One thing that jumps out at us from watching the video is that the game clearly isn't running on legacy console hardware. Creative director Dominic Robilliard confirms this a little later in the interview, when he states that the demo is being powered by PCs using Nvidia hardware.
Obviously we can't say for certain, but there's some good circumstantial evidence that the game is built for DX11. Shadows are always the best thing to check -- DX10/DX11 shadows are softer and more realistic than their DX9 counterparts. Fog is another area where DX11 implementations tend to noticably improve on DX9, and the 1313 scenes are impressive on both counts.
There's no reason LucasArts couldn't develop the title for current consoles and cutting-edge PC hardware simultaneously, but this is good news for computer gamers -- games built on our platform tend to play better (and look nicer) than console ports that offer better textures but otherwise keep to the limits of six year-old hardware.
Nobody cares about PC gaming epeen. Really, nobody. Prettier shadows.. got it, that's one of those boxes we uncheck for consistent framerate when playing against other people.
These guys are as bad as the audiophiles that are made fun of on/. all the time. First it was frame rate, 200+ FPS with 85/75/60 display refresh rate.../eyeroll Now that the average PC gamer has found vsync it's teh softer shadows and highlights. Lets be honest, if you can't do pretty with a moderately consistent frame rate, it gets turned off by any serious gamer.
I'm not saying your shadows _aren't_ super pretty, just that the money you have to spend for slightly prettier visuals at smooth not-disrupting-gameplay frame rates reminds me of $200 audio cables.
And... as nearly all of us are typing and reading this on a PC.. we most likely play/have played games on them. There is no us v them, just mostly people who already have played PC games and still don't give a damn about ridiculous epeen contests.
Now, supposing MS made some fantastic improvement to the BSD stack, and didn't contribute those changes back... Which they may have done, but we'll never know.
The community benefits are demonstrably less in this case.
Whereas, if it were under the (L)GPL, MS would be forced to pay back into the community, for the service that they received in the form of not having to reinvent their own TCP stack, or buy it from someone else.
Essentially, it's a Free Lunch for them. Some creators or authors may be fine with that, but I, ipersonally, am not.
If you already had made the decision to give your TCP stack away, why do you care how other people use it? You say "pay back... for the service" when someone makes changes to your project, but otherwise they can ride free. It's really, really confusing why you only think your project holds some value in just the one case, but not the other?!
If you feel you deserve compensation, then by gosh that means you think software has value above and beyond the cost of electrons to copy it. *gasp* *whatabizarreconcept*
FOSS to me is like an apple tree where you let anyone come by and eat as many apples as they want for free, but if someone wants to breed trees of their own from your yours, they have to have the same arrangement... because THEY would then owe the community of apple eaters as if they ripped a tree from the earth to plant their own.
I don't get it. Apples should be free, so if you derive some value from them you stole from us? It's like apples are just SCREAMING "I am valuable!" and you are trying really hard to ignore it.
I use my Apple TV mainly for playing music off my main iTunes library, but I looked at the video and saw $2.99 per episode for TV shows? I have Amazon Prime streaming and see similar stuff: $1.99/episode for a 4 year old How It's Made.
Everyone is talking about the merits of different technology, but the real road block to adoption seems to be an insanely broken pricing scheme. I saw that Dish pays around 0.25/month per subscriber to Comedy Central. Yet somehow it's reasonable to ask 2 bucks for a single episode of a single show from that channel?
3/4 hour of entertainment with no ads, for some fraction of the cost of a McDonald's extra value meal. 45 minutes of HDTV v. Just the sandwich please
How is the pricing "broken"?
I guess if you could subscribe to all you can eat McDonald's for $100 a month, a $2.99 McChicken would look pricy too. Would poor families benefit from a McDonald's subscription? Food is arguably more important than entertainment, why aren't we having that discussion?
If you think eating out at McDonald's every night is out of your price range, why do you think hours of recorded entertainment should be?
This is an arena where a few motivated civilians can play, too.
At the moment, I'll put Anonymous or a group of Eastern European boys I met a few years ago against the best that a political party's "opposition team" can put together.
Playing War in a distributed worldwide network is not the same as throwing a bunch of hardware onto a battlefield.
So far, the best armies on the Internet are not the ones affiliated with a government or establishment political party. Hell, despite the Octopus doing its best, Pirate Bay and wikileaks are still up and running. If they go down, I'll be more worried.
Just as they can and do play espionage in meatspace. Your little guerilla operations will be short lived if they sufficiently annoy powerful governments.
Don't fool yourself, computer networks can be tamed much easier than than say, the ocean. The players involved just haven't committed the same level of effort. The Internet isn't run on pixie dust buddy.
Oh my goodness, because I live in Australia I have to wait a week before seeing a TV show? How do I manage? Sometimes I can't quite believe the world we live in.
