Re:Gach! More amateur website baloney
on
DivX 6.0 is Out
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· Score: 1
While the rate of reviews is dissapointing, nothing I've found beats the quality of Ace's Hardware.
Tom's is crap, and has been for about six years now, and is steadily getting worse. Anand was better, but is slipping. Techreport is okay, as is Ars Technica. Avoid Tom's. Practically everyone there is incompetent.
So, we're going to go to Mars on a timetable that completely eliminates any accountability for him, while spending tremendous amounts of money on this, but we can't give NASA the funding to keep the Hubble, which will hold the title of greatest astronomical instrument ever for at least another ten years, from burning up on reentry?
Yeah, he's real dedicated to space. Mars/Moon is a boondogle designed to make Bush look like Kennedy. He wants to be a visionary without the annoying aspect of actually implementing said vision getting in his way like it did with his World of Democracy vision.
If any of the headlines you said were actually true, and not cynical half-hearted attempts to look like he's doing what you said, I'd applaud them. Instead, his energy plan consists of drilling in the ANWR and building more coal plants.
I'm willing to give credit where it is due. I hate Clinton, but I was pretty pleased when he relaxed cryptography export restrictions, just as an example So, out of curiosity, what exactly should I be giving Bush credit for?
Yeah, and an orchestra lead by John Williams follows everybody around.
Watching the movie, I was really hoping for a Blazing Saddles moment where they fly by the open hangar of a ship and there's a huge orchestra charging along with battle music as ships are destroyed around them...
Strangely enough he couldn't eat with manners at the table but he can keep his foolishness under wraps for the 5 seconds he's in a funeral parade in RotS.
That was because of the savage stick-beating he was given just before that scene, with a promise of more if he didn't keep his damn mouth shut. By that point, with the tragedy unfolding around them, nobody was willing to tolerate his stupidity.
Oh, and by 'he' I mean Lucas. No jar-jar! Bad Lucas! *thwack*
Absolutely, and it's all an after effect of the way it was presented in the media.
It's kinda like there's a big office building on fire downtown. The news reporter is standing in front of the blaze, speaking in a calm voice layed thinly over barely-contained hysterics: "As you can see behind me, the fire continues to burn! If left unchecked, this fire could spread to nearby buildings, and from there continue to spread, until eventually the entire metropolitan area is burned to the ground. From there, who knows how far it could spread! Civilization itself hangs in the balance! Flee, flee for your lives! And buy duct tape!" Meanwhile, fire fighters work like hell to put out the fire, and it eventually dies. The next day everyone is wondering what the hell the big deal was and what they are going to do with all the duct tape they bought. Feeling gullible and duped, they forget that there really could have been a disaster if the fire fighters had just sat on their thumbs watching the building burn...
I worked in IT for the large UK based pharm company and the last thing that they worried about was production cost. Yes it was a factor but so small in comparison to the rest, Why do you think Generic drugs are so widely available?
Well, my father works in a research lab and pilot plant, which gives me zero cred but from my end looks like a better source of information. The actual production is not an issue, because by the time they start full production runs they have repeatedly tested the procedure in pilot plants and ironed out all the details. That's the whole point of what the chemical engineers do -- find a way to produce the chemical in bulk as cheaply as possible. It is the development of that full-scale production procedure that is expensive, and which would be obviated by replicators.
Do you really think the cost of raw materials are what makes them *so* expensive??? The raw materials cost is miniscule, so much it's probably thought of as an oversight. Mainly costs are 2 things:
Having a father working in development of drugs, I'd say yes. The main material cost is not the starting materials, but in all the intermediate reactions that the starting materials have to go through. Some of these intermediate chemicals are extremely expensive to produce. Some chemicals can go through as many as twenty different stages, each a separate chemical requiring its own production methodology. Sometimes it takes a year of research just to figure out how to go from step 12 to step 13 in a reliable fashion. Getting small samples of an ingrediant for step 14 may cost millions and only produce enough for two or three test reactions which may fail.
So yes, being able to replicate these expensive and challenginge intermediate results, or being able to bypass their production entirely and alter molecules directly, would greatly reduce development costs of drugs.
