That's because HP appears to care about Linux. They release real open-source drivers that can be included by all Linux distros, even ones like Debian and Fedora that have very strict rules about licensing.
HP products maybe aren't the best value for money, but anyone who cares about open source drivers should definitely consider taking their custom to one of the few companies that gets it.
He said it does everything the iPad does, not that it does it in exactly the same way.
Touchscreens are cool and all, but they don't magically enable the device to do things you can't actually do just as well with a keyboard and touchpad.
It might not be great, but it's good enough for most people. You can say the same thing about MP3s and DVDs. Not great, but good enough.
And before those, cassette tapes and VHS were "good enough". Black-and-white TV was "good enough". Phonographs were "good enough". Believe it or not, people once lived perfectly happy lives with just books and whatever music they could sing and play themselves!
I would argue that "good enough" is not good enough. If you settle for "good enough", you are rejecting the very concept of progress. If on the other hand you believe that progress is both possible and desirable, then there can be no such thing as "good enough"; there is only "the best we've managed so far", and that is only tolerable until we figure out how to do better.
If it was really cost effective some private company would have already built it.
Don't be silly. Building a rail link is essentially impossible unless you can use eminent domain to acquire the necessary land; there's no way a private company could realistically expect to persuade thousands of individual landowners to sell them land in a straight line from one city to another, possibly crossing several different states in the process.
You overstate the case. In Britain, fuel prices are vastly higher than they are in the USA, and driving is still usually cheaper than taking the train.
People travel by rail in Britain when it's more convenient. For commuters it makes sense because you can work or relax on the train; of course, many US cities already have popular commuter rail services. For other people, it often boils down to things like the very poor parking facilities at urban destinations and the poor roads at rural destinations -- an expensive train ticket looks a lot more attractive if you know the alternative is going to be six hours stationary in heavy traffic on a narrow road, or an extortionate charge for commercial car parking. These latter problems tend not to exist so much in the USA, where there's plenty of room for wide roads and large car parks.
Re:Editors are a minefield
on
DocBook 5
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· Score: 1
Only one of those comes with a validating XML editor built in. And, sadly, it only comes with a schema for DocBook 4, though it should be simple enough to update.
I don't think mandating it is a good idea. But I do think that if more manufacturers put them in smart phones the devices would find a market.
In that case, the capitalist, pro-free-market solution would be for the radio industry to partner with cell phone manufacturers: they could offer reduced advertising rates for manufacturers who include and promote FM tuners as a phone feature.
Or they could even consider entering the 21st century and striking a deal with the cell phone networks to promote digital streaming of their radio stations.
And where's the problem with that? Music wasn't created by advertisers in 1950; it developed just fine for thousands, probably tens of thousands of years with people being perfectly happy to make music on a local basis for fun, and with tunes and songs spreading virally based on their actual appeal instead of being picked by a handful of suits based on their profit potential.
The idea that musicians should expect to become global superstars, and that any musician who doesn't is somehow a failure, has done more damage to music than any number of pirates. The sooner it dies, and popular culture is reclaimed by the people themselves, the better.
(Indeed, we can thank pirates for many of the viral hits of the past, such as the classic "Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum". Would the RIAA have promoted that? Methinks not.)
Why is it always assumed that people who spend $2500 on a computer have an unlimited amount of money?
It isn't. It is assumed that people will look at the money they have available, and budget appropriately.
If you only have $2500 available for a computer and software, and you foolishly spend all $2500 on the computer, you cannot then turn round and say "look, I have no money, so it's okay for me to pirate software". You should have bought a cheaper computer.
By contrast, the Pirate Bay Edition has been disinfected and works just like any other program in your computer. It's superior value and as an added bonus costs nothing. So, the coldly rational choice is to never buy from the store
No, that is not rational; that is selfish.
The rational thing to do -- if, for the sake of argument, we accept your dubious assertion that cracked games are better than the versions sold in stores -- is to buy a copy and then download one to play. In that scenario you have a moral right to play the game, and you have provided its creators with an incentive to continue to produce games you wish to play.
(Don't bother trying the "buying DRMed games encourages DRM" line; if you wish to send the message that you don't want them to use DRM, then pirating the game is exactly the worst thing to do.)
Of course, that requires us first to accept your assertion that it's more sensible to download a game cracked by God only knows who, infected with God only knows what malware, than to install a game with well-understood DRM provided by someone you can sue in the incredibly unlikely case where it actually hurts you. Which is frankly hilarious.
Where do you live that toll roads are not 100% government-regulated? I certainly can't think of any examples where you have rival toll road owners competing for the same traffic in a free market.
