The point that he demonstrated, rather well it seems, is that we in the west find the idea of us being subjected to the risk of malaria extremely offensive. On the other hand, how many of us are raising a protest about people in developing nations being subject to exactly the same disease?
I don't find being subjected to the risk of malaria "offensive." (On a side note, I find that a rather weird word to use.) I'm pleased that I'm at low risk for contracting malaria, living in the US, but I really don't give it that much thought. I'm not raising a protest about malaria risk in other countries because I simply don't care all that much. Sorry, but we all can't adopt every cause that floats our way.
I don't subscribe to the school of thought that, just because I live in the "West" and have benefits and a pretty comfortable life, I somehow "owe" people who are less fortunate. If I owe anyone, I owe my ancestors for having the foresight, means, and perseverance to emigrate from their native lands to the US. Public service and the taking up of causes is a choice, not an obligation.
If your site doesn't work with JavaScript turned off, your site is broken. Period, end of chapter.
I don't know about that. Ten years ago, when Javascript implementations were spotty, buggy, and at times incompatible, I'd probably agree. But nowadays I'd consider having a working Javascript implementation just about as important in browser selection as standards-compliant HTML and CSS support.
(On a side note, I'd also no longer consider a site that doesn't work properly without CSS to be broken. Lynx can bite me.)
Blame sloppy developers that use JavaScript for duties that they shouldn't.
Why? It's an available and useful tool. Unfortunately it's also abused for ads and popups, but that doesn't make people who use Javascript for legitimate purposes "sloppy." Welcome to modern web development.
Well, it kinda depends. Aside from things resulting from this switchover mess, is there any law that says a particular station *must* broadcast? I mean, if (for example) NBC just suddenly decided, "hey, we don't feel like broadcasting at all in Chicago," then... well, shouldn't they be allowed to stop? It's their money powering the transmitters, getting advertising to pay for content, etc.
So, by extension, what's wrong with them saying "hey, we don't feel like broadcasting in analog anymore"... at *any* time they want?
Well the Supreme contract of the land, the U.S. Constitution, states the people should receive payment for their books, patents, or other useful arts. i.e. Microsoft is wrong to steal another's man patented ideas.
No it doesn't. What it does do is give the 'owner' the sole right to control of copy. If payment was required by constitution, the GPL would not work.
Actually, it doesn't even do that. It allows Congress to enact laws to grant temporary monopolies over ideas. If Congress chose not to do so, or chose to repeal all copyright/patent/trademark/trade secret/etc. laws tomorrow, that would be fine, too. Maybe I'm just being pedantic, but I think it's an important distinction.
No, it's not. With a small-volume product (under 3k units per quarter), we ship a CD (with printed label) in a paper and plastic envelope jacket. This costs us around $1.50 per unit. If we were to substitute the envelope for a jewel case, I could see this price increasing to maybe $2.50 total. For this type of product, you add on between 10% and 15% (depending on your purchaser's negotiating ability) for the manufacturer's "overhead" (shipping, handling, returned/damaged goods, etc.). And this is for a part of a product produced in *tiny* volumes compared to your average top-40s CD.
Face it, the actual cost to produce music CDs is pretty marginal these days. Most of the retail price of a CD is certainly not in manufacturing or shipping costs.
When I used nvidia's proprietary driver with a composited desktop, the machine would mysteriously lock up at least once a week. Strangely, the experimental nouveau driver has no such problems. (Sadly, it lacks features like nobody's business, but I value stability over 3D support.)
Oh look, I refuted your anecdote with more anecdotal evidence! Go me!
It's funny, though. For years (I guess about 5-6 years) I used nvidia's proprietary driver. I was plagued with crashes and lockups that were clearly video-related. I had three different video cards and two different machines, so it likely wasn't the hardware. (And I did very little to no 3D; most of my problems came from running an XRender-based compositing manager.) My average uptime was under a week; sometimes the box would hard-lock, other times I could still ssh in, but the video was wedged and I couldn't get X running again without a reboot. I regularly updated the driver when new releases came out, hoping the next version would fix things, and participated in nvidia's support forum and gave as much information as I could find. End result: disappointed customer.
