The DirectX surface, or whatever, only gets shown on the primary display. You had the primary set to your LCD, not to the TV out. Hardware/software limitation, but not DRM.
Make the TV out the primary and you'll be able to watch the DVD on the big screen.
I am not certain of this, but I believe that because of the tri-licensing scheme, Google would not have to open-source much of its improvements to the code. They can choose to treat the code as MPL-licensed, in which case new files that they created could remain proprietary.
If anyone can verify this it woule be appreciated. Otherwise check out the MPL FAQ
It's certainly possible for everyone in the economy to receive a raise greater than inflation -- in fact, it's something we expect to see in tight labor markets. If this weren't the case, then living standards would at best remain steady. Since 1900 the average wage has increased at a much greater rate than inflation. In fact, wages can rise at the same rate as productivity without causing inflation.
Only when wages go up faster than productivity will prices have to adjust to reduce demand. Think about it: if everyone became 5% more productive, but received a wage increase of 10%, the entire country would be trying to consume more than it produced. Prices would increase until there was no longer any excess demand. That's inflation.
FWIW, productivity has risen much more rapidly than wages in recent years. This is probably a bad thing.
Actually, the submitter screwed up. The Securityfocus advisory that inspired his/her post referenced three potential holes, all of which are fixed in the current release. That link explains that if you upgrade to the latest releases, you will be safe from these security bugs.
The story then links to a *different* Secunia advisory, claiming this is the "first issue" in the Securityfocus advisory. It's not. That's the problem.
That said, this new vulnerability has to get fixed.
Yes, if they would get the same wage. They don't. Not by far. By paying a bit more a corporation would effectively cut some of the profits gained by outsourcing, yes. So what? They are already making more profit because of outsourcing. How much more is enough?
You've missed the result of any regulation of outsourced hiring: it will cause outsourced employment to shift from poorer to richer countries. As companies are forced to hold their foreign workers to higher labor standards, they will simply move their foreign offices to the countries with higher labor standards. If you have to hold Chinese workers to the level of labor standards in Mexico, you would earn more profit switching to Mexican workers, who have higher productivity than their Chinese counterparts. (I don't know if Mexican workers are more productive than Chinese workers, on average, although I'd imagine it to be so)
While it's obvious that when we employ people there they don't get the same wage as in the western world, I'm sure they could use a bit more. I'm sure they'd appreciate being able to do trade with less taxes, thus helping create an economy of their own instead of having to rely on international support and foreign companies.
This statement represents the great fallacy of the "fair trade" argument. Let's look at solely the cost of labor, because that tends to be the issue at hand with "fair trade". Why would a company outsource to a third world country? Because, in this model, it is more efficient to use foreign labor to render a good or service.
Let me make that clearer. American companies only outsource to foreign countries because certain foreign labor markets allow them to produce more while paying workers less.
Now consider what will happen if we implement "fair trade" policies. Let's say, for example, we require foreign workers to receive the same wage as American workers. Now the outsourced workers will finally receive fair compensation -- or will they?
Let's assume worker productivity is higher in the United States than in any third world country which has received outsourcing (And yes, that is a very safe assumption to make). In that case, a company paying the same to an American worker and to an outsourced worker would be receiving more output from the American one. The company would do well to fire the foreign worker, as it could use the same amount of money to get more goods or services from the American.
The net result would be a flow of jobs out of poor countries and back into the rich ones. Even with less restrictive "fair trade" agreements, the flow of jobs out of poorer countries and into richer ones will hold. Of course, this doesn't let companies off the hook. There are a variety of tricks that multi-national corporations play in order to subvert labor markets, and we need a mechanism to stop those tricks. It's just important to know the net effects of "fair trade", and why it won't improve the conditions of foreign workers if implemented the way most advocates describe it.
AOL was accessable by an off-branded-sort of IMAP for years, at least 8 years in fact.
Assuming that you are talking about the webmail feature of Netscape, yes, it was accessible by a strange variant of IMAP. In fact, in this protocol, everything looked pretty much identical to IMAP until it came time to authenticate. Then it started doing weird things, using some hashing method for login that nobody ever cared to figure out. IIRC, it then returned to looking like normal IMAP.
