's before you take into account that 99% of those 3% of kids are going to rebuff any such advances (no source for that last bit; it's paraphrased from one of the linked articles, but they had no source either). Saying the number is 20% is a lie, plain and simple. Nobody sane believes the number is 20%, because any two sets of parents can have a conversation and will likely confirm for each other that none of their children are being successfully sexually solicited. Now what does that say to those parents the next time NCMEC issues a real warning about a real very common threat?
Go back and read the fable again. There *is* a wolf. He comes and eats all the sheep at the end of the story. The threat *was* real. The analogy is practically perfect.
Go back to pre-school, find yourself a copy of Aesop's Fables, and read The Shepherd's Boy, and the Wolf.
When you've learned the lesson of the story, come back and we can continue this conversation.
What makes you think anywhere close to a majority of us would vote for Ron Paul? Seems like a poor indication of how mainstream Slashdot is.
You've never used a PS3, have you?
It puts the 360 to shame in that last category. It's not even close. More formats supported, standard ports, standard protocols, memory card readers, arbitrary data discs full of media, 1080p upscaling, a quality remote, practically silent operation... It's really no contest. The 360 is like a joke of a media center box in comparison.
When is the last time you've been to VGChartz?
The PS3 has been outselling the 360 for months worldwide, and as of January it's outselling the 360 in the US too. (Data from your own sited source)
You're also wrong about the PS2. Sales didn't peak until it had been on the market for over two years (peaked at christmas 2002). It was all uphill until then, and it stayed high and flat for a while. (Again, data from your own source)
When we start using our military power to keep our allies in line, you'll have a point. As far as empire building goes, the US is only several decades in, and we haven't even shown significant commitment to it. Our spending is disproportionate to the rest of the world because the world is a pretty peaceful place right now, not because we're "keeping the rebels in line".
The only reason Microsoft didn't put HD-DVD in the 360 is because Microsoft collects format royalties. They don't pay them. Their focus is collecting cash every time an American consumer sits down in their living room. The 360 was their most recent attempt, and it failed. They'll give it a last push through Live downloads, and when only a few percent of 360 owners pay for those downloads it will be replaced by the next attempt. In the meantime, they had a year on top of the current-generation console market share list before Nintendo passed them, and maybe another 10 months before they find their rightful spot back at the bottom.
When will companies learn that the American consumer doesn't like pay per use entertainment?
When it even comes close to the cost of living in a city, we'll talk.
And I don't know about everybody else, but my walls are well insulated, as are my windows. And my utilities and appliances are the most efficient models available. And the only reason it is only a lot more expensive to live in the city instead of cripplingly expensive is because my tax dollars go disproportionately to the subsidy of urban infrastructure.
As for the trucking of food... It's not a big deal for them to stop and drop some off on the way to the city from its source. Or are there suddenly farms in the city now?
The only people on the edge of bankruptcy from their mortgage are people who bought outside of their means, and it is a small minority of suburban homeowners. Far smaller than those urban dwellers on the edge of bankruptcy from their credit card debt. The two things are exactly the same problem and have nothing to do with the price of oil at all.
Yet more trash spewed by urban dwellers who have no idea what it's actually like to live outside a city, and/or no desire to be even reasonably self sufficient...
Perhaps you don't share the same motivations as those of us who choose to live outside of a city, but please don't pretend to understand why things are the way they are starting from a position of disbelief. Suburbs seem impractical to you; Cities seem impractical to us. You have 100% reliance on the local infrastructure, you take for granted the products of rural environments that make your day to day life possible, and you don't value the ability to use an abundance of space to provide some of either of those things for yourself. You think that people wouldn't move to urban areas because they consider their suburban home an investment? What about people who are just now buying new homes in these areas? It's not because it's an investment in terms of dollars. It's because the pursuit of happiness is a core tenet of our society, and the reliance on urban infrastructure designed by the squeekiest wheels of an enormous community doesn't provide the happiness people crave. Yes, we'd rather drive 10 minutes to the grocery store and 30 minutes to work than live in a city. (Neglecting that most urban dwellers spend more than 10 minutes walking to the grocery store, and more than 30 minutes taking public transport to work anyway) It improves our quality of life. When we're *not* driving around we can partake in enjoyable activities that aren't available to city dwellers. Space hungry hobbies. Private outdoor spaces. Quiet. Homes with no shared walls or floors.
Meanwhile, people like you go and proclaim how much of a "tragedy" it is that it takes us so long to get to consumer outlets, and cloistered academics wax intellectual at "TED" about how they know better than everybody about how people should live their lives. You know, based on their limited, insulated world experience, and a technical analysis of the few variables they actually care about out of the subset they're even aware of. You know... When they're not hypocritically living outside of their "ideal" environment themselves.
I'll work for a company for free for five years if they want to give me a $1.7mil "signing bonus". For 15 years if you want to give me $30mil in stock to go with it.
The base salary is almost a joke after the other stuff.
I highly doubt this guy punches a clock.
He was almost certainly a full-time, at will employee who agreed to certain reasonable terms when he signed his contract. One of the things this guy was hired for is his reputation, and it is completely reasonable for his employer to expect him maintain that reputation even when he is outside of the workplace. After all, he can't un-write his blog posts when he puts his CNN hat back on. It's also reasonable for an employer to fire somebody who comes in hung-over all the time, etc... There are plenty of reasons an employer should have cause to terminate your employment based on your off-hour activities. Those activities may affect your on-the-job performance.
To be perfectly clear here, they didn't try and prevent him from doing whatever he likes. They just fired him.
