Please publish some sort of evidence to back up your claim about Cuba!
There are these cute little things that you find on many web pages called hyperlinks. If you followed the first one that I included in my posting then you'd have the evidence that you want.
Of course, you could try using your own initiative and perform your own web searches on Juragua, the IAEA, and Cuban power generation in general but I guess that would be too much to ask.
After all, if you can't be bothered to follow a simple link what are the odds that you'll fire up Google, Alta Vista, Yahoo or whatever to do any research of your own?
This is bullshit. Cuba has been hydrogen-fuel-cell powered for decades.
I don't know if it was your meant to troll, but troll you did.
Cuba may have made some efforts to use clean, renewable energy sources (wind, wave, solar) but it's also made considerable effort to use dirty, finite sources as well, including nuclear power.
The nuclear power plant at Juragua has been under construction since 1983. It's not yet been completed, so it's not up and running, but Cuba is still trying to get the plant productive.
Unsurprisingly, for what it calls "safety concerns", the US isn't too keen to see that happen - apparently, it's OK for the US to have nuclear power plants all over the country, nuclear powered ships and submarines and even to launch nuclear powered satellites but God forbid that some communists 200 miles off the coast of Florida should want to use nuclear power too.
It's true that these concerns aren't totally unfounded as the type of reactor that the plant uses (the Soviet-designed VVER-440) doesn't have an exemplorary track record but let's remember that while the USSR had Chernobyl, the US had Three Mile Island.
By withholding its funding to the International Atomic Energy Agency - an overly-aggressive and short-sighted attempt to pressurise that body into abandoning all assistance that its giving Cuba to safely complete and operate the plant - the US is effectively shooting itself in the foot. By doing everything it can to make sure that the Cuban plant isn't built, the US is only ensuring that cost-effectiveness and completion at any cost are the paramount in Cuba's considerations, at the expense of safety.
Yet elsewhere, the US is spending millions to make sure that similar Soviet-designed plants are as safe as possible. Overall, a rather naive approach by US legislators - not the first time and it won't be the last either.
(So, in a way, there is a capitalist conspiracy, but not where you were looking.)
But I digress. Cuba obviously isn't 100 percent wave powered and, frankly, it's never likely to be. Wave power stations cost money too and, if you've got chronic power shortage problems like Cuba has, they're far less cost-effective than the alternatives.
On the other hand, Islay is hoping that its wave power station may soon provide all the energy that it ever needs - a noble goal, well worthy of our praise and good wishes.
Re:interesting approach
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This doesn't even address the fact that comparing Gnutella users to the codebreakers in WW2 is a stretch, at best. Remember, those guys invented the computer in order to defeat Nazis. This is very different from sharing one's collection of Beck songs and downloading Simpsons episodes.
Not that I agree with them but a great many Gnutella users think that they're using it to defeat Nazis too. It's just that their definition of Nazis is based on greedy businessmen in Hollywood rather than fascist murderers in wartime Germany.
Oh, and by the way, the code breakers at Bletchley Park didn't invent the computer - Charles Babbage did that a great many years earlier.
Be arrested for circumventing protocols designed by the Ministry of Truth to facilitate 'recall' of books in need of 'correction'...
After all, the UK is Oceania, isn't it?
Doubleplus ungood, but thanks for playing. The UK is Airstrip One, part of Oceania, one of the three superstates together with Eastasia and Eurasia. Oceania includes the territories that oldthinkers know as North and South America, Britain, Australia, and the southern portions of Africa.
Please report to MiniLuv (the Ministry Of Love) for your malreporting and crimethinking against the Party and Ingsoc. For members of the Brotherhood, such as yourself, Room 101 awaits.
Remember, Big Brother loves you.
War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.
(Check out http://www.newspeakdictionary.com for more, including the full text of 1984.)
didn't see anything about completely one sided wars, like Iraq v US (round 1)
And there was me thinking that it was a coalition of countries vs Iraq. Only 12 years on and already it's being revised.
You remind me of a guy who I talked to on IRC a couple of months back who swore blind that the US was actively involved in World War II before Pearl Harbor forced its hand. Any documentary evidence I produced about the US policy of isolationism, etc was just dismissed as "commie propoganda".
