No money - no responsibility. Money in - responsibility out.
I agree. It is for this reason that companies want to buy support contracts for otherwise free software. For most people in our capitalist society, money is an incredible motivator.
Someone said that Open Source will never effectively work on the desktop..
Interesting that they should say that, because the company with the most dominant position on the desktop - Microsoft - has opened the source to a number of desktop-related applications. Wordpad, for example. And some.NET stuff, which will likely compete with Linux and KDE for the most appropriate 'Open Source' technology in the future.
People say they do it in their spare time and that they don't care if they have users. Then they complain when they can't get drivers, and then they complain they don't get commercial software, and then they complain they don't get commercial backing or support.
That is a really good point. But it sounds like it could more like disgruntlement that they are doing work and other aren't, in their perception at least.
The light droplets, not yet demonstrated in the lab, would be useful as robust information bits in future optical computers.
Are they trying to bullshit people here? Not only have these droplets not had any real demonstration, i.e. it is all theoretical, but also they are just pulling applications out of a hat here. Robust information bits for optical computers? This is science fiction.
It's good that the KDE people are doing research into such things, as companies with successful GUIs like Apple and Microsoft have done.
Although with what little funding they have, it is difficult to do much more than this sort of 'market research' polling. Actual experiments set up to monitor GUI usage and human reactions may be more difficult to organise.
What's wrong with a 3Gb per month limit? That's like about 100Mb per day. The difference between that and the paltry amount you'll get on dial-up is probably quite worth paying for!
That is an excellent point. I wonder how they even came up with 3 MBit measurement in this case? It's not like people want to access the ISPs servers all the time anyway.
My local cable company does transparent proxying with common www and ftp ports. It seems to work ok, but it's misleading to always get a connection even when there is no server on the remote host.
And when their caching servers are down, I can't access any webpage at all (in which case it's time to use an external proxy server)
You can probably get away with things like that if you use transparent proxies to do web page caching, and so on. Or traffic shaping to make individual connections a little slower.
Call me suspicious, but I bet they have all sorts of tricks to keep the actual usage past their network down.
If you define a year as an orbit of the earth around the sun, and a day as one full rotation of the earth, then a year is something daft like 365.254 days, not a nice whole number at all. And hence leap years to make up for the.254 over time.
So we can split an hour or a minute up into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths and sixths and still have an integer number of hours or minutes. Similarly the day can be split in half or quartered and still have a whole number of hours.
Metric divisions can only be split into halves and fifths. I don't know about you, but when I say it's quarter to ten, I wouldn't want to see it represented as the fiddly non-integer 9.75.
Many modern motherboards power automatically power down when the CPU gets too hot, but that is just the CPU.. I think the greatest danger in modern computers is the power supply.
At work we recently had a problem where a paperclip fell inside the grilles in the power supply and shorted something out, causing power surges which trashed the rest of the computer, which wasn't nice.
But what was worse was the smell of the thing, it was really nasty. When capacitors burn due to having too much current put across them, they release all sorts of nasty toxins and also fibres which can stick to your clothes and make them smell for ages. Or even worse, stick to you skin and eyes and burn or blind you.
It's not just fires that are a hazard. Computers, and indeed most electronic devices, consist of many environmentally unhealthy and hazardous chemicals.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry can't resist
- No money - no responsibility. Money in - responsibility out.
I agree. It is for this reason that companies want to buy support contracts for otherwise free software. For most people in our capitalist society, money is an incredible motivator.This may well be a bad thing.
- Someone said that Open Source will never effectively work on the desktop..
Interesting that they should say that, because the company with the most dominant position on the desktop - Microsoft - has opened the source to a number of desktop-related applications. Wordpad, for example. And some- People say they do it in their spare time and that they don't care if they have users. Then they complain when they can't get drivers, and then they complain they don't get commercial software, and then they complain they don't get commercial backing or support.
That is a really good point. But it sounds like it could more like disgruntlement that they are doing work and other aren't, in their perception at least.- The light droplets, not yet demonstrated in the lab, would be useful as robust information bits in future optical computers.
Are they trying to bullshit people here? Not only have these droplets not had any real demonstration, i.e. it is all theoretical, but also they are just pulling applications out of a hat here. Robust information bits for optical computers? This is science fiction.It's good that the KDE people are doing research into such things, as companies with successful GUIs like Apple and Microsoft have done.
Although with what little funding they have, it is difficult to do much more than this sort of 'market research' polling. Actual experiments set up to monitor GUI usage and human reactions may be more difficult to organise.
That is pretty damn funny!
How rude. I bet you only talk to people like that when you're on your computer.
What's wrong with a 3Gb per month limit? That's like about 100Mb per day. The difference between that and the paltry amount you'll get on dial-up is probably quite worth paying for!
That is an excellent point. I wonder how they even came up with 3 MBit measurement in this case? It's not like people want to access the ISPs servers all the time anyway.
My local cable company does transparent proxying with common www and ftp ports. It seems to work ok, but it's misleading to always get a connection even when there is no server on the remote host.
And when their caching servers are down, I can't access any webpage at all (in which case it's time to use an external proxy server)
That is nice. I like being a whore.
You can probably get away with things like that if you use transparent proxies to do web page caching, and so on. Or traffic shaping to make individual connections a little slower.
Call me suspicious, but I bet they have all sorts of tricks to keep the actual usage past their network down.
And a more general article on displaying VGA pictures on your TV can be found here. I should've put this in the post I'm replying to, but never mind.
You could try building your own, there is a good page on it here.
I know what you mean, the dd/mm/yy and mm/dd/yy confusion is just ridiculous.
What is the point of putting it in such an arbitrary order as month, day, year anyway?
An extra hour would be nice, but sometimes it is just a few seconds more.
If you define a year as an orbit of the earth around the sun, and a day as one full rotation of the earth, then a year is something daft like 365.254 days, not a nice whole number at all. And hence leap years to make up for the .254 over time.
Dividing time into steps of 60 and 24 makes sense, in a way, because these numbers are more easily divisible.
60 = 1*60 = 2*30 = 3*20 = 4*15 = 5*12 = 6*10
24 = 1*24 = 2*12 = 3*8 = 4*6
10 = 1*10 = 2*5
So we can split an hour or a minute up into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths and sixths and still have an integer number of hours or minutes. Similarly the day can be split in half or quartered and still have a whole number of hours.
Metric divisions can only be split into halves and fifths. I don't know about you, but when I say it's quarter to ten, I wouldn't want to see it represented as the fiddly non-integer 9.75.
I'm impressed!
This question has already been debated quite extensively in the newsgroup sci.math.
It's quite an interesting read!
Many modern motherboards power automatically power down when the CPU gets too hot, but that is just the CPU .. I think the greatest danger in modern computers is the power supply.
At work we recently had a problem where a paperclip fell inside the grilles in the power supply and shorted something out, causing power surges which trashed the rest of the computer, which wasn't nice.
But what was worse was the smell of the thing, it was really nasty. When capacitors burn due to having too much current put across them, they release all sorts of nasty toxins and also fibres which can stick to your clothes and make them smell for ages. Or even worse, stick to you skin and eyes and burn or blind you.
It's not just fires that are a hazard. Computers, and indeed most electronic devices, consist of many environmentally unhealthy and hazardous chemicals.
Which scientists?
Huh? I never implied patents were evil.
Sorry, I was confused, no it's not a repeated story. I read it a couple of weeks ago in this journal.