A "volunteer" fire department doesn't sound very capitalist to me.
As for security guards, you clearly have no idea what it is the police do. Hint: it's a bit more than just standing around looking tough and, um, threatening to call the police if you don't leave.
I've migrated to XFCE-4.1, and in many ways, it feels like KDE used to feel
Ah, yes, the good old days of KDE, back when it had exactly five options that could be configured, and the only way to modify the menu was by hacking an XML file.
Funnily enough I recently made the reverse migration. Xfce served me well for a while, but every single recent version has replaced something that worked fine with a rewritten version that has fewer features and/or simply doesn't work properly at all. KDE meanwhile is very pleasant to use, runs perfectly fast even on my underpowered netbook, and is the only mainstream Linux desktop environment that actually bothers to support widescreen monitors properly by implementing usable vertical panels.
How, exactly, does deep packet inspection help ISPs to block access to known child porn websites?
If they know about the website, all they have to do is block access to it. There's no need whatsoever for them to examine the content of my communications, if all they're trying to do is block access to certain IP addresses.
There's no reason to suspect it will be different this time than the many times before.
What many times before? Please provide evidence, not assertions.
I can provide a counter-example. Many ISPs in the UK already block access to sites known to host child pornography -- remember the controversy a while back when they blocked Wikipedia? So they've been blocking one type of illegal content for a long time now, and yet somehow they have managed not to slip one single step further down the alleged slippery slope to universal censorship that the tinfoil hat brigade believes in so strongly.
I love fundamentalist atheists. They reassure me that hatred and intolerance of others' beliefs are found in all humans, not just those who believe in one or more deities.
Yeah, this is exactly the route we want to go down. I, for one, can't wait for the day when there is no longer any way to watch a movie without twenty minutes of advertising in every hour.
Enter the internet. For all intents and purposes of this discussion, she is the instantaneous transmission of such news stories. And duplication. How much time are you the center of attention when you break the story? A minute? Two minutes? You could have the best damned reporters in the world and some percentage of people will settle on reading a headline off of Slashdot or Google News that reads: "Murdoch Loses 90% of Readers with Times Paywall" instead of going to the source that called the Times and got that datum. And if I run a blog, all I need do is paraphrase everything in your article and suddenly I'm a contender for the endpoint of this information.
And what does this tell us? Simple: that competing to be the fastest is no longer sensible. A media organisation that wants to survive must find a business model that is not based on getting scoops. It needs to accept that information is now a commodity, and find other ways to make people use it as their information source.
For example, look at the Washington Post's current series on US intelligence. The headlines are all over the net, but if you want the full story you have to go to the Washington Post, because the story consists entirely of their analysis, and you can't easily paraphrase that. Interviews are another example here; bloggers can easily quote them, but you've got to go to the source if you want to see the whole thing, and J. Random Blooger doesn't have the kind of access that real journalists do.
For a different model, look at our very own Slashdot; old news, poorly presented, but still it thrives, because for some bizarre reason people actually enjoy the culture that's developed in the comments section here. That's Slashdot's "value" proposition.
The old media is in trouble, no doubt about it. But they won't get out of trouble by whinging and demanding money for something you can get elsewhere for free. They should stop looking for problems and start looking for new opportunities.
If I'm looking at an ATI card with the number given as 5850, I know that it's part of the current generation ( 5### ) and is a pretty high end card card ( #850 ).
If I see 4350, I'll know it's from the previous generation of cards ( 4### ) and it is an entry level or HTPC card.
Yes, it tells you the generation. But generations are about features, not performance. Comparing performance between generations is hard. For example, which is faster: 4890 or 5750? There's simply no way to know without studying benchmarks relevant to your intended use.
if all you do is read email and run trivial processing tasks (the largest customer base) there's no meaningful metric because things have been fast enough for a long time now.
If you're a Mac or Linux user, yeah. On Windows, they have this weird ritual called "virus scanning" that is able to consume arbitrary amounts of CPU time and RAM. Apparently this protects their computer from being possessed by evil spirits from beyond the internets or some such.
Remember quad core cpus just came out 3 years ago and we're already on 12 cores. Does anyone doubt we'll be on 24 or more cores in 3 years?
It's not so long ago that people were saying "Remember 1GHz processors just came out a couple of years ago and we're already on 3 GHz. Does anyone doubt we'll be on 9 or more GHz in 3 years?"
So far, massive parallelism has only been shown to be effective for solving certain specific types of problem. Just because the current trend is for more cores doesn't mean that we're inevitably going to see yet more cores in home computers. We might run into diminishing returns sooner than you think. Or then again, we might not. The tough thing about predicting the future is that it's impossible.
