> Apple isn't forcing everyone with a web page to give up 30% for any purchase from an iPad.
Not yet, but it is the next logical step.
Step three is to charge 30% on anything an iPad owner buys, whether through the iPad or not. After all, they could be inspired by an ad seen on the iPad...
This is where we were decades ago. In the 70's the western world had a (trial) Thorium pile reactor, an (experimental) HTR reactor, and there were plans for a lithium cooled reactor (with some valid safety and material concerns).
All of these projects died a slow death. Some say because they do not breed plutonium, some say because the they were not profitable, some say because the industry is conservative and sticks with the first design that works.
I have no doubt that this is an excellent opportunity for China. And we have just ourselves to blame for it.
> I'm not saying they are the best, but they are big.
Just like the McAfee virus scanner, then. It uses 300 MB of RAM if things are going well, but it frequently balloons upwards of 1 GB, sometimes even running out of address space and crashing. This problem is known since around 2008, and it is amazing that McAfee was not able (or willing?) to fix it in the mean time.
> because if its in the game mechanics, its not cheating.
I could be wrong, but I thought that is a typical conclusion for an autistic person. So can you cheat without intending to cheat? Can you cheat without even understanding the concept of cheating? I would say no.
In any case they may have to answer a non-discrimination case.
I'm sorry, but you only get so many chances. KDE has used theirs up.
Even worse, they also said it about KDE 4.1. And KDE 4.1.3 really p*ssed me off by being a terrible incoherent and buggy scaffolding.
With KDE 4.2 things did indeed improve, and some early adopters (such as myself) were actually happy with it.
Although I still miss the good old days when KDE was neat and nimble, and you could run it on all your systems, even a 5 year old laptop. Nowadays even XFCE has gotten really fat, and my only resort for old hardware is LXDE. Which incidentally is a lot like KDE 1, one of my all time favourite pieces of software.
Yes, I figure that out pretty quickly. In the beginning, all the telephone links seemed useful, but soon they get just annoying.
wait, let me fix it for myself
toolbars are junk anyway.
Not necessarily. Showing the toolbar is useless, yes. But you could hide the toolbar, and still benefit from its functionality. If there is any, that is.
Re:Making it just as heavy as Gnome and KDE now?
on
Xfce 4.8 Released
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· Score: 1
That has already happened. I tried Xubuntu 10.04 on an old laptop, and it was terribly slow. Slower than KDE3 (Trinity) in fact.
So I had to move on to Lubuntu with LXDE. It is lightning fast and very small now, but even there you have to be careful not to pull in to many Gnome dependencies. Unfortunately I need Nautilus, because I really like it, and it is the only file manager that Dropbox will cooperate with.
It's hard to think how Microsoft can make the next Windows better from Windows 7.
No, I think that is easy: a decent update system would be nice. One that does not have to scan all the files to figure out what is installed, but one that uses a database, like any other package system I know. And it should include support for third party applications. There, that should be enough to market Windows 6.2 as Windows 8.
The pharmaceutical industry is easily one of the most corrupt industries known to man. Perhaps some defense contractors are worse, but if so, then just barely. It's got just the right combination of billions of dollars at play, strong dependency on the part of many of its customers, a basis on intellectual property, financial leverage over most of the rest of the medical industry, and a strong disincentive against actually ever curing anything since it cannot make a profit from healthy people.
But it also takes a regulator more interesting in politics and appearances that fact to complete the arena. How many useful drugs used for decades all around the world are still banned in the US? And how many drugs were approved because they seemed harmless enough, not because a significant positive effect has been demonstrated? And how many drugs are still approved, even if independent studies have found no beneficial effects whatsoever?
The pharmaceutical industry has one goal, and one goal only: playing the regulator to their advantage. They are good at this game, and the regulator is not.
We're not talking about IE6, and this isn't 2003. It's time to update your prejudices. IE9 is a decent standards-conforming browser.
You say that, but even compared with the current generation of browsers, IE9 is usually ranked towards the bottom, and it is not even released yet. Once that happens, it will have to compete with Firefox 4, Opera 12 (I guess) and Chrome developing at insane speeds. Microsoft has promised to catch up with IE7, and again with IE8, and again with IE9. But it seems that is all they are doing: playing catch up.
