You know a game is good when you get scared, even though they only had 17 polygons to draw a person, and midi sound. Sometimes game developers think too much about flashy graphics, and forget to go back to the old tried and tested methods of creating ambiance with lighting, background music, and building suspense. Metriod Prime is an example of a recent game was great at this. It had pretty good graphics, but I found that was unimportant in drawing you into the game.
Me thinks my math was a bit wrong. 1.5 K per packet, at 10,000 packets is 15 MB/S, or 1.8 Mb/s. That is actually quite slow, especially if you're trying to transfer a file over your local network. I really should learn to check my math. Feel free to mod me down.
Or to put it a little simpler, people who need more than 10,000 packets per second, probably shouldn't be using their machine to listen to music. or if they do, they shouldn't worry about the speed too much. Let's do some math, 10,000 packets, at a standard ethernet packet size of 1.5 K, you would get a transfer rate of 1.5 MB/s, or in more appropriate data transfer units, about 12 Mb/s. That's way faster than most internet connections available on cosumer PCs. I also know quite a few people with 10 Mb hubs still operating on their network. It seems odd that they would have chosen some arbitrary number of packets, rather than have the computer try to analyze what's going on, and try to limit the number of packets only enough so that it doesn't make the audio skip. Possibly even by dropping packets, instead of skipping the audio, the problem would completely solve itself by having the connection slow itself down due to the dropped packets. However, I find this to be a little unnecessary. No other OS on the planet has to throttle the network speed to play MP3s without skipping. Why does Vista?
Ok. So here's how we fix privatized health care. Make it so that someone who is paying for medical insurance cannot be denied payment. Make it so that anybody, even those with pre-existing conditions can get coverage for some reasonable amount of money. If you can get the corporations in charge of medical insurance to go for that, then I could see it working. Like I said, I'm not all for paying for someone else's medical problems, especially when they brought it on themselves, but I just find that socialized health care is the only way I can garauntee that I will get the service that I need when I need it.
I know that Canadians and other people in socialized healthcare systems pay for their healthcare. The difference is that you get the same healthcare as everyone else, regardless of how much you pay, and you can't be denied. That's why I like socialized healthcare. Not because I fell I should have to pay for others, (actually, there's a lot of people who bring health problems on themselves, that I'd rather not pay for) but because I know it will be there if/when I need to use it.
The workers do have a right to unionize. However, the business also has a right to close up shop if they find that doing business is not financially beneficial. The reason that most companies give into unions demands, is because they find that it is in their best financial interests to keep the place open and pay higher wages, rather than shut the place down. Walmart just thinks otherwise.
Sorry to be so smug, but that's what happens when you rely on corporations to provide you with health care. Health care is a cost, and it's in the constition of most corporations to reduce costs where possible. This is why it isn't a good idea to rely on corporations for your health care. Telling people to either pay-up, or be sick/die, isn't something a corporation should have the power to do. That's why I'm happy to live somewhere with socialized health care. There's just too much room for corruption and taking advantage of people when you can dangle their health/life in front of them to get them to pay whatever you want them to pay.
Actually, I think they tried to unionize, but then they shut those stores down. Of course, they are entirely allowed to do that. If they don't want to do business, because they don't think it will be profitable (enough), then they are allowed to close up shop.
Every retailer tries do to that. It's just that Walmart has a little more clout than most. Did you items on the front page of the store flyer are not put there by which products the retailer likes the most, or what they think are the best deals, but rather by how much the manufacturers of said products are willing to pay to have their product on the front page. This isn't just at walmart, but at most major retailers. The only way for manufacturers to sell their products are through the retailers, and all the retailers (at least the smart ones) take full advantage of that.
What's full-time. Yes I know there's some legal definition in most places, and it's usually around 40 hours a week. I know quite a few people who work 40 hours a week at one place during the week, and then work another 15-20 hours on the weekend somewhere else. Not because they need to do so to survive, but mostly because they don't got much else better to do, and it's nice to have that second job to pay for a bunch of luxuries, like video games, computers, guitars, and so on. Making a law that would require that full time employees get paid a certain amount would just lead to less full timers getting hired, as well as the cost of everything going up.
They are "known for" the same thing in Canada. They have a very bad reputation here. However, I don't see any real evidence to support it, and even the claims against them that are true, I wouldn't expect any different from a large corporation.
