... it wants its recorded music release strategy back.
This is really a simple response to the implementation details of current technology, just as it always has been.
More cost effective to release music on media that holds multiple tracks: => albums.
Not more cost effective to release music on media that holds multiple tracks: => singles.
Re:Bold, italic, larger, and smaller tools?
on
GIMP 2.6 Released
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· Score: 1
look at MS Paint for instance
Yes, look at it. You can actually figure out how to draw a frigging rectangle without having to wade through a 200 page manual (that's often not even installed by default). You know what: most of the time that's what people want to draw: Rectangles. Not boolean operations on disjoint shapes. Rectangles.
Orthogonality is a nice goal, but if it means that people have to jump through hoops and do research in manuals to do the most common trivial tasks, then it's time to add shortcuts for those tasks. You can always add a user preference to turn off any non-orthogonal menu items for those who demand a foolish consistency.
Re:Check your own logic before calling others craz
on
Fossett's Plane Found
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· Score: 4, Insightful
that someone else found the crash site and (for reasons unexplained) took his ID and a grand in cash from it, then hid them where the hiker later found them
My guess would be that "someone" would have been something like a raccoon or a buzzard.
Re:Bold, italic, larger, and smaller tools?
on
GIMP 2.6 Released
·
· Score: 1
Alright, by your new definition, the Gimp currently needs *two* separate "verbs" to draw a rectangle, one for selecting rectangles and one for drawing. (And it actually needs more because you have to wade through and then dismiss a "stroke" dialog box.) What's worse, the two operations are found in totally different and unrelated parts of the GUI. That's still more work and more confusion.
Re:"Desu desu desu desu" -- Suiseiseki
on
GIMP 2.6 Released
·
· Score: 1
But it shouldn't need to be two separate steps at all. With a proper drawing tool, it's select and apply in a single atomic operation. There should be no need remember or find two different commands or worry about their relative order.
Re:Any chance we can draw circles and boxes now
on
GIMP 2.6 Released
·
· Score: 1
Make an oval / rectangular selection, stroke with the desired width. Wasn't so laborious now was it?
The problem I have is that I already vaguely know that's how you're supposed to draw shapes in Gimp. However, I probably need to do that less than once per year, so I've usually forgotten the details each time I try it. Now I'm stuck poking around until I relearn the exact procedure.
If they really never want to include a simple shape drawing tool, they need to add a Clippy-like popup: "It looks like you're trying to draw a shape using our back-asswards method. Let me show you the counterintuitive steps you'll need to take..."
Re:Foctothorpe FTW
on
C# In-Depth
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Pretty sure that music precedes unicode, dude, and they write the sharp sign using anything that looks like a tiny smooshed tick-tack-toe board.
If a sharp sign is the same as an octothorpe because it has a similar (but not identical) shape, then a flat sign must be the same as a lower-case "b". As it happens, however, neither pair of symbols have ever been interchangeable.
it just needs to be cool enough to condense back into liquid form so that it can once again be evaporated to drive the turbine.
Condensing gases give off large amounts of heat. That's why the condenser unit on an air conditioner needs to have a big fan blowing out hot air. If you can't radiate the heat fast enough, the whole condenser unit will quickly heat up until it's simply too hot for any more gas to condense.
The problem is that the people who live in urban New York cannot appreciate the viewpoints of people in rural Montana, and vice-versa. Reducing the election to a purely populous vote would result in Montana being ruled by New York.
It's a zero sum game, so what we get instead is New York is ruled by Montana. This wonderful Montana viewpoint of world affairs has worked out so well for the last 8 years.
The contract may create problems, but it was the only compromise that allowed for the United STATES to come together in the first place.
That was when there were only 13 states, and most of those selected electors via their legislatures rather than popular vote. There were only a few hundred votes in total to count back then. That system just doesn't scale properly, and today it is a sick joke.
Moreover, states like Montana were US territories owned by the federal government before they were granted statehood. There really was no need to "entice" them to join the union, since they were already subject to the rule of the other states. At any rate, as I said, you could weight each person's vote in Montana at ~2X a Californian's vote (as it is effectively done today) without resorting to this electoral college BS.
Really, these are all just symptoms of a bigger problem.
The bigger problem is the electoral college system. It acts as a statistical noise amplifier.
If the entire country were counted at one person per vote, then the odds of an election being so close as to hinge on less than 1% of the population of a single state would be practically nil.
