Can't speak to how they treat their employees but as a customer I've always been treated well enough. As far as the vendors go, though, it's the purpose of a retailer to squeeze vendors. The vendors have no right to make money and if they're not happy with being squeezed they can try to sell the product themselves.
If we all had to pay the prices vendors think of as "fair" it would be a more expensive world. I know that if Fry's (or Wal-Mart for that matter) starts seeing their vendors as best pals and charging what the vendors want them to charge, then I'll stop shopping there.
Re:Is it an open protocol?
on
Replacing TCP?
·
· Score: 1
Well, they can't charge for use, but they can charge for unrestricted copies. For example if Cisco wanted to use this company's protocol, they could just use the GPL implementation but then they would have to release the source to their modifications to the public as GPL software. Cisco might not want to do that, because to use the protocol they'd presumably have to port the code to IOS, and releasing a GPL version of the port would allow others to examine the code and potentially proprietary parts of IOS.
So it might be better for Cisco to approach this company and ask for a proprietary license that didn't have the GPL restrictions. Then Cisco would not have to release source.
Of course, Cisco might decide to just implement it themselves, since it's not patented.
Since the target consists only of solid black and solid white, I don't understand what role dithering has in this. Although there are curves, I don't think it's important that they be anti-aliased.
Mostly I think this is a question of the resolution of the printer. At 800x zoom on my 100 dpi monitor I can see all the small features clearly, so I expect a 1200dpi laser would render this image just fine. At 600dpi you might miss some of the fine details.
Well, you are talking about presidents -- I'm talking about the Republican-dominated Congress under Clinton, which (in association with certain Democrats) did balance the budget and create a projected surplus.
Neo-conservatives (in the derogatory sense) are not conservative fiscally. Their plan is to increase government spending in the form of corporate welfare while cutting taxes. The theory is that this will cause the economy to grow so much that the resulting deficit doesn't matter. They also believe in restricting civil rights; for instance granting the executive branch powers to lock people up without trial. They believe in solving international problems by going to war with the countries that are causing those problems.
To some degree these are valid attacks on the current Republican administration. Many people are wondering where the small-government Republicans of the '90s went.
Re:From the next-article-please dept.
on
Rio Karma User Review
·
· Score: 3, Informative
the iPod works great under Linux. USB is plug-and-go since it's just a Mass Storage device. To load songs on you have to use a program to manage the database but that just runs in userspace. gtkpod is pretty full-featured and GNUpod is great for shell junkies.
The thing does come formatted HFS+ but the included Windows software allows you to reformat it as FAT. Linux supports both though most people find it easier to use FAT. It's also possible to reformat it manually from Linux though that's a little bit tricky.
Note that this is 3rd-gen iPods... previous models only supported Firewire and HFS+ so they were a little harder to use under Linux (but people did it anyway).
Personally, I think we should get away from actually believing that a college student in Finland sat down and wrote an operating system.
A programmer from IBM passed the confidential trade-secret information for emulating UNIX to "Linux Tovald" who uploaded the program to an FTP site.
If you think a college student could just sit down and emulate an industry standard operating system, then you should go work for The O'Reilly Factor and not spend so much time trolling, troll.
More specifically, the "water" state is a low-energy state (chemically speaking) whereas the "oxygen+hydrogen" state is a higher-energy state. Energy (from the sun) is used to break the bonds; since this a move from a low state to a high state it requires energy input. Then when the two are reacted together into the low energy state, the energy is released.
None of the energy that moves the car is energy that was in the water in the first place. The water/hydrogen conversion is actually just a way to store the solar energy.
Companies regularly sell their own stock to make money. When the stock price is high enough and they figure they could use some cash, they issue more shares (diluting the value of what is already out there) and sell them on the open market. Of course they also issue stock options to employees as compensation.
You didn't know about that? Buying shares in a company does increase its real bottom-line health and profit potential, albeit indirectly.