I don't think you're fully comprehending what a replicator would do. Yes, it costs a lot to pay all these PhDs. You wouldn't have to pay them as much since the research wouldn't take as long. No waiting three years from conception to getting a small sample of the drug so that you can start trials.
In a lot of ways, a replicator would do for chemical development what a compiler does for software development, versus manually writting out the binary code. Yes, I do believe that this would drastically reduce the R&D cost of drug companies.
Which is only part of my main point, which was that a pharmaceutical should learn how to be profitable in a world in which cheap matter replication exists rather than force scarcity to remain.
Easy example: suppose the existence of a molecular replicator on a small level, i.e. a device capable of "reading" medicine and generating perfect (i.e. digitally perfect) duplicates of the original at a significantly reduced cost.
You're talking about an end of (or drastic reduction in) physical scarcity, much like how there is very little scarcity in the electronic realm. Just like copying a bit is nearly free, copying a physical molecule would be nearly free.
A developer (a person or a corporation, it doesn't matter) spends a few billion dollars to develop a medicine that perfectly cures the disease. The process is highly complex, and the procedure for making it is patented (like currently).
Do they not have replicators? Just like pressing CDs, we can assume the procedure for making the drug is "take existing sample of drug and place in replicator; push go".
Given a replicator, I would be amazed to find a drug that cost billions to develop. You would never need to run a reaction larger than what fits in a lab, and you would never need to worry about running out of rare materials or difficult to produce intermediate steps -- just replicate everything you need. If we assume that the replicator can make small changes to copied molecules, then there is no need to run any reactions at all. Just fabricate the molecule you need.
Okay, there are still costs involved in researching the drug. How does the developer recoup these costs? By selling the drug at a reasonable price. Take, for example, music: most people do want to reward the creator. Even with a price disparity of $0 vs $15, most people choose to pay $15. Yet today, in a replicator-less world, pharmaceuticals still charge so much that they not only recoup their development costs, they also recoup their 2-4x larger marketing costs, and then still post profits that are the envy of every other industry.
So how would a pharmaceutical survive in a world with replicators? Well, if they are as greedy as existing corps, they wouldn't. Good fucking riddance. If instead they wanted to charge a fair price, they would survive.
Basically, I'm curious as to what you think a capitalist system should contain to prevent this problem?
I do not consider the end of scaricity to be a problem. There are, of course, those whose power is based on scarcity and thus do see it as a problem. If the replicator is ever invented and runs as cheaply as we assume here (unlikely to put it mildly), then there will certainly be huge and horrible wars fought over the right to use the device. I tell you this right now: I will be fighting on the side that wishes to end physical scarcity and grant everyone access to replicators. Anyone who wishes to tell me I don't have the right to do this I will consider a mortal enemy.
A country's standard of living should at least not be destitute before attempting trips to the moon or Mars.
No kidding. This is just another international pissing contest, another Cold War that serves no real function. China and India are in it just as bad. Actually, India has been making some progress on poverty. China is worse.
Even pro-Republican posts that are 100% on the mark are given "troll" or "offtopic" because the left-leaning majority on/. can't bear to have a differing opinion from their own.
Please. If you actually read/. then you would know that while there is in fact an obvious liberal bias that does show up in the mods, it is quite common for a factually, intelligent post that goes against the/. "groupthink" to be modded up. That's not how the/. bias works.
The way the bias shows up is in the posts that agree with/. "groupthink" that get modded up despite not being factual or intelligent. Hell, I think a lot of not-so-intelligent dissenting posts get modded up because there are mods who seek to actively counterbalance the perceived "groupthink" effect.
I put "groupthink" in quotes because/. has a lot of users and claiming that all of them share a single perspective is pointless. Look at your post, and the GP post in question for that matter.
None of which is meant to disprove the severe craptacularity of/. mods. I'm just saying your portrayal of the situation is wrong.
Calm down; the post you replied to was full of shit. GPL 3 is aiming at better patent clauses and the web services arena where someone uses GPL software on a web server with a web interface and thus doesn't have to release code changes because they technically aren't distributing.
Requiring payment even from for-profit uses of GPL software goes against freedoms 1 and 2. RMS is nothing if not consistent, and he has never expressed dismay at people making money off of free software before.