A couple years ago I got a ppc laptop, and of course nvidia doesn't support Linux/ppc. So I've been using the rather-experimental reverse-engineered nouveau driver. It works ridiculously well. After some initial testing and troubleshooting (in which I helped developers by testing patches on my hardware), it's been rock-solid for over a year now. Sadly, it's missing 3D support, but I can live without that.
I'm going to be buying a new laptop this summer, and it will probably end up being x86 with nvidia graphics. I'll likely run nouveau on it, despite proprietary support from nvidia. I just don't trust them to keep my system stable.
I'll certainly acknowledge that they've done some revolutionary things with their driver. But if they can't get the basics right, it's pretty useless to me. At least with an open source driver, it's *possible* that I or someone else could figure out what's wrong and fix it. And if all their "revolutionary" improvements only work with their proprietary driver and their hardware, it's pretty useless for the community at large.
Much more usable than the XRender-based compositing offered as an alternative to XComposite in KDE4.
The two are not mutually exclusive. XComposite is the extension that makes composited window rendering possible at all. (All it does is allow a compositing manager to redirect rendering offscreen.) XRender is one possibility for the compositing manager to render the desktop using hardware acceleration. OpenGL is another. I'm not sure how KDE4 does it. Either way, they're gonna be using XComposite in some capacity.
I have a PowerBook (w/matte screen) at home, and a MacBook with glossy screen (it's about 2 years old) at work. If I use the MacBook for a while, and then immediately switch to the PowerBook, the PB seems very dim and "dull" to me.
But I haven't had the glare problems with my MacBook that many people have. I'm also not a professional photographer or graphics artist, so I don't care all that much about pedantic color accuracy.
No, I think he's just advocating a 2-stage cutoff. On one particular date, cease all "normal" broadcasting on the analog stations, and instead put up a static image (on the analog stations) giving information on what people need to do to get to their normal programming on DTV. Leave that going for, say, 30 days, and then shut down the analog stations entirely. Congress could certainly draft and pass through legislation to that effect. Instead we're just getting a 4-month delay that really won't do much. At the end of the 4 months, there will be close to the same number of clueless people complaining that their TV doesn't work.
They can't afford a $40 Dish TR40/DTVpal, or a $50 Zenith converter box??? C'mon. All they have to do is skip their daily candybar snack and they'll have the extra money for the box.
So what? How does that make his argument any less valid. In his (and many other people's) lifetime, no, there hasn't been a US President greeted with so much good will. To top that off, it's a landmark event for the US. This may be old hat to you, but that doesn't mean it's not a big deal to others.
So MS engineers worked overtime to make an opensource implementation of their product work on a an OS that competes with Windows. Which is what I said.
... which wasn't the parent's point. The fact that Linux or MacOS competes with Windows isn't relevant. Or maybe it is, but some people at MS decided that the benefit (to MS) of supporting Silverlight on other platforms as a viable alternative to Flash outweighed the possible downside of supporting an alternative OS in general.
Don't think that the guys over at MS did this out of the goodness of their hearts. They did this because there's a business case for it.
Personally I don't care if they did it early, late, or not at all. It's done, and they felt that doing so was a good move *for MS*. Personally I think it's also good for the community, too, but that's certainly debatable.
More or less, yes, but licensing terms can still be whatever the author wants. It's harder to enforce proprietary licensing terms when you have to give the source away (obfuscated or otherwise) for the program to run, but it's still doable.
(I won't even mention Objective C, which is an abomination unto Nuggan)
I love Objective C. I hate C++. ObjC is what C++ should have been: a thin object-oriented layer on top of C that adds dynamic runtime type-checking. The fact that method calls are simply messages passed to objects is brilliant. Now, ObjC's syntax can leave much to be desired, but the technical details of the language are great, IMO.
You do realise that YouTube now has high-def video support, right? Approx 2Mbps or so (I believe; rough estimate), and it looks great. Clearly you can get good results using Flash. While Flash isn't open either, it's at least a bit more accessible than Silverlight.