Nope.
And you're right. It's not completely uniform. But like I said: Compared to Photoshop it's a model of uniformity.
I think he was responding to my comment about Illustrator.
I think you've made a pretty arbitrary analogy.
I think posting to Slashdot, even in the comments section, would be considered writing "for an outlet". You've written something and made it public.
And of course it's about *what* he wrote. People's opinions of him will reflect on the company he writes for for a living, since they may rightfully assume that his bias has had an influence on their content.
Honestly I think this discussion is going in the direction it is in because we have a generation of people becoming adults after being raised by parents who couldn't say no to them. People have seriously unreasonable expectations of what is owed to them by others. If you think that your last sentence should have influenced a reasonable person to your side in this argument, and not away from it, you're in for a rude awakening when you realize how the real world works.
You had me until that last one.
Compared to Photoshop, GIMP is a model of UI uniformity. Tasks are scattered around all over the place in Photoshop... Sometimes in a menu, sometimes in a toolbar, sometimes in a toolbox... No rhyme or reason to which, it seems, and there are plenty of functions that are only available in one of those three places.
Gimp has the right click menu, with essentially *everything* in it, and then some convenience features to provide more than one way to do things.
You've got a point about all the rest of those things though, even if many of them don't matter for web artists.
What Linux *really* needs is a credible alternative to Illustrator.
How is this insightful? "writing done for a non-CNN outlet" clearly refers to published material. You're not writing for an "outlet", non-CNN or otherwise, when you make a grocery list.
Sure, it's not clear if you analyze just the first few words...
The object doesn't have any additional potential energy simply because it's spinning on the way down. The spin is just some indirection in the conversion process. The only difference it can possibly make is to make the conversion less efficient.
The model with hardware compatibility doesn't use the hardware anymore. It uses the software anyway, because the software adds advertised features that the hardware can't.
You don't have to "do research". It's basically safe to assume that the game you're buying "just works". The list of incompatibilities is really minimal at this point.
It's also really, really wrong to assume that the less expensive model is more numerous. It is stocked less, and purchased less. You hardly ever even see it in the store. It basically seems to exist simply to have a low-price version in the print ads. Pretty much everybody seems to buy the 80gb model. I don't see why it matters if it's more numerous though. The people buying it do so with the awareness that it can't play PS2 games (though it can still play PS1 games). It's even easier for them to know what's compatible too. There is literally no question.
I doubt there is anybody having this conversation that hasn't already decided to, or not to buy a PS3. It seems as irrelevant as the existence of the 360 "Arcade".
I find it amusing, though, that you brought Nintendo into the discussion. I've played exactly zero Gamecube games on my Wii, but I still pick up new PS2 titles for my PS3, and the upscaling has caused me to rediscover some of the games I already had. Even though it's less that 100% support, I think Sony still did something right with backwards compatibility that Nintendo missed. I will admit though, that I'd likely have a different take on the situation if I didn't have an HD TV.
You missed the point entirely. The problem isn't technological, it's cultural. I can't say to certain people "Yeah, I'm free then but I have more important things to do than have a meeting with you." And that's essentially what rejecting, re-scheduling a meeting is saying to them in their mind. Without a shared calendar, the other guy may expect that "I'm too busy" really means "Fuck off", but with a shared calendar they essentially have proof.
In terms of profitability, the only success I see on his list is Windows Mobile. I'm not sure what metric you'd use to call it a failure, unless you're counting "usability"... But that's subjective. Any reasonable business person would call it a success. The 360 is currently in third place in week-to-week sales, so it's still too early to call it a "success". Especially since it's lost such an enormous amount of money, while it's competitors (the Wii and the PS3) are currently selling at a profit.
You also seem to be misinformed. Only one PS3 model has lost backwards compatibility. If you want it, just buy the model that has it. Seems simple enough.
You're right, of course...
However, I can't help but think we'd see double digit percentage productivity gains if such things didn't exist. Shared calendars mean that people can see you're available and book you up solid with meetings, leaving no time to work. There isn't even plausible deniability, because they can see your calendar. You have to schedule fake appointments for yourself to get some time to work.
Sounds like somebody has never left the suburbs in his entire life.
The rest of the world can be quite nice. It'll be OK if you're more than 5 miles away from your mommy for a little while.
In Ubuntu, all you have to do is go into the monitor configuration tool and tell it you plugged in a second monitor. It makes you log out and back in, but it does not make you reboot, power off, or any of that stuff. If you want mirroring, the button on your laptop's keyboard should do the trick. It's easier than Windows, but still a bit more work than OSX.
That said, some funky stuff can happen if you have a less popular laptop. Laptop graphics are still fairly poorly supported. This is true in windows too though, where you're dependent on the manufacturer's display driver which never gets updated unless you're using a major brand (more major than Acer, or Sony).
DPMS + XRandR.
This problem was fixed ages ago. See, now X is perfect for you.
What happens with works that are created by more than one person? That are continually modified by an incoming stream of new people?
Until death is just dumb. It unfairly punishes the creator for dying early (he does have a right to provide for his family, after all), unfairly rewards the creator for living an extra long life, and isn't justified by the theoretical point of copyright in the first place (to encourage creation).
The term should be 14-20 years if registered, and 1 year if not. After that you should be able to renew as many times as you like on a five year interval, and you should be able to assign that right to your heirs. The fee should be large, and per work. The fee should increase exponentially for each renewal. That would make the law uniform amongst individuals, groups, and corporations. It would balance the societal benefits with rewards for the creator.