Which is fine. I don't think that it says in the constitution that you have a right to receive wages high enough to support yourself or your family. Not every job should have to pay enough to support a person, or their family. There are many people who don't need that much money, and are just looking for something to do in their spare time. Making the wages too high will just raise prices, and everything will go back to square one. Also, if everyone was entitle to a living wage, then where's the motivation to better yourself?
Lots of businesses oppose labour unions. And for good reason. It's no wonder all the American auto plants are shutting down, when you have to pay people $25 an hour for untrained labour, meanwhile, all the cars coming out of Japan can do it so much cheaper. How are they supposed to compete? There are many stores that do not pay union rates for workers. Why should Walmart be required to. Maybe it's not economically feasible for Walmart to pay rates that union employees demand. If that's their business model, then fine. That's their choice as a corporation. Meanwhile, there's still people lining up for jobs every time a walmart opens, and people lining up to buy stuff from there. So while there may be a lot of people who don't like them, there's a ton more people who do like what walmart is doing.
Where my dad lives there was a vocal minority who complained, and the city refused to let them build a walmart. Or just about any other big box store. What happened? the surrounding cities let all these big box stores come in, and their economy flourished. Meanwhile, their retail sector pretty much disappeared, because everybody went to the surrounding towns (that aren't more than 1/2 an hour away) to do their shopping. They are finally letting these stores move in, after they saw how negatively not having them affected their business sector. Luckily things seem to be recovering from this bad decision.
Yes, but it's significantly higher than the minimum wage where they are living. I could say the minimum wage on Rigel 7 is $37.50 an hour, and then many people on this planet are all making less than minimum wage. Or something a little more plausible, many people working in China, are making much less than most minimum wages in the western world. Even with the US dollar tanking, you can still walk into a lot of stores in the states and get them for about 2/3 of the price they would be in Canada. And your parent post is right about smaller stores paying less. I worked at a small shop right out of University until I found a job using my skills, and I got paid about 50 cents more than minimum wage. However, most people I know working at larger corporate type stores (walmart, futureshop, etc) got paid more than I did.
Why is the minimum wage set such that somebody working full time at minimum wage should not be able to support themselves. If they cannot support themselves, then either they are not spending their money correctly, or the minimum wage is too low. Is it Walmart's fault that the minimum wage is too low? They are just complying with the law, and try to make their owners happy. Just as any business does. Maybe the minimum wage is not meant to be the wage required to raise a family. Maybe one person living on their own, renting someone else's basement (which is where I find rent is cheapest), can do just fine on minimum wage. Minimum wage is nice so that people don't get completely exploited, but I'm not sure that there should be some requirement that somebody should have to be able to support themselves off minimum wage. What about those, like college kids, teenagers, and people with rich spouses who want to bring in a couple of extra bucks, but want a job with no responsibility. They probably don't have a problem with working for minimum wage.
I don't see what's so bad about Walmart. At least from my experiences here in Canada, they stock the exact same stuff as most other discount department stores, and pay their employees about the same amount. How much do you expect them to pay people to stock shelves? It's not a hard to fill position. They have their own store brand stuff, but that's made in China, just like all the other store brand clothes in all the other department stores. I've yet to find a large corporate store where half the stuff isn't made in China, India, or some other financially less well to do country. Except American Apparel, but I don't fell like wearing sweat pants and tight briefs that look like they are from the '70s.
2.0? They aren't even at web 1.0 yet here in Canada. You can't even buy stuff online in Canada, and they have only a few select items up on their website, not even close to their entire catalog. However, there is an option to add stuff to your shopping list, and print that out for buying at the B&M stores. Which is pretty useless though, considering the items may not be at the store you shop at, and like I said, the online product selection is maybe 10% of the items they actually stock.
1GB? I got my laptop with 512 MB of RAM, Vista came with it. Granted it's only home basic, so there's no Aero desktop, but it's amazing how low specs they will try to get a machine to run with. There was a lot of XP machines that shipped with 128 MB of RAM. Even though most of us would consider anything below 256 to be completely unusable, and 512 to be pretty good, but that you really should have 1GB, considering RAM prices.
