Um, what distribution are you using? Linux font rendering has looked far better than Windows and OS X for like the last 4 years. Try installing Ubuntu. You probably have a crappy firefox build that's compiled without Xft support or something. I get beatiful subpixel antialiasing that looks far better than the blurry crap that Mac OS X puts out.
Um, that's actually what I *like* about firefox, and dislike about konqueror and IE. I don't want the UI to be responsive when the engine is frozen -- that's retarded. It's the #1 thing I hate about IE -- you push a button, and it just sits there doing nothing for a few seconds. Sure, the UI is "responsive", but the browser is not.
The plugin issue is more significant, but it's probably not that hard to fix. The main issue with using threads is that it's much harder to achieve reliability and security. The synchronization issues can get pretty nasty.
It's mainly because OpenOffice is a giant mess. It basically implements its own desktop environment internally, replicating a lot of what KDE/GNOME or the Windows API do on Linux. This is the cost of extreme portability, especially since OpenOffice was designed to run on rather uncivilized UNIX systems from the early 90s. When you are forced to add 5 additional abstraction layers, performance always goes down. Plus, it's a monolithic app, so when you start up openoffice you are loading pretty much everything. Office on Windows is composed of completely separate programs with some shared DLLs.
I'm sure they wouldn't be treating their employees like criminals if they weren't having a problem with industrial espionage. Like it or not, it is a reality, and security measures need to be taken. Most employees who spy for others are being paid to do so, and the financial incentive is generally stronger than loyalty to their employer.
In any case, I see nothing ridiculous about an employer auditing the internal e-mail system. Hell, in the US, companies are often required to keep an archive of all internal mail for legal accountability. Internal mail and other computing resources are supposed to be used for business purposes; there is no expectation of privacy there.
Yeah, sure, that's why only Germany and Spain have significant wind capacity (they have about 85% of Europe's total capacity), and even there wind constitutes only about 4% of the total electricity generation.
And yes, customers can stop buying from Walmart to stop the economic collapse of their towns.
Well, a town whose economy consists entirely of selling household goods is very much overdue for an economic collapse. By this logic, we should ban computers to keep the typewriter companies in business. Hell, Wal-mart generally pays a lot better than small locally-owned retailers in small towns. A lot of those places employ illegals, or work off the books and don't pay taxes.
I mean, sure, you might enjoy buying your groceries from some shady hole-in-the-wall outfit that charges outrageous prices. But most people don't.
The union's representatives have full right and reason to use their work address to communicate with other employees regarding business with the union.
Um, why is that? Here in the US, unions generally cannot use employer resources to conduct union business. That makes sense, and obviates the privacy concerns anyone might have. Is it really that hard to register a Gmail account?
It's pretty ludicrous that in Finland you can just take confidential company information and use your work email to send it to a competitor. Not only is your company not allowed to look at the content of the emails you send, but they cannot even investigate WHO IT WAS SENT TO. This makes sense how?
Right now, total photovoltaic and wind energy production constitutes 0.4% of American energy consumption. Most of that is actually wind; photovoltaic is 0.07%. That's less than one large nuke plant, and has far more environmental impact. Wind farms are actually turning out surprisingly hard to build, and tend to produce energy when it's not needed (such as at night).
I really doubt any set-top box manufacturer is going to add something as expensive as a supercap just to save power. That will easily be the most expensive thing on the BOM. Adding a relay is expensive, too. I'm sure it can be done, it's just that nobody worries too much about standby power consumption. I'm not sure why it's such a big deal, either, as long as it's something reasonable (less than a watt or two). I'm not even sure why people worry about standby power, when an average household wastes orders of magnitude more electricity heating water, drying clothes, and running air conditioning.
I think that problem is very easy to solve. Don't allow any more coal plants to be built, and resolve the shortage using rolling blackouts. Significant opposition to nuke plants will disappear after two or three days. After a week or two, you'll have a pro-nuke movement.
You are exactly right. If everyone started commuting in a Prius tomorrow, there would probably be a lot MORE CO2 produced. First, you have to make all the priuses. Second, people tend to drive more when they feel good about it. Third, the Prius isn't a huge improvement over a similarly-sized car (40 vs 35 mpg).