The week delay wouldn't matter if everyone weren't connected via instant communication. Fans discuss shows online, so those that get it first start spilling spoilers all over the place. It's easier for many to go offline for a few hours and get the download, than it is to stay offline for a week (or months in the case of some shows). The regional delay in distribution is killing TV/Cable networks, yet they insist on holding on to the antiquated distribution methodology.
I think the GP wanted to say that this is a silly display of Internet entitlement mentality. Your response is yes it is serious because of spoilers on the Internet. Thanks for the good laugh buddy.
Somehow people do manage to enjoy TV shows and movies that are not steaming fresh out of the oven, and I hear people even manage to read books at their own leisure without being poked in the eye by spoilers at every turn. It's a great mystery how this is all possible I guess.
Brand really doesn't matter much. I have bought Dells exclusively for the past 9 or 10 years, and have never been burned. If you don't want to pay the Mac Tax and would prefer a PC, here's what I've found.
First, stalk your technology. Find exactly what you want. Don't buy in stores for this reason. Want more RAM? Get it. Want a backlit keyboard? Get it. With very few exceptions (usually hard drives and accessories), everything is cheaper to add on at the beginning.
Second, and most importantly, GO TO THE SUPPORT FORUMS. Find a laptop series that's been out for 4 or 5 months, and go to the company's support forums to search for it. See what people are complaining about. This is where you find out what's going on under the hood. Weak/incomplete drivers, faulty hardware, random errors, people are going to bitch. One or two complaints aren't anything to worry about. More than that? May be time to reconsider.
My last laptop purchase was going to be an XPS, because it had everything I wanted on it at a price point I was comfortable with. Problem was? It was a POS. Bad drivers, power supply problems, lots of service calls, lots of angry returns. It ended up being a good decision not to buy it. I found a business class laptop that cost more, but it's been flawless. The forums had barely anything bad to say. Plus, I ended up finding a coupon for it that brought it back down to reasonable pricing.
And as a final note... I echo the people who say to buy a business laptop. You'll be much happier. Drivers are way better... the hardware as well. And before you buy, scan those skeezy coupon sites. Sometimes they have absolute steals. My last laptop was 34% off (services AND hardware) thanks to a quick google search before I hit "checkout".
It's people like you that make paying more taxes sound appealing.
The opportunity costs and labor costs associated with the effort and delays in getting s**t done in the federal government is mind-numbing. When feds get bashed for having, in some cases, more costly compensation packages than the private sector, there's one factor that rarely comes up in conversation: any competent software developer will demand a pay premium in exchange for putting up with this soul-sucking crap on a daily basis.
Oh BOO HOOOOO, life is tough for the software developer on a government contract./eyeroll
Here's a thought, if it is hard to spend money, maybe they will be encouraged to stretch out what they have. As little businesses become big businesses, the same thing happens.
But really, laptop upgrades... you know how many people in the public and private sectors reading this are screaming how unlikely it is for shiny new laptops to show up in three weeks? You sound like you're in IT, did you bake validating the standard OS image against the new hardware or maybe even doing a limited rollout to find problems with it before buying them in bulk?
Jeez, that's how bureaucracy is born brother, because enough people f'ed that up and learned from it.
One of the parts of the otherwise totally asinine "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" that actually did stick with me was the story about some little part of a motorcycle that can be replaced with just a little piece of tin can if it breaks, and in some ways it even works better if you do. But, in the auto parts store it costs $15. The point is this guy's friend would never consider using a piece of tin can on his bike, and would always buy the expensive part every time because he's the kind of guy that associates paying for something with quality.
Doubling down on cheap, half-assed solutions is not the answer.
If you go the tin can route, the situation will _never_ improve. You say "if it breaks" with the tin can and "every time" with the expensive part. That's some misplaced optimism - you _know_ the tin can will break and you are using that as justification not to buy the part as if their fates are intertwined.
There will _never_ be an incentive to make the free tin can work better in this application because Tin Can Co. doesn't give a crap about your problem. There is _some_ incentive to make the replacement part work better. Rest assured, the company making expensive replacement parts does not want to be associated with the failure rate of tin cans applied to motorcycles.
The tin can approach is like treating the symptoms of a bigger problem. It's OK if you admit you have the problem. In my view, free software is very much the tin can, and zero upfront cost will be its most important feature right up until the moment the problem it attempted to solve gets optimized away. I'm not saying having a cost automatically makes software better fit to solve a problem, just that it does apply evolutionary pressure on it to do so.
Not sure I can buy into this side of your argument. When you consider everything involved, do you really think that people get married primarily for tax reasons? Half the people who get married spend so much on the event that I find it hard to believe that they ever recoup that in taxes unless they make $200k/yr or something.