The problem isn't input or even fonts -- it's encoding. Until the new symbol has been added to Unicode, it simply cannot be represented on a computer!
It would be possible to try to predict which codepoint will be assigned to it, and then start using that before it becomes official. The problem is that (a) your prediction might be wrong, and (b) until it becomes official you will be creating files that are not technically Unicode, and open-source projects tend to respect standards too much to go round violating them like that.
the only games which are like this are multiplayer games, where other humans genuinely act differently/unpredictably
Only if you define "acting differently" as "reading game guides to find the cheapest tactic available, then spamming that over and over again till the next patch, then whining that it was nerfed". That's not exactly what I'd call unpredictable, but YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because HP appears to care about Linux. They release real open-source drivers that can be included by all Linux distros, even ones like Debian and Fedora that have very strict rules about licensing.
HP products maybe aren't the best value for money, but anyone who cares about open source drivers should definitely consider taking their custom to one of the few companies that gets it.
A 3.5 inch display is also not the same size as an iPad's display, so I'm not sure what point you think you're making here.
He said it does everything the iPad does, not that it does it in exactly the same way.
Touchscreens are cool and all, but they don't magically enable the device to do things you can't actually do just as well with a keyboard and touchpad.
And before those, cassette tapes and VHS were "good enough". Black-and-white TV was "good enough". Phonographs were "good enough". Believe it or not, people once lived perfectly happy lives with just books and whatever music they could sing and play themselves!
I would argue that "good enough" is not good enough. If you settle for "good enough", you are rejecting the very concept of progress. If on the other hand you believe that progress is both possible and desirable, then there can be no such thing as "good enough"; there is only "the best we've managed so far", and that is only tolerable until we figure out how to do better.
Don't be silly. Building a rail link is essentially impossible unless you can use eminent domain to acquire the necessary land; there's no way a private company could realistically expect to persuade thousands of individual landowners to sell them land in a straight line from one city to another, possibly crossing several different states in the process.
You overstate the case. In Britain, fuel prices are vastly higher than they are in the USA, and driving is still usually cheaper than taking the train.
People travel by rail in Britain when it's more convenient. For commuters it makes sense because you can work or relax on the train; of course, many US cities already have popular commuter rail services. For other people, it often boils down to things like the very poor parking facilities at urban destinations and the poor roads at rural destinations -- an expensive train ticket looks a lot more attractive if you know the alternative is going to be six hours stationary in heavy traffic on a narrow road, or an extortionate charge for commercial car parking. These latter problems tend not to exist so much in the USA, where there's plenty of room for wide roads and large car parks.
Only one of those comes with a validating XML editor built in. And, sadly, it only comes with a schema for DocBook 4, though it should be simple enough to update.
Come on, did you fail maths or something? If the median is 3 and the mean is 4, then the average is 3.5.
In that case, the capitalist, pro-free-market solution would be for the radio industry to partner with cell phone manufacturers: they could offer reduced advertising rates for manufacturers who include and promote FM tuners as a phone feature.
Or they could even consider entering the 21st century and striking a deal with the cell phone networks to promote digital streaming of their radio stations.
And where's the problem with that? Music wasn't created by advertisers in 1950; it developed just fine for thousands, probably tens of thousands of years with people being perfectly happy to make music on a local basis for fun, and with tunes and songs spreading virally based on their actual appeal instead of being picked by a handful of suits based on their profit potential.
The idea that musicians should expect to become global superstars, and that any musician who doesn't is somehow a failure, has done more damage to music than any number of pirates. The sooner it dies, and popular culture is reclaimed by the people themselves, the better.
(Indeed, we can thank pirates for many of the viral hits of the past, such as the classic "Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum". Would the RIAA have promoted that? Methinks not.)
It isn't. It is assumed that people will look at the money they have available, and budget appropriately.
If you only have $2500 available for a computer and software, and you foolishly spend all $2500 on the computer, you cannot then turn round and say "look, I have no money, so it's okay for me to pirate software". You should have bought a cheaper computer.
No, that is not rational; that is selfish.
The rational thing to do -- if, for the sake of argument, we accept your dubious assertion that cracked games are better than the versions sold in stores -- is to buy a copy and then download one to play. In that scenario you have a moral right to play the game, and you have provided its creators with an incentive to continue to produce games you wish to play.
(Don't bother trying the "buying DRMed games encourages DRM" line; if you wish to send the message that you don't want them to use DRM, then pirating the game is exactly the worst thing to do.)
