I like Qt, but I'll agree it's pricey, and that's a per-seat cost. I'm currently researching options for a commercial product that will need to run on either a Linux or BSD platform, and TrollTech's pricing precludes them from even being considered. Unless you absolutely *have* to have cross-platform source, it's hard to justify that kind of money.
I feel kind of bad - as soon as I saw what the game consisted of, I knew what to do before even making a single roll and thought "this can't be a real puzzle". Doesn't reflect well on my intelligence, assuming it's true that it takes the smarter people longer to figure it out.:-)
I agree that it's harmful to go overboard on the cleaning thing for those reasons, however, I also know some people that have gone too far the other way - i.e., not washing hands after using the rest room, claiming the same reasons. Ewww.
You're trying to imply that without IP law these things would never be brought into existance. That is patently false.
No, I'm saying that your original assertion that the Diesel engine "rotted on the shelf" and saw no development until the expiration of the applicable patents is factually incorrect, and those factually incorrect statements should be borne in mind when considering the veracity of the rest of your somewhat hysterical rant.
I'm sure he did, but further developement really took off when the patents expired, and other people could make their own versions.
Other people could and did make their own versions, and there was plenty of development that occurred during the life of the patent - the licensing fees paid by those making his engines is what made Diesel an incredibly rich man, for crying out loud. Your attempted argument that IP issues stalled the development of Diesel engines just doesn't jive with the facts, nor does your argument that all companies should live in Bob Ross's "Land of Happy Trees" and selflessly throw millions of dollars at testing and certification requirements with an almost certain knowledge that they'll be at a competitive disadvantage for doing so.
Doctors prescribe antibiotics as a cure-all to get whining patients out of the office, and if they do try to suggest real cures that are less appealing to their patients they can kiss their revenue stream goodbye.
Not mine - he really doesn't have a sense of humor at all about stuff like that, and refuses to prescribe antibiotics until he's seen a positive culture or otherwise is *sure* the problem is bacterial in nature. He's also in great shape - it always bugs me whenever I see a doctor that smokes, is grossly overweight, or otherwise isn't taking care of himself. "Practice what you preach", and all that.
Yeah, just like the diesel engine...oh wait...that one rotted on the shelf until the patent expired. Fancy that. Did Mr. Armstrong(FM radio) a lot of good also.
You totally missed the point. Diesel engines and FM radios don't require millions and millions of dollars in government-required testing and fees before they're allowed to be sold. Without some kind of assurance that they can make their money back, no one in their right mind will foot those kinds of certification costs. Not having IP protection in this situation pretty much guarantees the device would never get manufactured by *anyone*.
Incidentally, Rudolf Diesel had become a millionaire from his invention (from patent licensing fees) less than 5 years after his first engine ran on its own power, so I'm not sure where the "rotted on the shelf" comment came from.
With IRC you are in a chat channel and while you can whisper to people it's cumbersome to do so.
I usually just use DCC for private conversations, although that might not be possible for the average corporate user with strict firewalls to deal with.
Learn how to! Programming is not difficult, to say otherwise means that you have bought the lie which has made His Billness so wealthy.
I don't find programming particularly difficult, but then I've been doing it professionally for almost twenty years. Learning to code by itself isn't hard, but there's a WHOLE lot of background knowledge that you need for real-time applications, which pretty much locks a lot of people out that don't have that in-depth knowledge. Sure, you can get a guy to code, but does he understand how his code needs to interact with the device driver? Does he know what a device driver is? Does he even know what a kernel is, and what the difference between "kernel space" and "user space" are? Does he know of all the different situations where the OS could yank control of his process, possibly causing an audible glitch? There's tons and tons of info that every competent programmer knows without thinking that would take months at best to teach someone.
Coding isn't difficult if you're sticking with Windows and not writing anything particularly demanding of the hardware, but to tell someone with no experience "just do it" when they haven't the first idea how their computer really works is just asking them to heap a lot of frustration on themselves. It's rather like expecting some random guy to be able to pick up a violin and with a little bit of practice, come out sounding like Itzak Perlman. "What do you mean you can't do it? Learning violin is *easy*!" Yes, picking up the basics and getting a decent tone is pretty easy, but getting proficient at it is *hard*.
$300 million is a lot of money to anyone - even a mega-corp.
