It's not a given that 3Dfx's marketing staff will be picked up by nVidia. The article said that 3dfx "will substantially reduce all of its workforce". I'm sure some of these people will be hired by nVidia and others will go on to jobs at ATI or Matrox perhaps. But this isn't like a merger. 3dfx is calling it quits and laying off its staff. Also the Board is recommending to the shareholders that they approve the sale of their assets to nVidia. This means IP like patents, trademarks & designs and also capital equipment and inventory. But it will be up to nVidia whether they want to hire any of these people.
On another note...what a hell of a thing to find out right before Christmas. Having been in a similar situation once, I really feel for the employees there that are being let go.
If it weren't for MKS I'd have had to give up programming. When I was forced to use PCs (386's at the time) I had never seen anything so brain dead as the DOS command 'shell'. We had just hired a new programmer and he showed me MKS. I was stunned at how good it was. I have used it now for over 10 years (still use it when I have to use Windows) and I never found a bug in it. Not to say they don't exist, but it's the most solid DOS/Windows software I have yet to encounter.
Well, I'll be dipped. Wonder how they do it since PalmOS doesn't support it. My Visor Deluxe just has the usual serial connection on the bottom. It was my understanding that the cradle was nothing more than a RS-232USB converter. Don't suppose they're lying do you?
That's a very good point. And I wasn't really trying to shift the blame to the S & M folks, just pointing out that they are often the drivers for new features for no other reason than dick-waving rights.
What I'd like to see is for them to think in terms of problems that the customers are having and let the software designers try to find a way to solve those problems. Instead they tend to think of things in terms of a list of features and if our gizmo is lacking in one, it must be added regardless of how useful it is.
But point well taken, and thanks for your response.
Yeah, but isn't the USB on the Handspring just RS-232 converted to USB. The OS is PalmOS and it doesn't natively support USB, so you can't get all the real benefits of USB and the data rate is limited to whatever the serial port can handle (115k?). Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.
There's truth to your sig, but at least part of the problem is that the designers are not the (only) ones making the decisions about what features should or should not go into a product. These decisions are often made primarily by the Sales & Marketing types who have little knowledge of computers and only fuzzy concepts of what the software is supposed to do or what the users want. Add to that the one-upmanship that goes on in this industry (XYZ Co. has 128 widgets in their thingamagiggy....we better support 256. Never mind that no user has ever needed more than 10.) and you have a recipe for feature-bloat and scope-creep. Then the product isn't very well tested because the requirements are poorly understood in the first place. And the huge parameter space of most programs coupled with the wide variety of hardware they must run on (and myriad of device drivers, etc.) just further complicates the testing process. And don't even get me started about release dates. I think this reason may be the worst of all: companies have decided that it's better economically to release buggy products sooner rather than better products later. The consumers for some reason tolerate this situation because they don't realize that it doesn't have to be this way. They just accept buggy software as a fact of life. If consumers demanded better software, they'd get better software. Add it all up and it's like elephants fucking: it's not pretty or elegant, but it's a miracle that it works at all.
Yes, it's spiralling down, but it's not really a question of geography. Mir is in a *really* low orbit. Atmospheric drag is causing it to decay even further, in fact it was boosted up to a higher orbit earlier this year or else it would have probably come down by now. But even so, it won't last in the current orbit very long: the lower it gets, the higher the drag and the lower it gets, lather, rinse, repeat until the big burn. At this point they still have some control over it so I think they plan to try to de-orbit it someplace (relatively) safe, such as over the Pacific (pity that).
Also, Mir is very heavy (ok, massive to be more exact), having acreted many pieces over its lifetime. To boost it into a higher orbit that would last any significant length of time would take a lot of energy (i.e., money) that would be better spent on ISS.
Umm, ever heard of blue-collar crimes? Umm, yep, but they have nothing to do with stock fraud or computer theft. What you're talking about are white-collar crimes. Blue-collar crimes are the more traditional ones. (As if pipefitters and truck drivers were more likely to commit murder or rob a bank.)
Indeed, in the case of worshipping Satan, great financial gains can be realized. Look how well Torvalds is doing! Now that is just funny. LMAO!
This is a good point, but I'm guessing (because the "article" didn't say) that they'll use a S/390 with many instances of Linux, each running in its own virtual machine. This way, if any one copy of Linux goes down (for whatever reason), it won't take the whole thing down with it. A paper was presented at ALS that suggested just such a strategy:
For an ISP or ASP, the savings in terms of facilities and management costs quickly overcome the higher initial cost of the System/390 hardware: if you are building a data center based around Suns, your crossover point is around 25 servers; with Intel, it's more like 150 servers. In either case, this is a small fraction of the several thousand machines VM can run with acceptable performance.