Of course, that requires us first to accept your assertion that it's more sensible to download a game cracked by God only knows who, infected with God only knows what malware, than to install a game with well-understood DRM provided by someone you can sue in the incredibly unlikely case where it actually hurts you. Which is frankly hilarious.
Where do you live that toll roads are not 100% government-regulated? I certainly can't think of any examples where you have rival toll road owners competing for the same traffic in a free market.
A "volunteer" fire department doesn't sound very capitalist to me.
As for security guards, you clearly have no idea what it is the police do. Hint: it's a bit more than just standing around looking tough and, um, threatening to call the police if you don't leave.
Ah, yes, the good old days of KDE, back when it had exactly five options that could be configured, and the only way to modify the menu was by hacking an XML file.
Funnily enough I recently made the reverse migration. Xfce served me well for a while, but every single recent version has replaced something that worked fine with a rewritten version that has fewer features and/or simply doesn't work properly at all. KDE meanwhile is very pleasant to use, runs perfectly fast even on my underpowered netbook, and is the only mainstream Linux desktop environment that actually bothers to support widescreen monitors properly by implementing usable vertical panels.
How, exactly, does deep packet inspection help ISPs to block access to known child porn websites?
If they know about the website, all they have to do is block access to it. There's no need whatsoever for them to examine the content of my communications, if all they're trying to do is block access to certain IP addresses.
What many times before? Please provide evidence, not assertions.
I can provide a counter-example. Many ISPs in the UK already block access to sites known to host child pornography -- remember the controversy a while back when they blocked Wikipedia? So they've been blocking one type of illegal content for a long time now, and yet somehow they have managed not to slip one single step further down the alleged slippery slope to universal censorship that the tinfoil hat brigade believes in so strongly.
I love fundamentalist atheists. They reassure me that hatred and intolerance of others' beliefs are found in all humans, not just those who believe in one or more deities.
Yeah, this is exactly the route we want to go down. I, for one, can't wait for the day when there is no longer any way to watch a movie without twenty minutes of advertising in every hour.
Yeah, but I think we can take it for granted that Mac users love staring at their own perfectly-styled hair, designer glasses, and ironic stubble.
And what does this tell us? Simple: that competing to be the fastest is no longer sensible. A media organisation that wants to survive must find a business model that is not based on getting scoops. It needs to accept that information is now a commodity, and find other ways to make people use it as their information source.
For example, look at the Washington Post's current series on US intelligence. The headlines are all over the net, but if you want the full story you have to go to the Washington Post, because the story consists entirely of their analysis, and you can't easily paraphrase that. Interviews are another example here; bloggers can easily quote them, but you've got to go to the source if you want to see the whole thing, and J. Random Blooger doesn't have the kind of access that real journalists do.
For a different model, look at our very own Slashdot; old news, poorly presented, but still it thrives, because for some bizarre reason people actually enjoy the culture that's developed in the comments section here. That's Slashdot's "value" proposition.
The old media is in trouble, no doubt about it. But they won't get out of trouble by whinging and demanding money for something you can get elsewhere for free. They should stop looking for problems and start looking for new opportunities.
Yes, it tells you the generation. But generations are about features, not performance. Comparing performance between generations is hard. For example, which is faster: 4890 or 5750? There's simply no way to know without studying benchmarks relevant to your intended use.
If you're a Mac or Linux user, yeah. On Windows, they have this weird ritual called "virus scanning" that is able to consume arbitrary amounts of CPU time and RAM. Apparently this protects their computer from being possessed by evil spirits from beyond the internets or some such.
It's not so long ago that people were saying "Remember 1GHz processors just came out a couple of years ago and we're already on 3 GHz. Does anyone doubt we'll be on 9 or more GHz in 3 years?"
So far, massive parallelism has only been shown to be effective for solving certain specific types of problem. Just because the current trend is for more cores doesn't mean that we're inevitably going to see yet more cores in home computers. We might run into diminishing returns sooner than you think. Or then again, we might not. The tough thing about predicting the future is that it's impossible.
The problem isn't input or even fonts -- it's encoding. Until the new symbol has been added to Unicode, it simply cannot be represented on a computer!
It would be possible to try to predict which codepoint will be assigned to it, and then start using that before it becomes official. The problem is that (a) your prediction might be wrong, and (b) until it becomes official you will be creating files that are not technically Unicode, and open-source projects tend to respect standards too much to go round violating them like that.
Only if you define "acting differently" as "reading game guides to find the cheapest tactic available, then spamming that over and over again till the next patch, then whining that it was nerfed". That's not exactly what I'd call unpredictable, but YMMV.