In my techno-religion, that's where the personality and "soul" of my computer is. My Red Hat 4.1 installation is now at 6.1, a half dozen revisions later (*sniff* my baby's growing up...), but I haven't reinstalled since 5.0 (repartitioning the hard drive), so since then I've considered it the same computer... even though the bits have moved through 3 hard drives, 3 motherboards, 3 CPUs, 2 cases, and lots of different extra junk over the years.
With Windows, on the other hand, I get the dubious pleasure of starting with a fresh new computer soul every year. This time it'll be because, after uninstalling and reinstalling various versions of DirectX, sound card drivers, etc. and fiddling back and forth with IRQ/DMA settings, I can't fix the "sound stops playing after.25 seconds" problem that started after I uninstalled a game this Christmas.
"Well, Mr. Stogner, we've uploaded your brain patterns into the computer, but there's been a bit of a surprise. You see, we thought that the uploading operation was destructive, shredding the original brain pattern as it created the digital copy. Unfortunately, the uploading went less invasively than usual, and well, (this is kind of embarrassing), here you still are. Don't worry, the digital copy is perfect, so you're really immortal now, but having two of you running around would create legal complications. So, if you'll simply swallow this pill here, we'll boot up your computer personality just as soon as we've disposed of the obsolescent copy."
You weren't waiting for a clean release!
on
Slash v0.9 Released
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· Score: 2
Honestly, can you really go from "it's too site-specific and ugly to release" to "here's slash v0.9" in a few days? I don't think so.
No, clearly the slash release was ready last week when we were all whining about it, but CmdrTaco decided it would be fun to see how many Slashdot regulars he could sucker into make asses of themselves in said whining first.
Take a look at the GeForce - it does (3) and (4) just like those SGI workstations, and on a $200 (or $300 depending on things like RAM bandwidth) PC 3D card. No, it's not up to $100k SGI workstation standards, but it's getting closer. Nvidia's Quadro (which isn't much more than a souped-up Geforce) isn't a gamer's card, and SGI is working with Nvidia on future PC accelerators IIRC. Take a look at Anandtech's Quadro DDR review and see what you can get on a PC for under $1000.
"Even if a virus cannot gain root access, to a home PC user, deleting his entire home directory is just as bad as infecting/bin/ls"
Not quite true. If a virus deletes my entire home directory, and I'm smart, I just whip out the latest backup CD-R and do the restore as root. Voila, no more virus.
On the other hand, if a virus infects my system running as root or infects my Windows system, there is nothing short of a reinstall I could do to make sure my system is secure. That virus might have infected anything on the system, from/bin/ls or explorer.exe to the kernel modules or kernel32.dll, and short of booting from a known clean floppy and reinstalling there's no way to be certain that a running virus isn't hiding itself from virus checkers (which isn't hard), maliciously attacking personal files repeatedly.
And frankly, I have to reinstall Windows often enough when it's virus-free. I haven't reinstalled Linux in years, and I'd like to keep it that way.
Honestly, do you open up a new book and think to yourself, "Look at this! This thing has the exact same vocabulary, font, and paper as the last book I read! What a rip off!" Do you watch a new movie, and complain that there wasn't a single new special effect or camera angle? Do you listen to a new rock album, and complain that it's still the same 44khz stereo sampled electric guitars as last time?
In the long run (long run being less than 10 years from now in the computer software world), storyline development should be far more important than engine improvements to how good a sequel to a game is. There's already insufficient attention paid to storyline in most games, and the "tournament/arena" game variety isn't helping. Are people going to be buying Baldur's Gate II in droves because they expect another engrossing world and story, or because they want to see the cool alpha-blending effects in the new engine?
The fact that people can think exactly the opposite is true, that a new game engine is the most important part of a new game, is just an artifact of the current situation where computer hardware and the computer gaming market are improving exponentially, and so compromises made in previous games due to slow hardware and low development budgets are no longer necessary. This situation won't last forever - eventually the size of the market will level off and the rate of hardware improvement will slow or become less relevant. The difference between a 100 and a 1000 poly model is much larger than the difference between a 1000 and a 10000 poly model, and a good engine will allow users with vastly differing systems to use any of the above models in the same game.
There's only so far that you can go with a game engine before other things become more important. There's a reason why the Marathon games (and even Duke3D) had better single player play than the technically superior Quake. Atmosphere, level design, etc. can be more important than whats under the hood.
Quick reality check, though - when I say that the days of huge game engine improvements won't last in the long run, that isn't to say that there isn't lots of room to improve today. Check out the upcoming Halo, for an example of how far we have yet to go.
As of this post, the only things scored 3 or above are in favor of the patent, and the score 2 posts are pretty well reasoned (and cautious) in both directions.