The guy even went as far as saying that only US troops were involved in D-Day (all those British and Canadian troops must have crossed the Channel on a collective day trip) and that they marched into Berlin and ended the war in Europe too (neatly omitting the Russian contribution as well).
Oh, and if you think that a war that saw half a million US troops deployed half the way around the world is "low magnitude" then you've got a really strange idea of scale. Other than WWII, Korea and Vietnam, the Gulf War is easily the biggest conflict in which the US has played an significant part.
Bottom line: get the facts straight please.
Tron is a Disney product...
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...and we all know what Disney thinks of the rights of end-users, don't we?
There are countless games out there worthy of your entertainment dollars/pounds/yen. Do the right thing, boycott Disney, and buy one of those other games instead.
If you have to buy this game for nostalgia reasons (hey, I have fond memories of wasting countless childhood hours playing the original Tron arcade machine too) then wait a month or so after the game's release and buy a second-hand copy.
The "Lord Of The Rings" movie trilogy isn't your average Hollywood "gee-what-kind-of-ending-did-the-test-audiences-li ke-the-most?" film series. It's a pretty faithful (so far) movie adaptation of what's commonly regarded as the best book of the twentieth century.
The second book in the trilogy is called "The Two Towers". And the title isn't a prescient, Nostrodamus-like reference to the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center but (shock, horror) a reference to two, uh, towers, that appear in that book as Frodo and Sam continue on to Mordor and the rest of the fellowship take part in an assault on Isengard.
Now, unless I'm truly living in an Orwellian society (which, ironically, is how I perceive the revisionism that Hollywood seems to be obsessed with whenever it turns its hand to historically-based entertainment), those are the historical facts. (Unless, of course, the Ministry Of Truth truly has tracked down every copy of LOTR, had them destroyed and replaced with "corrected" copies that aren't as offensive to The Party. Who knows, this could have happened. It might explain why my copy of LOTR has gone AWOL.)
I can't vouch for him personally, but Peter Jackson strikes me as a man of integrity. In every interview I've read or seen his love of the original text and his desire to bring it to life as faithfully as possible is clear. And I very much doubt that he's going to presume to meddle with Tolkien's masterpiece by changing the title of the second film.
The irony that he'd even be asked to do so is dripping - is there any way the world of Tolkien could possibly be further away from the world of September 11th?
The Hollywood suits asking for a name change are probably the same ones that were so vocal in the aftermath of last year's tragedy, spouting (script-written?) lines about how they couldn't produce another violent movie after what had happened yet barely waiting more than a heartbeat before rubber stamping the release of movies like Black Hawk Down and Collateral Damage.
All this while the Israeli army, funded by the US tax payer ($4 billion of US military aid per year, total military expenditure $7 billion per year), murders people in their homes with US-built, US-supplied hardware while the Bush administration vetoes any attempt by the United Nations' Security Council to condemn Israel's actions.
(When Israel kills, the world complains but the US pretends that nothing's happened. Ditto when the US military kills allied personnel in "friendly fire" incidents.)
Change the title of "The Two Towers"? How about changing the damn record instead?
(Go ahead, mod this down. Like I give a damn about karma.)
Optical character recognition of text that's been scanned at optimum conditions (high quality scan of mint, original page of text), is hard enough. Even the best OCR packages available off the shelf are only 98-99% successful in these conditions, and that's for straightforward English text, which has comparitively few characters that are easily distinguishable and with no accents.
Many asian languages have character sets that are orders of magnitude harder to recognise, because there are so many more characters in each set and because there are so many more characters in each set that are similiar (which makes it harder to differentiate between them). A few such languages includes Japanese, Chinese, Hindu and Urdu.
Now recognition of near-perfect type is one thing. Recognition of an individual's pen strokes is another thing altogether.
One of the reasons why the Apple Newton PDA failed so miserably was its promise of usable handwriting recognition. Unfortunately, that promise turned out to be more a case of wishful thinking. Having to rewrite characters many times before the Newton would correctly interpret them was a big turn-off for potential Newton purchasers.
On the other hand, Palm got it right when it went with Grafitti. An easy to learn equivalent character set that emphasised fast and easy entry rather than slow and complex recognition.
I'm sure that there are Grafitti equivalents for many Asian languages (it's hard to imagine that Sony don't have a japanese one for their Clie range) but, again, the large character set problem doesn't disappear (although context sensitive recognition algorithms can help.)
