I have to admit, my (limited) knowledge of publishing seems to indicate the actual author has very little juice here.
From my extensive knowledge of publishing (10 years in the book trade), if an author has a bestseller, as Ms Tarbox does apparently she can get just about anything she wants. (Thus the decline in quality of most bestselling novelists as they get the power to tell their editors to shove it.) Pretty much like an A-list movie star.
Has the Australian Dollar always been worth 70 to 80 US cents?
Prior to the stock market crash of October 1987, it was about US$1.20. I was travelling at the time and found that my traveller's cheques, in AUD, were suddenly worth about half in local currency than the day before. That hurt.
A good site for tracking the AUD is here, though it only goes back about two years.
Why would averaging the best and worst give you a value applicable to the whole decade?
I'm tired of you putting words in my mouth, like that above non sequitur, and then knocking them down.
>It is possible to add information without putting people down.
Maybe so, although that's not in my job description.
If you want a discussion, rather than an argument and name calling, try it some time. Till then, enjoy having the last word if that's what gets you off.
Soooo.... if the "take up" is insufficient, then the test failed? Where is the customer left in that case?
Same place every customer is when their hardware is obsolete. Except that once Linux drivers exist (hopefully open source, not just binaries) you can be pretty sure you can upgrade the OS indefinitely. As time goes by, regardless of what HP does, you'll have more choice of software and distros.
There are lots of hardware drivers for Win9x never updated to XP. The owners of these are really screwed.
Is it really a selling point selling a laptop pre-installed with Linux because it's such a challenge otherwise? What happens when it comes time for my annual reinstall?
Why should this be any harder then doing the same with Windows?
You know this unit will be simplified to the point of removing the learning curve for Linux, and so it will be sold to novices
I rather doubt that it will be targetted to novices unless they have a truly Mac-like GUI, which Linux is a few years away from at best.
[2] where X is whatever the proper collective term is for the citizens of Australia and New Zealand. Man, there must be a better word for all this...
Antipodean is a little old-fashioned, but fairly specific. It comes from the fact (I'm pretty sure it's a fact) that the antipodes of London is in the Tasman Sea, between Australia and NZ.
but I bet when it came time to walk up to the rocket and get in for take-off, more than half of the knee-jerk 'sure, what the hell' people would change their tune.
The going rate to climb Everest with expedition support is about $50,000. Several dozen do it each year. About 10% die in the process.
If Microsoft infringes upon someone else's patent then _Microsoft_ is responsible for satisfying the patent holder and for providing the same or equivalent product to the customer
However, the customer still faces the problem that they can't run the software. Either they have to negotiate a licence with teh claimant, who is likely to squeeze them for all they can, or pull the plug on various systems till tey can find a replacement.
some Linux code that is later found to violate a patent then the city of Munich is responsible (because they have no indemnification from the software provider.
I believe IBM for one has said it will indemnify its customers against SCO claims at least. Probably Munich will insist their vendor do the same.
why didn't he just change the permissions on them?
Some years ago I noticed the accountant in our company was spending way too much time playing solitaire, on our one-and-only shared Windows PC (everyone had a DOS PC, for their normal work). I like to play Solitaire too occasionally, so I didn't nuke it, but just deleted the icon. I could play by typing "Sol" on the run command. He was very frustrated, but cpould hardly complain. Unfortunaltely I shred the "secret" with other members of staff and son enough he found out too. I thought of renaming the file or doing something more creative (or nasty), but just let it slide; he quit soon after anyway.
Strangely enough on my current PC Freecell stopped working a year ago. I took it as a sign and haven't really tried to fix it, though soon I'll have to reinstall Windows (new hard disk, and the crap has built up making it crash secveral times a day) and the temptation will be there again, taking away good Slashdot browsing time.
Personally, I find this book rather disgusting. The fact that the "girlfriend" dies while attempting to obtain an implant only furthers the idea that life is cheap and emotions are pointless. The author should have more carefully chosen his pen name. "M.T. Anderson" is not synonymous with "M.T. Soul".
Since neither of us have read the book, it's a bit much to label it. But to me it sounds like a dystopian novel, in the long tradition of Orwell, Swift, etc. Do you think Orwell was hoping you'd agree with Winston Smith in his love for Big Brother at the end? Stories like this aren't meant to give you hope for a happy ending after a disaster; they're telling you if you allow things to go this way it will not be good.
