Yes, it's blame. Things aren't working properly, so you have to diagnose the problem to fix it. They went with "Open Office isn't up to par", instead of the equally plausible alternatives "we forgot about retraining", "we refuse to keep current", "we do not specify document formats to third parties", "out IT department should have thought about these quite obvious caveats and prepared for them".
Because they're stupid. They're using OpenOffice from 2007! Five years ago! Ditch your fancy Ubuntu 12.04 and run Debian Etch for a few weeks to understand the kind of frustration those dumb, dumb IT managers put their employees through.
Also, factor in that they're using the 2007 version. If Calc still isn't up to par with MS Office's stagnant Excel five years later, just think about what they were dealing with, especially considering how quickly OO has been improving in the past years. Who was the idiot that though living forever in 2007 was a good idea?
The usual problem. Interoperability issues. They try to open MSO files on OO and it doesn't work properly. They blame OO, then, for having adhered to open standars that MS won't adopt in order to create that sort of lock-in and for not having thought of making the necessary adjustments ahead of time (like converting old documents) when you're planning on changing your working platform. It's understandable, but still speaks volumes about their IT stupidity.
Let's get ranty and overly technical over a minor point of my previous post, almost unrelated to the whole discussion, shall we? It's fun for ages 12 to Alzheimer's:
You can say that we're counting only living people as "everyone", since everyone that died prior to a particular event has little chance of benefitting from it if we consider what we perceive as the normal, front-facing flow of time. Again, if we count only the living, then people who died in the process are no longer part of the group "everyone", and thus, the remaining "everyone" really did benefit from the whole ordeal. Even the prisioners who survived their stay in concentration camps. I mean, at least they got a job, and with the economy being really shitty at the time (there was a war going on and all), I'd say they were darn lucky. They even got to work on V2s, so they had exciting jobs in a period of recession. Just imagine being able to advance human exploration of space, creating magical calculus machines and creating iPods in the Mittelwerk. But I digress.
An event happening changes things around it. As there's a plethora of events happening at any point in time, nullifying even one of then would bring so many changes over a long period of time that, imaginative as we are, we would never be able to guess what would have happened if X simply wasn't. Which makes attributing direct consequences to a particular event more and more difficult the longer space, time or both separates them, and the more people it involves. There are simply too many variables.
I was thinking about immediate consequences. War, famine, destruction and all that mix of unpleasantries of the late 30s and early 40s. I wouldn't go any further so as not to venture that far into the unknown. That being said, if you insist on blaming the space race and microprocessors on WW2 (which is quite reasonable), I'd blame the Cold War on it, too, as it was not only a scenario greatly facilitated by the end war game, but a prerequisite of sorts to the space race. Laika wasn't pleased about any of that, BTW. Also, I'd blame global warming on it, too, since Europe being devastated led to the rise of the US, the current champion on the world in environment-raping. China's up there, too, but as it has to be to compete with the US, the blame can be traced back to Hitler again. He's also to blame for me feeling sadness when my dog died. I was 15 and it was a Weimaraner, a breed brought to my country in the post-war period, by fleeing germans. In fact, as a typical teenager when faced with the death of a loved one, I felt a great amount of guilt until I finally realized it was actually the führer's fault.
So, while you can definitely say that WW2 benefitted everyone, it also brought pretty much all the grief and destruction since, too. I'm not aware of a scale that allows us to subtract one from another (we could try converting both into positive and negative happiness values for every single individual, and I'd do that right now but my pen is dry and I'd need it to take notes as I'm not one of those people that WW2 has graced with an iPad*), so I'll end it here, quite confused by what I meant with all this other than "I have insomnia".
*though it did give me a copy of Gravity's Rainbow - stealing about $30 in the process, the damn nazis -, so all in all I'd say that war was pretty neat, since it brought us funny puns as a result. It's an amazing book and I'd recommend the read, even though it's quite long. To give you an idea of how massive it is, when thrown with reasonable force from the second floor of a building, the paperback edition's kinetic energy is enough to kill an adult Weimaraner.
Fuck it, I'm godwinning this shit right now! When the germans innovated warfare, not everybody ended up benefitting.