P/E ratios are a good measure but they are not everything. Again in the case of a technology company the investors want the company to take some risks with their money and hopefully develop higher profits in the future. Granted lots of technology stocks are overpriced but that is not a satisfactory argument that capital-growth investment is zero-sum gambling.
We already had the bubble and burst where investors ignored profits completely. It's not going to happen again in a broad-market sense for another decade or so. MS, Intel, Cisco, etc are headed for collapse no doubt, but that's because the profit growth that their valuation requires will not materialize.
Quite a few of the tech companies are machines sucking up investor money. Microsoft irresponsibly hung on to gobs of worthless cash for years. I was just differing with the principle that capital-growth investment is a zero-sum game.
It's not quite that simple because the invested money is supposedly used to grow the business.
Imagine I start a lemonade stand and I have some profits. Well, I can pay myself money and go buy a big-screen TV (dividends), or alternately I can put that money back into the business. Imagine I decide to put the money back in, and five years later I own a dozen profitable lemonade stands around the city.
Obviously a business consisting of a dozen profitable stands is worth more than a business consisting of just one. This stands true even if I never took the profits out. There is still "real value" there.
Investors in technology companies prefer generally for those companies to reinvest any potential dividends in R&D, especially since they believe that there is a lot of potentially profitable technology out there that hasn't been created yet.
By the way, it's hilarious to see people on Slashdot talking about stock market speculation when it seems like half the community is hooked on the same "free ipods" scam.
Well, there's no magic to "CD quality". It's just 1411kb/s linear PCM. At any given bitrate an MP3 has much better sound than PCM at the same bitrate. And don't talk to me about compression artifacts; linear PCM has compression artifacts too.
We don't encode MP3 much higher than 320 because naturally it's not possible to get better sound than was present in the original PCM data stream. If we had access to a very high-bitrate source, a hypothetical 1411kb/s lossy-compressed file made from that source would sound better than a CD... but you wouldn't have to go all the way to 1411 to beat the CD.
Point is, all sound recording is compression, some is better than others. And I'm just hassling you on the "no mp3 is better than a CD" line. A 192 of course isn't CD quality, but I'd challenge you to find much difference at 320.
The right to build on my land: mine, and I can deny it to anyone as I choose.
The right to walk on my land: mine, and I can put up fences and no trespassing signs.
The right to live on my land: mine, and I can sell it.
The right to fly over my land in an airplane: not mine. Belongs to the FAA. I cannot restrict this right or charge others for it.
The right to protect my property: mine. I can require tenants to refrain from activities which would damage the property, like the use of waterbeds or hot plates.
The right to send and receive electromagnetic signals while on my property: not mine. This belongs to the FCC. They control licensing of the electromagnetic spectrum. I cannot charge others from using this, whether they are physically on my property or not.
Also, I cannot require tenants to refrain from eating at a certain restaurant that I don't like.
You're trying to oversimplify the issue by using a stark word like "illegal". But the *truth* is that it isn't illegal, because the "laws" they violate are in violation of the Constitution. An unconstitutional law never holds force in the first place. The Supreme Court hasn't ruled on this yet, but even if they claim that these laws are valid, they are still wrong -- anyone can read the Constitution and decide for themselves. Even if people are put in jail and stay there, the actions of the government are still unconstitutional and therefore illegal in the philosophical absolute truth sense, if that makes them feel any better anyway. And even if the Supreme Court makes an incorrect ruling, it's still possible (though rare) for it to be corrected by the court at a later date. So don't get on your horse saying these things are "illegal" because Ashcroft says so -- I wouldn't believe what Ashcroft said if he told me water was wet, and neither should anyone else.
Oh no. The way I see it is, the interregator would be free to ask that question, and the computer would have to answer it -- but in such a way that would make the interregator believe that the computer was human. For example it could say, "I don't know what you mean", or better, "sorry, I flunked Calculus."
The short story is "The Last Question" (not to be confused with "The Last Answer"). I remember reading a comment by Asimov that nobody could ever remember its name. As I recall he thought it was his best short.