Actually, I kinda dig the Iridium flares. I saw one in broad daylight once. They never messed up my observations. The reason astronomers don't like them is because of radio interference - they operate in and near some of the more important wavelengths used for radio astronomy.
You are absolutely correct, but most computer (l)users seem to have a higher tolerance for failures of computer equipment (be it hardware- or software-related) than your average geek. They accept that it's going to fail periodically, or even expect it. When it does, they hit the reset switch like nothing happened and keep going. Most people don't seem to realize that it doesn't have to be that way. If they had to pull over to the side of the road and reboot their car every couple of hundred kilometers, how long do you think they would tolerate it? But for some reason, they do the same thing with their computers and never even give it a second thought - just hit the button and get a cup of coffee while it reboots.
So I guess my point is that not many people are going to vote with their pocketbooks as you suggest, since they believe that poor quality is the norm, or even inevitable.
Too expensive. You'd need a sizable lifter to get that much trash up to escape velocity. Then of course you'd have the problem of getting the lifter into the ISS's orbit in the first place. However, I don't see why they don't just let it burn up in re-entry. Has to be at least as good as putting it in a landfill, no?
how can excess photons damage anything nonorganic?
What has being organic got to do with anything? If you point the HST at the Sun (or any telescope w/o a proper filter for that matter) you will literally melt the CCD. (Think ants under a magnifying glass here). The HST contains a fail-safe program that automatically shuts the door if the telescope is pointing to within 20 degrees of the Sun to prevent damage to the cameras. Someone else mentioned that it is unable to image the Earth or Moon as well. This is true, I think, because they are too close - it can't focus on something that near.
You may have noticed that hubble photos often have the acronym WF/PC2 somewhere in them? This stands for Wide Field/Planetary Camera 2 (#1 being the one they replaced in the 1st servicing mission to fix the optics). Anyway, the Wide Field part is a wide angle camera for taking pictures of deep space things like the Lagoon Nebula and the Planetary Camera part is a high-power camera for taking pix of planets. The only thing that could be "too bright" would be the Sun, which would damage the CCD. For other things, if they are bright they would just make a shorter exposure. However it *is* pretty dumb to compare photos taken from a camera right on the Jovian doorstep to ones taken from Earth. That's like comparing HST photos of Mars with ones from the Mars Orbiter.
We usually think of evolution as a slow accretion of traits that's almost imperceptibly slow.
There is one school of thought that holds that evolution is pretty static for long periods of time, then explodes in response to suddenly changing environmental conditions (atmospheric oxygen, climatary changes, comet impacts, humans, etc.). Mass extinctions are extreme examples of this, but it also occurs on smaller scales more frequently. This sounds much more plausible to me and explains why we sometimes find in the fossil record evidence of pretty drastic evolution from one species to another in a relatively short period of time with no record of intermediate species.
I found that it usually took two or three actions to complete a single simple task, the program doesn't import images well (except.wmf images), it hates exporting to any other format (and can't even export directly to.pdf), it's painfully slow to complete most tasks, it creates monstrously huge files, and it's a memory HOG.
Yep, all true. A lot of the quirks that it has are downright silly. I can understand it not exporting pdf directly (I use the pdf Writer thingy from Adobe that looks like a printer driver), but it doesn't even *import* pdf. At all.
I hope that I don't offend, but I found using MS Publisher to be a nightmarish carnival of terror. It's really, really worth taking a look at the other tools that are out there.
No offense taken, I'm hardly in love with Publisher - I just use it because that's what I've got. Like I said, I'm trying get away (far away) from M$ apps & OSes (except for games maybe). I think I need true desktop publishing; from the descriptions I've read (thanks everybody), it doesn't sound like FM is the right tool for the job. Since you seem to have some familiarity, could you recommend one in particular? I don't need an industrial strength DTP package - it's just a small monthly newsletter - but something a little nicer than Publisher would be most welcome. And not tooooo expensive.