Individual handwriting recognition technology for the masses may still be a pipe dream. Let's face it, we all know people that have trouble reading their own handwriting let alone that of other people! Yet we expect a PC to be able to handle such tasks at a reasonable speed? (60 words per minute is probably something in the order of 240-300 characters per minute.) Frankly, I just don't see it happening yet.
Bottom line: if you want fast, accurate pen recognition then your probably going to have to learn how to write grafitti or a similar.
Do you know who the company was? If not then they did not get hurt at all. None of what you said effects them if they can muzzle the employees before, during and after.
I wasn't trying to refer to the specific employer in this case, rather I was referring to employers in general.
But if you do want to get specific, it seems to me that my first and third points still apply, regardless of whether or not you or I know which short-sighted corporation we're talking about.
This kind of "we own you and everything you do" approach only hurts the employer in the long run. Here are a few reasons why:
1) It pisses off the company's current staff.
When an employer treats you as a piece of property then there's very little incentive to treat the company as anything other than a source of income. Why devote your life to the job when you get no respect back?
2) It hurts the company when it's recruiting.
A lot of jobs are filled by recommendation, word of mouth, etc. If your friend's constantly telling you how badly his employer's screwing him would you apply for a job there?
Or, if you were offered two similar jobs would you take the one that wants to own you a third of the time or the one that wants to own you all of the time?
3) It discourages staff from furthering their knowledge and experience.
Pop quiz: if you were the boss, which would you rather have?
a) coders who care are in it for only the money, who switch off at 5.00pm sharp and spend their evenings playing on a PS2; or b) coders who live and breathe code, who actively take part in open source development, learning new tricks and techniques in their own time and come to work with fresh ideas and more experience under their belt everyday.
Tough one, huh?
I'm amazed this company has the balls to treat it staff so badly. Let's face it, treating your most valuable employees as little more than street urchins, turning away potentially brilliant hires because they refused to be shackled 24/7 and discouraging your employees from broadening their programming horizons and skills is incredibly short-sighted.
Ultimately, company's that persue such restrictive terms of employment are only shooting themselves in the foot.
Even if they did go out of business I'd doubt you'd be left completely high and dry.
Given that it's shareware we're discussing here, odds are that, if the company went under/stopped product development indefinitely, then the software would be made freeware and the source code made readily available.
So, assuming that the company does the right thing by it's installed user base, even the going out of business scenario wouldn't be that bad.
maybe they shouldn't be so GULLIBLE to expect that someone would want to fork over money for something if they dont have to. if a business model relies on honesty, it's not gonna work in the year 2002.
Show me (and the authors) a distribution model that gets as much potential exposure with next to no marketing spend and perhaps I'll consider your argument.
Relying on the honesty of others might not be as profitable in 2002 as it was in 1952 but to say that it can't work at all is foolish. Ever heard of WinZip?
The way I see it, shareware authors shouldn't expect to turn a profit. They should just see being profitable as a nice perk.
Why shouldn't shareware authors expect to make a profit? Because you say so?
Shareware is a distribution model - you like it so you register it, recommend it to your friends, etc - nothing more, nothing less.
Too many people equate shareware with free, and those that resort to password cracks are the worst kind as they can't even use the "I just wanted to see if it was what I wanted" defence.
Sure, most people will take advantage of the situation and never register software that they decide to use beyond the trial period, but some people are more honest and will happily pony up $20 for a package that does the job they want done.
But saying that the authors, the people who invested their time and effort into code that other people benefit from, shouldn't expect to see a return on their work is downright unbelievable.
Take your data with you. Keep it with you at all times or put it somewhere more secure or less obvious than an open server.
Yes, it's not a perfect solution but it works 99 per cent of the time. And, if you're paranoid, you can always encrypt the files on your CDR/floppy/zip/Compact Flash card/USB key chain drive for further security.
Why not give your servers a geo-political theme by naming them after countries that the Bush administration has fucked over?
Obviously, you start with Afghanistan (which, coincidentally, is first amongst all nations when they are placed alphabetically), and work your way through Iraq, North Korea, Russia, China and anyone else who doesn't salute the flag and sing "God Bless America" on demand.
