In the past couple of days, I've been in a Best Buy, and CompUSA, and a Fry's Electronics, and I can't find a single box that says "Photoshop" on it. Not even in the locked cases.
Probably just a retail anomaly, but you'd think that the most popular and feature-rich image editing software would be stocked in quantity in at least one of three competing stores within four miles of each other.
Unless for some reason, its reputation is overhyped...
Because I have an XP computer. And an XP notebook.
And I just ordered me a Nixon CoolPix 8800 as my Christmas present to me.
Guaranteed delivery Friday, the man said. Of course, he had a Noo Yawk accent and sounded like he was smiling a little too hard...
So I may be spending Xmas day taking super-sharp pictures with "the Nikon touch" color balance and messing them up in a tool that doesn't take 8 clicks and a foray into a semantic hall of mirrors to find something as simple as the contrast and brightness controls.
[p.s. when ordering from "back-east" camera houses, CALL and ask what's in the box; if it weren't for a snafu with the shipping address, I'd never have talked to them, and I'd never have found out that the reason they offered it almost $150 below everyone else was that it was a "camera-only" OEM package, esentially reselling a warranty replacement distribution, without things like, oh, the special rechargable battery, lens cap, etc...and this year's models are coming without an included SD card or CompactFlash drive, probably because they were getting a lot of requests to delete those because by now most camera-hacks have a stack of nicer ones than the mfg's were shipping in the kit...]
We used to have checks and balances in media, via the "equal time provision" of FCC licensing. When one side told a lie, the other side got a chance to counter it, either with facts or a lie of their own. If one side told the truth, the other side got a chance to rebut it, but the public at least saw both sides and could make a decision. In the end, the truth was much more readily available, and lies were harder to spread, obviated by juxtaposition with the truth.
But that is gone, now, and entire networks can pretend not to be political house-organs.
What is the solution?
Make it a crime to lie in published media intended to be taken as fact.
That simple.
This doesn't violate free speech rights, because you don't have a right to lie. Lies are illegal in all manner of situations. Perjury. Fraud. Making false police reports. Etc.
But it won't happen. We're already in the situation that the lying was intended to produce, and it will take etreme statistical deviance in political ideology to break us out of it.
The Internet is a point-to-point communications system. They'd have to inveigle a sniffer into every route. Even if they took 100% of the traffic on all of the backbones and well-connecteds, they'd still be 50% short of getting anything.
Terrorists are going to communicate. Stopping them from communicating isn't the way to stop terrorism. Stopping impressionable kids from wanting to be terrorists is.
I didn't even look but I'm sure I'm the 100th caller to point out that "It Stays Exactly the Same, Year after Year!" is a Damn Lie, when right there is shows the 7-day month of Newton jammed into every 6th year.
The unit probability of a dude who writes computer programs that can compose their own music not having the bandwidth in place for a proper slashdotting.
HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A^ytR^%}}}}}}}}}}}
Every option I was ever granted started out with a couple of dollars of value (even when they're "out of the money" you have to pay cash for a call option on the open market). As the stock appreciated, naturally, the value of my options increased, but I couldn't exercise them until the end of the vesting period (3-5 years for most corporations).
It's an interesting question, "what's the value of something you are barred from reselling", but not really, because the bar could just as easily be my own reticence to sell. And I could have written naked LEAP calls on the open market at any time.
So an option is an option is an option, and all options have some market value, no matter how ludicrous the deficit between strike price and stock price.
The net effect of stock options is the same whether you expense them at grant or at vesting or at exercise or at expiration.
This accounting rule just makes it more clear in the prospectus how much the extant option pool affects your risk as a speculator (don't get me started on the difference between retail stock and investing).
Bottom line, it's a wash. Top line, it's a huge win for shareholders and prospective buyers. And the corporations won't change their option plans just because of this, unless they're too stupid to see that the accounting method doesn't affect the morale-boosting premium value.
War of the Worlds is an interesting example of the way derivative art works.
It's not that much of a story: aliens attack, humans flee/fight/cower, aliens die of a cold.
But it keeps getting remade. Why?
