It's also interesting to note that the guy being interviewed is in the business of making 3D engines.
Now ask the question: would 3D engine makers perhaps have something to gain if OpenGL and DirectX would be scrapped, as the interview suggests?
Most game dev labs wouldn't have the resources to build their own engines from the scratch using a C++ compiler, making them to - wait for it - licence a 3D engine like the one this guy is selling.
So in summary, the article paints a picture from the future which would be very beneficial to interviewee, so I'd take it with a grain of salt. Either we'd get some de facto 3D engines replacing OpenGL and DirectX, or the game developers will waste time recreating each new graphics technology advancement into their own engines.
Seriously, when we have satellites that can read licence plates from space, how hard it would be to get some imaginery from the moon landing site and the flag?
Could someone who actually knows educate us about:
A) Is the landing site visible when looked from the earth (so you could perhaps use a huge telescope from earth, or Hubble)
B) What kind of zoom we would need if taking pictures from orbit, for example compared to the licence plate on earth?
My experience has been that if you only have a single 7200 rpm drive with half decent ventilation in the computer case, HDD temps keep well below 50 degrees celsius (122 F). This is why standard issue PCs don't have heatsinks and fans on them. 10k HDDs and RAID arrays are a different matter.
In these "normal" cases, you can simply decouple the hard drive from the case by placing it on soft foam pad (it stays there quite easily with gravity alone:), dramatically reducing computer noise (trust me, you'll be surprised). Assuming a good PSU and CPU cooler, much of the PC noise is caused by case resonance (in turn caused by HDD vibration), which is eliminated by decoupling the HDD and case. In addition to suppressing the idle noise to inaudibility, soft foam also almost eliminates seek noise (again mainly coming from the case), making the noise signature much nicer.
For me, increase in temperature for me was only a few degrees, and it halved the noise my computer was making, at virtually no cost at all (foam was from packaging material of some old network card or such). This and lowering the CPU fan voltage with Zalman fanmate was enough to make my HTPC nearly inaudible, with total cost of 5.9 euros (around 9 dollars).
To my count all of the 1000+ answers so far have circled around the following theories (and their inverses for less smart people):
1. Smart people understand the dangers of sex, hence don't do it 2. Smart people have less possible partners with desirable qualities 3. Smart people have less time for sex 4. Smart people have less interest for sex because of their "higher state of mind"
I find it interesting that none of the high-modded posts dared to suggest that perhaps smart teens just are not always that popular with teen girls? Is it too frightening explanation to consider that smart people have actually less possibilities for sex in high school?
The theories 1-4 explain the finding partially, but the truth is that quite many things you'd expect a person with high IQ to do aren't that hot within teenage girls. To my experience those sporty and outgoing types (activities which, while not excluding intelligence, do not explicitly require it) were wildly more popular with girls than those who got consistently good grades, shined in maths, computers etc.
It could be that some smart people actually are less interested in sex because of their intelligence, but I think the majority is just less inclined to do things the "average teen" would do (hang out at the mall or whatever you Americans do), thus getting less exposure to opposite sex, and therefore not getting the opportunity to get laid, even if they wanted to (because that's what the media tells them a normal teenage would do, and no-one wants to be freak, right?).
...And you should not forget that many other people in the world understand English even if it's not their official language. For example, I'm from Finland and about 90% of the browsing I do is on US servers. The content available in Finnish is a tiny fraction compared to the amount available in English, and not having the ability to pick the best-of-breed sites from each category would generally suck.
For example, there are probably hundreds of good blogging sites hosted in the US, whereas I only know one in Finnish, and the range of services it offers is pretty limited. The same applies for almost everything, and some things are not available at all in Finnish.
Re:VCR theory reduces to 'cannot change the past'!
on
No Time Travel, Sorry
·
· Score: 1
Ok, so essentially you mean that the reality "splits" when Marty does time travel, so instead of actually going to past, he gets his own "reality thread", with the world rearranged to the way it was in 1950's? In that case, my rant about iterations is not necessary, as God has unlimited amount of tapes instead of just one, and eternal pause'n'rewind between 1950 and 1985 wouldn't even be a problem - Marty goes on in his own reality thread, every time travel just meaning a reset (back in time) or fast-forward.
