Asking "why" presupposes a reason and in a lot of cases there isn't one
no and yes.
Asking 'Why, or is there an answer at all' is the right statement of the question.
In mathematics, a solution of "Solution does not exist" supported by a correct proof is a perfectly satisfactory answer.
I see no reason why in philosophy a similar answer wouldn't be okay: 'There's no reason, and here's the logical proof.' A problem with no solution is still a problem, and we can cease search for the solution only when we find one, or we're positively sure none exists.
It was simple, but masterfully done. A story of a hundred plotlines may be just 'inedible', boring. A short, concise, to the point story may be great. Portal had a very standard plot, but the mood was amazing - it was a comedy-horror mix, with the horror part dominating the comedy part, each complimenting the other and the mood being ultimately confusing, a feeling of conflict. You feel from the beginning that the voice is your enemy, so the praises for your achievments don't feel rewarding at all.
You resize the main box, and the layout of buttons changes. They are in a multi-line text-like layout, so you just can't remember where each button is, their location always changes.
Most operations on the image popup window right over the drawing area. Make the image 50x50px on a 1600x1200 screen, and the popup will be over the image still. Meaning you have to move the popup away before you start the operation like crop, stretch, scale, etc. If by a chance the piece of image you want to process is visible, the canvas will go to foreground, hiding the popup. Lots of dragging stuff around just to click 'OK'.
No 'save dock'. You create a new dock, carefully arrange toolbox items in it, then use it. Then you hurry home, and quickly click the [x] on the dock instead of on main Gimp window. Bye, new carefully arranged dock.
The image must be in focus for shortcut keys to work. If you have any other window, say, color picker active, sorry, the shortcuts won't work. (of course the question is 'WHICH' image if you have many open. Well, duh, any answer like 'the first open, the last open, the last focused, marked as primary' and so on is better than 'none'.)
The magic scisors interface is a horror. You never know when you drag, when you add, when you are over the line or about to add a point just next to it and so on.
You can't perform an operation on a group of layers. There's simply no multi-select for layers. If you work on animated GIF (one layer = one frame) and need to perform some filter on all frames, well, you're out of luck.
When you paste something with ctrl-V, the initial placement of the pasted piece appears entirely random. Meaning if you paste a 5x5 piece into a 124x768 collage, you spend the next minute seeking, where it is. You usually 'select' a piece just to know where the thing will appear, because if selection exists, it appears at the selection.
Can't edit built-in brushes, that's understandable but you can't create a new one starting edit from a built-in one as a template.
No goddamned square 1x1px 100% hardness brush. And no, 'Circle01' is not it.
Move in connection with Guides - you can't move a small piece of image without moving the guides away first. If you need the guides exactly where they are, you're out of luck.
There are dozens of such problems more. I can't recall them all at once.
No sensible font preview
No selecting color 'transparent/alpha'. You can only apply eraser, you can't apply any other drawing tool with it.
competition IS demand. Except non-linearly. (almost nothing is linear here. Get two identical products of identical quality and marketing, make the price differ by 5%, you get 90% customers towards the cheaper one.)
"If there is profit or sales potential in a certain segment, the companies will provide something competitive in that segment regardless if there is a surplus of bad chips or not to make that weaker card."
Not always. There are quite a few holes where one of them has monopoly in given range, or where neither fits in. There are some 'high end' chipsets that are actually more expensive and worse performing than similar chipsets of their own brand, from a 'class above, low end'. There is some advanced logic, but there's a lot of nonsense just as well in the market - paradoxes about which you think 'what kind of retard would ever buy it?' and 'how does it ever pay for them to sell it at such price?', or 'who are they competing with, themselves?' - and they all are effects of long-term strategy, hidden costs, screw-ups anywhere between engineering, production, logistics, sales and management, artifacts of market momentum, and many more we don't even know about.
You are right this is nowhere as simple, I explained just one of mechanisms of a very complex device, but the mechanism I did is one that is one of the strongest pushes behind what happens, a long-term, strong influence, while most of others are temporary hitches, artifacts of errors and mistakes, or need very active attention (as in 'research market, request device, engineer device, open manufacturing, manufacture, create marketing campaigb, sell') to happen and because of that, often don't happen.