Maybe you are right, and you will make a lot of money. You are probably wrong though.
The parent did not suggest that providing wi-fi would be profitable, so I doubt he could be found to be wrong in that claim. The claim is that a bean counter thinks it wouldn't be profitable, and thus will not provide it.
If people like you truly value a fast connection to the internet, you would move to an area where it is available. As it stands, you don't value an internet connection that much (compared to other benefits you recieve from living where you do) because you haven't moved.
I'm glad you think moving is such a non-event. You must be very fortunate to be able to either move wherever you want and keep your job, or be guaranteed to find equivalent work in any new place you move. Not everyone has that luxury, very few in fact, which makes your comment look snide and condescending.
The truth is that people like him do value an internet connection, and therefore will vote for their municipality to provide it if no corporation will. The fact that a state legislator acting on behalf of corporate lobyists was trying to ban cities from being able to vote to create wi-fi suggests that many cities would like to do so.
Why don't we provide interstates to everyones doorstep? Why don't we provide municipal water and sewer to everyone's house? There is a large list of services that aren't provided by corporations or governments in some areas because they are cost prohibitive..
We don't provide interstates to everyone's doorstep because it is physically impossible. We do provide roads to practically everyone's doorstep, and there are many, many such roads that cost more to lay down than what any for-profit corporation could extract in revenue from them. How many places in Idaho, Wyoming, Vermont, or even poor suburbs in Chicago, would have no street access whatsoever if corporations decided where it was profitable to lay down roads?
As for water, like most utilities municipal or otherwise, the users are billed for their consumption and the ones who don't use it aren't. And still more people are able to use the service if they wish than ever would if a for-profit entity had to decide whether to bury new pipes to some poor suburb.
If they weren't, people would already be buying them at a price they found reasonable.
You can't buy what isn't offered. Clearly there are people who want to be able to buy wi-fi access at a reasonable price, but they can't.
What you are asking is for everyone to buy a service that they may or may not wan't.
How the service is implemented would depend on the specific legislation creating it, which "everyone" would get to vote on, so if "everyone" doesn't want to pay, they can vote the measure down and thus won't have to. If the service is implemented like most municipal utilities, then only those who do want it would have to pay for it regardless.
The point is that if the people of a city want to have their city provide wi-fi access, then they should be able to vote to have this occur.
Well, normally it isn't too hard to pick out the flaws in an MS study. The first is usually when they claim the study isn't an MS study but rather "independent" where "independent" means "researchers who are paid by corporations to conduct studies for them".
If you can see any obvious flaws in this study that should give anyone considering the results to see if they should try it themselves, I welcome you to do so.
OOo is quite similar to Office, and I doubt most people will find the differences to matter in business. Frankly, if students do learn these differences and are able to adapt to Office, then they will be ahead of the tech curve by knowing more than one interface and thus being able to generalize, making them more effective at learning new features/programs rather than being paralyzed by change. It is the fear of something different that makes OOo and other MS alternatives unacceptable, not any practical business or money-making rational.
I don't know a single person I'd call technically competent who is only able to use one word processor, spreadsheet, IDE, CAD tool, whatever to the exclusion of all others. The tech curve is not static, and knowing one thing (even if it is the most popular) is to handicap yourself when that curve moves beyond what you know.
MS Tax or no, I consider this to be doing the students a favor.
Sorry, AC. Larry made it perfectly clear who can't be trusted by changing terms. Nobody in the OSS realm betrayed any trust; the one who ticked off Larry by writing a replacement was never a party to the agreement not to. This just shows how proprietary software can't be trusted. And the writing is, indeed, on the wall for that too.
Re:That's just silly. And here's why.
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McVoy Strikes Back
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· Score: 1
Larry doesn't care that there are open source version control systems, he cares that other people are copying his solution.
And why should I care?
Okay, your point may not be that I should care. It does illuminate why Larry cares though -- with development of an open source replacement for BK the writing is on the wall for him and his per-seat licenses.
Imagine the reprinting costs alone, not to mention customer confusion, disappearing brand loyalty and reputation,
I think you would find it unsurprising if I said that for many of the kind of companies who can't come up with anything better to improve themselves than to change their name, disappearing reputation can be a worthwhile goal.