Is Framemaker a word processor or more of a desktop publishing package? The reson I ask is that I'm trying to wean myself off of Windows entirely and there are currenly only 2 apps that I have to have Windows for: Publisher & Quicken. GNUCash will be a Quicken replacement someday (already is for many people), but I still need a desktop publishing package. I publish a newsletter once a month (for samples, look here - pdf format) and a word processor doesn't quite get the job done. I was hoping that Framemaker would be that solution, but looks like that's not going to happen. I'd still be willing to use the beta if it's heavy-duty enough. Any thoughts?
Bonobo is a component model for GNOME, loosely modeled after Microsoft's COM. It uses CORBA as the transport mechanism, which of course makes it far more portable than COM. For more info, check these links:
a guide to GNOME and CORBA an intro to Bonobo
Hold on, I'm not advocating anything. I'm just presenting the opposing viewpoint, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I agree with that viewpoint. What I'm really doing is fishing for countermeasures that I can pull out if someone ever tries to use that argument on me.
Secondly, I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. I made no mention of a perfect race and fail to see how that has anything to do with patents. Could you please clarify?
Thirdly, I'm dangerously close to whipping out Godwin's Law on you.:)
I agree with you, but allow me to play devil's advocate for a sec..... The counter-argument is that without patents, the drug never would have existed in the first place. No drug company would invest the boatloads of money it would take to invent this drug if they had not had some expectation of a semi-monopoly on the backend to recoup the r&d costs. Taken to a logical extreme, this creates a scenario where it's better for each drug company to wait for someone else to do their research for them. Kind of a "early bird gets the worm, but the second rat gets the cheese" type of situation.
What is the counter-counter-argument to this? I'm not trolling, I truly would like to know.
Obviously, in the case of software patents, no one is investing tons of money trying to find a better sorting algorithm (or one-click shopping, or whatever), so why should they have a protected monopoly just for being the first to patent something?
What you buy when you "buy" software is the right to use the software.
You also buy the right to tech. support, and in the case of free software, this is all you buy. To use ESR's example, how many people would plunk down a few hundred dollars for M$ Office if they knew there would be no support for the product? Of course, in this particular example, they are now charging extra for tech. support. But I guarantee you that if M$ announced that there would be no future support for Office, they wouldn't be able to give it away. My point is though, that with free (and open source) software, if you decide to buy it, you're really paying for documentation and support, not the right to use the code. And it's true for non-free software as well, to a certain point.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a given that 3Dfx's marketing staff will be picked up by nVidia. The article said that 3dfx "will substantially reduce all of its workforce". I'm sure some of these people will be hired by nVidia and others will go on to jobs at ATI or Matrox perhaps. But this isn't like a merger. 3dfx is calling it quits and laying off its staff. Also the Board is recommending to the shareholders that they approve the sale of their assets to nVidia. This means IP like patents, trademarks & designs and also capital equipment and inventory. But it will be up to nVidia whether they want to hire any of these people.
On another note...what a hell of a thing to find out right before Christmas. Having been in a similar situation once, I really feel for the employees there that are being let go.
use the radiation emission from your monitor (can't remember the name of it right now)
Van Eck phreaking
This is just a limitation of the FAT filesystem. To fix it, export DUALCASE=1. This works on NTFS, if you're using FAT, ymmv.
If it weren't for MKS I'd have had to give up programming. When I was forced to use PCs (386's at the time) I had never seen anything so brain dead as the DOS command 'shell'. We had just hired a new programmer and he showed me MKS. I was stunned at how good it was. I have used it now for over 10 years (still use it when I have to use Windows) and I never found a bug in it. Not to say they don't exist, but it's the most solid DOS/Windows software I have yet to encounter.
Well, I'll be dipped. Wonder how they do it since PalmOS doesn't support it. My Visor Deluxe just has the usual serial connection on the bottom. It was my understanding that the cradle was nothing more than a RS-232USB converter. Don't suppose they're lying do you?
That's a very good point. And I wasn't really trying to shift the blame to the S & M folks, just pointing out that they are often the drivers for new features for no other reason than dick-waving rights.
What I'd like to see is for them to think in terms of problems that the customers are having and let the software designers try to find a way to solve those problems. Instead they tend to think of things in terms of a list of features and if our gizmo is lacking in one, it must be added regardless of how useful it is.
But point well taken, and thanks for your response.
Yeah, but isn't the USB on the Handspring just RS-232 converted to USB. The OS is PalmOS and it doesn't natively support USB, so you can't get all the real benefits of USB and the data rate is limited to whatever the serial port can handle (115k?). Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.
