Actually, no. There is probably something you could do that would net you more. I.e., there is a better use for your time.
Not paying overtime doesn't cost you time, but saves you money. There is no more efficient way to spend your time, even if there are things that will net you more money.
Yes, you are right. I am not sure it is permanent vs. temporary conditions so much, but, in this case, the right verb to use would definitely by "estar".
Some people will stop at nothing to avoid running free (beer, freedom, or both) software. And if they discover it anywhere on their networks, they will attempt to have it removed.
``With an event of that scale, you're bound to have something crash eventually.''
Really? I realize that, as complexity increases, the chances of something going wrong go up. On the other hand, I don't think this is actually a very complex system. If it worked during the tests, why didn't it work during the ceremony? If they didn't have it working in the tests, why did they have it in the ceremony?
``The goal is to make the systems function, not crash.''
That depends. I am happy when my testers make the software I have written crash. That means they've found a major bug that I can fix before the customer gets bitten by it.
``I just hope I'm not driving down the street one day and see a "lost connection to server" message flashing on a stoplight.''
I think I saw pretty much that the other day. I was approaching a traffic light, and it suddenly went from red to blinking yellow. Blinking yellow is normally seen only at night, when they turn off the traffic lights, because the flow is better without regulation. This was in the afternoon, though.
Even still, this is an interesting situation. Assuming that virtually all BSODs and spontaneous resets on Windows are caused by faulty hardware drivers, apparently, these drivers, produced by professionals, even those certified by Microsoft, even those _shipped_ by Microsoft, seem to cause crashes a whole lot more often than those produced by a horde of hobbyists on the open-source side of the OS world.
``The developer community is generally furious, with many game developers intending to jump ship to DX10. Is this the end of cross-platform 3d on the cutting edge?''
Not as far as I am concerned. What it means to me is that we need to go looking for, creating, and rallying behind alternatives. DirectX can't be it, as it would tie us to the whims of a single vendor. OpenGL once was king, but I can't help but think it's failing. Everything I have seen starting with 2.0 has been disappointing. Besides, although I haven't really dug deeply into it, it seems to me that OpenGL's model isn't particularly good for efficient implementation in either hardware or software.
So, to kick it off, here is my wishlist:
- Standardization of a programming interface at the hardware level. How is it that there are hundreds of video card models that all provide the same functionality, but require different code to use it? Let's come up with some programming interface for a set of basic functionality, at least. So that you can put in your video card and have it work.
- Decoupling of the hardware interface from the software API. We don't have to require developers to bend over backwards to fit their program in the way the hardware works. We can have any number of different software APIs we want, and have developers pick the one that suits their program best. Eventually, this will, of course, have to be communicated to the hardware in a way the hardware understands. But exactly how the translation happens and how much of it happens in dedicated (as opposed to general-purpose) hardware need not be standardized.
Eventually, I could see a number of high-level software APIs being standardized, with hardware supporting subsets of those, in addition to the standardized base interface that all hardware supports. So you would get, for example, a low-end card supporting only the standard base hardware interface, with translation of high-level constructs from the software APIs happening in software, and a high-end card accelerating much of this translation by doing it in hardware.
It is the police's job to break and enter, under certain circumstances. In those cases, they are allowed (or indeed required) to. In other circumstances, they are not allowed to.
It is not the USAF's job to circumvent DRM on software they want to use.
I think one important aspect is motivation. And this is wider than just open source software. I think everybody would like their software to have better usability. But, in the end, your resources are limited. So you are going to do the things you are most motivated to do. Improving software usability apparently simply doesn't rank that high.
On the other hand, I have to agree with other posters that usability depends on your users (give me programmable interfaces over GUIs any day, but I know others have the opposite preference) and that a lot of open source software actually does very well as far as usability is concerned.
Or rather, assume innocence until you can be sure they are guilty, but err on the side of caution.
You don't want to jump to the conclusion that someone or some corporation is evil and start hating them and setting bad blood when all that happened was just an honest mistake. You gain little by pissing people off. If it really was a mistake, they might actually be willing to fix it. If you start a hate campaign against you, they might decide that if you want to hate them, they can as well give up trying to help you.
