I'm not even sure I understand what that means. I understand when something isn't backward compatible -- like when Windows XP can't run software written for Windows 95. But upward compatible? Is he talking about the failure of today's software to run on tomorrow's systems -- like how Windows XP won't run on Intel Nocoma chips?
Since supporting hardware is about the only purpose of any software, it should be completely open.
Let me guess... you're a sysadmin, right?
I don't mean to be harsh, but to anybody who actually produces something for a living, your attitude sounds totally bizarre. I use Microsoft Word to and Adobe Photoshop to create documents. I use databases to store information. I use spreadsheets to calculate numbers. On the enterprise level -- the companies this article talks about -- the software is used to power entire businesses, and the people who use it care precious little how shiny the box on the back end is, so long as it never, ever goes down.
I was in college in 2000 and I saw many students who just plain did not understand their computer at all trying to learn how to be an IT geek just in hope of the money...
That wasn't the problem. The problem was that in 1997 they got the money. Chances are, one of them's probably the head of your department now.
Note to all fan-driven industries and franchises: "Secrets of the mysterious past," as a plot device, is getting pretty tired -- e.g. Data, Wolverine, Van Helsing (do we care?), pretty much any "prequel," etc.
It's true! Yes, I too was once a left-coast California snob about my coffee, until I went back east with a girlfriend from New Jersey. Couldn't find an acceptable-looking "coffee shop" anywhere. I was "reduced" to grabbing a quick cuppa at a Dunkin Donuts... and what do you know, they really do have pretty good coffee there. Fellow West Coasters, when you're back East next time, try it out.
IT'S FUCKING COFFEE PEOPLE! COFFEE! THEY SELL COFFEE!!
Not really! They more sell milk. Think about it. What's a cup of coffee cost? Buck fifty? But now, reduce that cup of coffee to a single tiny shot of espresso and then fill the rest of the cup with milk. Foamy milk, too -- it's mostly air. But now you can charge maybe $3.25. Whenever you hear about outbreaks of hoof and mouth disease and how hundreds of cows need to be put down, don't think about McDonald's... think about Starbucks.
As other people are constantly pointing out whenever somebody posts an idea like this, "non-volatile" memory like MemorySticks and CompactFlash has a limited lifespan. It wears out after a certain number of erase/write cycles. That actual number is probably in the hundreds of thousands, but if you've got a Linux swap partition on there you'll be pounding the silicon pretty hard. Add to that a floppy disc as your boot partition, and... well... this sounds like one of the more head-scratchingly silly ideas I've heard in a while.
Honestly, I don't really give a rat's ass how you spend your weekends, Doc. By the same token, if you can't get used to life when you're not on drugs, maybe you're just not ready for it yet.
Aberration depends on your overly strict definition of "normal". Along the lines you use, hunger is normal, and satiety from food is aberrant, dependent as it is on consuming external chemicals.
What are you... high? (That was a joke.)
Obviously neither hunger or being satiated is an aberrant state, since most of us experience both daily as part of the process of life. But hunger is the closer of the two, as it is a reaction stemming from the lack of food (which produces the energy your cells need to continue).
Even you understand the difference between "external chemicals" that get broken down by your digestive system for their chemical energy and "external chemicals" that cause malfunctions in the your nervous system (for instance, anaesthetics). One we call "food." The other we call "drugs." That's a part of the commonly-accepted definition of "reality" that even you have to accept.
Similarly, it would be pretty severe to describe holding your breath until you go dizzy as an "aberrant state," but it is obviously the result of producing a state in your brain that isn't "normal," namely the lack of oxygen (which your brain needs to function properly).
You don't really have as hard a time understaning this concept as you pretend to. You just have an agenda to push, which is why you try so hard to use big words.
Absolutely. Everyone should take LSD at least once in their life. It really opens your eyes to things and I still have many insights into life that I think I might never had without it.
I'd have to disagree. But maybe not for the reasons you'd think.