But of course, none of that matters. By saying that "Poster credibility went boink" you get to feel superior to the average ignorant slashdot reader, don't you?
Most Linux setups I've seen default to using at least a couple of the "sucky" IDE controller settings. The "-d1" setting with hdparm is crucial, in particular, as it turns on DMA, which hacks a huge chunk out of your CPU usage, makes things nice for the scheduler, and increases transfer rates dramatically. With DMA off on my system MP3s skip whenever the hard drive thrashes too much; with DMA on I can't make an MP3 skip with any level of hard drive activity (and believe me I tried).
One last flag you might want to try: -X34 will make sure the drive is set to DMA mode 2 transfers, and on new drives -X66 will select Ultra DMA transfers. DMA->UDMA isn't nearly as big a leap as PIO->DMA, but it's sizable.
I wish more people knew about hdparm - it's a single command you can run as root that can double the performance of your system under some circumstances. I think new kernels are getting more aggressive about enabling good IDE settings themselves, but there are still too many systems out there where the default settings needlessly give both Linux and IDE a bad name.
I mean, just look at the pixels here! They're like 90% white! Sure, blacks have some representation, but even green seems to be doing better.
I don't know about "narrow", though. Sure, I can shrink my browser down to 640x480 and have Slashdot fit sometimes, but what about when stupid ACs create a thread nested 25 deep? Then Slashdot becomes one of the broadest sites on the web. Site width is definitely a more complicated issue than color.
In the interests of collecting all the flood of "look, beavis, he's anticipating wood" jokes in one place, and simultaneously preventing the uninterested from having to read all of them, I request that all such jokes be submitted as replies to this.
I mean, honestly, what is a "filesystem" except a way of organizing chunks of arbitrary data in a tree structure?
If you have a "database" that also can organize chunks of arbitrary data in a tree structure, but is so much faster than ext2 at this that you believe it should be built into programs... why not wrap a filesystem driver around it and build it into every program at once?
No, there's no liability at all! If I own one out of one million shares of Corporation A, and a court subsequently fines them one million dollars, I myself will not share any of the liability, not even the one dollar that is my share.
So you think your stock price will stay the same after that huge fine? How about your dividends? By the above logic, if a company you own stock in makes a billion dollar profit, it doesn't matter because that money "went to the company" and not directly into your pocket.
This would only happen in the most absurd fantasy.
Failure of imagination is a poor argument. For any market where there are few enough competitors that the loss of one is consequential (i.e. most markets) and for which there are significant barriers to entry (again, most markets) knocking a competitor out of business is going to do good things in the long run for your profits.
Corporations exist to make profits, not to eliminate the competition. There is much more profit to be had by making a profit:-) than by crushing the competition.
Sure, if you never look beyond the short term. In the long term, on the other hand, it's just basic macroeconomics. The maximum profit a monopoly can draw out of a market is a higher than the total profit that a large group of competing companies can draw out of the same market... and is a lot higher than the profit that any one of those companies can make.
So if the barriers to entry in your market are high enough, it pays to crush the competition. And in some markets...
We all bitch about Microsoft's underhanded tactics, but can anyone imagine the power they'd have in a truly libertarian society, where the EULA could say anything they wanted and it would be 100% enforceable? Say goodbye to dual-booting. Picture licenses for Visual C++ that disallow the purchasing company from developing software for any other platform, and (software enforced) licenses for Windows that don't let you run software created without Microsoft development tools. Microsoft could make running new Windows programs under Wine illegal, and make it stick. They could change TCP/IP over the course of a year so that only Windows computers could talk to Windows computers, and make it stick. This garbage about disallowing preinstalled Netscape is nothing compared to what a company with that kind of dominance could do if they weren't afraid of government reprisal.
I'm a little curious if there's been any improvement in the multimedia layer that Loki uses since the first CivCTP patch came out? Unfortunately, on my machine civctp is a statically linked executable (Bad Loki!) and so I can't just download the latest SDL code from their site and try it. I'll happily go hunting around again if they've had a later CivCTP patch than 1.1.
CivCTP has some problems. I've played both the Windows and Linux versions for a while, and while both are unacceptably slow and memory-leaking for a 2D game (and Alpha Centauri is even worse - what, do we need to start benchmarking frame rates on non-3D games again???), the Linux version cranks up X's CPU usage as well. As near as I can figure, they send a complete screen redraw across the X pipe every time something as simple as a small cursor blink happens. And on a 1280x1024 screen, that can hurt.
You could always have a time/date stamp included along with the hash. That would preclude later video alterations in many cases, until people reverse engineered the camera hardware. (How easy is it to embed a private key into a microchip that does digital encryption/signatures, and keep that private key secret from even a determined reverse engineering attempt?)