Considering the whole metric ton of financial risk involved and taxes are the only financial gain, I think it's a fairly sound argument the GP was making. You could just get married in the eyes of a church and not in the eyes of the STATE, but why isn't that common? Well, that's not all of it because you'd still have to deal with the legal ramifications of common law marriage.
I'll try to tackle wedding costs without offending too many... If you honestly think your tax dollars are subsidizing all Tons of marriages are between people in their mid-20s who barely have jobs let alone a grasp of tax accounting.
I bet they don't have a grasp on the risks and legal issues either.
I think the main driver for marriage is tradition and pressure by family to conform to social norms. That, and nobody in love really wants to plan for the incredibly unlikely event that something will go wrong
Agreed.
Whatever the reason people go into it for, I think the government's involvement in it is _crazy_.
The main problem is indeed the policies. While I (mostly) agree with the main statements TFA makes, I have my own note to add:
My bank's website enforces a MAXIMUM length. I'd love to have a password like "c0rr3c7 h0r53 b4773ry st4p13", but I can't use more than 6 characters. Yes, you read that right. 6 characters. Maximum.
I fear for my online bank info constantly . Why would there ever be a reason to enforce such a small maximum length? I don't get it.
Switch banks!!!! Or at least put your direct deposit in a different bank. One thing the world is not short on is banks of various sizes. Shop around, they should work for your money.
IMHO, there seems to be as many bank branches as there are fast food joints in the U.S. There's little reason to keep your money parked in a particular bank.
Not only that but another big turn off is that documentation often tends to be non-existent, incomplete, confusing, or simply wrong then, to make matters worse, when inexperienced users venture into the forums looking for guidance, the replies are usually along the lines of RTFM emphasized with varying degrees of condescension. Very rarely will you find a simple, clear set of instructions on how to perform a specific procedure. New users need hand holding but the Linux community will more often than not just throw them to the wolves.
Also, this doesn't only affect inexperienced users. Try writing a program that utilizes the/sys sysfs interface. Some of it is documented, sort of. Good luck figuring out what is stable or not under there.
I always pick on sysfs because it is native to Linux and it's where the kernel should be interfacing with userland stuff for the vast majority of admin folks. If there is any part of Linux that should be stable and documented, THAT'S IT.
And wifi speeds suck compared to gigabit ethernet. And exactly how am I supposed to replicated my 47tb with 'small footprint' servers?
So... you can pick up and move your equipment when you need to do bulk transfers, or run a temporary cable between them. You need to answer this question, how often do you need a sustained 1gb vs. 300mb between separate rooms in your house?
I can understand some hobbies might utilize fast transfer speeds frequently, but if it needs to be between different rooms in a house, you are just being ridiculous, or you are an _extreme_ outlier.
Businesses of all sizes often do initial replication locally then ship storage offsite if it saves them from clogging a WAN link for weeks on end. Their cost-benefit analysis does't stop with "but it's faster"
Only because this is a new home, _if_ the cost is trivial, then my response is fuck it, why not. All you disparaging WiFi in the home are delusional. There is no sound reason for it not to be part of the picture. Tethering everything to one wall in a room "because it is faster" is silly.
My grandpa had to move clear across the country back in the 50s because of "no poaching" deals in the aircraft industry on the east coast. The only way to advance was for someone above you in your company to retire/die/quit/get fired then they'd fill the gap. And no worries for the company about having to provide competitive wages. If they caught someone sniffing around another company, the person was fired and blacklisted. If someone from another company came sniffing around, they'd call the other company and the person would be fired and blacklisted. It's pretty close to creating a slave labor force. Sure, the shackles are padded but it's very demoralizing to know that trying to advance your career could end it.
I'm not that old, but I would hazard a guess that the aircraft industry in the 50's was as hot or better than IT is today.
It's not fair in a relative sense, and we can safely argue amongst our peers the value of our work, but the upper middle class complaining about padded shackles is a lot like the CEO of BP wanting his life back.
(Yes, the irony is real -- they are suing Samsung while simultaneously buying tons from them.)
How the heck is THAT irony?
I mean you don't call it ironic when someone sleeps with their ex do you, and that arrangement is a lot more black and white than the relations between huge companies.
Apple on the other hand, is not allowing users to configure IPv6 - even if it is present and enabled, what good does it do if it can't be configured? Less features is not something you should want or tolerate. That's what pre-release builds are for.
That isn't true, you can download the previous version easily and install it alongside the new. Instead of getting all butthurt over nothing, why don't you ask people who are actually affected by this in some meaningful way?
I think the threat is that the internet will cease to be a big place outside of a handful of walled gardens, or at the very least, it's very difficult to engage in certain activities without a Facebook account.
Cease to be a big place... What the hell does that even mean? I would take you all more seriously if the Internet freedom hippies didn't sound so much like a bunch of damned hippies.
