$10/year isn't bad, except I re-read books intermittently. I'll read a book, shelve it for a few years, and re-read it when there's nothing new that peaks my interest. Under this model, I'm paying $10 essentially every time I read it. Also, Kindles can't handle rich media, and they're still overpriced (and the black on dark grey text looks horrible). Reading a web site on my iPhone is a masochistic endeavor. Call me a luddite if you must, but I prefer paper.
I guess the question is what, exactly, are you paying for?
If you just want to be able to re-read the book again, you can probably download it for future reference. It's a web page. Just grab the HTML (if there isn't an epub download offered).
If you want the whole social media/supplemental content thing... Well, yes, you'd need to pay for that again. But that content will have changed. That's the whole point - to make the novel more dynamic and involved than a pile of printed pages. If you wanted to read the latest edition of a book you'd previously purchased, you'd probably have to pay for that again as well.
No, the kindle can't handle rich media... But neither can paper. Again, what is it that you want?
If you want the whole social media/supplemental content thing - use a computer. A netbook, a laptop, a desktop, whatever. If you want a printed paper analog, use a kindle or a nook or print the thing out.
So you're saying I should buy a $500 iPad and pay $10/year to read a website novel that I might not even like?
You don't need an iPad. You can get a kindle or nook for less than $200. A very large number of people are using laptops as their main computer these days. Or you could get a netbook. Hell, most cell phones have passable web browsers.
And $10/year is nothing to complain about. Most paperbacks sell for roughly $7. Anything more than a few hundred pages of paper will cost you more than that.
Wikileaks attacks nasty governments all over the world
So what? So does Al Qaeda.
A very important difference, however, is that Wikileaks uses words rather than bombs.
Attacking nasty governments is not inherently a good thing.
Actually... Depending on your definition of "nasty" and what you're using to attack them with, I'd say that it probably is an inherently good thing.
Criticism is good. Open communication is good. Forcing people to acknowledge and discuss the questionable things their government does in their name is good.
Blowing up random people because they don't believe in your imaginary friend is not good.
In the case of Wikileaks, the short-term political goal of discrediting the United States is being pushed forward without consideration for the long-term effects on the state of the world. I mean, come on. The US isn't going to pull out of Iraq or Afghanistan (or avoid its next military confrontation, for that matter) just because of Wikileaks. Making the US mission more difficult through leaks of classified information only increases the cost in blood of these military actions. It's the same preposterous logic that Iraqi anti-US insurgents have held, that continuing to blow people up will somehow make the US leave sooner rather than later.
I don't know what secret goals anyone at Wikileaks may have...
And I honestly haven't seen anything too shocking come out of Wikileaks either. That big Afghanistan leak that was all over the press not too long ago wasn't really too shocking. Most of that information was already public.
But, as a US citizen, I'd really like to know what my government is doing in my name. I'd prefer to be able to trust what my government says... I'd like to think there's some real transparency... But, if it takes Wikileaks to let the light in, so be it.
Just accept that the US is doing these things, and it will be over a lot sooner and with a lot less pain.
Don't fight back, it'll only hurt more? Seriously? Anyone else get a creepy rape-vibe when they read that line?
Anyone in the field who hasn't figured this out yet needs to be let go. Programming requires long nights staring blankly at mind-muddling objective languages. Experienced directors/designers have the foresight to be able to properly direct all that youthful energy to the most worthwhile pursuits, rather than just letting them wander aimlessly through some other other geek's code.
There's probably a good amount of truth to this.
Coding, to a large degree, is grunt work. No, this isn't universally true... But a lot of it is.
You want your more experienced people to be supervising the grunt coders - not wasting their time actually turning out line after line of code.
Don't run those apps as administrator. Administrator privileges are needed for raw disk access.
There are two problems with this.
The first one is that installing software generally requires elevation. And these apps could be doing their damage during install.
The second one is that if these apps need to be able to write to that section of the disk, they're going to ask for elevation. You'll either give them admin access, or you won't run them at all.
What we can learn from this is there's a lot of technology we've have had sooner if industrial design and packaging was a priority, rather than just getting something working for a cool demo, and assuming observers would understand the potential.
Except that neither industrial design nor packaging would have helped Kodak sell this film-less camera.
The problem with this film-less approach, in 1975, was largely one of infrastructure. Just look at the questions:
Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV? Given the technology of the time, it's a valid question. Folks didn't have home computers. TVs were low-resolution. Hell, not even everyone had a TV. Why would you go through the process of lugging around a giant camera and waiting several seconds for it to write to tape just to view a picture on a TV? Why not take a normal picture, get it developed normally, and look at a crisp photo like normal?
