Well imagine if a printing company decided that they were going to print and distribute your magazine or newspaper for free.
Why, the only way that you'd continue to be justly compensated for your work is if a framework existed in law wherein you would sell the RIGHT to COPY your work to specific printing companies, and any other company would be in violation of the law!
we've seen nearly 1000% inflation in 20 years (£2.99 in 1989 -> £20-30 in 2009), just for budget titles.
One has to consider that the complexity of a "budget title" has also increased at least tenfold in that time.
That nondescript diskette hanging on the budget rack at Babbage's 20 years ago may well have been written by two or three guys working on it in their free time. It was a couple hundred kilobytes of compiled assembly language and some 256-color 2D bitmaps.
Development of a modern budget game requires the services of at least a dozen people working fulltime for several months. It's hundreds of megabytes of object-oriented code libraries, 3D object meshes, high-color, hi-definition textures, sampled sounds...
There may be some exceptions, perhaps in retro-inspired corners like "casual gaming" and "mobile gaming", but as a general estimate I'd be surprised if today's gamesare ONLY a single order of magnitude more complex than those 20 years ago.
Are they an order of magnitude more fun? That's a different, and off-topic, question.
As a former user of the first-generation T-Mobile Sidekick, a mobile phone with dimensions extremely similar to a Dove bar (soap not icecream), I hope this concept is not adopted by phone manufacturers.
That thing was a joy to thumb-type on, but as a telephone it sucked donkey rocks.
So, you knowingly and deliberately inflated your billing to your client by doing unnecessary work due entirely to your own conceit? You owe your client a refund.
RTFC. The unnecessary work was due entirely to the cluelessness of the client's legal counsel.
An AC says before if these marks are still on the records for the kids. Well why wouldn't they be? Just because the sentencing was wrong doesn't mean the crime wasn't committed.
My understanding is that jury trials in juvenile court are rare, with both the verdict and the sentencing normally being determined by a judge.
I don't know if there was any malfeasance involved in the verdicts of these cases, but I wouldn't rule it out yet.
Kdawson always posts complete and utter bullshit, but this really is over the line. I've been reading Slashdot for a long long time, but if this is seriously what makes it on the front page these days, there's really no point in even visiting here anymore.
It's been real everyone, last one out hit the lights.
Farewell, drama queen.
I'll just update my account settings to prevent stories posted by kdawson from appearing on the front page for me, same as I did for michael and jonkatz in the past...
It reminds me of the personal computer industry of the early 1980s, dominated by proprietary, overpriced, non-interoperable components. IBM moved in with its PC and blew the field wide open, paving the way for today's mix-and-match technology.
Your memories of that period in computing history don't jibe with mine.
What I remember is a market with no clear leader: Apple, Commodore, and Tandy had substantial slices of the pie, with at least a half dozen more just behind them. Most platforms were "open" in the sense that anybody could build and sell a peripheral, or write and sell a software program, but because each system did things differently you probably had to do two or three versions in order to recoup your development costs.
The IBM PC and its clones unified the market, yes but did not open it any more than it already was.
Doesn't anyone wonder how Microsoft "allows large software vendors to penetrate your machine" without asking what it is that these large vendors can do that ANYONE with a compiler can't do?
You mean other than shove a pile of cash at Microsoft to receive "Windows Genuine KnowledgePoint Pro Partner Enterprise Plus 2009" services, aka documentation of some of the secret API calls that plebes aren't supposed to know about or use?
If you really wanted to have a database just do key / store values, you could quite easily do that in any rdms.
Sure, but it's not likely that a key/value store implemented within a general-purpose RDBMS can achieve the same raw performance that a system designed to do nothing but implement a key/value store -- nor the distributability, for that matter.
For everyone else in the world who does not know what PGO is maybe some details on why it is not enabled would be helpful.
Unlike the typical "professionally edited" Slashdot story submission, the grandparent comment actually provided the expansion of the acronym the first time it was used.
While I'm complaining about submission editing anyway, I might as well whinge about how awful and the headline and summary on this one are. What the article means to say is that "On Linux, performance is better running the Firefox Windows binary via Wine than running the Firefox Linux binary." What it actually implies is that "Performance is better running the Firefox Windows binary via Wine on Linux than running the Firefox Windows binary on Windows."
I don't know Todd, but I'm fairly certain reasonable people would NOT find the statement believable.
It depends on the context. As apparently random graffiti on a bathroom wall, no, a reasonable person would not consider the assertion credible. As part of a discussion pertaining to a man accused of allegedly performing sexual assault on a person, a reasonable person would not be so quick to dismiss the possibility that such a man may also be capable of sexual assault on farm animals.
Actually, the original Xbox hardware is entirely capable of output at 720p or 1080i. The bottleneck is the CPU, which simply isn't powerful enough to do sustained decoding of HD-resolution MPEG data.
