Ah, yes, "The user must be an idiot"—the last desperate defence of poor UI design. Is it not possible for you to accept criticism of something's usability without calling into question (quite mistakenly, in this case) the critic's technical credentials? If so, I hope I never have the misfortune of using any interface designed by you.
Yes, I see all the same pretty labels that you do. Clicking on them doesn't result in the information I expected, or in information presented in a way in which it is easy for me to understand and manipulate. If you were able to figure it out, then I bow to your superior intellectual prowess. But I couldn't make sense of the site, and please believe me when I say I spent a long time trying. From the other comments posted here I see I'm not the only one frustrated with the interface to this site.
To take just one example, I clicked on "NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 580" from the home page. The first thing that pops up is a list of OSes, drivers, and display servers. To me this implies that the benchmarks are categorized by OS, driver, and display server. That is, I can see different performance results for the NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 580 on, say, Linux 2.6.31-14-generic using the nouveau driver, and maybe compare them to those with the same OS using the proprietary nvidia driver. But no -- clicking on one of those OSes, drivers, or display servers just takes me to some generic page about them.
I'm sure you (or someone else) will be along soon to explain to me how it all works, but at this point I don't particularly care. If the site was properly designed to begin with I wouldn't need someone to tell me how to use it.
The article summary here intrigued and excited me. I headed to the site, eagerly hoping to compare the performance of my system against the 35,000 submissions, and to submit my own results for the community to share. But when I got there, I was lost and confused. The site is almost completely incomprehensible to me. Navigation is a nightmare. I can't figure out how to see the results for a given system. When I do, by accident, stumble upon a page with some graphs, I can't figure out how to compare these with another system. There seems to be no rhyme nor reason to the hyperlinks, and precious little in the way of explanations and guidance.
It's a pity that a site which has the potential to be such a useful resource has been rendered completely unusable by poor organization and UI design.
Immaculate conception != virgin birth. Immaculate conception refers to the doctrine in Catholicism, and some other branches of Christianity, that Mary was born without original sin. Mary was otherwise conceived the normal way (i.e., as a result of her two parents having sex).
Wi-Fi is the second most prevalent form of wireless technology next to cell phones.
Well, depending on how you define "prevalent", I'd say that radio and television are even more prevalent than Wi-Fi and cell phones. At any given location in Canada I think you're more likely to be within receiving range of a wireless radio or television signal than a Wi-Fi or cell phone signal.
In other words, a lot of Western Europeans who buy a TV with 3D capability don't even bother to buy the glasses to use that feature.
Am I correct in thinking that these glasses operate on the same principle as those used to view 3D movies in the cinema? If so, then it's no surprise that Europeans aren't buying the glasses—over here when you see a 3D movie, you get to keep the glasses. I'd wager that almost everyone who buys and uses a 3D TV already has glasses from a movie theatre.
I last worked there in 2000, so it's possible they've released some Enterprise solutions since then. But I'm sure that even so a lot of the data recovery tools they use are in-house only.
I used to be a software engineer for Ontrack Data Recovery, one of the major data recovery companies. Perhaps not surprisingly, our data recovery tools were proprietary tools custom-written in-house. It's not something that was available to, or marketed to, the average Joe (or even the average Joe Programmer).
There is a website devoted to this very topic, namely namingschemes.com. It has hundreds of example naming schemes for small to large networks. And it's also a wiki, so you're free to add your own comments and examples.
Silly computer scientists! Don't they know that any tape of finite length can be transformed into a tape of infinite length by taping the two ends together?
In fact, you can make your infinite-length tape twice as long by giving the tape a half twist before joining the ends!
Federation Starships, yes, but most of the action on DS9 took place on a Cardassian-built space station. Hence most of the computer graphics on that show were not LCARS.
I've never met anything that cdparanoia couldn't handle
I have. I bought a copy of the Beatles' Let It Be... Naked, which is one of those weird crippled discs, and I could neither play it nor rip it. I ended up returning it to the store.
"Tiny fibres" embedded in the concrete? Reminds me of the tiny fibres of asbestos, which get stuck in people's lungs and cause cancer. Are we looking at a possible health risk here as this bendable concrete crumbles off unmaintained buildings, and is gradually eroded off highly used roads?