How would you store these images? Again, nobody had computers. You couldn't write these tapes to your HDD. You couldn't upload them to a server or burn them to CD. You'd be storing a box of tapes. Why do that when you could just store photos instead?
What does an electronic photo album look like? The answer, of course, is Flickr, but that didn't exist at the time. What would an electronic photo album look like without a computer? It'd have to be another piece of hardware attached to a TV in all likelihood.
The problem wasn't vision... It wasn't packaging... It wasn't marketing... The problem was a lack of digital infrastructure to support electronic photography. The world, at the time, was still essentially analog. Yes, computers existed. Yes, networks existed. But you didn't have the kind of ubiquity that we do today. Today absolutely everything has a fairly high resolution display on it. Today pretty much everything has Internet access. Today you can view those film-less photos on almost anything you want, or print them out easier than you can get a real photo developed. Back in 1975 that just wasn't true.
I see absolutely no point in this. While it looks cool, why would I want to see results for "chee", "cheese" or "cheese and b" when I'm searching for "cheese and biscuits"?
From the point of view of a website looking for hits, there's more opportunity to come up in a search result. Joe's Cheese Emporium might not come up when you search for "cheese and biscuits", but it could come up as you typed out your search and had just "cheese" in there. This is a good thing if you're running a website.
From the point of view of a user searching for information, you never know exactly what search terms are going to be relevant. Maybe I'm being too specific in my search terms and not getting any results, but if I omit some term I get exactly what I'm looking for. Right now I have to do several searches to find that out. If it's searching as I type I can just delete terms and see what comes up. Hell, I might not even need to finish typing out my search term. Maybe just typing out "cheese and b" is enough to get results for sites about "cheese and biscuits".
I'd wager that in less than 8 years your statement of "If you want fast graphics then you buy a discrete graphics card." will sound just as outdated and clueless as "If you want to crunch numbers faster than you buy a dedicated math co-processor.".
Except there's an infinite capacity to use graphics power, so there's no way that in only eight years we will have reached an effective limit on processing power.
Ridiculous.
Once upon a time you bought a machine with a separate, discrete math coprocessor because the CPU couldn't handle math on its own. I remember there being a noticeable difference just running a spreadsheet on a two computers that were identical except for the presence of a math coprocessor. I remember some pieces of software simply refusing to run because I didn't have an FPU on my machine.
Those days are simply gone. These days nobody has a discrete math coprocessor. Sure, yes, you can get fancy cryptographic cards and things like that if you're doing specialized work... But those things don't go into your average workstation. Even heavy gamers and power users don't have discrete math coprocessors anymore.
Something similar will happen with graphics. It is only a matter of time. And I personally suspect that 8 years will be more than enough time to see it happen.
I'm not sure what you mean by an "infinite capacity to use graphics power"... Sure, you can make a scene arbitrarily complex. Keep tossing more shaders and polygons at the screen until the thing begs for mercy. But there's also an infinite capacity to use computation power. I can keep tossing calculations at my CPU until it begs for mercy. In fact, that's pretty much what your average benchmark is.
But that theoretically infinite capacity to use computation power doesn't mean a thing to your average user - or even gamers or power users. Sure, there's still a push for more raw horsepower... But nobody cares specifically about FLOPS on home computers.
And eventually we'll get to the point where the integrated graphics are more than capable of making a very pretty picture on the screen. More than equal to the best discrete card we have today. And it just won't make sense to have a separate card in the machine. Yes, there'll probably be cards available... But they'll be aimed at folks doing realtime photorealistic 3D modeling - not home users playing games.
Governments should not even be classifying a blog with ads as a business. It is an unethical money grab.
Why not?
If I have a free paper that's ad-supported, is that not a business? If I make money putting up billboards, is that not a business? Why is an ad-supported blog not a business?
If you can't afford the business license, you shouldn't be doing business.
Only someone who has a vested interest in license fees, or in the barrier to competition they create would say something like that.
I have neither.
I'm just a regular employee. I have nothing to do with license fees, and I don't care what kind of barriers there are to competition.
And I'm not making any sweeping judgment calls on whether this particular license fee makes sense, or whether license fees in general make sense.
But if a license fee exists, and is necessary for the work you're trying to do, then you're going to wind up having to pay that fee. And if the fee costs more than what you're making, you might want to reconsider what you're doing.
Doesn't most of it just get released back into the atmosphere? Sure, it's not contained underground or anything, but it's not REALLY "disappearing", exactly.