I know this is a mouthful for those who do not understand but I would highly recommend looking into how exactly this malware works. Here is how the default set-up of OS X can be subverted to install a binary to a hidden user directory without user permission or knowledge. Then download a binary which is really smart that will try to get user permission to install system wide and if it does not receive this permission it just does it to the ill informed Mac user without permission. With Linux the system would not allow a.so to be loaded to a user/home directory and then set it to run at login. This is the problem with Mac security there is also a huge hole in the way binaries can run from within a/home at login without permission!
Here is a run-down of how it works and why it will only work on Mac because its method of infection does not require user interaction to install the payload to a users home directory with Mac OS. However I have the feeling that this security nightmare will be addressed by the Apple coders simply by doing things the way most Linux distros do!
This is such an obvious troll, you retarded "+1 too long to read" moderators.
That's just scratching the surface of how a Linux user account can be compromised. With a teensy bit of effort, any user processes that open ~/.bash_profile could get ~/.your_original_one too. Then we could go down into what gets started with your X session and some convincing gksu prompts. It doesn't even have to be that complex, because I bet most of you don't fully qualify the path to sudo when you run it.
And I'm tackling just the clever Linux users. _Forget_ about casual users.
There is no fundamental mechanism or behavior in UNIX or Linux systems that protects a user and his/her processes from themselves. It is not designed that way. You can be reasonably sure that SUID binaries run unmolested, but that's about it.
If you're not running as an admin, a malicious script can still theoretically mess with your personal files and folders; but not the system-level ones.
What does this matter on a single user system?
Everything of value is owned by that user anyway.
On a multiuser system, for protection, yes, all user accounts should be isolated from each other as much as possible, but most macs are single user I imagine.
4th amendment "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Can some one point to the airport exclusion? Or where congress amended the constitution to allow this?
If you don't explain how it is unreasonable, how are we supposed to follow your logic? You obviously cannot define unreasonable to be _ANY_, so what is your definition? Bearing in mind that airplanes really, truly, absolutely, in fact, are popular targets for terrorists, and a successful attack paralyses mass air transit, which already needs to be propped up financially in most cases.
Also, we have this thing called a Judicial Branch in the U.S. Government, that does um.. word definitions among other things... you should look it up.
If you can make $10,000 by selling one copy at $10,000, but you could make $20,000 by selling 100 copies at $200 each (and enough customers exist that WOULD pay that but will never fucking pay $10,000), and your current price is $10,000, most people would say you're overpriced...
Well what if three people will pay $10,000? What if, what if, what if.
Putting those shenanigans aside...
There are PLENTY of good reasons for wanting fewer higher paying customers over 100x cheap customers - sales, marketing, support, etc. all scale with number of clients.
People hate getting "nickel and dimed", but that's what you have to do to spread out the costs of supporting them. Everybody gets all pissy when a big bank changes their fees, so they raise minimum account balances. That's the very low end of customer firing.
Say he hedges his bets, offers tiered versions, offers support separately, etc. You don't know what the breakdown will be, it might be that 10% of his clients generate 90% of his revenue. By trimming costs associated with the bottom end (possibly removing some of it) he could invest more in supporting the top 10%. With a niche product (without reading TFA I'll just assume $10k software is such) that could be a smart move, but he'll need to do some market analysis because we can only guess.
it's going to remain mostly a server and utility OS
Or... can we just do that better? The stagnation in that area even predates Linux itself, we're talking many decades. Standardized programatic interfaces for all system configuration tasks, please?
I love tools like Puppet and Augeas, but what they have to do is like performing brain surgery to change someone's mind.
It's a bit disappointing to see so many people on slashdot wondering what the purpose of a mainframe is. It shows so many "geeks" have a very limited knowledge of IT in the real world.
So true.
I think most people have very limited knowledge of the real world. I'm not sure if the Internet works to improve that, or merely demonstrates it.:\
... if not religion then some other ideology like nationalism, racism, economics, etc.
Oh you mean economic ideologies like capitalism, socialism, communism, etc., not economics. What you did is like putting psychology in a list of religions.
I'm only nit-picking because disagreeing with an ideology or a religion is ENTIRELY different than disagreeing with science. When you disagree with science, God steps on a helpless kitten.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that jumps out at us from watching the video is that the game clearly isn't running on legacy console hardware. Creative director Dominic Robilliard confirms this a little later in the interview, when he states that the demo is being powered by PCs using Nvidia hardware.
Obviously we can't say for certain, but there's some good circumstantial evidence that the game is built for DX11. Shadows are always the best thing to check -- DX10/DX11 shadows are softer and more realistic than their DX9 counterparts. Fog is another area where DX11 implementations tend to noticably improve on DX9, and the 1313 scenes are impressive on both counts.
There's no reason LucasArts couldn't develop the title for current consoles and cutting-edge PC hardware simultaneously, but this is good news for computer gamers -- games built on our platform tend to play better (and look nicer) than console ports that offer better textures but otherwise keep to the limits of six year-old hardware.