Of course, as abandoning US support for even a modest international plan to tackle global warming and protect the environment (the Kyoto agreement) was one of the first thing that George W Bush did in office, he's really fucked them all. Including America.
But hey, after he's nuked everyone and they've nuked back, our children and our grandchildren won't need clean air to breathe will they?
Kick them for using the most widely supported media format out there.
Hmmm. I'm not exactly armed with the latest media format usage figures (and, right now, I'm not exactly inclined to go looking for a reliable independent source that provides them), but I very much doubt that WMA is more popular than MP3 or WAV, or that WMV is more popular than MPEG or RM.
Care to provide any impartial hard evidence to back up that claim?
Just look at how many third party players support the various formats. And look at how many downloads out there use one of Microsoft's proprietary formats as opposed to one of the alternatives I mentioned.
Obviously, this is bad news for Intel but great great news for the industry in general.
Intel tried to push RAMBUS heavily. In fact, it tried to ram it down people's throats (no pun intended). For various reasons, not least of all cost, not too many people were happy with this state of affairs.
I can recall when Intel were pushing RAMBUS as the best thing since sliced bread and were denouncing DDR RAM as a pile of pants but now the company's been forced to perform a complete volte face.
Why does this matter? It matters because Intel, despite it's near total dominance of the desktop market, has been shifted from leading the herd to being forced to run with it. It just goes to prove, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink it.
Of course, all this doesn't change the fact that Intel is a major player, and will get its own way in lots of other areas but it's nice to see that it can't win 'em all.
Additionally, one fewer memory standard should help drive down the long-term cost of DDR RAM further (right now it's a twice what it was in November 2001 but still at least a third cheaper than March 2001).
Good news all round. Score one for the other guys.
Call me a troll if you want, but this is at least the third or fourth low footprint PC that has been featured on/. in the last couple of months of so.
And, as far as I can see, there is nothing special about this me-too box. It has no unique selling point at all - no low cost, no silent operation, no performance boost (relative to other mini PCs), no nada.
Now if there was something this box could do that other mini PCs couldn't do (especially those that have already been covered by/.), then I could see the point of posting this article. But, as it stands, this product is about as revolutionary as your grandma's apple pie.
Was it a real slow news day? Were there no better stories to submit? (I doubt it, as every other post seems to have at least one comment in which someone moans about the cool story that they submitted being rejected.)
Give us news for nerds. Give us stuff that matters. Don't give us re-runs.
(Sorry but I had to get it off my chest and it had to be said.)
Every business that I know that stuck with a single product has gone down the tubes.
Hmmm, last time I checked, Coca-Cola were doing just fine. And all they sell is flavoured fizzy water.
Of course, if they thought that their market was to disappear completely (or at least be greatly diminished), then they'd be just as scared as the networks and their friends are right now.
I agree that some sort of corporate evolution would be ideal, but is that likely? At best, it would mean the viewer paying more for their TV entertainment, likely by one of the following methods:
1. Some sort of PVR recording tax levied at the point of purchase, similar to that levied on blank media (audio and video cassettes, CD-Rs) in many countries; or
2. A pay-per-view mechanism, which would keep track of what you watch on your PVR and generate yet another monthly bill.
Personally, I don't like either alternative. I'd prefer a world where PVR recordings were treated no differently from VCR ones.
But let's get real here, that's not going to happen. It's only a matter of time before these companies start using their dollars on serious political lobbying to swing the situation back into their favour.
Buying a few politicians is a small price to pay for retaining your market. It's definitely a damn sight easier than evolving and finding a new business model as you suggest.
I agree with you that Jesse Owens achievement of winning four golds at those games was magnificent.
In my mind, Owens' shattering the myth of Aryan supremacy was perhaps the single greatest sporting moment in history - and I say that as a non-American.
However, that doesn't change the fact that the Nazis used those games as one big propaganda exercise and that, to it's shame, the world stood by and let it happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Please publish some sort of evidence to back up your claim about Cuba!
There are these cute little things that you find on many web pages called hyperlinks. If you followed the first one that I included in my posting then you'd have the evidence that you want.
Of course, you could try using your own initiative and perform your own web searches on Juragua, the IAEA, and Cuban power generation in general but I guess that would be too much to ask.