The only true IMAP-like access available was in this fashion, so you needed to use Netscape. Mozilla was no go, any email client save Netscape was no go. Thereby diluting any value to the service looking a bit like IMAP.
I will set my father up to use this service in a few moments.
Read carefully. Levin also believes that the Labeled Release experiment of the Viking landers proved the existence of life on Mars. The article says he is a "former Viking Mars lander investigator".
There is a reason that high profile scientists have not reiterated Levin's apparently blindingly obvious conclusions.
The book was released posthumously and to the dismay of his wife; Adams was never very proud of his color work. It's certainly not on the order of his B&W work.
However, Adams didn't go color because he was good at envisioning the shot in B&W. I don't think he had anything against taking advantage of new technology. In fact in the introduction he wrote to his book "Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs", said that he thought digital would be the major revolution in photography. I don't have the book on hand, but if anyone does, post the quote? Adam
I just watched two chapters and I have to say they do a great job explaining some concepts that were very confusing to me. That it takes a show like this one to make people interested does not show that people are dumb, rather it shows how tough the physics can be. I would give the so called "intellectuals" at your school a little more credit. Why don't you use your "calc knowledge" to show them what the program missed? If they don't want to listen, then maybe you're right and it was just for the infotainment. Consider that they might not really care much about physics, but that this program was so good it got them interested. (IMHO: Great job Nova!!)
Stallman's request that the writer use GNU/Linux throughout the article -- one most certainly about the Kernel -- is exactly the attitude which that passage describes.
I switched from Linux to Windows because I got sick of tinkering. Although I happily run Windows XP on my laptop, much of the software that I use from day-to-day has not changed. I make an effort to run programs which are free (especially those that are open-source), since piracy really isn't the right way to go. Here are 10 open-source must-haves for Windows systems. 1. Mozilla - For browsing the web and sending emails. You just can't beat it. 2. Gaim - I wanted something that would let me sign on to multiple services at once, cost nothing, and give me the opportunity to bug its devs on IRC (sorry devs). Recently the Windows port of gaim has become stable and efficient enough for extended use. Just make sure you don't use the Wimp theme, it leaks memory. 3. OpenOffice - The 1.1 release is simply great. It lacks the polish and speed of MS Office, but it also costs a lot less. I've used Writer and Presenter extensively with no problems. However, some people (e.g. my brother) do have a problem with the few features it lacks, so OO.o isn't for everyone. 4. PuTTY - The venerable Telnet and SSH client. Need I say more? 5. Apache - I rejoiced when I learned that I could run the same web server I trust on my FreeBSD server on my very own laptop. Now I can get my files from the web on a powerful web server that doesn't open tons of security holes. 6. TightVNC - Although it's slower than commercial alternatives, I still like VNC for its cross-platform nature and inline java client. The TightVNC distribution adds JPEG compression (and client based pointer drawing, I think) but maintains compatibility, which can't hurt. 7. Automachron - Maybe obsolete with XP's NTP capabilities, but I'm still running it. Keeps my time synced, and that keeps me happy. 8. Magical Jellybean Dictionary - Cheesy name, but it's a great little dict client. 9. GIMP - It's not as good as Photoshop, but for minor image work the GIMP will suffice. It runs just fine under Windows, except for a few random crashes. 10. LyX - Search for "lyx qt windows" on google and check out the newfangled QT port of it. Finally, LyX works great on Windows with no X server to speak of. Of course I can't forget to include the MikTeX distribution.
Think everyone uses AIM? Try leaving the States. Outside the US many other IM networks are popular. My girlfriend speaks to her Argentinean friends over MSN now. Although they once used ICQ, so many have switched that she's not even going to bother installing a client for that protocol on her new computer. Furthermore, none of her friends has an AIM account. I'm upset because I might not be able to use gaim to talk to them. Let's be realistic, should I make 10 people switch to protocol X (which probably doesn't support half of what MSN supports -- it's a very full-featured service) or just load MSN messenger myself?
