This seems like a subtle way to discourage automatic cars from making it to the roadways. The current crop of primative driverless cars uses lane markers as an easy-to-parse guide to finding the road edges and lane, and staying in them.
It will also make driving on wet roads, at night, much more exciting!
Anyone who thinks people will slow down has never actually driven to work in the morning.
You know, the fact that companies are expected to release their earnings numbers AFTER the market closes just smacks of how stupid the entire market system has become these days. In years gone by, such behavior would have been considered shady, as it's basically concealing the numbers until people can't take action upon them.
Sure, you can argue how it protects the market from knee-jerk reactions and panic... but do you want a free enterprise system or not? Freedom includes the ability to do stupid and impulsive things. Investing in the market should be risky, as it should only be done with "extra" money anyways. Too many people want the market to be a higher-return savings account to put their retirement and life's savings into.
This is why we can never have nice things under capitalism. I'm sure the contractor noticed this early in the construction process, and they took the gamble that maybe nobody would notice and saved some dollars. They got caught, and so it cost them... But if you think this is an isolated incident, you're sadly delusional. Pretty much every company out there pulls stunts like this, and most of them don't get caught. That's why they do it. Worship the all mighty ROI.
The only downside to using Linux in the workplace doesn't become apparent unless you regularly exchange documents with people in other locations, be they coworkers, clients, or what have you. At that point, you will discover that people outside your office will send you Microsoft format documents and not only expect you to be able to read them, but that you will be able to modify them and send them back.
While a pure linux shop can just use "Libre Office" and whatever other tools work well for a given circumstance, that idea just flat out fails when you're collaborating with folks who are using current Microsoft tools. The people in the home office don't like being told their document doesn't look right because they used a feature that's standard in Microsoft Office 2013, but that LIbre Office doesn't implement or doesn't get quite right. They *REALLY* don't like it when they send you a document and you send them back something forced down to Word 98 compatibility format.
So, that's the headache you're setting yourself (and your boss) up for if you switch the office (or part of it) to Linux. If you're all internal, it's easier to work around, but will still become an issue from time to time. If you don't share documents often, then it's a moot point.
Yeah, it'll convince people to switch alright... to switch the the clone version of the coffee maker so they can continue to use their favorite coffee pods. You can argue about the quality all day, but the fact is... being able to get a cup of coffee in the morning without all the fuss of making more than you need, or having to clean everything up is worth something.
The fact that LED bulbs get gradually dimmer over time is a huge failure point in their design. With incandescent or CFL bulbs, people buy the brightness they want, and when a bulb goes out, they replace it. No harm, other than a bit of cost in the replacement. On the other hand, do you REALLY want people to wonder why their having trouble reading, even with all the lights on? Having bulbs get gradually dimmer over time is a great way to make people visit the eye doctor, wasting hundreds of dollars on insurance, and even more if they end up getting new glasses more often than they might really need to.
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- some old guy nobody remembers these days.
Unfortunately for you, most game development companies can't afford to devote an extra few thousand hours of developer time to give less than 5% of their potential customer base the ability to thumb their noses at Bill Gates and say "Haaaaw Haw. I don't need no steenking windows!"
On the other hand, they usually CAN afford to spend the hundred hours or so it takes to ensure their game can run (albeit not perfectly) under Cider and thus give that small fraction of customers who are, frankly, just too damn stubborn to set up a windows machine for the sole purpose of playing games, a way to enjoy their product.
If you *really* want native OSX or linux games, perhaps you should pony up the cash it takes to develop one, with the understanding that you will not break even, and will probably be lucky if the sales pay for the packaging -- unless you also do a windows version.
Until then, you have four choices. You can use OSX/linux/whatever as your desktop and set up a second (possibly virtual) windows machine to play games. You can stay on your high horse and just not play games that only work well under windows. You can convince Steve Jobs (and various folks in the linux camp) to offer Microsoft a bunch of cash and get native DirectX support for your OS of choice. Or, you can continue to whine for something that is not economically feasable.