By the way, what's Arthur Anderson calling themselves these days?
It would be funny if they discovered the appendix in fact housed the soul. "And all this time we thought it was relatively useless!"
Hmm... That would be pretty hilarious. Especially because our appendix has been shrinking for quite some time because, evolutionarily speaking, it is pretty useless to us. Which would pretty much confirm the suspicions i have about humans and their souls...
analysts estimate that the software industry has lost $50 billion last year due to buggy software, unappealing upgrades, draconic licenses, BSA raids against customers, and excessively high prices making people not want to buy their shit.
"Lost revenue" is such a weasel phrase. It's basically a lie -- that money was never headed in their direction, they just want to claim the possibility that someone might have bought their software but endeded up not as a "loss" so they can look like victims.
Well, you want to be able to fire it remotely, right? Not IP of course, but a signal of some kind. Figure out the right signal and... Unless you want to put a person up there, so they can make sure they aren't firing at Nebraska. There could still be attempts to trick them. I can imagine the episode of Outer Limits now...
Oh, that's funny. And it involves space! Reality is worse, and scarier.
For the sake of argument, let's call "anyone" North Korea. Now, we know they've been collecting weapons-grade materials and the scientific knowledge for building them (thanks to our best buds in the War on Terror, Pakistan). We know they haven't tested one yet. You know when someone does, like we did with India and Pakistan. All you need is a seismograph. But that doesn't mean they haven't built any, or that they don't work.
True lunatics aside (typically not rational enough to amass power), Kim Jong may be crazy but he isn't stupid enough to launch a missle at the U.S. Assuming he survived the retaliation, he'd be ruling over roaches in a glass parking lot with an iron fist.
Why even use missles, which are hard, when they can use infiltration, which they are already good at. If they had a strategic target, they could get it there in a suitcase or a freight container. They could even do it before they're tested, and use a subsequent test to verify the design. Since your first test is your announcement of having weapons, it may be worth the risk to also have the capability to threaten with them at the same time.
The thing is, MAD works. U.S.S.R., U.S.A., India, Pakistan, have all found out how well. Even when war breaks out, it tends to be reigned in (or by proxy, yay!), as both sides want to avoid escalating it to the nuclear level at all costs. However, if it became clear an invasion of NK was inevitable then it would absolutely be in Kim Jong's interest to have a nuke in Manhatten and to let us know he had put it there. MAD may work very well once North Korea goes nuclear. The question is, what do we do about it?
Before you ask, I'll readily admit I don't have an answer. It's a tricky problem. However, if you're answer is "space lasers", I still think I'm entitled to say your answer sucks.
The tiny handles make my hands hurt after only 20 minutes or so.
Yeah, I could see that being a problem (I have small hands myself, which is why something like the original xbox controller is simply unusable for me -- I literally cannot reach the joystick!). This was another place the N64 did it right -- it had bulbous handles, fatter at the end and getting narrower toward the top. Big handed people held the big part, and small handed people held it closer to the top where it was narrower and they could reach the buttons/joystick.
I will always need to look at the controller every time I need to press anything other than Triangle.
Heh, yeah. The random symbols are truly stupid, at least for learning controls or on-screen prompts. Once I know the controls of course it doesn't matter.
I have no problem reaching any of the buttons
I have problems reaching them quickly. Doing the more difficult combos in Soul Calibur still drives me nuts. They are easy to remember, though.
with the exception of the Z button. (Incidentally, it was added at the begging of developers. Which developers? I've yet to play a game where it serves a meaningful function!)
Yeah, it's retarded. I wish they had gone with an N64-like Z-trigger under the handle that you hit with the middle finger. Zelda uses it for one of your item slots, so I always put the spyglass there since I never need it in the middle of a fight.
The L and R buttons are incredible for any game that has a good use for them.
My only issue with L and R is that it takes too much force to make them "click". As analog triggers or for digital use when a slight tap counts as "on", they're great. For games that require full depression to activate, it can get tiring to use them.
Slashdot Mirror
While the rate of reviews is dissapointing, nothing I've found beats the quality of Ace's Hardware.
