Um, optimization doesn't necessarily mean that there is no user-perceptable difference. In graphics, one of the main optimization techniques is to degrade quality in ways that you hope the user doesn't notice. If the user does notice, than you get a bad rep for quality, but its not cheating per se.
That's why I think TrollTech's scheme is a very good idea. For something like $1500 a developer, you get a complete, cross-platform application framework. Given that a large commercial shop probably payed thousands of dollars for their other development tool licenses (Visual Studio, Perforce, Rose, etc) I don't think $1500 is that much of a burden.
I've got a really good long term memory. I can remember pretty much everything from age two onwards. Besides that, I go back every so often, mostly to eat:)
Of course, what you're paying needs to be scaled. A simple dollar->rupee conversion isn't sufficient. Stuff in these countries is just cheaper, even taking into account currency differences. A man making $70,000 in the US is middle class. One making that much in India is very well-to-do. So even though you are paying less in American dollars, you're probably getting a developer that's just as qualified.
It's nice to see technology being applied to making the food industry more humane. However, I must use this opportunity to bitch about the quality of meat in the US. The poultry here, at least the stuff you buy at Giant or Safeway, sucks. Totally bland and tasteless. My family lived in Bangladesh until I was 4 or so. There, it takes six months to get a chicken ready for sale. Here, thanks to all the growth hormones, it takes a few weeks. In the process, the chicken is robbed of all flavor. When we moved here, it took me months to get used to the chicken here. Even now, the only way I can stand it is to cook it in tons of spices or deep fry it in grease.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but it isn't pleasent. C++ compilers are *slow*! And god help you if you change a header file and invoke recompilation of a couple of dozen template-heavy source files!
While I understand why you might use GTK+, so you have flexibility to change things in the future, and I personally think that's just peachy, you can understand why the FSF might prefer that you use a GPL library instead.
Actually, if you just use GTK+, then the LGPL says you can link to it without opening your source. Since Qt is GPL'ed, you can't link to it without opening your source.
Do you people do any *work* with your CPUs? Scientific computing, programming, gaming, graphics, mathematics, simulations, engineering, among other fields, all take more CPU power than is currently available. I'd be willing to bet that the number of people who use those types of applications make up more than 5%, and more importantly, make up far more than 5% in terms of how much revenue they generate for computer companies.
They're following the rules completely, even by the spirit of the GPL. If you're willing to comply with the GPL (ie. release your source) then great, you get to use Qt. If you don't want to release your code under the GPL, then you can pay TrollTech some money and they'll give you an alternate license you can use. Indeed, according to FSF ideology, Qt is doing the right thing and GTK+ is doing the wrong thing. Using the Lesser GNU Public License is discouraged unless necessary. The FSF doesn't really like it, because it encourages proprietory software. Using the GPL for libraries is encouraged because it creates highly desirable libraries that only GPL apps can use.
Psychological studies have shown that humans can remember seven basic units of information in their head at once, no matter what the basic units are. They could be words (lots of bits) or true/false values (few bits), it doesn't make a difference.
I have a very hard time believing that your I8500 gets anywhere near 3 hours of battery life. My I8200 is lucky to make it to 2, and that's with 802.11b off! Anyway, I wasn't talking about the Powerbook so much as the new iBooks. Those are most definately lighter, cooler, etc than the Inspirons.
The philosophy upon which our government is built does not recognize ideas to be the same thing as personal property, and thus the government does not have the same obligation to protect it as it does with your basic rights like life, freedom, etc. If you don't agree with that philosophy (I'd be hesitent, at least, to disagree with the likes of Jefferson and Locke, but that's just me) you can go live somewhere else:)
Geez, I never that I'd get to say that to someone else for a change!
Further, the copyright exists not so much to protect the rights of individuals, but to make sure that the good of society is served by the creation of art and literature. It was decided that a limited copyright, which is a restriction on the freedom of the people, was necessary for the overall good of society. The question of copyright length is a question of where the balance point is. The number of authors producing work does not scale linearly with the length of the copyright.
Thus, there is a point where the copyright term gets so long that the more work is being kept out of the public domain than can be justified by the number of additional works being created as a result of the increase copyright term.
It is at that point that the copyright term should be set.
