There is no cartel of the phone manufacturers. It may look like that with the twisted market in the US, but here is Finland the phone pricing is pretty clear and there just is no cartel. From the Nokia online store I can buy a phone with as little as 49€ (Nokia 5030) or as much as 579€ (N900 or N97). All prices are without plans - I can get a plan from at least three providers.
Now, obviously, the 49€ phone and the 579€ phones are not the same thing. The 49€ thing is very basic, but if I go up to 250€ I already get a camera and can listen to music on the device. You must realize that the devices featured on slashdot are all brand new and all have tons of new development in them (e.g. N900 has a new operating system). That costs development money and rises the price of the device. Also, the expensive phones are premium products.
As for the comparison to an ipod: You can get an MP3 player at about 30€ here. How can they charge me 200€ for the fifth generation nano? It's a premium product - but still I chose to buy it.
Re:Here are a few criticisms...
on
Becoming Agile
·
· Score: 1
The first link bashed XP because the writer feels that it is possible to spec everything up front. When the specs are done right (i.e. by him?) they are correct and implementation will be a stroll. If it is possible to completely spec the software before hand then, yeah, there is no need to be able to change it and therefore agile is not needed.
The second link bashed something called "agile" and promoted something else called "google agile" that sounded just greasy. Sure it may work for Google, but how many companies look like Google? The funny thing is, he really doesn't describe google agile that much at all: where do the requirements come from?
If you read carefully, you'll notice that the parent didn't say that EU was a nation. The nations that make up EU will enforce any ruling made by the commission. So they do have to acce
Stallman and Shuttleworth were both giving keynotes speeches and they are both leaders of the movement. If it was some random guy first posting on slashdot, it wouldn't matter, but if the leaders of a movement are sexist, the movement is sexist.
I was reading these slashdot comments and I wanted examples too. Then I read some examples and now I'm convinced. Look at this Couch DB slideset:
Now, I've read enough Slashdot to know that the Americans here hate taxes and all politicians are corrupt, but still...
Thinking of your entire nation as a whole, it doesn't make any sense at all to subsidize interstate trade at the expense of instate trade. Closing this in some sensible manner will be good for your whole country. It really isn't about taxing more, but about making things consistent and fair.
Wake up, not all paranoia is healthy. That's just my 2c from EU.
Hmm... you're right that I wasn't aware of the bills. Well, now I am.
And yes, I am in favor of some laws that limit what minors can do. But it should be the selling that is illegal, not the buying. If my child gets booze, I'd like to be the one giving it to him. If my child plays GTA4 I'd like to be the one that bought it. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't let my children play games that are rated for older kids then they are.
The idea that a parent can really control what their children are doing when in their teens is pure fantasy. And most parents realize that. But that doesn't mean that we should just leave them alone. Of course the parents must try to help their kids grow up.
Back to video games: If a kid buys violent a video game, hides it in his closet and always plays it after school before the parents come home, how is a parent supposed to control that? So it really helps if the stores don't sell the games to underage kids. Then the parent may actually know about the existance of the game so that they can play it with the child or talk about it.
(And it's all fine and dandy to say that it's a parents job to always know what their children are doing and always have time to be with them. That just isn't reality. In reality parents do need support from their community and the community needs the children as future tax payers.)
I guess you didn't read even the blurb about the bill? Now, I guess the real bill could contain anything, but the blurb made it seem like it would make it illegal to sell games rated for adults to kids.
This is a good thing. This allows parents to better control what games their children play. Then it's up to the parents to actually do that.
Well, I agree with the start of your post wholeheartedly. The people on this thread come from so varied programming environments that most of the advice is useless in any one environment.
But then you go on a weird vendetta against some languages. Have fun writing business web applications with c or c++. There are different languages for different stuff.
"The money has to come from somewhere." A lot of diseases are cheap to treat if they are treated early on or - better yet - they are prevented completely by people turning to healthier habits (quit smoking, lose weight). Early treatment also greatly reduces the number of lost working days and that is quite important to the governament as it increases taxes.
As I understand (from the socialist side of the pond), the current American system denies all "early on" treatment from the poor and only when they are dying they get treated (and the money comes from taxes or other patients bills).
What if they got treated early on and required fever costly operations? Wouldn't that possibly save money?
Our politicians are talking about this here too and one interesting detail is that with enough money (think millions) modern medicine can do miracles. Now there isn't enough money to give this service to all people, so someone has to decide what is "enough." This is proving to be quite a problem for politicians and doctors.
