A former colleague of mine was saying the same thing about
Australia. Industry (mostly IBM, apparently) lobbied the government to allow more
foreign workers in to address the supposed IT skills shortage.
In actual fact, there are a large number of qualified native residents,
but it's cheaper for large companies to employ foreign workers (who are prepared to accept signifiantly lower salaries) than it is
to employ Australians. It's therefore in the industry's interest to
exaggerate the skills shortage, as it enables them to
lower their payroll costs. Unethical, yes, but it makes
good business sense to the bean counters...
They're lowering the price based on whatever information I've given them, my ordered
habits over the years, and the books (and DVDs) that I've ordered in the past.
You would hope so, but the point, as you mentioned, is that we don't know
what criteria they're using. Maybe they are charging you higher
prices because of your political views, or your taste in music.
Both of these, and other attributes, can be guessed
with varying degrees of accuracy from your past purchases.
Now it probably isn't happening because it doesn't make commercial sense to do so (although it's
possible -- here in the UK at least, those leaning to the politic right tend to have a higher disposable income than other, and so would probably worry less about paying slightly more). The point is, we just don't know.
the split will be done according to some complex comparison of popularity that will
actually get some money even to small publishers
Yes, but which ones? If you assume there's a total fund available to go to
publishers, then you either:
Calculate the total value of copyrighted works, and split it proportionately, with each publisher getting their share.
Split the fund proportionately among those publishers that you know about.
The first method will leave a large surplus, as you'll never be able to find all the small publishers to give them their fair share, so who gets the extra?
The second method relies on some agency collecting a list of publishers, which is
never going to be accurate, and again will miss out the smaller publishers. Sure, you could do it on a "publishers must apply for their share" basis, but for small pbulishers, the administrative overhead will probably dilute the value of their share to nothing. The whole concept sucks. Let publishers go after copyright violators themselves. There's no need for governments to get involved at all.
You missed the point........
1600x1200 is a common resolution, but how many monitors will actually do 1600x*1400*?
No, *you* missed the point. A monitor isn't limited to the
resolutions it claims on the box. It's an analog device, and can
be run at whatever resolution you want so long as it's within
spec. I'd like to run my monitor here at work at 1280x1024, but the refresh rate is
too low. The next standard resolution down (1152x864) gives me the refresh rate I want, but it's too small.
As a result, I devised my own resolution, and hence I'm running at 1232x944, which is nearly
as good as 1280x1024, but it gives me a good enough refresh rate that it doesn't hurt my eyes. There's no reason whatsoever that I shouldn't run my Iiyama at 1600x1400. In fact, having done some quick modeline calculations, it looks like I can do it at around 85Hz, so I may well do that tonight, to give me that little bit extra screen real estate. See the
XFree86 Video Timings HOWTO for more details.
When I first looked at the FAQ, I thought they were
being very apostrophe shy, omitting them from words like
"companys", "securitys" etc. However, looking at the
page again in Netscape instead of Lynx shows that they're just just using
Microsoft moronic HTML. Sigh.
Ok how many people have moniters that can do 1600x1400?
Well I do. My Iiyama VisionMaster Pro450 can do
1920x1440 according to the spec sheet, and I suspect
a bit of modeline tweaking may persuade it to go a
bit higher than that. It's not even that expensive.
I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a decent monitor.
Really? Mine is still in 3 figures. That said,
it's been dropping by 1 point every so often, even
though I'm still getting moderated up. I'm guessing
that Rob's introduced some kind of slippery slope
for those with high karma, so they drop back to lower levels
unless consistently posting high rated comments.
Personally, I think it'd be better to just have a maximum karma of, say, 10 points over the +2 bonus level.
As it stands now, once you've got a high enough karma (not that hard to attain, with a bit of whoring), you can abuse the system pretty much all you want, and still retain your posting bonus.
The 2D performance looks
really good but the gaming... well it's another Matrox product.
Your point being? I've been using my G400 for gaming,
and haven't run into any framerate problems. I don't personally care if a GeFore2 gets better performance. If I'm not getting slowdown, why should I want a faster card? Admittedly, it doesn't do 1600x1200 at high speeds, but then for gaming, 1024x768 is good enough for me anyway. Furthermore, not
only is 2D performance really good, but the image quality
is unsurpassed. Matrox just seem to be able to get
really clean, crisp images to the screen.