Personally, I would much rather see the game developers spend their time and money fixing bugs and adding content to their games. I applaud the folks at Transgaming for making it POSSIBLE to play popular games under both linux and OSX.
If I buy a paperback for $8, I can read it as often as I want. It will (with care) last for many years. I never have to upgrade. I don't have to worry about it degrading or becoming unreadable unless my library becomes flooded.
With an e-book, there are many more things which could go wrong with it. Not having read about this beastie, I don't know what it uses for storage... but if it's magnetic, it can be easily erased if someone tosses it near some unshielded speakers. What happens if a download fails? How about a flash upgrade which fails?
I like the idea of a paperless book. Having all my existing books in one place would be nice. Having it break and losing my entire collection would be bad. Nothing short of a fire or flood will wipe out my entire collection of paper books.
NASCAR car ads.... that reminds me of Captain Amazing from Mystery Men. I can only hope the same fate awaits the geniuses who decided we needed advertising in our escapist video games too.:)
Back in the good old days of mainframes, people (companies) used to invest a large chunk of cash into a single powerful mainframe system. They were then obliged to spend even more cash to buy peripherals for that system, which usually were only available from the original vendor. Some folks grumbled about this, but those were mostly bean counters and management (who listened to the bean counters far more often than their technical staff).
The technical staff generally were happy with this arrangement. Part of the cash going to the vendor usually also paid for a nice fat service contract which meant if your disk drive walked a bit too far and bent the pins on the connector, they'd happily wander out and fix it for you. Sure, it might take them a little time, but generally speaking they'd eventually get it right and things would work properly.
It also meant that the developers could learn how the system worked in a few months and then be productive for many years to come. No need to relearn the OS every few years because an update was just that, an update -- not a whole wad of new stuff lumped in and a big chunk of old stuff ripped out. No need to write code to handle 5 billion possible combinations of hardware from vendors who can't even read an English spec sheet when they design their chipsets. You wrote code, it worked.
Then the microcomputer arrived and the PC got the attention of the bean counters. Not only could you buy dozens of these little boxes for a fraction of the cost of that big lump of iron in the basement, but there were no service contracts to sign... and no need for super-specialized support staff. The company could hire the VP's grandma to do tech support.
Thus the industry went through a total reversal of operating standards. We went from having single-source products which were well tested, reliable, and backed by support from the folks who built and designed the systems, to cobbled together bits of duct tape and bailing wire that needed to be kicked every few hours to keep it running. But, it's cheaper.
So, you'll forgive me if I don't take you guys very seriously when you say how much you love Apple because it just works, and because everything meshes together nicely, but you hate Apple because you can't add anything you want onto it and make it into the kind of frankenbox a typical PC is.
Apple made the decision to sign a deal with AT&T for the money. Duh, they're a company trying to make a profit. They probably ALSO figured if they only had to deal with ONE vendor, they wouldn't have to worry if their new iPhone gizmo looked horrible when Bob's Budget Cellz decided to write their own GUI to slap on it for their customers.
In short... make up your mind folks. You can have it done cheap, done right, or done quick... choose two.
There is such a license. It's called "public domain." Very few authors these days are willing to release anything to the public domain, as about half an hour later, someone else will take it, slap their own restrictive license on it, and try to sell it back to them.
Why does everyone insist on having their cake and eating it, while playing video games, with the television muted in the background, the ipod blasting, and their cell phone stuck in their ear at the same time?
You want free code that you can re-use. You want someone else to write it, fix bugs in it, and keep updating it. Which do you want more? If you really want "freedom", than use that public domain code and hand-check everything yourself. If you want someone else to write and provide it in a way you can trust, respect their copyright and the terms they give it to you under.
Welcome to the World of Open Source! Everyone is welcome to come join in the....
What? Microsoft is coming? Hey, can you go flip the sign to "Closed" for a bit? No, they're already here? Ummmm, yeah I guess, well... we don't really want THOSE people in here though. I mean, they don't think like we do and will just stink up the place.