Courts have repeatedly held up that once you are sold a copy of a product, you are entititled to privately do whatever you want with it. That includes space and time shifting. Text to speech is just another type of space shifting. i.e. Moving from one medium to another.
The Guild is not saying "if you use text-to-speech programs, YOU are a criminal", but rather "Amazon broke the law in providing you a text-to-speech system in the Kindle".
I still don't think the argument holds much weight. The text-to-speech program is not illegal. Merely providing a tool with a transformative application is not illegal. And Amazon's intent in doing so was obviously for the purpose of private individual usage, not in order to give the Kindle owner a factory for generating and distributing unauthorized audiobooks.
Because reading out loud would be an interpretation and infringe on the art? What about a monotone voice, like text to speech?
If you think today's text-to-speech algorithms sound monotone, try listening to what was innovative in the field 30 years ago.
The goal of artificial speech has always been to create a lifelike, authentic performance of human speech, not the more reproduction of a sequence of synthetic phonemes.
It should be remembered that whilst [the monthly patch schedule] doesn't work properly, it was introduced partly at the demand of corporate customers.
Okay, but that doesn't explain why people who WANT 0-day patches for 0-day exploits are forced to wait weeks.
Why not have msce.windowsupdate.com for the customers who demand patch releases only once a month, and competent.admin.windowsupdate.com with daily patch releases, and allow local administrators to choose which to get updates from?
It's like your car (come on, you knew that was coming): you don't usually drive it as fast as it will go, but it's nice to be able to go fast if you have to.
If you buy a Toyota Echo, you have an affordable little car that will reliably get you from Point A to Point B. But you have to accept that your cargo capacity is going to be rather limited, and even if it's possible to get it above 85mph on the highway, the car wasn't really designed to do that.
With all the rails in the air, real estate on the ground can be used for pretty much anything
Can be, but would it? Almost all of the passenger rail service in Manhattan was moved underground in the first half of the 20th century because of the effects the elevated train lines were having on the communities below them: the avenues were constantly dark, dirty, noisy, and unpleasant. If you've ever been under the remaining elevated lines in the outer boroughs, or in Chicago, or under Seattle's monorail, you'll understand how elevating the transit system may solve some of the problems of building at grade, but also introduces many new problems of its own.
A bus would use the same amount of energy to stop and let 10 people off, as it would to stop and let 1 off.
EXACTLY. Why run an enormous diesel (or electric, or CNG) motor to move around an entire bus, if the payload that needs to be transported is only a single person?
The PRT approach allows the energy expendicture of system to scale almost exactly with demand, albeit with a larger overhead at peak usage than traditional mass transit.
Persistent data objects require non-volatile persistent data storage, i.e., disk. But access times for disk are dismal; that's why every general-purpose computer and most of the specific-purpose computers since UNIVAC have used some form of volatile, but much faster, form of memory to store working data. This working copy by necessity has to be synchronized with the persistent copy periodically.
The benefit of Phantom OS, the not-yet-developers of Phantom OS argue, is that this synchronization is done for you automatically; the programmer does not need to think about it. I argue the programmer knows (or SHOULD know) the synchronization needs of the data better than the OS ever will.
Say there's an object in Phantom memory representing the textarea control I'm currently typing this comment into in my browser. How often is it going to save the changes I'm making to its contents back to disk? Once per minute? Once per second? After every single character I type? Even though this is just a couple kilobytes of plain text, if the VM has to re-write it to disk 300 times a second, it's going to be painful.
I suppose Phantom programs could give hints to the OS recommending a sync schedule for each object type it uses -- but at that point, why not just make it the program's responsibility to synchronize? And most programs already do just that, whether it takes the form of flushing a data buffer or auto-saving a draft of a word processing document.
Sugar is a bad idea dreamed up by theorists attached to their ideas of how children should learn, not on any actual observation or testing.
As a concept for a user interface, I like Sugar very much. Read through the HIG documents and you'll see a lot of innovative ideas; if only desktop OSes would do collaboration or file organization or activity scope this way!
As a completed product, Sugar falls short of the mark. It's slow, it's gray, it's bland. It's slow; I wrote it twice because I had the time to do so while waiting for the screen to redraw.
As a teaching tool, where primary-school-age students are ostensibly going to hit the 'View Source' key and edit the internals of their window manager on-the-fly, Sugar is a joke; a solution in search of a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Well imagine if a printing company decided that they were going to print and distribute your magazine or newspaper for free.
Why, the only way that you'd continue to be justly compensated for your work is if a framework existed in law wherein you would sell the RIGHT to COPY your work to specific printing companies, and any other company would be in violation of the law!
we've seen nearly 1000% inflation in 20 years (£2.99 in 1989 -> £20-30 in 2009), just for budget titles.
One has to consider that the complexity of a "budget title" has also increased at least tenfold in that time.