More details on the Star Trek project can be found
in Jim
Carlton's Apple book. It makes sickening reading, but it's
one of the most interesting reads I had in quite a while.
It's really quite unbelievable to see just how many times one
company can keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
maybe it is time to retire Gnome's obsolete C code
base.
OK, so it's flamebait (you even said so yourself), but I'll rise to it.
What is obsolete about GNOME's codebase? Are you claiming it's obsolete
purely because it's written in C? If so, do you propose retiring the obsolete Linux kernel
in favour of the obviously more advanced NT kernel (written in C++)? That argument just doesn't hold any water.
BTW, I too am dissatisfied with both GNOME and KDE (and enlightenment, for that matter), and
am quite happily using fvwm2.
Interesting choice. Going for the full GPL pleases
the extremists, but it also has the side effect of allowing Troll Tech to protect their
revenue stream. If they'd made it LGPL, then people could
develop and sell proprietarty (closed source) apps using Qt. Being GPL
prevents that, thus pleasing both sides. Those wanting to go that
route can still purchase a Qt Professional Edition license from Troll Tech (something
you had to do under the QPL anyway).
Now if you come into my restaurant and act like a know it all who doesn't tip, then I will
suddenly become incompetent and forget to get your drink refills or anything else.
Huh? I certainly don't behave any differently in a restaurant
to anyone else. I'm polite to the waiters, and expect the same
in return. At the end of the evening, I'll decide
whether a tip is justified or not. If you haven't been
refilling my drinks, the chances are I'll decide not.
If you want to lose your tip through such behaviour,
there's little I can do to stop you...
No! Paying them is their employer's responsibility, not mine. No one is forcing them to do the job.
If they don't like the salary, they should find a better paid job.
I'll tip if they've given good service, but 15% is way over the top. In fact, the tip shouldn't be related to
the value of the meal at all. The waiter hasn't given me better service because I
ordered the £50 lobster instead of the £5 burger. At the end of the day, though,
it probably just comes down to cultural differences.
In the US, you're seen as rude if you don't tip (hell, there's even people in this thread that tip pizza deliveries!). Here in the UK,
though, I see it as rude to expect a tip unless they've done something to warrant one.
I take the Perl source code to Slashdot, port it to Python (this would
be a good idea anyway) and don't release the source. When the GPL zealots come breathing
down my neck, I claim to have "reverse engineered" a slashdot "emulator". Do I have a
case? Like hell.
Sure you do, depending on how the "port" was done. In the traditional sense,
you'll be writing your own python code, complete with your own copyright. Perhaps you've implemented it the same
way, using the slashdot code for reference (even using some of the same function and variable names). It's still new code,
inluenced by, but not derived from the original slash code.
Where you might run into problems is if you do a "literal" port. That is, covert each individual perl statement to its corresponding python statement (assuming the two languages are 100% functionally equivalent). Then your code would be more of a translation than original code. However, virtually no "ports" to a new language are done this way.
I have no problem with there being no support for Linux by hardware manufacturers.
Nor do I. If you re-read my original post, you'll see
that I specifically did not want support.
I only wanted techincal information about the hardware/firmware,
so that I could make my own mistakes with that information.
I didn't want HP to fix any problems I had. I only
wanted the information to enable me to fix them myself.
This is not that big of a surprise. One division of the company appears to be pro-linux
and another division appears to be anti-Linux or Microsoft-exclusive.
Indeed. I got a perfect example of this when HP
technical support refused to tell me how to get the
BIOS to recognise the suspend partition on my HP laptop. I
said "Does it have to be in a specific location? Does it have to have a particular
partition type? Does it have to be formatted in any particular way?". They said "Use the utility we provide under Windows".
I pointed out that I didn't run Windows, and thus couldn't run the utility
(which I didn't have anyway). They refused to give me the information I needed. I didn't want help on how to do anything, I just needed the info so I could do it myself. But apparently any non-MS usage isn't allowed, and they wouldn't tell me anything. The tech support guy quite happily told me that he ran Red Hat at home, but wasn't allowed to tell me anything because I wasn't running Windows...