Assuming using JUST your logic, every slower processor or chip is one that has failed to be higher processor or chip across the same line of products. We all know that is not the case. There are also market demands that must be met. I have no idea about failure rates but I highly doubt only failed chips make lower tier products. What percentage of what does each company or product line use? No one here has any idea.
The availablity dictates price, price regulates demand.
Take 'LE' and 'GT' releases of NVidia cards. Their difference? GT have all the shader units fully operational, LE have half of them disabled.
Formerly, 'LE' versions of NVidia cards were a major part of the market, and the luxury 'GT' versions with 2 times as many shader units were at least twice as expensive. Nowadays 'LE' are just slightly cheaper from 'GT' and you need a sucker or desperate to buy the 'LE' version because the price gain is very low comparing to the performance penalty. Reason? NVidia improved the manufacturing efficiency, making way fewer faulty units. Supply for GT increased, supply for LE decreased. So we push some 'LE' sector customers into the 'GT' sector, by increasing price of 'LE' and decreasing of 'GT'. The manufacturing costs are the same (it costs exactly the same to produce a 100% working chip as a faulty one...) and people are encouraged to buy the higher-end device due to its lower price, and if they are strictly the 'old LE' market, meaning definitely cheaper product and not willing to pay for either the 'new cheaper' GT nor the 'new more expensive' LE, they will just buy a card from another line, a GT of an older model for example.
Prices of CPU don't increase linearly with speed. The curve of $/MIPS may seem puzzling, but in fact it's the line of yield of the manufacturing in given class.
Of course the market has a very heavy momentum and the price changes don't happen day-to-day. So the temporary differences between supply and demand get filled by units from higher class that have parts of functionality artificially disabled. That's the overclocker's heaven - you just need to 'unlock' the chip and you have a genuine 'higher version'. But that's a matter of pure luck (or insider info or following the news closely) because the chance the part will be 'crippled to lower the price' are worse than that it was faulty in the first place.
Solar sails do not use the solar wind (i.e. charged particles) for propulsion, but the light pressure (photons).
moot.
Also, you can actually control the direction of the thrust gained from from the solar sail by changing the direction in which the photons are reflected (at the expense of absolute thrust, since the effective area of the sail drops if it does not reflect the photons straight back at the sun).
Yes, but only within the "outward 180 degrees" range. You can't -propel- yourself towards the Sun using a solar sail. Still, the 180 degrees suffice, and in particulat the "very inefficient" areas near the edges of the interval, where most of the thrust is applied to the speed component paralell to the orbit, perpendicular to the solar wind. The outward component (paralell to the solar wind) should be soon ballanced by solar gravity as centrifugal force vanishes.
Very minor maneuvre engines would suffice to keep the orientation. This is a position of unstable ballance, but ballance - very weak active stabilizing suffices. We can't 'sail upwind' but we can introduce 'friction' against the solar wind in the movement on the orbit. Standard movement vector of solar wind (outward) is neglected (slides along the surface), and we're acting only in perpendicular direction, our orbital speed against "zero" component of the speed vector of the solar wind. As we lose angular speed, we 'fall' on the Sun, and even the drag outwards from solar wind isn't so harmful, because as you lose angular speed, influence of sun's gravity increases and will eventually counteract the drag of solar wind.
No worries here. All metamoderators know if you metamoderate -all- moderations you're given to metamoderate 'fair', you lose karma and likehood to get mod points, so they usually pick any 'dubious' moderations and metamod them 'unfair'.
You -could- bleed the speed, by say a solar wind sail paralell to the solar wind movement (this way the sail could be reusable, just reorient it to perpendicular and fly it back home on solar wind) - it would take a long time but we're not in a hurry with these.
Some consensus has been reached (shift, ctrl, space, esc). Some holy wars last (1-line vs 2-line enter, wandering backslash). But there are always retards who design stuff without thinking.
Not long ago I worked on a friend's keyboard that filled the room between del-end-pgDn and uparrow with power management keys. The power key was fully functional and placed just below del. I switched the computer off 4 times before I learned not to use del.