If I recall correctly, it is actually disappearing. I believe I read once upon a time that helium is actually bleeding out of our atmosphere. Once it's gone, it's gone.
She is being charged a flat $300 for a "privilege license", on top of any income tax. Being a flat fee that does not take into account how much, or little in this case, the business is making the fee is a punishment.
It's a business license, basically.
If you can't afford the business license, you shouldn't be doing business. If your blog is making that little money, pull the ads and call it done.
The problem is that on her taxes, she was asked to list all sources of income. She was honest and listed the blog. Now, she's basically being punished for being honest.
I don't see how that's a punishment.
You're supposed to pay taxes on your income. The taxes scale, more-or-less, on the income. It isn't like anyone is going to be asked to pay $1,000 in taxes on a blog that only made $50 in advertising.
Pay the taxes and move on.
It isn't a punishment any more than being taxed on the $50,000 you make and report yearly is.
To begin with 99% of commercial games don't even have a Linux version, so there's nothing to sell to Linux gamers.
The same could be said of Macs. Part of what made Steam viable on the Mac was Valve porting a number of their games over to the Mac. And they could do it again for Linux if they wanted to...
Also, just imagine the outcry about DRM and Valve not open sourcing Steam or it's games. The whole open source and everything-must-be-free mentality goes against businesses. You can already read here on slashdot how some people refuse to use Steam because it might go down in 50 years. This thinking is 100x worse with Linux users.
This, I think, is the real problem.
I like free stuff as much as the next guy... And I'm not a big fan of DRM in general... But I can at least accept that game developers need to eat, and that I'm not entitled to their games for free, and that Steam is a relatively reasonable platform.
A lot of folks here on Slashdot disagree with me. A lot of folks here on Slashdot think Steam is an absolutely horrible thing. They wouldn't touch it with a 10' pole. They sure as hell wouldn't install it on their Linux system and purchase games through it.
I think the Linux market is even smaller than the Mac market... Not because of the number of users out there, but because of the philosophy you see behind so many Linux users.
What's so bad with Intel's drivers? Even though some are outdated (especially for outdated HW) and don't have fancy GUIs doesn't mean it's broken. I've been using Intel's drivers (chipsets, grahics, storage) for 10+ years, didn't have a single problem. Unlike nVidia or ATI where uninstallation doesn't necessary mean the software is completely removed and the drivers keep crashing. And ATI drivers look even uglier than Intel's.
Agreed.
Intel's drivers generally work. Even older drivers that aren't really supported anymore generally work.
Sure, I've had issues from time to time... Everything breaks now and then... But compared to HP, nVidia, or ATI? I'll take Intel's drivers any day.
The value of McAfree isn't in their software, its in the fact that it comes preinstalled on a massive amount of computers, it has a subscription model for recurring revenue and LOTS of people use it.
I honestly haven't seen McAfee come pre-installed on a system in ages. Seems like it's normally Norton these days. Not saying you're wrong... Just pointing out that I haven't personally seen it in an awfully long time.
ALL ON-DEMAND SCANNERS KILL PERFORMANCE.
All on-demand scanners affect performance. They don't all kill performance.
I've had very good luck with Panda, Sophos, NOD32, and the newer versions of Symantec. They generally stay out of your way when you're trying to get work done. Sure, if you compare benchmarks there's a slowdown... But it's nothing compared to what McAfee does to a system.
The whole reason I bought a PS3 was because it was a closed platform, and because it was a closed platform, it was harder to hack the games. I like playing FPS games and they are absolutely ruined as soon as you have to deal with wallhacks and aimbots. Will this new hack open the door to programs like that?
Actually, being a closed platform doesn't have a whole lot to do with running wallhacks and aimbots.
Normally your server has some kind of basic validation to make sure the software you're running is the software it expects. This is why many games require you to have the latest patch before joining a server. You don't generally modify the executable itself to create a wallhack or aimbot. Normally that's done with a second utility running simultaneously - a mod or an add-on the the game, basically.
Typically a console has relatively little support for modding. Typically a console is only capable of running a single executable at a time. And even if you've cracked a PS3 to allow you to play pirated games or boot other OSes, you're probably stuck running a single game at a time with very little mod support and limited ability to run other utilities simultaneously.
5 billion devices is, let's face it, outside the capacity of an addressing scheme (IPv4) that originally only anticipated a shade over 4 billion possible devices. Why are we not moving over to IPv6 faster? I don't know much about networking and related issues; what are the big challenges for IPv6 going forward?