Yeah, it probably was due to the fact that I was still running windows 3.1. I probably could have played them running in DOS. I also recall having an 8-bit soundcard (left over from an old 386, but it worked, so why bother replacing it, sound cards weren't $15 back then) so the downsampling might have been what pushed it over the edge, along with running a 16 bit OS.
But an old Linux kernel or Windows 98 aren't the big beast OSes that Windows Vista is. I recently bought a laptop (Celeron M 1.6 GHz, and 512 MB of RAM). Vista runs extremely slow, but I installed Mandriva and the thing runs really fast. The short answer to all this is that MS Windows Vista is a big hog of an OS, and slows things down way more than it really should. Linux and MacOS seem to be getting faster with every release, meanwhile, Windows seems to be getting slower. I really think they are in kahoots with the hardware manufacturers, so that computers never get "fast enough". My $500 laptop would be all I or most people ever needed if Windows was programmed to be as resource friendly as Linux.
That's pretty impressive. I remember having a 486 DX4 100, and not being able to play MP3s on it because they would skip too much. However, what I do remember is finding an MP2 encoder, and enconding my files into MP2, because that could play without skipping. Maybe it was just bad software or something, because this was probably around 1996-1998. I think that the machine should be capable of decoding MP3 files, but for some reason it didn't work.
Thanks for clearing that up. I wasn't exactly sure of how the whole thing worked. It seems that this is just another sensationalist article written by someone who doesn't know what they are talking about. And the editors let it slip through, and be published. Never mind that they wouldn't publish real news like the fact that the Wii has recently beat the XBox 360 in sales. But such is life on Slashdot.
Is this the standard way of accesssing such information in Linux? I'm not a linux programmer, so I really haven't looked into it. Isn't there (shouldn't there be) better ways of accessing information such as username, home directory, shell, etc. without reading the file which also contains the passwords? Isn't this located in some environment variable? From reading the other posts, it seems like many applications "read/etc/passwd" mostly indirectly, by doing some system calls to get this kind of information. However, I think that this information should be available without reading the password file, as it may not be a good idea to give all users (especially on large multi-user systems) access to this file. It just seems like an unnecessary risk.
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How do you ensure that the data is passed to the hypervisor without modification?
You know a game is good when you get scared, even though they only had 17 polygons to draw a person, and midi sound. Sometimes game developers think too much about flashy graphics, and forget to go back to the old tried and tested methods of creating ambiance with lighting, background music, and building suspense. Metriod Prime is an example of a recent game was great at this. It had pretty good graphics, but I found that was unimportant in drawing you into the game.
Me thinks my math was a bit wrong. 1.5 K per packet, at 10,000 packets is 15 MB/S, or 1.8 Mb/s. That is actually quite slow, especially if you're trying to transfer a file over your local network. I really should learn to check my math. Feel free to mod me down.
Or to put it a little simpler, people who need more than 10,000 packets per second, probably shouldn't be using their machine to listen to music. or if they do, they shouldn't worry about the speed too much. Let's do some math, 10,000 packets, at a standard ethernet packet size of 1.5 K, you would get a transfer rate of 1.5 MB/s, or in more appropriate data transfer units, about 12 Mb/s. That's way faster than most internet connections available on cosumer PCs. I also know quite a few people with 10 Mb hubs still operating on their network. It seems odd that they would have chosen some arbitrary number of packets, rather than have the computer try to analyze what's going on, and try to limit the number of packets only enough so that it doesn't make the audio skip. Possibly even by dropping packets, instead of skipping the audio, the problem would completely solve itself by having the connection slow itself down due to the dropped packets. However, I find this to be a little unnecessary. No other OS on the planet has to throttle the network speed to play MP3s without skipping. Why does Vista?
Ok. So here's how we fix privatized health care. Make it so that someone who is paying for medical insurance cannot be denied payment. Make it so that anybody, even those with pre-existing conditions can get coverage for some reasonable amount of money. If you can get the corporations in charge of medical insurance to go for that, then I could see it working. Like I said, I'm not all for paying for someone else's medical problems, especially when they brought it on themselves, but I just find that socialized health care is the only way I can garauntee that I will get the service that I need when I need it.