Now, back to our normal programming, the current patent system also discourages your way of thinking. There are open initiatives, that really benefit the whole, if not exactly everyone, and closed initiatives that raise barriers to entry in a market, so every consumer and competing company is a little bit more fucked over so the patent holder can pocket more bucks.
It could just be bad music, dissonant or not. Try Pat Metheny's Zero Tolerance For Silence. Parts 3 and 4 are the best ones (1 and 2 are a bit boring).
The Yoda fight scene is one of the reasons I so deeply despise II. Yoda was a short, old, green, limpy fella. He symbolized precisely that being a great jedi master wasn't about fighting. Then they make him fight. And like some sort of cross between a midget Hulk, Super Meat Boy and cocaine. Using a fucking short lightsaber. The thing is weightless, so why would he choose something so short? Just to increase his already considerable handicap? I mean, Dooku only had to keep pointing his saber directly at yoda. It gets to the point where you can obviously realize that the FX team had trouble getting Yoda close to his arthritic opponent. Yoda almost never gets close to a position from which he can do any damage, because he has no reach. He's just spinning quite far from Dooku, which is about as dangerous as a tiny top with sharp edges. It's was too sad to see when it came out, now it's too funny.
Honestly, it's a toss-up between wookies watching TV and Anakin's "romantic" "getaway". However, since wookies can only shout incomprehensible gibberish the whole fucking time, II manages to get the cake by having significant worse dialogue.
VI had great moments. The lightsaber match in front of the emperor was the best, I think. Very tense and memorable. Unfortunately, yeah, Ewoks. Still, for me it goes
V > IV = VI > I = III > Holiday fucking Special > II
No, I was speaking in general terms. The auto industry has few relevant technological improvements and they are far between. I particularly love to hate the recent "OMFG! NOW YOU CAN START A CAR WITH A BUTTON INTEAD OF HAVING TO TUUURN THE KEEEEY AAAAALL THE WAAAAAAY!". It's an absurd feature in its meaninglessness. When I wrote that particular excerpt, I was thinking more about products like microprocessors, where R&D is incredibly expensive but it actually pays off pretty well for everyone that they advance as fast as possible.
Having said that, when I compare my 1992 bike to newer models, the difference is night and day. Fuel injection and improved frame designs are great, but better materials and more precise machining of parts also go a long way. Not to mention a few core design changes that make newer models way easier to service (I had to disassemble the entire engine just to repair my 1992 bike's electric starter, an endeavour that made me quite furious).
Sometimes higher efficiency isn't the best option. The most efficient way to produce something is to have a single manufacturer produce a single model with no change for years. Big scale operations like that tend to drive the cost of manufacture way down and fewer changes mean less R&D expenditure. However, for a variety of reasons, adding new technology to the market earlier tends to improve end user productivity and satisfaction, sometimes dramatically. Also, we tend to dislike monopolies because they negate the economic advantages of the efficiency they bring. Likewise, in this case, yes, cutting the middleman would probably increase efficiency, but then it would also concentrate income because independent dealerships wouldn't exist. Also, it would eliminate competition within a particular brand. Today, if you decide you want a Ford Foo, you can call N Ford dealerships and make them fight each other on price. If all Ford dealerships become Ford's Ford dealerships, it'll probably render such strategy unfeasible.
It's not heavy, it's slow. There's a difference. Kwin performs poorly, but doesn't really tax your machine. RAM usage is pretty ok, about 40% of what Win 7 uses and 20% higher than Gnome 3. Once you deactivate Nepomuk, that is. Here I'm currently using 720Mb, and that's mostly Firefox and its crapload of open tabs. Given that current netbooks have at least 2Gb, KDE will usually run pretty nicely.
Because sometimes, the world is a disgusting, shitty place.
I know. Chiefly due to the pervasiveness this mentality:
Note that I am not defending the activity of the military per se, but I also refuse to go along with the naive assumption that somehow you can avoid getting your hands dirty if you're a global player.
The guy is being replaced by someone from the Games Division. Surely the tinkerer suing, DRM purveying, Linux removing and just general customer fucking guys that brought us the overly expensive PS3 will do very differently at the helm of the company.
