Oh, that's right: VLC is developed by a megacorporation with close knowledge of Apple's secret internal APIs, and not a small team of Open Source developers. That's why their software can play back the same MP4 stream with 1/3 the CPU of Adobe's.
Sure, you can run Quake2 with software rendering in JS drawing on canvas. But the same Quake2 in Flash would require many times less of CPU time per frame.
LOL. I can't even watch a freaking badger without a core loading up.
The problem is that the PDF specification was created at a point in time when you had a reasonable expectation that software would not do bad things to your computer intentionally.
I had my first Amiga virus in about 1987, quite a few years before PDF came around (and certainly many years before they added JavaScript to the PDF standard).
I'm always amazed at the number of Slashdotters who will advocate closed research while despising closed software. If you like Open Source software, you've kind of got to like Open Source science for pretty much exactly the same reasons.
Hollywood does think is that having computers do such things in a story usually (not always, but usually) makes it easier or faster to tell the story the way it is intended, rather than getting bogged down in the real life technicalities that are actually involved that would bore almost anybody.
I get that, really, but computing is a lot different today than it was 20 years ago. Whereas only us total geeks used to own computers, your average developed country resident now owns several (counting cellphones and other smart gadgets). Entertainment requires a willing suspension of disbelief, and when a movie virus infects a refrigerator and makes it start launching soda cans at the protagonist, all but the dumbest viewers know that they're seeing something that can't really happen. You also have to consider demographics: if a movie features a lot of computer shots, isn't it reasonably likely that more than the expected number of geeks will want to see it? Why not make the movie enjoyable for them, too?
I'm not saying that Hollywood needs so show someone running "make menuconfig" for 10 minutes, but I think it's reasonable to expect them to be at least remotely plausible these days.
Meanwhile, if these sites have decent content, people will pay for it. If they don't pay for it, then evidently it's not worth the money.
I see you posting all over the place here, but there's no little asterisk next to your name showing that you've paid. I find that an interesting juxtaposition with your claims.
Exactly. The whole exercise part of the Wii is questionable at best.
Oh yeah? Free endorsement: in the last 9 months, I lost 35 pounds, 6 waist inches, and 6% body fat using EA Active (and its sequel) on the Wii and the free app "Lose It!" on my iPod. Wii Fit might not be strenuous, but even today a full workout on EA Active's hardest difficulty level will have me pretty well exhausted at the end of half an hour.
Another tidbit is also likely explains why I get moderated to hell is that many mental illnesses also show up on MRIs. Which suggests diseases such as sociopaths and psychopaths, among many others, are not actually diseases.
What you agreed to pay for was Lala's service, not iTunes'.
I disagree. Suppose you buy a gift card to Joe's Stuff, which is later bought by Bob's Widgets and gets converted to fit in with the rest of the chain. Bob's announces that all the Joe's Stuff gift cards will now be honored at all Bob's locations. Would you really expect to get a cash refund on your gift card, even though it's still being honored at its full face value for comparable products?
You paid Lala for service. Now Apple is letting you use that money to pay them for the same service. I think that's perfectly reasonable.
The case manager told me directly that netbooks are handled differently because they have small profit margins. Their service might be good on items they actually want to sell you.
No, it's not. I had a single broken keycap on my warranteed HP Mini 110. Once we established that they couldn't possibly do something as easy as drop a keycap in an envelope and mail it to me, the case manager (yes, I escalated!) said that the only option was for me to ship it in for repairs. Oh, and they they wouldn't pay the $20 shipping cost.
Me: I thought it was under warranty.
CM: It is.
Me: So you're paying for shipping?
CM: No. You have to pay shipping.
Me: So I have to pay, out of pocket, to fix a part covered under warranty?
CM: No! The repair is free! You only have to pay shipping!
Me: Then it's not free.
CM: But it is! We're not charging you to fix it.
Me: When I get my bank statement, will I have $20 less my account than if I hadn't had this problem fixed?
CM: Yes.
Me: Then I have to pay out of pocket to have it fixed.
CM: No, blah, lather/rinse/repeat.
They "compromised" and allowed me to pay a carrier directly instead of buying HP's own shipping label. I ended up paying more than $20, but I was perfectly happy to.
