Is this even a real question or just a troll setting people up? The resaons seem numerous and obvious.
Certainly high in the list is a desire for a large base of users of the project, which tends to equate to continued use and delevopment of the OS Ssoftware. Does anyone think that Firefox and Thunderbird would continue to be developed if there were a couple of hundred users of the software?
A larger base of users also helps insure that the software is well supported. I'm sick and tired of seeing websites that only work with Microsoft products. The more users out there using an alternative product, the more likely that websites and other resources will not make themselves Microdsoft only and in fact will even test their content against other popular tools.
The less users there out there using MS IE and other highly vulnerable products, the less systems are likely to get "owned" and thus there should be relatively less spam in my inbox and attempts to break into my system (at least less than there would be in an only Microsoft world). So I want to see as many IS browsers and outlook mail readers retired as posiable. If I can help even a few of those happen, great.
And, of course, there is that deep rooted hatred of Bill Gates....
On consumer equipment I have an $80 Apex DVD player that stoped seeing DVDs or CDs in less than a year. Head still moves but it always says no DVD. I have an expensive JVC multi-CD player. It frequently skips past discs saying nothing is present, but if I keep trying it will usually eventually play them, although many times only after 4 or 5 failures.
On PC equipment, my very first CD drive (1x) started randomly not seeing CDs after a couple of years. The replacement (a 2x writer, Hi-Val, a rebagged OEN version of a Philips) also squickly started having read and write problems. Eventually it would not write and CDRs, although it would still write CDRWs. Several other readers in this time period gave me frequent random reading problems. The next writer I git was an Iomega brand (also an OEM rebranded unit). That drive never worked right from the start, there were firmware issues dealing with 700 meg CDRW media. Iomega played stupid but I found out later the problems were well known to the original maker, Iomega just couldn't be bothered with firmware upgrades. They will never sell me another product. I also have a DVD reader that is flaking out in several ways, some read problems but mostly just getting it to open it's door is a problem. The replacement for the CDRW drive was a Lite-On drive. It worked well for about a year, but recently has been producing so many bad writes that I had to stop burning with it. Still reads OK. Even had one drive that was D.O.A., but sat on the shelf too long before being installed for it to be returned.
Have tried all of the obvious repairs to all of the above, including opening them and cleaning/inspecting the lense assembly, but no luck with any.
So overall I would have to say that if any other industry produced equipment the quality of optical drives, they would go out of business quickly and there would be massive consumer lawsuits. Why this isn't the case with this calss of product I'm not sure.
...fails to trigger the open source license if a company alters the code, but does not distribute its software through a CD or floppy disk...
So what? The use of the word "fails" above sure seems to apply there is something wrong in letting a company use the software and not charge them. I certainly don't see that there is. Others may not either. How to you deal with all the software that authors wrote and gave away by GPL with the deliberate intention of letting businesses use it freely in their own internal applications? This will get harder and harder to deal with when code released under the current GPL in mixed with code under this new "someone must pay" GPL, such as in a release of a Linux distro.. And how do you even police it? Does someone expect companies to self incriminate themselves or expose confidential internal software to audit just because someone thinks that it might contain GPL software?
I don't even see the point of making such a change. If anyone needs to be contributing back to GPL authors (a premis I reject), then it should certainly be the large distributers who have built multi-millon dollar businesses on the business plan of selling what other have written and make available free (some Linux distros come to mind) and not some company who's technology guys accept some GPL code that is offered freely for an in-house project (major or minor).
I certainly wasn't arrested and thrown in jail, but I had an experience at a Bojangles fast food place recently. I had gone out and left my regular cash in a pocket of a different pair of pants. But I had some $2 bills in the car, so I took them into the joint and ordered a sandwhich. The cashier looked at it strangely, which didn't really surprise me. But she ended up with a couple other cashiers and even someone with manager written on their name tag, and they all seemed to not understand that $2 bills exist. I insisted that they do and the money was real and another customer next to me laughed at them and backed me up. At that point the manager started started holding the bill up to the light. I asked what they were looking for and they said "the thread stripe in the bill. This one doesn't have one." I explained that $2 bills don't (neither do 1's), and that the date on the bill clearly shows that the bill was issued before the threads were ever used in any US money. They ended up taking the money but I think it was mostly because they knew I was't going to yield and the line was growing.
