But when are they going to write an OpenGL-accelerated desktop? I'm still waiting for a Quartz Extreme for Linux. That's what's holding me back from adopting it right now. Is it really that hard to do? Sheesh.
If you discover that an employee has, say, anime on his machine, it is certainly not your business to go and report him. You are not the law, you have no moral authority, and you should therefore not be able to bring punishment down upon someone who has done you no wrong. Pure and simple.
I know I would be very displeased if I found one of our system administrators playing "computer god" with our proprietary information. If he can't be trusted to keep the privacy of a coworker, then who's to say that he can keep the privacy of the company's trade secrets? He would be outta here in no time.
A "mobius stripper"? Why is it always with the nerdy population that we find such blatant sexism and a desire to exploit women? Are you people still wondering why no women want to enter the fields of engineering or computer science? It's a hostile environment, plain and simple, and you assholes are the cause.
Younger people are having major problems finding jobs, forget about older people. With all the open source products working to unemploy coders everywhere, it's really not that surprising that there's a crunch in this market sector. You guys got what you asked for.
It's not as much that older people, who are slower to learn new things and tend to be afraid of technology, are inferior job prospects. It's that the whole profession of coding is becoming irrelevant.
With jobs opening up in places like Mexico and India where the labor force is cheap and educated, the American code monkey doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell. What you need to do is move on to more specialized fields, like MechE or EE. Nobody would trust a bunch of cheapo foreigners with stuff that people would depend on for their safety, so those fields certainly won't be going away any time soon. On the other hand, those of you managing "Linux boxen" are quite replaceable.
Get a digital-to-film conversion machine. You can print all 650 hours of VHS on a format that will never suffer from a lack of proper equipment to view it with. Cheap, simple, effective, and long-lasting. HTH.
legislating developers' name on a screensaver leaves a bad taste in the mouth, honestly. If I had written any significant F/OSS, I would not feel nearly as good about knowing that the license was forcing my name to be displayed on the screen. I would feel nice if someone voluntarily put it up, sure.
Marketers would not want to "un-necessarily'" give credit. Agreed. Not every company selling (services for) open-source code might be doing it for this reason, though.
I can think of two more reasons: (a) they genuinely think that they are reducing information confusing to the (target) user; that their graphic is good; (b) they did not realize that the developers are feeling they are not getting enough credit.
There is merit in the idea that credit to people who write FOSS could be more prominent. There is also a gentler way to do this, IMHO. Like, "Hey Debian dudes! Good work on that release. BTW, my wishlist for the next one is a screensaver that would display names of authors who wrote the packages I installed. Here's a graphic for the background, and here's how I think one could go about it...".
If enough people support this idea and implement it, then the need to enforce it will not be needed. If some notable exception exists, one could consider license as a way to enforce it.
Like someone else mentioned above, this is not free software. If you write software that throws a bunch of credits in people's face all the time (the screensaver idea is an awful one), distros will be inclined not to use your software by default if the license forces the issue. Imagine if business contributes to a free software project and then insists that the business be "given credit" by putting their name all over the place. But then I see ReiserFS doing just that: last time I formatted a ReiserFS partition, I got a list of all the companies that contributed money to the project. Don't get me wrong, ReiserFS is great, but I don't care to see a bunch of ads in my software. Imagine if every time you ran ls you got some companies name listed along with your directory listing.
Free software is not about egos, it is about keeping software free. Forcing something like this through licensing makes the software non-free. Want the credits? Look at the source code or the documentation!!!
That thing records so-called "High Definition" in MPEG2 format. Have you ever tried to color correct source footage that's been compressed? It ain't pretty, that's for sure. And forget about keying.
So, instead of a decent laptop and a decent camera, I can get a combination that does both poorly and probably costs only slightly less. Wow, what a gain.
Thanks, but I'll stick with Firewire and my Canon GL2
You gotta hand it to Penny Arcade! They have come up with, hands down, the best absolute comeback to those dirty nasty lawyer people! "Fucking nazis!" indeed.
You're paying a lot less. If you know of an album where you like, say, two of the songs, can you go down to the music store and say "yes, I'd like just track 2 and track 6"? No, of course not. You'd have to shell out for the full price of the album. If you can buy individual songs at a lower price, you are most certainly not getting ripped off - you're saving tons of money, percentage-wise.