Don't I have the right to profit for the rest of my life from my work? >>>>>>>>>>>>&g t; No. A man can work in the fields for thousands of hours, or work on a sculpture for thousands of hours, and profit from it only as much as he can do so directly. And after he sells his creation to someone else, he has no right to control what that person does with it. I don't see why a book should be any different.
Now, our system of government is based on certain British, French, and German philosophies. In particular, it is assumed that in the state of nature, people are free to do whatever they want without external restrictions. It is only because the state of nature does not exist in a pure form that a government is allowed to make certain restrictions on everyone to protect the individual. Thus, your copyright is a favor the government has done for you, by restricting the right of everyone else to make as many copies as they want of pieces of paper. It is most definately *not* a right you are entitled to.
IP is an asset as well. >>>>>>> That's a circular arguement. By calling it IP (intellectual property) you assume its property to begin with. Rephrase it: "knowledge is an asset as well." Now consider: an asset, in this sense, means something that can be controlled, manipulated, restricted, etc. Do you really want to live in a world where you can do that to knowledge? Knowledge exists on a higher plane than money and property. The latter represents the sorry state of human existance as it is now. The former represents the perpetual struggle to advance human existance to what it should be.
While I don't agree with everything you say, I must make one point: if someone offered me a Radeon 9800 Pro to replace my GeForce4MX, I wouldn't -- couldn't. I run Linux. The ATI Linux drivers blow compared to the ATI Windows drivers. For more important, to me, than any cheating NVIDIA might or might not have done, is that NVIDIA has a history of releasing quality products, at decent prices, with good driver support. Further, they were the first company to release OpenGL ICDs for consumer-level cards that were conformant enough to perform well with pro-level apps. They were, and still are, also the first consumer graphics card company whose Linux drivers matched their Windows drivers in performance. ATI's driver situation has gotten better, but until ATI can equal NVIDIA's driver prowess, I'm one loyal NVIDIA customer.
Hmm. High end OpenGL drivers have had application-specific optimizations for years. It so happend that some of these applications were also used as benchmarks, but nobody bitched about it then. The whole issue really is a lot cloudier than people are making it out to be.
One key point, though: NVIDIA's shader precision is much higher than ATI's at its highest settings. NVIDIA's middle precision, however, is lower than ATI's maximum. This means that comparing the performance of the two is kind of a crap shot, because you can't configure the two to use the same precision.
Heh. A guy with an Inspiron should be the first person to understand the benifets of an Apple laptop:
1) Small 2) Light 3) Power efficient 4) Cool (as in not burning hot) 5) Well built.
All things that the Inspiron most definately isn't. Of course, I love my I8200 dearly, because of its capabilities as a portable workstation, but if I didn't need the power (and Apple would get with the '00s and finally start bundling those gorgeous UXGA screens:), I would definately get a machine that didn't need dual 8000 RPM fans just to keep the temperature at "mildy scalding."
Not really. Every new generation of chip is engineered to run at a given clock speed. So say you have a 3GHz, 2.8GHz, and 2.6GHz set of CPUs. The CPU line is engineered to run at 3GHz. However, variations in the build quality of each unit means that not all CPUs can reliably run at that speed. So these CPUs are released as 2.8 and 2.6 GHz models. If Apple is using 1.25's at 1.47 GHz (a fact which I can neither confirm nor deny, as I don't own a Mac) then they're taking a CPU engineered to run at 1.25 GHz, and running them at a higher speed.
Hmm, did you initialize (format) the Windows partition with BFS? It doesn't seem humanly possible to have trouble installing BeOS. There are something like 5 options in the entire installer! All supported hardware is autodetected. OTOH, you might just have bought a bad CD. If you're interested, check out the BeOS 5 PE (personal edition) which is flying around on the net. It limits you to 512MB, but you can install it to a file in your windows system (if you have a FAT32 system lying around) which is enough to give you a taste of how it works.
PS> The manual was cool. The JLG worship is a little creepy, but so is the Jobs worshiping from the Mac camp. Either way, the manual was quite detailed, and very instructive for those new to BeOS, or computing in general.
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Um, optimization doesn't necessarily mean that there is no user-perceptable difference. In graphics, one of the main optimization techniques is to degrade quality in ways that you hope the user doesn't notice. If the user does notice, than you get a bad rep for quality, but its not cheating per se.