Although even in this case some decisions need to be made, like what if Marty goes first to 1950, then to 1900 - do we already have the things done in 1900 when Marty goes to 1950? I suppose not. For example, suppose there's a bridge over some stream, originally existing since 1890:
1. Marty goes to 1950 (god pauses and rearranges) 2. Marty loosens the screws in the bridge, causing it to collapse 3. Marty returns to 1985 (god fast-forwards) - the bridge is collapsed 4. Marty goes to 1900 (god pauses and rearranges) 5. Marty blows up the bridge 6. Marty returns to 1985 - is the bridge blown up, or collapsed?
Obviosly Marty cannot loosen the screws on a blown up bridge, but it would be very hard to deduce what he would do instead, and that of course would change the whole chain of events afterwards (would he even go to 1900?). Only good solution would then be that when Marty goes to 1900, his time travel to 1950 gets erased as well as everything else. This is probably what you meant?
It seems the idea is internally consistent at least to some level. Only real drawback is the need for multiple realities. If only one thread of reality would exist, many additional decisions would likely arise if God would need to prioritize different time travellers (based on travel time), or "remember" people who are going to appear back in future in year X. For example, if Alice and Bob both leave from 1985 to 2000 and 2100, respectively, God has to remember, that once 2100 is realized, Bob is instantiated there (unless Alice's actions cancel bob leaving in 1985). I'm not intuitively sure if some arrangement of time travels back and forth would cause some logical conflict in there.
VCR theory reduces to 'cannot change the past'!
on
No Time Travel, Sorry
·
· Score: 1
Your "pausing the VCR" idea essentially means that you repeat twice those sections of the tape where time travel occurs, first with the original version, then with the modified one.
But doesn't this mean, that the God is then stuck to iterating the same 1950..1985 part of the tape over and over again? Because each time you reach 1985, it's a bit different (because of Marty's actions), and Marty's actions when he goes ("again") back to 1950 change a bit.
And once you take it to the logical conclusion, it seems that the only way time can go on from 1985 without the need for "pausing" is when the 1950-1985 reaches an equilibrium, and Marty's actions in 1950 produce exactly similar 1985 as it was when Marty went to past. Which is essentially the whole "you cannot alter the past in new ways" -concept we started with: Marty can only change the past to create exactly the kind of world he left from (and is this in a way forced to go to the past to do it).
Of course, there's the scenario where equilibrium would not be reached, and this would loop forever, but wouldn't God want to avoid those?-)
And when there are more than 1 simultaneous jumps back in time, the whole VCR thing starts to become really complicated - if two people leave from 1985 to 1900 and 1950, which of those realities you tackle first? What if the guy who went to 1900 goes then to 2100, and the other from 1950 to 1800?
Reading the summary makes me think either the PR firm who wrote it doesn't understand acceleration, or expects us to be unable to. In order to convey the predicament of the ISS the article should mention altitude, downward velocity, and acceleration.
Or then the writer of the summary understands acceleration, and you fail to notice it: "a kilometer of altitude every week, with the rate increasing as the orbit decays"
Basically giving the altitude and speed is to give a first degree estimate of the space station altitude at a given point of time. Your suggestion to include acceleration would only increase the resolution to a second degree estimate - there still could (and probably are) higher degree components in the exact equation - like increasing influence of air resistance that in turn accelerates the acceleration.
Most of the readers are not looking for third, fourth or fifth degree Taylor estimate of the altitude as a function of time, they are satisfied with the knowledge that it is falling, and falling faster all the time. Your suggestion to include acceleration is not guaranteed to give a completely accurate image of what is happening any more than the current summary, which kind of makes your "doesn't understand acceleration" moot.
Assembly is *not* the largest demoparty -- that honour belongs to Breakpoint. Assembly is mostly for gamers.
According to Breakpoint web site, they expected up to 1000 visitors this year, whereas Assembly usually has around 5000. What qualifies you into making a statement that less than 20% of people at Assembly are interested in demos?
You can argue whether assembly is a demoparty, but how do you define such an event? By amount of compos, size of prizes? Or the spirit of the people? Altough there IS a lot of gaming going on in Assembly, I'd count most of the visitors as computer enthusiasts instead of "mostly gamers", as you put it.