First, you've got the whole chicken-and-egg thing going on. There isn't a compelling reason for businesses to roll out IPv6 because most of the world is still on IPv4. Nobody will be visiting you v6 website. There isn't a compelling reason for ISPs to roll out IPv6 because most of the businesses are still on v4. There are no v6 websites to visit. Nobody wants to go first.
Then you've got some very real technical hurdles... New software and hardware requirements. Patches, upgrades. All that good stuff. And right now that looks like an awful lot of work for relatively little benefit. Legacy hardware that might not be upgrade-able.
Plus, right now, NAT pretty much works. Yes, I know, it's an ugly hack... But it works. It's hard to tell somebody that you really need to spend tons of time/effort/money switching things over to IPv6 when they're currently able to do everything they need to.
You've also got some weird psychological resistance to IPv6 addressing. Folks (even IT people) freak out when they see all those hex digits.
I don't think mandating it is a good idea. But I do think that if more manufacturers put them in smart phones the devices would find a market.
When I was shopping around for an MP3 player, I picked one specifically because it had an FM tuner built-in. It's a music playback device, and I wanted to have the ability to play broadcast radio.
Having the choice of an FM tuner is certainly handy.
I don't really want one in my phone... Hell, my phone can play MP3s and I never use that feature. But I wouldn't really be against some manufacturer offering a phone with an FM tuner.
And I suspect that if a manufacturer really thought there was a market for phones with FM tuners, they'd be making/selling one.
But to cram one of these into every single phone? It's just another feature I'm going to pay for, but never use.
You downloaded the wrong driver. You can download the entire printer driver suite which is 400 megs or just the plain vanilla driver which is around 5 megs. Not HP's fault you can't read.
It honestly depends on the printer.
Some of them don't offer a "basic" driver download... And even some of the "basic" driver downloads are inordinately large.
"Home schooled kids don't generally have to put up with schoolyard bullies. They don't have to make friends. They don't learn about compromises and sharing and common interests the way you do when you're surrounded by other people all day long."
All the homeschooled kids around where I grew up dealt with all that.
The asshole kids that bullied also bullied the home-schooled kids, granted they did not get to deal with the imported bullies from across town, but a bully is a bully. and they made friends with kids that lived near them..
So, you're saying that my anecdotal experience is not the same as your anecdotal experience?
Plus many were in sports programs with the public school kids. You can be home schooled and play football for your local public school at the same time. They joined lots of extra curricular activities. Many of us were jealous as they typically had a 4 hour school day plus got to take "classes" we never got. One kid was taking a class at the local motorcycle shop for learning small engine repair at 13 years old.
You did read the full text of my post, didn't you?
Specifically, the bit where I said:
Yes, you can supplement your home schooling with some good social exposures... Send your kid to the park for a good chunk of the day, or get them involved in some kind of sports or clubs... But, from what I've seen, an awful lot of folks who are doing home schooling aren't interested in exposing their kids to much of anything. They're more concerned about sheltering their kid either from harm, or from opposing viewpoints.
Like it or not, the folks who were home schooled when I was growing up did not turn out to be well-rounded individuals.
Like it or not, most of the folks that I've found very difficult to work with have turned out to be home schooled.
And since I'm not omniscient, I can only speak from my own relatively small chunk of life experiences.
Depending on the quality of the teacher's writing it could also be interpreted as a numeric zero.
In which case the interpretation given in the summary... The interpretation that apparently most kids gave... Doesn't work. It's very clear from the summary that folks were treating it like an empty box to put things in, not a numeric zero.
There are better ways of writing the expression that have much less scope of misunderstanding or ambiguity.
There certainly are.
Therefore this example is badly constructed.
Either that, or it's very well constructed to point out a deficiency in understanding.
If your kids are so dependent on specific syntax that they can't handle a different placeholder, you've got a problem.
I don't remember ever seeing the notation "4+3+2=( )+2" before.
But you know how to read an equation, right?
Left side is supposed to be equal to the right side... Stuff goes inside of parenthesis... Stuff inside parenthesis gets calculated first...
So it's fairly clear that we're looking at 4+3+2 = [something]+2
Normally you'd see an 'x' there... 4+3+2=x+2...and you'd solve for 'x'
But it doesn't have to be an 'x' - that's just a placeholder. You could put in any letter you like. Or some greek symbol. Or you could draw a little picture of a flower. If you were writing code you'd name a variable.
But none of that really matters, because it's just a placeholder.
Slashdot Mirror
$10/year isn't bad, except I re-read books intermittently. I'll read a book, shelve it for a few years, and re-read it when there's nothing new that peaks my interest. Under this model, I'm paying $10 essentially every time I read it. Also, Kindles can't handle rich media, and they're still overpriced (and the black on dark grey text looks horrible). Reading a web site on my iPhone is a masochistic endeavor. Call me a luddite if you must, but I prefer paper.
