Nothing new, but most people don't realize there are ten times more cells living in your gut than there are in the rest of your body (due to bacteria being much smaller than many cells in our bodies, in particular fat cells are enormous). A sobering reminder of who really rules the planet.
Fat cells? They can beat up all the other cells.
I can't think how much new research keeps popping up about the role gut flora plays in health and disease. But one has to wonder, what level of control our little friends really have over us?
Given what some of those brain parasites can do to behavior, I'm not sure I'd want to know.
Ditto. I'm also cheap and stick to old games that I bought in the past, free software and older games that have been discounted (GOG.com, etc). As a side-effect of this, I don't really have to deal with DRM much and I don't need a killer gaming machine. Warlords Battlecry, Stronghold and Master of Orion 2 run great on a netbook.
I have enough stuff I've bought in the last 20 years that I could be happy never buying a game again, even though discovering a great new game is much more exciting than replaying an old one, even if it is also a great game. Of course, discovering a great new game is very rare for me as well, which is another reason I'm unwilling to blow $50 or more for something I may not care for much.
OK. It sounds like you know what you're talking about even if your post implied you might not. And if you're a light consumer, then it's definitely a good strategy for you.
I hate advertising as much as the next guy, and I avoid it as much as possible, especially when it's done intrusively and annoyingly.
You know who I think does advertising well? Hulu. I found that AdBlock actually worked on Hulu's ads, and I unblocked it. I did it because Hulu runs a reasonable number of ads, which are by-and-large not annoying./. does too, but here I have the "legit" option to turn them off.
But they are the exception rather than the rule. Most advertisements annoy me or even make me angry rather than entice me to buy things. They are loud, obnoxious and distracting, and I almost literally cannot read something on a Web page when there's an animated ad on the page.
To those people who think blocking ads is evil... there's no law forcing you to look at ads, although I'm sure some Congressman or Senator is looking at his dwindling campaign funds and wondering if he could pull it off. It's a business strategy. If it works, good for the business and its customers. If it doesn't, well, then there needs to be another business model. I'll pay (directly) for things or do without if that's the option. But we are still free to decide what we watch/read/hear and what we don't, so don't try to guilt-trip me that I'm cheating, or stealing.
I'm hardly a handyman, but I've done many simple manual repairs or constructions around the house.
Since I have 4 kids, I always have someone helping me. When my oldest was two I gave him a screwdriver while I was putting together a changing table for the new baby. All he did at the time was stick the "goodriver" into the drilled holes, but at a toddler level, he was "helping" Daddy. Since then, I've expanded the kids' roles as they became more capable.
It worked for me. Now when I have a task I think is appropriate, I hand the tools to the kid and say, "Fix this". I'll explain what needs to be done as little as I think is necessary and tell him to come get me if he gets stuck. Works great and is a huge help for me too.
When it's something that the kids can't handle, I still have them help me by handing me tools, fetching items, holding things in place, etc. Even when they aren't actually doing the real work, they see what's being done and sometimes contribute good ideas.
With computer tech, I slowly but surely let my oldest son (who's now 16) start doing various simple tasks like removing harddrives and cards, etc. Last year, he bought a "junker" computer from the surplus store (I put it in quotes because while a/.'er might sneer at it, it is a 3GHz machine) and for Christmas I bought him better a video card (it's AGP, so the choices were limited) and a few other items he needed to make the thing better. By this point all I had to do with hand him the stuff and tell him to ask me for help if he needed it. Mostly he didn't and now he and his siblings have their own gaming computer that can run most of the games they play and cost about $150.
Anyhow, even if I've never changed oil or wired an outlet, there are still plenty of things I've done around the house, building, fixing, jury-rigging, improvising and I've made sure that the kids have been exposed to what I'm doing so they are not completely helpless.
I've also made sure to give them access to plenty of raw materials, art supplies and various things from which they can construct their own toys. And of course, there's Lego. I also have them help out in the kitchen a lot and we have the two older ones occasionally cook a meal for us.