Or, for those of you who think that the amount empty acreage around each citizen determines the relative worth of their opinion, you could still weight each individual vote based on the electoral college formula. This would still mitigate almost all of the sampling noise caused by the ill-conditioned algorithm that we use today. (Everyone learns in their introductory numerical analysis class that it's a bad idea to sum up the results of a bunch of subtractions or comparisons.)
It makes you wonder how history might have been different if one particular die in a stamping machine at some paper plant had been just a little sharper.
It's not the license. It's the huge PR machine behind it. IBM and all big boys supporting Linux are really selling hardware and are using Linux to commoditize enteprise software.
And do you know why these companies chose Linux as the focus of their PR machines? As the GP post argued, it's because the advantages the GPL provides to these big companies over BSD-style licenses.
These big companies know that if their competitors use the code they contribute, it will have to be on the same terms as the contributor. It can't be closed up, embraced, extended and then used as a weapon against the original contributor. It's a simple exercise in game theory.
I couldn't of said it better myself. I know there doing the best they can over their, but for all intensive purposes the editing is very poor. As for the verdict itself, I could care less.
Which begs the question: Irregardless of wether your disinterested in this verdict, do you tow the line on copywrite law in general?
That's true. Most people grew up with analog static and other artifacts, so they probably don't even notice it that much.
With digital TV, I could deal with occasional choppy video and pixelation when someone walks around the room if it weren't for the damned audio dropouts.
That's my pet peeve about digital TV. I can't figure out why they didn't allocate ~10kHz of bandwidth for a backup analog audio channel to switch to if the digital decoder fails. A brief audio dropout can make you miss enough important information to ruin the point of watching an entire show. Even a scratchy low-fidelity backup audio track would mostly fix that.
This has to be one of the biggest waste of tax dollars I have ever seen.
It's not tax dollars. The government made $Billions by selling off bandwidth to private telco monopolies, breaking my TV in the process. The coupons take some of those *sale proceeds*, NOT tax dollars, to partially compensate me for the hassle and expense of having to fix my TV.
Here's an analogy: Say you pour two different colored cans of paint into a bucket and start stirring. Weather is like predicting the exact patterns of swirls that you'll see as the colors mix. Very hard to do looking ahead more than a couple of stirs.
Climate is more like predicting the final color that will result after the mixing is done. Not nearly so intractable. The summary is talking about climate, not weather.
In 1997, the Gartner Group estimated that there were 240 billion lines of Cobol code in active apps, and billions of lines of new Cobol code are being written every year.
The report neglected to mention that 239.9 billion of those lines were boilerplate headers and math operators spelled out with English verbs.
No, the fact that the computer costs the same with or without windows means that I didn't pay for windows.
That assertion is just patently false.
If you bought a machine without windows for the same cost, then you paid the OEM for some additional profit/overhead.
If you bought a machine *with* windows for the same cost, then you paid MICROSOFT for WINDOWS.
*Your* money flowed from your credit card, to the OEM's bank, and then on to Microsoft's coffers. It doesn't matter whether you "give a shit" about it. Facts is facts.
Just because there are large barriers to entry in the preinstalled OEM OS market doesn't mean that you didn't pay for Windows. A good percentage of your $300 went straight to Microsoft's balance sheet. Those terms are certainly practical enough to drive Microsoft's generous profit margins. None of your hand waving changes that.
Yeah, that guy wanted a smaller, more efficient government.
And after 8 years, we were left with a bigger government, much more deeply in debt. But thanks to his impeccable acting skills, he convinced most people that the opposite had happened.
Seriously, there is a good reason, Romans considered entertainers to be among the lowest class of citizens â" above only prostitutes... They weren't even allowed to serve in the regular army units.
Yet we elected one commander-in-chief 28 years ago, and now his teary-eyed fanbois want to add his head to Mt. Rushmore. So go figure.
Seems you and the parent here (as most people are) are unaware that the United States is not and never was a democracy.
Yes it is. It's a democratic republic.
No country in the history of civilization (including ancient Greece) has ever been a "pure democracy". Insisting on your kind of pedantry would make the word democracy completely useless.
Moreover, any country without a hereditary king is a republic, including Burma, Syria, Sadaam's Iraq, Mussolini's Italy, etc. So the word "republic" by itself doesn't mean much. Specifically, republic != liberty. The only way we've found to ensure liberty so far is to use a democratic republic.
Slashdot Mirror
... it wants its recorded music release strategy back.
This is really a simple response to the implementation details of current technology, just as it always has been.