Re:Even the President of the United States
on
Feed
·
· Score: 1
I don't want an actor as president. His intelligence is shown by his ability to delegate, pick good advisors, and choose amongst all the possibilities they present. I wish I had even a fraction of that ability.
And we all wish GWB had those abilities too. He seems to have chosen the worst advisors (Cheney, Rumsfeld most prominently) and made the worst choices of action.
Frank Miller did a deconstruction of the Batman myth in the graphic novel "The Dark Knight Returns"
Actually, a few bits of that turned up in Tim Burton's Batman. The Joker's smiling poison, a few place names; but most importantly the whole ambience of Gotham City.
Consider some of the expressions of outrage when Stephen King won the National Book Foundation Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
That was really amusing. Odd though that he didn't dissect King's work, but Rowling's. I wonder if he's actually read any King? Of course it's true that a lot of King's work is very pedestrian, most of his "NYT bestselling" doorstops are just ways to sedate yourself, but a lot of his shorter fiction, and a few novels, are very good, on both the craft and literary level. He's very aware of what the critics think of him, but is confident enough not to pander to them.
So maybe, from the survivalist point of view, we should focus our resources on saving the world we have got instead of trying to export our destructive tendencies to the rest of the universe.
These arguments, since the 1960s, always seems to come down to making it seem there is a single choice between A) exploring space or B) "saving" the world. Ignoring the fact that rather a lot of other things use more resources than space travel now or at any time. How about giving up SUVs instead of giving up space? (One can't even suggest cutting back on military expenditure these days, no matter how counter productive it is to true security.)
Gerard O'Neill came up with his "High Frontier" concept in about 1975. He budgeted out settng up self-sustaing colonies in orbit (canonically the L5 orbit) as about $50 billion. These colonies would be able to export energy (from solar power, delivered by microwaves) and possibly mineral resources, refined from asteroids back down to earth, or the Moon or later Mars. Current technology has only made this more viable.
Which is 37 years ago. Under the copyright laws back then, it would be expected to be public domain within 28 years of his death. But thanks to Disney's lobbying that's not going to ever happen now. When a song written almost 50 years ago (1956) can't be parodied without lawyers threatening it shows the public domain is anathema to the (intellectual) property-owning class -- which in a broader sense, is what the original song was all about.
I cited the original definitions (as specified in 1791)... the SI units are so phenomenally screwy
All the changes in definitions you describe were irrelevant in practice for any except cutting-edge scientists at the time. I don't think any actually changed the value of the units by 1/1000, probably much less. And besides, for something like a century Imperial units have been defined with reference to metric standards: 1 inch is defined as 25.4 mm.
presumably apple's argument is that they've put a lot of money and effort into their delivery system, and they protect that investment through the DRM. once someone comes along, and reverse engineers it, they can take advantage of apple's hard work and make a profit, thereby reducing apple's earnings.
Just becasue you've invested a lot of money in something in itself doesn't give you the right to prevent other people taking advantage of it. If a law has been broken, then it would be relevant to assessment of damages, but until then, it's just tough. For instance, was the WordPerfect company happy that MS reverse engineered their file format and made WinWord able to import and export it? That's what enabled MS to roll over them and take over a market that WP had owned. But there wasn't anything they could do about it.
The Apple apologists are so predictable it's actually funny as hell. So the iPod supports all formats, as long as it's the Apple format? Which online music store sells tunes that have no DRM or use FairPlay besides iTunes?
Everyone using an iPod agreed to the software agreement involved in its use.
Just how? Certainly they never sign such. It'd be good if this lead to a test in court of the validity of shrinkwrap licences so beloved of software companies.
Unless you're trying to fix a very simple, very easily isolated problem it takes more than "change this and recompile" to fix bugs.
As I said, I wasn't talking of fixing complex lethal bugs, more of changing options to fit circumstances not foreseen by the original writer (or not seen as important). For instance, some years ago I was using the tin newsreader, its default behaviour was to put your local email address in the headers. Naturally, in the spam era, I wasn't happy about that. If I recall correctly, to turn this off wasn't possible in user config, but it was could be done by uncommenting or commenting some hash defines and recompiling. This took about 30 minutes all told. Other things like fixing annoying spelling mistakes in the interface are similarly easy.