That would be close to the top of my list. You need at least two levels: minor fixes, and major upgrades. Fixes should be minimal, make the system strictly better, and not get in the way of things.
Java is the example of how not to do it: 1.6.0u23 - and upping the last digit has often introduced new features and broken other things (plus the installer is extremely unpredictable). Adobe gets at least the version numbers right, but their upgrade path is often a miracle. Firefox gets it right, most of the time.
It really is. You can undercut Dell there, because you are already on site, plus you can keep a stock of spare parts or PCs. But there are hidden costs associated with it, and you have to face them.
For example you can get all PCs equipped with removable hard disks. If one falls, you just put a spare on in place, pop in the hard disk, and then you have time to sort out what is broken. (Mind the software, some licenses don't like motherboard IDs changing etc...). That is a major cost saver.
Plus once you get rid of the Dell service, you can buy upgrades such as RAM or CPU for (trusted!) third parties. Dell uses long term contracts, you can access the spot market, and use the differential to again save money.
But you still need a good source for new PCs, and Dell is pretty much as good as any. Just make sure that the specs are what you want - big companies have a tendency to shift what they have, not what you want.
> Though adobe in this one looks like they deserve to be slapped around a bit, if the conjecture is accurate.
Adobe deserve to be slapped around a bit (and then a bit more). Period.
Otherwise I think the problem is (again) the BIOS. It only loads the 1st sector to boot, when 63 sectors (or 2048 with EFI) are reserved. Back in the old days you could just fit some FAT16 code in there to find the DOS image - but only at the expense of error handling. Nowadays you have to load the next stage from a fixed position - and the only position that is certainly fixed are the other 62 sectors. So they are the logical place for a boot loader.
You could add a boot partition, but with only 4 partitions available, that would use up a very limited resource. And I guess even if you put a boot partition into the first 63 sectors (which is now perfectly possible), Adobe would still overwrite it (and Windows would possibly freak out).
> I've always been curious how penalties like this are judged and how they decide on a penalty. For instance, what if I put someone in harms way but other circumstances which were out of my control then contributed to the outcome?
The key question is what you did was legal or illegal. If it was legal (which is of course debatable), you are in the clear. If it is illegal, but some other illegal action also contributed, the blame is split between both.
> it's lack of support for modern platforms like x64 (which I might remind folks, have been around for a decade and we're only now seeing support)
Where are you "seeings support"? As far as I know, Adobe just terminated what little support there was: the test release of Flash 10.0 for Linux/x64 - which has known serious security issues. Since I run Linux/x64, I am not without Flash support now - unless I start a 32bit version of Firefox.
Adobe have demonstrated time and time again that they do not know how to make software. So they should just get out of that market.
> They ramped up vaccine production as fast as they possibly could, IN CASE by the time it was available, the virus would be still going gangbusters.
But they were too late. Swine flue peaked after the return to school in late summer (no surprise there), and the vaccine was not available until December or January in most places. Had this flu been serious, we would all be dead now (well, not all, but 10% or so).
So this was an epic fail on ever so many levels. Time for a tax on pharmacology companies to pay for this.
> That said, Apple bitch slapping the shit out of Flash has knocked a little sense into their heads.
How so? As far as I can tell Flash installs and upgrades are still every bit as unpredictable as they used to be. Google Chrome may actually be on to something by including it in the browser, but that is not exactly Adobe's achievement, is it?
And let's not forget that there is still a big gaping 0 day (or -7 day) hole in Acrobat - which seems to be getting the norm rather than the exception.
The 64bit plugin was discontinued without alternative. Sure you can run an old beta, but it also has known security issues.
So how exactly is Adobe making any progress? The software sucks more than ever.
> I went to a catholic school many years ago. They taught evolution with "enhancements". One was the de'Chardin theory that evolution was teleological, that is, goal-directed toward perfection. Is was their attempt to reconcile evolution and religion.
Yes, but that is the catholic church. They may represent a pretty extreme view, but they are trying very hard to be consistent. The news article however is about evangelical churches, which typically care a lot more about impact than about consistency.
Otherwise they would have noticed that creationisms has a massive religious problem. If god created the universe with all the traces of evolution, you have to wonder why god would do that. And the best way to find out is to study evolution - at least that is the obvious answer.