Re:Developers all want a royalty. NOT.
on
Salon on the XBox
·
· Score: 2
I would rather have a console that was six months less powerfull, but 100% completely
open, and that anyone could press games for.
Thank you!. Finally someone that gets it.
I've been saying for some time now that the first company to
make a royalty free console with a freely available dev-kit
(not necessarily free in price -- just not restricted to those producing "approved" content, although obviously it has to be cheap) will make an absolute killing.
Sure, the average quality of games for that console will inevitably decrease, as you'll get the crap that wouldn't normally pass the Sony/Sega/whoever approval process.
However, there's no reason to think that the number of quality titles will decrease, and there will certainly be some real gems that wouldn't normally be released. Open it up to fair competition, and let the market decide. The good (like id and Epic) will float, and the bad (like Automata or Ram Jam) will sink without trace, just as it should be.
In the olden days, any halfway competent coder could write a game for the Spectrum/C64/Amiga and release it to the world (either through an established publisher, or as shareware/freeware). In fact, I did just that. The low barrier to entry was what created such vibrant communities around these platforms (and that's much of the reason for the success of Linux today). I'd love to see the same happen for a modern day console.
how many signed packages are their in any other linux
distribution? I don't believe I've ever seen even a single one! (in other words.. who
cares if RPM can do this if nobody uses it).
petrol prices have jumped 20c/l (because of govt excise and taxes)
Try coming to the UK sometime. We're paying about six
times that (again due to taxation -- something like
80% of the price at the pump goes directly to the
government). People here can't help but watch in amusement
when others around the world complain about petrol prices.
Americans are apparently up in arms at the moment over
their $1/gallon prices. I can't remember when it last cost that little over here...
Run software to capture line in to digital file (under Linux, typically.wav format)
Just curious. What software would you use to do this under Linux?
Can you just dd from/dev/dsp, for example? Is there anything more advanced available?
Use sox to convert to CDR format to burn onto a blank CD
No need -- cdrecord accepts.wav files as input just fine.
I have no objections to Google using small ad banners
to bring in revenue. I can always filter them out.
What I don't like, though, is their recent changes to the way the site works.
If your initial search didn't find what you were looking
for, you used to be able to repeat the search, with a larger number
of results displayed. You can't do that anymore without going
to their cumbersome advanced search page. That would be OK,
but their page rank technology isn't quite good enough yet.
You'll usually find what you're looking for in the
top 10 results, but not always (and I find, increasingly less so with time -- I was getting more accurate results 6-9 months ago, for example).
With a bit of work, voice recognition systems may
be taught to recognize the syntax for some programming
languages. However, all this means is that you can
dictate a program to the machine. You can't actually program it because
programming is not linear in the same way as writing prose.
You'd need to be able to tell the editor to go up 3 lines, or to copy
the next 7 lines into the do_more_stuff function.
Voice recognition just isn't an efficient interface for doing
that sort of stuff. The keyboard will be with us for quite some time to come (even if it may evolve into
more efficient forms, such as a stenograph machines -- unlikely, but possible).
Slashdot Mirror
A former colleague of mine was saying the same thing about Australia. Industry (mostly IBM, apparently) lobbied the government to allow more foreign workers in to address the supposed IT skills shortage. In actual fact, there are a large number of qualified native residents, but it's cheaper for large companies to employ foreign workers (who are prepared to accept signifiantly lower salaries) than it is to employ Australians. It's therefore in the industry's interest to exaggerate the skills shortage, as it enables them to lower their payroll costs. Unethical, yes, but it makes good business sense to the bean counters...
You would hope so, but the point, as you mentioned, is that we don't know what criteria they're using. Maybe they are charging you higher prices because of your political views, or your taste in music. Both of these, and other attributes, can be guessed with varying degrees of accuracy from your past purchases. Now it probably isn't happening because it doesn't make commercial sense to do so (although it's possible -- here in the UK at least, those leaning to the politic right tend to have a higher disposable income than other, and so would probably worry less about paying slightly more). The point is, we just don't know.
Yes, but which ones? If you assume there's a total fund available to go to publishers, then you either:
The first method will leave a large surplus, as you'll never be able to find all the small publishers to give them their fair share, so who gets the extra? The second method relies on some agency collecting a list of publishers, which is never going to be accurate, and again will miss out the smaller publishers. Sure, you could do it on a "publishers must apply for their share" basis, but for small pbulishers, the administrative overhead will probably dilute the value of their share to nothing. The whole concept sucks. Let publishers go after copyright violators themselves. There's no need for governments to get involved at all.