Thanks to everyone for all your suggestions. A lot of you are recommending MS-Windows programs, which I can't use (since as I mentioned, I'm running GNU/Linux). Perhaps they'll help other Slashdotters who are Windows users and are wondering the same thing. However, there were several suggestions for some GNU/Linux programs which I am now checking out. I don't think I ever would have found them without being referred to them here.:)
Just because it wasn't enforced at one time, doesn't mean the NDA is null and void- in fact, many/most NDAs specifically say "lack of enforcement does not nullify this agreement".
And just because someone inserts some term into a contract doesn't mean it's legally binding. In many jurisdictions you cannot, for example, sign away your basic human rights, nor can you agree to do something which is illegal. Those parts of the contract will be null and void. A clause stating that "lack of enforcement does not nullify this agreement" may itself be nullified if the law unequivocally says that lack of enforcement nullifies this sort of agreement, no ifs, ands, or buts.
Disproving "trade secret" status is pointless(not to mention, unlikely to happen). It's still copyright SOMEONE ELSE, and YOU CAN'T USE IT unless they let you!
That depends on what the basis of SCO's lawsuit is. Have you read the plaintiff's claim in full? Do you know for sure that they're not suing on the basis of breach of trade secrets and not just copyright alone? Proving that SCO's source code is no longer secret may well prevent them from using that line of attack, to which they may very well resort (if they haven't already) if a simple breach of copyright can't be proven.
It's been said time+time again, there is no proprietary code that belongs to SCO in the Linux kernel.
Popular though that opinion may be among the Slashdot crowd, I'm sorry to say that it counts for absolutely nothing. The only thing that matters is what the judge and/or jury thinks of the evidence that will be presented at court. Remember that your average judge and jury knows absolutely nothing about writing computer code and open source software licences. A lazy or inadequately-prepared defence may lead the judge to conclude in the legal universe things which aren't necessarily true in the everyday-life universe, including and not limited to a ruling that the GPL is completely unenforceable. This might not help out SCO very much, though needless to say it would have interesting implications for the Free Software community.
I can hear the SCO execs and lawyers now: "See? They DID steal our code, now they're trying to find a loophole!"
Learn the alphabet, boy. ESR != IBM. SCO's lawyers will be thinking no such thing, but even if they do, it really doesn't matter (see above).
I've also got it... Yes, it's sort of coffee table book in shape, but it's rather heavy on the text to be classified with your standard browsable fare. It was really a work of narrative fiction based on the film, attractively packaged so that people would buy it for their kids who might not have had the patience to read through the x-thousand-page Tolkien original. I agree that it's more interesting than the movie version.:)
You intended that post as a joke, but there really was a novelization of the 1970s animated LotR film. It was marketed as a book for older children and had lots of illustrations taken from the film.
In order to recover damages in a civil case, the plaintiff must demonstrate that he took reasonable steps to mitigate his damages. I don't see much mitigation going on here -- seems to me that SCO could have very easily contacted the kernel developers and have had them remove the offending code. The judge in this case will be very interested to know why this was never done.
There's actually a very good reason for this idea of putting The Rightful King on the throne.
In a medieval society, the absolute worst tyrant on the throne was still better for the common people than a war of succession. If you put the King's son on the throne, there's at least a reasonable chance of stability, but if the line of succession is unclear, you often end up with a long, bloody war.
No, no, no. The best form of government in medieval society is the anarcho-syndicalist commune. You see, you take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week, but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more major ones.
Seriously, a chemistry friend of mine works
on commericial software running in the 10K per seat range... I can't find enough chemistry people and programmers who will cooperate to make
me specialized software of superb quality unless I unload a big pile of cash.
Oh, and paying $10K per seat for chemistry software is not unloading a big pile of cash?
Just how many licences do they have? Ten seats at $10K/seat is $100K, which is enough to two professional programmers full-time, or ten graduate students part-time, for a WHOLE YEAR to develop a free (hopefully GPL'd) alternative.
Re:VGMix.com: The long and the short (okay, the LO
on
Video Game Music Mixes
·
· Score: 2, Informative
[T]he law would have to be interpreted, as it's always been vague about derivative works. Based upon everything I've heard (from real, living lawyers) doing something like this for fun and COMPLETELY -not for profit- is totally legal.