Look, we only serve GPL here buddy. You wanna buy some GPL, or you wanna go sit in the BSD section over there behind the curtain?
The nerve of some people! Thinking they can come in here and offer any old free license, as if we care about anything THEY say. Hmph!
"What do you get for pretending the danger's not real. Meek and obedient you follow the leader Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel. What a surprise! A look of terminal shock in your eyes. Now things are really what they seem. No, this is not a bad dream."
We used the noatime option for mounting our disks many years ago, not so much for the performance gain (which IS measurable in an I/O heavy system), but for the stability. Not having the disk writing every time a read-only query is done in your database of millions of rows means, well, no disk is being written to most of the time. Hence, a power failure that lasts longer than your UPS isn't likely to cause any nasty database corruption.
Those who like access times for security reasons probably really want a full audit log that shows every instance of the access AND which UID did it.
Anyway, I don't see what the big deal is. Perhaps the folks that make any given Linux distribution can learn something from this and give potential customers some kind of assurance that their product will still be around/supported/updated for the foreseeable future.
I remember seeing this done on the VAX/VMS mainframe back in 1987. In that environment, it simply meant that you kept track of your timeslice and voluntarily gave it up before the scheduler took it away from you. That meant you got put at the top of the run queue, and unless someone else was doing the same thing, you were the next program to run. Voila... 99% CPU for you!
Of course, ordinary users were given a limited amount of CPU time (as well as connect time, disk space, etc), so for the ordinary student, this just meant they used it up in a day or two instead of having a whole month. But then again, for class accounts, they could usually beg for more.
Under unix variants, one could do the same by implementing cpu quotas at the user level. I've seen network packet quotas, and I'm sure someone out there has done cpu quotas along the same lines.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems like a subtle way to discourage automatic cars from making it to the roadways. The current crop of primative driverless cars uses lane markers as an easy-to-parse guide to finding the road edges and lane, and staying in them.
It will also make driving on wet roads, at night, much more exciting!
Anyone who thinks people will slow down has never actually driven to work in the morning.
You know, the fact that companies are expected to release their earnings numbers AFTER the market closes just smacks of how stupid the entire market system has become these days. In years gone by, such behavior would have been considered shady, as it's basically concealing the numbers until people can't take action upon them.
Sure, you can argue how it protects the market from knee-jerk reactions and panic... but do you want a free enterprise system or not? Freedom includes the ability to do stupid and impulsive things. Investing in the market should be risky, as it should only be done with "extra" money anyways. Too many people want the market to be a higher-return savings account to put their retirement and life's savings into.
This is why we can never have nice things under capitalism. I'm sure the contractor noticed this early in the construction process, and they took the gamble that maybe nobody would notice and saved some dollars. They got caught, and so it cost them... But if you think this is an isolated incident, you're sadly delusional. Pretty much every company out there pulls stunts like this, and most of them don't get caught. That's why they do it. Worship the all mighty ROI.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Clearly, this is the signature of an FTL drive spinning up. Pity the folks using it died out 5.4999 billion years ago.
The only downside to using Linux in the workplace doesn't become apparent unless you regularly exchange documents with people in other locations, be they coworkers, clients, or what have you. At that point, you will discover that people outside your office will send you Microsoft format documents and not only expect you to be able to read them, but that you will be able to modify them and send them back.
While a pure linux shop can just use "Libre Office" and whatever other tools work well for a given circumstance, that idea just flat out fails when you're collaborating with folks who are using current Microsoft tools. The people in the home office don't like being told their document doesn't look right because they used a feature that's standard in Microsoft Office 2013, but that LIbre Office doesn't implement or doesn't get quite right. They *REALLY* don't like it when they send you a document and you send them back something forced down to Word 98 compatibility format.
So, that's the headache you're setting yourself (and your boss) up for if you switch the office (or part of it) to Linux. If you're all internal, it's easier to work around, but will still become an issue from time to time. If you don't share documents often, then it's a moot point.
How's that old saying go? Security through obscurity is not security at all?