That's why I think TrollTech's scheme is a very good idea. For something like $1500 a developer, you get a complete, cross-platform application framework. Given that a large commercial shop probably payed thousands of dollars for their other development tool licenses (Visual Studio, Perforce, Rose, etc) I don't think $1500 is that much of a burden.
I've got a really good long term memory. I can remember pretty much everything from age two onwards. Besides that, I go back every so often, mostly to eat :)
Of course, what you're paying needs to be scaled. A simple dollar->rupee conversion isn't sufficient. Stuff in these countries is just cheaper, even taking into account currency differences. A man making $70,000 in the US is middle class. One making that much in India is very well-to-do. So even though you are paying less in American dollars, you're probably getting a developer that's just as qualified.
It's nice to see technology being applied to making the food industry more humane. However, I must use this opportunity to bitch about the quality of meat in the US. The poultry here, at least the stuff you buy at Giant or Safeway, sucks. Totally bland and tasteless. My family lived in Bangladesh until I was 4 or so. There, it takes six months to get a chicken ready for sale. Here, thanks to all the growth hormones, it takes a few weeks. In the process, the chicken is robbed of all flavor. When we moved here, it took me months to get used to the chicken here. Even now, the only way I can stand it is to cook it in tons of spices or deep fry it in grease.
In theory, though, something like XML is flexible enough to support the entire format.
Note: if you're "releasing" to entities within the same corporation (subdivisions and the like) you don't have to release any sources.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but it isn't pleasent. C++ compilers are *slow*! And god help you if you change a header file and invoke recompilation of a couple of dozen template-heavy source files!
While I understand why you might use GTK+, so you have flexibility to change things in the future, and I personally think that's just peachy, you can understand why the FSF might prefer that you use a GPL library instead.
Actually, if you just use GTK+, then the LGPL says you can link to it without opening your source. Since Qt is GPL'ed, you can't link to it without opening your source.
Do you people do any *work* with your CPUs? Scientific computing, programming, gaming, graphics, mathematics, simulations, engineering, among other fields, all take more CPU power than is currently available. I'd be willing to bet that the number of people who use those types of applications make up more than 5%, and more importantly, make up far more than 5% in terms of how much revenue they generate for computer companies.
Um, its not 1998 anymore. Qt has been open source for about half a decade now! Beyond that, it's been under the GPL for several years.
They're following the rules completely, even by the spirit of the GPL. If you're willing to comply with the GPL (ie. release your source) then great, you get to use Qt. If you don't want to release your code under the GPL, then you can pay TrollTech some money and they'll give you an alternate license you can use. Indeed, according to FSF ideology, Qt is doing the right thing and GTK+ is doing the wrong thing. Using the Lesser GNU Public License is discouraged unless necessary. The FSF doesn't really like it, because it encourages proprietory software. Using the GPL for libraries is encouraged because it creates highly desirable libraries that only GPL apps can use.
Psychological studies have shown that humans can remember seven basic units of information in their head at once, no matter what the basic units are. They could be words (lots of bits) or true/false values (few bits), it doesn't make a difference.
I have a very hard time believing that your I8500 gets anywhere near 3 hours of battery life. My I8200 is lucky to make it to 2, and that's with 802.11b off! Anyway, I wasn't talking about the Powerbook so much as the new iBooks. Those are most definately lighter, cooler, etc than the Inspirons.
The philosophy upon which our government is built does not recognize ideas to be the same thing as personal property, and thus the government does not have the same obligation to protect it as it does with your basic rights like life, freedom, etc. If you don't agree with that philosophy (I'd be hesitent, at least, to disagree with the likes of Jefferson and Locke, but that's just me) you can go live somewhere else :)
Geez, I never that I'd get to say that to someone else for a change!
To add on to my previous post:
Further, the copyright exists not so much to protect the rights of individuals, but to make sure that the good of society is served by the creation of art and literature. It was decided that a limited copyright, which is a restriction on the freedom of the people, was necessary for the overall good of society. The question of copyright length is a question of where the balance point is. The number of authors producing work does not scale linearly with the length of the copyright.