The argument about de'Chardin is one that comes up, and I think it is a very interest one. The ingredients of evolution are goal-less, but the resulting system behaves "as if" it has a goal. Compare that to a creature that behaves "as if" sentient - and you can find very interesting philosophical questions.
I think any PDF viewer that is developed as such is better than Acrobat Reader. The problem is that Acrobat Reader is not a cut down version of the full Acrobat, but a actually it is an extended version of Acrobat. It can still do pretty much anything Acrobat does, but it has additional restrictions on when you can do things and what you can save. So it is no surprise that it inherits all the problems, too...
If I have a choice, I use Foxit or okular - both do the job just fine.
That feature is missing for ages now. One tab with bad Javascript can slow everything down, because Firefox still has neither multithreading nor separate processes for each tab. Most other browsers are ahead there.
Nationality is an interesting issue. Not only can it change, but you can also have several nationalities. And since laws governing names are national laws, you could be known under different names for your different nationalities. How would you cope with that?
> When folks bitch "This is slooow" because a program takes a whole 8 seconds to load, I just wish I still had one of my old 8Mhz DOS boxes
It is slow. Home computers would "boot" in a split second. Turbo Pascal 3.0 took maybe 5 seconds to load from floppy disk, and then it was lightning fast. Modern development environments are dead slow by comparison. Those were the good old efficient 8 bit days, when bloat was not generally tolerated.
> provide 1 GB per month and then if you want additional throughput, charge about 10 cents per extra gigabyte.
That would be reasonable. Unfortunately, they tend to charge 10 cents per extra megabyte - so the second gigabyte sets you back 100 bucks! I am with the skeptics here: another company not delivering what they promised.
And what happens to existing contract? Maybe I just bought a subsidised iPhone - and due to the change of terms I can walk out of the contract? Neat!
Slashdot Mirror
Well yes, but it also shows that he is a better mathematician than a businessman.
If you really want to make profit, you write an app to do the math, and sell it for 50 bucks. No hassle, and still a good share of the profit. :-)
(Of course there is some doubt about the legality, and about sustainability...)
> Apple isn't forcing everyone with a web page to give up 30% for any purchase from an iPad.
Not yet, but it is the next logical step.
Step three is to charge 30% on anything an iPad owner buys, whether through the iPad or not. After all, they could be inspired by an ad seen on the iPad...
If it uses only 5W, why does it get so hot and blow up? Something does not add up here.
And my PC, even with a DVB-S card, only uses 55 watt during light use, probably less once the GPU powers down. A laptop/netbook would use even less.
This is where we were decades ago. In the 70's the western world had a (trial) Thorium pile reactor, an (experimental) HTR reactor, and there were plans for a lithium cooled reactor (with some valid safety and material concerns).
All of these projects died a slow death. Some say because they do not breed plutonium, some say because the they were not profitable, some say because the industry is conservative and sticks with the first design that works.
I have no doubt that this is an excellent opportunity for China. And we have just ourselves to blame for it.
> I'm not saying they are the best, but they are big.
Just like the McAfee virus scanner, then. It uses 300 MB of RAM if things are going well, but it frequently balloons upwards of 1 GB, sometimes even running out of address space and crashing. This problem is known since around 2008, and it is amazing that McAfee was not able (or willing?) to fix it in the mean time.
> because if its in the game mechanics, its not cheating.
I could be wrong, but I thought that is a typical conclusion for an autistic person. So can you cheat without intending to cheat? Can you cheat without even understanding the concept of cheating? I would say no.
In any case they may have to answer a non-discrimination case.
They said this about KDE 4.2. They were wrong.
They said this about KDE 4.3. They were wrong.
I'm sorry, but you only get so many chances. KDE has used theirs up.
Even worse, they also said it about KDE 4.1. And KDE 4.1.3 really p*ssed me off by being a terrible incoherent and buggy scaffolding.
With KDE 4.2 things did indeed improve, and some early adopters (such as myself) were actually happy with it.
Although I still miss the good old days when KDE was neat and nimble, and you could run it on all your systems, even a 5 year old laptop. Nowadays even XFCE has gotten really fat, and my only resort for old hardware is LXDE. Which incidentally is a lot like KDE 1, one of my all time favourite pieces of software.
the skype toolbar is junk anyway.