Er, no. The point he was making was that just because you "can" get under the hood of free software doesn't mean that you can really do anything worthwhile.
I think you can. Probably not so much in the sense of fixing bugs in the code, but by looking at a few places where choices were made, changing this, and recompiling. Of course, this is rather easier if it's been commented, or documented, preferably on the Man page. It can be extremely useful if you want to turn off certain features, for security or any other reason, or change default behaviour in a way that the config files don't let you. When working with legacy software you often have to waltz through a series of hacks to get it to do what you want, or just give up and throw it away, when a simple change to the source code, if only it were available, would make it all work.
Slashdot Mirror
From my extensive knowledge of publishing (10 years in the book trade), if an author has a bestseller, as Ms Tarbox does apparently she can get just about anything she wants. (Thus the decline in quality of most bestselling novelists as they get the power to tell their editors to shove it.) Pretty much like an A-list movie star.
Prior to the stock market crash of October 1987, it was about US$1.20. I was travelling at the time and found that my traveller's cheques, in AUD, were suddenly worth about half in local currency than the day before. That hurt.
A good site for tracking the AUD is here, though it only goes back about two years.
I'm tired of you putting words in my mouth, like that above non sequitur, and then knocking them down.
>It is possible to add information without putting people down.
Maybe so, although that's not in my job description.
If you want a discussion, rather than an argument and name calling, try it some time. Till then, enjoy having the last word if that's what gets you off.
Same place every customer is when their hardware is obsolete. Except that once Linux drivers exist (hopefully open source, not just binaries) you can be pretty sure you can upgrade the OS indefinitely. As time goes by, regardless of what HP does, you'll have more choice of software and distros.
There are lots of hardware drivers for Win9x never updated to XP. The owners of these are really screwed.
Why should this be any harder then doing the same with Windows?
You know this unit will be simplified to the point of removing the learning curve for Linux, and so it will be sold to novices
I rather doubt that it will be targetted to novices unless they have a truly Mac-like GUI, which Linux is a few years away from at best.
That's what I did.
That 10% figure would only be right if you go back for many decades
One decade. Here's a factoid: "Best and Worst Years on Everest:
1993, 129 summitted and eight died (6%);
1996, 98 summitted and 15 died (15%)"
Nowadays climbers have much better equipment.
In 1996 they had pretty good equipment. 15 died.
It is possible to add information without puting people down. Makes for a more pleasant experience.
Antipodean is a little old-fashioned, but fairly specific. It comes from the fact (I'm pretty sure it's a fact) that the antipodes of London is in the Tasman Sea, between Australia and NZ.
The going rate to climb Everest with expedition support is about $50,000. Several dozen do it each year. About 10% die in the process.
However, the customer still faces the problem that they can't run the software. Either they have to negotiate a licence with teh claimant, who is likely to squeeze them for all they can, or pull the plug on various systems till tey can find a replacement.
some Linux code that is later found to violate a patent then the city of Munich is responsible (because they have no indemnification from the software provider.
I believe IBM for one has said it will indemnify its customers against SCO claims at least. Probably Munich will insist their vendor do the same.
Some years ago I noticed the accountant in our company was spending way too much time playing solitaire, on our one-and-only shared Windows PC (everyone had a DOS PC, for their normal work). I like to play Solitaire too occasionally, so I didn't nuke it, but just deleted the icon. I could play by typing "Sol" on the run command. He was very frustrated, but cpould hardly complain. Unfortunaltely I shred the "secret" with other members of staff and son enough he found out too. I thought of renaming the file or doing something more creative (or nasty), but just let it slide; he quit soon after anyway.
Strangely enough on my current PC Freecell stopped working a year ago. I took it as a sign and haven't really tried to fix it, though soon I'll have to reinstall Windows (new hard disk, and the crap has built up making it crash secveral times a day) and the temptation will be there again, taking away good Slashdot browsing time.
