If you place a building that is 4-5 floors taller than yours outside the windows that are a problem you'll get the benefit of natural light without all the eyestrain problems. The light from the sun will never be direct so you won't have the glare problem. I guess you could do the same thing with concrete walls 50ft outside the windows, but it looks kinda funny as compared with a building across the street. Clouds also help, and there is a building in Switzerland that creates a cloud about the building, this also results in diffuse lighting, and might be cheaper if you can't move to a building with enough shade.
I really like natural light, but if your window gets direct sunlight you generally have to completely block it out and use indoor lighting. Some places dim and brighten the indoor lighting by computer to create the effect of sunlight, others use fiber optics to get sunlight into windowless rooms. There are solutions, but comfortable sunlight is a premium that generally costs ya something unless you live somewhere glummy(cloudy and damp) like England or San Francisco.
This is the format used for old school digital editing cuz it lets you timecode, and has decent quality. It will probably continue to be used for archiving and broadcast for some time to come.
Basically, these a days you transfer your source material onto beta, then into the editing station, then you edit, then you transfer onto another beta for distribution and delete the material from the editing station. You don't delete the edits so if you need to tweak it later you can get it back from the source material beta. In the olden days you'd to the edits on a low res-version on the computer, then use the edits to stream the right frames from the source beta to the final beta.
You can use DVC but it is significantly lower quality in my (limited) experience. DVD-R makes more sense for the final these days though. The disks are cheap and play in many more places. I saw a BBC pilot distributed that way a few weeks ago.
In short, any doctors that have been telling you that acetaminophen is no more effective than placebo have been giving you false information.
Ok, you win. But I could see why I got the impression that it didn't work. The "migrane sufferers" study didn't include anyone with a serious headache. And, even so it was only eliminated a little over 50% of minor headaches after two hours, compared with 30% doing nothing. My doctors may have colored their, "it may work for lowering a temperature" because they knew 3 Excedrin didn't do much for me, and I'm pretty sure my current doctor hasn't seen just acetaminophen work for anyone(Excedin has asprin + caffeine + acetominophen, the first can help individually in my experience). And I may have overinterpreted that because I've been getting my friends for years to try something else when Tylenol didn't work.
The cold-induced pain one doesn't have enough participants. The morphine one does say it slightly decreases pain, but the main reason for using it seems to be that it prevents overdosing. The post-operative and migrane ones are the strongest ones, but I couldn't read the paper to see how solid they were. "Statistically significant" doesn't say much, studies of 14 ppl doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the medical establishment.
Do you know of any papers comparing the effectiveness of asprin, ibuprofin and acetaminophen?
You still have to "show your papers" in Russia. A policeman can stop anyone at anytime and ask for them to be produced. In Moscow you can only spend three days there, I believe, without special dispensation.
Yeah, in New York you can be held for three days for not having government ID when a cop wants to write you a ticket for loitering or jaywalking, whatever. (Loitering, for non-native English speakers, means standing in one place not indented for standing, like waiting for a friend on a streetcorner sidewalk. Standing in a public park during the day is not illegal.)
Foreigners/visitors must show a passport with valid visa, or be held indefinately while the INS does the deportation paperwork, generally just 9 months but up to 18 years, that I've read about. It's best for foreigners to tell a friend before they visit the US since they may not be allowed a phone call, and your friend can ask the consulate to ask about your whereabouts if you go missing.
Re:Talk about adding insult to injury...
on
Pentium 4 2.8GHz
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· Score: 2
Printer servers chug along fine with 486
*shrug* I didn't have a 486 to spare.
I have a spare 30 Gig drive that is nice and quiet.
I disabled one of the processors to save power, but I can use the horsepower since I have an old laser without postscript. Thankfully the motherboard has powersaving features so it runs cool.
Double-blind studies have long-ago proven that acetaminophen
Please cite one. Was it funded by the makers of Tylenol? Did it work better than anything else that lowered your body temp?