Most definitely, but they won't bat an eye at continuing conduct that draws those kinds of fines if they make $500 million for every $300 million they pay in fines.
No, a real punishment for a corporation would be dissolution, or an injunction preventing business in the U.S. for a period of time with the threat of dissolution should it be found they were conducting business in violation of the injunction. *That* would hurt them. As it is, corporations aren't held to anything approaching responsibility. They have most of the rights of people, but almost none of the responsbilities. As long as it's cheaper to break the law, they will.
Traditional news media at least attempts to make sure they got the story right. They do fact checking, carefully organize sources, etc. All that stuff you had to learn when writing research papers. I'm not talking TV news here, because we all know Fox News doesn't fact-check shit.
Perhaps the print journalists that have continued to publish sensationalist and blatantly incorrect information about Florida's recently enacted self-defense law didn't get that memo, nor did they apparently even read the law about which they continue to write about.
Saying "the traditional news media will do a better job of reporting" doesn't hold water for me in light of the stuff I read in the paper every day written by journalists who are either ignorant of the subject matter or have some kind of agenda. I don't necessarily fault them for that, and that's not to say that all professional journalists are like that, but the lofty and sacred standards by which they're taught to abide in college are at best taken to be mere guidelines in my experience.
I certainly hope that's the case - I gave my Launchcast subscription the heave-ho after getting fed up with only being able to use it at work or on only one of three machines that see regular use at home, and the one it works on is an XP/Linux dual boot box, so even there Launchcast was usually unavailable. If they supported OS X, I'd have bought two subscriptions - one for myself and one for my wife to use with her iBook. As it is, they get nothing.
OS X has been out for five years now, so I think Yahoo's had plenty of time to find someone to write an up-to-date Cocoa client for them if they were really serious about it. Writing for Cocoa is not particularly difficult once you get used to Objective-C.
My question, though, is - WHY does the US need this shit ? I mean, how much does the US really rely on its navy these days for national security.
For real national security, as opposed to projection of force, the U.S. probably relies on its navy more than any other single branch of the armed forces. It's very simple for the U.S. to park a Trident missile sub off the coast of a potential trouble spot, and rain nuclear hell down on anyone that poses a genuine threat to the country in less time than it takes for them to even become aware of what's happening. It also may become necessary to bring shipping traffic in a particular area to a screeching halt, which the U.S. Navy could do quite quickly and efficiently.
As regards the effect on ocean wildlife, I can't imagine that this new defense system could be much worse than the active sonar already in use on ships all over the world. The more powerful units cause cavitation around the sonar dome for several feet and can be picked up from a *long* distance away, so we've already been making really loud sounds in the water for many, many years already. In the event that a carrier is trying to avoid the direct loss of 5,000 lives along with the potential for indirect loss of thousands more in the battle group and elsewhere, I'm sure the prevailing thought will be that the whales will adjust.
As someone that lives in the U.S., I'd *love* it if we could get more coinage in circulation. While visiting Europe, I found the pound and euro coins to be extremely convenient. Besides, I really like the clicking sound that pound coins produce as opposed to the jingle that U.S. money makes.:-)
Firstly, there was OS/2 and Windows NT or more esoteric choices like NeXTSTEP. Not to mention that as of Windows/386 (ca. 1988) the OS was becoming "32 bit".
Given that NT wasn't introduced until almost 10 years after the Mac, and only a year before Apple went to the PPC architecture, I don't think it really can be considered here. OS/2, while a true pre-emptive multitasking system (and a damn good one IMHO), didn't come out until about the time the second-generation Macs did (1987), and didn't even have a GUI until more than a year later. It's interesting that you mention the NeXT OS, since the original NeXT machines ran just fine on 68030 CPUs and it wasn't until after the 68K-based machines were discontinued that the NeXT system was ported to the Intel architecture. Windows/386 was basically a 16-bit window/event manager bolted on top of DOS, with usage of 386-specific features limited to XMS memory support and support for multiple real-mode DOS applications, and you *still* couldn't directly allocate a chunk of memory larger than a megabyte IIRC. Support for printing for any of the systems mentioned (except for NeXT) wasn't anywhere comparable to that offered by Apple at the time.
Secondly, MacOS didn't have protected memory at all (until OS X, ca. 2000) and wasn't "32 bit" until System 7, in 1991 (and then only on "32 bit clean" Mac hardware).