Of course if you mean demoparty as in "we are as hostile towards gamers as possible" -sense, I'll agree with you, Assembly is no longer a pure demoparty. But still, saying "Assembly is mostly for gamers" sounds a touch elitist.
So at 99 cents per song, that's a little under 500 million in revenue over 3 years. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the 33 billion dollar annual global music market.
But considering that most of it came from last year's sales (400 million?), I'd say that even 1% share of global music market from a single store is quite huge contribution.
Especially when they are selling their music a lot cheaper than those new Britney Spears albums and whatever happens to sell well these days in the US.
Meanwhile, script kiddies and HTML coders are using the still more conspicious "" to thwart security specialists and noob Slashdot readers all around the world.
The problem with this method is, that the characters <, !, - and > are needed in common use and are not as easy to remove from keyboard as/.
For those of you who do not see what I mean: I mean just you guys.
actually, it is very flat, oh topographically challenged one
Except, for the hills, of course.:)
Just hope that they don't install any hotspots on the hills, we won't want to have another great bush fire in there (fifth image from top left corner)!
I seem to remember from some old hacker's manual I read when I was younger, that a goverment agency did just what was told in the article.
The problem with the pronouncable passwords was, that with the given guidelines, there were only few million (or something like that) possible passwords, and the redudancy was so great that you could zip 'em all into a one nice 4MB tarball and cracking the passwords was very easy for hackers.
So while easy-to-pronounce passwords may be a good thing, the length of the password need to be increased significantly to compensate the narrowed-down search space needed.
And for those companies with older software and hardware, good old Win95 on harddrive, customized boot disk on floppy drive and WinNuke to boot 'em up goes just as well!:)
Wow, even though I'm not american, the seamless scrolling makes the application superb way to waste time - zoom into a city, and just start scrolling along a road, and you never know where you are going to get!
Rather nice if you want to plan a trip, too, as you get an idea how things look like along the way! And if the resolution gets better in distant future, who will need to do the actual trip anyway?
If a service like this really becomes popular, it has vast potential - just zoom to where you are, and you can see all web sites in the area, plus visual hints on how to get there and how does the thing look like. Now if you only could link images taken from those places directly to maps..
SCO's lawyer held up a piece of paper - that was duplicated on a projection screen that only the magistrate judge, Brooke Wells, could see - that listed all of the AIX code that IBM has and hasn't turned over to SCO.
Makes me wonder how small font they used to get it all into a piece of paper..
The fact that you don't believe it doesn't make it any less true. From what I have heard, color LCD costs around 30 dollars/euros, which is quite a large portion of the price - between 20% and 30% of the low-end models.
Especially when you consider the fact that assembling, transporting and the retailer get their fair share, you'll see that a five-dollar price cut could make a huge impact on mobile phone manufacturers' profit margins.
It isn't always as easy as this. My installation looked a bit like this:
emerge mythtv: 1hr (Gentoo jokes aside)
re-compile kernel with video: 0.5hr
try to get xawtv working to tune the channels - I live in Finland and need to tune mythtv frequencies manually: 2hrs of audio/video permission and other problems
mythsetup: 0.1hr
mythfilldatabase hangs after finding the first channel, no resolution available through google: 4hrs
manually using xmltv to get the data: 2hrs
trying to use xml file directly with mythfilldatabase - still hangs after reading into database: 1hr
manually editing mysql database: 1hr
starting up mythtv - permission problems: 2hrs
figuring out correct alsa mixer settings from mediocre installation documents: 2hrs
getting rid of blank screen and audio buffering errors: 3hrs
now that everything works, trying to figure why in the hell I cannot change channels in mythtv
Total time: 18.6hrs
If everything goes OK, mythtv setup is a breeze - I've done it before. But when you have audio card that only records in 48kHz and start having prebuffering problems, or live outside US where you have to do little more than use ZapIt it CAN get ugly.
During my three workdays with MythTV most of the problems were mentioned in some web forums, but the answers proved to be few and far between. So far I've at least learned to hate the troubleshooting-section of MythTV documentation, which is about as much of use in shooting the trouble as a robot that eats flies.