On the other hand, as long as they haven't actually shown it was a mistake, and fixed it, you don't want to do any business with them. Not because they are evil, but because their product has known issues. Until the issues are acknowledged and fixed, that's a reason to take your business elsewhere. Especially if there seems to be no intention of acknowledging and fixing the issues. Regardless of whether a company is evil or simply incompetent, a broken system is a broken system.
``Any affected customers want to tell us if they think they can have their entire library transfered over?''
Have it transfered over? No. Rather, they'll have to download every single song all over again, manually, if they want to rebuild their collection. And that is only even possible if (1) the library the coupons give access to has all those songs and (2) the coupons are enough to pay for all that.
Alternatively, of course, they could pay out of their own pocket to download the songs from a different service. Or download them for free from various services. Or hope that someone will release some software that allows them to play the songs they already downloaded and paid for.
I don't know if this is the case for you, but I find most people who find LaTeX hard are using it wrongly. Specifically, they are trying to precisely control the formatting, placement, etc. etc. of everything in their document. This is, pretty much, how you use today's WYSIWYG word processors. It's very cumbersome and arcane to do the same in LaTeX, and the results don't usually look very good in either case.
The right way to use LaTeX is to basically enter the semantic structure of your document, let LaTeX do all the typesetting, and then tweak it a bit as necessary. Realizing this was the point where I stopped fighting with LaTeX and started letting it work for me. I've been getting compliments on how beautiful my documents are. There's a lot of typesetting knowledge encoded in LaTeX, and, really, it probably does a better job than most of us can hope to do. One particular example I like to share is that, when I took my thesis to the printer, he remarked how glad he was that, finally, someone had thought about making the margins large enough that the text would be readable once printed and bound. I hadn't. But LaTeX had.
Incidentally, the above is also why I don't see a lot of value in WYSIWYG editors for LaTeX. On the one hand, being able to see what your final document will look like while you are creating it is good. On the other hand, it makes it very easy to fall into the trap of spending all of your time correcting this or that perceived layout error, instead of getting your actualy work done while letting LaTeX do the typesetting. I am not even sure WYSIWYG can be made to work right; a lot of algorithms in LaTeX are simply slow, and changing even one letter can cause your text to jump around, which is very annoying while editing.
Then, of course, there is the matter of commands. I recognize that having to type in commands is a significant hurdle for many people. Being a programmer and having a lot of experience with HTML, this isn't the case for me - I am used to using commands. As a programmer, I actually see LaTeX as having an advantage here: by defining new commands, you can automate repeating tasks and increase the maintainability of your code...err...document. I don't actually do this a lot, but it's very nice to have that ability for when it's useful.
All in all, I won't deny that LaTeX is hard. I know it is. On the other hand, I am not actually sure it is harder than Microsoft Word, which, in my experience, is its main competitor. Although Word is probably easier to get started with, learning the basic LaTeX necessary for creating a simple document is really not that much work, and the documents you produce will look a lot better than what Word produces. When you get to more complex documents, I find Word has a tendency to screw up - it will crash and/or eat parts of the formatting or content of your document. Granted, that's bugginess, not something inherent in WYSIWYG word processing, but it still ends up causing you a lot of frustration and losing you a lot of time. I've never seen LaTeX do this, and, even if it did, you would still have the source code of your document - at the very least, all your content is still there.
So, there you have it. My opinion, my experience, with input from quite a few others - LaTeX users, non-LaTeX users, and "I tried LaTeX but couldn't figure it out" users. In the end, my conclusion is that LaTeX is far from perfect, but it's still the best.
Call me a bigot, but I am only really interested in open source search engines these days. Google pretty much has the proprietary search engine market covered, as far as I'm concerned. It's fast, has the results I want on the first page almost always, and it doesn't cost me anything to use it.
``The initial test involved VOIP! (You can see the truck used for testing the internet at the Computer History Museum. http://www.computerhistory.org/events/ index.php?id=1191351626)''
But...but...I thought the Internet was _not_ a truck???
Let's just forget about Al Gore. He may have some good points. He may have some made some bogus claims. But what really matters is the facts. Let's look at the facts and judge technologies on their own merits, not based on what Al Gore has said about them and what we think of him.
File this under having done the world a service by publishing their findings.
Now we know that at least some Foxconn motherboards do not work with Linux, and Foxconn is not interested in doing anything about that. That's useful information.
