The bombing part was a reference to The_Fountainhead. Sure, continuing working without pay is just as bad a plan as lending to someone in default. I just hope you're never in the position of having that be your only option.
Yo, homeslice. These people did work for their money. One of the things they are protesting about is unpaid back wages. Don't go all Ayn Rand on them because they're after money they're owed. Hell, Rand would think it was OK to blow the place up over that.
On the bright side, you wouldn't be paying $50 for a boxed game and getting tired of it in a day because it sucks. If there were pay per play, that would never happen. What's more indsidious is that game companies could sell you a box at retail which includes N plays. Then, play numbers N+1 and greater will cost you an incremental amount, conveniently billable to your credit card (for those without credit cards, prepaid cards will be available). Then they get to have it both ways.
Do you really want to get committed to a removable storage solution brought to you by the company that still charges $15 for a disk that holds 100MB and $100 for one that holds 1GB?
Iomega has a long history of never significantly lowering their prices for removable media. If they still sold 10MB Bernoulli cartridges, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see they still cost $200.
One (compound) word. TotalRecorder. And, yes, I find it damn ironic that the same NPR that claims to be non-commercial and accepts donations and tax funding streams audio in an evil, proprietary, non-time-shiftable format like Real. Fortunately, the PCM saves nicely.
Many posters have already joked about writing a script to poll sites waiting for the best price. But, seriously, stocks are traded this way now. If this trend continues, there will be a time when consumers have intelligent agents on our sides, too, scouting prices for everything from guns to butter. And I think that the last thing these large vendors really want is a theoretically perfect market--because that will minimize their profits.
Which is why you enter a zip code for a city in Arkansas, then place your order and have it shipped to your home in Connecticut. If the price changes, you cry foul and sic the AG on them. Whether or not you have a case, the publicity will do them no good. Victoria's Secret pulled this same crap with different editions of their catalog in different parts of the country. Guess what? People compared notes, got pissed, and the practice stopped. I predict more of the same.
Uh, because it's data the taxpayers paid for once already, perhaps? This is just another example of the U.S. government handing a big bucket of free money to yet another corporation by allowing them to charge for public records. It needs to stop now.
Re:Unions are useful, so long as they're not requi
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 1
The key to fixing that situation is to guarantee, in law, that union membership is always voluntary.
So employers can conveniently coerce employees into not joining--if they join, they just be opposed to management's view of what's best for the company, right?
Forcing people to work in groups to "prepare them for the real world" is a fallacy. In the real world, people in groups who aren't pulling their weight get fired. In school, they only screw up the grade for the group or force the working members to work harder. Group-graded work should be banished from colleges and universities until the ability to vote a group member "off the island" is added.
I think this might have been mentioned on/. awhile ago, but there are tools and information at the Eat Watch site from John Walker, the creator of AutoCAD. Cool stuff, including Palm tools for weight tracking.
So sad and so true. I can't stand hearing students referred to as customers. While colleges and universities have an obligation to not mistreat students or jerk them around adminstratively, students are not g-d damned customers buying a product, they're students. At least in theory.
A couple of years ago, a researcher took an image from a web page, split it into m x n images, then displayed them together. The result? A group of images that looks just like the original image when viewed in a web browser, but that no automated watermark crawler could detect.
Now if "secure" music is watermarked, then sharers would just have to contribute sections of music short enough that the watermark is not discernible, along with the offset (e.g. a 3 second clip starting at 2:14).
A network service of some kind, either central or not, could collect these pieces from multiple, different users, convert the audion to PCM, then assemble them into one non-watermarked music file.
While it would take many such pieces (e.g. if length of clips is 3 seconds, and there is no offset duplication, it would take 100 different users contributing pieces), the result would now be untracable.
A similar concept could be used in the frequency domain if necessary.
Your post brings back some fond memories for me, too. In 1991, I gave a class presentation using an OS/2 2.1 beta on a 386SX running at 20Mhz with 8MB of RAM. It blew people away.
One line jumped out at me, though (boldface mine):
And of course I supported what I used. I worked for IBM which helped a lot, but I still bought the printer drivers for my Epson printer
That was a big contributor to killing OS/2 as a mainstream operating system--lack of driver support included in the box.
In theory, we can turn the administration in charge of the IRS out of office. (Notice the bloodbath at the IRS a year or so ago?) We don't have anywhere near as direct a chain accountability with contractors.