Yes, I figure that out pretty quickly. In the beginning, all the telephone links seemed useful, but soon they get just annoying.
wait, let me fix it for myself
toolbars are junk anyway.
Not necessarily. Showing the toolbar is useless, yes. But you could hide the toolbar, and still benefit from its functionality. If there is any, that is.
That has already happened. I tried Xubuntu 10.04 on an old laptop, and it was terribly slow. Slower than KDE3 (Trinity) in fact.
So I had to move on to Lubuntu with LXDE. It is lightning fast and very small now, but even there you have to be careful not to pull in to many Gnome dependencies. Unfortunately I need Nautilus, because I really like it, and it is the only file manager that Dropbox will cooperate with.
It's hard to think how Microsoft can make the next Windows better from Windows 7.
No, I think that is easy: a decent update system would be nice. One that does not have to scan all the files to figure out what is installed, but one that uses a database, like any other package system I know. And it should include support for third party applications. There, that should be enough to market Windows 6.2 as Windows 8.
The pharmaceutical industry is easily one of the most corrupt industries known to man. Perhaps some defense contractors are worse, but if so, then just barely. It's got just the right combination of billions of dollars at play, strong dependency on the part of many of its customers, a basis on intellectual property, financial leverage over most of the rest of the medical industry, and a strong disincentive against actually ever curing anything since it cannot make a profit from healthy people.
But it also takes a regulator more interesting in politics and appearances that fact to complete the arena. How many useful drugs used for decades all around the world are still banned in the US? And how many drugs were approved because they seemed harmless enough, not because a significant positive effect has been demonstrated? And how many drugs are still approved, even if independent studies have found no beneficial effects whatsoever?
The pharmaceutical industry has one goal, and one goal only: playing the regulator to their advantage. They are good at this game, and the regulator is not.
We're not talking about IE6, and this isn't 2003. It's time to update your prejudices. IE9 is a decent standards-conforming browser.
You say that, but even compared with the current generation of browsers, IE9 is usually ranked towards the bottom, and it is not even released yet. Once that happens, it will have to compete with Firefox 4, Opera 12 (I guess) and Chrome developing at insane speeds. Microsoft has promised to catch up with IE7, and again with IE8, and again with IE9. But it seems that is all they are doing: playing catch up.
That would be close to the top of my list. You need at least two levels: minor fixes, and major upgrades. Fixes should be minimal, make the system strictly better, and not get in the way of things.
Java is the example of how not to do it: 1.6.0u23 - and upping the last digit has often introduced new features and broken other things (plus the installer is extremely unpredictable). Adobe gets at least the version numbers right, but their upgrade path is often a miracle. Firefox gets it right, most of the time.
It really is. You can undercut Dell there, because you are already on site, plus you can keep a stock of spare parts or PCs. But there are hidden costs associated with it, and you have to face them.
For example you can get all PCs equipped with removable hard disks. If one falls, you just put a spare on in place, pop in the hard disk, and then you have time to sort out what is broken. (Mind the software, some licenses don't like motherboard IDs changing etc...). That is a major cost saver.
Plus once you get rid of the Dell service, you can buy upgrades such as RAM or CPU for (trusted!) third parties. Dell uses long term contracts, you can access the spot market, and use the differential to again save money.
But you still need a good source for new PCs, and Dell is pretty much as good as any. Just make sure that the specs are what you want - big companies have a tendency to shift what they have, not what you want.
> Though adobe in this one looks like they deserve to be slapped around a bit, if the conjecture is accurate.
Adobe deserve to be slapped around a bit (and then a bit more). Period.
Otherwise I think the problem is (again) the BIOS. It only loads the 1st sector to boot, when 63 sectors (or 2048 with EFI) are reserved. Back in the old days you could just fit some FAT16 code in there to find the DOS image - but only at the expense of error handling. Nowadays you have to load the next stage from a fixed position - and the only position that is certainly fixed are the other 62 sectors. So they are the logical place for a boot loader.
You could add a boot partition, but with only 4 partitions available, that would use up a very limited resource. And I guess even if you put a boot partition into the first 63 sectors (which is now perfectly possible), Adobe would still overwrite it (and Windows would possibly freak out).