"32-bit clean" referred to software, specifically an application that properly used the 68K address registers for addresses ONLY, and thus could run on a 68K-family chip with a 32-bit address bus.
But isn't the amp used with an electric guitar essentially part of the instument and fundamentally different from an amplifier used for playing back pre-recorded audio?
Most definitely, and in playback/sound reinforcement situations you want the cleanest amplification possible. Having said that, no amplifier is perfect, and tube amps tend to distort in a manner that is more pleasing to the ear, even though the actual amount of total harmonic distortion is usually higher than that offered by a transistorized amp. Intermodulation distortion numbers are thus often higher for tubes as well, but owing to the even-order harmonic distortion, the intermod artifacts are generally not as objectionable as those produced in solid-state applications. Since both amps are going to distort to some degree, I'd prefer the amp that will sound better when doing so.
For me personally, the price premium for tube amps doesn't justify the (in my opinion *only*) better sound, when perfectly acceptable quality can be obtained for a fraction of the price from a transistorized amp that has sufficient headroom for whatever it is I'm listening to. Consequently, my Kenwood 100W stereo amp isn't going to be replaced by a high-end McIntosh anytime soon.:-)
You obviously don't know what you're talking about, and any electrical engineer that has experience with both tube and transistor audio amplification applications would concur. Tubes distort more than transistors do, but the distortion produced by tubes is mostly even-order harmonics (the signal is clipped, but will have very rounded edges) and offers a pleasing sound in small amounts (the aforementioned "warmth"). Larger distortions produce a characteristic "fuzz" tone which has been the basis for the sterotypical "rock guitar" sound for around 50 years now. Overdriven transistors generally clip the signal very sharply at whatever the supply voltage is, so instead of producing a smooth, musical even-order distortion, they produce distortion that contains both even and odd-order harmonics and sounds much harsher. It is possible to produce a solid-state circuit that will somewhat simulate the characteristics of an overdriven tube, but as can be seen on any spectrum analyzer, the tone isn't the same.
If you don't believe me, grab an oscilloscope or a spectrum analyzer and compare the output of both tube and transistor circuits yourself.
Interestingly, the article also refers to the 8088 as a 16-bit processor, which is an 8-bit processor if one uses the same criteria that you'd have to in order to call a 68000 "16-bit".
68000: 32-bit registers, 24-bit address bus (linear addressing), 16-bit data bus
8088: 16-bit registers, 20-bit address bus (segmented addressing), 8-bit data bus
I frankly don't consider the 8088 and 68000 even remotely comparable - it's far easier to program for (and design hardware around, IMHO) the 68K. The only difficulties that I knew of anyone really experiencing when moving to the 68020 and other full 32-bit variants was that people had gotten into the really bad habit of using the upper 8 bits of the A registers for general storage, which would break things on a '020 horribly. Even so, it was certainly nothing like the EMS/XMS hell that PC programmers had to go through just to use memory above 1MB because of the limitations of the 8088 memory architecture.
I don't buy into the ridiculous claims some people make regarding cables, but tube (valve) amps *do* sound noticeably different from solid-state in that their distortion characteristics are different, as any electric guitar player can tell you. A tube amp usually won't have better total harmonic or intermodulation distortion numbers than a solid-state amp, but the distortion sounds better and is often perceived as "warmth".
It's been my experience that Flash under Firefox pretty much firewalls the machine regardless of clock speed. That's not a "native app" issue, that's a problem with the Flash plug-in, Firefox, or both.
/wishes the Flash problems with Firefox were fixed //wishes Firefox could do form variables properly ///uses mostly Opera now
On the other hand, he was also getting 2 weeks' vacation and sick time. Sounds more like a regular ol' employee to me, and assuming so, being offered overtime of any kind in a salaried position is rather unusual in a good way.
It bugs me that there are so many of these "contract" positions that exist solely for the purpose of allowing the employer to save money by not paying the employment taxes and such that are legally due, while not adhering to the letter of the law in allowing the "contractor" the flexibility in hours and work location that they're entitled to.
Slashdot Mirror
GTK is LGPL, so as I understand the license it should be okay to use it in both free and proprietary projects.
IANAL, this isn't legal advice, etc....