While I understand your concerns about an inept civil service, we as citizenry don't have to take it as a given--we can demand a competent civil service, and get it. And they're not all incompetent and lazy. And, no, if you're wondering, I'm not a civil servant:).
And the Postal Service may have lost some money, but where would we be without one? If it weren't for the USPS, if you lived in the boonies, you'd have no mail delivery, because it'd only be done where it's profitable, probably in the cities.
I'm filing for student aid online this year - did you know you could do that? They do the whole process online, right down to your digital signature.
While it's certainly cool that you can file your FAFSA on line, the PIN number they use is only a digital signature in the legal sense--it's not a public key based digital signature, but, rather, a shared secret. (The government is working on public key certificates, q.v. the Federal PKI group.) The IRS does it the same way, with pins.
I think if you look closely, you'll find that the guts of these operations are outsourced to contractors in both the Departments of Education and Treasury. Particularly egregious is the symbiotic relationship between Treasury and electronic tax filing services--Treasury has basically agreed not to compete with them, so there will never be a way to file electronically without paying a fee, save for the sop thrown to very low income people filing very simple forms. I believe the taxpayers have already paid once for the IRS infrastructure, and should not have to pay either a private vendor or the government an additional fee to file electronically.
Perhaps a technology czar would create the expertise in the civil service to bring those services in house, where they can be maintained without the danger of future problems often associated with the extensive use of contracting.
OK, fair enough. But now there's the matter of the TRS-80 Model I users who can't use lowercase to discuss . ..
P.S.: All aliterations are free for your use:).
Re:Another great reason to not port games to Linux
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Direct3D on Linux?
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I'll take your word about the subtleties of executable file formats, but how would OS/2 having adoped PE have made it any easier for them to make WINOS2 Windows 95 compatible without Microsoft's source or cooperation?
Re:Another great reason to not port games to Linux
on
Direct3D on Linux?
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· Score: 3
And there's a perfect historical parallel: OS/2. IBM did such a good job making Windows 3.1 programs run under OS/2 (while they had access to the Windows source under previous agreements with Microsoft) that hardly anyone made native OS/2 applications. When WordPerfect Corp. saw there wasn't a big OS/2 market, I remember them distinctly saying they were stopping development of WP at 5.2 for OS/2 and concentrating on making the Windows version "run better" under OS/2. WordPerfect was only one such nail in the coffin; who knows how many developers that might have tried their hand in the OS/2 market didn't because the current Windows applications would run just fine.
Of course, when MS released Windows 95 and broke backward compatibility with Windows 3.1 for new apps, it was all over for OS/2. If Linux comes to run Windows applications seamlessly without significant problems, then as you point out, there's not likely to be much Linux commerical development.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, you're bitter. But then, I'd be bitter if I hitched my wagon to BeOS, too.
The bombing part was a reference to The_Fountainhead. Sure, continuing working without pay is just as bad a plan as lending to someone in default. I just hope you're never in the position of having that be your only option.
Yo, homeslice. These people did work for their money. One of the things they are protesting about is unpaid back wages. Don't go all Ayn Rand on them because they're after money they're owed. Hell, Rand would think it was OK to blow the place up over that.
On the bright side, you wouldn't be paying $50 for a boxed game and getting tired of it in a day because it sucks. If there were pay per play, that would never happen. What's more indsidious is that game companies could sell you a box at retail which includes N plays. Then, play numbers N+1 and greater will cost you an incremental amount, conveniently billable to your credit card (for those without credit cards, prepaid cards will be available). Then they get to have it both ways.
Iomega has a long history of never significantly lowering their prices for removable media. If they still sold 10MB Bernoulli cartridges, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see they still cost $200.
One (compound) word. TotalRecorder. And, yes, I find it damn ironic that the same NPR that claims to be non-commercial and accepts donations and tax funding streams audio in an evil, proprietary, non-time-shiftable format like Real. Fortunately, the PCM saves nicely.
But I digress--thanks for the link; it's good reading. I particularly liked
Many posters have already joked about writing a script to poll sites waiting for the best price. But, seriously, stocks are traded this way now. If this trend continues, there will be a time when consumers have intelligent agents on our sides, too, scouting prices for everything from guns to butter. And I think that the last thing these large vendors really want is a theoretically perfect market--because that will minimize their profits.