> I've always been curious how penalties like this are judged and how they decide on a penalty. For instance, what if I put someone in harms way but other circumstances which were out of my control then contributed to the outcome?
The key question is what you did was legal or illegal. If it was legal (which is of course debatable), you are in the clear. If it is illegal, but some other illegal action also contributed, the blame is split between both.
> it's lack of support for modern platforms like x64 (which I might remind folks, have been around for a decade and we're only now seeing support)
Where are you "seeings support"? As far as I know, Adobe just terminated what little support there was: the test release of Flash 10.0 for Linux/x64 - which has known serious security issues. Since I run Linux/x64, I am not without Flash support now - unless I start a 32bit version of Firefox.
Adobe have demonstrated time and time again that they do not know how to make software. So they should just get out of that market.
> They ramped up vaccine production as fast as they possibly could, IN CASE by the time it was available, the virus would be still going gangbusters.
But they were too late. Swine flue peaked after the return to school in late summer (no surprise there), and the vaccine was not available until December or January in most places. Had this flu been serious, we would all be dead now (well, not all, but 10% or so).
So this was an epic fail on ever so many levels. Time for a tax on pharmacology companies to pay for this.
> That said, Apple bitch slapping the shit out of Flash has knocked a little sense into their heads.
How so? As far as I can tell Flash installs and upgrades are still every bit as unpredictable as they used to be. Google Chrome may actually be on to something by including it in the browser, but that is not exactly Adobe's achievement, is it?
And let's not forget that there is still a big gaping 0 day (or -7 day) hole in Acrobat - which seems to be getting the norm rather than the exception.
The 64bit plugin was discontinued without alternative. Sure you can run an old beta, but it also has known security issues.
So how exactly is Adobe making any progress? The software sucks more than ever.
> I went to a catholic school many years ago. They taught evolution with "enhancements". One was the de'Chardin theory that evolution was teleological, that is, goal-directed toward perfection. Is was their attempt to reconcile evolution and religion.
Yes, but that is the catholic church. They may represent a pretty extreme view, but they are trying very hard to be consistent. The news article however is about evangelical churches, which typically care a lot more about impact than about consistency.
Otherwise they would have noticed that creationisms has a massive religious problem. If god created the universe with all the traces of evolution, you have to wonder why god would do that. And the best way to find out is to study evolution - at least that is the obvious answer.
The argument about de'Chardin is one that comes up, and I think it is a very interest one. The ingredients of evolution are goal-less, but the resulting system behaves "as if" it has a goal. Compare that to a creature that behaves "as if" sentient - and you can find very interesting philosophical questions.
I think any PDF viewer that is developed as such is better than Acrobat Reader. The problem is that Acrobat Reader is not a cut down version of the full Acrobat, but a actually it is an extended version of Acrobat. It can still do pretty much anything Acrobat does, but it has additional restrictions on when you can do things and what you can save. So it is no surprise that it inherits all the problems, too...
If I have a choice, I use Foxit or okular - both do the job just fine.
That feature is missing for ages now. One tab with bad Javascript can slow everything down, because Firefox still has neither multithreading nor separate processes for each tab. Most other browsers are ahead there.
Nationality is an interesting issue. Not only can it change, but you can also have several nationalities. And since laws governing names are national laws, you could be known under different names for your different nationalities. How would you cope with that?
> When folks bitch "This is slooow" because a program takes a whole 8 seconds to load, I just wish I still had one of my old 8Mhz DOS boxes
It is slow. Home computers would "boot" in a split second. Turbo Pascal 3.0 took maybe 5 seconds to load from floppy disk, and then it was lightning fast. Modern development environments are dead slow by comparison. Those were the good old efficient 8 bit days, when bloat was not generally tolerated.
> provide 1 GB per month and then if you want additional throughput, charge about 10 cents per extra gigabyte.
That would be reasonable. Unfortunately, they tend to charge 10 cents per extra megabyte - so the second gigabyte sets you back 100 bucks! I am with the skeptics here: another company not delivering what they promised.
And what happens to existing contract? Maybe I just bought a subsidised iPhone - and due to the change of terms I can walk out of the contract? Neat!