Can you name a single time that the US has placed export tariffs on its processors? Because "The US" (it is all one big organization, right?) really wants to sell fewer processors. Because that would hurt other economies.
It's nice to see CPU producers diversifying, but can we skip the anti-American bullshit?
In other news, Mozilla dropped support for MNG/JNG (animated PNG/JPEG-like PNG) in its 1.5 branch. Mozilla 1.4 will support it, but unless someone steps up as a full time maintainer, 1.5 will not. Basically, the old maintainer felt that MNG/JNG support wasn't worthwhile, especially because its library took up as much space as the entire imglib -- roughly 240KB on Windows and 170KB on Linux. With some integration they were able to get it down to 135KB, but it stopped around there.
To be honest, that *is* quite a lot of space for just one format decoder to take. The decoder's writers should get a pat on the back though, because this was still the first MNG/JNG decoder with full support for the spec. (For those who were wondering, JNG is a subformat of MNG and provides non-animated JPEG-compressed images with alpha transparency. Supporting it requires only a few KB extra if MNG is already supported)
MNG/JNG was never used very much on the web, but neither was PNG before a few browsers started supporting it. Clearly if Mozilla drops support MNG/JNG will be dead in the water. In particular, the format provides 8-bit transparency with *animation*, which you would be hard pressed to find in any other open, web-optimized format.
Many theme authors used MNG to produce animated icons that blended with the background (The Mozilla Firebird throbber used one, in fact.) Now they will have to jump through hoops to get this feature. Or they will have to emulate it using GIF's (blegh.)
So far there have been a lot of complaints from the community about the removal of MNG/JNG, but in comparison, very little action. One person submitted an XPI (installer) to allow 1.5/nightlies users to regain MNG/JNG support, but obviously this is suboptimal -- for the format to gain popularity it's going to at least need to be in the default install! Interested persons should check out these bugs on Bugzilla: (#195280) Removal of MNG/JNG support (#18574) restore support for MNG animation format and JNG image format
Adam
From the College Board AP Computer Science 2003 Course Description:
The AP Computer Science Examinations will require knowledge of the programming language Java beginning with the 2003-04 academic year and the 2004 examinations. The exams will continue to cover the fundamentals of computer science taught in first-year college courses. However, those sections of the examination that require the reading or writing of actual programs will use Java rather than C++.
So maybe standardization doesn't matter for getting the language into the classroom? Next year every AP computer science student will be learning Java.
Try _Cat's Cradle_, which has a wondefully bleak view of the future. However, it's not exactly a "dystopia novel" like _1984_. Just read it, it'll be good for you.
I would love to see them make Lindows stable -- really, I would -- but I seriously doubt that they could. During their big Linux stage, Corel devoted several programmers to WINE development for about a year. The idea was to make WINE stable enough to run their Office suite. With the source at hand, and full support of the WINE opensource community, the task did not seem impossible.
It doesn't look like they were able to succeed, though. The reviews for Corel PerfectOffice for Linux put me off. Besides one glowing review, they all mentioned the buginess of the suite. As for sales, they obviously were not great enough for Corel to release an upgrade to the suite this year.
Now consider Lindows' situation:
1) Their target application list is unclear. At least Corel knew what they had to run. For Lindows to succeed, it's going to need to support a whole host of applications.
2) No access to the source of their target applications. Corel could work around unsupported API functions by rewriting the code. Lindows will have to fix the functions in WINE. For some applications, they will also need to implement undocumented functions, which can be tough.
3) No support in the WINE community. To me, it sure looks like Lindows uses WINE. They aren't too upfront about it, though. Corel had the advantage of an ongoing and friendly dialogue with the traditional WINE team. They could always, and did, fire off a message to wine-devel. The community might not be so warm with this closed-source project.
The Lindows project has several hurdles in its way that put it at a disadvantage to Corel, who certainly did not have success in sales.
At least Corel contributed their patches back to WINE, though...
Adam
Slashdot Mirror
The DirectX surface, or whatever, only gets shown on the primary display. You had the primary set to your LCD, not to the TV out. Hardware/software limitation, but not DRM.