I'm just basing this on what every doctor has told me the last 5 years, and the experience of myself and everyone I know. Most studies are so badly conducted as to be worthless, I personally think if any exemption to the free speach should be made it should be a ban against studies conducted by people who think a "statistics" class is a math course.
How's that for a "Troll" ?:)
Re:Talk about adding insult to injury...
on
Pentium 4 2.8GHz
·
· Score: 2
I knew that my P200 was getting old...
Yeah, it was a sad day when I turned my dual pentium pro 200 into a print server. I couldn't even give it a new hard drive guz the BIOS wouldn't recognize a 30Gig dive. I had to stick an old 4Gig one in there that was sitting in my dresser from some other antique. (The old 6G had a dozen bad blocks, getting more each time I checked, it's disk is now a small shaving mirror.) That was a cool machine in 97.
When I go to the store and think "damn my head hurts, I should get something for it", you don't think maybe regular dosings of Tylenol commercials is going to affect my decision?
Funny thing is Tylenol is less effective than sugar pills on a headache. At least sugar pills theoretically help if your headache is caused by low blood sugar. Take an asprin or ibuprofin if you have a headache, or get some real meds from your doctor. Tylenol is only good for lowering your body temp when you have a fewer.
Compilers use a lot of memory. I bet the real difference between the two computers is RAM, a bug that never shows up on a 1 Gig machine will call for attention on a 64 MB machine.
How many of us wouldn't be pissed if we got an e-mail saying, "Hi, I cracked your security and got into your computer via --some exploit--
You'd rather not know?
Back when you were in college you didn't e-mail people that left themselves logged in after they left the terminal?
You never got one?
I never like having my machine cracked, but I do like the fact that it's much easier to find out these days than when my first BBS was cracked. My workplace even hires people to come in and break into as many computers as they can. I wish the military took security as seriously. We have holes we know about, but we do keep at least one machine running a password cracker and port scans at all times. I get at least two attemped breakins into my computer a week, I'm sure their machines were owned many times over. At least these people had the good morals to tell the world.
If they had reported this to the army it would have never been made public, and they might have been arrested anyway. The only thing I think they should have done differently is get a Senator involved before going to the media, it would have given them some cover. Seriously though they should be given a congressional metal of honor for bravery for informing us of the lax security.
I used to live near a couple military bases so I know it's not exactly geniouses running the place. But they are a very organized bunch and I would have expected a policy on passwords, and that in that culture it should be easy to enforce. Password crackers shouldn't work on the military. Someone who leaves a password of "password" or "administrator" on a computer should be dishonorably discharged at the very least. If any of those machines exposed sensitive data they should get at least a few years on a slab of concrete in Cuba.
The dirty little secret of the military is that sensitive information is a lot more important than classified stuff. Engineering data that was classified in 1950, that made it into every textbook by 1960, is still locked in a safe at night because it's too much work to declassify anything. The day to day functioning of the military tells any enemy everything they might care about and that never gets classified.
Hey even the top secret nuclear stuff doesn' really matter since the information to build a nuke was long ago published, and the high tech stuff the US and Russia have isn't of interest to anyone. It's already expensive to build a nuke that takes out Manhattan, building one that takes out the Jersey City in the same hit is just a waste of money. But what kind of gas masks are being packed for the attack on Iraq, well that could be useful.
it's still pretty expensive... why's that? Each department is usually given the MSDN cd's. You should be able to knock on your department secretaries door and ask for your free-beer copy of XP. The bookstore is a profit center for the university, they're not going to tell you that you can get the same software for free.
And they are also selling a different pruduct, the licences they sell generally don't expire when you graduate, they are simply restricted to non-commercial use when you graduate.
I live in NYC and it's been kinda hot so the AC's been running all summer. I used 11kWh last month. So that's about 330Wh a day.