I like Qt, but I'll agree it's pricey, and that's a per-seat cost. I'm currently researching options for a commercial product that will need to run on either a Linux or BSD platform, and TrollTech's pricing precludes them from even being considered. Unless you absolutely *have* to have cross-platform source, it's hard to justify that kind of money.
It seems there are actually examiners at the USPTO that are willing to call bullshit on a bogus patent. That offers a bit of encouragement.
I feel kind of bad - as soon as I saw what the game consisted of, I knew what to do before even making a single roll and thought "this can't be a real puzzle". Doesn't reflect well on my intelligence, assuming it's true that it takes the smarter people longer to figure it out. :-)
I agree that it's harmful to go overboard on the cleaning thing for those reasons, however, I also know some people that have gone too far the other way - i.e., not washing hands after using the rest room, claiming the same reasons. Ewww.
You're trying to imply that without IP law these things would never be brought into existance. That is patently false.
No, I'm saying that your original assertion that the Diesel engine "rotted on the shelf" and saw no development until the expiration of the applicable patents is factually incorrect, and those factually incorrect statements should be borne in mind when considering the veracity of the rest of your somewhat hysterical rant.
I'm sure he did, but further developement really took off when the patents expired, and other people could make their own versions.
Other people could and did make their own versions, and there was plenty of development that occurred during the life of the patent - the licensing fees paid by those making his engines is what made Diesel an incredibly rich man, for crying out loud. Your attempted argument that IP issues stalled the development of Diesel engines just doesn't jive with the facts, nor does your argument that all companies should live in Bob Ross's "Land of Happy Trees" and selflessly throw millions of dollars at testing and certification requirements with an almost certain knowledge that they'll be at a competitive disadvantage for doing so.
Doctors prescribe antibiotics as a cure-all to get whining patients out of the office, and if they do try to suggest real cures that are less appealing to their patients they can kiss their revenue stream goodbye.
Not mine - he really doesn't have a sense of humor at all about stuff like that, and refuses to prescribe antibiotics until he's seen a positive culture or otherwise is *sure* the problem is bacterial in nature. He's also in great shape - it always bugs me whenever I see a doctor that smokes, is grossly overweight, or otherwise isn't taking care of himself. "Practice what you preach", and all that.
Yeah, just like the diesel engine...oh wait...that one rotted on the shelf until the patent expired. Fancy that. Did Mr. Armstrong(FM radio) a lot of good also.
You totally missed the point. Diesel engines and FM radios don't require millions and millions of dollars in government-required testing and fees before they're allowed to be sold. Without some kind of assurance that they can make their money back, no one in their right mind will foot those kinds of certification costs. Not having IP protection in this situation pretty much guarantees the device would never get manufactured by *anyone*.
Incidentally, Rudolf Diesel had become a millionaire from his invention (from patent licensing fees) less than 5 years after his first engine ran on its own power, so I'm not sure where the "rotted on the shelf" comment came from.
With IRC you are in a chat channel and while you can whisper to people it's cumbersome to do so.
I usually just use DCC for private conversations, although that might not be possible for the average corporate user with strict firewalls to deal with.
The best time to start a large coding project is in the middle of a recording project.
Absolutely. You get more done when you have to work under pressure.
Learn how to! Programming is not difficult, to say otherwise means that you have bought the lie which has made His Billness so wealthy.
I don't find programming particularly difficult, but then I've been doing it professionally for almost twenty years. Learning to code by itself isn't hard, but there's a WHOLE lot of background knowledge that you need for real-time applications, which pretty much locks a lot of people out that don't have that in-depth knowledge. Sure, you can get a guy to code, but does he understand how his code needs to interact with the device driver? Does he know what a device driver is? Does he even know what a kernel is, and what the difference between "kernel space" and "user space" are? Does he know of all the different situations where the OS could yank control of his process, possibly causing an audible glitch? There's tons and tons of info that every competent programmer knows without thinking that would take months at best to teach someone.
Coding isn't difficult if you're sticking with Windows and not writing anything particularly demanding of the hardware, but to tell someone with no experience "just do it" when they haven't the first idea how their computer really works is just asking them to heap a lot of frustration on themselves. It's rather like expecting some random guy to be able to pick up a violin and with a little bit of practice, come out sounding like Itzak Perlman. "What do you mean you can't do it? Learning violin is *easy*!" Yes, picking up the basics and getting a decent tone is pretty easy, but getting proficient at it is *hard*.