Um, can you run a pic off of 120/240Vac in a safe UL-approved manner, and still draw less than 100 mW, AND have enough power available to operate a relay? I very seriously doubt that. Hell, I bet the goddamn surge suppressor MOVs on the input leak more than 100 mW. It's fairly complicated to design a good power switch, and $2.95 for a device with a $15-20 bill of materials is a lot of money, especially given that pretty much nobody gives a shit. Getting the power consumption of an ac power supply that far down is very tough.
Unless you are being paid by the university to work on stuff, or you have a WRITTEN AGREEMENT that assigns copyright to the university, the copyright belongs to you. Transfers of copyright always require a signed, written agreement.
Surly the communists were at the time, considered as bad as the Nazis.
Um, that was not, and is not, the case pretty much anywhere outside the US. This is pretty much just American brainwashing propaganda that started in the 50s and goes on to this day. Last I checked, ethnic cleansing was never a part of any Communist doctrine, and all of Stalin's "crimes" pale in comparison to what Bush is doing in Iraq.
Yes, because they were forced into it. Make no mistake, Apple depended on the DRM to lock customers into an eternal stream of future iPods which keeps people using iTunes and even sells Macs. Without the locks you can buy anybody's player.
Um, what? Last I checked, nobody even came close to the iPod in terms of overall quality, software integration, and industrial design. That's what sells players, not iTunes DRM. The Zune is fugly and has crap software and crap usability. Same goes for Sandisk. It's like comparing a Porsche to a Kia.
I'm not exactly sure why you think that. First, while planes have not been intentionally used as missiles until 9/11, there have been many hijackings. Tighter airport security was always a good idea, 9/11 just made that obvious. Second, if the TSA is now the biggest security threat, that means the screening efforts are working. Sure, it's not perfect, but again, it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be. Before 9/11, I'm sure you could sneak a loaded gun onto an airplane and not get caught 95% of the time. These days, it's pretty hard to even sneak a small knife through.
I'm not sure why you think this stuff matters. The university can put anything it wants in its policies, it doesn't mean anything. Unless you signed a contract of some sort, which would be rather strange, anything you create belongs to you. HOWEVER, if you are actually employed by the university as a research assistant (like most graduate students), anything you create is considered work for hire for the purposes of copyright/patent law. This is not the case for homework or class projects. If a professor or another student takes your code and uses it somewhere without your permission, it would be copyright infringement.
Besides, I'm pretty sure most universities have a good IP licensing policy. Usually, it's a fixed sum (something like 75K) and a small royalty for an exclusive license. If your idea is worth patenting, it should be no trouble to come up with that money. Considering that most university research requires multimillion dollar facilities, this is more than fair. I know someone who is trying to commercialize their invention, and this is not seen as a hindrance at all.
What a dumb argument. Airplanes are obviously a much bigger target than trains or buses, given the carnage that a hijacked plane can cause. And while the airline security measures are far from perfect, they are a HELL of a lot better than they used to, and they make it VERY difficult to sneak enough weapons through the checkpoint to hijack a plane. Just because you find something inconvenient doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing it.
And hey, a lock on your house door is pretty much a waste of resources, too. It can easily be picked, and 99% of the time, nobody is trying to break it. But that doesn't mean it's useless.
They work fine and last pretty much forever. I've used laser printers with 6-year-old toner cartridges, they worked just fine. The toner is just fine plastic powder, it doesn't deteriorate in normal conditions. The laser printer I have right now sees a few pages every month, and seems to be quite happy.
Hahahaha, you are completely fucking retarded. Just so you know, none of what you are claiming is actually true. Lexmark vs. SCC has absolutely no bearing in this situation, since it was purely a copyright case. That case established that an authentication code is not copyrightable, since it's purely functional rather than creative. If you are saying Mac OS X is not copyrightable, I want some of what you are smoking.
Brother makes very good laser printers. Get one with an Ethernet interface, then you can just print to it directly, using Samba. Samsung is another good choice.