The point of saying, for example, "those shields are always going down. Maybe they need new batteries?" isn't borne out of technical ignorance. What he's saying is that the events in Star Trek movies are recycled and today convey little or no interest. The fights now seem all the same; maybe the shields will go down and maybe they won't but that's not the point -- we don't care anymore if they do go down. We don't even care if the Enterprise gets destroyed. It's all happened already, and there are few new ideas left.
I would say that if the United States was trying to hide them, it would take about 400 years for a team of 10,000 inspectors to find the "smoking gun" type of evidence of biological weapons in the United States. Hell, it'd probably take them at least ten years to find any of the nuclear devices. I bet if they were all moved to Texas, it would take about a year.
Iraq is 432,000 square kilometers. If they have a square kilometer of WMD research and storage facility (which is a lot), then you have 0.00023% of the country where evidence can be found. If you had lost a contact that was 1 square centimeter, this would be like trying to find it in a space of 43 square meters -- with the wind maybe moving it around.
Inspectors have flatly not been on the ground long enough to validate your assertion that there is nothing there. The only places they've had time to search so far are the suspicious sites, sites where the activity was previously. They wouldn't have found anything yet unless it had been deliberately placed. I'll believe that there is nothing in Iraq when Hans Blix says there is nothing there, and not before.
By the way, since you believe what Iraq says about their weapons, do you also believe the inspectors are spies? Because if you do, I'm suspicious of whether you really care what the inspectors say or find (if you don't trust them, after all) and I wonder if you're not just looking for an oppurtunity to make jabs at the US because it's fashionable to do that where you come from.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but they can sure cause problems. That's why we need an ineffective president like Kerry.
Can't speak to how they treat their employees but as a customer I've always been treated well enough. As far as the vendors go, though, it's the purpose of a retailer to squeeze vendors. The vendors have no right to make money and if they're not happy with being squeezed they can try to sell the product themselves.
If we all had to pay the prices vendors think of as "fair" it would be a more expensive world. I know that if Fry's (or Wal-Mart for that matter) starts seeing their vendors as best pals and charging what the vendors want them to charge, then I'll stop shopping there.
Well, they can't charge for use, but they can charge for unrestricted copies. For example if Cisco wanted to use this company's protocol, they could just use the GPL implementation but then they would have to release the source to their modifications to the public as GPL software. Cisco might not want to do that, because to use the protocol they'd presumably have to port the code to IOS, and releasing a GPL version of the port would allow others to examine the code and potentially proprietary parts of IOS.
So it might be better for Cisco to approach this company and ask for a proprietary license that didn't have the GPL restrictions. Then Cisco would not have to release source.
Of course, Cisco might decide to just implement it themselves, since it's not patented.
Since the target consists only of solid black and solid white, I don't understand what role dithering has in this. Although there are curves, I don't think it's important that they be anti-aliased.
Mostly I think this is a question of the resolution of the printer. At 800x zoom on my 100 dpi monitor I can see all the small features clearly, so I expect a 1200dpi laser would render this image just fine. At 600dpi you might miss some of the fine details.
Well, you are talking about presidents -- I'm talking about the Republican-dominated Congress under Clinton, which (in association with certain Democrats) did balance the budget and create a projected surplus.
Neo-conservatives (in the derogatory sense) are not conservative fiscally. Their plan is to increase government spending in the form of corporate welfare while cutting taxes. The theory is that this will cause the economy to grow so much that the resulting deficit doesn't matter. They also believe in restricting civil rights; for instance granting the executive branch powers to lock people up without trial. They believe in solving international problems by going to war with the countries that are causing those problems.
To some degree these are valid attacks on the current Republican administration. Many people are wondering where the small-government Republicans of the '90s went.
the iPod works great under Linux. USB is plug-and-go since it's just a Mass Storage device. To load songs on you have to use a program to manage the database but that just runs in userspace. gtkpod is pretty full-featured and GNUpod is great for shell junkies.