Next time I go back there I plan to have more $2 bills with me.
From The FA: "The air is compressed using a small motor, powered by a 48-volt battery, which powers both the air compressor and the electric motor." and "The system eliminates the need for fuel,..."
Oh yea, this makes sense, because we all know you get more energy by first compressing air with a battery and then using it to power a motor than you would by powering the motor with the batter directly. Right. And it's not dangerous at all haveing a high pressure air tank sitting in a hot car that sits in the sun, all scuba divers know that. And the inches of travel that you'll manage to get out of any such system if the tank actually fits in a car makes this so worth while.
The air in the city is BAD. taking the pollution
an putting it where there are less people
would benefit a LOT OF PEOPLE.
Actually, maybe exporting the polution to other people is a bad thing. Maybe in it's own little way the polution is helping keep LA from being even more over crowded. Maybe it's keeping even more ten million dollar houses from being built on known mudslide locations and then national taxpayers living in $50,000 homes being hit with more taxes to pay for them the next time a "natural disaster" hits the area and a "disaster area" is declaired. Perhaps the nation at large doesn't need even more people packing into the LA area and exporting their polution somewhere else, and it could be better served if the polution stayed there and some of the people and jobs moved somewhere else.
It is a lot easier to deal with one or very few sources.
You just have to look at what the Bush administration and the EPA did to Mercury Emmision Regulations last month to see see that they are not dealing with it, or that their way of dealing with it is to say go ahead and polute the air. And the source of most of that mercury polution into the atmosphere is coal fired power plants.
I've RTFA, but what is missing is the real cost per mile of getting that 180 mpg, when the cost of the electricity is factored in. Electricity isn't free, and the efficency of the batteries to store it isn't that great either. So it would be important to give a break down in cost per mile, not MPG. Also, the articles do mention that it costs even more to outfit a hybred to be able to do this (along with the already premium cost of a hybred). So an even better figure would be cost per mile with these extra costs factored in over the expected life of the car and/or batteries.
And before the eco-kooks chime in that it's electric and so cleaner, it's not. The article point out that 60% of the country's electricity comes from burning dirtier coal. Much like hydrogen powered cars really just shift the polution to a very wasteful and poluting production of hydrogen away from the car, the plug in car talked about here may not be bringing any real benefit. We need real numbers to know if it is, and they are not given.
You claim they want to advertise lower prices, but this just isn't happening. As I said, they got rid of all the "free after rebate" stuff they used to use to bring in customers long ago. Gone are the free CDRs, mice, keyboards, CD lable kits, CD cases, even CDRW drives that used to be free after rebate. But have they been replaced by any "loss leaders" that are just free or even very low cost (just a few dollars) that they could continue to advertise? NO! If they were going to do this they would already be doing this, considering all the free-after-rebate items that they have stopped giving out in the past two years. Instead these bargans that were frequent a few years ago have simply stopped (with the one exceptopn that I've noted of occasional very low cost cordless phones after rebate), and no other cost savings to the customer has replaced them.
You may rejoice that all of the rebate deals are ending. And I certainly didn't like waiting to get my money back or paying extra sales tax that I would never get back. But don't lie and say that now we'll get those deals up front at the register when there is absolutely no indication of that and no reason to believe it. If you want to say "I was too lazy to send in for the rebate and I'm glad that no one else will be able to get a rebate either now", that would be honest and I could believe it. But don't do Best Buys job of telling lies that now prices will be lower when we've alread seen that that isn't happening.
Actually, Best Buy has gone a large way to eliminate rebates already. I used to get a lot of good rebate deals at Best Buy, now I hardly get any. In elimination of the rebates they don't seem to have done much to reduce prices, they have just eliminated many of the deals. I for one miss getting free optical mice or free 50 or 100 packs of CDRs after rebate, even if I did have to send in the rebate materials and wait months. The remaining rebates seem to be on higher priced items, but before you get too thrilled that they are eliminating rebates, what in the world makes you think that they will lower prices to reflect these lost rebates? They sure didn't do it on the cheaper items that frequently had rebate deals on them, I doubt that they will do it often on any item after they completely get rid of rebates. No one forced you to send in those rebates, but it was a way to get money back if you did. If the rebates vanish completely but the prices still don't reflect it, then we all lose.