Nobody cares about PC gaming epeen. Really, nobody. Prettier shadows.. got it, that's one of those boxes we uncheck for consistent framerate when playing against other people.
These guys are as bad as the audiophiles that are made fun of on /. all the time. First it was frame rate, 200+ FPS with 85/75/60 display refresh rate... /eyeroll
Now that the average PC gamer has found vsync it's teh softer shadows and highlights. Lets be honest, if you can't do pretty with a moderately consistent frame rate, it gets turned off by any serious gamer.
I'm not saying your shadows _aren't_ super pretty, just that the money you have to spend for slightly prettier visuals at smooth not-disrupting-gameplay frame rates reminds me of $200 audio cables.
And... as nearly all of us are typing and reading this on a PC.. we most likely play/have played games on them. There is no us v them, just mostly people who already have played PC games and still don't give a damn about ridiculous epeen contests.
Now, supposing MS made some fantastic improvement to the BSD stack, and didn't contribute those changes back... Which they may have done, but we'll never know.
The community benefits are demonstrably less in this case.
Whereas, if it were under the (L)GPL, MS would be forced to pay back into the community, for the service that they received in the form of not having to reinvent their own TCP stack, or buy it from someone else.
Essentially, it's a Free Lunch for them. Some creators or authors may be fine with that, but I, ipersonally, am not.
If you already had made the decision to give your TCP stack away, why do you care how other people use it? You say "pay back ... for the service" when someone makes changes to your project, but otherwise they can ride free. It's really, really confusing why you only think your project holds some value in just the one case, but not the other?!
If you feel you deserve compensation, then by gosh that means you think software has value above and beyond the cost of electrons to copy it. *gasp* *whatabizarreconcept*
FOSS to me is like an apple tree where you let anyone come by and eat as many apples as they want for free, but if someone wants to breed trees of their own from your yours, they have to have the same arrangement... because THEY would then owe the community of apple eaters as if they ripped a tree from the earth to plant their own.
I don't get it. Apples should be free, so if you derive some value from them you stole from us? It's like apples are just SCREAMING "I am valuable!" and you are trying really hard to ignore it.
I use my Apple TV mainly for playing music off my main iTunes library, but I looked at the video and saw $2.99 per episode for TV shows? I have Amazon Prime streaming and see similar stuff: $1.99/episode for a 4 year old How It's Made.
Everyone is talking about the merits of different technology, but the real road block to adoption seems to be an insanely broken pricing scheme. I saw that Dish pays around 0.25/month per subscriber to Comedy Central. Yet somehow it's reasonable to ask 2 bucks for a single episode of a single show from that channel?
3/4 hour of entertainment with no ads, for some fraction of the cost of a McDonald's extra value meal.
45 minutes of HDTV v. Just the sandwich please
How is the pricing "broken"?
I guess if you could subscribe to all you can eat McDonald's for $100 a month, a $2.99 McChicken would look pricy too. Would poor families benefit from a McDonald's subscription? Food is arguably more important than entertainment, why aren't we having that discussion?
If you think eating out at McDonald's every night is out of your price range, why do you think hours of recorded entertainment should be?
This is an arena where a few motivated civilians can play, too.
At the moment, I'll put Anonymous or a group of Eastern European boys I met a few years ago against the best that a political party's "opposition team" can put together.
Playing War in a distributed worldwide network is not the same as throwing a bunch of hardware onto a battlefield.
So far, the best armies on the Internet are not the ones affiliated with a government or establishment political party. Hell, despite the Octopus doing its best, Pirate Bay and wikileaks are still up and running. If they go down, I'll be more worried.
Just as they can and do play espionage in meatspace. Your little guerilla operations will be short lived if they sufficiently annoy powerful governments.
Don't fool yourself, computer networks can be tamed much easier than than say, the ocean. The players involved just haven't committed the same level of effort. The Internet isn't run on pixie dust buddy.
Oh my goodness, because I live in Australia I have to wait a week before seeing a TV show? How do I manage? Sometimes I can't quite believe the world we live in.
The week delay wouldn't matter if everyone weren't connected via instant communication. Fans discuss shows online, so those that get it first start spilling spoilers all over the place. It's easier for many to go offline for a few hours and get the download, than it is to stay offline for a week (or months in the case of some shows). The regional delay in distribution is killing TV/Cable networks, yet they insist on holding on to the antiquated distribution methodology.
I think the GP wanted to say that this is a silly display of Internet entitlement mentality. Your response is yes it is serious because of spoilers on the Internet. Thanks for the good laugh buddy.
Somehow people do manage to enjoy TV shows and movies that are not steaming fresh out of the oven, and I hear people even manage to read books at their own leisure without being poked in the eye by spoilers at every turn. It's a great mystery how this is all possible I guess.