Says the rational American who realizes that the military may do a lot of really disgusting shit, so does every military. If we can't keep secrets, we will simply fail to be effective on the world stage.
Why would you want to be effective in doing really disgusting shit on the world stage, though? Whistleblowing leeway exists exactly to prevent revolting things from happening covertly. Since most military organizations can be so prone to enacting terrible deeds, even more freedom should be given for whistleblowing. I understand they might need secrecy for some of their shit, but if their own agents are morally averted by what's going on, then it's a good idea to bring the debate to the public.
We're on the same boat. I don't really fancy buying Nvidia, either, mainly because I'm a rancorous sucker that once bought an FX card. The trick for buying AMD graphics is buying outdated crap. My HD5570 works like a charm, even on Linux (when I'm not trapped in that limbo that follows every Xorg ABI change, of course).
Looking at the charts, we see some workloads benefit more from weaker IGPs than from much more powerful discrete cards. That puts AMD's best IGPs on the market in a very unique and advantageous position. This has been AMD's plan since they bought ATI, and I hope they survive long enough to see it through, at least.
Well, better performance per dollar isn't necessarily false nowadays. The Athlon overlingered and Bulldozer was a failure, but the revised Piledrivers are actually doing ok, at least on the lower end. An A10-5800K is pretty much on par with an i3 3220 on heavier workloads and you get a much better IGP. For about the same as an i3 3240 you get an FX-6300, which is way better for any kind of multithreaded work.
I don't think they'll be able to hold on much longer, since Haswell at 14nm vs Steamroller at 28nm will probably be embarassing to watch, but for this generation, thanks to Intel not having gained a lot on the performance front by moving to 22nm, they managed to catch up, if only on price/performance.
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Yes, it's blame. Things aren't working properly, so you have to diagnose the problem to fix it. They went with "Open Office isn't up to par", instead of the equally plausible alternatives "we forgot about retraining", "we refuse to keep current", "we do not specify document formats to third parties", "out IT department should have thought about these quite obvious caveats and prepared for them".
Because they're stupid. They're using OpenOffice from 2007! Five years ago! Ditch your fancy Ubuntu 12.04 and run Debian Etch for a few weeks to understand the kind of frustration those dumb, dumb IT managers put their employees through.
Also, factor in that they're using the 2007 version. If Calc still isn't up to par with MS Office's stagnant Excel five years later, just think about what they were dealing with, especially considering how quickly OO has been improving in the past years. Who was the idiot that though living forever in 2007 was a good idea?
The usual problem. Interoperability issues. They try to open MSO files on OO and it doesn't work properly. They blame OO, then, for having adhered to open standars that MS won't adopt in order to create that sort of lock-in and for not having thought of making the necessary adjustments ahead of time (like converting old documents) when you're planning on changing your working platform. It's understandable, but still speaks volumes about their IT stupidity.
Let's get ranty and overly technical over a minor point of my previous post, almost unrelated to the whole discussion, shall we? It's fun for ages 12 to Alzheimer's:
You can say that we're counting only living people as "everyone", since everyone that died prior to a particular event has little chance of benefitting from it if we consider what we perceive as the normal, front-facing flow of time. Again, if we count only the living, then people who died in the process are no longer part of the group "everyone", and thus, the remaining "everyone" really did benefit from the whole ordeal. Even the prisioners who survived their stay in concentration camps. I mean, at least they got a job, and with the economy being really shitty at the time (there was a war going on and all), I'd say they were darn lucky. They even got to work on V2s, so they had exciting jobs in a period of recession. Just imagine being able to advance human exploration of space, creating magical calculus machines and creating iPods in the Mittelwerk. But I digress.
An event happening changes things around it. As there's a plethora of events happening at any point in time, nullifying even one of then would bring so many changes over a long period of time that, imaginative as we are, we would never be able to guess what would have happened if X simply wasn't. Which makes attributing direct consequences to a particular event more and more difficult the longer space, time or both separates them, and the more people it involves. There are simply too many variables.