I have to admit that out of all of them, the iPod looks like the cadidate most likely to be rigged.
Yea, the Ipod one really really looks unlikely to me. If you enlarge the shot about 400% and look at the text at the bottom of the screen and the text to the right of the Ipod on the same line you will see that the pixels seem exactly the same size and there is no degrading of text as one would expect there to be if the Ipod had an image of the background and that was skewed so that it only looked right from this one side angle (as opposed to straight on).
I do not have an Ipod, have never even touched one. So let me ask a few questions. These are only questions, I in no way offer them as proof that the image is false: I assume the Ipod has a color screen or there would be no discussion of this at all. Is the color screen resolution great enough o pull this off? Is the color depth deep enough to pull of the slight color differences seen? Can you even put up a background and show absolutely nothing else as seems to be done here? Of course, even if the answers to all of these are affirmative, I still don't think the text resolution would be that sharp it it was really displaying a distorted image when viewed head on.
I'm sure a lot of people will point out why they were not done in PS.
Only if they point out "proof" like the colors not perfectly matching or the images be slightly misaligned. The point is that you can't prove it wasn't done in Photoshop. In some cases you might prove that a photo was doctored with a Photoshop like product (matches of background in cloned areas, errors in shadow direction, and similar mistakes), but these types of error are unlikley when merging two pictures taken from the same spot. Anything else, including color mis-matches and even screen reflection placed over the added image, can be added in by Photoshop. So if someone made an error in putting together a composit you might be able to find and make a good argument that it was done with Photoshop, you can never prove that it was not.
There are a few where I suspect Photoshop's use is even more likely than some others. These include the Ipod device in gallery_2661_11_46165.jpg and the multiple notebooks in gallery_9311_11_153001.jpg. In both cases the screens we see are at an angle to the observer. (the ipod seen from below, the front laptop turned away from the camera. To acomplish the photos in the "official way" the images would have to be distorted when see front-on so that they look right only for that one exact camera angle the picture is taken from. That doesn't prove anything, because with a lot of work the images could be distorted that way. But both images show remarkable detail through their "transparent backgrounds". I would expect any such image manipulation if done the "real" way would cause some loss of pixel resolution. Yet looking at the printed text through the Ipod (from below, so the actual picture would have to be distorted to acomplish this) you can see that the pixel resolution of the text as seen through the ipod is as good as other text on the page, just color corrected to make it look like it is being seen through the screen. For the second picture you can see that the texture of the rock wall, although it undergoes a color shift, does not show the loss of resolution that would be expected if the image had been manipulated to allow it to be viewed properly from the direction it is being viewed. Feel free to point out anything in either picture that can be done by the techniques that supposedly made these pictures that cannot be done in Photoshop.
It's not just a simple square object, it's a square object with icons and other clutter on the desktop. So you constrain yourself to the area of the desktop but select only the background color (maybe with just the magic wand selecting by color) That hen gives you an area with icon cutouts that you overlay the alte5rnate picture with. Adjust colors as needed. If you took the two pictures from about the dame position but without a tripod then slide around the in-lay picture for best fit; if you took two pictures from the exct same position with a tripod then slightly scale and move the in-lay to make it look like the pictures were taken by hand.
Sure, but that would be too much of a give away. But it's easy enough to introduce small imprefections and still do the hard work after the fact in Photoshop, particularly when working with two images. And you can deliberately shift the camera position slightly to help sell the concept. (Actually, the one of the hand is not one of the ones I even had thought was done this way).
I'm sorry, but I don't believe everything I read on the Internet. I know I should, but I just don't.
As to the color being slightly "off", of course it is. No self respecting Photoshop hack would miss adjusting the colors slightly to give just this impression. And there are slight issues in getting the two images aligned also, but nothing that can't be done with minimal effort in Photoshop.