Well, then, you need to get some better lawyers. No, the law is not vague about derivative works. Releasing derivative works without the author's permission, whether or not you are doing it for profit, is most certainly illegal under US and Canadian law, and probably also in any other country which is a Berne convention signatory. (The "I'm not doing it for profit so it must be OK" defence is one of the biggest myths about copyright law.) See the Circular on Derivative Works by the US Copyright office.
Actually, they do it so that you always know who's PROPERTY the broadcast is.
You obviously don't know much about how television shows are produced. Television networks (like ABC, CBS, FOX, etc.) broadcast many shows, some of which they produce and some of which they do not. For example, in my home town, the local CTV station used to broadcast Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was produced by Paramount. (At the time, Paramount did not have its own network.) CTV (or its affiliate) was given a licence to broadcast TNG, but it did not "own" the show, or even its copyright.
They could care less
about brand identification...
Wrong again. Some stations, such as Space, have publically gone on record saying that they display their logo for brand recognition only. In fact, it's difficult to fathom any other reason -- at least when the station first started up, it had very little (if any) content that wasn't syndicated.
Slashdot Mirror
This is so not true.
Ah, yes, "The user must be an idiot"—the last desperate defence of poor UI design. Is it not possible for you to accept criticism of something's usability without calling into question (quite mistakenly, in this case) the critic's technical credentials? If so, I hope I never have the misfortune of using any interface designed by you.
Yes, I see all the same pretty labels that you do. Clicking on them doesn't result in the information I expected, or in information presented in a way in which it is easy for me to understand and manipulate. If you were able to figure it out, then I bow to your superior intellectual prowess. But I couldn't make sense of the site, and please believe me when I say I spent a long time trying. From the other comments posted here I see I'm not the only one frustrated with the interface to this site.
To take just one example, I clicked on "NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 580" from the home page. The first thing that pops up is a list of OSes, drivers, and display servers. To me this implies that the benchmarks are categorized by OS, driver, and display server. That is, I can see different performance results for the NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 580 on, say, Linux 2.6.31-14-generic using the nouveau driver, and maybe compare them to those with the same OS using the proprietary nvidia driver. But no -- clicking on one of those OSes, drivers, or display servers just takes me to some generic page about them.
I'm sure you (or someone else) will be along soon to explain to me how it all works, but at this point I don't particularly care. If the site was properly designed to begin with I wouldn't need someone to tell me how to use it.
The article summary here intrigued and excited me. I headed to the site, eagerly hoping to compare the performance of my system against the 35,000 submissions, and to submit my own results for the community to share. But when I got there, I was lost and confused. The site is almost completely incomprehensible to me. Navigation is a nightmare. I can't figure out how to see the results for a given system. When I do, by accident, stumble upon a page with some graphs, I can't figure out how to compare these with another system. There seems to be no rhyme nor reason to the hyperlinks, and precious little in the way of explanations and guidance. It's a pity that a site which has the potential to be such a useful resource has been rendered completely unusable by poor organization and UI design.
Immaculate conception != virgin birth. Immaculate conception refers to the doctrine in Catholicism, and some other branches of Christianity, that Mary was born without original sin. Mary was otherwise conceived the normal way (i.e., as a result of her two parents having sex).
Well, depending on how you define "prevalent", I'd say that radio and television are even more prevalent than Wi-Fi and cell phones. At any given location in Canada I think you're more likely to be within receiving range of a wireless radio or television signal than a Wi-Fi or cell phone signal.
Am I correct in thinking that these glasses operate on the same principle as those used to view 3D movies in the cinema? If so, then it's no surprise that Europeans aren't buying the glasses—over here when you see a 3D movie, you get to keep the glasses. I'd wager that almost everyone who buys and uses a 3D TV already has glasses from a movie theatre.
I last worked there in 2000, so it's possible they've released some Enterprise solutions since then. But I'm sure that even so a lot of the data recovery tools they use are in-house only.
