Naturally. Some shareholders hold more shares than others. Other shareholders are founders or directors and have correspondingly deeper roles. When I start a company and still own most of the shares a few years later, I continue to have a vital interest in seeing that company do well. I know this is not The Socialist Way, but if I did not have that incentive to start with, I probably wouldn't bother starting a company. It would be an interesting experiment to see what would happen if all shareholders were "equal", as you say. Just keep that idea away from any companies that I own shares in! (Or let me cash out and start shorting the stock now!)
Mutual fund shares do not get you anything
You get what you pay for. If you want direct shares and the associated ups and downs and daily or hourly decisions associated with managing an equity invesment and trying to turn yourself a profit, then you buy Real Shares. If you want a fund manager to make the buy and sell decisions for you and would like to reduce both your upside and downside then you buy units of mutual funds. Mutual funds get you exactly what you buy them for. No, you don't get rights to vote at shareholder meetings -- you've chosen to give your rights to the fund managers. However, you're still extremely interested in seeing the corporations that your fund invests in do well. Thus, my point is still that all the citizens out there with stocks, mutual funds, GICs, and anything else tied to corporations are all interested in seeing those corporations profit. It should be no surprise that we elect governments that try to help corporations thrive. It's a vital interest to most of us. Unless you live on a subsistence farm and keep your cash buried in a jar in the back yard.
It really bothers me when the law enforcement arm of any level of a government organization sides with the corporations rather than the people that they are supposed to serve.
When citizens that a government serves create a corporation or purchase shares in a corporation, those citizens now have vital interests in that corporation. Citizens have billions of dollars of interests in these corporations you speak of. We're talking about moms and dads and grandparents with money in GICs, mutual funds, commercial bonds, stocks, etc. You may not like certain choices of investment or interests (eg. Microsoft, Ford, etc.), but ultimately, we're talking about serving citizens here.
Ask yourself this: do you really want the type of person who finds fulfillment playing Solitaire and Minesweeper to divert his/her attention to building the next skyscraper or hydroelectric project? Please, no!
Ever since I can remember, what the general public knowledge is, usually runs about 10 years behind the times.
Your 10-year theory may hold for satellite imaging technology, but it seems to me that one of the most important measures of progress or technology doesn't really lag at all for the private sector: CPU power.
Is the military able to get their hands on supercomputing or number-crunching power that the private sector will need to wait 10 years for? I doubt it. SETI@home may be one interesting example, but private entities with enough cash (and some can give even military budgets a run for their money) can buy as many supercomputers from Cray, IBM, NEC, Fujitsu, etc. as they need.
This probably didn't bother the military 10 or 20 years ago. But today, having the ability to encrypt, decrypt, process photographs, extract signals from noise, etc. can create or win wars.
Working on a machine that has 128k of memory and uses an NTSC monitor is pointless; most wristwatches have more processing power than that nowadays.
I understand the point your trying to make, but you're clearly ignorant of present technology if you think most wristwatches have a CPU more powerful than an Apple ][ or more than 128k of memory. Most wristwatches I see today are still analog, and most of the remaining digital ones have far poorer specs than an Apple ][. Care to change your definition of "most" or "processing power"?;-)
Some people need to just grow up and change with the times. Nostalgia is good but living in the past will get you nowhere. Get a grip.
People who UNDERSTAND the technology they use commonly have a VERY good grip. Of course, they LOOK like they're standing still compared to those who chase the bleeding edge of tech and never quite get a grip on any of it.
Your watch analogy reminded me of a quote from James Gleick's book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything:
"A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with 2 watches is never sure".
That book will really ruffle the feathers of anyone who thinks the only way to make progress is to develop more and newer and faster technologies. Very good book./. review here and more info here and here.
Re:I must be missing something
on
Review: SliMP3
·
· Score: 2
It lets me listen to all my MP3s, playlists, and streams in my living room on my $5,000 stereo
If you're like me and you have good home audio gear, you'll be disappointed that the SliMP3 routes everything through a cheap DAC and analog RCA patch cables. The website says a SPDIF hack may be coming soon, but for now, it's a darn shame about the analog bottleneck. I'm looking forward to enhancements, but for now I'll stick with 20 feet of SPDIF coax cable running from my PC to my home audio gear in another room (where a much better DAC awaits the stream).