When I was in high school, LSD was the drug of choice. I'm not kidding -- more people were around, dropping acid, than doing cocaine or pills or speed or anything else. Certainly all that stuff was there, too, but you could barely go to class on your average Thursday and be assured that nobody in that class was tripping on LSD. And I mean everybody did it. The jocks did it. And you know what? As far as I can tell, it "opened their eyes" to pretty much exactly... nothing. Those clowns acted like jocks act pretty much the world over. If you met them at a party and they were tripping pretty hard, they would babble at you with some sheepish grin on their faces, but the rest of the time they were getting into fights, date-raping girls, tricking out cars, getting drunk, and refusing to pay for abortions just like the rest of 'em. If anything, their experiences with LSD only opened them up to start taking E when that came on the market, and subsequently some of those guys fried their brains out pretty good getting into that whole culture. (On the plus side, it seemed to make them a lot less aggressive/violent.)
So yeah, maybe if you're curious about certain kinds of brain experiments you can conduct on yourself, and you're a contemplative enough person to get something out of it, then maybe you should add LSD to your checklist of "things to do before I croak." But otherwise, you're just taking drugs. I can't really tell who'se worse, though... the people who just take LSD to get high, or those hippies who still walk around yammering about how great it is to take drugs, not realizing that while they were stoned and not paying attention, pretty much the whole world started taking drugs, and nonetheless, the utopian society of like-thinking individuals enlightened by LSD never happened. Pity.
Re:Regarding conciousness
on
Lysergically Yours
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Who knows what "real" is, when your conscious perceptions of reality can be so profoundly altered by taking a few milligrams (or in this case, micrograms) of some chemical compound?
In a psychedelic state, it is common to look at normal waking life that used to seem so normal, and feel that it is completely ridiculous.
But surely you see where one could make the argument that this is more rationally seen as evidence of a chronic dysfunction of the brain caused by the use of drugs than as evidence of any "heightened mental state." You're going to experience what most people accept as "reality" for all of the period of your life that you spend not under the influence of psychedelic drugs. It's the default state of the organism. Why assume that it's an aberrant or erroneous state, just because you can produce a different state by introducing foreign chemical compounds into the system? It makes more sense to assume that the post-chemical state is aberrant.
Or, to put it another way, countless books, pamphelets, plays, movies, and rambling diaries have been produced attempting to explain or prove the profound revelations produced by the use of hallucinogens, and in every case, it seems to me that the "revelations" can be very simply illustrated with the following statement:
Either the BBC made a hell of a lot of them or they've been breeding while we weren't looking...
I think maybe everyone who can make a passable replica does the throwaway "genuine dalek" thing.
No, it's very possible the BBC made a hell of a lot of them. Most people don't notice, but the styles of Dalek fashion have changed considerably over the years, particularly in their color schemes. The last few Dalek series featured sort of a war between two factions of Daleks, one sort of cream-colored and the others the more traditional dark grey. The little lights on the sides of their heads have changed regularly throughout the years, too. What's more, the idea that the BBC would throw away such a thing is hardly crazy, either -- they threw away countless original masters of Doctor Who episodes as well, back in the days when reruns on the BBC were unheard-of.
If you're talking about the iRiver H series (the hard drive ones), then no, they can't record FM to MP3. They can't record from the radio at all, and by all accounts no firmware upgrade will change that. The receiver isn't inline with the digital circuitry, apparently.
UNIX utilities such as cp, tar and nsync can properly handle HFS+ resource forks
"Properly handle"... I take it that means discard them? Instead of littering MS-DOS filesystems with a bunch of._filename.ext files that nobody uses or wants?
As I understand it, resource forks are now a legacy feature of Mac OS 9. Cocoa applications store their resources in a special directory structure called an application bundle. Most data formats -- including compressed files, images, Adobe formats, Microsoft formats, PDF, and on and on -- haven't required the use of resource forks in years. Can't we finally retire this non-feature that was a clever idea if anybody else was going to support it, but a horrible impediment to cross-platform compatibility?