Make the TV out the primary and you'll be able to watch the DVD on the big screen.
I am not certain of this, but I believe that because of the tri-licensing scheme, Google would not have to open-source much of its improvements to the code. They can choose to treat the code as MPL-licensed, in which case new files that they created could remain proprietary.
If anyone can verify this it woule be appreciated. Otherwise check out the MPL FAQ
It's certainly possible for everyone in the economy to receive a raise greater than inflation -- in fact, it's something we expect to see in tight labor markets. If this weren't the case, then living standards would at best remain steady. Since 1900 the average wage has increased at a much greater rate than inflation. In fact, wages can rise at the same rate as productivity without causing inflation.
Only when wages go up faster than productivity will prices have to adjust to reduce demand. Think about it: if everyone became 5% more productive, but received a wage increase of 10%, the entire country would be trying to consume more than it produced. Prices would increase until there was no longer any excess demand. That's inflation.
FWIW, productivity has risen much more rapidly than wages in recent years. This is probably a bad thing.
Actually, the submitter screwed up. The Securityfocus advisory that inspired his/her post referenced three potential holes, all of which are fixed in the current release. That link explains that if you upgrade to the latest releases, you will be safe from these security bugs.
The story then links to a *different* Secunia advisory, claiming this is the "first issue" in the Securityfocus advisory. It's not. That's the problem.
That said, this new vulnerability has to get fixed.
All of these security issues are fixed in the latest releases of Firefox/Thunderbird/Seamonkey. They have all been fixed for quite some time now.
It would have been helpful for this information to be included in the story. Thanks, Slashdot.
Yes, if they would get the same wage. They don't. Not by far. By paying a bit more a corporation would effectively cut some of the profits gained by outsourcing, yes. So what? They are already making more profit because of outsourcing. How much more is enough?
You've missed the result of any regulation of outsourced hiring: it will cause outsourced employment to shift from poorer to richer countries. As companies are forced to hold their foreign workers to higher labor standards, they will simply move their foreign offices to the countries with higher labor standards. If you have to hold Chinese workers to the level of labor standards in Mexico, you would earn more profit switching to Mexican workers, who have higher productivity than their Chinese counterparts. (I don't know if Mexican workers are more productive than Chinese workers, on average, although I'd imagine it to be so)
While it's obvious that when we employ people there they don't get the same wage as in the western world, I'm sure they could use a bit more. I'm sure they'd appreciate being able to do trade with less taxes, thus helping create an economy of their own instead of having to rely on international support and foreign companies.
This statement represents the great fallacy of the "fair trade" argument. Let's look at solely the cost of labor, because that tends to be the issue at hand with "fair trade". Why would a company outsource to a third world country? Because, in this model, it is more efficient to use foreign labor to render a good or service.
Let me make that clearer. American companies only outsource to foreign countries because certain foreign labor markets allow them to produce more while paying workers less.
Now consider what will happen if we implement "fair trade" policies. Let's say, for example, we require foreign workers to receive the same wage as American workers. Now the outsourced workers will finally receive fair compensation -- or will they?
Let's assume worker productivity is higher in the United States than in any third world country which has received outsourcing (And yes, that is a very safe assumption to make). In that case, a company paying the same to an American worker and to an outsourced worker would be receiving more output from the American one. The company would do well to fire the foreign worker, as it could use the same amount of money to get more goods or services from the American.
The net result would be a flow of jobs out of poor countries and back into the rich ones. Even with less restrictive "fair trade" agreements, the flow of jobs out of poorer countries and into richer ones will hold. Of course, this doesn't let companies off the hook. There are a variety of tricks that multi-national corporations play in order to subvert labor markets, and we need a mechanism to stop those tricks. It's just important to know the net effects of "fair trade", and why it won't improve the conditions of foreign workers if implemented the way most advocates describe it.
Adam
AOL was accessable by an off-branded-sort of IMAP for years, at least 8 years in fact.