There's truth to your sig, but at least part of the problem is that the designers are not the (only) ones making the decisions about what features should or should not go into a product. These decisions are often made primarily by the Sales & Marketing types who have little knowledge of computers and only fuzzy concepts of what the software is supposed to do or what the users want. Add to that the one-upmanship that goes on in this industry (XYZ Co. has 128 widgets in their thingamagiggy....we better support 256. Never mind that no user has ever needed more than 10.) and you have a recipe for feature-bloat and scope-creep. Then the product isn't very well tested because the requirements are poorly understood in the first place. And the huge parameter space of most programs coupled with the wide variety of hardware they must run on (and myriad of device drivers, etc.) just further complicates the testing process. And don't even get me started about release dates. I think this reason may be the worst of all: companies have decided that it's better economically to release buggy products sooner rather than better products later. The consumers for some reason tolerate this situation because they don't realize that it doesn't have to be this way. They just accept buggy software as a fact of life. If consumers demanded better software, they'd get better software. Add it all up and it's like elephants fucking: it's not pretty or elegant, but it's a miracle that it works at all.
Yes, it's spiralling down, but it's not really a question of geography. Mir is in a *really* low orbit. Atmospheric drag is causing it to decay even further, in fact it was boosted up to a higher orbit earlier this year or else it would have probably come down by now. But even so, it won't last in the current orbit very long: the lower it gets, the higher the drag and the lower it gets, lather, rinse, repeat until the big burn. At this point they still have some control over it so I think they plan to try to de-orbit it someplace (relatively) safe, such as over the Pacific (pity that).
Also, Mir is very heavy (ok, massive to be more exact), having acreted many pieces over its lifetime. To boost it into a higher orbit that would last any significant length of time would take a lot of energy (i.e., money) that would be better spent on ISS.
Umm, ever heard of blue-collar crimes?
Umm, yep, but they have nothing to do with stock fraud or computer theft. What you're talking about are white-collar crimes. Blue-collar crimes are the more traditional ones. (As if pipefitters and truck drivers were more likely to commit murder or rob a bank.)
Indeed, in the case of worshipping Satan, great financial gains can be realized. Look how well Torvalds is doing!
Now that is just funny. LMAO!
For more info, look at these links:
Marist Univ.
IBM
linux.s390.org
Actually, I kinda dig the Iridium flares. I saw one in broad daylight once. They never messed up my observations. The reason astronomers don't like them is because of radio interference - they operate in and near some of the more important wavelengths used for radio astronomy.
You are absolutely correct, but most computer (l)users seem to have a higher tolerance for failures of computer equipment (be it hardware- or software-related) than your average geek. They accept that it's going to fail periodically, or even expect it. When it does, they hit the reset switch like nothing happened and keep going. Most people don't seem to realize that it doesn't have to be that way. If they had to pull over to the side of the road and reboot their car every couple of hundred kilometers, how long do you think they would tolerate it? But for some reason, they do the same thing with their computers and never even give it a second thought - just hit the button and get a cup of coffee while it reboots.
So I guess my point is that not many people are going to vote with their pocketbooks as you suggest, since they believe that poor quality is the norm, or even inevitable.
Too expensive. You'd need a sizable lifter to get that much trash up to escape velocity. Then of course you'd have the problem of getting the lifter into the ISS's orbit in the first place. However, I don't see why they don't just let it burn up in re-entry. Has to be at least as good as putting it in a landfill, no?
how can excess photons damage anything nonorganic?
What has being organic got to do with anything? If you point the HST at the Sun (or any telescope w/o a proper filter for that matter) you will literally melt the CCD. (Think ants under a magnifying glass here). The HST contains a fail-safe program that automatically shuts the door if the telescope is pointing to within 20 degrees of the Sun to prevent damage to the cameras. Someone else mentioned that it is unable to image the Earth or Moon as well. This is true, I think, because they are too close - it can't focus on something that near.
You may have noticed that hubble photos often have the acronym WF/PC2 somewhere in them? This stands for Wide Field/Planetary Camera 2 (#1 being the one they replaced in the 1st servicing mission to fix the optics). Anyway, the Wide Field part is a wide angle camera for taking pictures of deep space things like the Lagoon Nebula and the Planetary Camera part is a high-power camera for taking pix of planets. The only thing that could be "too bright" would be the Sun, which would damage the CCD. For other things, if they are bright they would just make a shorter exposure. However it *is* pretty dumb to compare photos taken from a camera right on the Jovian doorstep to ones taken from Earth. That's like comparing HST photos of Mars with ones from the Mars Orbiter.