Marital, family, religious, and civic ties to society, IMHO, are much more likely to keep people honest than their age, even counting the fact that younger workers may be less experienced... I work in a government agency, so I see a large proportion of older workers. Some are smart, hard workers; others are idiots. I see no larger proportion of idiots among younger people than I do among older ones, nor do I see any indication that the intelligence or ethics of the old have anything to do with the fact that they are old.
I understand your righteous indignation, but I disagree with you. It's not a matter of who's an "idiot" or not. When I was younger, I was no more of an idiot than I am now -- but I was certainly much more of a prick, and much more likely to try and "fuck over da man" if I thought I could get away with it. And I was much more likely to "get away with it" than somebody older than I was because, like the earlier poster said, I had nothing to lose anyway.
Yes, maybe if I had been a devout Christian I would have had more moral fiber -- but unfortunately, in California at least, you can't ask about that kind of thing in a job interview. Can't even ask their age, in fact -- but it's a little more obvious.
The fact is that more mature people are more likely to be married, more likely to have established civic ties (as opposed to living in a shitty apartment with three guys they just graduated from college with)... hell, they're more likely to have health problems that they can't afford to be out of a job and free health insurance for!
Sorry you feel discriminated against, and yeah, it sucks being young -- but don't worry. That problem fixes itself, sooner than you think.
About the time of the.dotcom kabloom, Comdex bosses thought they were finally in the uppity ranks, and closed it all off except to 'vips' and other fortune50-exclusive folks.
If true, that's a sign that they were hurting for cash. Here's how it works: You close it all off except to "VIP" type people. Then you turn around to all the potential sponsors and say, "Hey look, 92.4 percent of our audience is exactly the type of business decision makers whom you want to reach with your message. And according to this quickie survey we did, 69.1 percent of them are ready to make a purchase in these key product areas within the 4-6 months timeframe!" And of course, these facts make sponsoring your conference a much better deal for these companies, since they won't be wasting their money on people who aren't interested anymore -- so you can jack up your rates.
It's not that they hate you. They just needed the money.
Ooooohhh ho ho ho, the U.S. will be bringing the Imperial Units back -- just you wait! The only reason you aren't using 'em is because you live in the provinc--er, other countries.
There's even more to it than that. I used to work for a computer magazine called New Architect, and we got more than one irate email from people outside the United States, in countries where the term "architect" was reserved specifically for... well, architects. It would expressly illegal in some of these countries, for example, to advertise that you had an architect on your staff if you did not employ somebody who knew how to design buildings.
These people would write us demanding that we change the name of our magazine, sometimes even making vague threats of legal action. (In our defense, we offered free subscriptions to our magazine to people who filled out a questionnaire in the U.S. only -- maybe Canada, but I'm not even sure about that. Everybody else had to go out of their way to order it.)
Something tells me calling yourself a "certified architect" in those countries would be even a little worse. SUSE must be grinning right now.
Of course, my people are also known for their other weirdnesses, such as a religion that believes the spirits of our dead ancestors haunt the streets picking up the shit of the living and eating it.
Stop shitting on public streets. Problem solved! Now how hard was that?
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."
OK, so I own a tract of land. Big, huge thing, with rolling fields. One day you're driving along the country road that runs past my property, and you decide it's so nice you want to build a house on it. So you do. How, exactly, does Ayn Rand propose we resolve this dispute? Manifest Destinty?
Or wait, I suppose the guy who built the house is a "criminal," because he's from the "user" class that takes from the people who capitalize upon the... no, no, wait, I'm the "criminal," because though I owned the land I failed to build a house on it, meaning that the person with the creative, intellectual energy to build the house has the right to... aw, screw it.
Seriously, Ayn Rand has one or two decent points to make, but that one right there ranks as one of the most totally asinine platitudes I've ever heard. Way to go, Ayn.
but can find no practical reason for this that makes sense to me. The people who overclock know that they can burn up their chip, and the people who do not overclock don't have to worry about it. I guess maybe a small percentage of people might go poking around in CMOS setup and change the clock speed, but is that number large enough to alienate gamers and hackers who want control over their own boxes? I think not.