And where the fuck did you come up with this $0.50 number? "A bag of chips"?? Why aren't new Fords priced around $300? After all, that's about the price of my pair of speakers - it's a fair price.
Earth to HanzoSan: They don't care, we don't care.
They know that they can't get tightwad cheapskates like you to pay for music, you're not their target audience. The people they are targetting are those who have real, actual money to spend and happen to like the convenience of being able to buy just one song, instead of a whole album of questionable merit. What this means for you, in practical terms, is that you will no longer have to shell out for the whole "Gay Dance Beats Mix XVII" album, but rather just download "YMCA" and "In the Navy". If you weren't a tightwad, that is.
$0.99US for one song?! Shit, these are going to be crappy 128kbit/s tracks, even! That's an awfully high price to pay for substandard music quality.
You can go ahead and say "Oh, but all my 128kbps MP3s sound just as good as the CDs", but chances are, you're wrong. Anybody with anything better than cheapo computer speakers or $5 headphones they got for free in a box of Cracker Jacks is able to hear an enormous difference. It is especially bad if you have high fidelity audiophile gear. For example, the vibration dampers and $1000 cables I bought for my Bose speakers aren't going to help that much when the source material is total shit. Isn't this supposed to be Apple's target market, anyway? You know - the artsy types who care about things like well-rendered fonts and high-quality sound? What are they thinking?
Not to mention the DRM restrictions that Apple is imposing. I thought we had decided that Apple wasn't going to do DRM? It sure looked like it, but then here we are, looking at Apple supporting and using DRM in one of its premiere applications. Do you feel betrayed yet?
The only way that Apple could even begin to make this all acceptable would be to offer the music for $0.25US/track at 320kbps quality. Sure, it still won't really approach CD quality, but at least you won't be charged an arm and a leg for substandard music.
Everybody keeps talking about how great the Opteron's "price/performance ratio" is, but I have not seen a price anywhere. How much do these things run, anyway?
I tried out Blue Shift and the end was... depressing. It was OK overall, I guess, but it didn't have the same feel as the original. I haven't tried Opposing Forces, though, I'll have to give that one a look.
Slashdot Mirror
But when are they going to write an OpenGL-accelerated desktop? I'm still waiting for a Quartz Extreme for Linux. That's what's holding me back from adopting it right now. Is it really that hard to do? Sheesh.
I know I would be very displeased if I found one of our system administrators playing "computer god" with our proprietary information. If he can't be trusted to keep the privacy of a coworker, then who's to say that he can keep the privacy of the company's trade secrets? He would be outta here in no time.
A "mobius stripper"? Why is it always with the nerdy population that we find such blatant sexism and a desire to exploit women? Are you people still wondering why no women want to enter the fields of engineering or computer science? It's a hostile environment, plain and simple, and you assholes are the cause.
Younger people are having major problems finding jobs, forget about older people. With all the open source products working to unemploy coders everywhere, it's really not that surprising that there's a crunch in this market sector. You guys got what you asked for.
With jobs opening up in places like Mexico and India where the labor force is cheap and educated, the American code monkey doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell. What you need to do is move on to more specialized fields, like MechE or EE. Nobody would trust a bunch of cheapo foreigners with stuff that people would depend on for their safety, so those fields certainly won't be going away any time soon. On the other hand, those of you managing "Linux boxen" are quite replaceable.
Your pal, --sdem
Uh, you wish.
Get a digital-to-film conversion machine. You can print all 650 hours of VHS on a format that will never suffer from a lack of proper equipment to view it with. Cheap, simple, effective, and long-lasting. HTH.
Use Debian and apt-get. No, seriously, could it be much easier?
legislating developers' name on a screensaver leaves a bad taste in the mouth, honestly. If I had written any significant F/OSS, I would not feel nearly as good about knowing that the license was forcing my name to be displayed on the screen. I would feel nice if someone voluntarily put it up, sure.
Marketers would not want to "un-necessarily'" give credit. Agreed. Not every company selling (services for) open-source code might be doing it for this reason, though.