Oh, and for the punch line: when I got it back a week and a half later, the packing sheet stated that they'd replaced the keycap. And the hard drive. And the motherboard. Oh, and they generously fixed it for free, even though they'd determined that a user-installed part had caused the problem. I don't know whether the part that broke my keyboard was the sticker I put on the outside of the case, or if it was the 2GB DIMM I installed and that they moved over to the new motherboard before returning it. I swear to God I'm not exaggerating a word of that. I still have the packing slip at home as a souvenir.
Well, SCO would almost certainly argue (without merit) that Novell should turn over the copyrights now because they were supposed to have done so 10 years ago, so Novell has been improperly using SCO's code. Oh, and they're suing for 87 gigadollars for past violations.
If you read into my original post that I'm supporting SCO in any way, you misread it. My dislike of them doesn't make me underestimate their legal insanity and creative interpretations, though.
It's like car enthusiasts telling everyone that they must drive sticks because they are more powerful and more in line with the nature of the technology,
As a side note, a friend of mine has a sub-11 second Mustang drag car. It, like most other dragsters, has an automatic transmission that you shift manually. That's not really a contradiction; imagine starting from a stop light with your transmission in "1", bumping up to "2" when your engine is almost at redline, then again to "D" when appropriate. Anyway, the advantage is that the automatic shifts much faster on average than a human can. A trained professional's fastest time might be shorter than an automatic transmission's fastest time, but the odds of even that professional being able to shift perfectly 3 or 4 times in a row are pretty slim.
So to extend your analogy, average drivers like automatics, enthusiasts like manuals, and many true motorheads like automatics. Well, average users like simple computers, enthusiasts like complicated, configurable interfaces, and many true geeks like simple computers. Don't believe me? Go into any highly technical conference and see how many Macbooks and iPhones you see. Those people didn't pick the simplified interfaces over the other options because they can't manage anything harder, but because they want to spend their efforts elsewhere.
Me? I guess I'm either a wannabe or an outlier because I'm typing this on Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Still, a lot of my equally technical friends love those "walled garden" systems.
The point I was trying to make was that if someone distributes code under the GPL who didn't have the right to, then you can't expect to get to keep using that code just because it had been GPLed. We all know that SCO doesn't really own the Unix code - a jury just confirmed it! - but if they did, and Novell had been wrongly distributing it without having the legal right to, then SCO could declare that the GPL on that code (and that code only) is invalid and that all users would be required to stop using or distributing it.
The jury was asked, "Did the amended Asset Purchase Agreement transfer the Unix and UnixWare copyrights from Novell to SCO?" It answered, "No,"
Well, clearly they mean that a different APA (to be revealed at a later date, pending further funding from Microsoft) will prove their ownership. The first APA - the one we actually know about - doesn't, but SCO feels that the jury was dumb to find that way without consulting a magic 8 ball first.
Getting the copyrights now shouldn't help them. All the code in Linux has been already distributed by the current Unix copyright holders under the terms of the GPL.
Purely devil's advocate: if the copyrights rightfully belong to SCO, then Novell didn't have the right to distribute that code under the GPL in the first place and SCO could un-license it. By analogy, if I ended up with a copy of that source code Microsoft lost a while back, I couldn't legally put it under the GPL and give a copy to you under the terms of that license. If I did, and Microsoft came knocking on your door, you wouldn't be able to tell them that you were entitled to keep and use your copy.
I don't think in all fairness that anyone could have predicted that Microsoft would not only break compatibility with other browsers, but also break compatibility with their own.
As an employee at a company still working to divest itself of Visual FoxPro, which Microsoft killed after promising to support it, I could see the hell out of it.
Of course, I also encourage people to do any *ahem* personal browsing in Firefox anyway, but IE6 isn't going to go away until we don't need it.
Or until you can't run it because the lowest-end hardware your vendor sells isn't supported by XP, and there's not a version of IE6 available for Windows 7. Have fun thinking about that one tonight when you're trying to go to sleep, and planning what you'll tell your boss when he asks why you let this happen.
I'd suggest that the single largest sector of reduction has been from large companies streamlining their processes to replace paper with electrons, the latter is monumentally cheaper and more efficient to store (especially since it would likely be stored electronically anyway, effectively making it a sunk cost), transport, produce, reproduce, track, edit, distribute and dispose of.