More cost effective to release music on media that holds multiple tracks: => albums.
Not more cost effective to release music on media that holds multiple tracks: => singles.
look at MS Paint for instance
Yes, look at it. You can actually figure out how to draw a frigging rectangle without having to wade through a 200 page manual (that's often not even installed by default). You know what: most of the time that's what people want to draw: Rectangles. Not boolean operations on disjoint shapes. Rectangles.
Orthogonality is a nice goal, but if it means that people have to jump through hoops and do research in manuals to do the most common trivial tasks, then it's time to add shortcuts for those tasks. You can always add a user preference to turn off any non-orthogonal menu items for those who demand a foolish consistency.
that someone else found the crash site and (for reasons unexplained) took his ID and a grand in cash from it, then hid them where the hiker later found them
My guess would be that "someone" would have been something like a raccoon or a buzzard.
Alright, by your new definition, the Gimp currently needs *two* separate "verbs" to draw a rectangle, one for selecting rectangles and one for drawing. (And it actually needs more because you have to wade through and then dismiss a "stroke" dialog box.) What's worse, the two operations are found in totally different and unrelated parts of the GUI. That's still more work and more confusion.
But it shouldn't need to be two separate steps at all. With a proper drawing tool, it's select and apply in a single atomic operation. There should be no need remember or find two different commands or worry about their relative order.
Make an oval / rectangular selection, stroke with the desired width. Wasn't so laborious now was it?
The problem I have is that I already vaguely know that's how you're supposed to draw shapes in Gimp. However, I probably need to do that less than once per year, so I've usually forgotten the details each time I try it. Now I'm stuck poking around until I relearn the exact procedure.
If they really never want to include a simple shape drawing tool, they need to add a Clippy-like popup: "It looks like you're trying to draw a shape using our back-asswards method. Let me show you the counterintuitive steps you'll need to take..."
Pretty sure that music precedes unicode, dude, and they write the sharp sign using anything that looks like a tiny smooshed tick-tack-toe board.
If a sharp sign is the same as an octothorpe because it has a similar (but not identical) shape, then a flat sign must be the same as a lower-case "b". As it happens, however, neither pair of symbols have ever been interchangeable.
it just needs to be cool enough to condense back into liquid form so that it can once again be evaporated to drive the turbine.
Condensing gases give off large amounts of heat. That's why the condenser unit on an air conditioner needs to have a big fan blowing out hot air. If you can't radiate the heat fast enough, the whole condenser unit will quickly heat up until it's simply too hot for any more gas to condense.
The problem is that the people who live in urban New York cannot appreciate the viewpoints of people in rural Montana, and vice-versa. Reducing the election to a purely populous vote would result in Montana being ruled by New York.
It's a zero sum game, so what we get instead is New York is ruled by Montana. This wonderful Montana viewpoint of world affairs has worked out so well for the last 8 years.
The contract may create problems, but it was the only compromise that allowed for the United STATES to come together in the first place.
That was when there were only 13 states, and most of those selected electors via their legislatures rather than popular vote. There were only a few hundred votes in total to count back then. That system just doesn't scale properly, and today it is a sick joke.
Moreover, states like Montana were US territories owned by the federal government before they were granted statehood. There really was no need to "entice" them to join the union, since they were already subject to the rule of the other states. At any rate, as I said, you could weight each person's vote in Montana at ~2X a Californian's vote (as it is effectively done today) without resorting to this electoral college BS.
Really, these are all just symptoms of a bigger problem.
The bigger problem is the electoral college system. It acts as a statistical noise amplifier.
If the entire country were counted at one person per vote, then the odds of an election being so close as to hinge on less than 1% of the population of a single state would be practically nil.
Or, for those of you who think that the amount empty acreage around each citizen determines the relative worth of their opinion, you could still weight each individual vote based on the electoral college formula. This would still mitigate almost all of the sampling noise caused by the ill-conditioned algorithm that we use today. (Everyone learns in their introductory numerical analysis class that it's a bad idea to sum up the results of a bunch of subtractions or comparisons.)
It makes you wonder how history might have been different if one particular die in a stamping machine at some paper plant had been just a little sharper.
It's not the license. It's the huge PR machine behind it. IBM and all big boys supporting Linux are really selling hardware and are using Linux to commoditize enteprise software.
And do you know why these companies chose Linux as the focus of their PR machines? As the GP post argued, it's because the advantages the GPL provides to these big companies over BSD-style licenses.