No, *you* missed the point. A monitor isn't limited to the resolutions it claims on the box. It's an analog device, and can be run at whatever resolution you want so long as it's within spec. I'd like to run my monitor here at work at 1280x1024, but the refresh rate is too low. The next standard resolution down (1152x864) gives me the refresh rate I want, but it's too small. As a result, I devised my own resolution, and hence I'm running at 1232x944, which is nearly as good as 1280x1024, but it gives me a good enough refresh rate that it doesn't hurt my eyes. There's no reason whatsoever that I shouldn't run my Iiyama at 1600x1400. In fact, having done some quick modeline calculations, it looks like I can do it at around 85Hz, so I may well do that tonight, to give me that little bit extra screen real estate. See the XFree86 Video Timings HOWTO for more details.
When I first looked at the FAQ, I thought they were being very apostrophe shy, omitting them from words like "companys", "securitys" etc. However, looking at the page again in Netscape instead of Lynx shows that they're just just using Microsoft moronic HTML. Sigh.
Well I do. My Iiyama VisionMaster Pro450 can do 1920x1440 according to the spec sheet, and I suspect a bit of modeline tweaking may persuade it to go a bit higher than that. It's not even that expensive. I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a decent monitor.
Or simply that the original license agreement contained a buy back clause, saying something like:
Toshiba and IBM might not have had a choice...
Really? Mine is still in 3 figures. That said, it's been dropping by 1 point every so often, even though I'm still getting moderated up. I'm guessing that Rob's introduced some kind of slippery slope for those with high karma, so they drop back to lower levels unless consistently posting high rated comments. Personally, I think it'd be better to just have a maximum karma of, say, 10 points over the +2 bonus level. As it stands now, once you've got a high enough karma (not that hard to attain, with a bit of whoring), you can abuse the system pretty much all you want, and still retain your posting bonus.
Your point being? I've been using my G400 for gaming, and haven't run into any framerate problems. I don't personally care if a GeFore2 gets better performance. If I'm not getting slowdown, why should I want a faster card? Admittedly, it doesn't do 1600x1200 at high speeds, but then for gaming, 1024x768 is good enough for me anyway. Furthermore, not only is 2D performance really good, but the image quality is unsurpassed. Matrox just seem to be able to get really clean, crisp images to the screen.
More details on the Star Trek project can be found in Jim Carlton's Apple book. It makes sickening reading, but it's one of the most interesting reads I had in quite a while. It's really quite unbelievable to see just how many times one company can keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
OK, so it's flamebait (you even said so yourself), but I'll rise to it. What is obsolete about GNOME's codebase? Are you claiming it's obsolete purely because it's written in C? If so, do you propose retiring the obsolete Linux kernel in favour of the obviously more advanced NT kernel (written in C++)? That argument just doesn't hold any water. BTW, I too am dissatisfied with both GNOME and KDE (and enlightenment, for that matter), and am quite happily using fvwm2.
Interesting choice. Going for the full GPL pleases the extremists, but it also has the side effect of allowing Troll Tech to protect their revenue stream. If they'd made it LGPL, then people could develop and sell proprietarty (closed source) apps using Qt. Being GPL prevents that, thus pleasing both sides. Those wanting to go that route can still purchase a Qt Professional Edition license from Troll Tech (something you had to do under the QPL anyway).
Huh? I certainly don't behave any differently in a restaurant to anyone else. I'm polite to the waiters, and expect the same in return. At the end of the evening, I'll decide whether a tip is justified or not. If you haven't been refilling my drinks, the chances are I'll decide not. If you want to lose your tip through such behaviour, there's little I can do to stop you...
No! Paying them is their employer's responsibility, not mine. No one is forcing them to do the job. If they don't like the salary, they should find a better paid job. I'll tip if they've given good service, but 15% is way over the top. In fact, the tip shouldn't be related to the value of the meal at all. The waiter hasn't given me better service because I ordered the £50 lobster instead of the £5 burger. At the end of the day, though, it probably just comes down to cultural differences. In the US, you're seen as rude if you don't tip (hell, there's even people in this thread that tip pizza deliveries!). Here in the UK, though, I see it as rude to expect a tip unless they've done something to warrant one.