And then, of course from a more intellectual point of view, we read to them extensively when they were younger, and since we have hundreds if not thousands of books around the house, there's no lack of reading material. We've always made sure they have plenty of free time, and try to help them make good use of it. Of course, we watch our share of TV, and the kids play plenty of games on the computers and consoles, but they create their own pixel art, animations, 3D editing, etc. Mostly I've just provided the means to do these things and showed them the kinds of things you can do to get them started. And the other big advantage is that with 4 kids, they each have their own interests and each learns from the other 3.
I find it sad to read that children of this generation are less creative than previous generations, but my wife and I have tried very hard not to let that happen to our kids and I think we've succeeded pretty well.
It's nice to give stuff away for free, but *somebody* still has to pay the bill. I'd sooner it be the rich corporations rather than poor little-old me. So please - give me more ads. I'll do anything to avoid monthly bills (plus the taxes included therein).
Yikes! You do realize that the cost of all that advertising gets passed along to you through higher prices.
Advertising, just like everything else, doesn't make something out of nothing. The best you can say about advertising, and of course it depends on what's being advertised, is that the rich usually finance it more than the poor. However, you don't know what it is you actually pay, and you do pay, for "free" content like broadcast TV.
I read years ago that "free" broadcast TV actually cost each household something like $30/month on average. I don't know how that would have changed now that broadcast TV is a much smaller proportion of the media that we consume, but it's not free, and never was. It's just that its costs are hidden and indirect.
So what you're really saying is that you'd rather not know how much you are paying for your media, rather than having the terms in simple straightforward language.
It's not/.'s job to provide a secure means for posting politically sensitive stories. It would be nice if that's possible but that's not what they are in the business of doing, so I don't think it's fair to suggest/. "should know better".
I'm sure they know perfectly well, and I'm sure that the decision support HTTPS this way is also an economic and technological decision./. is a business, not a charity, and not a public service (although it provides public service as part of its business model). If/. advertised itself _primarily_ as a forum for free, uncensored speech or a forum for communicating with people in less free circumstances then it's a fair cop.
It's one thing to suggest/. _should_ do this (and I think they should, all things being equal), but it's another to say (or imply) it is wrong for them not to.
On the other hand, like Microsoft, busting on/. is fun and often justified, so I wouldn't mind piling on. They're such insensitive clods!
I think you've got a good point. I graduated with a degree in CS from Virginia Tech in 1987. Not a whole lot of what I was taught was specifically and directly relevant to any job I'd had subsequent to that. In other words, my college experience was more of an education than training, and that's what it should be. The classes from which I felt I got the most value were seldom CS classes. That is not to the fault the CS department which I thought was pretty good, just that there is, or should be, more to a university degree than job training, otherwise it's just a glorified vo-tech school and should cost a third as much.
For instance, my first job was as a C programmer, when I'd used Pascal almost exclusively prior to that. The company that hired me was looking for entry-level C developers, so they were not looking for prior experience (and with the salary they offered, their expectations were appropriate). They offered a fairly simple test for us to take along with the interview. I don't recall all of the test, but one problem was to write a simple string handling function in C. I think it was to write a strcpy( ) function. Sounds pretty brain dead, huh? Well, apparently not...
I found out later that out of a group of 15 people that took the test, 2 of us aced it. Apparently, none of the rest did even marginally well. The company's attitude about the selection process also was an important factor in my decision to accept their employment offer and turn down another for more money.
There are two important realizations to this little anecdote. First, it confirmed that my CS degree served me well because I came out knowing how to program, and was able to get a job (and be successful at it) writing a language I had not heretofore used. In fact, I did so again in later years with both C++ and Tcl. Nowadays, languages come and (often) go like pop singers. If you can't adapt, you won't have a future in software development.
My other big realization, lo those many years ago, is that someone can come out with a Computer Science (or similar) degree and not be able to figure out how to implement strcpy( ). Although I suspected the case all along, I'd never seen such stark evidence.
"Libraries of Congress" is a measure of information. It is unit based on the amount of printed data stored by the Library of Congress expressed in bytes. It's value is 10 terabytes, according to some random website I googled, but that value seems awfully low to me unless you're talking strictly text data.