Which is why you enter a zip code for a city in Arkansas, then place your order and have it shipped to your home in Connecticut. If the price changes, you cry foul and sic the AG on them. Whether or not you have a case, the publicity will do them no good. Victoria's Secret pulled this same crap with different editions of their catalog in different parts of the country. Guess what? People compared notes, got pissed, and the practice stopped. I predict more of the same.
Uh, because it's data the taxpayers paid for once already, perhaps? This is just another example of the U.S. government handing a big bucket of free money to yet another corporation by allowing them to charge for public records. It needs to stop now.
So employers can conveniently coerce employees into not joining--if they join, they just be opposed to management's view of what's best for the company, right?
Forcing people to work in groups to "prepare them for the real world" is a fallacy. In the real world, people in groups who aren't pulling their weight get fired. In school, they only screw up the grade for the group or force the working members to work harder. Group-graded work should be banished from colleges and universities until the ability to vote a group member "off the island" is added.
I think this might have been mentioned on /. awhile ago, but there are tools and information at the Eat Watch site from John Walker, the creator of AutoCAD. Cool stuff, including Palm tools for weight tracking.
So sad and so true. I can't stand hearing students referred to as customers. While colleges and universities have an obligation to not mistreat students or jerk them around adminstratively, students are not g-d damned customers buying a product, they're students. At least in theory.
Now if "secure" music is watermarked, then sharers would just have to contribute sections of music short enough that the watermark is not discernible, along with the offset (e.g. a 3 second clip starting at 2:14).
A network service of some kind, either central or not, could collect these pieces from multiple, different users, convert the audion to PCM, then assemble them into one non-watermarked music file.
While it would take many such pieces (e.g. if length of clips is 3 seconds, and there is no offset duplication, it would take 100 different users contributing pieces), the result would now be untracable.
A similar concept could be used in the frequency domain if necessary.
One line jumped out at me, though (boldface mine):
And of course I supported what I used. I worked for IBM which helped a lot, but I still bought the printer drivers for my Epson printer
That was a big contributor to killing OS/2 as a mainstream operating system--lack of driver support included in the box.
. . . that if I stuff carrier pigeons holding IP datagrams inside of these pneumatic tubes that I'm tunneling?
And, of course, I meant to say "Office XP" rather than "Windows XP," but I'm glad you knew what I meant :).
I imagine that would be the same site from which you purchase versions of Windows XP for those platforms.
I won't make fun of you. You're talking Rural Electrification, I assume?
While I understand your concerns about an inept civil service, we as citizenry don't have to take it as a given--we can demand a competent civil service, and get it. And they're not all incompetent and lazy. And, no, if you're wondering, I'm not a civil servant :).
And the Postal Service may have lost some money, but where would we be without one? If it weren't for the USPS, if you lived in the boonies, you'd have no mail delivery, because it'd only be done where it's profitable, probably in the cities.
While it's certainly cool that you can file your FAFSA on line, the PIN number they use is only a digital signature in the legal sense--it's not a public key based digital signature, but, rather, a shared secret. (The government is working on public key certificates, q.v. the Federal PKI group.) The IRS does it the same way, with pins.
I think if you look closely, you'll find that the guts of these operations are outsourced to contractors in both the Departments of Education and Treasury. Particularly egregious is the symbiotic relationship between Treasury and electronic tax filing services--Treasury has basically agreed not to compete with them, so there will never be a way to file electronically without paying a fee, save for the sop thrown to very low income people filing very simple forms. I believe the taxpayers have already paid once for the IRS infrastructure, and should not have to pay either a private vendor or the government an additional fee to file electronically.
Perhaps a technology czar would create the expertise in the civil service to bring those services in house, where they can be maintained without the danger of future problems often associated with the extensive use of contracting.
P.S.: All aliterations are free for your use :).
I'll take your word about the subtleties of executable file formats, but how would OS/2 having adoped PE have made it any easier for them to make WINOS2 Windows 95 compatible without Microsoft's source or cooperation?
Of course, when MS released Windows 95 and broke backward compatibility with Windows 3.1 for new apps, it was all over for OS/2. If Linux comes to run Windows applications seamlessly without significant problems, then as you point out, there's not likely to be much Linux commerical development.