I guess the question is what, exactly, are you paying for?
If you just want to be able to re-read the book again, you can probably download it for future reference. It's a web page. Just grab the HTML (if there isn't an epub download offered).
If you want the whole social media/supplemental content thing... Well, yes, you'd need to pay for that again. But that content will have changed. That's the whole point - to make the novel more dynamic and involved than a pile of printed pages. If you wanted to read the latest edition of a book you'd previously purchased, you'd probably have to pay for that again as well.
No, the kindle can't handle rich media... But neither can paper. Again, what is it that you want?
If you want the whole social media/supplemental content thing - use a computer. A netbook, a laptop, a desktop, whatever. If you want a printed paper analog, use a kindle or a nook or print the thing out.
So you're saying I should buy a $500 iPad and pay $10/year to read a website novel that I might not even like?
You don't need an iPad. You can get a kindle or nook for less than $200. A very large number of people are using laptops as their main computer these days. Or you could get a netbook. Hell, most cell phones have passable web browsers.
And $10/year is nothing to complain about. Most paperbacks sell for roughly $7. Anything more than a few hundred pages of paper will cost you more than that.
Wikileaks attacks nasty governments all over the world
So what? So does Al Qaeda.
A very important difference, however, is that Wikileaks uses words rather than bombs.
Attacking nasty governments is not inherently a good thing.
Actually... Depending on your definition of "nasty" and what you're using to attack them with, I'd say that it probably is an inherently good thing.
Criticism is good. Open communication is good. Forcing people to acknowledge and discuss the questionable things their government does in their name is good.
Blowing up random people because they don't believe in your imaginary friend is not good.
In the case of Wikileaks, the short-term political goal of discrediting the United States is being pushed forward without consideration for the long-term effects on the state of the world. I mean, come on. The US isn't going to pull out of Iraq or Afghanistan (or avoid its next military confrontation, for that matter) just because of Wikileaks. Making the US mission more difficult through leaks of classified information only increases the cost in blood of these military actions. It's the same preposterous logic that Iraqi anti-US insurgents have held, that continuing to blow people up will somehow make the US leave sooner rather than later.
I don't know what secret goals anyone at Wikileaks may have...
And I honestly haven't seen anything too shocking come out of Wikileaks either. That big Afghanistan leak that was all over the press not too long ago wasn't really too shocking. Most of that information was already public.
But, as a US citizen, I'd really like to know what my government is doing in my name. I'd prefer to be able to trust what my government says... I'd like to think there's some real transparency... But, if it takes Wikileaks to let the light in, so be it.
Just accept that the US is doing these things, and it will be over a lot sooner and with a lot less pain.
Don't fight back, it'll only hurt more? Seriously? Anyone else get a creepy rape-vibe when they read that line?
Anyone in the field who hasn't figured this out yet needs to be let go. Programming requires long nights staring blankly at mind-muddling objective languages. Experienced directors/designers have the foresight to be able to properly direct all that youthful energy to the most worthwhile pursuits, rather than just letting them wander aimlessly through some other other geek's code.
There's probably a good amount of truth to this.
Coding, to a large degree, is grunt work. No, this isn't universally true... But a lot of it is.
You want your more experienced people to be supervising the grunt coders - not wasting their time actually turning out line after line of code.
Don't run those apps as administrator. Administrator privileges are needed for raw disk access.
There are two problems with this.
The first one is that installing software generally requires elevation. And these apps could be doing their damage during install.
The second one is that if these apps need to be able to write to that section of the disk, they're going to ask for elevation. You'll either give them admin access, or you won't run them at all.
What we can learn from this is there's a lot of technology we've have had sooner if industrial design and packaging was a priority, rather than just getting something working for a cool demo, and assuming observers would understand the potential.
Except that neither industrial design nor packaging would have helped Kodak sell this film-less camera.
The problem with this film-less approach, in 1975, was largely one of infrastructure. Just look at the questions:
Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV? Given the technology of the time, it's a valid question. Folks didn't have home computers. TVs were low-resolution. Hell, not even everyone had a TV. Why would you go through the process of lugging around a giant camera and waiting several seconds for it to write to tape just to view a picture on a TV? Why not take a normal picture, get it developed normally, and look at a crisp photo like normal?
How would you store these images? Again, nobody had computers. You couldn't write these tapes to your HDD. You couldn't upload them to a server or burn them to CD. You'd be storing a box of tapes. Why do that when you could just store photos instead?