After all, if you can't be bothered to follow a simple link what are the odds that you'll fire up Google, Alta Vista, Yahoo or whatever to do any research of your own?
This development of alternative fuels powering large areas is indeed quite encourageing...
OK, I know you're trying to pass yourself off as CmdrTaco but can you spare us the obvious atrocious spelling mistakes please?
This is bullshit. Cuba has been hydrogen-fuel-cell powered for decades.
I don't know if it was your meant to troll, but troll you did.
Cuba may have made some efforts to use clean, renewable energy sources (wind, wave, solar) but it's also made considerable effort to use dirty, finite sources as well, including nuclear power.
The nuclear power plant at Juragua has been under construction since 1983. It's not yet been completed, so it's not up and running, but Cuba is still trying to get the plant productive.
Unsurprisingly, for what it calls "safety concerns", the US isn't too keen to see that happen - apparently, it's OK for the US to have nuclear power plants all over the country, nuclear powered ships and submarines and even to launch nuclear powered satellites but God forbid that some communists 200 miles off the coast of Florida should want to use nuclear power too.
It's true that these concerns aren't totally unfounded as the type of reactor that the plant uses (the Soviet-designed VVER-440) doesn't have an exemplorary track record but let's remember that while the USSR had Chernobyl, the US had Three Mile Island.
By withholding its funding to the International Atomic Energy Agency - an overly-aggressive and short-sighted attempt to pressurise that body into abandoning all assistance that its giving Cuba to safely complete and operate the plant - the US is effectively shooting itself in the foot. By doing everything it can to make sure that the Cuban plant isn't built, the US is only ensuring that cost-effectiveness and completion at any cost are the paramount in Cuba's considerations, at the expense of safety.
Yet elsewhere, the US is spending millions to make sure that similar Soviet-designed plants are as safe as possible. Overall, a rather naive approach by US legislators - not the first time and it won't be the last either.
(So, in a way, there is a capitalist conspiracy, but not where you were looking.)
But I digress. Cuba obviously isn't 100 percent wave powered and, frankly, it's never likely to be. Wave power stations cost money too and, if you've got chronic power shortage problems like Cuba has, they're far less cost-effective than the alternatives.
On the other hand, Islay is hoping that its wave power station may soon provide all the energy that it ever needs - a noble goal, well worthy of our praise and good wishes.
This doesn't even address the fact that comparing Gnutella users to the codebreakers in WW2 is a stretch, at best. Remember, those guys invented the computer in order to defeat Nazis. This is very different from sharing one's collection of Beck songs and downloading Simpsons episodes.
Not that I agree with them but a great many Gnutella users think that they're using it to defeat Nazis too. It's just that their definition of Nazis is based on greedy businessmen in Hollywood rather than fascist murderers in wartime Germany.
Oh, and by the way, the code breakers at Bletchley Park didn't invent the computer - Charles Babbage did that a great many years earlier.
Be arrested for circumventing protocols designed by the Ministry of Truth to facilitate 'recall' of books in need of 'correction'...
After all, the UK is Oceania, isn't it?
Doubleplus ungood, but thanks for playing. The UK is Airstrip One, part of Oceania, one of the three superstates together with Eastasia and Eurasia. Oceania includes the territories that oldthinkers know as North and South America, Britain, Australia, and the southern portions of Africa.
Please report to MiniLuv (the Ministry Of Love) for your malreporting and crimethinking against the Party and Ingsoc. For members of the Brotherhood, such as yourself, Room 101 awaits.
Remember, Big Brother loves you.
War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.
(Check out http://www.newspeakdictionary.com for more, including the full text of 1984.)
Incidentally, the DUL is currently stopping CmdrTaco from directly emailing one of the Slash coders.
Lucky Slash coder. That's one less email sender who's message he'll have to decipher from proto-Pigeon English to the real thing...
didn't see anything about completely one sided wars, like Iraq v US (round 1)
And there was me thinking that it was a coalition of countries vs Iraq. Only 12 years on and already it's being revised.
You remind me of a guy who I talked to on IRC a couple of months back who swore blind that the US was actively involved in World War II before Pearl Harbor forced its hand. Any documentary evidence I produced about the US policy of isolationism, etc was just dismissed as "commie propoganda".