For that matter, why not just provide a 2-4Mbps video stream over http?
I think this is really just about managing expectations. If your company has an official 9/80 policy, then *you* have to stick to it as well. That means not checking work email on your day off, and if your boss calls, you don't answer it. Or if you do, you tell him you're not at home, and it's not feasible for you to leave what you're doing. If your boss still somehow manages to get you to come in on your day off, then you ask him -- up front -- what you're getting in return.
If you let your boss walk all over your schedule, he's just going to assume you don't mind and keep doing it.
If I had this arrangement and my boss pulled this, I'd start looking for a new job, while cutting back my hours in general so losing the day off doesn't give the company more of my time than I'm supposed to be giving.
But anyway, I question how this works if you're salaried. At my company we're just expected to get our work done, and for many people here that means working 9- or 10-hour days as a matter of course with a normal 5-day work week. I guess in a company where you -- for example -- do a lot of government contracts this might work, since you're usually expected to account for the time that you've worked on various projects for billing purposes.
Hell, I have a phone that claims to support MMS, but any time I've tried to send an MMS message to anyone whose phone also claims to be MMS-capable, it hasn't worked. At least Apple just said "fuck it" and the iPhone doesn't support it at all.
In a 3 dimensional world, the most important measure of size is volume
No, it really isn't. My phone goes in my pocket. You may put yours in a belt-attached holster, but I don't, and I do not want to. My pockets may indeed be limited by volume, but they are also limited in each of the 3 dimensions, which must all be considered separately. Beyond that, there is also comfort. Even if an object technically fits in my pocket, it may not be comfortable to keep it there. The iPhone does not fit comfortably in my pockets, even if it may take up less space volume-wise than a phone that does.
Slashdot Mirror
The point that he demonstrated, rather well it seems, is that we in the west find the idea of us being subjected to the risk of malaria extremely offensive. On the other hand, how many of us are raising a protest about people in developing nations being subject to exactly the same disease?
I don't find being subjected to the risk of malaria "offensive." (On a side note, I find that a rather weird word to use.) I'm pleased that I'm at low risk for contracting malaria, living in the US, but I really don't give it that much thought. I'm not raising a protest about malaria risk in other countries because I simply don't care all that much. Sorry, but we all can't adopt every cause that floats our way.
I don't subscribe to the school of thought that, just because I live in the "West" and have benefits and a pretty comfortable life, I somehow "owe" people who are less fortunate. If I owe anyone, I owe my ancestors for having the foresight, means, and perseverance to emigrate from their native lands to the US. Public service and the taking up of causes is a choice, not an obligation.
If your site doesn't work with JavaScript turned off, your site is broken. Period, end of chapter.
I don't know about that. Ten years ago, when Javascript implementations were spotty, buggy, and at times incompatible, I'd probably agree. But nowadays I'd consider having a working Javascript implementation just about as important in browser selection as standards-compliant HTML and CSS support.
(On a side note, I'd also no longer consider a site that doesn't work properly without CSS to be broken. Lynx can bite me.)
Blame sloppy developers that use JavaScript for duties that they shouldn't.
Why? It's an available and useful tool. Unfortunately it's also abused for ads and popups, but that doesn't make people who use Javascript for legitimate purposes "sloppy." Welcome to modern web development.
Well, it kinda depends. Aside from things resulting from this switchover mess, is there any law that says a particular station *must* broadcast? I mean, if (for example) NBC just suddenly decided, "hey, we don't feel like broadcasting at all in Chicago," then... well, shouldn't they be allowed to stop? It's their money powering the transmitters, getting advertising to pay for content, etc.
... at *any* time they want?
So, by extension, what's wrong with them saying "hey, we don't feel like broadcasting in analog anymore"
Well the Supreme contract of the land, the U.S. Constitution, states the people should receive payment for their books, patents, or other useful arts. i.e. Microsoft is wrong to steal another's man patented ideas.
No it doesn't. What it does do is give the 'owner' the sole right to control of copy. If payment was required by constitution, the GPL would not work.