There are no counter-protests, for example. No red-state-blue-state kind of active political debates. There are regular protests in Turkey opposing any change towards a more islamic nation. And I do believe the protesters are muslims. So it's not all black and white.
Because the calculating happens during the election process:
The candidate calculates the topics that get the most supporters. When the candidate gets elected she doesn't care about the topics she talked about during the election process and uses her energy to drive the things she tryly cares about.
The rules change when you have monopoly power in a market. And whether or not apple has monopoly power with the music store is not clear at all. I think I can argue that is the best store on the planet and Apple is using that market power to sell an unrelated product (the ipods).
Well, the positivelympics would be fair in the "may the best lab win" sense. The problem is that it isn't very ethical to fool people into ruining their health in hope of huge money prices should they win. The doping rules are there to protect the athletes from their own greed.
What are you talking about? I live in Finland and the students here do not get enough to travel and come back each month for the exams! Sure a student can get almost 500 each month, but this country is expensive. Even a crappy student flat is 200 / month and the extra 300 is not enough for food and clothes and stuff. And there is a limit of about five years after which you get nothing. So if you travel and bum around the world you still have to study at the same time.
Now, it actually might work if you always travel to some really cheap third world coutries - like the ones you mention in your post. I still don't understand how you are supposed to pay for the plane tickets. Also if you study really hard, you can probably afford a year off wandering the same cheap countries.
But when I use the word "travel" I don't mean a 1 star hotel in rural Romania or Sudan. So maybe we just don't speak of the same thing..
We'we got plenty here in Finland too. The rate here is 249 (22% VAT) so even without VAT it is 204 => $298. So maybe Nintendo just want's to make sure the premium paying regions get their share?
Where so you get MS Office 2007 for $50? Is it used or warez?
Here we have to pay 150 for an academic version and >200 for anything that you can use for work (= getting paid to use it). There are more then 20 versions and most are well over 300 , I've no idea what the differences are between the versions...
That brings it to about 100 / year if you want to stay current. I'll take the free OO.o instead thank you very much. I guess if MS Office is your primary tool it's worth it, but since for me it's an additional cost in addition to the software development tools I can live without.
Even if all the petitions are rejected they still have value: Your prime minister has taken a stand on the issue and his opinion is in your mail box in writing. We (Finland) don't have any way of getting an opinion out of our prime minister at all.
In the news the politicians never comment on issues like this - we have an election coming and all I see is how everyone will magically give me more money if I vote them. The worthless press never ask politicians questions that the politicians actually have control over. Instead we get questions like: Will you give more money to starving college students? [YES] Will you sneak Finland in to NATO agaist the opinion of the population? [NO] Will you get more jubs for unemployed people? [YES]
So if the petitions are just a way of telling the polititians what the people are most concerned about and getting a response, it is still valuable. At least they cannot believably claim ignorance after that. Neither can they say that it was a decicion for someone else if they have commented on it.
Still though: Here, when you make a contract that has a lower night price for electricity, the power company sends your switchbox a signal when the cheap power goes online and another when it goes off. This allows the company to start the night rate at different times for different people so that the rate change doesn't create a huge surge in energy use.
So this could already be implemented in regular households! The power can be erratic since it is used to heat huge boilers and fireplaces that store energy for the next day. I guess, we'll need another article with more facts. Good news for wind power, I guess.
Here in Finland at least electricity is cheaper during the night, so if I had a cold store, I would already be freezing it more during the night and letting it warm during the day.
While you are absolutely right in your diagnosis of Ask Slashdot: what is wrong with that? Isn't it wonderful that you can get other peoples opinions on questions and you don't have to figure all the answers yourself?
If our culture was based on figuring everything out ourselves, we'd be still living in the caves learning to catch deer for a living, unless we had already gone extinct trying to figure out how to raise children by ourselves.
As to the subject at hand: is it realistic to expect all the pixels to be same color even if the target area appears to have a uniform color? Not all the colors in the world are contained in the RGB numbers and so it's quite understandable that the different pixels get (slightly) different values as approximations of what is really there.
I was in the US for the first time last summer and I war really surprised to learn that the cashiers weigh the fruit and stuff on the counter. Here is Finland we weigh them on the fruit and veggie department and get a stick on barcode label that they read on the counter.
And guess what: they trust us to not add stuff after weighing, the cashier doesn't have a scale.
OTOH, we don't have self checkout lanes and the cashiers do not pack our stuff in to bags as we leave.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no cartel of the phone manufacturers. It may look like that with the twisted market in the US, but here is Finland the phone pricing is pretty clear and there just is no cartel. From the Nokia online store I can buy a phone with as little as 49€ (Nokia 5030) or as much as 579€ (N900 or N97). All prices are without plans - I can get a plan from at least three providers.