The thing does come formatted HFS+ but the included Windows software allows you to reformat it as FAT. Linux supports both though most people find it easier to use FAT. It's also possible to reformat it manually from Linux though that's a little bit tricky.
Note that this is 3rd-gen iPods... previous models only supported Firewire and HFS+ so they were a little harder to use under Linux (but people did it anyway).
Personally, I think we should get away from actually believing that a college student in Finland sat down and wrote an operating system.
A programmer from IBM passed the confidential trade-secret information for emulating UNIX to "Linux Tovald" who uploaded the program to an FTP site.
If you think a college student could just sit down and emulate an industry standard operating system, then you should go work for The O'Reilly Factor and not spend so much time trolling, troll.
More specifically, the "water" state is a low-energy state (chemically speaking) whereas the "oxygen+hydrogen" state is a higher-energy state. Energy (from the sun) is used to break the bonds; since this a move from a low state to a high state it requires energy input. Then when the two are reacted together into the low energy state, the energy is released.
None of the energy that moves the car is energy that was in the water in the first place. The water/hydrogen conversion is actually just a way to store the solar energy.
the kilogram is a measure of mass, not weight. The pennies have the same mass no matter what the gravity situation is.
what is wrong with just
paper, lots of m&ms
another person?
Companies regularly sell their own stock to make money. When the stock price is high enough and they figure they could use some cash, they issue more shares (diluting the value of what is already out there) and sell them on the open market. Of course they also issue stock options to employees as compensation.
You didn't know about that? Buying shares in a company does increase its real bottom-line health and profit potential, albeit indirectly.
P/E ratios are a good measure but they are not everything. Again in the case of a technology company the investors want the company to take some risks with their money and hopefully develop higher profits in the future. Granted lots of technology stocks are overpriced but that is not a satisfactory argument that capital-growth investment is zero-sum gambling.
We already had the bubble and burst where investors ignored profits completely. It's not going to happen again in a broad-market sense for another decade or so. MS, Intel, Cisco, etc are headed for collapse no doubt, but that's because the profit growth that their valuation requires will not materialize.
Quite a few of the tech companies are machines sucking up investor money. Microsoft irresponsibly hung on to gobs of worthless cash for years. I was just differing with the principle that capital-growth investment is a zero-sum game.
It's not quite that simple because the invested money is supposedly used to grow the business.
Imagine I start a lemonade stand and I have some profits. Well, I can pay myself money and go buy a big-screen TV (dividends), or alternately I can put that money back into the business. Imagine I decide to put the money back in, and five years later I own a dozen profitable lemonade stands around the city.
Obviously a business consisting of a dozen profitable stands is worth more than a business consisting of just one. This stands true even if I never took the profits out. There is still "real value" there.
Investors in technology companies prefer generally for those companies to reinvest any potential dividends in R&D, especially since they believe that there is a lot of potentially profitable technology out there that hasn't been created yet.
By the way, it's hilarious to see people on Slashdot talking about stock market speculation when it seems like half the community is hooked on the same "free ipods" scam.
Well, there's no magic to "CD quality". It's just 1411kb/s linear PCM. At any given bitrate an MP3 has much better sound than PCM at the same bitrate. And don't talk to me about compression artifacts; linear PCM has compression artifacts too.
We don't encode MP3 much higher than 320 because naturally it's not possible to get better sound than was present in the original PCM data stream. If we had access to a very high-bitrate source, a hypothetical 1411kb/s lossy-compressed file made from that source would sound better than a CD... but you wouldn't have to go all the way to 1411 to beat the CD.
Point is, all sound recording is compression, some is better than others. And I'm just hassling you on the "no mp3 is better than a CD" line. A 192 of course isn't CD quality, but I'd challenge you to find much difference at 320.
Let's say I own some land.
The right to build on my land: mine, and I can deny it to anyone as I choose.
The right to walk on my land: mine, and I can put up fences and no trespassing signs.
The right to live on my land: mine, and I can sell it.