From other posts, I gather that the motherboard actually has a table specifically targeted at Linux, which supplies broken settings. So it's more than Foxconn simply not supporting Linux; they've actually gone and broken things.
Finally, it seems there is already a workaround available. I guess Linux is willing to support Foxconn, even if Foxconn doesn't want it to. And, really, this is a case of "yay, open source!"
First of all, security and spam are not the same. If one security threat makes it through to you, your security has been compromised. If one spam message makes it through to you, it's a little annoying, but no disaster. If, on the other hand, your "spam filtering" causes a legitimate message not to reach you, this is much worse. For spam, you err on the safe side by letting the message through. In security, you err on the safe side by blocking it.
Secondly, while mjr's 6 "dumb ideas" aren't going to give you perfect security, it's not obvious how you _would_ get that, nor that you should not implement any of those ideas. For example: enumerating badness is certainly not going to allow you to recognize and stop all badness. However, it isn't clear how you _would_ do that. How do you determine if something should or shouldn't be allowed to enter your system? Perhaps having a list of things you _don't_ want on your system could be helpful.
Enumerating badness certainly seems to work pretty well for email. With software, you can (really!) get away with making a list of what _is_ allowed on your system, and refuse everything else. With email, you actually _want_ messages you have never seen before from people you have never seen before, about things you have never talked about before. At least, most people do. On the other hand, spammers will often send lots of somehow similar messages. My spam filter, which I train based on lists of good and bad messages, correctly recognizes all good messages and something like 99% (it varies a bit) of bad messages. It doesn't keep the spam out, but it reduces it by a factor 100, without losing me any good messages. Is this a Dumb Idea?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, no. There is probably something you could do that would net you more. I.e., there is a better use for your time.
Not paying overtime doesn't cost you time, but saves you money. There is no more efficient way to spend your time, even if there are things that will net you more money.
Yes, you are right. I am not sure it is permanent vs. temporary conditions so much, but, in this case, the right verb to use would definitely by "estar".
Some people will stop at nothing to avoid running free (beer, freedom, or both) software. And if they discover it anywhere on their networks, they will attempt to have it removed.
I wish I were kidding.
``"Yo soy emberassado" does not mean "I am embarrassed" and using Windows software does not mean you are a professional organization...''
You are right. But I wonder what you think "Yo soy emberassado" means.
If you had said "soy embarazada" that would have meant "I am pregnant". But "emberassado" is not so clear... ;-)
``With an event of that scale, you're bound to have something crash eventually.''
Really? I realize that, as complexity increases, the chances of something going wrong go up. On the other hand, I don't think this is actually a very complex system. If it worked during the tests, why didn't it work during the ceremony? If they didn't have it working in the tests, why did they have it in the ceremony?
``The goal is to make the systems function, not crash.''
That depends. I am happy when my testers make the software I have written crash. That means they've found a major bug that I can fix before the customer gets bitten by it.
``I just hope I'm not driving down the street one day and see a "lost connection to server" message flashing on a stoplight.''
I think I saw pretty much that the other day. I was approaching a traffic light, and it suddenly went from red to blinking yellow. Blinking yellow is normally seen only at night, when they turn off the traffic lights, because the flow is better without regulation. This was in the afternoon, though.
Even still, this is an interesting situation. Assuming that virtually all BSODs and spontaneous resets on Windows are caused by faulty hardware drivers, apparently, these drivers, produced by professionals, even those certified by Microsoft, even those _shipped_ by Microsoft, seem to cause crashes a whole lot more often than those produced by a horde of hobbyists on the open-source side of the OS world.
``The developer community is generally furious, with many game developers intending to jump ship to DX10. Is this the end of cross-platform 3d on the cutting edge?''
Not as far as I am concerned. What it means to me is that we need to go looking for, creating, and rallying behind alternatives. DirectX can't be it, as it would tie us to the whims of a single vendor. OpenGL once was king, but I can't help but think it's failing. Everything I have seen starting with 2.0 has been disappointing. Besides, although I haven't really dug deeply into it, it seems to me that OpenGL's model isn't particularly good for efficient implementation in either hardware or software.
So, to kick it off, here is my wishlist:
- Standardization of a programming interface at the hardware level. How is it that there are hundreds of video card models that all provide the same functionality, but require different code to use it? Let's come up with some programming interface for a set of basic functionality, at least. So that you can put in your video card and have it work.