Do you understand that UseNet exists entirely because articles are COPIED from server to server and kept around as long as possible? There's nothing centralized; by the time you read a posted article, it has been COPIED many many many times and exists on many servers simultaneously, for as long as each server cares to keep it around. That might be forever. In any, case UseNet relies on COPYING articles (not propogating them, like e-mail for example). Google Groups is a great place to get UseNet articles from -- it's currently the strongest node for UseNet content and I'm happy about it.
Those postings were made in the expectation that they were part of an informal, temporary discussion group, not a permanent archive searchable by anybody and everybody in perpetuity.
Were your expectations set by policy or wishful thinking? I've been posting to UseNet since 1990/91 and I've never had a feeling that my comments would cease to exist. Each server in the distributed UseNet has always set its own policies, time horizons, groups to propogate, etc. When you've got thousands of those servers, each with different interests and resources, it's pretty natural to think that some of them would try to keep articles around longer than others.
Is the typical/.'er American and are they concerned about this? I'm Canadian, so I care about it, but Canadian stories don't get front-page/. billing very often. I'd like to see a poll of/. nationalities. I wonder how many people live in Cowboy Neal.
Someone mod this guy down as his "+1 Information" is incorrect information. This isn't old news; maybe it is old rumor.
No studio has agreed to pick this pic up yet. No money has been paid out to start making it. No footage of Arnie has been shot yet.
From the current article:
According to entertainment trade paper Daily Variety, the
producers behind the project have set their asking price at $50 million, plus half of the gross receipts generated from the film.
Sources told Reuters Friday that talks could wrap by early this week. Assuming a deal goes through, production would begin in April with Jonathan Mostow, who directed the submarine war flick "U-571," succeeding James Cameron at the helm of the latest "Terminator." Variety has put Mostow's fee at more than $5 million.
The film is seen as a potential "tentpole" picture for the summer of 2003, and studio interest is keen given that "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" grossed more than $500 million worldwide after its 1991 release. Experts say a franchise with such proven box-office clout normally has a studio home by the time it gets to its third outing.
"Almost every studio in town... is looking to handle domestic rights to this picture," one person with knowledge of the talks told Reuters. "Over the last few days, this has been the hottest property in Hollywood."
On the days I work out, I come home STARVED. I hit the gym and by the time I get home, I'm not that hungry.
That sounds a bit bizarre to me. Are you sure you're starved? If your body is actually hungry for fueld (ie, not a mental habit or food addiction) and you do heavy physical work, it sounds like a recipe for bonking.
Since you're talking about adding muscle mass, I hope you're at least eating when you get home. To add muscle mass, it's generally accepted that you should use the "glycogen window" within an hour (some say longer, some say shorter) of a long exercise session. ie, fuel up with a good amound of primarily carbs within that window and your body will convert carbohydrates to muscle glycogen at triple the rate it normally would. As time passes after the workout, the rate drops, so the sooner the better. Naturally, rehydration is pretty important.
Mind you, this is only important if you're trying to put on more muscle mass. If you're a big, muscley, chubby person to start with and you're looking to get slimmer, this probably won't achieve the desired result.
Can I get a sound card with SPDIF input and start ripping thru the digital optical connection? Will this be the same quality as the CDDA data streams?
Every bit of audio present on a CD will be retrieved with a SPDIF connection. Enough quality for ya?;-)
As for the interface and ease of writing discrete MP3 tracks when the SPDIF stream changes, tagging, etc., well, that's where a SPDIF connection becomes more of a hassle than normal ripping. But that's all really just a software issue -- all the hardware is available. Like the poster, I also have a Slink-e from Nirvis. Great box and it lets you pull approximate TOC info from the CD in a single or multi-disc Sony player (via an S-Link cable) to retrieve CDDB (or equiv) info for tagging or naming. You'll need another connection (S-Link, for example) alongside the SPDIF connection for player/disc/track data.
The Slinke hardware is platform independent, though the software the give away with it is entirely Windows. Search around and you'll see some Linux and Apple support for the Slink-e also...
By the way, the Slink-e is great for general infrared in/out in addition to controlling Sony (and a few other manufacturers') CDs, MDs, receivers, TVs, etc.
Care to venture a theory as to why there would be gradient patches of BOTH white and grey on that map, then? Maybe grey is where they didn't take measurements, and white is where the really, really didn't take measurements.;-)
Do you really want a version of Office for Linux? Really?
More than anything, I'd like to see an alternative/stable desktop OS. Running a popular, fat, bloated application on Linux that people love (for better or worse) and are familiar with would help Linux desktop adoption immensely.
Sigh. Tears well up in my eyes. My first paying job out of school was writing Z80 assembly code for the Sega GameGear and Nintendo GameBoy (a crippled, cheapo Z80 on the Nintendo).