But of course just yesterday there was a GPL'ed software release to do realtime video editing, and anyone with enough kilobucks to spend can do better.
There are third party services out there that will timestamp and PGP sign your data, but that's kind of pointless when the latency involved in video editing is less than the latency involved in sending hashes to the timestamper's server and getting them back.
A friend of mine picked up an ATI All-in-Wonder (or was it an All-in-Wonder Pro?) a month or two ago, and after spending a few days futzing with beta software he had TV-out working well. I don't think the TV input is supported yet but it was under development. IIRC it was only recently that ATI saw the open source light, so all the Linux driver software (including Mesa modifications, I believe) is in a fairly alpha stage. If you're desparate you could always get a separate bttv card for input.
"The United States loves to see itself as the cradle of liberty"...
Yeah, and Jon Katz loves to see himself as an exposer of hypocrisy and warrior against The Man. Neither of which is a perfect self-image, but I think the U.S. is a little closer.
Haven't you made this "liberty == total lack of judgement" mistake before, Jon? I seem to remember some previous article where most of the replies were patiently explaining to you the difference between "freedom of speech" and "freedom to make people listen to you".
Liberty doesn't mean that everybody has to be a mindless proponent of whatever stupid opinion, annoying behavior, or questionable pornography that their neighbor puts online. Liberty just means that those things are allowed, whether most people like them or not.
And if you'll do a search for "xxx" (or many more interesting keywords) sometime you'll find that these things are, most definitely, allowed. En masse.
Even in the prudish, hypocritical USA. Imagine that.
And as for those links you provided, "disproving" the glass ceiling
You know, if you put something in quotes, it sounds more dubious?
and wage gap arguments: the arguments they present seem to me to miss the point entirely.
Actually, the arguments hit the point exactly. They're not dealing with "institutionalized sexism", they're dealing with "the glass ceiling" and "the wage gap", which in at least the first case they are surprisingly good at debunking.
Notice how both articles say "we need to control for qualified applicants"?
Yes. And they're right. Both articles are looking at discrimination in the workplace, not discrimination in education. And when you're looking at salaries or promotions, any comparison of groups of applicants with different qualifications, expecting equivalent results, is ridiculous.
Why do you think there aren't as many qualified applicants?
If you read the article you'd have their answer, one which certainly sounds sufficient to me: "In 1970, when today's senior managers were graduating, fewer than five percent of law and MBA degrees were awarded to women."
Is it because women are stupid?
Note that they didn't use the phrase "dumb women" once. It's not that women are stupid. It's most likely because during the 50s when 1970 graduates were growing up, there was incredible social and media pressure against successful career women and toward homemakers. It's quite likely because in the 60s when today's senior managers were in school, there was serious discrimination against women at every level of education.
The claim isn't that the current lack of women CEOs isn't a result of bias and discrimination, just that that lack is much more a result of 30 year old discrimination than current discrimination.
The link given fails to give conclusive evidence to the lack of a "glass ceiling", though. Not nearly enough figures in what's essentially an editorial summary.
This is why I like Thomas Sowell, BTW - his newspaper columns aren't much better than you'd expect from a couple hundred words, but his books contain statistically relevant facts, something all too absent from discussion of social issues.
Why, every now and then you even run across a writer who is proud of not inserting facts among his thoughts and criticizes others for doing so. Imagine that.
I think it's because of what you might call "institutionalized sexism" in which women are systematically marginalized, so they don't really have a fighting chance at being society's leaders.
If you're talking about socialization of women, about the imbued traits that our culture tries to slap on young girls, than I'm inclined to agree with you... although the problem isn't nearly as current as you seem to think, judging by the female majority in today's college admissions.
As for why I didn't provide citations: one, I am currently on vacation and away from my books and articles, and unfortunately most gender research is published only on dead trees.
This is why I liked MajorNet (and like Usenet, if you filter out the losers) more than Slashdot for serious debates. It was always nice, when caught off guard by a point of your opponent, to be able to come back days later with a well-supported rebuttal. Of course Slashdot discussions fade into oblivion within 24 hours.
Two, I find the citation game to be rather stupid. I would rather have people read and respond thoughtfully to my thoughts
This is just stupid. First of all, those links took up a couple words space in what was otherwise all original. Secondly, while I was amused by your parody and this whole discussion, those links are the most worthwhile thing I've seen from either of you. Stupid engineer-brained me, to want to read factual numbers and see accurate methodology instead of watching two people insult each other.
Put another way: I find that most people hide behind citation to conceal the fact that they don't have any of their own thoughts, and I don't like that.
The last person I heard that from was a creationist who was indignant that I responded to his claim that there are no transitional fossils with details on mammal, whale, bird, and horse lineages. It knocked my opinion of him down a notch, too. Not that his writing was ever as good as yours to begin with.