What makes you think dot-matrix printers are either fixed-width or invariant? This isn't 1978. Most dot-matrix printers support a large variety of fonts.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, what distribution are you using? Linux font rendering has looked far better than Windows and OS X for like the last 4 years. Try installing Ubuntu. You probably have a crappy firefox build that's compiled without Xft support or something. I get beatiful subpixel antialiasing that looks far better than the blurry crap that Mac OS X puts out.
Um, that's actually what I *like* about firefox, and dislike about konqueror and IE. I don't want the UI to be responsive when the engine is frozen -- that's retarded. It's the #1 thing I hate about IE -- you push a button, and it just sits there doing nothing for a few seconds. Sure, the UI is "responsive", but the browser is not.
The plugin issue is more significant, but it's probably not that hard to fix. The main issue with using threads is that it's much harder to achieve reliability and security. The synchronization issues can get pretty nasty.
It's mainly because OpenOffice is a giant mess. It basically implements its own desktop environment internally, replicating a lot of what KDE/GNOME or the Windows API do on Linux. This is the cost of extreme portability, especially since OpenOffice was designed to run on rather uncivilized UNIX systems from the early 90s. When you are forced to add 5 additional abstraction layers, performance always goes down. Plus, it's a monolithic app, so when you start up openoffice you are loading pretty much everything. Office on Windows is composed of completely separate programs with some shared DLLs.
I'm sure they wouldn't be treating their employees like criminals if they weren't having a problem with industrial espionage. Like it or not, it is a reality, and security measures need to be taken. Most employees who spy for others are being paid to do so, and the financial incentive is generally stronger than loyalty to their employer.
In any case, I see nothing ridiculous about an employer auditing the internal e-mail system. Hell, in the US, companies are often required to keep an archive of all internal mail for legal accountability. Internal mail and other computing resources are supposed to be used for business purposes; there is no expectation of privacy there.
Yeah, sure, that's why only Germany and Spain have significant wind capacity (they have about 85% of Europe's total capacity), and even there wind constitutes only about 4% of the total electricity generation.
Well, a town whose economy consists entirely of selling household goods is very much overdue for an economic collapse. By this logic, we should ban computers to keep the typewriter companies in business. Hell, Wal-mart generally pays a lot better than small locally-owned retailers in small towns. A lot of those places employ illegals, or work off the books and don't pay taxes.
I mean, sure, you might enjoy buying your groceries from some shady hole-in-the-wall outfit that charges outrageous prices. But most people don't.
Um, why is that? Here in the US, unions generally cannot use employer resources to conduct union business. That makes sense, and obviates the privacy concerns anyone might have. Is it really that hard to register a Gmail account?
It's pretty ludicrous that in Finland you can just take confidential company information and use your work email to send it to a competitor. Not only is your company not allowed to look at the content of the emails you send, but they cannot even investigate WHO IT WAS SENT TO. This makes sense how?
Right now, total photovoltaic and wind energy production constitutes 0.4% of American energy consumption. Most of that is actually wind; photovoltaic is 0.07%. That's less than one large nuke plant, and has far more environmental impact. Wind farms are actually turning out surprisingly hard to build, and tend to produce energy when it's not needed (such as at night).
I really doubt any set-top box manufacturer is going to add something as expensive as a supercap just to save power. That will easily be the most expensive thing on the BOM. Adding a relay is expensive, too. I'm sure it can be done, it's just that nobody worries too much about standby power consumption. I'm not sure why it's such a big deal, either, as long as it's something reasonable (less than a watt or two). I'm not even sure why people worry about standby power, when an average household wastes orders of magnitude more electricity heating water, drying clothes, and running air conditioning.
I think that problem is very easy to solve. Don't allow any more coal plants to be built, and resolve the shortage using rolling blackouts. Significant opposition to nuke plants will disappear after two or three days. After a week or two, you'll have a pro-nuke movement.
You are exactly right. If everyone started commuting in a Prius tomorrow, there would probably be a lot MORE CO2 produced. First, you have to make all the priuses. Second, people tend to drive more when they feel good about it. Third, the Prius isn't a huge improvement over a similarly-sized car (40 vs 35 mpg).