The right to fly over my land in an airplane: not mine. Belongs to the FAA. I cannot restrict this right or charge others for it.
The right to protect my property: mine. I can require tenants to refrain from activities which would damage the property, like the use of waterbeds or hot plates.
The right to send and receive electromagnetic signals while on my property: not mine. This belongs to the FCC. They control licensing of the electromagnetic spectrum. I cannot charge others from using this, whether they are physically on my property or not.
Also, I cannot require tenants to refrain from eating at a certain restaurant that I don't like.
Weird. I've been reading Slashdot for a while and I've never seen it yet.
One time I did click on the link, but the site was down or something that day.
Yes, but then you would annoy the clique and get banished from the board.
You're trying to oversimplify the issue by using a stark word like "illegal". But the *truth* is that it isn't illegal, because the "laws" they violate are in violation of the Constitution. An unconstitutional law never holds force in the first place. The Supreme Court hasn't ruled on this yet, but even if they claim that these laws are valid, they are still wrong -- anyone can read the Constitution and decide for themselves. Even if people are put in jail and stay there, the actions of the government are still unconstitutional and therefore illegal in the philosophical absolute truth sense, if that makes them feel any better anyway. And even if the Supreme Court makes an incorrect ruling, it's still possible (though rare) for it to be corrected by the court at a later date. So don't get on your horse saying these things are "illegal" because Ashcroft says so -- I wouldn't believe what Ashcroft said if he told me water was wet, and neither should anyone else.
Oh no. The way I see it is, the interregator would be free to ask that question, and the computer would have to answer it -- but in such a way that would make the interregator believe that the computer was human. For example it could say, "I don't know what you mean", or better, "sorry, I flunked Calculus."
The short story is "The Last Question" (not to be confused with "The Last Answer"). I remember reading a comment by Asimov that nobody could ever remember its name. As I recall he thought it was his best short.
The point of saying, for example, "those shields are always going down. Maybe they need new batteries?" isn't borne out of technical ignorance. What he's saying is that the events in Star Trek movies are recycled and today convey little or no interest. The fights now seem all the same; maybe the shields will go down and maybe they won't but that's not the point -- we don't care anymore if they do go down. We don't even care if the Enterprise gets destroyed. It's all happened already, and there are few new ideas left.
Your logic is flawed. You're saying:
Millions of Americans USED AOL to connect to the Internet, therefore, these people would not have used the Internet otherwise.
Compare:
It's a damn good thing for the Albertson's on the corner; since I bought a lot of food from them, if they hadn't been there, I would have starved.
Without AOL those millions would have gone somewhere else. Case doesn't deserve credit for being the lucky one.
I would say that if the United States was trying to hide them, it would take about 400 years for a team of 10,000 inspectors to find the "smoking gun" type of evidence of biological weapons in the United States. Hell, it'd probably take them at least ten years to find any of the nuclear devices. I bet if they were all moved to Texas, it would take about a year.
Iraq is 432,000 square kilometers. If they have a square kilometer of WMD research and storage facility (which is a lot), then you have 0.00023% of the country where evidence can be found. If you had lost a contact that was 1 square centimeter, this would be like trying to find it in a space of 43 square meters -- with the wind maybe moving it around.
Inspectors have flatly not been on the ground long enough to validate your assertion that there is nothing there. The only places they've had time to search so far are the suspicious sites, sites where the activity was previously. They wouldn't have found anything yet unless it had been deliberately placed. I'll believe that there is nothing in Iraq when Hans Blix says there is nothing there, and not before.
By the way, since you believe what Iraq says about their weapons, do you also believe the inspectors are spies? Because if you do, I'm suspicious of whether you really care what the inspectors say or find (if you don't trust them, after all) and I wonder if you're not just looking for an oppurtunity to make jabs at the US because it's fashionable to do that where you come from.
How about my preferred restatement:
The simplest theory is likely to be the easiest to find a hole in, and therefore a good place to start.