Brand really doesn't matter much. I have bought Dells exclusively for the past 9 or 10 years, and have never been burned. If you don't want to pay the Mac Tax and would prefer a PC, here's what I've found.
First, stalk your technology. Find exactly what you want. Don't buy in stores for this reason. Want more RAM? Get it. Want a backlit keyboard? Get it. With very few exceptions (usually hard drives and accessories), everything is cheaper to add on at the beginning.
Second, and most importantly, GO TO THE SUPPORT FORUMS. Find a laptop series that's been out for 4 or 5 months, and go to the company's support forums to search for it. See what people are complaining about. This is where you find out what's going on under the hood. Weak/incomplete drivers, faulty hardware, random errors, people are going to bitch. One or two complaints aren't anything to worry about. More than that? May be time to reconsider.
My last laptop purchase was going to be an XPS, because it had everything I wanted on it at a price point I was comfortable with. Problem was? It was a POS. Bad drivers, power supply problems, lots of service calls, lots of angry returns. It ended up being a good decision not to buy it. I found a business class laptop that cost more, but it's been flawless. The forums had barely anything bad to say. Plus, I ended up finding a coupon for it that brought it back down to reasonable pricing.
And as a final note... I echo the people who say to buy a business laptop. You'll be much happier. Drivers are way better... the hardware as well. And before you buy, scan those skeezy coupon sites. Sometimes they have absolute steals. My last laptop was 34% off (services AND hardware) thanks to a quick google search before I hit "checkout".
It's people like you that make paying more taxes sound appealing.
The opportunity costs and labor costs associated with the effort and delays in getting s**t done in the federal government is mind-numbing. When feds get bashed for having, in some cases, more costly compensation packages than the private sector, there's one factor that rarely comes up in conversation: any competent software developer will demand a pay premium in exchange for putting up with this soul-sucking crap on a daily basis.
Oh BOO HOOOOO, life is tough for the software developer on a government contract. /eyeroll
Here's a thought, if it is hard to spend money, maybe they will be encouraged to stretch out what they have. As little businesses become big businesses, the same thing happens.
But really, laptop upgrades... you know how many people in the public and private sectors reading this are screaming how unlikely it is for shiny new laptops to show up in three weeks? You sound like you're in IT, did you bake validating the standard OS image against the new hardware or maybe even doing a limited rollout to find problems with it before buying them in bulk?
Jeez, that's how bureaucracy is born brother, because enough people f'ed that up and learned from it.
One of the parts of the otherwise totally asinine "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" that actually did stick with me was the story about some little part of a motorcycle that can be replaced with just a little piece of tin can if it breaks, and in some ways it even works better if you do. But, in the auto parts store it costs $15. The point is this guy's friend would never consider using a piece of tin can on his bike, and would always buy the expensive part every time because he's the kind of guy that associates paying for something with quality.
Doubling down on cheap, half-assed solutions is not the answer.
If you go the tin can route, the situation will _never_ improve. You say "if it breaks" with the tin can and "every time" with the expensive part. That's some misplaced optimism - you _know_ the tin can will break and you are using that as justification not to buy the part as if their fates are intertwined.
There will _never_ be an incentive to make the free tin can work better in this application because Tin Can Co. doesn't give a crap about your problem. There is _some_ incentive to make the replacement part work better. Rest assured, the company making expensive replacement parts does not want to be associated with the failure rate of tin cans applied to motorcycles.
The tin can approach is like treating the symptoms of a bigger problem. It's OK if you admit you have the problem.
In my view, free software is very much the tin can, and zero upfront cost will be its most important feature right up until the moment the problem it attempted to solve gets optimized away. I'm not saying having a cost automatically makes software better fit to solve a problem, just that it does apply evolutionary pressure on it to do so.
Not sure I can buy into this side of your argument. When you consider everything involved, do you really think that people get married primarily for tax reasons? Half the people who get married spend so much on the event that I find it hard to believe that they ever recoup that in taxes unless they make $200k/yr or something.
Considering the whole metric ton of financial risk involved and taxes are the only financial gain, I think it's a fairly sound argument the GP was making. You could just get married in the eyes of a church and not in the eyes of the STATE, but why isn't that common? Well, that's not all of it because you'd still have to deal with the legal ramifications of common law marriage.
I'll try to tackle wedding costs without offending too many... If you honestly think your tax dollars are subsidizing all Tons of marriages are between people in their mid-20s who barely have jobs let alone a grasp of tax accounting.
I bet they don't have a grasp on the risks and legal issues either.
I think the main driver for marriage is tradition and pressure by family to conform to social norms. That, and nobody in love really wants to plan for the incredibly unlikely event that something will go wrong
Agreed.
Whatever the reason people go into it for, I think the government's involvement in it is _crazy_.