My previous job, working with a CNC engraving machine. If you want for example engrave letters (outlines), the tool runs over enclosed paths so the start and end of each path is at the same point. Each line is a single path associated with a single point. The tool needs to be moved between these points above the surface of the material. The ordering which path goes first is of little significance, but travel above the material takes time - so picking paths that are near results in a shorter time of the production. So you order the paths so that the total distance between start/end points is shortest. This is about 99% of the salesman problem - only exception is that you don't return to the first point after you finish your work. (also, "cities" are non-zero size and you may enter any at any given "city limit" point, but exit in the same place - any point of the path is good for the start/end point)
I don't have the actual citation at hand, but someone just added up the costs of separate parts (with all the applicable bulk/partnership discounts) and came up with quite a bit more than $30 above the sales price.
You'd have to wrestle against the power steering with the wheel (and changing the direction randomly you throw them off-guard). Manual brakes might work, but without ABS. Accelerator to the bottom - hell, yes, but starting from a good speed.
And it wouldn't be easy to save a ton of money by dropping Windows. MS is deathly afraid of non-MS OSes taking hold in the developing world -- they are offering Windows in that market at $3 a pop.
Actually, it would. Well, not easy but possible.
First, Microsoft would never admit to $3 a pop, with some $60 for Home Edition in retail. That would cause some serious outrage, so even if they ofer it at $3 a pop, they would discount some $20 just to hide that fact. And with prices of these systems that's not so little.
And the second fact is that for THESE systems, going to developing countries, conquering the market, getting potential future users, they are offering Windows at -$30 a pop. Yes, that's right, sell the laptops below costs, just to get the beach head on the new markets. Of course that's illegal, so it would be even harder to get Microsoft to admit to it, but as result the practical discount would be like $50 below the actual product cost.
Mesh network is a software feature, could be provided by OS. E-book mode isn't a significant perk. Battery life is, but it should be able to enter some strong power-saving mode, shouldn't it?
If it's not nearly as rugged or serviceable, it might be a show-stopper, although a GOOD support contract could solve it.
As for price, it is sold cheaper than XO. And that's a HUGE catch, the "dark secret": manufacturing costs exceed sales price by a hefty margin, and the difference is paid by Microsoft, to push Windows. So actually shipping Classmates WITHOUT Windows woulld result in a significant INCREASE of the price, as opposed to 'expected' discount. That's why the "wink-wink". "Wouldn't that be price dumping? But that's illegal! Why would you want me to partake in some illegal scheme?" - a nice small blackmail, calling their bluff - either sell the laptop even cheaper, without Windows (far below manufacturing costs) or create some VERY bad press (and maybe a bit of legal trouble as well) by forcing them to admit to some illegal, evil practice against a charity.
The OS of XO is free and open-source. Classmate specs are better than XO. There is a bit of goods in XO hardware, but not all that much. Most of it is in the software. The way I see it from the government side would be "Yes, okay, but without Windows preinstalled please. Get Linux with Sugar running on it, make it 100% compatibile with XO software, and get the price by 10% below XO (shouldn't be hard, you're dropping costly Windows, don't you? *wink-wink*) and we'll spend the same amount of cash we'd spend on XO to get 10% of the laptops more."
Actually, it may get much more spectacular than wrong medications served to patients.
Flight control hacking Railway tracks control Time bombs in firmware of cars (in all cars of given model, after given date, once the speed is over 60mph, disable brakes and force power steering all the way to the left) huge chemical industry factory manufacturing systems municipal gas networks oil pipelines control Nuclear power plants halon dump release system firmware top secret strategical plans posted to usenet military devices control systems
The work based off the copyrighted works has to be discarded. The license reputation suffers. There's a lot of bad blood before the problem is explained. There are damages that court order won't repair.
Slashdot Mirror
Asking "why" presupposes a reason and in a lot of cases there isn't one
no and yes.
Asking 'Why, or is there an answer at all' is the right statement of the question.
In mathematics, a solution of "Solution does not exist" supported by a correct proof is a perfectly satisfactory answer.
I see no reason why in philosophy a similar answer wouldn't be okay: 'There's no reason, and here's the logical proof.' A problem with no solution is still a problem, and we can cease search for the solution only when we find one, or we're positively sure none exists.