The guy even went as far as saying that only US troops were involved in D-Day (all those British and Canadian troops must have crossed the Channel on a collective day trip) and that they marched into Berlin and ended the war in Europe too (neatly omitting the Russian contribution as well).
Oh, and if you think that a war that saw half a million US troops deployed half the way around the world is "low magnitude" then you've got a really strange idea of scale. Other than WWII, Korea and Vietnam, the Gulf War is easily the biggest conflict in which the US has played an significant part.
Bottom line: get the facts straight please.
...and we all know what Disney thinks of the rights of end-users, don't we?
There are countless games out there worthy of your entertainment dollars/pounds/yen. Do the right thing, boycott Disney, and buy one of those other games instead.
If you have to buy this game for nostalgia reasons (hey, I have fond memories of wasting countless childhood hours playing the original Tron arcade machine too) then wait a month or so after the game's release and buy a second-hand copy.
Silly boy, haven't you learnt yet that Microsoft software never contain bugs, only "undocumented features".
Sorry, but I think you've been had there.
i ke-the-most?" film series. It's a pretty faithful (so far) movie adaptation of what's commonly regarded as the best book of the twentieth century.
The "Lord Of The Rings" movie trilogy isn't your average Hollywood "gee-what-kind-of-ending-did-the-test-audiences-l
The second book in the trilogy is called "The Two Towers". And the title isn't a prescient, Nostrodamus-like reference to the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center but (shock, horror) a reference to two, uh, towers, that appear in that book as Frodo and Sam continue on to Mordor and the rest of the fellowship take part in an assault on Isengard.
Now, unless I'm truly living in an Orwellian society (which, ironically, is how I perceive the revisionism that Hollywood seems to be obsessed with whenever it turns its hand to historically-based entertainment), those are the historical facts. (Unless, of course, the Ministry Of Truth truly has tracked down every copy of LOTR, had them destroyed and replaced with "corrected" copies that aren't as offensive to The Party. Who knows, this could have happened. It might explain why my copy of LOTR has gone AWOL.)
I can't vouch for him personally, but Peter Jackson strikes me as a man of integrity. In every interview I've read or seen his love of the original text and his desire to bring it to life as faithfully as possible is clear. And I very much doubt that he's going to presume to meddle with Tolkien's masterpiece by changing the title of the second film.
The irony that he'd even be asked to do so is dripping - is there any way the world of Tolkien could possibly be further away from the world of September 11th?
The Hollywood suits asking for a name change are probably the same ones that were so vocal in the aftermath of last year's tragedy, spouting (script-written?) lines about how they couldn't produce another violent movie after what had happened yet barely waiting more than a heartbeat before rubber stamping the release of movies like Black Hawk Down and Collateral Damage.
All this while the Israeli army, funded by the US tax payer ($4 billion of US military aid per year, total military expenditure $7 billion per year), murders people in their homes with US-built, US-supplied hardware while the Bush administration vetoes any attempt by the United Nations' Security Council to condemn Israel's actions.
(When Israel kills, the world complains but the US pretends that nothing's happened. Ditto when the US military kills allied personnel in "friendly fire" incidents.)
Change the title of "The Two Towers"? How about changing the damn record instead?
(Go ahead, mod this down. Like I give a damn about karma.)
Optical character recognition of text that's been scanned at optimum conditions (high quality scan of mint, original page of text), is hard enough. Even the best OCR packages available off the shelf are only 98-99% successful in these conditions, and that's for straightforward English text, which has comparitively few characters that are easily distinguishable and with no accents.
Many asian languages have character sets that are orders of magnitude harder to recognise, because there are so many more characters in each set and because there are so many more characters in each set that are similiar (which makes it harder to differentiate between them). A few such languages includes Japanese, Chinese, Hindu and Urdu.
Now recognition of near-perfect type is one thing. Recognition of an individual's pen strokes is another thing altogether.
One of the reasons why the Apple Newton PDA failed so miserably was its promise of usable handwriting recognition. Unfortunately, that promise turned out to be more a case of wishful thinking. Having to rewrite characters many times before the Newton would correctly interpret them was a big turn-off for potential Newton purchasers.
On the other hand, Palm got it right when it went with Grafitti. An easy to learn equivalent character set that emphasised fast and easy entry rather than slow and complex recognition.