In the winter I use about half that. Granted It's not a massive house, but an apartment, but I do have two computers on all the time, and have a TV, Microwave, Waffle Maker, big Fridge, etc.
If you want to send someone an encrypted e-mail, you're gonna ask them for their PGP key. But you'll probably tell them where to get the Free-as-in-beer GUI. If there wasn't the nice one from PGP you'd point them to the Free GPG one as well, and that's what they would probably download, even though it's a little tougher to use.
I accept that I've usually heard about something before it appears on/. but that should mean someone thought it was worth reading.
So some guy working for a supporter of the DMCA says the free people are just silly to worry about their actions being illegal. It's not like this is some respected reporter saying this. Or coming from a mainstream source like the Washington Post, NYT.
What's the news in some adverporter sending out cleverly disguised PR? Why can't the moderators send this kinda junk into/dev/null ?
I had to switch an application from a screaming PC to a chunky old SGI we now use for a stool because of this problem. We eventually found an expensive graphics card that could keep up. I think it was called Wildcat something or other. We were getting free Quatro 3's at the time which we really wanted to use, but they just had horrible memory read rates. The nVidia guy told us it was an unoptimized path, using software with no hardware support or something. Like maybe they were reading a pixel at a time or something.
Re:Compare to Playstation Linux
on
LinuXbox Boots
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I can tell you right now that the XBox will win on this count. The PS2 is a very specialized chip that does mostly floating point. But if you post a web page with your benchmark suite I'll run it on the PS2 for ya.
Could someone now please clarify to me and everyone else what the use of LGPL in this case exactly means in practise??
With LGPL you can statically link a single function from a library into your program. This means you don't have to ship the entire library, and if you have not modified the library, or have published the modified library somewhere else as an LGPL library, you don't have to distribute the source in the same manner as the code.
It was designed so that people implementing open source versions of libraries widely available royalty free in closed source, could enforce the publishing of discovered bugs while still allowing the same ease of use that the closed source version users enjoyed. (By not having to leave a note for the release team to include some source, cuz you used printf from an open source library you didn't modify.)
RMS discourages the use of this library because it has some faults, like if no one knows someone has published the changes. Like Microsoft leaving little source snippets on random ftp sites in directories no one ever looks at as x452fgsd.zip. And as a LISPer he doesn't really care about performance or ease of use so he wants you to use dynamic linking. Dynamic linking has some bonuses like when there is a bug in a widely used library only the library has to be redistributed if it is dynamically linked.
As a San Francisco resident who has seen the difference between buildings put up at the turn of this century and at the turn of the last one, I would sincerely vote for building replicas of 100 year of old designs.
In New York when these buildings were being built a hundred years ago Banks didn't finance them. People in the community would get together and invest in building a single 6 story walk up. If you build things for yourself or people like you, you'll make something you would want to live in.
I love my old apartment. It's been renovated to include a bathroom(yes!), and unfortunately a raised floor(wood) and dropped ceiling(plaster board). There used to be just bathrooms on the first floor, there is still a key-box outside the door.
Somewhere along the way, modern industrial culture lost the ability or the desire to build anything that isn't a piece of crap.
This is isn't entirely true, there are some new buildings going up in New York that are decent. They are in the $2-3+ million category. The reason they are being built is because the price of pre-war buildings has gotten insane($6M+), so banks can be convinced to build something that costs more per sq. foot than it absolutely has to. The most important thing from a quality of life standpoint is the soundproofing.
Anyway I think the explanation really comes down to that old maxim, "If you want it done right, do it yourself." + "..or, pay through the nose."
GPL is all but comunist, because it removes ownership from a single person.
Um, no. as the author of some GPL'd and LGPL'd programs, I'm the only one who can relicense the code for unrestricted commercial use.