- Decoupling of the hardware interface from the software API. We don't have to require developers to bend over backwards to fit their program in the way the hardware works. We can have any number of different software APIs we want, and have developers pick the one that suits their program best. Eventually, this will, of course, have to be communicated to the hardware in a way the hardware understands. But exactly how the translation happens and how much of it happens in dedicated (as opposed to general-purpose) hardware need not be standardized.
Eventually, I could see a number of high-level software APIs being standardized, with hardware supporting subsets of those, in addition to the standardized base interface that all hardware supports. So you would get, for example, a low-end card supporting only the standard base hardware interface, with translation of high-level constructs from the software APIs happening in software, and a high-end card accelerating much of this translation by doing it in hardware.
It is the police's job to break and enter, under certain circumstances. In those cases, they are allowed (or indeed required) to. In other circumstances, they are not allowed to.
It is not the USAF's job to circumvent DRM on software they want to use.
I think one important aspect is motivation. And this is wider than just open source software. I think everybody would like their software to have better usability. But, in the end, your resources are limited. So you are going to do the things you are most motivated to do. Improving software usability apparently simply doesn't rank that high.
On the other hand, I have to agree with other posters that usability depends on your users (give me programmable interfaces over GUIs any day, but I know others have the opposite preference) and that a lot of open source software actually does very well as far as usability is concerned.
Or rather, assume innocence until you can be sure they are guilty, but err on the side of caution.
You don't want to jump to the conclusion that someone or some corporation is evil and start hating them and setting bad blood when all that happened was just an honest mistake. You gain little by pissing people off. If it really was a mistake, they might actually be willing to fix it. If you start a hate campaign against you, they might decide that if you want to hate them, they can as well give up trying to help you.
On the other hand, as long as they haven't actually shown it was a mistake, and fixed it, you don't want to do any business with them. Not because they are evil, but because their product has known issues. Until the issues are acknowledged and fixed, that's a reason to take your business elsewhere. Especially if there seems to be no intention of acknowledging and fixing the issues. Regardless of whether a company is evil or simply incompetent, a broken system is a broken system.
As far as I am concerned, all of HTML5 is like that.
How non-free is H.264, actually?
``Any affected customers want to tell us if they think they can have their entire library transfered over?''
Have it transfered over? No. Rather, they'll have to download every single song all over again, manually, if they want to rebuild their collection. And that is only even possible if (1) the library the coupons give access to has all those songs and (2) the coupons are enough to pay for all that.
Alternatively, of course, they could pay out of their own pocket to download the songs from a different service. Or download them for free from various services. Or hope that someone will release some software that allows them to play the songs they already downloaded and paid for.
I don't know if this is the case for you, but I find most people who find LaTeX hard are using it wrongly. Specifically, they are trying to precisely control the formatting, placement, etc. etc. of everything in their document. This is, pretty much, how you use today's WYSIWYG word processors. It's very cumbersome and arcane to do the same in LaTeX, and the results don't usually look very good in either case.
The right way to use LaTeX is to basically enter the semantic structure of your document, let LaTeX do all the typesetting, and then tweak it a bit as necessary. Realizing this was the point where I stopped fighting with LaTeX and started letting it work for me. I've been getting compliments on how beautiful my documents are. There's a lot of typesetting knowledge encoded in LaTeX, and, really, it probably does a better job than most of us can hope to do. One particular example I like to share is that, when I took my thesis to the printer, he remarked how glad he was that, finally, someone had thought about making the margins large enough that the text would be readable once printed and bound. I hadn't. But LaTeX had.
Incidentally, the above is also why I don't see a lot of value in WYSIWYG editors for LaTeX. On the one hand, being able to see what your final document will look like while you are creating it is good. On the other hand, it makes it very easy to fall into the trap of spending all of your time correcting this or that perceived layout error, instead of getting your actualy work done while letting LaTeX do the typesetting. I am not even sure WYSIWYG can be made to work right; a lot of algorithms in LaTeX are simply slow, and changing even one letter can cause your text to jump around, which is very annoying while editing.
Then, of course, there is the matter of commands. I recognize that having to type in commands is a significant hurdle for many people. Being a programmer and having a lot of experience with HTML, this isn't the case for me - I am used to using commands. As a programmer, I actually see LaTeX as having an advantage here: by defining new commands, you can automate repeating tasks and increase the maintainability of your code...err...document. I don't actually do this a lot, but it's very nice to have that ability for when it's useful.