My company used to get a lot of documents from our customers and then forward them to various government agencies. Those agencies required us to keep paper copies of the forms so that we could re-submit them if they ever lost the copies that we'd sent to them.
Eventually, our customers started submitting the information on the forms to us electronically. We'd fill them out, print the required copy for our records, and mail a copy to the gov't agencies.
After a while, the agencies went mostly paperless and allowed us to transmit the images of the completed forms electronically, but still mandated that we keep a paper copy - just in case.
Some time after that, cooler heads prevailed and decided it would be OK if we just kept electronic copies of the images of the completed forms.
Because the transition was so gradual from the original paper trail to the new all-electronic system, certain parts never got refactored. One day I walked through the scanning room and saw a giant stack of papers next to the scanner. As it turns out, the process of generating the forms for submission to the agencies included printing a copy of those forms. Then, an employee would feed that stack into our bulk scanners, view each page in a custom in-house app, read a number on the form to see what internal batch it belonged to, and enter that value into the program which would then file it away appropriately.
Well, a few hours later I'd shortened that to saving an image of each outbound form to the fileserver and skipped the print/scan/data-entry step altogether. That saved the company a few thousand dollars worth of paper each year, the costs of transporting, storing, and disposing of all the paper, and the wages of the data entry clerk (who was thrilled to move to something less soul-crushingly boring). Our friend at the paper mill might not see the benefits of the change, but my boss and coworkers were pretty darn happy with it.
to prove that fears (inspired by books like "Holy Blood and the Holy Grail", "The Da Vinci Code", etc, and by right-wing Baptist loonies) that the Church was an active participant in satanic activities was crud.
If there is a Satan, then what activity could be more pleasing to him than to ruin children in the name of God?
Slashdot Mirror
That's a pretty dang good point.
No, it's not..
Oh, that's right: VLC is developed by a megacorporation with close knowledge of Apple's secret internal APIs, and not a small team of Open Source developers. That's why their software can play back the same MP4 stream with 1/3 the CPU of Adobe's.
Sure, you can run Quake2 with software rendering in JS drawing on canvas. But the same Quake2 in Flash would require many times less of CPU time per frame.
LOL. I can't even watch a freaking badger without a core loading up.
The problem is that the PDF specification was created at a point in time when you had a reasonable expectation that software would not do bad things to your computer intentionally.
I had my first Amiga virus in about 1987, quite a few years before PDF came around (and certainly many years before they added JavaScript to the PDF standard).
Closed research considered harmful.
I'm always amazed at the number of Slashdotters who will advocate closed research while despising closed software. If you like Open Source software, you've kind of got to like Open Source science for pretty much exactly the same reasons.
Hollywood does think is that having computers do such things in a story usually (not always, but usually) makes it easier or faster to tell the story the way it is intended, rather than getting bogged down in the real life technicalities that are actually involved that would bore almost anybody.
I get that, really, but computing is a lot different today than it was 20 years ago. Whereas only us total geeks used to own computers, your average developed country resident now owns several (counting cellphones and other smart gadgets). Entertainment requires a willing suspension of disbelief, and when a movie virus infects a refrigerator and makes it start launching soda cans at the protagonist, all but the dumbest viewers know that they're seeing something that can't really happen. You also have to consider demographics: if a movie features a lot of computer shots, isn't it reasonably likely that more than the expected number of geeks will want to see it? Why not make the movie enjoyable for them, too?
I'm not saying that Hollywood needs so show someone running "make menuconfig" for 10 minutes, but I think it's reasonable to expect them to be at least remotely plausible these days.
Whether its the EMH or just a mundane collection of data. Once it's been copied from its original place the orginal has gone.
Never owned anything by Iomega, huh?
Meanwhile, if these sites have decent content, people will pay for it. If they don't pay for it, then evidently it's not worth the money.
I see you posting all over the place here, but there's no little asterisk next to your name showing that you've paid. I find that an interesting juxtaposition with your claims.
Exactly. The whole exercise part of the Wii is questionable at best.
Oh yeah? Free endorsement: in the last 9 months, I lost 35 pounds, 6 waist inches, and 6% body fat using EA Active (and its sequel) on the Wii and the free app "Lose It!" on my iPod. Wii Fit might not be strenuous, but even today a full workout on EA Active's hardest difficulty level will have me pretty well exhausted at the end of half an hour.