It was simple, but masterfully done. A story of a hundred plotlines may be just 'inedible', boring. A short, concise, to the point story may be great. Portal had a very standard plot, but the mood was amazing - it was a comedy-horror mix, with the horror part dominating the comedy part, each complimenting the other and the mood being ultimately confusing, a feeling of conflict. You feel from the beginning that the voice is your enemy, so the praises for your achievments don't feel rewarding at all.
You resize the main box, and the layout of buttons changes. They are in a multi-line text-like layout, so you just can't remember where each button is, their location always changes.
Most operations on the image popup window right over the drawing area. Make the image 50x50px on a 1600x1200 screen, and the popup will be over the image still. Meaning you have to move the popup away before you start the operation like crop, stretch, scale, etc. If by a chance the piece of image you want to process is visible, the canvas will go to foreground, hiding the popup. Lots of dragging stuff around just to click 'OK'.
No 'save dock'. You create a new dock, carefully arrange toolbox items in it, then use it. Then you hurry home, and quickly click the [x] on the dock instead of on main Gimp window. Bye, new carefully arranged dock.
The image must be in focus for shortcut keys to work. If you have any other window, say, color picker active, sorry, the shortcuts won't work. (of course the question is 'WHICH' image if you have many open. Well, duh, any answer like 'the first open, the last open, the last focused, marked as primary' and so on is better than 'none'.)
The magic scisors interface is a horror. You never know when you drag, when you add, when you are over the line or about to add a point just next to it and so on.
You can't perform an operation on a group of layers. There's simply no multi-select for layers. If you work on animated GIF (one layer = one frame) and need to perform some filter on all frames, well, you're out of luck.
When you paste something with ctrl-V, the initial placement of the pasted piece appears entirely random. Meaning if you paste a 5x5 piece into a 124x768 collage, you spend the next minute seeking, where it is. You usually 'select' a piece just to know where the thing will appear, because if selection exists, it appears at the selection.
Can't edit built-in brushes, that's understandable but you can't create a new one starting edit from a built-in one as a template.
No goddamned square 1x1px 100% hardness brush. And no, 'Circle01' is not it.
Move in connection with Guides - you can't move a small piece of image without moving the guides away first. If you need the guides exactly where they are, you're out of luck.
There are dozens of such problems more. I can't recall them all at once.
No sensible font preview
No selecting color 'transparent/alpha'. You can only apply eraser, you can't apply any other drawing tool with it.
Amen.
I'm proficient in GIMP and don't know photoshop. I even like GIMP. I use it often. And I still think its UI is horrible.
competition IS demand. Except non-linearly. (almost nothing is linear here. Get two identical products of identical quality and marketing, make the price differ by 5%, you get 90% customers towards the cheaper one.)
"If there is profit or sales potential in a certain segment, the companies will provide something competitive in that segment regardless if there is a surplus of bad chips or not to make that weaker card."
Not always. There are quite a few holes where one of them has monopoly in given range, or where neither fits in. There are some 'high end' chipsets that are actually more expensive and worse performing than similar chipsets of their own brand, from a 'class above, low end'. There is some advanced logic, but there's a lot of nonsense just as well in the market - paradoxes about which you think 'what kind of retard would ever buy it?' and 'how does it ever pay for them to sell it at such price?', or 'who are they competing with, themselves?' - and they all are effects of long-term strategy, hidden costs, screw-ups anywhere between engineering, production, logistics, sales and management, artifacts of market momentum, and many more we don't even know about.
You are right this is nowhere as simple, I explained just one of mechanisms of a very complex device, but the mechanism I did is one that is one of the strongest pushes behind what happens, a long-term, strong influence, while most of others are temporary hitches, artifacts of errors and mistakes, or need very active attention (as in 'research market, request device, engineer device, open manufacturing, manufacture, create marketing campaigb, sell') to happen and because of that, often don't happen.
Assuming using JUST your logic, every slower processor or chip is one that has failed to be higher processor or chip across the same line of products. We all know that is not the case. There are also market demands that must be met. I have no idea about failure rates but I highly doubt only failed chips make lower tier products. What percentage of what does each company or product line use? No one here has any idea.