$300 million is a lot of money to anyone - even a mega-corp.
Most definitely, but they won't bat an eye at continuing conduct that draws those kinds of fines if they make $500 million for every $300 million they pay in fines.
No, a real punishment for a corporation would be dissolution, or an injunction preventing business in the U.S. for a period of time with the threat of dissolution should it be found they were conducting business in violation of the injunction. *That* would hurt them. As it is, corporations aren't held to anything approaching responsibility. They have most of the rights of people, but almost none of the responsbilities. As long as it's cheaper to break the law, they will.
Traditional news media at least attempts to make sure they got the story right. They do fact checking, carefully organize sources, etc. All that stuff you had to learn when writing research papers. I'm not talking TV news here, because we all know Fox News doesn't fact-check shit.
Perhaps the print journalists that have continued to publish sensationalist and blatantly incorrect information about Florida's recently enacted self-defense law didn't get that memo, nor did they apparently even read the law about which they continue to write about.
Saying "the traditional news media will do a better job of reporting" doesn't hold water for me in light of the stuff I read in the paper every day written by journalists who are either ignorant of the subject matter or have some kind of agenda. I don't necessarily fault them for that, and that's not to say that all professional journalists are like that, but the lofty and sacred standards by which they're taught to abide in college are at best taken to be mere guidelines in my experience.
I certainly hope that's the case - I gave my Launchcast subscription the heave-ho after getting fed up with only being able to use it at work or on only one of three machines that see regular use at home, and the one it works on is an XP/Linux dual boot box, so even there Launchcast was usually unavailable. If they supported OS X, I'd have bought two subscriptions - one for myself and one for my wife to use with her iBook. As it is, they get nothing.
OS X has been out for five years now, so I think Yahoo's had plenty of time to find someone to write an up-to-date Cocoa client for them if they were really serious about it. Writing for Cocoa is not particularly difficult once you get used to Objective-C.
My question, though, is - WHY does the US need this shit ? I mean, how much does the US really rely on its navy these days for national security.
For real national security, as opposed to projection of force, the U.S. probably relies on its navy more than any other single branch of the armed forces. It's very simple for the U.S. to park a Trident missile sub off the coast of a potential trouble spot, and rain nuclear hell down on anyone that poses a genuine threat to the country in less time than it takes for them to even become aware of what's happening. It also may become necessary to bring shipping traffic in a particular area to a screeching halt, which the U.S. Navy could do quite quickly and efficiently.
As regards the effect on ocean wildlife, I can't imagine that this new defense system could be much worse than the active sonar already in use on ships all over the world. The more powerful units cause cavitation around the sonar dome for several feet and can be picked up from a *long* distance away, so we've already been making really loud sounds in the water for many, many years already. In the event that a carrier is trying to avoid the direct loss of 5,000 lives along with the potential for indirect loss of thousands more in the battle group and elsewhere, I'm sure the prevailing thought will be that the whales will adjust.
As someone that lives in the U.S., I'd *love* it if we could get more coinage in circulation. While visiting Europe, I found the pound and euro coins to be extremely convenient. Besides, I really like the clicking sound that pound coins produce as opposed to the jingle that U.S. money makes. :-)
Firstly, there was OS/2 and Windows NT or more esoteric choices like NeXTSTEP. Not to mention that as of Windows/386 (ca. 1988) the OS was becoming "32 bit".
Given that NT wasn't introduced until almost 10 years after the Mac, and only a year before Apple went to the PPC architecture, I don't think it really can be considered here. OS/2, while a true pre-emptive multitasking system (and a damn good one IMHO), didn't come out until about the time the second-generation Macs did (1987), and didn't even have a GUI until more than a year later. It's interesting that you mention the NeXT OS, since the original NeXT machines ran just fine on 68030 CPUs and it wasn't until after the 68K-based machines were discontinued that the NeXT system was ported to the Intel architecture. Windows/386 was basically a 16-bit window/event manager bolted on top of DOS, with usage of 386-specific features limited to XMS memory support and support for multiple real-mode DOS applications, and you *still* couldn't directly allocate a chunk of memory larger than a megabyte IIRC. Support for printing for any of the systems mentioned (except for NeXT) wasn't anywhere comparable to that offered by Apple at the time.