Another tidbit is also likely explains why I get moderated to hell is that many mental illnesses also show up on MRIs. Which suggests diseases such as sociopaths and psychopaths, among many others, are not actually diseases.
So does lung cancer.
What you agreed to pay for was Lala's service, not iTunes'.
I disagree. Suppose you buy a gift card to Joe's Stuff, which is later bought by Bob's Widgets and gets converted to fit in with the rest of the chain. Bob's announces that all the Joe's Stuff gift cards will now be honored at all Bob's locations. Would you really expect to get a cash refund on your gift card, even though it's still being honored at its full face value for comparable products?
You paid Lala for service. Now Apple is letting you use that money to pay them for the same service. I think that's perfectly reasonable.
The case manager told me directly that netbooks are handled differently because they have small profit margins. Their service might be good on items they actually want to sell you.
When you have warranty the service is great
No, it's not. I had a single broken keycap on my warranteed HP Mini 110. Once we established that they couldn't possibly do something as easy as drop a keycap in an envelope and mail it to me, the case manager (yes, I escalated!) said that the only option was for me to ship it in for repairs. Oh, and they they wouldn't pay the $20 shipping cost.
Me: I thought it was under warranty.
CM: It is.
Me: So you're paying for shipping?
CM: No. You have to pay shipping.
Me: So I have to pay, out of pocket, to fix a part covered under warranty?
CM: No! The repair is free! You only have to pay shipping!
Me: Then it's not free.
CM: But it is! We're not charging you to fix it.
Me: When I get my bank statement, will I have $20 less my account than if I hadn't had this problem fixed?
CM: Yes.
Me: Then I have to pay out of pocket to have it fixed.
CM: No, blah, lather/rinse/repeat.
They "compromised" and allowed me to pay a carrier directly instead of buying HP's own shipping label. I ended up paying more than $20, but I was perfectly happy to.
Oh, and for the punch line: when I got it back a week and a half later, the packing sheet stated that they'd replaced the keycap. And the hard drive. And the motherboard. Oh, and they generously fixed it for free, even though they'd determined that a user-installed part had caused the problem. I don't know whether the part that broke my keyboard was the sticker I put on the outside of the case, or if it was the 2GB DIMM I installed and that they moved over to the new motherboard before returning it. I swear to God I'm not exaggerating a word of that. I still have the packing slip at home as a souvenir.
Objective-C lets me read byte from an allocated memory location, lets me write byte to an allocated memory location. Sounds like what C++ can do.
So can a Turing machine, but I don't want to implement a GUI networked application with one.
Well, SCO would almost certainly argue (without merit) that Novell should turn over the copyrights now because they were supposed to have done so 10 years ago, so Novell has been improperly using SCO's code. Oh, and they're suing for 87 gigadollars for past violations.
If you read into my original post that I'm supporting SCO in any way, you misread it. My dislike of them doesn't make me underestimate their legal insanity and creative interpretations, though.
I didn't mean it that way. I was agreeing with you and wanted to build upon your premise.
But that was a pretty influential 5%, even if I made a lot of fun of them at a time.
It's like car enthusiasts telling everyone that they must drive sticks because they are more powerful and more in line with the nature of the technology,
As a side note, a friend of mine has a sub-11 second Mustang drag car. It, like most other dragsters, has an automatic transmission that you shift manually. That's not really a contradiction; imagine starting from a stop light with your transmission in "1", bumping up to "2" when your engine is almost at redline, then again to "D" when appropriate. Anyway, the advantage is that the automatic shifts much faster on average than a human can. A trained professional's fastest time might be shorter than an automatic transmission's fastest time, but the odds of even that professional being able to shift perfectly 3 or 4 times in a row are pretty slim.
So to extend your analogy, average drivers like automatics, enthusiasts like manuals, and many true motorheads like automatics. Well, average users like simple computers, enthusiasts like complicated, configurable interfaces, and many true geeks like simple computers. Don't believe me? Go into any highly technical conference and see how many Macbooks and iPhones you see. Those people didn't pick the simplified interfaces over the other options because they can't manage anything harder, but because they want to spend their efforts elsewhere.