Yeah, it'll convince people to switch alright... to switch the the clone version of the coffee maker so they can continue to use their favorite coffee pods. You can argue about the quality all day, but the fact is... being able to get a cup of coffee in the morning without all the fuss of making more than you need, or having to clean everything up is worth something.
The fact that LED bulbs get gradually dimmer over time is a huge failure point in their design. With incandescent or CFL bulbs, people buy the brightness they want, and when a bulb goes out, they replace it. No harm, other than a bit of cost in the replacement. On the other hand, do you REALLY want people to wonder why their having trouble reading, even with all the lights on? Having bulbs get gradually dimmer over time is a great way to make people visit the eye doctor, wasting hundreds of dollars on insurance, and even more if they end up getting new glasses more often than they might really need to.
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- some old guy nobody remembers these days.
How many of those Apple portables are running WIndows via bootcamp?
Yarrrr... me peg leg'll be worth a few bottles o rum afterall!
Yeah, I predict it will start filling faster when Spore is released in September.
Unfortunately for you, most game development companies can't afford to devote an extra few thousand hours of developer time to give less than 5% of their potential customer base the ability to thumb their noses at Bill Gates and say "Haaaaw Haw. I don't need no steenking windows!"
On the other hand, they usually CAN afford to spend the hundred hours or so it takes to ensure their game can run (albeit not perfectly) under Cider and thus give that small fraction of customers who are, frankly, just too damn stubborn to set up a windows machine for the sole purpose of playing games, a way to enjoy their product.
If you *really* want native OSX or linux games, perhaps you should pony up the cash it takes to develop one, with the understanding that you will not break even, and will probably be lucky if the sales pay for the packaging -- unless you also do a windows version.
Until then, you have four choices. You can use OSX/linux/whatever as your desktop and set up a second (possibly virtual) windows machine to play games. You can stay on your high horse and just not play games that only work well under windows. You can convince Steve Jobs (and various folks in the linux camp) to offer Microsoft a bunch of cash and get native DirectX support for your OS of choice. Or, you can continue to whine for something that is not economically feasable.
Personally, I would much rather see the game developers spend their time and money fixing bugs and adding content to their games. I applaud the folks at Transgaming for making it POSSIBLE to play popular games under both linux and OSX.
If I buy a paperback for $8, I can read it as often as I want. It will (with care) last for many years. I never have to upgrade. I don't have to worry about it degrading or becoming unreadable unless my library becomes flooded.
With an e-book, there are many more things which could go wrong with it. Not having read about this beastie, I don't know what it uses for storage... but if it's magnetic, it can be easily erased if someone tosses it near some unshielded speakers. What happens if a download fails? How about a flash upgrade which fails?
I like the idea of a paperless book. Having all my existing books in one place would be nice. Having it break and losing my entire collection would be bad. Nothing short of a fire or flood will wipe out my entire collection of paper books.
NASCAR car ads.... that reminds me of Captain Amazing from Mystery Men. :)
I can only hope the same fate awaits the geniuses who decided we needed advertising in our escapist video games too.
See?
Global warming is just nature's defense against the lack of solar activity.
Use those florocarbons, help keep the Earth warm while the sun is napping!
Back in the good old days of mainframes, people (companies) used to invest a large chunk of cash into a single powerful mainframe system. They were then obliged to spend even more cash to buy peripherals for that system, which usually were only available from the original vendor. Some folks grumbled about this, but those were mostly bean counters and management (who listened to the bean counters far more often than their technical staff).
The technical staff generally were happy with this arrangement. Part of the cash going to the vendor usually also paid for a nice fat service contract which meant if your disk drive walked a bit too far and bent the pins on the connector, they'd happily wander out and fix it for you. Sure, it might take them a little time, but generally speaking they'd eventually get it right and things would work properly.
It also meant that the developers could learn how the system worked in a few months and then be productive for many years to come. No need to relearn the OS every few years because an update was just that, an update -- not a whole wad of new stuff lumped in and a big chunk of old stuff ripped out. No need to write code to handle 5 billion possible combinations of hardware from vendors who can't even read an English spec sheet when they design their chipsets. You wrote code, it worked.