I'm sure that there are Grafitti equivalents for many Asian languages (it's hard to imagine that Sony don't have a japanese one for their Clie range) but, again, the large character set problem doesn't disappear (although context sensitive recognition algorithms can help.)
Individual handwriting recognition technology for the masses may still be a pipe dream. Let's face it, we all know people that have trouble reading their own handwriting let alone that of other people! Yet we expect a PC to be able to handle such tasks at a reasonable speed? (60 words per minute is probably something in the order of 240-300 characters per minute.) Frankly, I just don't see it happening yet.
Bottom line: if you want fast, accurate pen recognition then your probably going to have to learn how to write grafitti or a similar.
...'cos the common abbreviation for a Compaq Linux Impact Team would be interesting.
/. readers who have no Y chromosone and/or who don't appreciate South Park-style humour.)
(Apologies in advance to all
Do you know who the company was? If not then they did not get hurt at all. None of what you said effects them if they can muzzle the employees before, during and after.
I wasn't trying to refer to the specific employer in this case, rather I was referring to employers in general.
But if you do want to get specific, it seems to me that my first and third points still apply, regardless of whether or not you or I know which short-sighted corporation we're talking about.
This kind of "we own you and everything you do" approach only hurts the employer in the long run. Here are a few reasons why:
1) It pisses off the company's current staff.
When an employer treats you as a piece of property then there's very little incentive to treat the company as anything other than a source of income. Why devote your life to the job when you get no respect back?
2) It hurts the company when it's recruiting.
A lot of jobs are filled by recommendation, word of mouth, etc. If your friend's constantly telling you how badly his employer's screwing him would you apply for a job there?
Or, if you were offered two similar jobs would you take the one that wants to own you a third of the time or the one that wants to own you all of the time?
3) It discourages staff from furthering their knowledge and experience.
Pop quiz: if you were the boss, which would you rather have?
a) coders who care are in it for only the money, who switch off at 5.00pm sharp and spend their evenings playing on a PS2; or
b) coders who live and breathe code, who actively take part in open source development, learning new tricks and techniques in their own time and come to work with fresh ideas and more experience under their belt everyday.
Tough one, huh?
I'm amazed this company has the balls to treat it staff so badly. Let's face it, treating your most valuable employees as little more than street urchins, turning away potentially brilliant hires because they refused to be shackled 24/7 and discouraging your employees from broadening their programming horizons and skills is incredibly short-sighted.
Ultimately, company's that persue such restrictive terms of employment are only shooting themselves in the foot.
Even if they did go out of business I'd doubt you'd be left completely high and dry.
Given that it's shareware we're discussing here, odds are that, if the company went under/stopped product development indefinitely, then the software would be made freeware and the source code made readily available.
So, assuming that the company does the right thing by it's installed user base, even the going out of business scenario wouldn't be that bad.
maybe they shouldn't be so GULLIBLE to expect that someone would want to fork over money for something if they dont have to. if a business model relies on honesty, it's not gonna work in the year 2002.
Show me (and the authors) a distribution model that gets as much potential exposure with next to no marketing spend and perhaps I'll consider your argument.
Relying on the honesty of others might not be as profitable in 2002 as it was in 1952 but to say that it can't work at all is foolish. Ever heard of WinZip?
The way I see it, shareware authors shouldn't expect to turn a profit. They should just see being profitable as a nice perk.
Why shouldn't shareware authors expect to make a profit? Because you say so?
Shareware is a distribution model - you like it so you register it, recommend it to your friends, etc - nothing more, nothing less.
Too many people equate shareware with free, and those that resort to password cracks are the worst kind as they can't even use the "I just wanted to see if it was what I wanted" defence.
Sure, most people will take advantage of the situation and never register software that they decide to use beyond the trial period, but some people are more honest and will happily pony up $20 for a package that does the job they want done.
But saying that the authors, the people who invested their time and effort into code that other people benefit from, shouldn't expect to see a return on their work is downright unbelievable.
Take your data with you. Keep it with you at all times or put it somewhere more secure or less obvious than an open server.
Yes, it's not a perfect solution but it works 99 per cent of the time. And, if you're paranoid, you can always encrypt the files on your CDR/floppy/zip/Compact Flash card/USB key chain drive for further security.
Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.