"Congress" is a measure of corruption and incompetence. It is a unit based on the measure of immoral and destructive acts committed by the U. S. Congress expressed in terms of bogon flux. A bogon is a quantum of stupidity (also referred to as an "anti-cluon" or "tau-moron"). All stupid and many evil people emit a bogon flux, which increases proportionally with the level of stupidity or petty evil a person commits. For instance, if a 10-year-old calls you "gay" because you like classical music, he is emitting approximately 1 bogon per cm^2*s (also referred to a having a "bogosity of 1"). If your boss forces you to work late and miss a concert because you neglected to put the new covers on your TPS reports, he has a bogosity of around 1000. A bogosity of a million (10e6) has been officially designed in the SI system as a "darl".
Andy Dick registers in the 5 to 8 darl range. Steve Ballmer averages about 20 darls, but researchers measured a spike of nearly a kilodarl when he performed his "monkeyboy" dance. Although the U.S. Congress has been measured at bogosity levels as low as 800 kilodarls, measured shortly after they balanced the budget in 1998, all the way to well over 300 megadarls in the aftermath of 9/11 to nearly 4 gigadarls measured during the passage of the latest "stimulus" bill, a "Congress" was traditionally (and informally) considered to represent a bogon flux of 1 megadarl. This began to be regarded as woefully out of date by 2003. In recent years, the round number of 1 gigadarl has become the commonly accepted value of "Congress", which is equal to approximately 6.4 Kim Jong-Ils or an even six-pack of Mahmoud Ahmadinejads.
The problem with that is that the average person would have to sell his house (assuming he has one) to defend against such a lawsuit. As much as it would pain me, I couldn't do that, could you?
AIUI, the latest C standard adds stuff that is not in C++98. But using C++ is now merely an option, not a requirement. It probably won't be used much, at least at first. But who knows, maybe some of that serious juju coming in C++1x will allow for writing some amazing tools more easily and quickly.
My goodness, the only thing worse than lame articles on/. is the people whose time is way too important to read lame articles, but not, apparently too important to whine about lame articles.
I liked the video. I thought it was funny. But even if I hadn't, if I took the time to complain about all the things on/., or anywhere else, I thought were pointless, I would have any time to do anything but whine.
I have no doubts that some people didn't see it, but most of us did. I finally gave up on KDE because I was just sick of the lameness and brokenness. I actually just tried it again with Ubuntu 10.04 for the first time in a year or two and it seems better now, but I still prefer the way it was in 3.5.10. It still seems less customizable than I recall 3.5 being.
Based on what I've seen the suggestion that they've been focusing too much on eye candy and not enough on making it good is plausible. However, given what I've paid for the software, I don't think it's a bad deal.
Ketchup packets aren't printed with ink jets and don't have the precision that the ink jets provide.
On the other hand, HP's excuse is a load of bollocks. They practically give away the printers and make up the difference in replaceables. This is a common marketing technique used for everything from video games to shaving razors.
Given the huge pains they go through to shut out the third parties who seem, despite not having the tremendous resources of a huge company like HP, to be able to provide much cheaper ink that works quite well kind of makes HP look a little hypocritical.
If actual expense were truly the reason for the high price of ink, I think the market would look a lot different.
Actually, near elections there are a lot of political stories on/. I recall that there was an actual "Politics" section created in 2004.
Let's fact it, U.S. elections have a huge effect on the technology world and a Supreme Court appointment directly effects many issues as well. Many YRO stories are closely tied to what the leadership of the U.S. is choosing to do with respect to technology, the policies they pursue and the laws they pass.
Now I would have expected to see a story relating something in Kagan's past that related to technology and might reflect her views on something relevant to our interests. Nevertheless, her choice can be very important to "News for Nerds", but since she has not been a judge I think it will be very interesting trying to decide what kind of judge she will be. Non-judges have been appointed before, there's no problem with someone who's never been a judge but has other relevant experience, but there's no paper trail of judgements or decisions.