Surely a super-expert in ALSA could've solved the haunting audio problems with a flick of his wrist, but sometimes it seems like a waste of good freetime to start learning devfs and the inner workings of.asoundrc just to be able to watch TV..
If they have given the legal team an additional 13% from the settlement, we can easily calculate how high considers its probability of success to be.
If we estimate that the payment cap to the lawyers deprive them of... say $30 million, and they are trying to get $5bn from IBM settlement, they consider their chances to be:
IBM's Redacted Reply Memorandum In Further Support of its Cross Motion For Partial Summary Judgment
Shouldn't we just refer to it as IBM's RRMIFSoiCMFPSJ instead, to keep things simple?
(IANAL:)
Can Linux ever develop user-friendliness
on
Linux vs. Windows
·
· Score: 1
This "getting user-friendly interfaces to do stuff" -thing is a good goal, but I just realized one problem, and it is nature of Linux itself.
Because Linux and its applications are done by thousands of computer enthusiasts, it is constantly changing. A few illustrations:
"great that the guy XXX developed this nice gui for configuring the soundcard to work on linux, too bad we no more like this OSS stuff, but use ALSA instead!"
"nice that you got your CD-R drive working in Linux too, but sorry to inform you that it won't work quite the same when you upgrade your kernel, see the/dev filesystem was a pretty bad idea, and now we have this devfs-thing"
"devfs? yeah that is a good thing to have, but see, the concept was a bit flawed.. we now have this NEW device system, which goes like this..."
I could give a dozen more examples. The hackers who develop this stuff like to keep things up to date, and are constantly developing new applications to do everything better than the guy who got it almost right last time. It's not just sexy to improve the partially right solution, but a develop a better one, optimally with other programming language, other libraries and completely different user interface. As a hacker, that's what I'd rather do, make my vision come true, not to fix someone else's.
And it means that there is no learning curve for linux. You get comfortable with something, and when you check back a year later, all the "must-have" applications have changed, and you need to start from the bottom back again. Last time I encountered this was yesterday when installing CUPS, it was like a whole new world to me, with its applications, libraries, web-driven configuration interfaces..
This is where Windows outperforms Linux 10 to 0. Installing a printer isn't that different from installing a camera, graphics card, TV tuner or anything else. With linux, you have CUPS, graphics vendor kernel modules, V4L and mixed bunch of software ranging from xawtv to mythtv, and what else.
Slashdot Mirror
Affect; not effect.
Man, I've seen this so many times recently its starting to seem rediculous!!
There, fixed it four you.
It's also interesting to note that the guy being interviewed is in the business of making 3D engines.
Now ask the question: would 3D engine makers perhaps have something to gain if OpenGL and DirectX would be scrapped, as the interview suggests?
Most game dev labs wouldn't have the resources to build their own engines from the scratch using a C++ compiler, making them to - wait for it - licence a 3D engine like the one this guy is selling.
So in summary, the article paints a picture from the future which would be very beneficial to interviewee, so I'd take it with a grain of salt. Either we'd get some de facto 3D engines replacing OpenGL and DirectX, or the game developers will waste time recreating each new graphics technology advancement into their own engines.
Yes! Once we get this OLED printing thing rolling, we can utilize it and hang green
(and I do like the numerous possible interpretations of the previous sentence
Just wait until the Apple engineers get hold of this, and re-engineer the meaning of "also available in black" for their line of products.
Take, for example, the MacBook Air, now available as MacBook Space, for less than three times the price.
Careful, or he'll give ya the 132 salute.
:)
This is the stuff I read Slashdot for.
Now, if I only could remember what was the article we were discussing about..
Seriously, when we have satellites that can read licence plates from space, how hard it would be to get some imaginery from the moon landing site and the flag?
Could someone who actually knows educate us about:
A) Is the landing site visible when looked from the earth (so you could perhaps use a huge telescope from earth, or Hubble)
B) What kind of zoom we would need if taking pictures from orbit, for example compared to the licence plate on earth?
My experience has been that if you only have a single 7200 rpm drive with half decent ventilation in the computer case, HDD temps keep well below 50 degrees celsius (122 F). This is why standard issue PCs don't have heatsinks and fans on them. 10k HDDs and RAID arrays are a different matter.