The availablity dictates price, price regulates demand.
Take 'LE' and 'GT' releases of NVidia cards. Their difference? GT have all the shader units fully operational, LE have half of them disabled.
Formerly, 'LE' versions of NVidia cards were a major part of the market, and the luxury 'GT' versions with 2 times as many shader units were at least twice as expensive. Nowadays 'LE' are just slightly cheaper from 'GT' and you need a sucker or desperate to buy the 'LE' version because the price gain is very low comparing to the performance penalty. Reason? NVidia improved the manufacturing efficiency, making way fewer faulty units. Supply for GT increased, supply for LE decreased. So we push some 'LE' sector customers into the 'GT' sector, by increasing price of 'LE' and decreasing of 'GT'. The manufacturing costs are the same (it costs exactly the same to produce a 100% working chip as a faulty one...) and people are encouraged to buy the higher-end device due to its lower price, and if they are strictly the 'old LE' market, meaning definitely cheaper product and not willing to pay for either the 'new cheaper' GT nor the 'new more expensive' LE, they will just buy a card from another line, a GT of an older model for example.
Prices of CPU don't increase linearly with speed. The curve of $/MIPS may seem puzzling, but in fact it's the line of yield of the manufacturing in given class.
Of course the market has a very heavy momentum and the price changes don't happen day-to-day. So the temporary differences between supply and demand get filled by units from higher class that have parts of functionality artificially disabled. That's the overclocker's heaven - you just need to 'unlock' the chip and you have a genuine 'higher version'. But that's a matter of pure luck (or insider info or following the news closely) because the chance the part will be 'crippled to lower the price' are worse than that it was faulty in the first place.
Solar sails do not use the solar wind (i.e. charged particles) for propulsion, but the light pressure (photons).
moot.
Also, you can actually control the direction of the thrust gained from from the solar sail by changing the direction in which the photons are reflected (at the expense of absolute thrust, since the effective area of the sail drops if it does not reflect the photons straight back at the sun).
Yes, but only within the "outward 180 degrees" range. You can't -propel- yourself towards the Sun using a solar sail. Still, the 180 degrees suffice, and in particulat the "very inefficient" areas near the edges of the interval, where most of the thrust is applied to the speed component paralell to the orbit, perpendicular to the solar wind. The outward component (paralell to the solar wind) should be soon ballanced by solar gravity as centrifugal force vanishes.
Very minor maneuvre engines would suffice to keep the orientation. This is a position of unstable ballance, but ballance - very weak active stabilizing suffices. We can't 'sail upwind' but we can introduce 'friction' against the solar wind in the movement on the orbit. Standard movement vector of solar wind (outward) is neglected (slides along the surface), and we're acting only in perpendicular direction, our orbital speed against "zero" component of the speed vector of the solar wind. As we lose angular speed, we 'fall' on the Sun, and even the drag outwards from solar wind isn't so harmful, because as you lose angular speed, influence of sun's gravity increases and will eventually counteract the drag of solar wind.
No worries here. All metamoderators know if you metamoderate -all- moderations you're given to metamoderate 'fair', you lose karma and likehood to get mod points, so they usually pick any 'dubious' moderations and metamod them 'unfair'.
in before unix timestamp
You -could- bleed the speed, by say a solar wind sail paralell to the solar wind movement (this way the sail could be reusable, just reorient it to perpendicular and fly it back home on solar wind) - it would take a long time but we're not in a hurry with these.
Get assassinated after requesting Kennedy's assassination secrets published.
Does anyone favor that vertical cluster over the 3 x 2 horizontal layout?
Some manufacturers, some computer-illiterate aesthetes, some shop managers who bundle these with computer sets, and similar.
I haven't found a -user- to like it yet.
Some consensus has been reached (shift, ctrl, space, esc).
Some holy wars last (1-line vs 2-line enter, wandering backslash).
But there are always retards who design stuff without thinking.
Not long ago I worked on a friend's keyboard that filled the room between del-end-pgDn and uparrow with power management keys.
The power key was fully functional and placed just below del. I switched the computer off 4 times before I learned not to use del.
Maybe it wasn't but it definitely happens.