Secondly, MacOS didn't have protected memory at all (until OS X, ca. 2000) and wasn't "32 bit" until System 7, in 1991 (and then only on "32 bit clean" Mac hardware).
"32-bit clean" referred to software, specifically an application that properly used the 68K address registers for addresses ONLY, and thus could run on a 68K-family chip with a 32-bit address bus.
But isn't the amp used with an electric guitar essentially part of the instument and fundamentally different from an amplifier used for playing back pre-recorded audio?
:-)
Most definitely, and in playback/sound reinforcement situations you want the cleanest amplification possible. Having said that, no amplifier is perfect, and tube amps tend to distort in a manner that is more pleasing to the ear, even though the actual amount of total harmonic distortion is usually higher than that offered by a transistorized amp. Intermodulation distortion numbers are thus often higher for tubes as well, but owing to the even-order harmonic distortion, the intermod artifacts are generally not as objectionable as those produced in solid-state applications. Since both amps are going to distort to some degree, I'd prefer the amp that will sound better when doing so.
For me personally, the price premium for tube amps doesn't justify the (in my opinion *only*) better sound, when perfectly acceptable quality can be obtained for a fraction of the price from a transistorized amp that has sufficient headroom for whatever it is I'm listening to. Consequently, my Kenwood 100W stereo amp isn't going to be replaced by a high-end McIntosh anytime soon.
You obviously don't know what you're talking about, and any electrical engineer that has experience with both tube and transistor audio amplification applications would concur. Tubes distort more than transistors do, but the distortion produced by tubes is mostly even-order harmonics (the signal is clipped, but will have very rounded edges) and offers a pleasing sound in small amounts (the aforementioned "warmth"). Larger distortions produce a characteristic "fuzz" tone which has been the basis for the sterotypical "rock guitar" sound for around 50 years now. Overdriven transistors generally clip the signal very sharply at whatever the supply voltage is, so instead of producing a smooth, musical even-order distortion, they produce distortion that contains both even and odd-order harmonics and sounds much harsher. It is possible to produce a solid-state circuit that will somewhat simulate the characteristics of an overdriven tube, but as can be seen on any spectrum analyzer, the tone isn't the same.
If you don't believe me, grab an oscilloscope or a spectrum analyzer and compare the output of both tube and transistor circuits yourself.
Interestingly, the article also refers to the 8088 as a 16-bit processor, which is an 8-bit processor if one uses the same criteria that you'd have to in order to call a 68000 "16-bit".
68000: 32-bit registers, 24-bit address bus (linear addressing), 16-bit data bus
8088: 16-bit registers, 20-bit address bus (segmented addressing), 8-bit data bus
I frankly don't consider the 8088 and 68000 even remotely comparable - it's far easier to program for (and design hardware around, IMHO) the 68K. The only difficulties that I knew of anyone really experiencing when moving to the 68020 and other full 32-bit variants was that people had gotten into the really bad habit of using the upper 8 bits of the A registers for general storage, which would break things on a '020 horribly. Even so, it was certainly nothing like the EMS/XMS hell that PC programmers had to go through just to use memory above 1MB because of the limitations of the 8088 memory architecture.
I don't buy into the ridiculous claims some people make regarding cables, but tube (valve) amps *do* sound noticeably different from solid-state in that their distortion characteristics are different, as any electric guitar player can tell you. A tube amp usually won't have better total harmonic or intermodulation distortion numbers than a solid-state amp, but the distortion sounds better and is often perceived as "warmth".
It's been my experience that Flash under Firefox pretty much firewalls the machine regardless of clock speed. That's not a "native app" issue, that's a problem with the Flash plug-in, Firefox, or both.
/wishes the Flash problems with Firefox were fixed
//wishes Firefox could do form variables properly
///uses mostly Opera now
On the other hand, he was also getting 2 weeks' vacation and sick time. Sounds more like a regular ol' employee to me, and assuming so, being offered overtime of any kind in a salaried position is rather unusual in a good way.
It bugs me that there are so many of these "contract" positions that exist solely for the purpose of allowing the employer to save money by not paying the employment taxes and such that are legally due, while not adhering to the letter of the law in allowing the "contractor" the flexibility in hours and work location that they're entitled to.