:), dramatically reducing computer noise (trust me, you'll be surprised). Assuming a good PSU and CPU cooler, much of the PC noise is caused by case resonance (in turn caused by HDD vibration), which is eliminated by decoupling the HDD and case. In addition to suppressing the idle noise to inaudibility, soft foam also almost eliminates seek noise (again mainly coming from the case), making the noise signature much nicer.
In these "normal" cases, you can simply decouple the hard drive from the case by placing it on soft foam pad (it stays there quite easily with gravity alone
For me, increase in temperature for me was only a few degrees, and it halved the noise my computer was making, at virtually no cost at all (foam was from packaging material of some old network card or such). This and lowering the CPU fan voltage with Zalman fanmate was enough to make my HTPC nearly inaudible, with total cost of 5.9 euros (around 9 dollars).
To my count all of the 1000+ answers so far have circled around the following theories (and their inverses for less smart people):
1. Smart people understand the dangers of sex, hence don't do it
2. Smart people have less possible partners with desirable qualities
3. Smart people have less time for sex
4. Smart people have less interest for sex because of their "higher state of mind"
I find it interesting that none of the high-modded posts dared to suggest that perhaps smart teens just are not always that popular with teen girls? Is it too frightening explanation to consider that smart people have actually less possibilities for sex in high school?
The theories 1-4 explain the finding partially, but the truth is that quite many things you'd expect a person with high IQ to do aren't that hot within teenage girls. To my experience those sporty and outgoing types (activities which, while not excluding intelligence, do not explicitly require it) were wildly more popular with girls than those who got consistently good grades, shined in maths, computers etc.
It could be that some smart people actually are less interested in sex because of their intelligence, but I think the majority is just less inclined to do things the "average teen" would do (hang out at the mall or whatever you Americans do), thus getting less exposure to opposite sex, and therefore not getting the opportunity to get laid, even if they wanted to (because that's what the media tells them a normal teenage would do, and no-one wants to be freak, right?).
...And you should not forget that many other people in the world understand English even if it's not their official language. For example, I'm from Finland and about 90% of the browsing I do is on US servers. The content available in Finnish is a tiny fraction compared to the amount available in English, and not having the ability to pick the best-of-breed sites from each category would generally suck.
For example, there are probably hundreds of good blogging sites hosted in the US, whereas I only know one in Finnish, and the range of services it offers is pretty limited. The same applies for almost everything, and some things are not available at all in Finnish.
Ok, so essentially you mean that the reality "splits" when Marty does time travel, so instead of actually going to past, he gets his own "reality thread", with the world rearranged to the way it was in 1950's? In that case, my rant about iterations is not necessary, as God has unlimited amount of tapes instead of just one, and eternal pause'n'rewind between 1950 and 1985 wouldn't even be a problem - Marty goes on in his own reality thread, every time travel just meaning a reset (back in time) or fast-forward.
Although even in this case some decisions need to be made, like what if Marty goes first to 1950, then to 1900 - do we already have the things done in 1900 when Marty goes to 1950? I suppose not. For example, suppose there's a bridge over some stream, originally existing since 1890:
1. Marty goes to 1950 (god pauses and rearranges)
2. Marty loosens the screws in the bridge, causing it to collapse
3. Marty returns to 1985 (god fast-forwards) - the bridge is collapsed
4. Marty goes to 1900 (god pauses and rearranges)
5. Marty blows up the bridge
6. Marty returns to 1985 - is the bridge blown up, or collapsed?
Obviosly Marty cannot loosen the screws on a blown up bridge, but it would be very hard to deduce what he would do instead, and that of course would change the whole chain of events afterwards (would he even go to 1900?). Only good solution would then be that when Marty goes to 1900, his time travel to 1950 gets erased as well as everything else. This is probably what you meant?
It seems the idea is internally consistent at least to some level. Only real drawback is the need for multiple realities. If only one thread of reality would exist, many additional decisions would likely arise if God would need to prioritize different time travellers (based on travel time), or "remember" people who are going to appear back in future in year X. For example, if Alice and Bob both leave from 1985 to 2000 and 2100, respectively, God has to remember, that once 2100 is realized, Bob is instantiated there (unless Alice's actions cancel bob leaving in 1985). I'm not intuitively sure if some arrangement of time travels back and forth would cause some logical conflict in there.