If they can get the restriction on visas lifted, the market gets flooded, and salaries and quality drops.
Damn straight! Everybody knows them immigants can't write good code like Honest God-Fearing Americans! Why, the next thing you know there'll be a horde of swarthy green card holders here working on their cheap Leenooks and slandering the quality of the US and our Windows software!
They probably program in their strange furriner tongues, too! Imagine!
para(índice=0;índice<10;índice++) { impresarf("Soy un imigrante malvado!"); }
Now, how is a humble young American boy supposed to debug that?
The IEEE has done a pretty good job at fighting this, it should be an issue for anyone working in technology.
That warms my heart. Only when we get back to the kind of economic isolationism and protectionism we enjoyed in the 1930s will America truly prosper. Why, if we're enjoying the longest economic boom in decades after NAFTA, just think of how great the American economy would be if we stopped letting furriners steal our jobs!
Frankly, I copped out and didn't touch the monitor. I figured I'd need a new case in a year anyway and would try a different paint job then.
Painting the monitor carefully with a non spray paint might work.
Taking apart the monitor then spray painting the plastic might work too... but this can be quite dangerous. Your monitor has what's effectively one big freaking capacitor inside it, and can retain a dangerous static charge for a long time (at least hours) after it's even unplugged. My monitor isn't the most solidly made model out there, and you can literally hear several loud spark discharges hours after it's been turned off.
I painted my case (with this cool speckly "American Accents" spray paint) last summer. It's got a stoneish texture (both visual and tactile) with blue, black, white, and grey on it now.
The biggest things to worry about are "will the paint harm my computer?" and "will the paint stay on?"
For the first question, the simple rule is to never have your electronic parts anywhere near the painting. I'm lucky, my case has a sheet metalish cover for the top and the sides, and a plastic faceplate covering the entire case front, so I just snapped those off and painted them, leaving the back unpainted metal. It's a good idea to sand off any paint spray that gets on the inside face of the parts you paint, too.
For things like CD-ROM and floppy drives, you'll find that generally the plastic faceplate on the drive snaps off and can be painted away from the drive. On these you'll definitely want to sand off any paint that ends up on the inside surface of the faceplate.
As for "will the paint stay on?" the key things are primer and clearcoat. I used a plain white spray-on primer and an acrylic sealant, and with the amount my case gets hauled around and banged up I've already got a couple chips in the paint job. Now, maybe this is just because I used a thick coat of that fancy paint and put my case through physical abuse, or maybe the guy who posted instructions for using auto paints has the right idea.
I'm not the only one who can't work inside his computer case for 15 minutes without drawing blood. The damn thing has some hidden edge in it which is sharper than fresh-cut paper but hard as steel, and the thing slices through my skin so cleanly it'll be 5 minutes later before I feel any pain or notice the welling blood.
Anyway, it's good to know it's the case's fault. I thought I was just an idiot. Every band-aid felt like a "klutz badge"...
Nobody's talking about having a "right" to the Slashdot code. Nobody's talking about legally enforcing that fictitious right, or about being ethically wronged by Rob.
Rob has a right to keep his code closed source, to pick his nose in public, or to post a "Racist Rant of the Week" on the front page. Just because he has a right to do it doesn't mean it's a good idea.
We're not asking for bug-free code, commented code, or even ready to release code. And it's not even like OSS coders are depending on a Slash release; there are other slash-like codebases out there, just a year or more less advanced. All we're asking is "tar czf slash.tar.gz..."
And the "hypocrisy" claim, albeit extreme, is important here. Nobody is begging Yahoo, DejaNews, or ZDNet to release their CGI code. But the fact that Slashdot, the most popular open source friendly site on the net, isn't releasing source code? It's just a bit annoying.
Imagine if, after the initial release of buggy, lobotomized Communicator code, Netscape had announced that they changed their minds, and were going to release all future Navigator work under a closed source only. Well, that would be their right, and it would be much more reasonable for Netscape than for Slashdot to stop releasing source... but do you not think that everyone here, including the editors, would be outraged and disappointed? Imagine if after AOL (read: Andover) made its purchases, Netscape under new management never released another line of code?
Granted, we all trust Rob's good intentions, but if those intentions are to wait until they have well-commented, perfectly designed, autoconfigured portable code to release... then anyone still expecting that release is just deluding themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
In my techno-religion, that's where the personality and "soul" of my computer is. My Red Hat 4.1 installation is now at 6.1, a half dozen revisions later (*sniff* my baby's growing up...), but I haven't reinstalled since 5.0 (repartitioning the hard drive), so since then I've considered it the same computer... even though the bits have moved through 3 hard drives, 3 motherboards, 3 CPUs, 2 cases, and lots of different extra junk over the years.