Tom's is crap, and has been for about six years now, and is steadily getting worse. Anand was better, but is slipping. Techreport is okay, as is Ars Technica. Avoid Tom's. Practically everyone there is incompetent.
So, we're going to go to Mars on a timetable that completely eliminates any accountability for him, while spending tremendous amounts of money on this, but we can't give NASA the funding to keep the Hubble, which will hold the title of greatest astronomical instrument ever for at least another ten years, from burning up on reentry?
Yeah, he's real dedicated to space. Mars/Moon is a boondogle designed to make Bush look like Kennedy. He wants to be a visionary without the annoying aspect of actually implementing said vision getting in his way like it did with his World of Democracy vision.
If any of the headlines you said were actually true, and not cynical half-hearted attempts to look like he's doing what you said, I'd applaud them. Instead, his energy plan consists of drilling in the ANWR and building more coal plants.
I'm willing to give credit where it is due. I hate Clinton, but I was pretty pleased when he relaxed cryptography export restrictions, just as an example So, out of curiosity, what exactly should I be giving Bush credit for?
Yeah, and an orchestra lead by John Williams follows everybody around.
Watching the movie, I was really hoping for a Blazing Saddles moment where they fly by the open hangar of a ship and there's a huge orchestra charging along with battle music as ships are destroyed around them...
Strangely enough he couldn't eat with manners at the table but he can keep his foolishness under wraps for the 5 seconds he's in a funeral parade in RotS.
That was because of the savage stick-beating he was given just before that scene, with a promise of more if he didn't keep his damn mouth shut. By that point, with the tragedy unfolding around them, nobody was willing to tolerate his stupidity.
Oh, and by 'he' I mean Lucas. No jar-jar! Bad Lucas! *thwack*
Absolutely, and it's all an after effect of the way it was presented in the media.
It's kinda like there's a big office building on fire downtown. The news reporter is standing in front of the blaze, speaking in a calm voice layed thinly over barely-contained hysterics: "As you can see behind me, the fire continues to burn! If left unchecked, this fire could spread to nearby buildings, and from there continue to spread, until eventually the entire metropolitan area is burned to the ground. From there, who knows how far it could spread! Civilization itself hangs in the balance! Flee, flee for your lives! And buy duct tape!" Meanwhile, fire fighters work like hell to put out the fire, and it eventually dies. The next day everyone is wondering what the hell the big deal was and what they are going to do with all the duct tape they bought. Feeling gullible and duped, they forget that there really could have been a disaster if the fire fighters had just sat on their thumbs watching the building burn...
I worked in IT for the large UK based pharm company and the last thing that they worried about was production cost. Yes it was a factor but so small in comparison to the rest, Why do you think Generic drugs are so widely available?
Well, my father works in a research lab and pilot plant, which gives me zero cred but from my end looks like a better source of information. The actual production is not an issue, because by the time they start full production runs they have repeatedly tested the procedure in pilot plants and ironed out all the details. That's the whole point of what the chemical engineers do -- find a way to produce the chemical in bulk as cheaply as possible. It is the development of that full-scale production procedure that is expensive, and which would be obviated by replicators.
Do you really think the cost of raw materials are what makes them *so* expensive??? The raw materials cost is miniscule, so much it's probably thought of as an oversight. Mainly costs are 2 things:
Having a father working in development of drugs, I'd say yes. The main material cost is not the starting materials, but in all the intermediate reactions that the starting materials have to go through. Some of these intermediate chemicals are extremely expensive to produce. Some chemicals can go through as many as twenty different stages, each a separate chemical requiring its own production methodology. Sometimes it takes a year of research just to figure out how to go from step 12 to step 13 in a reliable fashion. Getting small samples of an ingrediant for step 14 may cost millions and only produce enough for two or three test reactions which may fail.
So yes, being able to replicate these expensive and challenginge intermediate results, or being able to bypass their production entirely and alter molecules directly, would greatly reduce development costs of drugs.
I don't think you're fully comprehending what a replicator would do. Yes, it costs a lot to pay all these PhDs. You wouldn't have to pay them as much since the research wouldn't take as long. No waiting three years from conception to getting a small sample of the drug so that you can start trials.