Your "pausing the VCR" idea essentially means that you repeat twice those sections of the tape where time travel occurs, first with the original version, then with the modified one.
But doesn't this mean, that the God is then stuck to iterating the same 1950..1985 part of the tape over and over again? Because each time you reach 1985, it's a bit different (because of Marty's actions), and Marty's actions when he goes ("again") back to 1950 change a bit.
And once you take it to the logical conclusion, it seems that the only way time can go on from 1985 without the need for "pausing" is when the 1950-1985 reaches an equilibrium, and Marty's actions in 1950 produce exactly similar 1985 as it was when Marty went to past. Which is essentially the whole "you cannot alter the past in new ways" -concept we started with: Marty can only change the past to create exactly the kind of world he left from (and is this in a way forced to go to the past to do it).
Of course, there's the scenario where equilibrium would not be reached, and this would loop forever, but wouldn't God want to avoid those?-)
And when there are more than 1 simultaneous jumps back in time, the whole VCR thing starts to become really complicated - if two people leave from 1985 to 1900 and 1950, which of those realities you tackle first? What if the guy who went to 1900 goes then to 2100, and the other from 1950 to 1800?
Reading the summary makes me think either the PR firm who wrote it doesn't understand acceleration, or expects us to be unable to. In order to convey the predicament of the ISS the article should mention altitude, downward velocity, and acceleration.
Or then the writer of the summary understands acceleration, and you fail to notice it: "a kilometer of altitude every week, with the rate increasing as the orbit decays"
Basically giving the altitude and speed is to give a first degree estimate of the space station altitude at a given point of time. Your suggestion to include acceleration would only increase the resolution to a second degree estimate - there still could (and probably are) higher degree components in the exact equation - like increasing influence of air resistance that in turn accelerates the acceleration.
Most of the readers are not looking for third, fourth or fifth degree Taylor estimate of the altitude as a function of time, they are satisfied with the knowledge that it is falling, and falling faster all the time. Your suggestion to include acceleration is not guaranteed to give a completely accurate image of what is happening any more than the current summary, which kind of makes your "doesn't understand acceleration" moot.
Assembly is *not* the largest demoparty -- that honour belongs to Breakpoint. Assembly is mostly for gamers.
According to Breakpoint web site, they expected up to 1000 visitors this year, whereas Assembly usually has around 5000. What qualifies you into making a statement that less than 20% of people at Assembly are interested in demos?
You can argue whether assembly is a demoparty, but how do you define such an event? By amount of compos, size of prizes? Or the spirit of the people? Altough there IS a lot of gaming going on in Assembly, I'd count most of the visitors as computer enthusiasts instead of "mostly gamers", as you put it.
Of course if you mean demoparty as in "we are as hostile towards gamers as possible" -sense, I'll agree with you, Assembly is no longer a pure demoparty. But still, saying "Assembly is mostly for gamers" sounds a touch elitist.
So at 99 cents per song, that's a little under 500 million in revenue over 3 years. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the 33 billion dollar annual global music market.
But considering that most of it came from last year's sales (400 million?), I'd say that even 1% share of global music market from a single store is quite huge contribution.
Especially when they are selling their music a lot cheaper than those new Britney Spears albums and whatever happens to sell well these days in the US.
Meanwhile, script kiddies and HTML coders are using the still more conspicious "" to thwart security specialists and noob Slashdot readers all around the world.
/.
The problem with this method is, that the characters <, !, - and > are needed in common use and are not as easy to remove from keyboard as
For those of you who do not see what I mean: I mean just you guys.
actually, it is very flat, oh topographically challenged one
:)
Except, for the hills, of course.
Just hope that they don't install any hotspots on the hills, we won't want to have another great bush fire in there (fifth image from top left corner)!
I seem to remember from some old hacker's manual I read when I was younger, that a goverment agency did just what was told in the article.
The problem with the pronouncable passwords was, that with the given guidelines, there were only few million (or something like that) possible passwords, and the redudancy was so great that you could zip 'em all into a one nice 4MB tarball and cracking the passwords was very easy for hackers.
So while easy-to-pronounce passwords may be a good thing, the length of the password need to be increased significantly to compensate the narrowed-down search space needed.