.25 seconds" problem that started after I uninstalled a game this Christmas.
With Windows, on the other hand, I get the dubious pleasure of starting with a fresh new computer soul every year. This time it'll be because, after uninstalling and reinstalling various versions of DirectX, sound card drivers, etc. and fiddling back and forth with IRQ/DMA settings, I can't fix the "sound stops playing after
I can just see the first failed operation:
Doctor to patient on table:
"Well, Mr. Stogner, we've uploaded your brain patterns into the computer, but there's been a bit of a surprise. You see, we thought that the uploading operation was destructive, shredding the original brain pattern as it created the digital copy. Unfortunately, the uploading went less invasively than usual, and well, (this is kind of embarrassing), here you still are. Don't worry, the digital copy is perfect, so you're really immortal now, but having two of you running around would create legal complications. So, if you'll simply swallow this pill here, we'll boot up your computer personality just as soon as we've disposed of the obsolescent copy."
Honestly, can you really go from "it's too site-specific and ugly to release" to "here's slash v0.9" in a few days? I don't think so.
No, clearly the slash release was ready last week when we were all whining about it, but CmdrTaco decided it would be fun to see how many Slashdot regulars he could sucker into make asses of themselves in said whining first.
Consider me suckered. Egg on my face.
Thanks for the code, guys.
Take a look at the GeForce - it does (3) and (4) just like those SGI workstations, and on a $200 (or $300 depending on things like RAM bandwidth) PC 3D card. No, it's not up to $100k SGI workstation standards, but it's getting closer. Nvidia's Quadro (which isn't much more than a souped-up Geforce) isn't a gamer's card, and SGI is working with Nvidia on future PC accelerators IIRC. Take a look at Anandtech's Quadro DDR review and see what you can get on a PC for under $1000.
"Even if a virus cannot gain root access, to a home PC user, deleting his entire home directory is just as bad as infecting /bin/ls"
/bin/ls or explorer.exe to the kernel modules or kernel32.dll, and short of booting from a known clean floppy and reinstalling there's no way to be certain that a running virus isn't hiding itself from virus checkers (which isn't hard), maliciously attacking personal files repeatedly.
Not quite true. If a virus deletes my entire home directory, and I'm smart, I just whip out the latest backup CD-R and do the restore as root. Voila, no more virus.
On the other hand, if a virus infects my system running as root or infects my Windows system, there is nothing short of a reinstall I could do to make sure my system is secure. That virus might have infected anything on the system, from
And frankly, I have to reinstall Windows often enough when it's virus-free. I haven't reinstalled Linux in years, and I'd like to keep it that way.
Honestly, do you open up a new book and think to yourself, "Look at this! This thing has the exact same vocabulary, font, and paper as the last book I read! What a rip off!" Do you watch a new movie, and complain that there wasn't a single new special effect or camera angle? Do you listen to a new rock album, and complain that it's still the same 44khz stereo sampled electric guitars as last time?
In the long run (long run being less than 10 years from now in the computer software world), storyline development should be far more important than engine improvements to how good a sequel to a game is. There's already insufficient attention paid to storyline in most games, and the "tournament/arena" game variety isn't helping. Are people going to be buying Baldur's Gate II in droves because they expect another engrossing world and story, or because they want to see the cool alpha-blending effects in the new engine?
The fact that people can think exactly the opposite is true, that a new game engine is the most important part of a new game, is just an artifact of the current situation where computer hardware and the computer gaming market are improving exponentially, and so compromises made in previous games due to slow hardware and low development budgets are no longer necessary. This situation won't last forever - eventually the size of the market will level off and the rate of hardware improvement will slow or become less relevant. The difference between a 100 and a 1000 poly model is much larger than the difference between a 1000 and a 10000 poly model, and a good engine will allow users with vastly differing systems to use any of the above models in the same game.
There's only so far that you can go with a game engine before other things become more important. There's a reason why the Marathon games (and even Duke3D) had better single player play than the technically superior Quake. Atmosphere, level design, etc. can be more important than whats under the hood.
Quick reality check, though - when I say that the days of huge game engine improvements won't last in the long run, that isn't to say that there isn't lots of room to improve today. Check out the upcoming Halo, for an example of how far we have yet to go.
As of this post, the only things scored 3 or above are in favor of the patent, and the score 2 posts are pretty well reasoned (and cautious) in both directions.
But of course, none of that matters. By saying that "Poster credibility went boink" you get to feel superior to the average ignorant slashdot reader, don't you?