EULA's are anti-capitalists because they deter competition. When I put something under GPL anyone can figure out how it works and write a clone, add some features and compete with my implementation. A EULA often makes figuring out how the program works a licence violation, even reading the machine code is disallowed in some cases. So it acts to restrict competition since no amount of capital will get you a clone of their protocols legally. Hence they restrict the flow of capital and enforce a government coerced monopoly, i.e. communism. Actually socialism, cuz there is still a quasi-democratic government that could theoretically make EULA's illegal.
Well let me make it clear to you. The number of millionares in this country gets bigger almost every year. The number of impoverished people gets smaller, and has gotten smaller, almost every year. The middle class is much larger than "the middle" of the country statistically speaking - it's gigantic.
That's just silly, by any measure I can think of we have the smallest middle class in the industrialized world. Maybe you're only comparing us to 3rd world countries?
I don't think having the smallest middle class means we're bad, on the contrary I think it's because we've been more liberal in our approach to imigration between 67-2001 than most of Europe, we're a microcosm of the whole world, from deep poverty to great wealth. It's because the US isn't a real country but the world writ small that makes it great.
Tell me one feature in DirectX 8.1 that isn't supported in the nVidia OpenGL 1.3 drivers?
none? It's because OpenGL was designed to be stable but extendible. It's sort of like the x86 instruction set which still contains BCD instructions from what the 4004?
They haven't had to go to a version 2.0 because it's easy to retain backward compatibility yet keep up with the newest cards with the extension mechanism. Microsoft started with such a brain dead design that they have needed several complete rewrites. Remember OpenGL went through all those early years as IrixGL a closed beasty like DirectX.
Version 2.0 depends on hardware that does not yet exist, requiring if-then-elses to be allowed in fragment programs. It includes a compiler for the vertex and fragment programs, which have equally powerful instruction sets. DirectX exists because Microsoft marketed heavily to game writers at the right time and simplified other things like joystick and sound control. To unless you have your own in house libraries for those you pretty much have to use DirectX for a Windows game, whether you use it for graphics or not.
Slashdot Mirror
If you place a building that is 4-5 floors taller than yours outside the windows that are a problem you'll get the benefit of natural light without all the eyestrain problems. The light from the sun will never be direct so you won't have the glare problem. I guess you could do the same thing with concrete walls 50ft outside the windows, but it looks kinda funny as compared with a building across the street. Clouds also help, and there is a building in Switzerland that creates a cloud about the building, this also results in diffuse lighting, and might be cheaper if you can't move to a building with enough shade.
I really like natural light, but if your window gets direct sunlight you generally have to completely block it out and use indoor lighting. Some places dim and brighten the indoor lighting by computer to create the effect of sunlight, others use fiber optics to get sunlight into windowless rooms. There are solutions, but comfortable sunlight is a premium that generally costs ya something unless you live somewhere glummy(cloudy and damp) like England or San Francisco.
This is the format used for old school digital editing cuz it lets you timecode, and has decent quality. It will probably continue to be used for archiving and broadcast for some time to come.
Basically, these a days you transfer your source material onto beta, then into the editing station, then you edit, then you transfer onto another beta for distribution and delete the material from the editing station. You don't delete the edits so if you need to tweak it later you can get it back from the source material beta. In the olden days you'd to the edits on a low res-version on the computer, then use the edits to stream the right frames from the source beta to the final beta.
You can use DVC but it is significantly lower quality in my (limited) experience. DVD-R makes more sense for the final these days though. The disks are cheap and play in many more places. I saw a BBC pilot distributed that way a few weeks ago.
In short, any doctors that have been telling you that acetaminophen is no more effective than placebo have been giving you false information.
Ok, you win. But I could see why I got the impression that it didn't work. The "migrane sufferers" study didn't include anyone with a serious headache. And, even so it was only eliminated a little over 50% of minor headaches after two hours, compared with 30% doing nothing. My doctors may have colored their, "it may work for lowering a temperature" because they knew 3 Excedrin didn't do much for me, and I'm pretty sure my current doctor hasn't seen just acetaminophen work for anyone(Excedin has asprin + caffeine + acetominophen, the first can help individually in my experience). And I may have overinterpreted that because I've been getting my friends for years to try something else when Tylenol didn't work.