What does an electronic photo album look like? The answer, of course, is Flickr, but that didn't exist at the time. What would an electronic photo album look like without a computer? It'd have to be another piece of hardware attached to a TV in all likelihood.
The problem wasn't vision... It wasn't packaging... It wasn't marketing... The problem was a lack of digital infrastructure to support electronic photography. The world, at the time, was still essentially analog. Yes, computers existed. Yes, networks existed. But you didn't have the kind of ubiquity that we do today. Today absolutely everything has a fairly high resolution display on it. Today pretty much everything has Internet access. Today you can view those film-less photos on almost anything you want, or print them out easier than you can get a real photo developed. Back in 1975 that just wasn't true.
I see absolutely no point in this. While it looks cool, why would I want to see results for "chee", "cheese" or "cheese and b" when I'm searching for "cheese and biscuits"?
From the point of view of a website looking for hits, there's more opportunity to come up in a search result. Joe's Cheese Emporium might not come up when you search for "cheese and biscuits", but it could come up as you typed out your search and had just "cheese" in there. This is a good thing if you're running a website.
From the point of view of a user searching for information, you never know exactly what search terms are going to be relevant. Maybe I'm being too specific in my search terms and not getting any results, but if I omit some term I get exactly what I'm looking for. Right now I have to do several searches to find that out. If it's searching as I type I can just delete terms and see what comes up. Hell, I might not even need to finish typing out my search term. Maybe just typing out "cheese and b" is enough to get results for sites about "cheese and biscuits".
I'd wager that in less than 8 years your statement of "If you want fast graphics then you buy a discrete graphics card." will sound just as outdated and clueless as "If you want to crunch numbers faster than you buy a dedicated math co-processor.".
Except there's an infinite capacity to use graphics power, so there's no way that in only eight years we will have reached an effective limit on processing power.
Ridiculous.
Once upon a time you bought a machine with a separate, discrete math coprocessor because the CPU couldn't handle math on its own. I remember there being a noticeable difference just running a spreadsheet on a two computers that were identical except for the presence of a math coprocessor. I remember some pieces of software simply refusing to run because I didn't have an FPU on my machine.
Those days are simply gone. These days nobody has a discrete math coprocessor. Sure, yes, you can get fancy cryptographic cards and things like that if you're doing specialized work... But those things don't go into your average workstation. Even heavy gamers and power users don't have discrete math coprocessors anymore.
Something similar will happen with graphics. It is only a matter of time. And I personally suspect that 8 years will be more than enough time to see it happen.
I'm not sure what you mean by an "infinite capacity to use graphics power"... Sure, you can make a scene arbitrarily complex. Keep tossing more shaders and polygons at the screen until the thing begs for mercy. But there's also an infinite capacity to use computation power. I can keep tossing calculations at my CPU until it begs for mercy. In fact, that's pretty much what your average benchmark is.
But that theoretically infinite capacity to use computation power doesn't mean a thing to your average user - or even gamers or power users. Sure, there's still a push for more raw horsepower... But nobody cares specifically about FLOPS on home computers.
And eventually we'll get to the point where the integrated graphics are more than capable of making a very pretty picture on the screen. More than equal to the best discrete card we have today. And it just won't make sense to have a separate card in the machine. Yes, there'll probably be cards available... But they'll be aimed at folks doing realtime photorealistic 3D modeling - not home users playing games.
Governments should not even be classifying a blog with ads as a business. It is an unethical money grab.
Why not?
If I have a free paper that's ad-supported, is that not a business? If I make money putting up billboards, is that not a business? Why is an ad-supported blog not a business?
Only someone who has a vested interest in license fees, or in the barrier to competition they create would say something like that.
I have neither.
I'm just a regular employee. I have nothing to do with license fees, and I don't care what kind of barriers there are to competition.
And I'm not making any sweeping judgment calls on whether this particular license fee makes sense, or whether license fees in general make sense.
But if a license fee exists, and is necessary for the work you're trying to do, then you're going to wind up having to pay that fee. And if the fee costs more than what you're making, you might want to reconsider what you're doing.
Doesn't most of it just get released back into the atmosphere? Sure, it's not contained underground or anything, but it's not REALLY "disappearing", exactly.
If I recall correctly, it is actually disappearing. I believe I read once upon a time that helium is actually bleeding out of our atmosphere. Once it's gone, it's gone.
Like the article said, she will have to pay a minimum $300 tax on $50 of income.
She isn't being taxed $300. It's basically a business license that she needs.
If you don't make enough money from your business to cover the cost of the license, you ought to stop doing business.