Most Linux setups I've seen default to using at least a couple of the "sucky" IDE controller settings. The "-d1" setting with hdparm is crucial, in particular, as it turns on DMA, which hacks a huge chunk out of your CPU usage, makes things nice for the scheduler, and increases transfer rates dramatically. With DMA off on my system MP3s skip whenever the hard drive thrashes too much; with DMA on I can't make an MP3 skip with any level of hard drive activity (and believe me I tried).
One last flag you might want to try: -X34 will make sure the drive is set to DMA mode 2 transfers, and on new drives -X66 will select Ultra DMA transfers. DMA->UDMA isn't nearly as big a leap as PIO->DMA, but it's sizable.
I wish more people knew about hdparm - it's a single command you can run as root that can double the performance of your system under some circumstances. I think new kernels are getting more aggressive about enabling good IDE settings themselves, but there are still too many systems out there where the default settings needlessly give both Linux and IDE a bad name.
Granted, there are many giant clumps of jerks on the internet... but do you really think any of them are doing much breeding?
Remember, folks, Jon Katz isn't a geek wannabe. He's "a non-programmer who made different technology choices."
I mean, just look at the pixels here! They're like 90% white! Sure, blacks have some representation, but even green seems to be doing better.
I don't know about "narrow", though. Sure, I can shrink my browser down to 640x480 and have Slashdot fit sometimes, but what about when stupid ACs create a thread nested 25 deep? Then Slashdot becomes one of the broadest sites on the web. Site width is definitely a more complicated issue than color.
In the interests of collecting all the flood of "look, beavis, he's anticipating wood" jokes in one place, and simultaneously preventing the uninterested from having to read all of them, I request that all such jokes be submitted as replies to this.
Thank you for your consideration.
I mean, honestly, what is a "filesystem" except a way of organizing chunks of arbitrary data in a tree structure?
If you have a "database" that also can organize chunks of arbitrary data in a tree structure, but is so much faster than ext2 at this that you believe it should be built into programs... why not wrap a filesystem driver around it and build it into every program at once?
No, there's no liability at all! If I own one out of one million shares of Corporation A, and a court subsequently fines them one million dollars, I myself will not share any of the liability, not even the one dollar that is my share.
:-) than by crushing the competition.
So you think your stock price will stay the same after that huge fine? How about your dividends? By the above logic, if a company you own stock in makes a billion dollar profit, it doesn't matter because that money "went to the company" and not directly into your pocket.
This would only happen in the most absurd fantasy.
Failure of imagination is a poor argument. For any market where there are few enough competitors that the loss of one is consequential (i.e. most markets) and for which there are significant barriers to entry (again, most markets) knocking a competitor out of business is going to do good things in the long run for your profits.
Corporations exist to make profits, not to eliminate the competition. There is much more profit to be had by making a profit
Sure, if you never look beyond the short term. In the long term, on the other hand, it's just basic macroeconomics. The maximum profit a monopoly can draw out of a market is a higher than the total profit that a large group of competing companies can draw out of the same market... and is a lot higher than the profit that any one of those companies can make.
So if the barriers to entry in your market are high enough, it pays to crush the competition. And in some markets...
We all bitch about Microsoft's underhanded tactics, but can anyone imagine the power they'd have in a truly libertarian society, where the EULA could say anything they wanted and it would be 100% enforceable? Say goodbye to dual-booting. Picture licenses for Visual C++ that disallow the purchasing company from developing software for any other platform, and (software enforced) licenses for Windows that don't let you run software created without Microsoft development tools. Microsoft could make running new Windows programs under Wine illegal, and make it stick. They could change TCP/IP over the course of a year so that only Windows computers could talk to Windows computers, and make it stick. This garbage about disallowing preinstalled Netscape is nothing compared to what a company with that kind of dominance could do if they weren't afraid of government reprisal.
I'm a little curious if there's been any improvement in the multimedia layer that Loki uses since the first CivCTP patch came out? Unfortunately, on my machine civctp is a statically linked executable (Bad Loki!) and so I can't just download the latest SDL code from their site and try it. I'll happily go hunting around again if they've had a later CivCTP patch than 1.1.
CivCTP has some problems. I've played both the Windows and Linux versions for a while, and while both are unacceptably slow and memory-leaking for a 2D game (and Alpha Centauri is even worse - what, do we need to start benchmarking frame rates on non-3D games again???), the Linux version cranks up X's CPU usage as well. As near as I can figure, they send a complete screen redraw across the X pipe every time something as simple as a small cursor blink happens. And on a 1280x1024 screen, that can hurt.
You could always have a time/date stamp included along with the hash. That would preclude later video alterations in many cases, until people reverse engineered the camera hardware. (How easy is it to embed a private key into a microchip that does digital encryption/signatures, and keep that private key secret from even a determined reverse engineering attempt?)