The cold-induced pain one doesn't have enough participants. The morphine one does say it slightly decreases pain, but the main reason for using it seems to be that it prevents overdosing. The post-operative and migrane ones are the strongest ones, but I couldn't read the paper to see how solid they were. "Statistically significant" doesn't say much, studies of 14 ppl doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the medical establishment.
Do you know of any papers comparing the effectiveness of asprin, ibuprofin and acetaminophen?
You still have to "show your papers" in Russia. A policeman can stop anyone at anytime and ask for them to be produced. In Moscow you can only spend three days there, I believe, without special dispensation.
Yeah, in New York you can be held for three days for not having government ID when a cop wants to write you a ticket for loitering or jaywalking, whatever. (Loitering, for non-native English speakers, means standing in one place not indented for standing, like waiting for a friend on a streetcorner sidewalk. Standing in a public park during the day is not illegal.)
Foreigners/visitors must show a passport with valid visa, or be held indefinately while the INS does the deportation paperwork, generally just 9 months but up to 18 years, that I've read about. It's best for foreigners to tell a friend before they visit the US since they may not be allowed a phone call, and your friend can ask the consulate to ask about your whereabouts if you go missing.
Printer servers chug along fine with 486
*shrug* I didn't have a 486 to spare.
I have a spare 30 Gig drive that is nice and quiet.
I disabled one of the processors to save power, but I can use the horsepower since I have an old laser without postscript. Thankfully the motherboard has powersaving features so it runs cool.
Double-blind studies have long-ago proven that acetaminophen
:)
Please cite one. Was it funded by the makers of Tylenol? Did it work better than anything else that lowered your body temp?
I'm just basing this on what every doctor has told me the last 5 years, and the experience of myself and everyone I know. Most studies are so badly conducted as to be worthless, I personally think if any exemption to the free speach should be made it should be a ban against studies conducted by people who think a "statistics" class is a math course.
How's that for a "Troll" ?
I knew that my P200 was getting old...
Yeah, it was a sad day when I turned my dual pentium pro 200 into a print server. I couldn't even give it a new hard drive guz the BIOS wouldn't recognize a 30Gig dive. I had to stick an old 4Gig one in there that was sitting in my dresser from some other antique. (The old 6G had a dozen bad blocks, getting more each time I checked, it's disk is now a small shaving mirror.) That was a cool machine in 97.
When I go to the store and think "damn my head hurts, I should get something for it", you don't think maybe regular dosings of Tylenol commercials is going to affect my decision?
Funny thing is Tylenol is less effective than sugar pills on a headache. At least sugar pills theoretically help if your headache is caused by low blood sugar. Take an asprin or ibuprofin if you have a headache, or get some real meds from your doctor. Tylenol is only good for lowering your body temp when you have a fewer.
Compilers use a lot of memory. I bet the real difference between the two computers is RAM, a bug that never shows up on a 1 Gig machine will call for attention on a 64 MB machine.
How many of us wouldn't be pissed if we got an e-mail saying, "Hi, I cracked your security and got into your computer via --some exploit--
You'd rather not know?
Back when you were in college you didn't e-mail people that left themselves logged in after they left the terminal?
You never got one?
I never like having my machine cracked, but I do like the fact that it's much easier to find out these days than when my first BBS was cracked. My workplace even hires people to come in and break into as many computers as they can. I wish the military took security as seriously. We have holes we know about, but we do keep at least one machine running a password cracker and port scans at all times. I get at least two attemped breakins into my computer a week, I'm sure their machines were owned many times over. At least these people had the good morals to tell the world.
If they had reported this to the army it would have never been made public, and they might have been arrested anyway. The only thing I think they should have done differently is get a Senator involved before going to the media, it would have given them some cover. Seriously though they should be given a congressional metal of honor for bravery for informing us of the lax security.