And I suspect there were a bunch of arcade games that ran a Z80 besides PacMan.
Please, however, give me examples of truly bad names of commercial products.
Okay, thoroughly offtopic here now, but it's time to burn off some karma. And product naming is something I've been involved with...
That's a nicely constructed challenge you issue, since any name I give you can be retorted with "it's unique/politically incorrect/irreverant/offensive/bizarre/funny/horri ble, and therefore good for its intended market". Furthermore, as long as a product is still on the market and selling to at least a niche, it can be claimed that the name must not be truly bad.
I won't cite this as a "bad" example, because it actually works, but something that still amuses me is the way Ikea names its products. There are thousands of nearly interchangable names for their stuff. Now, functionally they might as well just use model numbers, but the crazy Swedish names apparently sound sexy or exotic to non-Swedish buyers, so they work. They communicate nearly nothing and are frequently impossible to pronounce, spell, or remember to non-Swedes. But they do the job in the store and catalog and are quickly forgotten since the product itself is good enough. I don't know the name of any of my Ikea products, and I've got a bunch. And I couldn't use those names to give to a friend for a referral. There's simply nothing "good" about any of those names, but as a naming scheme it's good. So I suppose you'll say that's a "meta-rule" in action.
The best thing about rules is that there are so many to choose from and we can always make more!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
...I think that must be a typo.
We all know that KIBO is alive and well in our computers.
By seeing what the cheats come up with, perhaps the next generation of client-server games will have better cheat avoidance
;-)
Yes, especially if the cheat coders release their cheats as Open Source also.
Hey now, if a cheat applied to GPL'ed source doesn't follow the GPL itself, we can just sue all the cheat coders out of existence! Perfect.
Free The Cheats!
but some shareholders are more equal than others
Naturally. Some shareholders hold more shares than others. Other shareholders are founders or directors and have correspondingly deeper roles. When I start a company and still own most of the shares a few years later, I continue to have a vital interest in seeing that company do well. I know this is not The Socialist Way, but if I did not have that incentive to start with, I probably wouldn't bother starting a company. It would be an interesting experiment to see what would happen if all shareholders were "equal", as you say. Just keep that idea away from any companies that I own shares in! (Or let me cash out and start shorting the stock now!)
Mutual fund shares do not get you anything
You get what you pay for. If you want direct shares and the associated ups and downs and daily or hourly decisions associated with managing an equity invesment and trying to turn yourself a profit, then you buy Real Shares. If you want a fund manager to make the buy and sell decisions for you and would like to reduce both your upside and downside then you buy units of mutual funds. Mutual funds get you exactly what you buy them for. No, you don't get rights to vote at shareholder meetings -- you've chosen to give your rights to the fund managers. However, you're still extremely interested in seeing the corporations that your fund invests in do well. Thus, my point is still that all the citizens out there with stocks, mutual funds, GICs, and anything else tied to corporations are all interested in seeing those corporations profit. It should be no surprise that we elect governments that try to help corporations thrive. It's a vital interest to most of us. Unless you live on a subsistence farm and keep your cash buried in a jar in the back yard.
It really bothers me when the law enforcement arm of any level of a government organization sides with the corporations rather than the people that they are supposed to serve.
When citizens that a government serves create a corporation or purchase shares in a corporation, those citizens now have vital interests in that corporation. Citizens have billions of dollars of interests in these corporations you speak of. We're talking about moms and dads and grandparents with money in GICs, mutual funds, commercial bonds, stocks, etc. You may not like certain choices of investment or interests (eg. Microsoft, Ford, etc.), but ultimately, we're talking about serving citizens here.
I'm curious... when is it necessary for a limited-production commercial product to be FCC-certified? Would this also apply in Canada?
Ask yourself this: do you really want the type of person who finds fulfillment playing Solitaire and Minesweeper to divert his/her attention to building the next skyscraper or hydroelectric project? Please, no!
As my dad used to say, "A laser is just a laser".
... [ZOT!] [pffft] [sizzle] [thump]"
"Used" to say? As in famous last words?
Dad: "It's perfectly safe, son -- a laser is just a laser and
Son: "Dad?"
Ever since I can remember, what the general public knowledge is, usually runs about 10 years behind the times.
Your 10-year theory may hold for satellite imaging technology, but it seems to me that one of the most important measures of progress or technology doesn't really lag at all for the private sector: CPU power.