I can think of two more reasons: (a) they genuinely think that they are reducing information confusing to the (target) user; that their graphic is good; (b) they did not realize that the developers are feeling they are not getting enough credit.
There is merit in the idea that credit to people who write FOSS could be more prominent. There is also a gentler way to do this, IMHO. Like, "Hey Debian dudes! Good work on that release. BTW, my wishlist for the next one is a screensaver that would display names of authors who wrote the packages I installed. Here's a graphic for the background, and here's how I think one could go about it...".
If enough people support this idea and implement it, then the need to enforce it will not be needed. If some notable exception exists, one could consider license as a way to enforce it.
Like someone else mentioned above, this is not free software. If you write software that throws a bunch of credits in people's face all the time (the screensaver idea is an awful one), distros will be inclined not to use your software by default if the license forces the issue. Imagine if business contributes to a free software project and then insists that the business be "given credit" by putting their name all over the place. But then I see ReiserFS doing just that: last time I formatted a ReiserFS partition, I got a list of all the companies that contributed money to the project. Don't get me wrong, ReiserFS is great, but I don't care to see a bunch of ads in my software. Imagine if every time you ran ls you got some companies name listed along with your directory listing.
Free software is not about egos, it is about keeping software free. Forcing something like this through licensing makes the software non-free. Want the credits? Look at the source code or the documentation!!!
That thing records so-called "High Definition" in MPEG2 format. Have you ever tried to color correct source footage that's been compressed? It ain't pretty, that's for sure. And forget about keying.
Did you not just see me disparage it?
Thanks, but I'll stick with Firewire and my Canon GL2
BMWs are too expensive for college students to be able to afford! They should be less expensive!
I barely have enough money to eat lunch everyday and I'm supposed to be spending a dollar on some 128bitrate low quality music file?
Why the fuck are you spending money on luxuries like music if you "barely have enough money to eat"??
You gotta hand it to Penny Arcade! They have come up with, hands down, the best absolute comeback to those dirty nasty lawyer people! "Fucking nazis!" indeed.
How many times are you going to post the same thing in this article?
And where the fuck did you come up with this $0.50 number? "A bag of chips"?? Why aren't new Fords priced around $300? After all, that's about the price of my pair of speakers - it's a fair price.
They know that they can't get tightwad cheapskates like you to pay for music, you're not their target audience. The people they are targetting are those who have real, actual money to spend and happen to like the convenience of being able to buy just one song, instead of a whole album of questionable merit. What this means for you, in practical terms, is that you will no longer have to shell out for the whole "Gay Dance Beats Mix XVII" album, but rather just download "YMCA" and "In the Navy". If you weren't a tightwad, that is.
You can go ahead and say "Oh, but all my 128kbps MP3s sound just as good as the CDs", but chances are, you're wrong. Anybody with anything better than cheapo computer speakers or $5 headphones they got for free in a box of Cracker Jacks is able to hear an enormous difference. It is especially bad if you have high fidelity audiophile gear. For example, the vibration dampers and $1000 cables I bought for my Bose speakers aren't going to help that much when the source material is total shit. Isn't this supposed to be Apple's target market, anyway? You know - the artsy types who care about things like well-rendered fonts and high-quality sound? What are they thinking?
Not to mention the DRM restrictions that Apple is imposing. I thought we had decided that Apple wasn't going to do DRM? It sure looked like it, but then here we are, looking at Apple supporting and using DRM in one of its premiere applications. Do you feel betrayed yet?
The only way that Apple could even begin to make this all acceptable would be to offer the music for $0.25US/track at 320kbps quality. Sure, it still won't really approach CD quality, but at least you won't be charged an arm and a leg for substandard music.
Or the laughter?
So, it's almost twice as expensive as the Xeon (according to PriceWatch), but it is not nearly twice as fast. Now I see.
Everybody keeps talking about how great the Opteron's "price/performance ratio" is, but I have not seen a price anywhere. How much do these things run, anyway?
I tried out Blue Shift and the end was... depressing. It was OK overall, I guess, but it didn't have the same feel as the original. I haven't tried Opposing Forces, though, I'll have to give that one a look.
I finally decided to go through the single-player mode and just finished up. I will be anticipating this with great relish.