Now, obviously, the 49€ phone and the 579€ phones are not the same thing. The 49€ thing is very basic, but if I go up to 250€ I already get a camera and can listen to music on the device. You must realize that the devices featured on slashdot are all brand new and all have tons of new development in them (e.g. N900 has a new operating system). That costs development money and rises the price of the device. Also, the expensive phones are premium products.
As for the comparison to an ipod: You can get an MP3 player at about 30€ here. How can they charge me 200€ for the fifth generation nano? It's a premium product - but still I chose to buy it.
The first link bashed XP because the writer feels that it is possible to spec everything up front. When the specs are done right (i.e. by him?) they are correct and implementation will be a stroll. If it is possible to completely spec the software before hand then, yeah, there is no need to be able to change it and therefore agile is not needed.
The second link bashed something called "agile" and promoted something else called "google agile" that sounded just greasy. Sure it may work for Google, but how many companies look like Google? The funny thing is, he really doesn't describe google agile that much at all: where do the requirements come from?
Can I have better criticisms, please.
If you read carefully, you'll notice that the parent didn't say that EU was a nation. The nations that make up EU will enforce any ruling made by the commission. So they do have to acce
http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2009/04/25/why-rails-is-still-a-ghetto/
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth_at_Linuxcon
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/EMACS_virgins_joke
I agree - it would have been nice to have links in the article.
Stallman and Shuttleworth were both giving keynotes speeches and they are both leaders of the movement. If it was some random guy first posting on slashdot, it wouldn't matter, but if the leaders of a movement are sexist, the movement is sexist.
I was reading these slashdot comments and I wanted examples too. Then I read some examples and now I'm convinced. Look at this Couch DB slideset:
http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2009/04/25/why-rails-is-still-a-ghetto/
(That page has the actual presentation slodes - with porn.)
Now, that is sexist. It really doesn't matter if there are 1000 slidesets without sexism to counter it.
Now, I've read enough Slashdot to know that the Americans here hate taxes and all politicians are corrupt, but still...
Thinking of your entire nation as a whole, it doesn't make any sense at all to subsidize interstate trade at the expense of instate trade. Closing this in some sensible manner will be good for your whole country. It really isn't about taxing more, but about making things consistent and fair.
Wake up, not all paranoia is healthy. That's just my 2c from EU.
Hmm... you're right that I wasn't aware of the bills. Well, now I am.
And yes, I am in favor of some laws that limit what minors can do. But it should be the selling that is illegal, not the buying. If my child gets booze, I'd like to be the one giving it to him. If my child plays GTA4 I'd like to be the one that bought it. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't let my children play games that are rated for older kids then they are.
The idea that a parent can really control what their children are doing when in their teens is pure fantasy. And most parents realize that. But that doesn't mean that we should just leave them alone. Of course the parents must try to help their kids grow up.
Back to video games: If a kid buys violent a video game, hides it in his closet and always plays it after school before the parents come home, how is a parent supposed to control that? So it really helps if the stores don't sell the games to underage kids. Then the parent may actually know about the existance of the game so that they can play it with the child or talk about it.
(And it's all fine and dandy to say that it's a parents job to always know what their children are doing and always have time to be with them. That just isn't reality. In reality parents do need support from their community and the community needs the children as future tax payers.)
I guess you didn't read even the blurb about the bill? Now, I guess the real bill could contain anything, but the blurb made it seem like it would make it illegal to sell games rated for adults to kids.
This is a good thing. This allows parents to better control what games their children play. Then it's up to the parents to actually do that.
Don't ask about programming advice on Slashdot!
Well, I agree with the start of your post wholeheartedly. The people on this thread come from so varied programming environments that most of the advice is useless in any one environment.
But then you go on a weird vendetta against some languages. Have fun writing business web applications with c or c++. There are different languages for different stuff.
As I understand (from the socialist side of the pond), the current American system denies all "early on" treatment from the poor and only when they are dying they get treated (and the money comes from taxes or other patients bills).
What if they got treated early on and required fever costly operations? Wouldn't that possibly save money?
Our politicians are talking about this here too and one interesting detail is that with enough money (think millions) modern medicine can do miracles. Now there isn't enough money to give this service to all people, so someone has to decide what is "enough." This is proving to be quite a problem for politicians and doctors.
Or just maybe "flailing around" is better management (at least in the money grabbing sense) than what the geeks have to offer?
According to xe.com: $0.02 = £0.0100373.