The main problem is indeed the policies. While I (mostly) agree with the main statements TFA makes, I have my own note to add:
My bank's website enforces a MAXIMUM length. I'd love to have a password like "c0rr3c7 h0r53 b4773ry st4p13", but I can't use more than 6 characters.
Yes, you read that right. 6 characters. Maximum.
I fear for my online bank info constantly .
Why would there ever be a reason to enforce such a small maximum length? I don't get it.
Switch banks!!!! Or at least put your direct deposit in a different bank. One thing the world is not short on is banks of various sizes. Shop around, they should work for your money.
IMHO, there seems to be as many bank branches as there are fast food joints in the U.S. There's little reason to keep your money parked in a particular bank.
I'll just quote from the source articles and let you make up your own minds.
http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/03/technology/verizon-iphone-sales/
Anecdotal evidence is stacking up on chat forums and other outlets...
http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/03/technology/verizon-iphone-sales/
A pretty hot story is going around, stoked by CNNMoney...
[give some facts]
Maybe those are minor factors, but they aren't the primary reason.
[reach any conclusion you want]
MAYBE it's true, maybe it's not, but I fucking hate "new media".
Not only that but another big turn off is that documentation often tends to be non-existent, incomplete, confusing, or simply wrong then, to make matters worse, when inexperienced users venture into the forums looking for guidance, the replies are usually along the lines of RTFM emphasized with varying degrees of condescension. Very rarely will you find a simple, clear set of instructions on how to perform a specific procedure. New users need hand holding but the Linux community will more often than not just throw them to the wolves.
Also, this doesn't only affect inexperienced users. Try writing a program that utilizes the /sys sysfs interface. Some of it is documented, sort of. Good luck figuring out what is stable or not under there.
I always pick on sysfs because it is native to Linux and it's where the kernel should be interfacing with userland stuff for the vast majority of admin folks. If there is any part of Linux that should be stable and documented, THAT'S IT.
Speaking of userland, http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Online_Storage_Reconfiguration_Guide/adding_storage-device-or-path.html
How long are grep and echo going to sufficient for making configuration changes? Why even bother providing a file level interface that isn't explicitly stable?? End users will be using this, not just distros.
And wifi speeds suck compared to gigabit ethernet. And exactly how am I supposed to replicated my 47tb with 'small footprint' servers?
So... you can pick up and move your equipment when you need to do bulk transfers, or run a temporary cable between them. You need to answer this question, how often do you need a sustained 1gb vs. 300mb between separate rooms in your house?
I can understand some hobbies might utilize fast transfer speeds frequently, but if it needs to be between different rooms in a house, you are just being ridiculous, or you are an _extreme_ outlier.
Businesses of all sizes often do initial replication locally then ship storage offsite if it saves them from clogging a WAN link for weeks on end. Their cost-benefit analysis does't stop with "but it's faster"
Only because this is a new home, _if_ the cost is trivial, then my response is fuck it, why not. All you disparaging WiFi in the home are delusional. There is no sound reason for it not to be part of the picture. Tethering everything to one wall in a room "because it is faster" is silly.
You mean before and after the LG Prada, right? Which came out before the iPhone and was the first phone ever with a capacitive touchscreen.
If LG and Apple came to some sort of agreement, we can only infer from the lack of a lawsuit which way that went.
Nobody is foolish enough to think smartphone makers are merely copying the _Prada_, they are gunning for the iPhone's success.
My grandpa had to move clear across the country back in the 50s because of "no poaching" deals in the aircraft industry on the east coast. The only way to advance was for someone above you in your company to retire/die/quit/get fired then they'd fill the gap. And no worries for the company about having to provide competitive wages. If they caught someone sniffing around another company, the person was fired and blacklisted. If someone from another company came sniffing around, they'd call the other company and the person would be fired and blacklisted. It's pretty close to creating a slave labor force. Sure, the shackles are padded but it's very demoralizing to know that trying to advance your career could end it.
I'm not that old, but I would hazard a guess that the aircraft industry in the 50's was as hot or better than IT is today.
It's not fair in a relative sense, and we can safely argue amongst our peers the value of our work, but the upper middle class complaining about padded shackles is a lot like the CEO of BP wanting his life back.
(Yes, the irony is real -- they are suing Samsung while simultaneously buying tons from them.)
How the heck is THAT irony?
I mean you don't call it ironic when someone sleeps with their ex do you, and that arrangement is a lot more black and white than the relations between huge companies.
Apple on the other hand, is not allowing users to configure IPv6 - even if it is present and enabled, what good does it do if it can't be configured? Less features is not something you should want or tolerate. That's what pre-release builds are for.
That isn't true, you can download the previous version easily and install it alongside the new. Instead of getting all butthurt over nothing, why don't you ask people who are actually affected by this in some meaningful way?