I know that Canadians and other people in socialized healthcare systems pay for their healthcare. The difference is that you get the same healthcare as everyone else, regardless of how much you pay, and you can't be denied. That's why I like socialized healthcare. Not because I fell I should have to pay for others, (actually, there's a lot of people who bring health problems on themselves, that I'd rather not pay for) but because I know it will be there if/when I need to use it.
The workers do have a right to unionize. However, the business also has a right to close up shop if they find that doing business is not financially beneficial. The reason that most companies give into unions demands, is because they find that it is in their best financial interests to keep the place open and pay higher wages, rather than shut the place down. Walmart just thinks otherwise.
Sorry to be so smug, but that's what happens when you rely on corporations to provide you with health care. Health care is a cost, and it's in the constition of most corporations to reduce costs where possible. This is why it isn't a good idea to rely on corporations for your health care. Telling people to either pay-up, or be sick/die, isn't something a corporation should have the power to do. That's why I'm happy to live somewhere with socialized health care. There's just too much room for corruption and taking advantage of people when you can dangle their health/life in front of them to get them to pay whatever you want them to pay.
Actually, I think they tried to unionize, but then they shut those stores down. Of course, they are entirely allowed to do that. If they don't want to do business, because they don't think it will be profitable (enough), then they are allowed to close up shop.
Every retailer tries do to that. It's just that Walmart has a little more clout than most. Did you items on the front page of the store flyer are not put there by which products the retailer likes the most, or what they think are the best deals, but rather by how much the manufacturers of said products are willing to pay to have their product on the front page. This isn't just at walmart, but at most major retailers. The only way for manufacturers to sell their products are through the retailers, and all the retailers (at least the smart ones) take full advantage of that.
What's full-time. Yes I know there's some legal definition in most places, and it's usually around 40 hours a week. I know quite a few people who work 40 hours a week at one place during the week, and then work another 15-20 hours on the weekend somewhere else. Not because they need to do so to survive, but mostly because they don't got much else better to do, and it's nice to have that second job to pay for a bunch of luxuries, like video games, computers, guitars, and so on. Making a law that would require that full time employees get paid a certain amount would just lead to less full timers getting hired, as well as the cost of everything going up.
They are "known for" the same thing in Canada. They have a very bad reputation here. However, I don't see any real evidence to support it, and even the claims against them that are true, I wouldn't expect any different from a large corporation.
Which is fine. I don't think that it says in the constitution that you have a right to receive wages high enough to support yourself or your family. Not every job should have to pay enough to support a person, or their family. There are many people who don't need that much money, and are just looking for something to do in their spare time. Making the wages too high will just raise prices, and everything will go back to square one. Also, if everyone was entitle to a living wage, then where's the motivation to better yourself?
Lots of businesses oppose labour unions. And for good reason. It's no wonder all the American auto plants are shutting down, when you have to pay people $25 an hour for untrained labour, meanwhile, all the cars coming out of Japan can do it so much cheaper. How are they supposed to compete? There are many stores that do not pay union rates for workers. Why should Walmart be required to. Maybe it's not economically feasible for Walmart to pay rates that union employees demand. If that's their business model, then fine. That's their choice as a corporation. Meanwhile, there's still people lining up for jobs every time a walmart opens, and people lining up to buy stuff from there. So while there may be a lot of people who don't like them, there's a ton more people who do like what walmart is doing.
Where my dad lives there was a vocal minority who complained, and the city refused to let them build a walmart. Or just about any other big box store. What happened? the surrounding cities let all these big box stores come in, and their economy flourished. Meanwhile, their retail sector pretty much disappeared, because everybody went to the surrounding towns (that aren't more than 1/2 an hour away) to do their shopping. They are finally letting these stores move in, after they saw how negatively not having them affected their business sector. Luckily things seem to be recovering from this bad decision.
Yes, but it's significantly higher than the minimum wage where they are living. I could say the minimum wage on Rigel 7 is $37.50 an hour, and then many people on this planet are all making less than minimum wage. Or something a little more plausible, many people working in China, are making much less than most minimum wages in the western world. Even with the US dollar tanking, you can still walk into a lot of stores in the states and get them for about 2/3 of the price they would be in Canada. And your parent post is right about smaller stores paying less. I worked at a small shop right out of University until I found a job using my skills, and I got paid about 50 cents more than minimum wage. However, most people I know working at larger corporate type stores (walmart, futureshop, etc) got paid more than I did.