In a lot of ways, a replicator would do for chemical development what a compiler does for software development, versus manually writting out the binary code. Yes, I do believe that this would drastically reduce the R&D cost of drug companies.
Which is only part of my main point, which was that a pharmaceutical should learn how to be profitable in a world in which cheap matter replication exists rather than force scarcity to remain.
Easy example: suppose the existence of a molecular replicator on a small level, i.e. a device capable of "reading" medicine and generating perfect (i.e. digitally perfect) duplicates of the original at a significantly reduced cost.
You're talking about an end of (or drastic reduction in) physical scarcity, much like how there is very little scarcity in the electronic realm. Just like copying a bit is nearly free, copying a physical molecule would be nearly free.
A developer (a person or a corporation, it doesn't matter) spends a few billion dollars to develop a medicine that perfectly cures the disease. The process is highly complex, and the procedure for making it is patented (like currently).
Do they not have replicators? Just like pressing CDs, we can assume the procedure for making the drug is "take existing sample of drug and place in replicator; push go".
Given a replicator, I would be amazed to find a drug that cost billions to develop. You would never need to run a reaction larger than what fits in a lab, and you would never need to worry about running out of rare materials or difficult to produce intermediate steps -- just replicate everything you need. If we assume that the replicator can make small changes to copied molecules, then there is no need to run any reactions at all. Just fabricate the molecule you need.
Okay, there are still costs involved in researching the drug. How does the developer recoup these costs? By selling the drug at a reasonable price. Take, for example, music: most people do want to reward the creator. Even with a price disparity of $0 vs $15, most people choose to pay $15. Yet today, in a replicator-less world, pharmaceuticals still charge so much that they not only recoup their development costs, they also recoup their 2-4x larger marketing costs, and then still post profits that are the envy of every other industry.
So how would a pharmaceutical survive in a world with replicators? Well, if they are as greedy as existing corps, they wouldn't. Good fucking riddance. If instead they wanted to charge a fair price, they would survive.
Basically, I'm curious as to what you think a capitalist system should contain to prevent this problem?
I do not consider the end of scaricity to be a problem. There are, of course, those whose power is based on scarcity and thus do see it as a problem. If the replicator is ever invented and runs as cheaply as we assume here (unlikely to put it mildly), then there will certainly be huge and horrible wars fought over the right to use the device. I tell you this right now: I will be fighting on the side that wishes to end physical scarcity and grant everyone access to replicators. Anyone who wishes to tell me I don't have the right to do this I will consider a mortal enemy.
A country's standard of living should at least not be destitute before attempting trips to the moon or Mars.
No kidding. This is just another international pissing contest, another Cold War that serves no real function. China and India are in it just as bad. Actually, India has been making some progress on poverty. China is worse.
Even pro-Republican posts that are 100% on the mark are given "troll" or "offtopic" because the left-leaning majority on /. can't bear to have a differing opinion from their own.
/. then you would know that while there is in fact an obvious liberal bias that does show up in the mods, it is quite common for a factually, intelligent post that goes against the /. "groupthink" to be modded up. That's not how the /. bias works.
/. "groupthink" that get modded up despite not being factual or intelligent. Hell, I think a lot of not-so-intelligent dissenting posts get modded up because there are mods who seek to actively counterbalance the perceived "groupthink" effect.
/. has a lot of users and claiming that all of them share a single perspective is pointless. Look at your post, and the GP post in question for that matter.
/. mods. I'm just saying your portrayal of the situation is wrong.
Please. If you actually read
The way the bias shows up is in the posts that agree with
I put "groupthink" in quotes because
None of which is meant to disprove the severe craptacularity of
Here's my contribution:
#include <stdio.h>
You stole my code, you bastard! You'll be hearing from my lawyers.
Calm down; the post you replied to was full of shit. GPL 3 is aiming at better patent clauses and the web services arena where someone uses GPL software on a web server with a web interface and thus doesn't have to release code changes because they technically aren't distributing.
Requiring payment even from for-profit uses of GPL software goes against freedoms 1 and 2. RMS is nothing if not consistent, and he has never expressed dismay at people making money off of free software before.
Maybe you are right, and you will make a lot of money. You are probably wrong though.
.