I used to live near a couple military bases so I know it's not exactly geniouses running the place. But they are a very organized bunch and I would have expected a policy on passwords, and that in that culture it should be easy to enforce. Password crackers shouldn't work on the military. Someone who leaves a password of "password" or "administrator" on a computer should be dishonorably discharged at the very least. If any of those machines exposed sensitive data they should get at least a few years on a slab of concrete in Cuba.
The dirty little secret of the military is that sensitive information is a lot more important than classified stuff. Engineering data that was classified in 1950, that made it into every textbook by 1960, is still locked in a safe at night because it's too much work to declassify anything. The day to day functioning of the military tells any enemy everything they might care about and that never gets classified.
Hey even the top secret nuclear stuff doesn' really matter since the information to build a nuke was long ago published, and the high tech stuff the US and Russia have isn't of interest to anyone. It's already expensive to build a nuke that takes out Manhattan, building one that takes out the Jersey City in the same hit is just a waste of money. But what kind of gas masks are being packed for the attack on Iraq, well that could be useful.
it's still pretty expensive... why's that?
Each department is usually given the MSDN cd's. You should be able to knock on your department secretaries door and ask for your free-beer copy of XP. The bookstore is a profit center for the university, they're not going to tell you that you can get the same software for free.
And they are also selling a different pruduct, the licences they sell generally don't expire when you graduate, they are simply restricted to non-commercial use when you graduate.
I live in NYC and it's been kinda hot so the AC's been running all summer. I used 11kWh last month. So that's about 330Wh a day.
In the winter I use about half that. Granted It's not a massive house, but an apartment, but I do have two computers on all the time, and have a TV, Microwave, Waffle Maker, big Fridge, etc.
Because otherwise /. becomes a blatant position organization (as if it isn't now?).
/. so useful as compared to usenet. Why not moderate the articles as well?
In it's very name it's already not mainstream. It's news for nerds, remember... stuff that matters.
The filtering system on member posts is what makes
If you want to send someone an encrypted e-mail, you're gonna ask them for their PGP key. But you'll probably tell them where to get the Free-as-in-beer GUI. If there wasn't the nice one from PGP you'd point them to the Free GPG one as well, and that's what they would probably download, even though it's a little tougher to use.
How does tripe like this get on the front page?
/. but that should mean someone thought it was worth reading.
/dev/null ?
I accept that I've usually heard about something before it appears on
So some guy working for a supporter of the DMCA says the free people are just silly to worry about their actions being illegal. It's not like this is some respected reporter saying this. Or coming from a mainstream source like the Washington Post, NYT.
What's the news in some adverporter sending out cleverly disguised PR? Why can't the moderators send this kinda junk into
I had to switch an application from a screaming PC to a chunky old SGI we now use for a stool because of this problem. We eventually found an expensive graphics card that could keep up. I think it was called Wildcat something or other. We were getting free Quatro 3's at the time which we really wanted to use, but they just had horrible memory read rates. The nVidia guy told us it was an unoptimized path, using software with no hardware support or something. Like maybe they were reading a pixel at a time or something.
I can tell you right now that the XBox will win on this count. The PS2 is a very specialized chip that does mostly floating point. But if you post a web page with your benchmark suite I'll run it on the PS2 for ya.
Could someone now please clarify to me and everyone else what the use of LGPL in this case exactly means in practise??
With LGPL you can statically link a single function from a library into your program. This means you don't have to ship the entire library, and if you have not modified the library, or have published the modified library somewhere else as an LGPL library, you don't have to distribute the source in the same manner as the code.
It was designed so that people implementing open source versions of libraries widely available royalty free in closed source, could enforce the publishing of discovered bugs while still allowing the same ease of use that the closed source version users enjoyed. (By not having to leave a note for the release team to include some source, cuz you used printf from an open source library you didn't modify.)