Actually, it doesn't even do that. It allows Congress to enact laws to grant temporary monopolies over ideas. If Congress chose not to do so, or chose to repeal all copyright/patent/trademark/trade secret/etc. laws tomorrow, that would be fine, too. Maybe I'm just being pedantic, but I think it's an important distinction.
No, it's not. With a small-volume product (under 3k units per quarter), we ship a CD (with printed label) in a paper and plastic envelope jacket. This costs us around $1.50 per unit. If we were to substitute the envelope for a jewel case, I could see this price increasing to maybe $2.50 total. For this type of product, you add on between 10% and 15% (depending on your purchaser's negotiating ability) for the manufacturer's "overhead" (shipping, handling, returned/damaged goods, etc.). And this is for a part of a product produced in *tiny* volumes compared to your average top-40s CD.
Face it, the actual cost to produce music CDs is pretty marginal these days. Most of the retail price of a CD is certainly not in manufacturing or shipping costs.
But nVidia does not release the source code for Windows, either.
Yeah, and I don't use nvidia's closed-source driver on Windows, either.
When I used nvidia's proprietary driver with a composited desktop, the machine would mysteriously lock up at least once a week. Strangely, the experimental nouveau driver has no such problems. (Sadly, it lacks features like nobody's business, but I value stability over 3D support.)
Oh look, I refuted your anecdote with more anecdotal evidence! Go me!
Preface: my experience is a little out of date.
It's funny, though. For years (I guess about 5-6 years) I used nvidia's proprietary driver. I was plagued with crashes and lockups that were clearly video-related. I had three different video cards and two different machines, so it likely wasn't the hardware. (And I did very little to no 3D; most of my problems came from running an XRender-based compositing manager.) My average uptime was under a week; sometimes the box would hard-lock, other times I could still ssh in, but the video was wedged and I couldn't get X running again without a reboot. I regularly updated the driver when new releases came out, hoping the next version would fix things, and participated in nvidia's support forum and gave as much information as I could find. End result: disappointed customer.
A couple years ago I got a ppc laptop, and of course nvidia doesn't support Linux/ppc. So I've been using the rather-experimental reverse-engineered nouveau driver. It works ridiculously well. After some initial testing and troubleshooting (in which I helped developers by testing patches on my hardware), it's been rock-solid for over a year now. Sadly, it's missing 3D support, but I can live without that.
I'm going to be buying a new laptop this summer, and it will probably end up being x86 with nvidia graphics. I'll likely run nouveau on it, despite proprietary support from nvidia. I just don't trust them to keep my system stable.
I'll certainly acknowledge that they've done some revolutionary things with their driver. But if they can't get the basics right, it's pretty useless to me. At least with an open source driver, it's *possible* that I or someone else could figure out what's wrong and fix it. And if all their "revolutionary" improvements only work with their proprietary driver and their hardware, it's pretty useless for the community at large.
Much more usable than the XRender-based compositing offered as an alternative to XComposite in KDE4.
The two are not mutually exclusive. XComposite is the extension that makes composited window rendering possible at all. (All it does is allow a compositing manager to redirect rendering offscreen.) XRender is one possibility for the compositing manager to render the desktop using hardware acceleration. OpenGL is another. I'm not sure how KDE4 does it. Either way, they're gonna be using XComposite in some capacity.
That's awful arrogant to say everyone has pirated something.
Yeah, that's probably true. But presenting your story as if you represent the majority (or even a significant minority) of people is naive at best.
I have a PowerBook (w/matte screen) at home, and a MacBook with glossy screen (it's about 2 years old) at work. If I use the MacBook for a while, and then immediately switch to the PowerBook, the PB seems very dim and "dull" to me.
But I haven't had the glare problems with my MacBook that many people have. I'm also not a professional photographer or graphics artist, so I don't care all that much about pedantic color accuracy.
No, I think he's just advocating a 2-stage cutoff. On one particular date, cease all "normal" broadcasting on the analog stations, and instead put up a static image (on the analog stations) giving information on what people need to do to get to their normal programming on DTV. Leave that going for, say, 30 days, and then shut down the analog stations entirely. Congress could certainly draft and pass through legislation to that effect. Instead we're just getting a 4-month delay that really won't do much. At the end of the 4 months, there will be close to the same number of clueless people complaining that their TV doesn't work.