It's not to limit individual customers who bought the chips fair and square. It's to crack down on "grey market" resellers who buy chips at a certain clock frequency, overclock them, and then relabel them as higher-speed chips. Whose responsibility is it to honor the warranty when one of those melts down? No matter the outcome, it's going to be bad for Intel -- either in terms of cash or customer relations.
Why is this marked offtopic? I think it's pretty germane to the topic, myself. The whole point of these "you can get this free," "this has been open sourced" announcements from Novell is to generate buzz around the company by making them seem friendly to open source. I've heard a lot about them open sourcing YaST, though, and I can't find it anywhere. There's no obvious download on Novell's site. It's not on forge.novell.com, their open source site. It's not on Sourceforge. And the top Google search for YaST reveals this page, where the crux of the message seems to be "Only SUSE has YaST."
I keep hearing about open source YaST. So where is it already? And, more to the point, I'm kind of waiting for Novell's open source/Linux strategy to be more than just talk. Right now it seems to be business as usual at the OSS divisions, and business as usual at Novell. Are the two sides going to meet?
You can still get royalties if you do work for hire. It all depends on your contract. What you do give up, however, is any claim to copyright.
Comic book artists for Marvel and DC work this way all the time. So far as I know, all contracts for these companies specify "work for hire." If a particular issue of a comic reaches certain sales goals, however, the artist gets a royalty. It's stipulated in the contract. On the other hand, if Marvel decides to take a drawing the artist did in one panel of the comic and slap it all over backpacks and lunchboxes, the artist gets nada. Zero. (Unless the policy has changed in the last few years.) The company owns the art and they can do whatever they want with it. It was work for hire, case closed. Though they do pay royalties for the initial publication, that was really just a scrap they threw to the artists in the late 70s or early 80s, to prevent them from being aggressively poached by the competition. They could rescind the policy any time they wanted.
You can only recycle something if there's a facility near you that handles it.
Doesn't anyone around here have curbside recycling? We have it in San Francisco. The city issued everybody three different "garbage" cans: black ones for regular trash, blue ones for standard recycling, and green ones for recycling compostable materials such as vegetable matter, yard trimmings, etc.
You can dump whatever you want into the blue can -- glass, aluminum, paper, and recyclable plastic. I am told it all gets sorted out by some kind of scheme that measures the density of the material.
On the minus side, everybody pays their 2.5 cent "deposit" per bottle or can, which is presumably money you'll get back when you take them in for recycling. But since nobody takes them in, nobody gets the deposit back -- instead, you pay a company to haul your recycling away and pick up the deposit for you (and keep it).
Also, since people have gotten into the habit of leaving their recycling on the curbs, it's created a cottage industry of low-income people who drive around in trucks and steal it all, to recycle it themselves (for cash). More power to them, I say... nobody knows the difference, whether it's a corporation picking up my bottles and cans or a couple Mexican guys in a pickup.
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I'm not even sure I understand what that means. I understand when something isn't backward compatible -- like when Windows XP can't run software written for Windows 95. But upward compatible? Is he talking about the failure of today's software to run on tomorrow's systems -- like how Windows XP won't run on Intel Nocoma chips?
I don't mean to be harsh, but to anybody who actually produces something for a living, your attitude sounds totally bizarre. I use Microsoft Word to and Adobe Photoshop to create documents. I use databases to store information. I use spreadsheets to calculate numbers. On the enterprise level -- the companies this article talks about -- the software is used to power entire businesses, and the people who use it care precious little how shiny the box on the back end is, so long as it never, ever goes down.
Note to all fan-driven industries and franchises: "Secrets of the mysterious past," as a plot device, is getting pretty tired -- e.g. Data, Wolverine, Van Helsing (do we care?), pretty much any "prequel," etc.
It's true! Yes, I too was once a left-coast California snob about my coffee, until I went back east with a girlfriend from New Jersey. Couldn't find an acceptable-looking "coffee shop" anywhere. I was "reduced" to grabbing a quick cuppa at a Dunkin Donuts ... and what do you know, they really do have pretty good coffee there. Fellow West Coasters, when you're back East next time, try it out.