The parent did not suggest that providing wi-fi would be profitable, so I doubt he could be found to be wrong in that claim. The claim is that a bean counter thinks it wouldn't be profitable, and thus will not provide it.
If people like you truly value a fast connection to the internet, you would move to an area where it is available. As it stands, you don't value an internet connection that much (compared to other benefits you recieve from living where you do) because you haven't moved.
I'm glad you think moving is such a non-event. You must be very fortunate to be able to either move wherever you want and keep your job, or be guaranteed to find equivalent work in any new place you move. Not everyone has that luxury, very few in fact, which makes your comment look snide and condescending.
The truth is that people like him do value an internet connection, and therefore will vote for their municipality to provide it if no corporation will. The fact that a state legislator acting on behalf of corporate lobyists was trying to ban cities from being able to vote to create wi-fi suggests that many cities would like to do so.
Why don't we provide interstates to everyones doorstep? Why don't we provide municipal water and sewer to everyone's house? There is a large list of services that aren't provided by corporations or governments in some areas because they are cost prohibitive.
We don't provide interstates to everyone's doorstep because it is physically impossible. We do provide roads to practically everyone's doorstep, and there are many, many such roads that cost more to lay down than what any for-profit corporation could extract in revenue from them. How many places in Idaho, Wyoming, Vermont, or even poor suburbs in Chicago, would have no street access whatsoever if corporations decided where it was profitable to lay down roads?
As for water, like most utilities municipal or otherwise, the users are billed for their consumption and the ones who don't use it aren't. And still more people are able to use the service if they wish than ever would if a for-profit entity had to decide whether to bury new pipes to some poor suburb.
If they weren't, people would already be buying them at a price they found reasonable.
You can't buy what isn't offered. Clearly there are people who want to be able to buy wi-fi access at a reasonable price, but they can't.
What you are asking is for everyone to buy a service that they may or may not wan't.
How the service is implemented would depend on the specific legislation creating it, which "everyone" would get to vote on, so if "everyone" doesn't want to pay, they can vote the measure down and thus won't have to. If the service is implemented like most municipal utilities, then only those who do want it would have to pay for it regardless.
The point is that if the people of a city want to have their city provide wi-fi access, then they should be able to vote to have this occur.
Well, normally it isn't too hard to pick out the flaws in an MS study. The first is usually when they claim the study isn't an MS study but rather "independent" where "independent" means "researchers who are paid by corporations to conduct studies for them".
If you can see any obvious flaws in this study that should give anyone considering the results to see if they should try it themselves, I welcome you to do so.
OOo is quite similar to Office, and I doubt most people will find the differences to matter in business. Frankly, if students do learn these differences and are able to adapt to Office, then they will be ahead of the tech curve by knowing more than one interface and thus being able to generalize, making them more effective at learning new features/programs rather than being paralyzed by change. It is the fear of something different that makes OOo and other MS alternatives unacceptable, not any practical business or money-making rational.
I don't know a single person I'd call technically competent who is only able to use one word processor, spreadsheet, IDE, CAD tool, whatever to the exclusion of all others. The tech curve is not static, and knowing one thing (even if it is the most popular) is to handicap yourself when that curve moves beyond what you know.
MS Tax or no, I consider this to be doing the students a favor.
Sorry, AC. Larry made it perfectly clear who can't be trusted by changing terms. Nobody in the OSS realm betrayed any trust; the one who ticked off Larry by writing a replacement was never a party to the agreement not to. This just shows how proprietary software can't be trusted. And the writing is, indeed, on the wall for that too.
Larry doesn't care that there are open source version control systems, he cares that other people are copying his solution.
And why should I care?
Okay, your point may not be that I should care. It does illuminate why Larry cares though -- with development of an open source replacement for BK the writing is on the wall for him and his per-seat licenses.
Imagine the reprinting costs alone, not to mention customer confusion, disappearing brand loyalty and reputation,
I think you would find it unsurprising if I said that for many of the kind of companies who can't come up with anything better to improve themselves than to change their name, disappearing reputation can be a worthwhile goal.
By the way, what's Arthur Anderson calling themselves these days?
It would be funny if they discovered the appendix in fact housed the soul. "And all this time we thought it was relatively useless!"