Since neither of us have read the book, it's a bit much to label it. But to me it sounds like a dystopian novel, in the long tradition of Orwell, Swift, etc. Do you think Orwell was hoping you'd agree with Winston Smith in his love for Big Brother at the end? Stories like this aren't meant to give you hope for a happy ending after a disaster; they're telling you if you allow things to go this way it will not be good.
And we all wish GWB had those abilities too. He seems to have chosen the worst advisors (Cheney, Rumsfeld most prominently) and made the worst choices of action.
A more direct link is http://pdl.warnerbros.com/wbmovies/batmanbegins/te aser/teaser_hi_a.mov
Actually, a few bits of that turned up in Tim Burton's Batman. The Joker's smiling poison, a few place names; but most importantly the whole ambience of Gotham City.
That was really amusing. Odd though that he didn't dissect King's work, but Rowling's. I wonder if he's actually read any King? Of course it's true that a lot of King's work is very pedestrian, most of his "NYT bestselling" doorstops are just ways to sedate yourself, but a lot of his shorter fiction, and a few novels, are very good, on both the craft and literary level. He's very aware of what the critics think of him, but is confident enough not to pander to them.
These arguments, since the 1960s, always seems to come down to making it seem there is a single choice between A) exploring space or B) "saving" the world. Ignoring the fact that rather a lot of other things use more resources than space travel now or at any time. How about giving up SUVs instead of giving up space? (One can't even suggest cutting back on military expenditure these days, no matter how counter productive it is to true security.)
Gerard O'Neill came up with his "High Frontier" concept in about 1975. He budgeted out settng up self-sustaing colonies in orbit (canonically the L5 orbit) as about $50 billion. These colonies would be able to export energy (from solar power, delivered by microwaves) and possibly mineral resources, refined from asteroids back down to earth, or the Moon or later Mars. Current technology has only made this more viable.
Which is 37 years ago. Under the copyright laws back then, it would be expected to be public domain within 28 years of his death. But thanks to Disney's lobbying that's not going to ever happen now. When a song written almost 50 years ago (1956) can't be parodied without lawyers threatening it shows the public domain is anathema to the (intellectual) property-owning class -- which in a broader sense, is what the original song was all about.
All the changes in definitions you describe were irrelevant in practice for any except cutting-edge scientists at the time. I don't think any actually changed the value of the units by 1/1000, probably much less. And besides, for something like a century Imperial units have been defined with reference to metric standards: 1 inch is defined as 25.4 mm.
Correction to Story:
"K" is the unit of temperature, the Kelvin.
"k" is the abbreviation for "kilo", 1,000.
Yes, the south. But though they haven't been sighted since 1844, there were the Great Auks in the northern polar regions, pretty similar to penguins.
At least they provide a way to retcon those cartoons you see with Eskimos, polar bears and penguins in the same place.
Just becasue you've invested a lot of money in something in itself doesn't give you the right to prevent other people taking advantage of it. If a law has been broken, then it would be relevant to assessment of damages, but until then, it's just tough. For instance, was the WordPerfect company happy that MS reverse engineered their file format and made WinWord able to import and export it? That's what enabled MS to roll over them and take over a market that WP had owned. But there wasn't anything they could do about it.
allofmp3.com
Just how? Certainly they never sign such. It'd be good if this lead to a test in court of the validity of shrinkwrap licences so beloved of software companies.
As I said, I wasn't talking of fixing complex lethal bugs, more of changing options to fit circumstances not foreseen by the original writer (or not seen as important). For instance, some years ago I was using the tin newsreader, its default behaviour was to put your local email address in the headers. Naturally, in the spam era, I wasn't happy about that. If I recall correctly, to turn this off wasn't possible in user config, but it was could be done by uncommenting or commenting some hash defines and recompiling. This took about 30 minutes all told. Other things like fixing annoying spelling mistakes in the interface are similarly easy.
I think you can. Probably not so much in the sense of fixing bugs in the code, but by looking at a few places where choices were made, changing this, and recompiling. Of course, this is rather easier if it's been commented, or documented, preferably on the Man page. It can be extremely useful if you want to turn off certain features, for security or any other reason, or change default behaviour in a way that the config files don't let you. When working with legacy software you often have to waltz through a series of hacks to get it to do what you want, or just give up and throw it away, when a simple change to the source code, if only it were available, would make it all work.