And for those companies with older software and hardware, good old Win95 on harddrive, customized boot disk on floppy drive and WinNuke to boot 'em up goes just as well! :)
Wow, even though I'm not american, the seamless scrolling makes the application superb way to waste time - zoom into a city, and just start scrolling along a road, and you never know where you are going to get!
Rather nice if you want to plan a trip, too, as you get an idea how things look like along the way! And if the resolution gets better in distant future, who will need to do the actual trip anyway?
If a service like this really becomes popular, it has vast potential - just zoom to where you are, and you can see all web sites in the area, plus visual hints on how to get there and how does the thing look like. Now if you only could link images taken from those places directly to maps..
SCO's lawyer held up a piece of paper - that was duplicated on a projection screen that only the magistrate judge, Brooke Wells, could see - that listed all of the AIX code that IBM has and hasn't turned over to SCO.
Makes me wonder how small font they used to get it all into a piece of paper..
The fact that you don't believe it doesn't make it any less true. From what I have heard, color LCD costs around 30 dollars/euros, which is quite a large portion of the price - between 20% and 30% of the low-end models.
Especially when you consider the fact that assembling, transporting and the retailer get their fair share, you'll see that a five-dollar price cut could make a huge impact on mobile phone manufacturers' profit margins.
It isn't always as easy as this. My installation looked a bit like this:
Total time: 18.6hrs
If everything goes OK, mythtv setup is a breeze - I've done it before. But when you have audio card that only records in 48kHz and start having prebuffering problems, or live outside US where you have to do little more than use ZapIt it CAN get ugly.
During my three workdays with MythTV most of the problems were mentioned in some web forums, but the answers proved to be few and far between. So far I've at least learned to hate the troubleshooting-section of MythTV documentation, which is about as much of use in shooting the trouble as a robot that eats flies.
Surely a super-expert in ALSA could've solved the haunting audio problems with a flick of his wrist, but sometimes it seems like a waste of good freetime to start learning devfs and the inner workings of
If they have given the legal team an additional 13% from the settlement, we can easily calculate how high considers its probability of success to be.
If we estimate that the payment cap to the lawyers deprive them of... say $30 million, and they are trying to get $5bn from IBM settlement, they consider their chances to be:
$5bn * p = $30 million
=> p = 4.6%
IBM's Redacted Reply Memorandum In Further Support of its Cross Motion For Partial Summary Judgment
:)
Shouldn't we just refer to it as IBM's RRMIFSoiCMFPSJ instead, to keep things simple?
(IANAL
This "getting user-friendly interfaces to do stuff" -thing is a good goal, but I just realized one problem, and it is nature of Linux itself.
/dev filesystem was a pretty bad idea, and now we have this devfs-thing"
.5 points of Karma.
Because Linux and its applications are done by thousands of computer enthusiasts, it is constantly changing. A few illustrations:
"great that the guy XXX developed this nice gui for configuring the soundcard to work on linux, too bad we no more like this OSS stuff, but use ALSA instead!"
"nice that you got your CD-R drive working in Linux too, but sorry to inform you that it won't work quite the same when you upgrade your kernel, see the
"devfs? yeah that is a good thing to have, but see, the concept was a bit flawed.. we now have this NEW device system, which goes like this..."
I could give a dozen more examples. The hackers who develop this stuff like to keep things up to date, and are constantly developing new applications to do everything better than the guy who got it almost right last time. It's not just sexy to improve the partially right solution, but a develop a better one, optimally with other programming language, other libraries and completely different user interface. As a hacker, that's what I'd rather do, make my vision come true, not to fix someone else's.
And it means that there is no learning curve for linux. You get comfortable with something, and when you check back a year later, all the "must-have" applications have changed, and you need to start from the bottom back again. Last time I encountered this was yesterday when installing CUPS, it was like a whole new world to me, with its applications, libraries, web-driven configuration interfaces..
This is where Windows outperforms Linux 10 to 0. Installing a printer isn't that different from installing a camera, graphics card, TV tuner or anything else. With linux, you have CUPS, graphics vendor kernel modules, V4L and mixed bunch of software ranging from xawtv to mythtv, and what else.
Just my