All in all, I won't deny that LaTeX is hard. I know it is. On the other hand, I am not actually sure it is harder than Microsoft Word, which, in my experience, is its main competitor. Although Word is probably easier to get started with, learning the basic LaTeX necessary for creating a simple document is really not that much work, and the documents you produce will look a lot better than what Word produces. When you get to more complex documents, I find Word has a tendency to screw up - it will crash and/or eat parts of the formatting or content of your document. Granted, that's bugginess, not something inherent in WYSIWYG word processing, but it still ends up causing you a lot of frustration and losing you a lot of time. I've never seen LaTeX do this, and, even if it did, you would still have the source code of your document - at the very least, all your content is still there.
So, there you have it. My opinion, my experience, with input from quite a few others - LaTeX users, non-LaTeX users, and "I tried LaTeX but couldn't figure it out" users. In the end, my conclusion is that LaTeX is far from perfect, but it's still the best.
Call me a bigot, but I am only really interested in open source search engines these days. Google pretty much has the proprietary search engine market covered, as far as I'm concerned. It's fast, has the results I want on the first page almost always, and it doesn't cost me anything to use it.
``You know what else helps have a big opening weekend? Making a good movie.''
And, who knows? Maybe people getting enthusiastic about it because they heard from their friends that it's a good movie helps, too.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that piracy drives sales in movies, too.
``The initial test involved VOIP! (You can see the truck used for testing the internet at the Computer History Museum. http://www.computerhistory.org/events/ index.php?id=1191351626)''
But...but...I thought the Internet was _not_ a truck???
You currently do have a choice. But the VIA RNG seems to work well.
Let's just forget about Al Gore. He may have some good points. He may have some made some bogus claims. But what really matters is the facts. Let's look at the facts and judge technologies on their own merits, not based on what Al Gore has said about them and what we think of him.
Obviously, they were counting on people not RTFA, but sharing their insights.
Perhaps it is simply a move to improve the experience of running popular open source software on Windows.
Apache is the most widely used webserver.
PHP is a widely used, if not the most widely used, language for dynamic web pages on Apache.
Traditionally, Apache and PHP have been a Linux game.
Now, Microsoft is investing in Apache, and I believe they have also made great contributions to PHP.
I think what they are trying to win here is customers for their operating system.
No, actually.
File this under having done the world a service by publishing their findings.
Now we know that at least some Foxconn motherboards do not work with Linux, and Foxconn is not interested in doing anything about that. That's useful information.
From other posts, I gather that the motherboard actually has a table specifically targeted at Linux, which supplies broken settings. So it's more than Foxconn simply not supporting Linux; they've actually gone and broken things.
Finally, it seems there is already a workaround available. I guess Linux is willing to support Foxconn, even if Foxconn doesn't want it to. And, really, this is a case of "yay, open source!"
Well, two points here.
First of all, security and spam are not the same. If one security threat makes it through to you, your security has been compromised. If one spam message makes it through to you, it's a little annoying, but no disaster. If, on the other hand, your "spam filtering" causes a legitimate message not to reach you, this is much worse. For spam, you err on the safe side by letting the message through. In security, you err on the safe side by blocking it.
Secondly, while mjr's 6 "dumb ideas" aren't going to give you perfect security, it's not obvious how you _would_ get that, nor that you should not implement any of those ideas. For example: enumerating badness is certainly not going to allow you to recognize and stop all badness. However, it isn't clear how you _would_ do that. How do you determine if something should or shouldn't be allowed to enter your system? Perhaps having a list of things you _don't_ want on your system could be helpful.
Enumerating badness certainly seems to work pretty well for email. With software, you can (really!) get away with making a list of what _is_ allowed on your system, and refuse everything else. With email, you actually _want_ messages you have never seen before from people you have never seen before, about things you have never talked about before. At least, most people do. On the other hand, spammers will often send lots of somehow similar messages. My spam filter, which I train based on lists of good and bad messages, correctly recognizes all good messages and something like 99% (it varies a bit) of bad messages. It doesn't keep the spam out, but it reduces it by a factor 100, without losing me any good messages. Is this a Dumb Idea?