So the dollar rate for toughts is actually a bargain, but maybe they don't include VAT in the figure?
Hmm.. I'm pretty sure I can do my share of the damage, in fact I'm pretty sure I'm doing my share of the damage. Please see:
http://f8d.org/?c=33
We havn't been a "little" species for a while now, you know.
Because the calculating happens during the election process:
The candidate calculates the topics that get the most supporters. When the candidate gets elected she doesn't care about the topics she talked about during the election process and uses her energy to drive the things she tryly cares about.
The rules change when you have monopoly power in a market. And whether or not apple has monopoly power with the music store is not clear at all. I think I can argue that is the best store on the planet and Apple is using that market power to sell an unrelated product (the ipods).
Well, the positivelympics would be fair in the "may the best lab win" sense. The problem is that it isn't very ethical to fool people into ruining their health in hope of huge money prices should they win. The doping rules are there to protect the athletes from their own greed.
What are you talking about? I live in Finland and the students here do not get enough to travel and come back each month for the exams! Sure a student can get almost 500 each month, but this country is expensive. Even a crappy student flat is 200 / month and the extra 300 is not enough for food and clothes and stuff. And there is a limit of about five years after which you get nothing. So if you travel and bum around the world you still have to study at the same time.
Now, it actually might work if you always travel to some really cheap third world coutries - like the ones you mention in your post. I still don't understand how you are supposed to pay for the plane tickets. Also if you study really hard, you can probably afford a year off wandering the same cheap countries.
But when I use the word "travel" I don't mean a 1 star hotel in rural Romania or Sudan. So maybe we just don't speak of the same thing..
We'we got plenty here in Finland too. The rate here is 249 (22% VAT) so even without VAT it is 204 => $298. So maybe Nintendo just want's to make sure the premium paying regions get their share?
Where so you get MS Office 2007 for $50? Is it used or warez?
Here we have to pay 150 for an academic version and >200 for anything that you can use for work (= getting paid to use it). There are more then 20 versions and most are well over 300 , I've no idea what the differences are between the versions...
That brings it to about 100 / year if you want to stay current. I'll take the free OO.o instead thank you very much. I guess if MS Office is your primary tool it's worth it, but since for me it's an additional cost in addition to the software development tools I can live without.
Even if all the petitions are rejected they still have value: Your prime minister has taken a stand on the issue and his opinion is in your mail box in writing. We (Finland) don't have any way of getting an opinion out of our prime minister at all.
In the news the politicians never comment on issues like this - we have an election coming and all I see is how everyone will magically give me more money if I vote them. The worthless press never ask politicians questions that the politicians actually have control over. Instead we get questions like: Will you give more money to starving college students? [YES] Will you sneak Finland in to NATO agaist the opinion of the population? [NO] Will you get more jubs for unemployed people? [YES]
So if the petitions are just a way of telling the polititians what the people are most concerned about and getting a response, it is still valuable. At least they cannot believably claim ignorance after that. Neither can they say that it was a decicion for someone else if they have commented on it.
Thank you! I finally got what the point was.
Still though: Here, when you make a contract that has a lower night price for electricity, the power company sends your switchbox a signal when the cheap power goes online and another when it goes off. This allows the company to start the night rate at different times for different people so that the rate change doesn't create a huge surge in energy use.
So this could already be implemented in regular households! The power can be erratic since it is used to heat huge boilers and fireplaces that store energy for the next day. I guess, we'll need another article with more facts. Good news for wind power, I guess.
Here in Finland at least electricity is cheaper during the night, so if I had a cold store, I would already be freezing it more during the night and letting it warm during the day.
So why the hell are they not doing it already?
While you are absolutely right in your diagnosis of Ask Slashdot: what is wrong with that? Isn't it wonderful that you can get other peoples opinions on questions and you don't have to figure all the answers yourself?
If our culture was based on figuring everything out ourselves, we'd be still living in the caves learning to catch deer for a living, unless we had already gone extinct trying to figure out how to raise children by ourselves.
As to the subject at hand: is it realistic to expect all the pixels to be same color even if the target area appears to have a uniform color? Not all the colors in the world are contained in the RGB numbers and so it's quite understandable that the different pixels get (slightly) different values as approximations of what is really there.
I was in the US for the first time last summer and I war really surprised to learn that the cashiers weigh the fruit and stuff on the counter. Here is Finland we weigh them on the fruit and veggie department and get a stick on barcode label that they read on the counter.
And guess what: they trust us to not add stuff after weighing, the cashier doesn't have a scale.
OTOH, we don't have self checkout lanes and the cashiers do not pack our stuff in to bags as we leave.