I was thinking about immediate consequences. War, famine, destruction and all that mix of unpleasantries of the late 30s and early 40s. I wouldn't go any further so as not to venture that far into the unknown. That being said, if you insist on blaming the space race and microprocessors on WW2 (which is quite reasonable), I'd blame the Cold War on it, too, as it was not only a scenario greatly facilitated by the end war game, but a prerequisite of sorts to the space race. Laika wasn't pleased about any of that, BTW. Also, I'd blame global warming on it, too, since Europe being devastated led to the rise of the US, the current champion on the world in environment-raping. China's up there, too, but as it has to be to compete with the US, the blame can be traced back to Hitler again. He's also to blame for me feeling sadness when my dog died. I was 15 and it was a Weimaraner, a breed brought to my country in the post-war period, by fleeing germans. In fact, as a typical teenager when faced with the death of a loved one, I felt a great amount of guilt until I finally realized it was actually the führer's fault.
So, while you can definitely say that WW2 benefitted everyone, it also brought pretty much all the grief and destruction since, too. I'm not aware of a scale that allows us to subtract one from another (we could try converting both into positive and negative happiness values for every single individual, and I'd do that right now but my pen is dry and I'd need it to take notes as I'm not one of those people that WW2 has graced with an iPad*), so I'll end it here, quite confused by what I meant with all this other than "I have insomnia".
*though it did give me a copy of Gravity's Rainbow - stealing about $30 in the process, the damn nazis -, so all in all I'd say that war was pretty neat, since it brought us funny puns as a result. It's an amazing book and I'd recommend the read, even though it's quite long. To give you an idea of how massive it is, when thrown with reasonable force from the second floor of a building, the paperback edition's kinetic energy is enough to kill an adult Weimaraner.
Fuck it, I'm godwinning this shit right now! When the germans innovated warfare, not everybody ended up benefitting.
Now, back to our normal programming, the current patent system also discourages your way of thinking. There are open initiatives, that really benefit the whole, if not exactly everyone, and closed initiatives that raise barriers to entry in a market, so every consumer and competing company is a little bit more fucked over so the patent holder can pocket more bucks.
It could just be bad music, dissonant or not. Try Pat Metheny's Zero Tolerance For Silence. Parts 3 and 4 are the best ones (1 and 2 are a bit boring).
Yeah, it's bee "The 3 Musketeers", followed by "The 3 Musketeers 2", followed by something completely different.
The Yoda fight scene is one of the reasons I so deeply despise II. Yoda was a short, old, green, limpy fella. He symbolized precisely that being a great jedi master wasn't about fighting. Then they make him fight. And like some sort of cross between a midget Hulk, Super Meat Boy and cocaine. Using a fucking short lightsaber. The thing is weightless, so why would he choose something so short? Just to increase his already considerable handicap? I mean, Dooku only had to keep pointing his saber directly at yoda. It gets to the point where you can obviously realize that the FX team had trouble getting Yoda close to his arthritic opponent. Yoda almost never gets close to a position from which he can do any damage, because he has no reach. He's just spinning quite far from Dooku, which is about as dangerous as a tiny top with sharp edges. It's was too sad to see when it came out, now it's too funny.
Honestly, it's a toss-up between wookies watching TV and Anakin's "romantic" "getaway". However, since wookies can only shout incomprehensible gibberish the whole fucking time, II manages to get the cake by having significant worse dialogue.
VI had great moments. The lightsaber match in front of the emperor was the best, I think. Very tense and memorable. Unfortunately, yeah, Ewoks. Still, for me it goes
V > IV = VI > I = III > Holiday fucking Special > II
Actually, if you really want to dual boot, you can only have two.
No, I was speaking in general terms. The auto industry has few relevant technological improvements and they are far between. I particularly love to hate the recent "OMFG! NOW YOU CAN START A CAR WITH A BUTTON INTEAD OF HAVING TO TUUURN THE KEEEEY AAAAALL THE WAAAAAAY!". It's an absurd feature in its meaninglessness. When I wrote that particular excerpt, I was thinking more about products like microprocessors, where R&D is incredibly expensive but it actually pays off pretty well for everyone that they advance as fast as possible.
Having said that, when I compare my 1992 bike to newer models, the difference is night and day. Fuel injection and improved frame designs are great, but better materials and more precise machining of parts also go a long way. Not to mention a few core design changes that make newer models way easier to service (I had to disassemble the entire engine just to repair my 1992 bike's electric starter, an endeavour that made me quite furious).