As other people are constantly pointing out whenever somebody posts an idea like this, "non-volatile" memory like MemorySticks and CompactFlash has a limited lifespan. It wears out after a certain number of erase/write cycles. That actual number is probably in the hundreds of thousands, but if you've got a Linux swap partition on there you'll be pounding the silicon pretty hard. Add to that a floppy disc as your boot partition, and ... well ... this sounds like one of the more head-scratchingly silly ideas I've heard in a while.
Honestly, I don't really give a rat's ass how you spend your weekends, Doc. By the same token, if you can't get used to life when you're not on drugs, maybe you're just not ready for it yet.
Obviously neither hunger or being satiated is an aberrant state, since most of us experience both daily as part of the process of life. But hunger is the closer of the two, as it is a reaction stemming from the lack of food (which produces the energy your cells need to continue).
Even you understand the difference between "external chemicals" that get broken down by your digestive system for their chemical energy and "external chemicals" that cause malfunctions in the your nervous system (for instance, anaesthetics). One we call "food." The other we call "drugs." That's a part of the commonly-accepted definition of "reality" that even you have to accept.
Similarly, it would be pretty severe to describe holding your breath until you go dizzy as an "aberrant state," but it is obviously the result of producing a state in your brain that isn't "normal," namely the lack of oxygen (which your brain needs to function properly).
You don't really have as hard a time understaning this concept as you pretend to. You just have an agenda to push, which is why you try so hard to use big words.
When I was in high school, LSD was the drug of choice. I'm not kidding -- more people were around, dropping acid, than doing cocaine or pills or speed or anything else. Certainly all that stuff was there, too, but you could barely go to class on your average Thursday and be assured that nobody in that class was tripping on LSD. And I mean everybody did it. The jocks did it. And you know what? As far as I can tell, it "opened their eyes" to pretty much exactly ... nothing. Those clowns acted like jocks act pretty much the world over. If you met them at a party and they were tripping pretty hard, they would babble at you with some sheepish grin on their faces, but the rest of the time they were getting into fights, date-raping girls, tricking out cars, getting drunk, and refusing to pay for abortions just like the rest of 'em. If anything, their experiences with LSD only opened them up to start taking E when that came on the market, and subsequently some of those guys fried their brains out pretty good getting into that whole culture. (On the plus side, it seemed to make them a lot less aggressive/violent.)
So yeah, maybe if you're curious about certain kinds of brain experiments you can conduct on yourself, and you're a contemplative enough person to get something out of it, then maybe you should add LSD to your checklist of "things to do before I croak." But otherwise, you're just taking drugs. I can't really tell who'se worse, though ... the people who just take LSD to get high, or those hippies who still walk around yammering about how great it is to take drugs, not realizing that while they were stoned and not paying attention, pretty much the whole world started taking drugs, and nonetheless, the utopian society of like-thinking individuals enlightened by LSD never happened. Pity.
Or, to put it another way, countless books, pamphelets, plays, movies, and rambling diaries have been produced attempting to explain or prove the profound revelations produced by the use of hallucinogens, and in every case, it seems to me that the "revelations" can be very simply illustrated with the following statement:
Can't we all just admit it and move on?If you're talking about the iRiver H series (the hard drive ones), then no, they can't record FM to MP3. They can't record from the radio at all, and by all accounts no firmware upgrade will change that. The receiver isn't inline with the digital circuitry, apparently.
As I understand it, resource forks are now a legacy feature of Mac OS 9. Cocoa applications store their resources in a special directory structure called an application bundle. Most data formats -- including compressed files, images, Adobe formats, Microsoft formats, PDF, and on and on -- haven't required the use of resource forks in years. Can't we finally retire this non-feature that was a clever idea if anybody else was going to support it, but a horrible impediment to cross-platform compatibility?
Yes, maybe if I had been a devout Christian I would have had more moral fiber -- but unfortunately, in California at least, you can't ask about that kind of thing in a job interview. Can't even ask their age, in fact -- but it's a little more obvious.