We usually think of evolution as a slow accretion of traits that's almost imperceptibly slow.
There is one school of thought that holds that evolution is pretty static for long periods of time, then explodes in response to suddenly changing environmental conditions (atmospheric oxygen, climatary changes, comet impacts, humans, etc.). Mass extinctions are extreme examples of this, but it also occurs on smaller scales more frequently. This sounds much more plausible to me and explains why we sometimes find in the fossil record evidence of pretty drastic evolution from one species to another in a relatively short period of time with no record of intermediate species.
I found that it usually took two or three actions to complete a single simple task, the program doesn't import images well (except .wmf images), it hates exporting to any other format (and can't even export directly to .pdf), it's painfully slow to complete most tasks, it creates monstrously huge files, and it's a memory HOG.
Yep, all true. A lot of the quirks that it has are downright silly. I can understand it not exporting pdf directly (I use the pdf Writer thingy from Adobe that looks like a printer driver), but it doesn't even *import* pdf. At all.
I hope that I don't offend, but I found using MS Publisher to be a nightmarish carnival of terror. It's really, really worth taking a look at the other tools that are out there.
No offense taken, I'm hardly in love with Publisher - I just use it because that's what I've got. Like I said, I'm trying get away (far away) from M$ apps & OSes (except for games maybe). I think I need true desktop publishing; from the descriptions I've read (thanks everybody), it doesn't sound like FM is the right tool for the job. Since you seem to have some familiarity, could you recommend one in particular? I don't need an industrial strength DTP package - it's just a small monthly newsletter - but something a little nicer than Publisher would be most welcome. And not tooooo expensive.
Thanks a lot for your response.
Alas, no Pagemaker for Unix. :(
Maybe it's time to get a Mac.....can't see getting one just for this application, tho.
Thanks for the response.
Is Framemaker a word processor or more of a desktop publishing package? The reson I ask is that I'm trying to wean myself off of Windows entirely and there are currenly only 2 apps that I have to have Windows for: Publisher & Quicken. GNUCash will be a Quicken replacement someday (already is for many people), but I still need a desktop publishing package. I publish a newsletter once a month (for samples, look here - pdf format) and a word processor doesn't quite get the job done. I was hoping that Framemaker would be that solution, but looks like that's not going to happen. I'd still be willing to use the beta if it's heavy-duty enough. Any thoughts?
You were close, I guess. Actually it's the Seven Sisters and it isn't a constellation but an open cluster of stars in the constellation of Taurus.
The western name is The Pleides.
Bonobo is a component model for GNOME, loosely modeled after Microsoft's COM. It uses CORBA as the transport mechanism, which of course makes it far more portable than COM. For more info, check these links:
a guide to GNOME and CORBA
an intro to Bonobo
Hold on, I'm not advocating anything. I'm just presenting the opposing viewpoint, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I agree with that viewpoint. What I'm really doing is fishing for countermeasures that I can pull out if someone ever tries to use that argument on me.
:)
Secondly, I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. I made no mention of a perfect race and fail to see how that has anything to do with patents. Could you please clarify?
Thirdly, I'm dangerously close to whipping out Godwin's Law on you.
I agree with you, but allow me to play devil's advocate for a sec..... The counter-argument is that without patents, the drug never would have existed in the first place. No drug company would invest the boatloads of money it would take to invent this drug if they had not had some expectation of a semi-monopoly on the backend to recoup the r&d costs. Taken to a logical extreme, this creates a scenario where it's better for each drug company to wait for someone else to do their research for them. Kind of a "early bird gets the worm, but the second rat gets the cheese" type of situation.
What is the counter-counter-argument to this? I'm not trolling, I truly would like to know.
Obviously, in the case of software patents, no one is investing tons of money trying to find a better sorting algorithm (or one-click shopping, or whatever), so why should they have a protected monopoly just for being the first to patent something?
What you buy when you "buy" software is the right to use the software.
You also buy the right to tech. support, and in the case of free software, this is all you buy. To use ESR's example, how many people would plunk down a few hundred dollars for M$ Office if they knew there would be no support for the product? Of course, in this particular example, they are now charging extra for tech. support. But I guarantee you that if M$ announced that there would be no future support for Office, they wouldn't be able to give it away. My point is though, that with free (and open source) software, if you decide to buy it, you're really paying for documentation and support, not the right to use the code. And it's true for non-free software as well, to a certain point.