That nondescript diskette hanging on the budget rack at Babbage's 20 years ago may well have been written by two or three guys working on it in their free time. It was a couple hundred kilobytes of compiled assembly language and some 256-color 2D bitmaps.
Development of a modern budget game requires the services of at least a dozen people working fulltime for several months. It's hundreds of megabytes of object-oriented code libraries, 3D object meshes, high-color, hi-definition textures, sampled sounds...
There may be some exceptions, perhaps in retro-inspired corners like "casual gaming" and "mobile gaming", but as a general estimate I'd be surprised if today's gamesare ONLY a single order of magnitude more complex than those 20 years ago.
Are they an order of magnitude more fun? That's a different, and off-topic, question.
As a former user of the first-generation T-Mobile Sidekick, a mobile phone with dimensions extremely similar to a Dove bar (soap not icecream), I hope this concept is not adopted by phone manufacturers.
That thing was a joy to thumb-type on, but as a telephone it sucked donkey rocks.
So, you knowingly and deliberately inflated your billing to your client by doing unnecessary work due entirely to your own conceit? You owe your client a refund.
RTFC. The unnecessary work was due entirely to the cluelessness of the client's legal counsel.
An AC says before if these marks are still on the records for the kids. Well why wouldn't they be? Just because the sentencing was wrong doesn't mean the crime wasn't committed.
My understanding is that jury trials in juvenile court are rare, with both the verdict and the sentencing normally being determined by a judge.
I don't know if there was any malfeasance involved in the verdicts of these cases, but I wouldn't rule it out yet.
Kdawson always posts complete and utter bullshit, but this really is over the line. I've been reading Slashdot for a long long time, but if this is seriously what makes it on the front page these days, there's really no point in even visiting here anymore.
It's been real everyone, last one out hit the lights.
Farewell, drama queen.
I'll just update my account settings to prevent stories posted by kdawson from appearing on the front page for me, same as I did for michael and jonkatz in the past...
It reminds me of the personal computer industry of the early 1980s, dominated by proprietary, overpriced, non-interoperable components. IBM moved in with its PC and blew the field wide open, paving the way for today's mix-and-match technology.
Your memories of that period in computing history don't jibe with mine.
What I remember is a market with no clear leader: Apple, Commodore, and Tandy had substantial slices of the pie, with at least a half dozen more just behind them. Most platforms were "open" in the sense that anybody could build and sell a peripheral, or write and sell a software program, but because each system did things differently you probably had to do two or three versions in order to recoup your development costs.
The IBM PC and its clones unified the market, yes but did not open it any more than it already was.
Doesn't anyone wonder how Microsoft "allows large software vendors to penetrate your machine" without asking what it is that these large vendors can do that ANYONE with a compiler can't do?
You mean other than shove a pile of cash at Microsoft to receive "Windows Genuine KnowledgePoint Pro Partner Enterprise Plus 2009" services, aka documentation of some of the secret API calls that plebes aren't supposed to know about or use?
they think Nissan makes the Civic!
This lack of data integrity could have been prevented if they had used a relational database...
"Enough with the bad blog posts already, it's like facebook, only less interesting."
No, it's more like porn, except it doesn't have naked people doing things to themselves and each other.
It's kind of like a car, if the car didn't have a fuel gauge or any springs inside the passenger seat...
If you really wanted to have a database just do key / store values, you could quite easily do that in any rdms.
Sure, but it's not likely that a key/value store implemented within a general-purpose RDBMS can achieve the same raw performance that a system designed to do nothing but implement a key/value store -- nor the distributability, for that matter.
So I come up with an idea that could save the company thousands, or even millions of dollars. and, I get a toaster oven. nice incentive.
Not even. The company rewards you for your million-dollar idea by giving you a CHANCE to win a toaster oven. Gee, thanks.
Yet another company taking the high road of suing their customers for profit!
Very true, except for the "suing" part. And the "profit" part, and by some definitions the "customers" part.
For everyone else in the world who does not know what PGO is maybe some details on why it is not enabled would be helpful.
Unlike the typical "professionally edited" Slashdot story submission, the grandparent comment actually provided the expansion of the acronym the first time it was used.
While I'm complaining about submission editing anyway, I might as well whinge about how awful and the headline and summary on this one are. What the article means to say is that "On Linux, performance is better running the Firefox Windows binary via Wine than running the Firefox Linux binary." What it actually implies is that "Performance is better running the Firefox Windows binary via Wine on Linux than running the Firefox Windows binary on Windows."
I don't know Todd, but I'm fairly certain reasonable people would NOT find the statement believable.
It depends on the context. As apparently random graffiti on a bathroom wall, no, a reasonable person would not consider the assertion credible. As part of a discussion pertaining to a man accused of allegedly performing sexual assault on a person, a reasonable person would not be so quick to dismiss the possibility that such a man may also be capable of sexual assault on farm animals.