Pull the ads off your blog and call it done.
RTFA
She is being charged a flat $300 for a "privilege license", on top of any income tax. Being a flat fee that does not take into account how much, or little in this case, the business is making the fee is a punishment.
It's a business license, basically.
If you can't afford the business license, you shouldn't be doing business. If your blog is making that little money, pull the ads and call it done.
The problem is that on her taxes, she was asked to list all sources of income. She was honest and listed the blog. Now, she's basically being punished for being honest.
I don't see how that's a punishment.
You're supposed to pay taxes on your income. The taxes scale, more-or-less, on the income. It isn't like anyone is going to be asked to pay $1,000 in taxes on a blog that only made $50 in advertising.
Pay the taxes and move on.
It isn't a punishment any more than being taxed on the $50,000 you make and report yearly is.
To begin with 99% of commercial games don't even have a Linux version, so there's nothing to sell to Linux gamers.
The same could be said of Macs. Part of what made Steam viable on the Mac was Valve porting a number of their games over to the Mac. And they could do it again for Linux if they wanted to...
Also, just imagine the outcry about DRM and Valve not open sourcing Steam or it's games. The whole open source and everything-must-be-free mentality goes against businesses. You can already read here on slashdot how some people refuse to use Steam because it might go down in 50 years. This thinking is 100x worse with Linux users.
This, I think, is the real problem.
I like free stuff as much as the next guy... And I'm not a big fan of DRM in general... But I can at least accept that game developers need to eat, and that I'm not entitled to their games for free, and that Steam is a relatively reasonable platform.
A lot of folks here on Slashdot disagree with me. A lot of folks here on Slashdot think Steam is an absolutely horrible thing. They wouldn't touch it with a 10' pole. They sure as hell wouldn't install it on their Linux system and purchase games through it.
I think the Linux market is even smaller than the Mac market... Not because of the number of users out there, but because of the philosophy you see behind so many Linux users.
So what system make a good compromise in terms of security vs performance vs price?
Seems like it's the old conundrum... Security, performance, price - pick two.
Seems like the better software (security + performance) usually costs more. I'm a big fan of Sophos myself, but it isn't cheap.
For a home user, I've been pretty happy with NOD32.
What's so bad with Intel's drivers? Even though some are outdated (especially for outdated HW) and don't have fancy GUIs doesn't mean it's broken. I've been using Intel's drivers (chipsets, grahics, storage) for 10+ years, didn't have a single problem. Unlike nVidia or ATI where uninstallation doesn't necessary mean the software is completely removed and the drivers keep crashing. And ATI drivers look even uglier than Intel's.
Agreed.
Intel's drivers generally work. Even older drivers that aren't really supported anymore generally work.
Sure, I've had issues from time to time... Everything breaks now and then... But compared to HP, nVidia, or ATI? I'll take Intel's drivers any day.
The value of McAfree isn't in their software, its in the fact that it comes preinstalled on a massive amount of computers, it has a subscription model for recurring revenue and LOTS of people use it.
I honestly haven't seen McAfee come pre-installed on a system in ages. Seems like it's normally Norton these days. Not saying you're wrong... Just pointing out that I haven't personally seen it in an awfully long time.
ALL ON-DEMAND SCANNERS KILL PERFORMANCE.
All on-demand scanners affect performance. They don't all kill performance.
I've had very good luck with Panda, Sophos, NOD32, and the newer versions of Symantec. They generally stay out of your way when you're trying to get work done. Sure, if you compare benchmarks there's a slowdown... But it's nothing compared to what McAfee does to a system.
The whole reason I bought a PS3 was because it was a closed platform, and because it was a closed platform, it was harder to hack the games. I like playing FPS games and they are absolutely ruined as soon as you have to deal with wallhacks and aimbots. Will this new hack open the door to programs like that?
Actually, being a closed platform doesn't have a whole lot to do with running wallhacks and aimbots.
Normally your server has some kind of basic validation to make sure the software you're running is the software it expects. This is why many games require you to have the latest patch before joining a server. You don't generally modify the executable itself to create a wallhack or aimbot. Normally that's done with a second utility running simultaneously - a mod or an add-on the the game, basically.
Typically a console has relatively little support for modding. Typically a console is only capable of running a single executable at a time. And even if you've cracked a PS3 to allow you to play pirated games or boot other OSes, you're probably stuck running a single game at a time with very little mod support and limited ability to run other utilities simultaneously.
5 billion devices is, let's face it, outside the capacity of an addressing scheme (IPv4) that originally only anticipated a shade over 4 billion possible devices. Why are we not moving over to IPv6 faster? I don't know much about networking and related issues; what are the big challenges for IPv6 going forward?