My previous job, working with a CNC engraving machine. If you want for example engrave letters (outlines), the tool runs over enclosed paths so the start and end of each path is at the same point. Each line is a single path associated with a single point. The tool needs to be moved between these points above the surface of the material. The ordering which path goes first is of little significance, but travel above the material takes time - so picking paths that are near results in a shorter time of the production. So you order the paths so that the total distance between start/end points is shortest. This is about 99% of the salesman problem - only exception is that you don't return to the first point after you finish your work. (also, "cities" are non-zero size and you may enter any at any given "city limit" point, but exit in the same place - any point of the path is good for the start/end point)
I don't have the actual citation at hand, but someone just added up the costs of separate parts (with all the applicable bulk/partnership discounts) and came up with quite a bit more than $30 above the sales price.
You'd have to wrestle against the power steering with the wheel (and changing the direction randomly you throw them off-guard). Manual brakes might work, but without ABS. Accelerator to the bottom - hell, yes, but starting from a good speed.
I picked the speed at which things get killed, and is rather common to reach, for maximizing the yield.
And it wouldn't be easy to save a ton of money by dropping Windows. MS is deathly afraid of non-MS OSes taking hold in the developing world -- they are offering Windows in that market at $3 a pop.
Actually, it would. Well, not easy but possible.
First, Microsoft would never admit to $3 a pop, with some $60 for Home Edition in retail. That would cause some serious outrage, so even if they ofer it at $3 a pop, they would discount some $20 just to hide that fact. And with prices of these systems that's not so little.
And the second fact is that for THESE systems, going to developing countries, conquering the market, getting potential future users, they are offering Windows at -$30 a pop. Yes, that's right, sell the laptops below costs, just to get the beach head on the new markets. Of course that's illegal, so it would be even harder to get Microsoft to admit to it, but as result the practical discount would be like $50 below the actual product cost.
Mesh network is a software feature, could be provided by OS. E-book mode isn't a significant perk. Battery life is, but it should be able to enter some strong power-saving mode, shouldn't it?
If it's not nearly as rugged or serviceable, it might be a show-stopper, although a GOOD support contract could solve it.
As for price, it is sold cheaper than XO. And that's a HUGE catch, the "dark secret": manufacturing costs exceed sales price by a hefty margin, and the difference is paid by Microsoft, to push Windows. So actually shipping Classmates WITHOUT Windows woulld result in a significant INCREASE of the price, as opposed to 'expected' discount. That's why the "wink-wink". "Wouldn't that be price dumping? But that's illegal! Why would you want me to partake in some illegal scheme?" - a nice small blackmail, calling their bluff - either sell the laptop even cheaper, without Windows (far below manufacturing costs) or create some VERY bad press (and maybe a bit of legal trouble as well) by forcing them to admit to some illegal, evil practice against a charity.
The OS of XO is free and open-source. Classmate specs are better than XO. There is a bit of goods in XO hardware, but not all that much. Most of it is in the software. The way I see it from the government side would be "Yes, okay, but without Windows preinstalled please. Get Linux with Sugar running on it, make it 100% compatibile with XO software, and get the price by 10% below XO (shouldn't be hard, you're dropping costly Windows, don't you? *wink-wink*) and we'll spend the same amount of cash we'd spend on XO to get 10% of the laptops more."
Actually, it may get much more spectacular than wrong medications served to patients.
Flight control hacking
Railway tracks control
Time bombs in firmware of cars (in all cars of given model, after given date, once the speed is over 60mph, disable brakes and force power steering all the way to the left)
huge chemical industry factory manufacturing systems
municipal gas networks
oil pipelines control
Nuclear power plants
halon dump release system firmware
top secret strategical plans posted to usenet
military devices control systems
Interesting question.
I sense a flaw in your logic, but interestingly, I can't quite pinpoint it.
IF the person is caught and doesn't use fake ID.
The work based off the copyrighted works has to be discarded. The license reputation suffers. There's a lot of bad blood before the problem is explained. There are damages that court order won't repair.
Through spreading fear, life-protecting resource was made unavailable, as result putting human lives at risk.
Doesn't the act meet definition of terrorism by a chance?