RMS discourages the use of this library because it has some faults, like if no one knows someone has published the changes. Like Microsoft leaving little source snippets on random ftp sites in directories no one ever looks at as x452fgsd.zip. And as a LISPer he doesn't really care about performance or ease of use so he wants you to use dynamic linking. Dynamic linking has some bonuses like when there is a bug in a widely used library only the library has to be redistributed if it is dynamically linked.
As a San Francisco resident who has seen the difference between buildings put up at the turn of this century and at the turn of the last one, I would sincerely vote for building replicas of 100 year of old designs.
In New York when these buildings were being built a hundred years ago Banks didn't finance them. People in the community would get together and invest in building a single 6 story walk up. If you build things for yourself or people like you, you'll make something you would want to live in.
I love my old apartment. It's been renovated to include a bathroom(yes!), and unfortunately a raised floor(wood) and dropped ceiling(plaster board). There used to be just bathrooms on the first floor, there is still a key-box outside the door.
Somewhere along the way, modern industrial culture lost the ability or the desire to build anything that isn't a piece of crap.
This is isn't entirely true, there are some new buildings going up in New York that are decent. They are in the $2-3+ million category. The reason they are being built is because the price of pre-war buildings has gotten insane($6M+), so banks can be convinced to build something that costs more per sq. foot than it absolutely has to. The most important thing from a quality of life standpoint is the soundproofing.
Anyway I think the explanation really comes down to that old maxim, "If you want it done right, do it yourself." + "..or, pay through the nose."
GPL is all but comunist, because it removes ownership from a single person.
Um, no. as the author of some GPL'd and LGPL'd programs, I'm the only one who can relicense the code for unrestricted commercial use.
EULA's are anti-capitalists because they deter competition. When I put something under GPL anyone can figure out how it works and write a clone, add some features and compete with my implementation. A EULA often makes figuring out how the program works a licence violation, even reading the machine code is disallowed in some cases. So it acts to restrict competition since no amount of capital will get you a clone of their protocols legally. Hence they restrict the flow of capital and enforce a government coerced monopoly, i.e. communism. Actually socialism, cuz there is still a quasi-democratic government that could theoretically make EULA's illegal.
Well let me make it clear to you. The number of millionares in this country gets bigger almost every year. The number of impoverished people gets smaller, and has gotten smaller, almost every year. The middle class is much larger than "the middle" of the country statistically speaking - it's gigantic.
That's just silly, by any measure I can think of we have the smallest middle class in the industrialized world. Maybe you're only comparing us to 3rd world countries?
I don't think having the smallest middle class means we're bad, on the contrary I think it's because we've been more liberal in our approach to imigration between 67-2001 than most of Europe, we're a microcosm of the whole world, from deep poverty to great wealth. It's because the US isn't a real country but the world writ small that makes it great.
So, given the choice, is the freedom of one guy more important than the job security of thousands?
If the happyness of millions depended on the torture of one little girl, would you support it?
Tell me one feature in DirectX 8.1 that isn't supported in the nVidia OpenGL 1.3 drivers?
none? It's because OpenGL was designed to be stable but extendible. It's sort of like the x86 instruction set which still contains BCD instructions from what the 4004?
They haven't had to go to a version 2.0 because it's easy to retain backward compatibility yet keep up with the newest cards with the extension mechanism. Microsoft started with such a brain dead design that they have needed several complete rewrites. Remember OpenGL went through all those early years as IrixGL a closed beasty like DirectX.
Version 2.0 depends on hardware that does not yet exist, requiring if-then-elses to be allowed in fragment programs. It includes a compiler for the vertex and fragment programs, which have equally powerful instruction sets. DirectX exists because Microsoft marketed heavily to game writers at the right time and simplified other things like joystick and sound control. To unless you have your own in house libraries for those you pretty much have to use DirectX for a Windows game, whether you use it for graphics or not.
Oh so he became an artist then?