But of course just yesterday there was a GPL'ed software release to do realtime video editing, and anyone with enough kilobucks to spend can do better.
There are third party services out there that will timestamp and PGP sign your data, but that's kind of pointless when the latency involved in video editing is less than the latency involved in sending hashes to the timestamper's server and getting them back.
A friend of mine picked up an ATI All-in-Wonder (or was it an All-in-Wonder Pro?) a month or two ago, and after spending a few days futzing with beta software he had TV-out working well. I don't think the TV input is supported yet but it was under development. IIRC it was only recently that ATI saw the open source light, so all the Linux driver software (including Mesa modifications, I believe) is in a fairly alpha stage. If you're desparate you could always get a separate bttv card for input.
"The United States loves to see itself as the cradle of liberty"...
Yeah, and Jon Katz loves to see himself as an exposer of hypocrisy and warrior against The Man. Neither of which is a perfect self-image, but I think the U.S. is a little closer.
Haven't you made this "liberty == total lack of judgement" mistake before, Jon? I seem to remember some previous article where most of the replies were patiently explaining to you the difference between "freedom of speech" and "freedom to make people listen to you".
Liberty doesn't mean that everybody has to be a mindless proponent of whatever stupid opinion, annoying behavior, or questionable pornography that their neighbor puts online. Liberty just means that those things are allowed, whether most people like them or not.
And if you'll do a search for "xxx" (or many more interesting keywords) sometime you'll find that these things are, most definitely, allowed. En masse.
Even in the prudish, hypocritical USA. Imagine that.
...he was insinuating that I'm some foreigner hating redneck, which is far from the truth.
Read this statement again. It has two different interpretations, both of which are correct, but one of which I assume was accidental.
Don't be so sensitive. Laugh a little. Realize that a post containing the line 'printf("I am an evil immigrant")' probably isn't a personal attack.
And as for those links you provided, "disproving" the glass ceiling
You know, if you put something in quotes, it sounds more dubious?
and wage gap arguments: the arguments they present seem to me to miss the point entirely.
Actually, the arguments hit the point exactly. They're not dealing with "institutionalized sexism", they're dealing with "the glass ceiling" and "the wage gap", which in at least the first case they are surprisingly good at debunking.
Notice how both articles say "we need to control for qualified applicants"?
Yes. And they're right. Both articles are looking at discrimination in the workplace, not discrimination in education. And when you're looking at salaries or promotions, any comparison of groups of applicants with different qualifications, expecting equivalent results, is ridiculous.
Why do you think there aren't as many qualified applicants?
If you read the article you'd have their answer, one which certainly sounds sufficient to me: "In 1970, when today's senior managers were graduating, fewer than five percent of law and MBA degrees were awarded to women."
Is it because women are stupid?
Note that they didn't use the phrase "dumb women" once. It's not that women are stupid. It's most likely because during the 50s when 1970 graduates were growing up, there was incredible social and media pressure against successful career women and toward homemakers. It's quite likely because in the 60s when today's senior managers were in school, there was serious discrimination against women at every level of education.
The claim isn't that the current lack of women CEOs isn't a result of bias and discrimination, just that that lack is much more a result of 30 year old discrimination than current discrimination.
The link given fails to give conclusive evidence to the lack of a "glass ceiling", though. Not nearly enough figures in what's essentially an editorial summary.
This is why I like Thomas Sowell, BTW - his newspaper columns aren't much better than you'd expect from a couple hundred words, but his books contain statistically relevant facts, something all too absent from discussion of social issues.
Why, every now and then you even run across a writer who is proud of not inserting facts among his thoughts and criticizes others for doing so. Imagine that.
I think it's because of what you might call "institutionalized sexism" in which women are systematically marginalized, so they don't really have a fighting chance at being society's leaders.
If you're talking about socialization of women, about the imbued traits that our culture tries to slap on young girls, than I'm inclined to agree with you... although the problem isn't nearly as current as you seem to think, judging by the female majority in today's college admissions.
As for why I didn't provide citations: one, I am currently on vacation and away from my books and articles, and unfortunately most gender research is published only on dead trees.
This is why I liked MajorNet (and like Usenet, if you filter out the losers) more than Slashdot for serious debates. It was always nice, when caught off guard by a point of your opponent, to be able to come back days later with a well-supported rebuttal. Of course Slashdot discussions fade into oblivion within 24 hours.
Two, I find the citation game to be rather stupid. I would rather have people read and respond thoughtfully to my thoughts
This is just stupid. First of all, those links took up a couple words space in what was otherwise all original. Secondly, while I was amused by your parody and this whole discussion, those links are the most worthwhile thing I've seen from either of you. Stupid engineer-brained me, to want to read factual numbers and see accurate methodology instead of watching two people insult each other.