Sure you do, depending on how the "port" was done. In the traditional sense, you'll be writing your own python code, complete with your own copyright. Perhaps you've implemented it the same way, using the slashdot code for reference (even using some of the same function and variable names). It's still new code, inluenced by, but not derived from the original slash code. Where you might run into problems is if you do a "literal" port. That is, covert each individual perl statement to its corresponding python statement (assuming the two languages are 100% functionally equivalent). Then your code would be more of a translation than original code. However, virtually no "ports" to a new language are done this way.
Nor do I. If you re-read my original post, you'll see that I specifically did not want support. I only wanted techincal information about the hardware/firmware, so that I could make my own mistakes with that information. I didn't want HP to fix any problems I had. I only wanted the information to enable me to fix them myself.
Indeed. I got a perfect example of this when HP technical support refused to tell me how to get the BIOS to recognise the suspend partition on my HP laptop. I said "Does it have to be in a specific location? Does it have to have a particular partition type? Does it have to be formatted in any particular way?". They said "Use the utility we provide under Windows". I pointed out that I didn't run Windows, and thus couldn't run the utility (which I didn't have anyway). They refused to give me the information I needed. I didn't want help on how to do anything, I just needed the info so I could do it myself. But apparently any non-MS usage isn't allowed, and they wouldn't tell me anything. The tech support guy quite happily told me that he ran Red Hat at home, but wasn't allowed to tell me anything because I wasn't running Windows...
Thank you!. Finally someone that gets it. I've been saying for some time now that the first company to make a royalty free console with a freely available dev-kit (not necessarily free in price -- just not restricted to those producing "approved" content, although obviously it has to be cheap) will make an absolute killing. Sure, the average quality of games for that console will inevitably decrease, as you'll get the crap that wouldn't normally pass the Sony/Sega/whoever approval process. However, there's no reason to think that the number of quality titles will decrease, and there will certainly be some real gems that wouldn't normally be released. Open it up to fair competition, and let the market decide. The good (like id and Epic) will float, and the bad (like Automata or Ram Jam) will sink without trace, just as it should be. In the olden days, any halfway competent coder could write a game for the Spectrum/C64/Amiga and release it to the world (either through an established publisher, or as shareware/freeware). In fact, I did just that. The low barrier to entry was what created such vibrant communities around these platforms (and that's much of the reason for the success of Linux today). I'd love to see the same happen for a modern day console.
Actually, every RPM issued by Red Hat is signed.
Sorry, but the only reason I know it was posted the day before was that I saw it on the main page...
Try coming to the UK sometime. We're paying about six times that (again due to taxation -- something like 80% of the price at the pump goes directly to the government). People here can't help but watch in amusement when others around the world complain about petrol prices. Americans are apparently up in arms at the moment over their $1/gallon prices. I can't remember when it last cost that little over here...
This story was already posted yesterday.
Just curious. What software would you use to do this under Linux? Can you just dd from /dev/dsp, for example? Is there anything more advanced available?
Use sox to convert to CDR format to burn onto a blank CD
No need -- cdrecord accepts .wav files as input just fine.
I have no objections to Google using small ad banners to bring in revenue. I can always filter them out. What I don't like, though, is their recent changes to the way the site works. If your initial search didn't find what you were looking for, you used to be able to repeat the search, with a larger number of results displayed. You can't do that anymore without going to their cumbersome advanced search page. That would be OK, but their page rank technology isn't quite good enough yet. You'll usually find what you're looking for in the top 10 results, but not always (and I find, increasingly less so with time -- I was getting more accurate results 6-9 months ago, for example).
With a bit of work, voice recognition systems may be taught to recognize the syntax for some programming languages. However, all this means is that you can dictate a program to the machine. You can't actually program it because programming is not linear in the same way as writing prose. You'd need to be able to tell the editor to go up 3 lines, or to copy the next 7 lines into the do_more_stuff function. Voice recognition just isn't an efficient interface for doing that sort of stuff. The keyboard will be with us for quite some time to come (even if it may evolve into more efficient forms, such as a stenograph machines -- unlikely, but possible).