*chirp* *chirp*
I think the threat is that the internet will cease to be a big place outside of a handful of walled gardens, or at the very least, it's very difficult to engage in certain activities without a Facebook account.
Cease to be a big place... What the hell does that even mean? I would take you all more seriously if the Internet freedom hippies didn't sound so much like a bunch of damned hippies.
I know this is a mouthful for those who do not understand but I would highly recommend looking into how exactly this malware works. Here is how the default set-up of OS X can be subverted to install a binary to a hidden user directory without user permission or knowledge. Then download a binary which is really smart that will try to get user permission to install system wide and if it does not receive this permission it just does it to the ill informed Mac user without permission. With Linux the system would not allow a .so to be loaded to a user /home directory and then set it to run at login. This is the problem with Mac security there is also a huge hole in the way binaries can run from within a /home at login without permission!
Here is a run-down of how it works and why it will only work on Mac because its method of infection does not require user interaction to install the payload to a users home directory with Mac OS. However I have the feeling that this security nightmare will be addressed by the Apple coders simply by doing things the way most Linux distros do!
This is such an obvious troll, you retarded "+1 too long to read" moderators.
echo "export PATH="~/.gnome2/.hackersbins:$PATH" >> ~/.bash_profile
or
echo "export LB_LIBRARY_PATH="~/.gnome2/.hackerslibs" >> ~/.bash_profile
That's just scratching the surface of how a Linux user account can be compromised.
With a teensy bit of effort, any user processes that open ~/.bash_profile could get ~/.your_original_one too.
Then we could go down into what gets started with your X session and some convincing gksu prompts.
It doesn't even have to be that complex, because I bet most of you don't fully qualify the path to sudo when you run it.
And I'm tackling just the clever Linux users. _Forget_ about casual users.
There is no fundamental mechanism or behavior in UNIX or Linux systems that protects a user and his/her processes from themselves. It is not designed that way. You can be reasonably sure that SUID binaries run unmolested, but that's about it.
If you're not running as an admin, a malicious script can still theoretically mess with your personal files and folders; but not the system-level ones.
What does this matter on a single user system?
Everything of value is owned by that user anyway.
On a multiuser system, for protection, yes, all user accounts should be isolated from each other as much as possible, but most macs are single user I imagine.
4th amendment
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Can some one point to the airport exclusion? Or where congress amended the constitution to allow this?
If you don't explain how it is unreasonable, how are we supposed to follow your logic? You obviously cannot define unreasonable to be _ANY_, so what is your definition? Bearing in mind that airplanes really, truly, absolutely, in fact, are popular targets for terrorists, and a successful attack paralyses mass air transit, which already needs to be propped up financially in most cases.
Also, we have this thing called a Judicial Branch in the U.S. Government, that does um.. word definitions among other things... you should look it up.
If you can make $10,000 by selling one copy at $10,000, but you could make $20,000 by selling 100 copies at $200 each (and enough customers exist that WOULD pay that but will never fucking pay $10,000), and your current price is $10,000, most people would say you're overpriced...
Well what if three people will pay $10,000?
What if, what if, what if.
Putting those shenanigans aside...
There are PLENTY of good reasons for wanting fewer higher paying customers over 100x cheap customers - sales, marketing, support, etc. all scale with number of clients.
People hate getting "nickel and dimed", but that's what you have to do to spread out the costs of supporting them. Everybody gets all pissy when a big bank changes their fees, so they raise minimum account balances. That's the very low end of customer firing.
Say he hedges his bets, offers tiered versions, offers support separately, etc. You don't know what the breakdown will be, it might be that 10% of his clients generate 90% of his revenue. By trimming costs associated with the bottom end (possibly removing some of it) he could invest more in supporting the top 10%. With a niche product (without reading TFA I'll just assume $10k software is such) that could be a smart move, but he'll need to do some market analysis because we can only guess.
it's going to remain mostly a server and utility OS
Or... can we just do that better? The stagnation in that area even predates Linux itself, we're talking many decades.
Standardized programatic interfaces for all system configuration tasks, please?
I love tools like Puppet and Augeas, but what they have to do is like performing brain surgery to change someone's mind.
It's a bit disappointing to see so many people on slashdot wondering what the purpose of a mainframe is. It shows so many "geeks" have a very limited knowledge of IT in the real world.
So true.
I think most people have very limited knowledge of the real world. I'm not sure if the Internet works to improve that, or merely demonstrates it. :\
... if not religion then some other ideology like nationalism, racism, economics, etc.
Oh you mean economic ideologies like capitalism, socialism, communism, etc., not economics.
What you did is like putting psychology in a list of religions.
I'm only nit-picking because disagreeing with an ideology or a religion is ENTIRELY different than disagreeing with science.
When you disagree with science, God steps on a helpless kitten.