I think it's mostly because of the way Orson Welles planted the meme in our consciousness. At the time, it was plausible to people that Mars was inhabited and even hostile, and of course the presentation believed the central conceit perfectly. Meanwhile the particular pitfalls of asynchronous simplex communication (people turning the radio on after the disclaimer; people appending their own interpretations and extrapolations when explaining what others entering the room are discovering) did nothing to reduce its credibility.
So while the story isn't all that fascinating, the legend is, and derivative art capitalizes on the legend. Titanic is the single most expensive and profitable example, but I'd bet the budgets of the many remakes of War of the Worlds would be even more than what's been spent on the Titanic story.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what, though?
I can't find it anywhere.
In the past couple of days, I've been in a Best Buy, and CompUSA, and a Fry's Electronics, and I can't find a single box that says "Photoshop" on it. Not even in the locked cases.
Probably just a retail anomaly, but you'd think that the most popular and feature-rich image editing software would be stocked in quantity in at least one of three competing stores within four miles of each other.
Unless for some reason, its reputation is overhyped...
This is nifty news.
Because I have an XP computer. And an XP notebook.
And I just ordered me a Nixon CoolPix 8800 as my Christmas present to me.
Guaranteed delivery Friday, the man said. Of course, he had a Noo Yawk accent and sounded like he was smiling a little too hard...
So I may be spending Xmas day taking super-sharp pictures with "the Nikon touch" color balance and messing them up in a tool that doesn't take 8 clicks and a foray into a semantic hall of mirrors to find something as simple as the contrast and brightness controls.
[p.s. when ordering from "back-east" camera houses, CALL and ask what's in the box; if it weren't for a snafu with the shipping address, I'd never have talked to them, and I'd never have found out that the reason they offered it almost $150 below everyone else was that it was a "camera-only" OEM package, esentially reselling a warranty replacement distribution, without things like, oh, the special rechargable battery, lens cap, etc...and this year's models are coming without an included SD card or CompactFlash drive, probably because they were getting a lot of requests to delete those because by now most camera-hacks have a stack of nicer ones than the mfg's were shipping in the kit...]
Oh, and I just have to link this cool picture of the unpainted body: cool picture of the unpainted body from one of the reviews.
</brag>
From the mirror:
.nettish, we can expect a pile of plugins.
"Paint.NET has many of the powerful features that expensive commercial applications have, including the ability to use layers."
Depending on the gorm possessed by the blurb writer, we might be safe in assuming it has channels, too.
And as it's
Never underestimate the momentum that Microsoft's billion-computer installation base brings to software-development dynamics.
If I ran the The Gimp project, I'd be running down the e-halls screaming "fix the interface! fix the interface!" right now.
The Powell FCC helped the right-wing junta get re-elected, which proves they don't care about anything but corporatism.
Their only holdup seems to be that the telecoms haven't offered a big enough bribe, yet.
We used to have checks and balances in media, via the "equal time provision" of FCC licensing. When one side told a lie, the other side got a chance to counter it, either with facts or a lie of their own. If one side told the truth, the other side got a chance to rebut it, but the public at least saw both sides and could make a decision. In the end, the truth was much more readily available, and lies were harder to spread, obviated by juxtaposition with the truth.
But that is gone, now, and entire networks can pretend not to be political house-organs.
What is the solution?
Make it a crime to lie in published media intended to be taken as fact.
That simple.
This doesn't violate free speech rights, because you don't have a right to lie. Lies are illegal in all manner of situations. Perjury. Fraud. Making false police reports. Etc.
But it won't happen. We're already in the situation that the lying was intended to produce, and it will take etreme statistical deviance in political ideology to break us out of it.
The Internet is a point-to-point communications system. They'd have to inveigle a sniffer into every route. Even if they took 100% of the traffic on all of the backbones and well-connecteds, they'd still be 50% short of getting anything.
Terrorists are going to communicate. Stopping them from communicating isn't the way to stop terrorism. Stopping impressionable kids from wanting to be terrorists is.