First, you've got the whole chicken-and-egg thing going on. There isn't a compelling reason for businesses to roll out IPv6 because most of the world is still on IPv4. Nobody will be visiting you v6 website. There isn't a compelling reason for ISPs to roll out IPv6 because most of the businesses are still on v4. There are no v6 websites to visit. Nobody wants to go first.
Then you've got some very real technical hurdles... New software and hardware requirements. Patches, upgrades. All that good stuff. And right now that looks like an awful lot of work for relatively little benefit. Legacy hardware that might not be upgrade-able.
Plus, right now, NAT pretty much works. Yes, I know, it's an ugly hack... But it works. It's hard to tell somebody that you really need to spend tons of time/effort/money switching things over to IPv6 when they're currently able to do everything they need to.
You've also got some weird psychological resistance to IPv6 addressing. Folks (even IT people) freak out when they see all those hex digits.
I don't think mandating it is a good idea. But I do think that if more manufacturers put them in smart phones the devices would find a market.
When I was shopping around for an MP3 player, I picked one specifically because it had an FM tuner built-in. It's a music playback device, and I wanted to have the ability to play broadcast radio.
Having the choice of an FM tuner is certainly handy.
I don't really want one in my phone... Hell, my phone can play MP3s and I never use that feature. But I wouldn't really be against some manufacturer offering a phone with an FM tuner.
And I suspect that if a manufacturer really thought there was a market for phones with FM tuners, they'd be making/selling one.
But to cram one of these into every single phone? It's just another feature I'm going to pay for, but never use.
You downloaded the wrong driver. You can download the entire printer driver suite which is 400 megs or just the plain vanilla driver which is around 5 megs. Not HP's fault you can't read.
It honestly depends on the printer.
Some of them don't offer a "basic" driver download... And even some of the "basic" driver downloads are inordinately large.
Are you nuts?
Not as far as I know...
"Home schooled kids don't generally have to put up with schoolyard bullies. They don't have to make friends. They don't learn about compromises and sharing and common interests the way you do when you're surrounded by other people all day long."
All the homeschooled kids around where I grew up dealt with all that.
The asshole kids that bullied also bullied the home-schooled kids, granted they did not get to deal with the imported bullies from across town, but a bully is a bully. and they made friends with kids that lived near them..
So, you're saying that my anecdotal experience is not the same as your anecdotal experience?
Plus many were in sports programs with the public school kids. You can be home schooled and play football for your local public school at the same time. They joined lots of extra curricular activities. Many of us were jealous as they typically had a 4 hour school day plus got to take "classes" we never got. One kid was taking a class at the local motorcycle shop for learning small engine repair at 13 years old.
You did read the full text of my post, didn't you?
Specifically, the bit where I said:
Yes, you can supplement your home schooling with some good social exposures... Send your kid to the park for a good chunk of the day, or get them involved in some kind of sports or clubs... But, from what I've seen, an awful lot of folks who are doing home schooling aren't interested in exposing their kids to much of anything. They're more concerned about sheltering their kid either from harm, or from opposing viewpoints.
Like it or not, the folks who were home schooled when I was growing up did not turn out to be well-rounded individuals.
Like it or not, most of the folks that I've found very difficult to work with have turned out to be home schooled.
And since I'm not omniscient, I can only speak from my own relatively small chunk of life experiences.
Depending on the quality of the teacher's writing it could also be interpreted as a numeric zero.
In which case the interpretation given in the summary... The interpretation that apparently most kids gave... Doesn't work. It's very clear from the summary that folks were treating it like an empty box to put things in, not a numeric zero.
There are better ways of writing the expression that have much less scope of misunderstanding or ambiguity.
There certainly are.
Therefore this example is badly constructed.
Either that, or it's very well constructed to point out a deficiency in understanding.
If your kids are so dependent on specific syntax that they can't handle a different placeholder, you've got a problem.
I don't remember ever seeing the notation "4+3+2=( )+2" before.
But you know how to read an equation, right?
Left side is supposed to be equal to the right side... Stuff goes inside of parenthesis... Stuff inside parenthesis gets calculated first...
So it's fairly clear that we're looking at 4+3+2 = [something]+2
Normally you'd see an 'x' there... 4+3+2=x+2 ...and you'd solve for 'x'
But it doesn't have to be an 'x' - that's just a placeholder. You could put in any letter you like. Or some greek symbol. Or you could draw a little picture of a flower. If you were writing code you'd name a variable.
But none of that really matters, because it's just a placeholder.