This is a very valid point. In fact, I've been using GIMP for many years since before 1.0 (I'm not a hardcore user and I still prefer Paint Shop Pro), and I even knew this plug-in existed, but never realized what it actually was until a few weeks ago. I was recently able to get it to work and have used it, neither of which is intuitive or easy, but had had no idea that that kind of functionality was available before seeing a page that replicated the Adobe demonstrations using GIMP and Resynth.
For most people GIMP itself doesn't exist, which is unfortunate, (and I'll add to the choir of voices pointing out that the name does not help a bit) but for most people Windows, IE and Microsoft Office are the be-all and end-all of software. It's something that is nearly universal and probably will remain so for many years. The fact that alternatives exist, and in some cases are better, is not widely known, but thanks to Firefox, the concept seems to be gaining ground. When my non-techie friends are talking about using Firefox, I know a threshold has been crossed, but it's a small step in a long journey.
Meanwhile, those of us without the budget for CS5 nor the willingness to pirate it can enjoy a really cool piece of software technology that most people think you have to pay hundreds of dollars to acquire. PS might do it better. In fact, I would expect so, given that Adobe can throw serious resources into the development of their premiere product... oh wait, that's something else.;-) Anyhow, a large company can afford to spend the time and energy required to make the functionality work really well, but the fact that this same functionality, or a reasonable approximation thereof, can be had for no cost, developed by enthusiasts for a free and open software package is still amazing and incredibly valuable.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing new, but most people don't realize there are ten times more cells living in your gut than there are in the rest of your body (due to bacteria being much smaller than many cells in our bodies, in particular fat cells are enormous). A sobering reminder of who really rules the planet.
Fat cells? They can beat up all the other cells.
I can't think how much new research keeps popping up about the role gut flora plays in health and disease. But one has to wonder, what level of control our little friends really have over us?
Given what some of those brain parasites can do to behavior, I'm not sure I'd want to know.
Ditto. I'm also cheap and stick to old games that I bought in the past, free software and older games that have been discounted (GOG.com, etc). As a side-effect of this, I don't really have to deal with DRM much and I don't need a killer gaming machine. Warlords Battlecry, Stronghold and Master of Orion 2 run great on a netbook.
I have enough stuff I've bought in the last 20 years that I could be happy never buying a game again, even though discovering a great new game is much more exciting than replaying an old one, even if it is also a great game. Of course, discovering a great new game is very rare for me as well, which is another reason I'm unwilling to blow $50 or more for something I may not care for much.
I am naturally skeptical of anything that claims to alter human consciousness.
Not even a hammer blow to the head?
I experimented with a binaural beats generator several years ago. Nothing happened as far as I can tell, but I didn't expect anything either.
OK. It sounds like you know what you're talking about even if your post implied you might not. And if you're a light consumer, then it's definitely a good strategy for you.
I hate advertising as much as the next guy, and I avoid it as much as possible, especially when it's done intrusively and annoyingly.
You know who I think does advertising well? Hulu. I found that AdBlock actually worked on Hulu's ads, and I unblocked it. I did it because Hulu runs a reasonable number of ads, which are by-and-large not annoying. /. does too, but here I have the "legit" option to turn them off.
But they are the exception rather than the rule. Most advertisements annoy me or even make me angry rather than entice me to buy things. They are loud, obnoxious and distracting, and I almost literally cannot read something on a Web page when there's an animated ad on the page.
To those people who think blocking ads is evil... there's no law forcing you to look at ads, although I'm sure some Congressman or Senator is looking at his dwindling campaign funds and wondering if he could pull it off. It's a business strategy. If it works, good for the business and its customers. If it doesn't, well, then there needs to be another business model. I'll pay (directly) for things or do without if that's the option. But we are still free to decide what we watch/read/hear and what we don't, so don't try to guilt-trip me that I'm cheating, or stealing.
I'm hardly a handyman, but I've done many simple manual repairs or constructions around the house.
Since I have 4 kids, I always have someone helping me. When my oldest was two I gave him a screwdriver while I was putting together a changing table for the new baby. All he did at the time was stick the "goodriver" into the drilled holes, but at a toddler level, he was "helping" Daddy. Since then, I've expanded the kids' roles as they became more capable.