I used to be a software engineer for Ontrack Data Recovery, one of the major data recovery companies. Perhaps not surprisingly, our data recovery tools were proprietary tools custom-written in-house. It's not something that was available to, or marketed to, the average Joe (or even the average Joe Programmer).
There is a website devoted to this very topic, namely namingschemes.com. It has hundreds of example naming schemes for small to large networks. And it's also a wiki, so you're free to add your own comments and examples.
Silly computer scientists! Don't they know that any tape of finite length can be transformed into a tape of infinite length by taping the two ends together?
In fact, you can make your infinite-length tape twice as long by giving the tape a half twist before joining the ends!
Federation Starships, yes, but most of the action on DS9 took place on a Cardassian-built space station. Hence most of the computer graphics on that show were not LCARS.
In the time it took you to post that rant you could have simply edited the Wikipedia page to fix the error. Dumbass.
I have. I bought a copy of the Beatles' Let It Be... Naked, which is one of those weird crippled discs, and I could neither play it nor rip it. I ended up returning it to the store.
"Tiny fibres" embedded in the concrete? Reminds me of the tiny fibres of asbestos, which get stuck in people's lungs and cause cancer. Are we looking at a possible health risk here as this bendable concrete crumbles off unmaintained buildings, and is gradually eroded off highly used roads?
Thanks to everyone for all your suggestions. A lot of you are recommending MS-Windows programs, which I can't use (since as I mentioned, I'm running GNU/Linux). Perhaps they'll help other Slashdotters who are Windows users and are wondering the same thing. However, there were several suggestions for some GNU/Linux programs which I am now checking out. I don't think I ever would have found them without being referred to them here. :)
What makes you suppose that everyone hoping to DDoS the server is in the US?
And just because someone inserts some term into a contract doesn't mean it's legally binding. In many jurisdictions you cannot, for example, sign away your basic human rights, nor can you agree to do something which is illegal. Those parts of the contract will be null and void. A clause stating that "lack of enforcement does not nullify this agreement" may itself be nullified if the law unequivocally says that lack of enforcement nullifies this sort of agreement, no ifs, ands, or buts.
That depends on what the basis of SCO's lawsuit is. Have you read the plaintiff's claim in full? Do you know for sure that they're not suing on the basis of breach of trade secrets and not just copyright alone? Proving that SCO's source code is no longer secret may well prevent them from using that line of attack, to which they may very well resort (if they haven't already) if a simple breach of copyright can't be proven.
Popular though that opinion may be among the Slashdot crowd, I'm sorry to say that it counts for absolutely nothing. The only thing that matters is what the judge and/or jury thinks of the evidence that will be presented at court. Remember that your average judge and jury knows absolutely nothing about writing computer code and open source software licences. A lazy or inadequately-prepared defence may lead the judge to conclude in the legal universe things which aren't necessarily true in the everyday-life universe, including and not limited to a ruling that the GPL is completely unenforceable. This might not help out SCO very much, though needless to say it would have interesting implications for the Free Software community.
Learn the alphabet, boy. ESR != IBM. SCO's lawyers will be thinking no such thing, but even if they do, it really doesn't matter (see above).
I've also got it... Yes, it's sort of coffee table book in shape, but it's rather heavy on the text to be classified with your standard browsable fare. It was really a work of narrative fiction based on the film, attractively packaged so that people would buy it for their kids who might not have had the patience to read through the x-thousand-page Tolkien original. I agree that it's more interesting than the movie version. :)
You intended that post as a joke, but there really was a novelization of the 1970s animated LotR film. It was marketed as a book for older children and had lots of illustrations taken from the film.
In order to recover damages in a civil case, the plaintiff must demonstrate that he took reasonable steps to mitigate his damages. I don't see much mitigation going on here -- seems to me that SCO could have very easily contacted the kernel developers and have had them remove the offending code. The judge in this case will be very interested to know why this was never done.
No, no, no. The best form of government in medieval society is the anarcho-syndicalist commune. You see, you take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week, but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more major ones.
Oh, and paying $10K per seat for chemistry software is not unloading a big pile of cash?
Just how many licences do they have? Ten seats at $10K/seat is $100K, which is enough to two professional programmers full-time, or ten graduate students part-time, for a WHOLE YEAR to develop a free (hopefully GPL'd) alternative.