I think that's how most were done, but it looks like a few may ghave been "done" by taking a picture, putting the monitor in place and putting a solid color on the background (with icons and such on top of that) and then taking a picture of that. The second picture was then merged with the first in Photoshop or a similar application by effects that mimic cromakey. The picture is only a picture, the actual view never existed.
Wow, free for life, right in a slashdot healine. I sill have my e-mail from USA.NET when I joined their e-mail service. I was an early supporter, so early I was able to snag foo@usa.net as my e-mail address. Their promotion and my e-mail from them said it was my account, free for life. That was, of course, before I gave it out widely to all of my friends and contacts, as well as encouraging many of my friends to get their usa.net free for life accounts. Then they announced that it would no longer be free for life. Not intending to do business with a company who deals with their early adopters this way, I no longer have the account. There may still be people who occasionally try to reach me that way, but I never get the mail.
Think this is an isolated cae? I can tell you a similar story about a company who promoted their free e-mail accounts with the phrase "Bigfoot for Life". Now since I don't cough up a monthly fee they cut my mail off after a small number of e-mails each day. The spammers use up that capacity, so I seldom get anything useful to my Bigfoot account, although on a rare occasion e-mail for an old friend I had lost contact with does still sneak through (the only reason I still bother to sort through the sapm).
In the Internet world free for life seems to mean free until you get dependent on the account and have your address passed out to all your friends, then we start charging you. It's a shame to see Slashdot involved in this type of marketing hype.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, they found that pi wasn't random. Imagine that. Maybe someday we'll even be able to predict the value of pi.
Is this even a real question or just a troll setting people up? The resaons seem numerous and obvious.
Certainly high in the list is a desire for a large base of users of the project, which tends to equate to continued use and delevopment of the OS Ssoftware. Does anyone think that Firefox and Thunderbird would continue to be developed if there were a couple of hundred users of the software?
A larger base of users also helps insure that the software is well supported. I'm sick and tired of seeing websites that only work with Microsoft products. The more users out there using an alternative product, the more likely that websites and other resources will not make themselves Microdsoft only and in fact will even test their content against other popular tools.
The less users there out there using MS IE and other highly vulnerable products, the less systems are likely to get "owned" and thus there should be relatively less spam in my inbox and attempts to break into my system (at least less than there would be in an only Microsoft world). So I want to see as many IS browsers and outlook mail readers retired as posiable. If I can help even a few of those happen, great.
And, of course, there is that deep rooted hatred of Bill Gates ....
So is no one else old enough to think of Adam Strange and the Dust Devils when reading this? Looks like NASA hit the wrong planet with their rovers.
It takes information without my knowing or permission and steals my bandwidth to send it somewhere. It's spyware. Next question?
PCMag welcomes its old Redmond Overlords.
On PC equipment, my very first CD drive (1x) started randomly not seeing CDs after a couple of years. The replacement (a 2x writer, Hi-Val, a rebagged OEN version of a Philips) also squickly started having read and write problems. Eventually it would not write and CDRs, although it would still write CDRWs. Several other readers in this time period gave me frequent random reading problems. The next writer I git was an Iomega brand (also an OEM rebranded unit). That drive never worked right from the start, there were firmware issues dealing with 700 meg CDRW media. Iomega played stupid but I found out later the problems were well known to the original maker, Iomega just couldn't be bothered with firmware upgrades. They will never sell me another product. I also have a DVD reader that is flaking out in several ways, some read problems but mostly just getting it to open it's door is a problem. The replacement for the CDRW drive was a Lite-On drive. It worked well for about a year, but recently has been producing so many bad writes that I had to stop burning with it. Still reads OK. Even had one drive that was D.O.A., but sat on the shelf too long before being installed for it to be returned.
Have tried all of the obvious repairs to all of the above, including opening them and cleaning/inspecting the lense assembly, but no luck with any.
So overall I would have to say that if any other industry produced equipment the quality of optical drives, they would go out of business quickly and there would be massive consumer lawsuits. Why this isn't the case with this calss of product I'm not sure.
Sure, and I guess you believe that they will do something if you point out shilling in auction bids too....