Thus, there is a point where the copyright term gets so long that the more work is being kept out of the public domain than can be justified by the number of additional works being created as a result of the increase copyright term.
It is at that point that the copyright term should be set.
Don't I have the right to profit for the rest of my life from my work?
>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;
No. A man can work in the fields for thousands of hours, or work on a sculpture for thousands of hours, and profit from it only as much as he can do so directly. And after he sells his creation to someone else, he has no right to control what that person does with it. I don't see why a book should be any different.
Now, our system of government is based on certain British, French, and German philosophies. In particular, it is assumed that in the state of nature, people are free to do whatever they want without external restrictions. It is only because the state of nature does not exist in a pure form that a government is allowed to make certain restrictions on everyone to protect the individual. Thus, your copyright is a favor the government has done for you, by restricting the right of everyone else to make as many copies as they want of pieces of paper. It is most definately *not* a right you are entitled to.
IP is an asset as well.
>>>>>>>
That's a circular arguement. By calling it IP (intellectual property) you assume its property to begin with. Rephrase it:
"knowledge is an asset as well." Now consider: an asset, in this sense, means something that can be controlled, manipulated, restricted, etc. Do you really want to live in a world where you can do that to knowledge? Knowledge exists on a higher plane than money and property. The latter represents the sorry state of human existance as it is now. The former represents the perpetual struggle to advance human existance to what it should be.
While I don't agree with everything you say, I must make one point: if someone offered me a Radeon 9800 Pro to replace my GeForce4MX, I wouldn't -- couldn't. I run Linux. The ATI Linux drivers blow compared to the ATI Windows drivers. For more important, to me, than any cheating NVIDIA might or might not have done, is that NVIDIA has a history of releasing quality products, at decent prices, with good driver support. Further, they were the first company to release OpenGL ICDs for consumer-level cards that were conformant enough to perform well with pro-level apps. They were, and still are, also the first consumer graphics card company whose Linux drivers matched their Windows drivers in performance. ATI's driver situation has gotten better, but until ATI can equal NVIDIA's driver prowess, I'm one loyal NVIDIA customer.
Hmm. High end OpenGL drivers have had application-specific optimizations for years. It so happend that some of these applications were also used as benchmarks, but nobody bitched about it then. The whole issue really is a lot cloudier than people are making it out to be.
One key point, though: NVIDIA's shader precision is much higher than ATI's at its highest settings. NVIDIA's middle precision, however, is lower than ATI's maximum. This means that comparing the performance of the two is kind of a crap shot, because you can't configure the two to use the same precision.
Heh. A guy with an Inspiron should be the first person to understand the benifets of an Apple laptop:
:), I would definately get a machine that didn't need dual 8000 RPM fans just to keep the temperature at "mildy scalding."
1) Small
2) Light
3) Power efficient
4) Cool (as in not burning hot)
5) Well built.
All things that the Inspiron most definately isn't. Of course, I love my I8200 dearly, because of its capabilities as a portable workstation, but if I didn't need the power (and Apple would get with the '00s and finally start bundling those gorgeous UXGA screens
Not really. Every new generation of chip is engineered to run at a given clock speed. So say you have a 3GHz, 2.8GHz, and 2.6GHz set of CPUs. The CPU line is engineered to run at 3GHz. However, variations in the build quality of each unit means that not all CPUs can reliably run at that speed. So these CPUs are released as 2.8 and 2.6 GHz models. If Apple is using 1.25's at 1.47 GHz (a fact which I can neither confirm nor deny, as I don't own a Mac) then they're taking a CPU engineered to run at 1.25 GHz, and running them at a higher speed.
Hmm, did you initialize (format) the Windows partition with BFS? It doesn't seem humanly possible to have trouble installing BeOS. There are something like 5 options in the entire installer! All supported hardware is autodetected. OTOH, you might just have bought a bad CD. If you're interested, check out the BeOS 5 PE (personal edition) which is flying around on the net. It limits you to 512MB, but you can install it to a file in your windows system (if you have a FAT32 system lying around) which is enough to give you a taste of how it works.
PS> The manual was cool. The JLG worship is a little creepy, but so is the Jobs worshiping from the Mac camp. Either way, the manual was quite detailed, and very instructive for those new to BeOS, or computing in general.