Is the military able to get their hands on supercomputing or number-crunching power that the private sector will need to wait 10 years for? I doubt it. SETI@home may be one interesting example, but private entities with enough cash (and some can give even military budgets a run for their money) can buy as many supercomputers from Cray, IBM, NEC, Fujitsu, etc. as they need.
This probably didn't bother the military 10 or 20 years ago. But today, having the ability to encrypt, decrypt, process photographs, extract signals from noise, etc. can create or win wars.
so it's good enough to pick Ron Jeremy out of a crowd
Only if Ron finds the crowd arousing.
Oh man, this guy can't tell the nodes from the cluster.
I just hope someone wires the cluster in parallel. Otherwise, "Honey, everything just froze. Can you go outside and find the hung node?"
- Hung Node.
Working on a machine that has 128k of memory and uses an NTSC monitor is pointless; most wristwatches have more processing power than that nowadays.
;-)
/. review here and more info here and here.
I understand the point your trying to make, but you're clearly ignorant of present technology if you think most wristwatches have a CPU more powerful than an Apple ][ or more than 128k of memory. Most wristwatches I see today are still analog, and most of the remaining digital ones have far poorer specs than an Apple ][. Care to change your definition of "most" or "processing power"?
Some people need to just grow up and change with the times. Nostalgia is good but living in the past will get you nowhere. Get a grip.
People who UNDERSTAND the technology they use commonly have a VERY good grip. Of course, they LOOK like they're standing still compared to those who chase the bleeding edge of tech and never quite get a grip on any of it.
Your watch analogy reminded me of a quote from James Gleick's book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything:
"A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with 2 watches is never sure".
That book will really ruffle the feathers of anyone who thinks the only way to make progress is to develop more and newer and faster technologies. Very good book.
It lets me listen to all my MP3s, playlists, and streams in my living room on my $5,000 stereo
If you're like me and you have good home audio gear, you'll be disappointed that the SliMP3 routes everything through a cheap DAC and analog RCA patch cables. The website says a SPDIF hack may be coming soon, but for now, it's a darn shame about the analog bottleneck. I'm looking forward to enhancements, but for now I'll stick with 20 feet of SPDIF coax cable running from my PC to my home audio gear in another room (where a much better DAC awaits the stream).
Do you understand that UseNet exists entirely because articles are COPIED from server to server and kept around as long as possible? There's nothing centralized; by the time you read a posted article, it has been COPIED many many many times and exists on many servers simultaneously, for as long as each server cares to keep it around. That might be forever. In any, case UseNet relies on COPYING articles (not propogating them, like e-mail for example). Google Groups is a great place to get UseNet articles from -- it's currently the strongest node for UseNet content and I'm happy about it.
Those postings were made in the expectation that they were part of an informal, temporary discussion group, not a permanent archive searchable by anybody and everybody in perpetuity.
Were your expectations set by policy or wishful thinking? I've been posting to UseNet since 1990/91 and I've never had a feeling that my comments would cease to exist. Each server in the distributed UseNet has always set its own policies, time horizons, groups to propogate, etc. When you've got thousands of those servers, each with different interests and resources, it's pretty natural to think that some of them would try to keep articles around longer than others.
Is the typical /.'er American and are they concerned about this? I'm Canadian, so I care about it, but Canadian stories don't get front-page /. billing very often. I'd like to see a poll of /. nationalities. I wonder how many people live in Cowboy Neal.
Someone mod this guy down as his "+1 Information" is incorrect information. This isn't old news; maybe it is old rumor.
... is looking to handle domestic rights to this picture," one person with knowledge of the talks told Reuters. "Over the last few days, this has been the hottest property in Hollywood."
No studio has agreed to pick this pic up yet. No money has been paid out to start making it. No footage of Arnie has been shot yet.
From the current article:
According to entertainment trade paper Daily Variety, the producers behind the project have set their asking price at $50 million, plus half of the gross receipts generated from the film. Sources told Reuters Friday that talks could wrap by early this week. Assuming a deal goes through, production would begin in April with Jonathan Mostow, who directed the submarine war flick "U-571," succeeding James Cameron at the helm of the latest "Terminator." Variety has put Mostow's fee at more than $5 million. The film is seen as a potential "tentpole" picture for the summer of 2003, and studio interest is keen given that "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" grossed more than $500 million worldwide after its 1991 release. Experts say a franchise with such proven box-office clout normally has a studio home by the time it gets to its third outing. "Almost every studio in town
On the days I work out, I come home STARVED. I hit the gym and by the time I get home, I'm not that hungry.