I didn't even look but I'm sure I'm the 100th caller to point out that "It Stays Exactly the Same, Year after Year!" is a Damn Lie, when right there is shows the 7-day month of Newton jammed into every 6th year.
Nothing is certain in life but death, taxes, and being slashdotted if you put shiny thing on the internet.
>Some people just don't need any more than that.
Nobody needs more than that.
But show then $35 billion in stacks of $100 bills some time, and tell them he'll never be subject to risk if he has money.
Any one of them who denies wanting to stuff a duffel bag with as much as they can carry is a damn liar.
Do you think Linus Torvalds looks at that $35 billion valuation for Linux and thinks, "I wish I'd invented that..."
I say we give rights to the computers.
So at least they have reason to be compassionate when they start thinking of taking our rights away.
But then it won't be LBA-complete
/.?
Since when are you allowed to actually know something about computer science on
SHENANIGANS!
Intel has been roadmapping this sort of thing for over 10 years. They got distracted by whoring to the Internet and AMD's 64-bit overreach.
Besides, putting a math coprocessor alongside every integer unit was the beginning of multi-core CPUs.
He's feeding the bits themselves into a relay that controls the starter motor on a '57 Chevy that hasn't been lubed since '58.
No?
Then what in the flaming hell is this?
There's harmony to it, but barely.
There's no "christmassy" rhythm, and certainly no melody.
Optimal for exactly what, is this supposed to be?
The holiday depression suicide rate?
You know what's statistically optimal?
The unit probability of a dude who writes computer programs that can compose their own music not having the bandwidth in place for a proper slashdotting.
HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A^ytR^%}}}}}}}}}}}
Every option I was ever granted started out with a couple of dollars of value (even when they're "out of the money" you have to pay cash for a call option on the open market). As the stock appreciated, naturally, the value of my options increased, but I couldn't exercise them until the end of the vesting period (3-5 years for most corporations).
It's an interesting question, "what's the value of something you are barred from reselling", but not really, because the bar could just as easily be my own reticence to sell. And I could have written naked LEAP calls on the open market at any time.
So an option is an option is an option, and all options have some market value, no matter how ludicrous the deficit between strike price and stock price.
The net effect of stock options is the same whether you expense them at grant or at vesting or at exercise or at expiration.
This accounting rule just makes it more clear in the prospectus how much the extant option pool affects your risk as a speculator (don't get me started on the difference between retail stock and investing).
Bottom line, it's a wash. Top line, it's a huge win for shareholders and prospective buyers. And the corporations won't change their option plans just because of this, unless they're too stupid to see that the accounting method doesn't affect the morale-boosting premium value.
>This is brings out one of the greatest aspects of open source...they don't make something 1.0 until it really is a working version.
Is that a rule?
I keep looking through the regulations and I don't see it.
Are you sure?
Do what everyone else did.
Hack into a bank and get caught.
You'll get a few years in the state pen, but then you'll be a hot commodity.
(P.S. This is one fucked-up world.)
Why do I find it ominous that I can't find the bandwidth spec anywhere?
100 years later, the quake is still causing damage (in this case to webservers...)
War of the Worlds is an interesting example of the way derivative art works.
It's not that much of a story: aliens attack, humans flee/fight/cower, aliens die of a cold.
But it keeps getting remade. Why?
I think it's mostly because of the way Orson Welles planted the meme in our consciousness. At the time, it was plausible to people that Mars was inhabited and even hostile, and of course the presentation believed the central conceit perfectly. Meanwhile the particular pitfalls of asynchronous simplex communication (people turning the radio on after the disclaimer; people appending their own interpretations and extrapolations when explaining what others entering the room are discovering) did nothing to reduce its credibility.
So while the story isn't all that fascinating, the legend is, and derivative art capitalizes on the legend. Titanic is the single most expensive and profitable example, but I'd bet the budgets of the many remakes of War of the Worlds would be even more than what's been spent on the Titanic story.
COWARDS!
If you disagree with me, show your sorry faces.
Don't hide behind your feckless moderator points, you Gatesian tools.
I'm still waiting for planux.
Ah. No. You didn't write the music.
I wrote my posts.
Try again. This time with some legal basis.