The fact is that more mature people are more likely to be married, more likely to have established civic ties (as opposed to living in a shitty apartment with three guys they just graduated from college with) ... hell, they're more likely to have health problems that they can't afford to be out of a job and free health insurance for!
Sorry you feel discriminated against, and yeah, it sucks being young -- but don't worry. That problem fixes itself, sooner than you think.
It's not that they hate you. They just needed the money.
Ooooohhh ho ho ho, the U.S. will be bringing the Imperial Units back -- just you wait! The only reason you aren't using 'em is because you live in the provinc--er, other countries.
There's even more to it than that. I used to work for a computer magazine called New Architect, and we got more than one irate email from people outside the United States, in countries where the term "architect" was reserved specifically for ... well, architects. It would expressly illegal in some of these countries, for example, to advertise that you had an architect on your staff if you did not employ somebody who knew how to design buildings.
These people would write us demanding that we change the name of our magazine, sometimes even making vague threats of legal action. (In our defense, we offered free subscriptions to our magazine to people who filled out a questionnaire in the U.S. only -- maybe Canada, but I'm not even sure about that. Everybody else had to go out of their way to order it.)
Something tells me calling yourself a "certified architect" in those countries would be even a little worse. SUSE must be grinning right now.
Or wait, I suppose the guy who built the house is a "criminal," because he's from the "user" class that takes from the people who capitalize upon the ... no, no, wait, I'm the "criminal," because though I owned the land I failed to build a house on it, meaning that the person with the creative, intellectual energy to build the house has the right to ... aw, screw it.
Seriously, Ayn Rand has one or two decent points to make, but that one right there ranks as one of the most totally asinine platitudes I've ever heard. Way to go, Ayn.
Why is this marked offtopic? I think it's pretty germane to the topic, myself. The whole point of these "you can get this free," "this has been open sourced" announcements from Novell is to generate buzz around the company by making them seem friendly to open source. I've heard a lot about them open sourcing YaST, though, and I can't find it anywhere. There's no obvious download on Novell's site. It's not on forge.novell.com, their open source site. It's not on Sourceforge. And the top Google search for YaST reveals this page, where the crux of the message seems to be "Only SUSE has YaST."
I keep hearing about open source YaST. So where is it already? And, more to the point, I'm kind of waiting for Novell's open source/Linux strategy to be more than just talk. Right now it seems to be business as usual at the OSS divisions, and business as usual at Novell. Are the two sides going to meet?
East your ChickieNobs!
You can still get royalties if you do work for hire. It all depends on your contract. What you do give up, however, is any claim to copyright.
Comic book artists for Marvel and DC work this way all the time. So far as I know, all contracts for these companies specify "work for hire." If a particular issue of a comic reaches certain sales goals, however, the artist gets a royalty. It's stipulated in the contract. On the other hand, if Marvel decides to take a drawing the artist did in one panel of the comic and slap it all over backpacks and lunchboxes, the artist gets nada. Zero. (Unless the policy has changed in the last few years.) The company owns the art and they can do whatever they want with it. It was work for hire, case closed. Though they do pay royalties for the initial publication, that was really just a scrap they threw to the artists in the late 70s or early 80s, to prevent them from being aggressively poached by the competition. They could rescind the policy any time they wanted.
You can dump whatever you want into the blue can -- glass, aluminum, paper, and recyclable plastic. I am told it all gets sorted out by some kind of scheme that measures the density of the material.
On the minus side, everybody pays their 2.5 cent "deposit" per bottle or can, which is presumably money you'll get back when you take them in for recycling. But since nobody takes them in, nobody gets the deposit back -- instead, you pay a company to haul your recycling away and pick up the deposit for you (and keep it).
Also, since people have gotten into the habit of leaving their recycling on the curbs, it's created a cottage industry of low-income people who drive around in trucks and steal it all, to recycle it themselves (for cash). More power to them, I say ... nobody knows the difference, whether it's a corporation picking up my bottles and cans or a couple Mexican guys in a pickup.