Put another way: I find that most people hide behind citation to conceal the fact that they don't have any of their own thoughts, and I don't like that.
The last person I heard that from was a creationist who was indignant that I responded to his claim that there are no transitional fossils with details on mammal, whale, bird, and horse lineages. It knocked my opinion of him down a notch, too. Not that his writing was ever as good as yours to begin with.
If they can get the restriction on visas lifted, the market gets flooded, and salaries and quality drops.
Damn straight! Everybody knows them immigants can't write good code like Honest God-Fearing Americans! Why, the next thing you know there'll be a horde of swarthy green card holders here working on their cheap Leenooks and slandering the quality of the US and our Windows software!
They probably program in their strange furriner tongues, too! Imagine!
para(índice=0;índice<10;índice++)
{
impresarf("Soy un imigrante malvado!");
}
Now, how is a humble young American boy supposed to debug that?
The IEEE has done a pretty good job at fighting this, it should be an issue for anyone working in technology.
That warms my heart. Only when we get back to the kind of economic isolationism and protectionism we enjoyed in the 1930s will America truly prosper. Why, if we're enjoying the longest economic boom in decades after NAFTA, just think of how great the American economy would be if we stopped letting furriners steal our jobs!
I forgot you asked about this too.
Frankly, I copped out and didn't touch the monitor. I figured I'd need a new case in a year anyway and would try a different paint job then.
Painting the monitor carefully with a non spray paint might work.
Taking apart the monitor then spray painting the plastic might work too... but this can be quite dangerous. Your monitor has what's effectively one big freaking capacitor inside it, and can retain a dangerous static charge for a long time (at least hours) after it's even unplugged. My monitor isn't the most solidly made model out there, and you can literally hear several loud spark discharges hours after it's been turned off.
I painted my case (with this cool speckly "American Accents" spray paint) last summer. It's got a stoneish texture (both visual and tactile) with blue, black, white, and grey on it now.
The biggest things to worry about are "will the paint harm my computer?" and "will the paint stay on?"
For the first question, the simple rule is to never have your electronic parts anywhere near the painting. I'm lucky, my case has a sheet metalish cover for the top and the sides, and a plastic faceplate covering the entire case front, so I just snapped those off and painted them, leaving the back unpainted metal. It's a good idea to sand off any paint spray that gets on the inside face of the parts you paint, too.
For things like CD-ROM and floppy drives, you'll find that generally the plastic faceplate on the drive snaps off and can be painted away from the drive. On these you'll definitely want to sand off any paint that ends up on the inside surface of the faceplate.
As for "will the paint stay on?" the key things are primer and clearcoat. I used a plain white spray-on primer and an acrylic sealant, and with the amount my case gets hauled around and banged up I've already got a couple chips in the paint job. Now, maybe this is just because I used a thick coat of that fancy paint and put my case through physical abuse, or maybe the guy who posted instructions for using auto paints has the right idea.
I'm not the only one who can't work inside his computer case for 15 minutes without drawing blood. The damn thing has some hidden edge in it which is sharper than fresh-cut paper but hard as steel, and the thing slices through my skin so cleanly it'll be 5 minutes later before I feel any pain or notice the welling blood.
Anyway, it's good to know it's the case's fault. I thought I was just an idiot. Every band-aid felt like a "klutz badge"...
Nobody's talking about having a "right" to the Slashdot code. Nobody's talking about legally enforcing that fictitious right, or about being ethically wronged by Rob.
..."
Rob has a right to keep his code closed source, to pick his nose in public, or to post a "Racist Rant of the Week" on the front page. Just because he has a right to do it doesn't mean it's a good idea.
We're not asking for bug-free code, commented code, or even ready to release code. And it's not even like OSS coders are depending on a Slash release; there are other slash-like codebases out there, just a year or more less advanced. All we're asking is "tar czf slash.tar.gz
And the "hypocrisy" claim, albeit extreme, is important here. Nobody is begging Yahoo, DejaNews, or ZDNet to release their CGI code. But the fact that Slashdot, the most popular open source friendly site on the net, isn't releasing source code? It's just a bit annoying.
Imagine if, after the initial release of buggy, lobotomized Communicator code, Netscape had announced that they changed their minds, and were going to release all future Navigator work under a closed source only. Well, that would be their right, and it would be much more reasonable for Netscape than for Slashdot to stop releasing source... but do you not think that everyone here, including the editors, would be outraged and disappointed? Imagine if after AOL (read: Andover) made its purchases, Netscape under new management never released another line of code?
Granted, we all trust Rob's good intentions, but if those intentions are to wait until they have well-commented, perfectly designed, autoconfigured portable code to release... then anyone still expecting that release is just deluding themselves.