So what? The use of the word " fails " above sure seems to apply there is something wrong in letting a company use the software and not charge them. I certainly don't see that there is. Others may not either. How to you deal with all the software that authors wrote and gave away by GPL with the deliberate intention of letting businesses use it freely in their own internal applications? This will get harder and harder to deal with when code released under the current GPL in mixed with code under this new "someone must pay" GPL, such as in a release of a Linux distro.. And how do you even police it? Does someone expect companies to self incriminate themselves or expose confidential internal software to audit just because someone thinks that it might contain GPL software?
I don't even see the point of making such a change. If anyone needs to be contributing back to GPL authors (a premis I reject), then it should certainly be the large distributers who have built multi-millon dollar businesses on the business plan of selling what other have written and make available free (some Linux distros come to mind) and not some company who's technology guys accept some GPL code that is offered freely for an in-house project (major or minor).
Next time I go back there I plan to have more $2 bills with me.
Oh yea, this makes sense, because we all know you get more energy by first compressing air with a battery and then using it to power a motor than you would by powering the motor with the batter directly. Right. And it's not dangerous at all haveing a high pressure air tank sitting in a hot car that sits in the sun, all scuba divers know that. And the inches of travel that you'll manage to get out of any such system if the tank actually fits in a car makes this so worth while.
Does no one think before publishing this stuff???
Actually, maybe exporting the polution to other people is a bad thing. Maybe in it's own little way the polution is helping keep LA from being even more over crowded. Maybe it's keeping even more ten million dollar houses from being built on known mudslide locations and then national taxpayers living in $50,000 homes being hit with more taxes to pay for them the next time a "natural disaster" hits the area and a "disaster area" is declaired. Perhaps the nation at large doesn't need even more people packing into the LA area and exporting their polution somewhere else, and it could be better served if the polution stayed there and some of the people and jobs moved somewhere else.
You just have to look at what the Bush administration and the EPA did to Mercury Emmision Regulations last month to see see that they are not dealing with it, or that their way of dealing with it is to say go ahead and polute the air. And the source of most of that mercury polution into the atmosphere is coal fired power plants.
And before the eco-kooks chime in that it's electric and so cleaner, it's not. The article point out that 60% of the country's electricity comes from burning dirtier coal. Much like hydrogen powered cars really just shift the polution to a very wasteful and poluting production of hydrogen away from the car, the plug in car talked about here may not be bringing any real benefit. We need real numbers to know if it is, and they are not given.
You may rejoice that all of the rebate deals are ending. And I certainly didn't like waiting to get my money back or paying extra sales tax that I would never get back. But don't lie and say that now we'll get those deals up front at the register when there is absolutely no indication of that and no reason to believe it. If you want to say "I was too lazy to send in for the rebate and I'm glad that no one else will be able to get a rebate either now", that would be honest and I could believe it. But don't do Best Buys job of telling lies that now prices will be lower when we've alread seen that that isn't happening.
Actually, Best Buy has gone a large way to eliminate rebates already. I used to get a lot of good rebate deals at Best Buy, now I hardly get any. In elimination of the rebates they don't seem to have done much to reduce prices, they have just eliminated many of the deals. I for one miss getting free optical mice or free 50 or 100 packs of CDRs after rebate, even if I did have to send in the rebate materials and wait months. The remaining rebates seem to be on higher priced items, but before you get too thrilled that they are eliminating rebates, what in the world makes you think that they will lower prices to reflect these lost rebates? They sure didn't do it on the cheaper items that frequently had rebate deals on them, I doubt that they will do it often on any item after they completely get rid of rebates. No one forced you to send in those rebates, but it was a way to get money back if you did. If the rebates vanish completely but the prices still don't reflect it, then we all lose.
As a black man I find this use of the N word extremely offensive.
Yea, the Ipod one really really looks unlikely to me. If you enlarge the shot about 400% and look at the text at the bottom of the screen and the text to the right of the Ipod on the same line you will see that the pixels seem exactly the same size and there is no degrading of text as one would expect there to be if the Ipod had an image of the background and that was skewed so that it only looked right from this one side angle (as opposed to straight on).