That sounds a bit bizarre to me. Are you sure you're starved? If your body is actually hungry for fueld (ie, not a mental habit or food addiction) and you do heavy physical work, it sounds like a recipe for bonking.
Since you're talking about adding muscle mass, I hope you're at least eating when you get home. To add muscle mass, it's generally accepted that you should use the "glycogen window" within an hour (some say longer, some say shorter) of a long exercise session. ie, fuel up with a good amound of primarily carbs within that window and your body will convert carbohydrates to muscle glycogen at triple the rate it normally would. As time passes after the workout, the rate drops, so the sooner the better. Naturally, rehydration is pretty important.
Mind you, this is only important if you're trying to put on more muscle mass. If you're a big, muscley, chubby person to start with and you're looking to get slimmer, this probably won't achieve the desired result.
Yes, that's a good idea, But remember, you're only ever going to be able to "rip" at single speed with SPDIF.
40 lousy bucks. I can't believe the kid agreed to do it. What is that? $1.20 an hour at best. You're a jerk.
Or the kid lacks basic math skills. Or the kid's parents/guardians don't have much influence on what/where he wastes his time!
Besides, you said it: "the kid agreed to do it." It takes two to mambo.
Can I get a sound card with SPDIF input and start ripping thru the digital optical connection? Will this be the same quality as the CDDA data streams?
;-)
Every bit of audio present on a CD will be retrieved with a SPDIF connection. Enough quality for ya?
As for the interface and ease of writing discrete MP3 tracks when the SPDIF stream changes, tagging, etc., well, that's where a SPDIF connection becomes more of a hassle than normal ripping. But that's all really just a software issue -- all the hardware is available. Like the poster, I also have a Slink-e from Nirvis. Great box and it lets you pull approximate TOC info from the CD in a single or multi-disc Sony player (via an S-Link cable) to retrieve CDDB (or equiv) info for tagging or naming. You'll need another connection (S-Link, for example) alongside the SPDIF connection for player/disc/track data.
The Slinke hardware is platform independent, though the software the give away with it is entirely Windows. Search around and you'll see some Linux and Apple support for the Slink-e also...
in Python
someone's project & some links
HA support
By the way, the Slink-e is great for general infrared in/out in addition to controlling Sony (and a few other manufacturers') CDs, MDs, receivers, TVs, etc.
Care to venture a theory as to why there would be gradient patches of BOTH white and grey on that map, then? Maybe grey is where they didn't take measurements, and white is where the really, really didn't take measurements. ;-)
Do you really want a version of Office for Linux? Really?
More than anything, I'd like to see an alternative/stable desktop OS. Running a popular, fat, bloated application on Linux that people love (for better or worse) and are familiar with would help Linux desktop adoption immensely.
Pop quiz, hot shot. Tell me what this Z80 code does...
LD BC,0FFFFH
LOOP: DEC BC
JP NZ,LOOP
Sigh. Tears well up in my eyes. My first paying job out of school was writing Z80 assembly code for the Sega GameGear and Nintendo GameBoy (a crippled, cheapo Z80 on the Nintendo).
And I suspect there were a bunch of arcade games that ran a Z80 besides PacMan.
Rest in peace, my little 8 bit friend, RIP.
Please, however, give me examples of truly bad names of commercial products.
i ble, and therefore good for its intended market". Furthermore, as long as a product is still on the market and selling to at least a niche, it can be claimed that the name must not be truly bad.
;-)
Okay, thoroughly offtopic here now, but it's time to burn off some karma. And product naming is something I've been involved with...
That's a nicely constructed challenge you issue, since any name I give you can be retorted with "it's unique/politically incorrect/irreverant/offensive/bizarre/funny/horr
I won't cite this as a "bad" example, because it actually works, but something that still amuses me is the way Ikea names its products. There are thousands of nearly interchangable names for their stuff. Now, functionally they might as well just use model numbers, but the crazy Swedish names apparently sound sexy or exotic to non-Swedish buyers, so they work. They communicate nearly nothing and are frequently impossible to pronounce, spell, or remember to non-Swedes. But they do the job in the store and catalog and are quickly forgotten since the product itself is good enough. I don't know the name of any of my Ikea products, and I've got a bunch. And I couldn't use those names to give to a friend for a referral. There's simply nothing "good" about any of those names, but as a naming scheme it's good. So I suppose you'll say that's a "meta-rule" in action.
The best thing about rules is that there are so many to choose from and we can always make more!