Why not give your servers a geo-political theme by naming them after countries that the Bush administration has fucked over?
Obviously, you start with Afghanistan (which, coincidentally, is first amongst all nations when they are placed alphabetically), and work your way through Iraq, North Korea, Russia, China and anyone else who doesn't salute the flag and sing "God Bless America" on demand.
Of course, as abandoning US support for even a modest international plan to tackle global warming and protect the environment (the Kyoto agreement) was one of the first thing that George W Bush did in office, he's really fucked them all. Including America.
But hey, after he's nuked everyone and they've nuked back, our children and our grandchildren won't need clean air to breathe will they?
Kick them for using the most widely supported media format out there.
Hmmm. I'm not exactly armed with the latest media format usage figures (and, right now, I'm not exactly inclined to go looking for a reliable independent source that provides them), but I very much doubt that WMA is more popular than MP3 or WAV, or that WMV is more popular than MPEG or RM.
Care to provide any impartial hard evidence to back up that claim?
Just look at how many third party players support the various formats. And look at how many downloads out there use one of Microsoft's proprietary formats as opposed to one of the alternatives I mentioned.
Maybe, just maybe, you're wrong.
Obviously, this is bad news for Intel but great great news for the industry in general.
Intel tried to push RAMBUS heavily. In fact, it tried to ram it down people's throats (no pun intended). For various reasons, not least of all cost, not too many people were happy with this state of affairs.
I can recall when Intel were pushing RAMBUS as the best thing since sliced bread and were denouncing DDR RAM as a pile of pants but now the company's been forced to perform a complete volte face.
Why does this matter? It matters because Intel, despite it's near total dominance of the desktop market, has been shifted from leading the herd to being forced to run with it. It just goes to prove, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink it.
Of course, all this doesn't change the fact that Intel is a major player, and will get its own way in lots of other areas but it's nice to see that it can't win 'em all.
Additionally, one fewer memory standard should help drive down the long-term cost of DDR RAM further (right now it's a twice what it was in November 2001 but still at least a third cheaper than March 2001).
Good news all round. Score one for the other guys.
You never know, they might find some one day...
Call me a troll if you want, but this is at least the third or fourth low footprint PC that has been featured on /. in the last couple of months of so.
/.), then I could see the point of posting this article. But, as it stands, this product is about as revolutionary as your grandma's apple pie.
And, as far as I can see, there is nothing special about this me-too box. It has no unique selling point at all - no low cost, no silent operation, no performance boost (relative to other mini PCs), no nada.
Now if there was something this box could do that other mini PCs couldn't do (especially those that have already been covered by
Was it a real slow news day? Were there no better stories to submit? (I doubt it, as every other post seems to have at least one comment in which someone moans about the cool story that they submitted being rejected.)
Give us news for nerds. Give us stuff that matters. Don't give us re-runs.
(Sorry but I had to get it off my chest and it had to be said.)
Every business that I know that stuck with a single product has gone down the tubes.
Hmmm, last time I checked, Coca-Cola were doing just fine. And all they sell is flavoured fizzy water.
Of course, if they thought that their market was to disappear completely (or at least be greatly diminished), then they'd be just as scared as the networks and their friends are right now.
I agree that some sort of corporate evolution would be ideal, but is that likely? At best, it would mean the viewer paying more for their TV entertainment, likely by one of the following methods:
1. Some sort of PVR recording tax levied at the point of purchase, similar to that levied on blank media (audio and video cassettes, CD-Rs) in many countries; or
2. A pay-per-view mechanism, which would keep track of what you watch on your PVR and generate yet another monthly bill.
Personally, I don't like either alternative. I'd prefer a world where PVR recordings were treated no differently from VCR ones.
But let's get real here, that's not going to happen. It's only a matter of time before these companies start using their dollars on serious political lobbying to swing the situation back into their favour.
Buying a few politicians is a small price to pay for retaining your market. It's definitely a damn sight easier than evolving and finding a new business model as you suggest.
I agree with you that Jesse Owens achievement of winning four golds at those games was magnificent.
In my mind, Owens' shattering the myth of Aryan supremacy was perhaps the single greatest sporting moment in history - and I say that as a non-American.
However, that doesn't change the fact that the Nazis used those games as one big propaganda exercise and that, to it's shame, the world stood by and let it happen.