I do not have an Ipod, have never even touched one. So let me ask a few questions. These are only questions, I in no way offer them as proof that the image is false: I assume the Ipod has a color screen or there would be no discussion of this at all. Is the color screen resolution great enough o pull this off? Is the color depth deep enough to pull of the slight color differences seen? Can you even put up a background and show absolutely nothing else as seems to be done here? Of course, even if the answers to all of these are affirmative, I still don't think the text resolution would be that sharp it it was really displaying a distorted image when viewed head on.
Only if they point out "proof" like the colors not perfectly matching or the images be slightly misaligned. The point is that you can't prove it wasn't done in Photoshop. In some cases you might prove that a photo was doctored with a Photoshop like product (matches of background in cloned areas, errors in shadow direction, and similar mistakes), but these types of error are unlikley when merging two pictures taken from the same spot. Anything else, including color mis-matches and even screen reflection placed over the added image, can be added in by Photoshop. So if someone made an error in putting together a composit you might be able to find and make a good argument that it was done with Photoshop, you can never prove that it was not.
There are a few where I suspect Photoshop's use is even more likely than some others. These include the Ipod device in gallery_2661_11_46165.jpg and the multiple notebooks in gallery_9311_11_153001.jpg. In both cases the screens we see are at an angle to the observer. (the ipod seen from below, the front laptop turned away from the camera. To acomplish the photos in the "official way" the images would have to be distorted when see front-on so that they look right only for that one exact camera angle the picture is taken from. That doesn't prove anything, because with a lot of work the images could be distorted that way. But both images show remarkable detail through their "transparent backgrounds". I would expect any such image manipulation if done the "real" way would cause some loss of pixel resolution. Yet looking at the printed text through the Ipod (from below, so the actual picture would have to be distorted to acomplish this) you can see that the pixel resolution of the text as seen through the ipod is as good as other text on the page, just color corrected to make it look like it is being seen through the screen. For the second picture you can see that the texture of the rock wall, although it undergoes a color shift, does not show the loss of resolution that would be expected if the image had been manipulated to allow it to be viewed properly from the direction it is being viewed. Feel free to point out anything in either picture that can be done by the techniques that supposedly made these pictures that cannot be done in Photoshop.
It's not just a simple square object, it's a square object with icons and other clutter on the desktop. So you constrain yourself to the area of the desktop but select only the background color (maybe with just the magic wand selecting by color) That hen gives you an area with icon cutouts that you overlay the alte5rnate picture with. Adjust colors as needed. If you took the two pictures from about the dame position but without a tripod then slide around the in-lay picture for best fit; if you took two pictures from the exct same position with a tripod then slightly scale and move the in-lay to make it look like the pictures were taken by hand.
Sure, but that would be too much of a give away. But it's easy enough to introduce small imprefections and still do the hard work after the fact in Photoshop, particularly when working with two images. And you can deliberately shift the camera position slightly to help sell the concept. (Actually, the one of the hand is not one of the ones I even had thought was done this way).
As to the color being slightly "off", of course it is. No self respecting Photoshop hack would miss adjusting the colors slightly to give just this impression. And there are slight issues in getting the two images aligned also, but nothing that can't be done with minimal effort in Photoshop.
I think that's how most were done, but it looks like a few may ghave been "done" by taking a picture, putting the monitor in place and putting a solid color on the background (with icons and such on top of that) and then taking a picture of that. The second picture was then merged with the first in Photoshop or a similar application by effects that mimic cromakey. The picture is only a picture, the actual view never existed.
Think this is an isolated cae? I can tell you a similar story about a company who promoted their free e-mail accounts with the phrase "Bigfoot for Life". Now since I don't cough up a monthly fee they cut my mail off after a small number of e-mails each day. The spammers use up that capacity, so I seldom get anything useful to my Bigfoot account, although on a rare occasion e-mail for an old friend I had lost contact with does still sneak through (the only reason I still bother to sort through the sapm).
In the Internet world free for life seems to mean free until you get dependent on the account and have your address passed out to all your friends, then we start charging you. It's a shame to see Slashdot involved in this type of marketing hype.
So it's probably this, but on the other hand it's most likely something else? My faith in anything the article might say was lost.
Funny how this mutual trade agreement doesn't make those mod chips legal in the U.S too, isn't it?