It worked for me. Now when I have a task I think is appropriate, I hand the tools to the kid and say, "Fix this". I'll explain what needs to be done as little as I think is necessary and tell him to come get me if he gets stuck. Works great and is a huge help for me too.
When it's something that the kids can't handle, I still have them help me by handing me tools, fetching items, holding things in place, etc. Even when they aren't actually doing the real work, they see what's being done and sometimes contribute good ideas.
With computer tech, I slowly but surely let my oldest son (who's now 16) start doing various simple tasks like removing harddrives and cards, etc. Last year, he bought a "junker" computer from the surplus store (I put it in quotes because while a /.'er might sneer at it, it is a 3GHz machine) and for Christmas I bought him better a video card (it's AGP, so the choices were limited) and a few other items he needed to make the thing better. By this point all I had to do with hand him the stuff and tell him to ask me for help if he needed it. Mostly he didn't and now he and his siblings have their own gaming computer that can run most of the games they play and cost about $150.
Anyhow, even if I've never changed oil or wired an outlet, there are still plenty of things I've done around the house, building, fixing, jury-rigging, improvising and I've made sure that the kids have been exposed to what I'm doing so they are not completely helpless.
I've also made sure to give them access to plenty of raw materials, art supplies and various things from which they can construct their own toys. And of course, there's Lego. I also have them help out in the kitchen a lot and we have the two older ones occasionally cook a meal for us.
And then, of course from a more intellectual point of view, we read to them extensively when they were younger, and since we have hundreds if not thousands of books around the house, there's no lack of reading material. We've always made sure they have plenty of free time, and try to help them make good use of it. Of course, we watch our share of TV, and the kids play plenty of games on the computers and consoles, but they create their own pixel art, animations, 3D editing, etc. Mostly I've just provided the means to do these things and showed them the kinds of things you can do to get them started. And the other big advantage is that with 4 kids, they each have their own interests and each learns from the other 3.
I find it sad to read that children of this generation are less creative than previous generations, but my wife and I have tried very hard not to let that happen to our kids and I think we've succeeded pretty well.
It's nice to give stuff away for free, but *somebody* still has to pay the bill. I'd sooner it be the rich corporations rather than poor little-old me. So please - give me more ads. I'll do anything to avoid monthly bills (plus the taxes included therein).
Yikes! You do realize that the cost of all that advertising gets passed along to you through higher prices.
Advertising, just like everything else, doesn't make something out of nothing. The best you can say about advertising, and of course it depends on what's being advertised, is that the rich usually finance it more than the poor. However, you don't know what it is you actually pay, and you do pay, for "free" content like broadcast TV.
I read years ago that "free" broadcast TV actually cost each household something like $30/month on average. I don't know how that would have changed now that broadcast TV is a much smaller proportion of the media that we consume, but it's not free, and never was. It's just that its costs are hidden and indirect.
So what you're really saying is that you'd rather not know how much you are paying for your media, rather than having the terms in simple straightforward language.
Don't forget: Amusement park ride operator and farmer.
The government is our enemy. Only the non-treasonous are treasonous!
It's not /.'s job to provide a secure means for posting politically sensitive stories. It would be nice if that's possible but that's not what they are in the business of doing, so I don't think it's fair to suggest /. "should know better".
I'm sure they know perfectly well, and I'm sure that the decision support HTTPS this way is also an economic and technological decision. /. is a business, not a charity, and not a public service (although it provides public service as part of its business model). If /. advertised itself _primarily_ as a forum for free, uncensored speech or a forum for communicating with people in less free circumstances then it's a fair cop.
It's one thing to suggest /. _should_ do this (and I think they should, all things being equal), but it's another to say (or imply) it is wrong for them not to.
On the other hand, like Microsoft, busting on /. is fun and often justified, so I wouldn't mind piling on. They're such insensitive clods!
I find that pretty funny given all the Java apps I've seen that will only run on one specific version of the JRE, not older _or_ newer.