These big companies know that if their competitors use the code they contribute, it will have to be on the same terms as the contributor. It can't be closed up, embraced, extended and then used as a weapon against the original contributor. It's a simple exercise in game theory.
I couldn't of said it better myself. I know there doing the best they can over their, but for all intensive purposes the editing is very poor. As for the verdict itself, I could care less.
Which begs the question: Irregardless of wether your disinterested in this verdict, do you tow the line on copywrite law in general?
That's true. Most people grew up with analog static and other artifacts, so they probably don't even notice it that much.
With digital TV, I could deal with occasional choppy video and pixelation when someone walks around the room if it weren't for the damned audio dropouts.
That's my pet peeve about digital TV. I can't figure out why they didn't allocate ~10kHz of bandwidth for a backup analog audio channel to switch to if the digital decoder fails. A brief audio dropout can make you miss enough important information to ruin the point of watching an entire show. Even a scratchy low-fidelity backup audio track would mostly fix that.
This has to be one of the biggest waste of tax dollars I have ever seen.
It's not tax dollars. The government made $Billions by selling off bandwidth to private telco monopolies, breaking my TV in the process. The coupons take some of those *sale proceeds*, NOT tax dollars, to partially compensate me for the hassle and expense of having to fix my TV.
IANAM (I am not a meteorologist)
That's for sure.
Here's an analogy: Say you pour two different colored cans of paint into a bucket and start stirring. Weather is like predicting the exact patterns of swirls that you'll see as the colors mix. Very hard to do looking ahead more than a couple of stirs.
Climate is more like predicting the final color that will result after the mixing is done. Not nearly so intractable. The summary is talking about climate, not weather.
Actually, it's :x<Enter> or :q!<Enter> to quit. I tend to use the equivalent shortcuts ZZ or ZQ instead.
In 1997, the Gartner Group estimated that there were 240 billion lines of Cobol code in active apps, and billions of lines of new Cobol code are being written every year.
The report neglected to mention that 239.9 billion of those lines were boilerplate headers and math operators spelled out with English verbs.
No, the fact that the computer costs the same with or without windows means that I didn't pay for windows.
That assertion is just patently false.
If you bought a machine without windows for the same cost, then you paid the OEM for some additional profit/overhead.
If you bought a machine *with* windows for the same cost, then you paid MICROSOFT for WINDOWS.
*Your* money flowed from your credit card, to the OEM's bank, and then on to Microsoft's coffers. It doesn't matter whether you "give a shit" about it. Facts is facts.
Just because there are large barriers to entry in the preinstalled OEM OS market doesn't mean that you didn't pay for Windows. A good percentage of your $300 went straight to Microsoft's balance sheet. Those terms are certainly practical enough to drive Microsoft's generous profit margins. None of your hand waving changes that.
Yeah, that guy wanted a smaller, more efficient government.
And after 8 years, we were left with a bigger government, much more deeply in debt. But thanks to his impeccable acting skills, he convinced most people that the opposite had happened.
Seriously, there is a good reason, Romans considered entertainers to be among the lowest class of citizens â" above only prostitutes... They weren't even allowed to serve in the regular army units.
Yet we elected one commander-in-chief 28 years ago, and now his teary-eyed fanbois want to add his head to Mt. Rushmore. So go figure.
... if the complete reference can't be included inline in a /. post. Here's all you need to know:
> increment the pointer (to point to the next cell to the right).
< decrement the pointer (to point to the next cell to the left).
+ increment (increase by one) the byte at the pointer.
- decrement (decrease by one) the byte at the pointer.
. output the value of the byte at the pointer.
, accept one byte of input, storing its value in the byte at the pointer.
[ jump forward to the command after the corresponding ] if the byte at the pointer is zero.
] jump back to the command after the corresponding [ if the byte at the pointer is nonzero.
The objective meaning of those words are not changed just because some countries incorrectly include them in their names.
Seems you and the parent here (as most people are) are unaware that the United States is not and never was a democracy.
Yes it is. It's a democratic republic.
No country in the history of civilization (including ancient Greece) has ever been a "pure democracy". Insisting on your kind of pedantry would make the word democracy completely useless.
Moreover, any country without a hereditary king is a republic, including Burma, Syria, Sadaam's Iraq, Mussolini's Italy, etc. So the word "republic" by itself doesn't mean much. Specifically, republic != liberty. The only way we've found to ensure liberty so far is to use a democratic republic.