Assuming that you are talking about the webmail feature of Netscape, yes, it was accessible by a strange variant of IMAP. In fact, in this protocol, everything looked pretty much identical to IMAP until it came time to authenticate. Then it started doing weird things, using some hashing method for login that nobody ever cared to figure out. IIRC, it then returned to looking like normal IMAP.
The only true IMAP-like access available was in this fashion, so you needed to use Netscape. Mozilla was no go, any email client save Netscape was no go. Thereby diluting any value to the service looking a bit like IMAP.
I will set my father up to use this service in a few moments.
Adam
Read carefully. Levin also believes that the Labeled Release experiment of the Viking landers proved the existence of life on Mars. The article says he is a "former Viking Mars lander investigator".
There is a reason that high profile scientists have not reiterated Levin's apparently blindingly obvious conclusions.
Adam
The book was released posthumously and to the dismay of his wife; Adams was never very proud of his color work. It's certainly not on the order of his B&W work.
However, Adams didn't go color because he was good at envisioning the shot in B&W. I don't think he had anything against taking advantage of new technology. In fact in the introduction he wrote to his book "Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs", said that he thought digital would be the major revolution in photography. I don't have the book on hand, but if anyone does, post the quote?
Adam
I just watched two chapters and I have to say they do a great job explaining some concepts that were very confusing to me. That it takes a show like this one to make people interested does not show that people are dumb, rather it shows how tough the physics can be. I would give the so called "intellectuals" at your school a little more credit. Why don't you use your "calc knowledge" to show them what the program missed? If they don't want to listen, then maybe you're right and it was just for the infotainment. Consider that they might not really care much about physics, but that this program was so good it got them interested. (IMHO: Great job Nova!!)
Stallman's request that the writer use GNU/Linux throughout the article -- one most certainly about the Kernel -- is exactly the attitude which that passage describes.
I switched from Linux to Windows because I got sick of tinkering. Although I happily run Windows XP on my laptop, much of the software that I use from day-to-day has not changed. I make an effort to run programs which are free (especially those that are open-source), since piracy really isn't the right way to go. Here are 10 open-source must-haves for Windows systems.
1. Mozilla - For browsing the web and sending emails. You just can't beat it.
2. Gaim - I wanted something that would let me sign on to multiple services at once, cost nothing, and give me the opportunity to bug its devs on IRC (sorry devs). Recently the Windows port of gaim has become stable and efficient enough for extended use. Just make sure you don't use the Wimp theme, it leaks memory.
3. OpenOffice - The 1.1 release is simply great. It lacks the polish and speed of MS Office, but it also costs a lot less. I've used Writer and Presenter extensively with no problems. However, some people (e.g. my brother) do have a problem with the few features it lacks, so OO.o isn't for everyone.
4. PuTTY - The venerable Telnet and SSH client. Need I say more?
5. Apache - I rejoiced when I learned that I could run the same web server I trust on my FreeBSD server on my very own laptop. Now I can get my files from the web on a powerful web server that doesn't open tons of security holes.
6. TightVNC - Although it's slower than commercial alternatives, I still like VNC for its cross-platform nature and inline java client. The TightVNC distribution adds JPEG compression (and client based pointer drawing, I think) but maintains compatibility, which can't hurt.
7. Automachron - Maybe obsolete with XP's NTP capabilities, but I'm still running it. Keeps my time synced, and that keeps me happy.
8. Magical Jellybean Dictionary - Cheesy name, but it's a great little dict client.
9. GIMP - It's not as good as Photoshop, but for minor image work the GIMP will suffice. It runs just fine under Windows, except for a few random crashes.
10. LyX - Search for "lyx qt windows" on google and check out the newfangled QT port of it. Finally, LyX works great on Windows with no X server to speak of. Of course I can't forget to include the MikTeX distribution.
Think everyone uses AIM? Try leaving the States. Outside the US many other IM networks are popular.
My girlfriend speaks to her Argentinean friends over MSN now. Although they once used ICQ, so many have switched that she's not even going to bother installing a client for that protocol on her new computer. Furthermore, none of her friends has an AIM account.