Why is the minimum wage set such that somebody working full time at minimum wage should not be able to support themselves. If they cannot support themselves, then either they are not spending their money correctly, or the minimum wage is too low. Is it Walmart's fault that the minimum wage is too low? They are just complying with the law, and try to make their owners happy. Just as any business does. Maybe the minimum wage is not meant to be the wage required to raise a family. Maybe one person living on their own, renting someone else's basement (which is where I find rent is cheapest), can do just fine on minimum wage. Minimum wage is nice so that people don't get completely exploited, but I'm not sure that there should be some requirement that somebody should have to be able to support themselves off minimum wage. What about those, like college kids, teenagers, and people with rich spouses who want to bring in a couple of extra bucks, but want a job with no responsibility. They probably don't have a problem with working for minimum wage.
I don't see what's so bad about Walmart. At least from my experiences here in Canada, they stock the exact same stuff as most other discount department stores, and pay their employees about the same amount. How much do you expect them to pay people to stock shelves? It's not a hard to fill position. They have their own store brand stuff, but that's made in China, just like all the other store brand clothes in all the other department stores. I've yet to find a large corporate store where half the stuff isn't made in China, India, or some other financially less well to do country. Except American Apparel, but I don't fell like wearing sweat pants and tight briefs that look like they are from the '70s.
2.0? They aren't even at web 1.0 yet here in Canada. You can't even buy stuff online in Canada, and they have only a few select items up on their website, not even close to their entire catalog. However, there is an option to add stuff to your shopping list, and print that out for buying at the B&M stores. Which is pretty useless though, considering the items may not be at the store you shop at, and like I said, the online product selection is maybe 10% of the items they actually stock.
1GB? I got my laptop with 512 MB of RAM, Vista came with it. Granted it's only home basic, so there's no Aero desktop, but it's amazing how low specs they will try to get a machine to run with. There was a lot of XP machines that shipped with 128 MB of RAM. Even though most of us would consider anything below 256 to be completely unusable, and 512 to be pretty good, but that you really should have 1GB, considering RAM prices.
Yeah, it probably was due to the fact that I was still running windows 3.1. I probably could have played them running in DOS. I also recall having an 8-bit soundcard (left over from an old 386, but it worked, so why bother replacing it, sound cards weren't $15 back then) so the downsampling might have been what pushed it over the edge, along with running a 16 bit OS.
But an old Linux kernel or Windows 98 aren't the big beast OSes that Windows Vista is. I recently bought a laptop (Celeron M 1.6 GHz, and 512 MB of RAM). Vista runs extremely slow, but I installed Mandriva and the thing runs really fast. The short answer to all this is that MS Windows Vista is a big hog of an OS, and slows things down way more than it really should. Linux and MacOS seem to be getting faster with every release, meanwhile, Windows seems to be getting slower. I really think they are in kahoots with the hardware manufacturers, so that computers never get "fast enough". My $500 laptop would be all I or most people ever needed if Windows was programmed to be as resource friendly as Linux.
That's pretty impressive. I remember having a 486 DX4 100, and not being able to play MP3s on it because they would skip too much. However, what I do remember is finding an MP2 encoder, and enconding my files into MP2, because that could play without skipping. Maybe it was just bad software or something, because this was probably around 1996-1998. I think that the machine should be capable of decoding MP3 files, but for some reason it didn't work.
Thanks for clearing that up. I wasn't exactly sure of how the whole thing worked. It seems that this is just another sensationalist article written by someone who doesn't know what they are talking about. And the editors let it slip through, and be published. Never mind that they wouldn't publish real news like the fact that the Wii has recently beat the XBox 360 in sales. But such is life on Slashdot.
Is this the standard way of accesssing such information in Linux? I'm not a linux programmer, so I really haven't looked into it. Isn't there (shouldn't there be) better ways of accessing information such as username, home directory, shell, etc. without reading the file which also contains the passwords? Isn't this located in some environment variable? From reading the other posts, it seems like many applications "read /etc/passwd" mostly indirectly, by doing some system calls to get this kind of information. However, I think that this information should be available without reading the password file, as it may not be a good idea to give all users (especially on large multi-user systems) access to this file. It just seems like an unnecessary risk.