I find too many Java apps to be no better at compatibility than their native counterparts, and are usually much more trouble get working.
That may not be a legitimate criticism of the platform, but it is a legitimate criticism of way too many people who develop for it.
I think you've got a good point. I graduated with a degree in CS from Virginia Tech in 1987. Not a whole lot of what I was taught was specifically and directly relevant to any job I'd had subsequent to that. In other words, my college experience was more of an education than training, and that's what it should be. The classes from which I felt I got the most value were seldom CS classes. That is not to the fault the CS department which I thought was pretty good, just that there is, or should be, more to a university degree than job training, otherwise it's just a glorified vo-tech school and should cost a third as much.
For instance, my first job was as a C programmer, when I'd used Pascal almost exclusively prior to that. The company that hired me was looking for entry-level C developers, so they were not looking for prior experience (and with the salary they offered, their expectations were appropriate). They offered a fairly simple test for us to take along with the interview. I don't recall all of the test, but one problem was to write a simple string handling function in C. I think it was to write a strcpy( ) function. Sounds pretty brain dead, huh? Well, apparently not...
I found out later that out of a group of 15 people that took the test, 2 of us aced it. Apparently, none of the rest did even marginally well. The company's attitude about the selection process also was an important factor in my decision to accept their employment offer and turn down another for more money.
There are two important realizations to this little anecdote. First, it confirmed that my CS degree served me well because I came out knowing how to program, and was able to get a job (and be successful at it) writing a language I had not heretofore used. In fact, I did so again in later years with both C++ and Tcl. Nowadays, languages come and (often) go like pop singers. If you can't adapt, you won't have a future in software development.
My other big realization, lo those many years ago, is that someone can come out with a Computer Science (or similar) degree and not be able to figure out how to implement strcpy( ). Although I suspected the case all along, I'd never seen such stark evidence.
No way, he'd be using a TRS-80 with an ORCH-85... all 3 voices... and he'd make the aliasing do things you'd never imagine!
Testify! We all know the world was around 75,000,000 years ago when Xenu was using DC-10s to drop H-bombs into volcanoes.
OK. It's really simple.
"Libraries of Congress" is a measure of information. It is unit based on the amount of printed data stored by the Library of Congress expressed in bytes. It's value is 10 terabytes, according to some random website I googled, but that value seems awfully low to me unless you're talking strictly text data.
"Congress" is a measure of corruption and incompetence. It is a unit based on the measure of immoral and destructive acts committed by the U. S. Congress expressed in terms of bogon flux. A bogon is a quantum of stupidity (also referred to as an "anti-cluon" or "tau-moron"). All stupid and many evil people emit a bogon flux, which increases proportionally with the level of stupidity or petty evil a person commits. For instance, if a 10-year-old calls you "gay" because you like classical music, he is emitting approximately 1 bogon per cm^2*s (also referred to a having a "bogosity of 1"). If your boss forces you to work late and miss a concert because you neglected to put the new covers on your TPS reports, he has a bogosity of around 1000. A bogosity of a million (10e6) has been officially designed in the SI system as a "darl".
Andy Dick registers in the 5 to 8 darl range. Steve Ballmer averages about 20 darls, but researchers measured a spike of nearly a kilodarl when he performed his "monkeyboy" dance. Although the U.S. Congress has been measured at bogosity levels as low as 800 kilodarls, measured shortly after they balanced the budget in 1998, all the way to well over 300 megadarls in the aftermath of 9/11 to nearly 4 gigadarls measured during the passage of the latest "stimulus" bill, a "Congress" was traditionally (and informally) considered to represent a bogon flux of 1 megadarl. This began to be regarded as woefully out of date by 2003. In recent years, the round number of 1 gigadarl has become the commonly accepted value of "Congress", which is equal to approximately 6.4 Kim Jong-Ils or an even six-pack of Mahmoud Ahmadinejads.
The problem with that is that the average person would have to sell his house (assuming he has one) to defend against such a lawsuit. As much as it would pain me, I couldn't do that, could you?