I'm upset because I might not be able to use gaim to talk to them. Let's be realistic, should I make 10 people switch to protocol X (which probably doesn't support half of what MSN supports -- it's a very full-featured service) or just load MSN messenger myself?
Can you name a single time that the US has placed export tariffs on its processors? Because "The US" (it is all one big organization, right?) really wants to sell fewer processors. Because that would hurt other economies.
It's nice to see CPU producers diversifying, but can we skip the anti-American bullshit?
In other news, Mozilla dropped support for MNG/JNG (animated PNG/JPEG-like PNG) in its 1.5 branch. Mozilla 1.4 will support it, but unless someone steps up as a full time maintainer, 1.5 will not. Basically, the old maintainer felt that MNG/JNG support wasn't worthwhile, especially because its library took up as much space as the entire imglib -- roughly 240KB on Windows and 170KB on Linux. With some integration they were able to get it down to 135KB, but it stopped around there.
To be honest, that *is* quite a lot of space for just one format decoder to take. The decoder's writers should get a pat on the back though, because this was still the first MNG/JNG decoder with full support for the spec. (For those who were wondering, JNG is a subformat of MNG and provides non-animated JPEG-compressed images with alpha transparency. Supporting it requires only a few KB extra if MNG is already supported)
MNG/JNG was never used very much on the web, but neither was PNG before a few browsers started supporting it. Clearly if Mozilla drops support MNG/JNG will be dead in the water. In particular, the format provides 8-bit transparency with *animation*, which you would be hard pressed to find in any other open, web-optimized format.
Many theme authors used MNG to produce animated icons that blended with the background (The Mozilla Firebird throbber used one, in fact.) Now they will have to jump through hoops to get this feature. Or they will have to emulate it using GIF's (blegh.)
So far there have been a lot of complaints from the community about the removal of MNG/JNG, but in comparison, very little action. One person submitted an XPI (installer) to allow 1.5/nightlies users to regain MNG/JNG support, but obviously this is suboptimal -- for the format to gain popularity it's going to at least need to be in the default install! Interested persons should check out these bugs on Bugzilla:
(#195280) Removal of MNG/JNG support
(#18574) restore support for MNG animation format and JNG image format
Adam
From the College Board AP Computer Science 2003 Course Description:
The AP Computer Science Examinations will require knowledge of the programming language Java beginning with the 2003-04 academic year and the 2004 examinations. The exams will continue to cover the fundamentals of computer science taught in first-year college courses. However, those sections of the examination that require the reading or writing of actual programs will use Java rather than C++.
So maybe standardization doesn't matter for getting the language into the classroom? Next year every AP computer science student will be learning Java.
Adam
Try _Cat's Cradle_, which has a wondefully bleak view of the future. However, it's not exactly a "dystopia novel" like _1984_. Just read it, it'll be good for you.
I would love to see them make Lindows stable -- really, I would -- but I seriously doubt that they could. During their big Linux stage, Corel devoted several programmers to WINE development for about a year. The idea was to make WINE stable enough to run their Office suite. With the source at hand, and full support of the WINE opensource community, the task did not seem impossible.
It doesn't look like they were able to succeed, though. The reviews for Corel PerfectOffice for Linux put me off. Besides one glowing review, they all mentioned the buginess of the suite. As for sales, they obviously were not great enough for Corel to release an upgrade to the suite this year.
Now consider Lindows' situation:
1) Their target application list is unclear. At least Corel knew what they had to run. For Lindows to succeed, it's going to need to support a whole host of applications.
2) No access to the source of their target applications. Corel could work around unsupported API functions by rewriting the code. Lindows will have to fix the functions in WINE. For some applications, they will also need to implement undocumented functions, which can be tough.
3) No support in the WINE community. To me, it sure looks like Lindows uses WINE. They aren't too upfront about it, though. Corel had the advantage of an ongoing and friendly dialogue with the traditional WINE team. They could always, and did, fire off a message to wine-devel. The community might not be so warm with this closed-source project.
The Lindows project has several hurdles in its way that put it at a disadvantage to Corel, who certainly did not have success in sales.
At least Corel contributed their patches back to WINE, though...
Adam