Then the microcomputer arrived and the PC got the attention of the bean counters. Not only could you buy dozens of these little boxes for a fraction of the cost of that big lump of iron in the basement, but there were no service contracts to sign... and no need for super-specialized support staff. The company could hire the VP's grandma to do tech support.
Thus the industry went through a total reversal of operating standards. We went from having single-source products which were well tested, reliable, and backed by support from the folks who built and designed the systems, to cobbled together bits of duct tape and bailing wire that needed to be kicked every few hours to keep it running. But, it's cheaper.
So, you'll forgive me if I don't take you guys very seriously when you say how much you love Apple because it just works, and because everything meshes together nicely, but you hate Apple because you can't add anything you want onto it and make it into the kind of frankenbox a typical PC is.
Apple made the decision to sign a deal with AT&T for the money. Duh, they're a company trying to make a profit. They probably ALSO figured if they only had to deal with ONE vendor, they wouldn't have to worry if their new iPhone gizmo looked horrible when Bob's Budget Cellz decided to write their own GUI to slap on it for their customers.
In short... make up your mind folks. You can have it done cheap, done right, or done quick... choose two.
There is such a license. It's called "public domain." Very few authors these days are willing to release anything to the public domain, as about half an hour later, someone else will take it, slap their own restrictive license on it, and try to sell it back to them.
Why does everyone insist on having their cake and eating it, while playing video games, with the television muted in the background, the ipod blasting, and their cell phone stuck in their ear at the same time?
You want free code that you can re-use. You want someone else to write it, fix bugs in it, and keep updating it. Which do you want more? If you really want "freedom", than use that public domain code and hand-check everything yourself. If you want someone else to write and provide it in a way you can trust, respect their copyright and the terms they give it to you under.
I mean, it wouldn't even be enough to run Jita, let alone the whole EVE-Online cluster. :)
Welcome to the World of Open Source! Everyone is welcome to come join in the....
What? Microsoft is coming? Hey, can you go flip the sign to "Closed" for a bit? No, they're already here? Ummmm, yeah I guess, well... we don't really want THOSE people in here though. I mean, they don't think like we do and will just stink up the place.
Look, we only serve GPL here buddy. You wanna buy some GPL, or you wanna go sit in the BSD section over there behind the curtain?
The nerve of some people! Thinking they can come in here and offer any old free license, as if we care about anything THEY say. Hmph!
"What do you get for pretending the danger's not real.
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.
What a surprise!
A look of terminal shock in your eyes.
Now things are really what they seem.
No, this is not a bad dream."
We used the noatime option for mounting our disks many years ago, not so much for the performance gain (which IS measurable in an I/O heavy system), but for the stability. Not having the disk writing every time a read-only query is done in your database of millions of rows means, well, no disk is being written to most of the time. Hence, a power failure that lasts longer than your UPS isn't likely to cause any nasty database corruption.
Those who like access times for security reasons probably really want a full audit log that shows every instance of the access AND which UID did it.
What does Open Office have to do with this story?
Anyway, I don't see what the big deal is. Perhaps the folks that make any given Linux distribution can learn something from this and give potential customers some kind of assurance that their product will still be around/supported/updated for the foreseeable future.
Nothing new here.
I remember seeing this done on the VAX/VMS mainframe back in 1987. In that environment, it simply meant that you kept track of your timeslice and voluntarily gave it up before the scheduler took it away from you. That meant you got put at the top of the run queue, and unless someone else was doing the same thing, you were the next program to run. Voila... 99% CPU for you!
Of course, ordinary users were given a limited amount of CPU time (as well as connect time, disk space, etc), so for the ordinary student, this just meant they used it up in a day or two instead of having a whole month. But then again, for class accounts, they could usually beg for more.
Under unix variants, one could do the same by implementing cpu quotas at the user level. I've seen network packet quotas, and I'm sure someone out there has done cpu quotas along the same lines.