More appropriately, their OS is reminiscent of Oscar the Grouch: hostile, obnoxious and buried in trash.
AIUI, the latest C standard adds stuff that is not in C++98. But using C++ is now merely an option, not a requirement. It probably won't be used much, at least at first. But who knows, maybe some of that serious juju coming in C++1x will allow for writing some amazing tools more easily and quickly.
My goodness, the only thing worse than lame articles on /. is the people whose time is way too important to read lame articles, but not, apparently too important to whine about lame articles.
I liked the video. I thought it was funny. But even if I hadn't, if I took the time to complain about all the things on /., or anywhere else, I thought were pointless, I would have any time to do anything but whine.
I have no doubts that some people didn't see it, but most of us did. I finally gave up on KDE because I was just sick of the lameness and brokenness. I actually just tried it again with Ubuntu 10.04 for the first time in a year or two and it seems better now, but I still prefer the way it was in 3.5.10. It still seems less customizable than I recall 3.5 being.
Based on what I've seen the suggestion that they've been focusing too much on eye candy and not enough on making it good is plausible. However, given what I've paid for the software, I don't think it's a bad deal.
So, are you saying all the crashing was a feature?
Ketchup packets aren't printed with ink jets and don't have the precision that the ink jets provide.
On the other hand, HP's excuse is a load of bollocks. They practically give away the printers and make up the difference in replaceables. This is a common marketing technique used for everything from video games to shaving razors.
Given the huge pains they go through to shut out the third parties who seem, despite not having the tremendous resources of a huge company like HP, to be able to provide much cheaper ink that works quite well kind of makes HP look a little hypocritical.
If actual expense were truly the reason for the high price of ink, I think the market would look a lot different.
Not to be confused with the third alternative... "I am going to make so and so pay" and then sending that person an invoice.
Actually, near elections there are a lot of political stories on /. I recall that there was an actual "Politics" section created in 2004.
Let's fact it, U.S. elections have a huge effect on the technology world and a Supreme Court appointment directly effects many issues as well. Many YRO stories are closely tied to what the leadership of the U.S. is choosing to do with respect to technology, the policies they pursue and the laws they pass.
Now I would have expected to see a story relating something in Kagan's past that related to technology and might reflect her views on something relevant to our interests. Nevertheless, her choice can be very important to "News for Nerds", but since she has not been a judge I think it will be very interesting trying to decide what kind of judge she will be. Non-judges have been appointed before, there's no problem with someone who's never been a judge but has other relevant experience, but there's no paper trail of judgements or decisions.
This is a very valid point. In fact, I've been using GIMP for many years since before 1.0 (I'm not a hardcore user and I still prefer Paint Shop Pro), and I even knew this plug-in existed, but never realized what it actually was until a few weeks ago. I was recently able to get it to work and have used it, neither of which is intuitive or easy, but had had no idea that that kind of functionality was available before seeing a page that replicated the Adobe demonstrations using GIMP and Resynth.
For most people GIMP itself doesn't exist, which is unfortunate, (and I'll add to the choir of voices pointing out that the name does not help a bit) but for most people Windows, IE and Microsoft Office are the be-all and end-all of software. It's something that is nearly universal and probably will remain so for many years. The fact that alternatives exist, and in some cases are better, is not widely known, but thanks to Firefox, the concept seems to be gaining ground. When my non-techie friends are talking about using Firefox, I know a threshold has been crossed, but it's a small step in a long journey.
Meanwhile, those of us without the budget for CS5 nor the willingness to pirate it can enjoy a really cool piece of software technology that most people think you have to pay hundreds of dollars to acquire. PS might do it better. In fact, I would expect so, given that Adobe can throw serious resources into the development of their premiere product... oh wait, that's something else. ;-) Anyhow, a large company can afford to spend the time and energy required to make the functionality work really well, but the fact that this same functionality, or a reasonable approximation thereof, can be had for no cost, developed by enthusiasts for a free and open software package is still amazing and incredibly valuable.
Just like you're the one that put misuse of apostrophes over the top and are making everybody physically ill when they see them misused. :-)