Um, can you run a pic off of 120/240Vac in a safe UL-approved manner, and still draw less than 100 mW, AND have enough power available to operate a relay? I very seriously doubt that. Hell, I bet the goddamn surge suppressor MOVs on the input leak more than 100 mW. It's fairly complicated to design a good power switch, and $2.95 for a device with a $15-20 bill of materials is a lot of money, especially given that pretty much nobody gives a shit. Getting the power consumption of an ac power supply that far down is very tough.
Unless you are being paid by the university to work on stuff, or you have a WRITTEN AGREEMENT that assigns copyright to the university, the copyright belongs to you. Transfers of copyright always require a signed, written agreement.
Um, that was not, and is not, the case pretty much anywhere outside the US. This is pretty much just American brainwashing propaganda that started in the 50s and goes on to this day. Last I checked, ethnic cleansing was never a part of any Communist doctrine, and all of Stalin's "crimes" pale in comparison to what Bush is doing in Iraq.
Um, what? Last I checked, nobody even came close to the iPod in terms of overall quality, software integration, and industrial design. That's what sells players, not iTunes DRM. The Zune is fugly and has crap software and crap usability. Same goes for Sandisk. It's like comparing a Porsche to a Kia.
I'm not exactly sure why you think that. First, while planes have not been intentionally used as missiles until 9/11, there have been many hijackings. Tighter airport security was always a good idea, 9/11 just made that obvious. Second, if the TSA is now the biggest security threat, that means the screening efforts are working. Sure, it's not perfect, but again, it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be. Before 9/11, I'm sure you could sneak a loaded gun onto an airplane and not get caught 95% of the time. These days, it's pretty hard to even sneak a small knife through.
I'm not sure why you think this stuff matters. The university can put anything it wants in its policies, it doesn't mean anything. Unless you signed a contract of some sort, which would be rather strange, anything you create belongs to you. HOWEVER, if you are actually employed by the university as a research assistant (like most graduate students), anything you create is considered work for hire for the purposes of copyright/patent law. This is not the case for homework or class projects. If a professor or another student takes your code and uses it somewhere without your permission, it would be copyright infringement.
Besides, I'm pretty sure most universities have a good IP licensing policy. Usually, it's a fixed sum (something like 75K) and a small royalty for an exclusive license. If your idea is worth patenting, it should be no trouble to come up with that money. Considering that most university research requires multimillion dollar facilities, this is more than fair. I know someone who is trying to commercialize their invention, and this is not seen as a hindrance at all.
What a dumb argument. Airplanes are obviously a much bigger target than trains or buses, given the carnage that a hijacked plane can cause. And while the airline security measures are far from perfect, they are a HELL of a lot better than they used to, and they make it VERY difficult to sneak enough weapons through the checkpoint to hijack a plane. Just because you find something inconvenient doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing it.
And hey, a lock on your house door is pretty much a waste of resources, too. It can easily be picked, and 99% of the time, nobody is trying to break it. But that doesn't mean it's useless.
Hahahhaha, you are totally retarded. The "entire program" that they "lost copyright" of consisted of 8 machine words in the cartridge chip.
They work fine and last pretty much forever. I've used laser printers with 6-year-old toner cartridges, they worked just fine. The toner is just fine plastic powder, it doesn't deteriorate in normal conditions. The laser printer I have right now sees a few pages every month, and seems to be quite happy.
Hahahaha, you are completely fucking retarded. Just so you know, none of what you are claiming is actually true. Lexmark vs. SCC has absolutely no bearing in this situation, since it was purely a copyright case. That case established that an authentication code is not copyrightable, since it's purely functional rather than creative. If you are saying Mac OS X is not copyrightable, I want some of what you are smoking.
Brother makes very good laser printers. Get one with an Ethernet interface, then you can just print to it directly, using Samba. Samsung is another good choice.
Goddammit, it's not "octopi", it's "octopuses". We speak English, not Latin, and in any case "octopus" comes from Greek.
What makes you think dot-matrix printers are either fixed-width or invariant? This isn't 1978. Most dot-matrix printers support a large variety of fonts.