They can't afford a $40 Dish TR40/DTVpal, or a $50 Zenith converter box??? C'mon. All they have to do is skip their daily candybar snack and they'll have the extra money for the box.
Wow, can you really be that ignorant?
$200 is overpriced for a smartphone? Really?
You're just being very young.
So what? How does that make his argument any less valid. In his (and many other people's) lifetime, no, there hasn't been a US President greeted with so much good will. To top that off, it's a landmark event for the US. This may be old hat to you, but that doesn't mean it's not a big deal to others.
So MS engineers worked overtime to make an opensource implementation of their product work on a an OS that competes with Windows. Which is what I said.
... which wasn't the parent's point. The fact that Linux or MacOS competes with Windows isn't relevant. Or maybe it is, but some people at MS decided that the benefit (to MS) of supporting Silverlight on other platforms as a viable alternative to Flash outweighed the possible downside of supporting an alternative OS in general.
Don't think that the guys over at MS did this out of the goodness of their hearts. They did this because there's a business case for it.
Personally I don't care if they did it early, late, or not at all. It's done, and they felt that doing so was a good move *for MS*. Personally I think it's also good for the community, too, but that's certainly debatable.
More or less, yes, but licensing terms can still be whatever the author wants. It's harder to enforce proprietary licensing terms when you have to give the source away (obfuscated or otherwise) for the program to run, but it's still doable.
(I won't even mention Objective C, which is an abomination unto Nuggan)
I love Objective C. I hate C++. ObjC is what C++ should have been: a thin object-oriented layer on top of C that adds dynamic runtime type-checking. The fact that method calls are simply messages passed to objects is brilliant. Now, ObjC's syntax can leave much to be desired, but the technical details of the language are great, IMO.
You do realise that YouTube now has high-def video support, right? Approx 2Mbps or so (I believe; rough estimate), and it looks great. Clearly you can get good results using Flash. While Flash isn't open either, it's at least a bit more accessible than Silverlight.
For that matter, why not just provide a 2-4Mbps video stream over http?
I'd be impressed that the XP system was able to squeeze 14Mbps out of a 10Mbps ethernet port.
I think this is really just about managing expectations. If your company has an official 9/80 policy, then *you* have to stick to it as well. That means not checking work email on your day off, and if your boss calls, you don't answer it. Or if you do, you tell him you're not at home, and it's not feasible for you to leave what you're doing. If your boss still somehow manages to get you to come in on your day off, then you ask him -- up front -- what you're getting in return.
If you let your boss walk all over your schedule, he's just going to assume you don't mind and keep doing it.
If I had this arrangement and my boss pulled this, I'd start looking for a new job, while cutting back my hours in general so losing the day off doesn't give the company more of my time than I'm supposed to be giving.
But anyway, I question how this works if you're salaried. At my company we're just expected to get our work done, and for many people here that means working 9- or 10-hour days as a matter of course with a normal 5-day work week. I guess in a company where you -- for example -- do a lot of government contracts this might work, since you're usually expected to account for the time that you've worked on various projects for billing purposes.
Hell, I have a phone that claims to support MMS, but any time I've tried to send an MMS message to anyone whose phone also claims to be MMS-capable, it hasn't worked. At least Apple just said "fuck it" and the iPhone doesn't support it at all.
In a 3 dimensional world, the most important measure of size is volume
No, it really isn't. My phone goes in my pocket. You may put yours in a belt-attached holster, but I don't, and I do not want to. My pockets may indeed be limited by volume, but they are also limited in each of the 3 dimensions, which must all be considered separately. Beyond that, there is also comfort. Even if an object technically fits in my pocket, it may not be comfortable to keep it there. The iPhone does not fit comfortably in my pockets, even if it may take up less space volume-wise than a phone that does.
You do realise the 8GB iPhone costs $200 now, which is comparable to or cheaper than the price of many other smartphones?