Me? I guess I'm either a wannabe or an outlier because I'm typing this on Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Still, a lot of my equally technical friends love those "walled garden" systems.
The point I was trying to make was that if someone distributes code under the GPL who didn't have the right to, then you can't expect to get to keep using that code just because it had been GPLed. We all know that SCO doesn't really own the Unix code - a jury just confirmed it! - but if they did, and Novell had been wrongly distributing it without having the legal right to, then SCO could declare that the GPL on that code (and that code only) is invalid and that all users would be required to stop using or distributing it.
The jury was asked, "Did the amended Asset Purchase Agreement transfer the Unix and UnixWare copyrights from Novell to SCO?" It answered, "No,"
Well, clearly they mean that a different APA (to be revealed at a later date, pending further funding from Microsoft) will prove their ownership. The first APA - the one we actually know about - doesn't, but SCO feels that the jury was dumb to find that way without consulting a magic 8 ball first.
Getting the copyrights now shouldn't help them. All the code in Linux has been already distributed by the current Unix copyright holders under the terms of the GPL.
Purely devil's advocate: if the copyrights rightfully belong to SCO, then Novell didn't have the right to distribute that code under the GPL in the first place and SCO could un-license it. By analogy, if I ended up with a copy of that source code Microsoft lost a while back, I couldn't legally put it under the GPL and give a copy to you under the terms of that license. If I did, and Microsoft came knocking on your door, you wouldn't be able to tell them that you were entitled to keep and use your copy.
I wrote something you might find handy. It's what we're using to transition away from FoxPro to PostgreSQL.
I don't think in all fairness that anyone could have predicted that Microsoft would not only break compatibility with other browsers, but also break compatibility with their own.
As an employee at a company still working to divest itself of Visual FoxPro, which Microsoft killed after promising to support it, I could see the hell out of it.
Of course, I also encourage people to do any *ahem* personal browsing in Firefox anyway, but IE6 isn't going to go away until we don't need it.
Or until you can't run it because the lowest-end hardware your vendor sells isn't supported by XP, and there's not a version of IE6 available for Windows 7. Have fun thinking about that one tonight when you're trying to go to sleep, and planning what you'll tell your boss when he asks why you let this happen.
I'd suggest that the single largest sector of reduction has been from large companies streamlining their processes to replace paper with electrons, the latter is monumentally cheaper and more efficient to store (especially since it would likely be stored electronically anyway, effectively making it a sunk cost), transport, produce, reproduce, track, edit, distribute and dispose of.
My company used to get a lot of documents from our customers and then forward them to various government agencies. Those agencies required us to keep paper copies of the forms so that we could re-submit them if they ever lost the copies that we'd sent to them.
Eventually, our customers started submitting the information on the forms to us electronically. We'd fill them out, print the required copy for our records, and mail a copy to the gov't agencies.
After a while, the agencies went mostly paperless and allowed us to transmit the images of the completed forms electronically, but still mandated that we keep a paper copy - just in case.
Some time after that, cooler heads prevailed and decided it would be OK if we just kept electronic copies of the images of the completed forms.
Because the transition was so gradual from the original paper trail to the new all-electronic system, certain parts never got refactored. One day I walked through the scanning room and saw a giant stack of papers next to the scanner. As it turns out, the process of generating the forms for submission to the agencies included printing a copy of those forms. Then, an employee would feed that stack into our bulk scanners, view each page in a custom in-house app, read a number on the form to see what internal batch it belonged to, and enter that value into the program which would then file it away appropriately.
Well, a few hours later I'd shortened that to saving an image of each outbound form to the fileserver and skipped the print/scan/data-entry step altogether. That saved the company a few thousand dollars worth of paper each year, the costs of transporting, storing, and disposing of all the paper, and the wages of the data entry clerk (who was thrilled to move to something less soul-crushingly boring). Our friend at the paper mill might not see the benefits of the change, but my boss and coworkers were pretty darn happy with it.
to prove that fears (inspired by books like "Holy Blood and the Holy Grail", "The Da Vinci Code", etc, and by right-wing Baptist loonies) that the Church was an active participant in satanic activities was crud.
If there is a Satan, then what activity could be more pleasing to him than to ruin children in the name of God?