Hmm... That would be pretty hilarious. Especially because our appendix has been shrinking for quite some time because, evolutionarily speaking, it is pretty useless to us. Which would pretty much confirm the suspicions i have about humans and their souls...
analysts estimate that the software industry has lost $50 billion last year due to buggy software, unappealing upgrades, draconic licenses, BSA raids against customers, and excessively high prices making people not want to buy their shit.
"Lost revenue" is such a weasel phrase. It's basically a lie -- that money was never headed in their direction, they just want to claim the possibility that someone might have bought their software but endeded up not as a "loss" so they can look like victims.
Well, you want to be able to fire it remotely, right? Not IP of course, but a signal of some kind. Figure out the right signal and... Unless you want to put a person up there, so they can make sure they aren't firing at Nebraska. There could still be attempts to trick them. I can imagine the episode of Outer Limits now...
Oh, that's funny. And it involves space! Reality is worse, and scarier.
For the sake of argument, let's call "anyone" North Korea. Now, we know they've been collecting weapons-grade materials and the scientific knowledge for building them (thanks to our best buds in the War on Terror, Pakistan). We know they haven't tested one yet. You know when someone does, like we did with India and Pakistan. All you need is a seismograph. But that doesn't mean they haven't built any, or that they don't work.
True lunatics aside (typically not rational enough to amass power), Kim Jong may be crazy but he isn't stupid enough to launch a missle at the U.S. Assuming he survived the retaliation, he'd be ruling over roaches in a glass parking lot with an iron fist.
Why even use missles, which are hard, when they can use infiltration, which they are already good at. If they had a strategic target, they could get it there in a suitcase or a freight container. They could even do it before they're tested, and use a subsequent test to verify the design. Since your first test is your announcement of having weapons, it may be worth the risk to also have the capability to threaten with them at the same time.
The thing is, MAD works. U.S.S.R., U.S.A., India, Pakistan, have all found out how well. Even when war breaks out, it tends to be reigned in (or by proxy, yay!), as both sides want to avoid escalating it to the nuclear level at all costs. However, if it became clear an invasion of NK was inevitable then it would absolutely be in Kim Jong's interest to have a nuke in Manhatten and to let us know he had put it there. MAD may work very well once North Korea goes nuclear. The question is, what do we do about it?
Before you ask, I'll readily admit I don't have an answer. It's a tricky problem. However, if you're answer is "space lasers", I still think I'm entitled to say your answer sucks.
No matter how far we develop our technology, not only will we be using it to kill someone, but on some level, it's still "Hit guy with rock."
Still? What's wrong with "Hit guy with rock"? I love "Hit guy with rock"!
I'll also acknowledge that the L and R buttons are sometimes used improperly...that's incredibly annoying.
Yeah, and like the A.C. said, this "flaw" is really the developer's fault, not the controller's.
The tiny handles make my hands hurt after only 20 minutes or so.
Yeah, I could see that being a problem (I have small hands myself, which is why something like the original xbox controller is simply unusable for me -- I literally cannot reach the joystick!). This was another place the N64 did it right -- it had bulbous handles, fatter at the end and getting narrower toward the top. Big handed people held the big part, and small handed people held it closer to the top where it was narrower and they could reach the buttons/joystick.
I will always need to look at the controller every time I need to press anything other than Triangle.
Heh, yeah. The random symbols are truly stupid, at least for learning controls or on-screen prompts. Once I know the controls of course it doesn't matter.
I have no problem reaching any of the buttons
I have problems reaching them quickly. Doing the more difficult combos in Soul Calibur still drives me nuts. They are easy to remember, though.
with the exception of the Z button. (Incidentally, it was added at the begging of developers. Which developers? I've yet to play a game where it serves a meaningful function!)
Yeah, it's retarded. I wish they had gone with an N64-like Z-trigger under the handle that you hit with the middle finger. Zelda uses it for one of your item slots, so I always put the spyglass there since I never need it in the middle of a fight.
The L and R buttons are incredible for any game that has a good use for them.
My only issue with L and R is that it takes too much force to make them "click". As analog triggers or for digital use when a slight tap counts as "on", they're great. For games that require full depression to activate, it can get tiring to use them.