Sometimes higher efficiency isn't the best option. The most efficient way to produce something is to have a single manufacturer produce a single model with no change for years. Big scale operations like that tend to drive the cost of manufacture way down and fewer changes mean less R&D expenditure. However, for a variety of reasons, adding new technology to the market earlier tends to improve end user productivity and satisfaction, sometimes dramatically. Also, we tend to dislike monopolies because they negate the economic advantages of the efficiency they bring. Likewise, in this case, yes, cutting the middleman would probably increase efficiency, but then it would also concentrate income because independent dealerships wouldn't exist. Also, it would eliminate competition within a particular brand. Today, if you decide you want a Ford Foo, you can call N Ford dealerships and make them fight each other on price. If all Ford dealerships become Ford's Ford dealerships, it'll probably render such strategy unfeasible.
It's not heavy, it's slow. There's a difference. Kwin performs poorly, but doesn't really tax your machine. RAM usage is pretty ok, about 40% of what Win 7 uses and 20% higher than Gnome 3. Once you deactivate Nepomuk, that is. Here I'm currently using 720Mb, and that's mostly Firefox and its crapload of open tabs. Given that current netbooks have at least 2Gb, KDE will usually run pretty nicely.
Because sometimes, the world is a disgusting, shitty place.
I know. Chiefly due to the pervasiveness this mentality:
Note that I am not defending the activity of the military per se, but I also refuse to go along with the naive assumption that somehow you can avoid getting your hands dirty if you're a global player.
The guy is being replaced by someone from the Games Division. Surely the tinkerer suing, DRM purveying, Linux removing and just general customer fucking guys that brought us the overly expensive PS3 will do very differently at the helm of the company.
Says the rational American who realizes that the military may do a lot of really disgusting shit, so does every military. If we can't keep secrets, we will simply fail to be effective on the world stage.
Why would you want to be effective in doing really disgusting shit on the world stage, though? Whistleblowing leeway exists exactly to prevent revolting things from happening covertly. Since most military organizations can be so prone to enacting terrible deeds, even more freedom should be given for whistleblowing. I understand they might need secrecy for some of their shit, but if their own agents are morally averted by what's going on, then it's a good idea to bring the debate to the public.
Shit. Jumped the gun. My bad. -1 plain stupid for me.
-1 plain wrong.
Mouse -> Advanced -> Pointer Acceleration.
Nope, it's a perfectly cromulent word.
(Sleeping Beauty could not be reached for comment, but it's rumored that she has transitioned to an Apple platform)
I'm pretty sure she's running Linux, hence being unable to resume from sleep.
We're on the same boat. I don't really fancy buying Nvidia, either, mainly because I'm a rancorous sucker that once bought an FX card. The trick for buying AMD graphics is buying outdated crap. My HD5570 works like a charm, even on Linux (when I'm not trapped in that limbo that follows every Xorg ABI change, of course).
We might not have to buy Intel next time, though. AMD still has a trump card, namely earlier and better OpenCL support in widely used products like Adobe's CS. Tom's has a preview bench of the performance gains: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/photoshop-cs6-gimp-aftershot-pro,3208-13.html
Looking at the charts, we see some workloads benefit more from weaker IGPs than from much more powerful discrete cards. That puts AMD's best IGPs on the market in a very unique and advantageous position. This has been AMD's plan since they bought ATI, and I hope they survive long enough to see it through, at least.
Well, better performance per dollar isn't necessarily false nowadays. The Athlon overlingered and Bulldozer was a failure, but the revised Piledrivers are actually doing ok, at least on the lower end. An A10-5800K is pretty much on par with an i3 3220 on heavier workloads and you get a much better IGP. For about the same as an i3 3240 you get an FX-6300, which is way better for any kind of multithreaded work.
I don't think they'll be able to hold on much longer, since Haswell at 14nm vs Steamroller at 28nm will probably be embarassing to watch, but for this generation, thanks to Intel not having gained a lot on the performance front by moving to 22nm, they managed to catch up, if only on price/performance.
If the thesis in question is "i won't be punished", then argument by punishment is not fallacious at all.