Buy an old xbox. It's not going to do HD content
Actually, the original Xbox hardware is entirely capable of output at 720p or 1080i. The bottleneck is the CPU, which simply isn't powerful enough to do sustained decoding of HD-resolution MPEG data.
Courts have repeatedly held up that once you are sold a copy of a product, you are entititled to privately do whatever you want with it. That includes space and time shifting. Text to speech is just another type of space shifting. i.e. Moving from one medium to another.
The Guild is not saying "if you use text-to-speech programs, YOU are a criminal", but rather "Amazon broke the law in providing you a text-to-speech system in the Kindle".
I still don't think the argument holds much weight.
The text-to-speech program is not illegal. Merely providing a tool with a transformative application is not illegal. And Amazon's intent in doing so was obviously for the purpose of private individual usage, not in order to give the Kindle owner a factory for generating and distributing unauthorized audiobooks.
Because reading out loud would be an interpretation and infringe on the art? What about a monotone voice, like text to speech?
If you think today's text-to-speech algorithms sound monotone, try listening to what was innovative in the field 30 years ago.
The goal of artificial speech has always been to create a lifelike, authentic performance of human speech, not the more reproduction of a sequence of synthetic phonemes.
It should be remembered that whilst [the monthly patch schedule] doesn't work properly, it was introduced partly at the demand of corporate customers.
Okay, but that doesn't explain why people who WANT 0-day patches for 0-day exploits are forced to wait weeks.
Why not have msce.windowsupdate.com for the customers who demand patch releases only once a month, and competent.admin.windowsupdate.com with daily patch releases, and allow local administrators to choose which to get updates from?
It's like your car (come on, you knew that was coming): you don't usually drive it as fast as it will go, but it's nice to be able to go fast if you have to.
If you buy a Toyota Echo, you have an affordable little car that will reliably get you from Point A to Point B. But you have to accept that your cargo capacity is going to be rather limited, and even if it's possible to get it above 85mph on the highway, the car wasn't really designed to do that.
With all the rails in the air, real estate on the ground can be used for pretty much anything
Can be, but would it? Almost all of the passenger rail service in Manhattan was moved underground in the first half of the 20th century because of the effects the elevated train lines were having on the communities below them: the avenues were constantly dark, dirty, noisy, and unpleasant. If you've ever been under the remaining elevated lines in the outer boroughs, or in Chicago, or under Seattle's monorail, you'll understand how elevating the transit system may solve some of the problems of building at grade, but also introduces many new problems of its own.
A bus would use the same amount of energy to stop and let 10 people off, as it would to stop and let 1 off.
EXACTLY. Why run an enormous diesel (or electric, or CNG) motor to move around an entire bus, if the payload that needs to be transported is only a single person?
The PRT approach allows the energy expendicture of system to scale almost exactly with demand, albeit with a larger overhead at peak usage than traditional mass transit.
Persistent data objects require non-volatile persistent data storage, i.e., disk. But access times for disk are dismal; that's why every general-purpose computer and most of the specific-purpose computers since UNIVAC have used some form of volatile, but much faster, form of memory to store working data. This working copy by necessity has to be synchronized with the persistent copy periodically.
The benefit of Phantom OS, the not-yet-developers of Phantom OS argue, is that this synchronization is done for you automatically; the programmer does not need to think about it. I argue the programmer knows (or SHOULD know) the synchronization needs of the data better than the OS ever will.
Say there's an object in Phantom memory representing the textarea control I'm currently typing this comment into in my browser. How often is it going to save the changes I'm making to its contents back to disk? Once per minute? Once per second? After every single character I type? Even though this is just a couple kilobytes of plain text, if the VM has to re-write it to disk 300 times a second, it's going to be painful.
I suppose Phantom programs could give hints to the OS recommending a sync schedule for each object type it uses -- but at that point, why not just make it the program's responsibility to synchronize? And most programs already do just that, whether it takes the form of flushing a data buffer or auto-saving a draft of a word processing document.
Buying an LCD is becoming a real pain in the arse.
Perhaps, but buying a CRT was a real pain in the back.
Sugar is a bad idea dreamed up by theorists attached to their ideas of how children should learn, not on any actual observation or testing.
As a concept for a user interface, I like Sugar very much. Read through the HIG documents and you'll see a lot of innovative ideas; if only desktop OSes would do collaboration or file organization or activity scope this way!
As a completed product, Sugar falls short of the mark. It's slow, it's gray, it's bland. It's slow; I wrote it twice because I had the time to do so while waiting for the screen to redraw.
As a teaching tool, where primary-school-age students are ostensibly going to hit the 'View Source' key and edit the internals of their window manager on-the-fly, Sugar is a joke; a solution in search of a problem.