But you are forgetting that they may not be paying dividends now, but they can always choose to do it later. And this choice is really made by the stockholders(Maybe indirectly by voting for the board).
If I own 10% of a company with 10 million in cash, then the value of my investment will be at least a million, even if the company is not currently paying any dividends.
So you may think of the value of a stock as the ability of the company to pay dividends. And if they choose not to do it now, it is in a way the same as you lending money to the company.
If the company is in a high growth marked, then investing all the money now might allow the company to pay much more dividends later, and thus be a good thing. The companies that pay dividends are normally companies that are in a stable marked where they don't need all invest all their profit.
But the big problem is that EA refuse to say exactly what it does.
They don't even want to say what consist a new computer and thus requiring a new install, and I could not even get the Spore license from their webiste(Despite the fact that the box say to go to their website and download it before buying the game).
After 3 mails to EA tech support I have simply given up finding out exactly what what the license for Spore is, what exactly SecuROM does and if it overwrite my boot sector(There were some versions of SecuROM that did that).
So now all we know is that it will install some software that can't be removed, and which for some users prevent other software from running. Exactly what it does, how it affect the users and what hardware changes require a new install, is as deep secret.
Most likely, the problem is with the driver. If you use the opensource nvidia/ati driver you really miss a lot of hardware acceleration and speed(And not just for 3d graphics2 2d graphics suffer as well).
I had to install the binary nvidia driver, because scrolling in firefox, and xterm was to slow otherwise, but now I have fast scrolling, and no graphics artifact when scrolling.
Dam, I did not know that Denmark had been accepted as a new state in USA. Now I only have a few days to find out which president candidate to vote for.
One big problem with this is that copyright is not only about the money, but also about controlling what the work is used for.
Example: Imagine that I wrote some nice music 20(Or whatever the limit is) year ago. Anybody who would want to buy it have already done so, so I would lose money by registration for a new longer copyright. But if I let the work fall into public domain $EVIL_CORPORATION* could use it to advertise their new product. And I would have that.
And if I wrote a book, I would hate to have to have a film made out of it without me having a say in who/how it was made. (Just imagine what would happend if Uwe boll could have made a "Lord of the rings" while Tolkien was still alive. That might have given Tolkien a nightmare that no man should have.
So what we need is a new copyright category where work after 20 year, becomes "Free to use for private non-business use" only.
If the fact that the file is online online and can be downloaded is enough to grant me access to run it, can it not then be argued, that I also have the right to run and use the ati drivers(https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/firegl/firegl_8_502_xp32_driver_only_065657.exe) without accepting the eula?
This is 2 different files, and I can't see any difference other then the license. And if I reject the license, I should have the same right to use/not use both files.
I always wondered about if accepting the gpl is required. If I decline the gpl license, what right does I have to use the software?
I mean I don't think I have any right to use any software, unless that right is explicit given to me. Or is the fact that I am in possession of the software enough to also grant me right to run it?
If possession is enough, then I can also conclude that any software EULA is invalid, because I can just run the software without accepting the EULA.
There might just be a single Win32 api, BUT most applications are not using the gui widgets from that api. Microsoft office are not using it. Apple software is not using it. Adobe are not using it. Firefox are no using it.
Hell, windows don't even include a widget to make a split pane(You know, the thing where you have to widgets, and a thing between them you can drag, to set their size).
And a nice question: Does a popup menu in windows show when you press the right mouse, or when you release it? (Hint: It depend on the application, because well there is no uniform windows gui toolkit).
The day linux only have 2 toolkits, its userinterface wil be much better. But now we have gtk, qt3,qt4,tcl,motif/lesstif) and that wierd thing that emacs is using. (And all the applications that insist of including their own special designed toolkit.
You can't grow a file in the middle. There don't exists any filesystem call that can do that.
Fragmentation only happens if you append to a file, but that kind of fragmentation should not be a problem for ssd, because all blocks(Except the last) will be full, and ssd don't read the 'next' block, any faster then any other black.
If Cedega gave all the code back to wine, then wine would be as good as Cedega, and nobody would buy Cedega. Cedega would thus close down which would leaving DirectX work under WINE frozen for several years.
You can get a fan less computer from deltatronic(www.deltatronic.de). They will sell you as something as fast as it get. They do have an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 4 x 3,20 GHz 12288 (2x 6144) kB cache, FSB 1600 MHz, Yorkfield 45nm Quad Core, socket 775 Which you can pair up with a NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT dual DVI-I with HDCP, 2 x Dual Link (or NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT)
Try company of heroes. While it is realtime, clicking fast is not the way to win the game.
It got 3 features I really like:
1: Cover: Hiding behind a wall i a good thing, and units will in general use cover is if it close to their current position and they are fighting. (unit control is squad based, with a squad consisting of up to 6 men).
2: Direction - Some weapons such as machine gun, and anti-tank guns have a limited "field of fire" Which mean that they can only fire in a specific direction. And to turn them around, take quite some time. (Enough that if you attack, a mg emplacement from the back, it can't turn around, before it is dead. This mean that flanking and so on, become very importent. (Remember to cover the flank with a tank:}
3: Infantry units can be pinned down. So if you attack an mg direct on, it does not really matter how many squads of infantry you have, because they will all cast them self down on the ground for cover and move very slowly only. This mean that you can create 'fields of control' where you know the enemy infantry can't really attack over.
Resources in the game are spread around the map like in dawn of war, so there are control points you need to touch, in order to get the resources).
So the way to win, is to get control of most of the map, fortify the land so when the enemy attack he will die:}
Very fun (And it almost works in linux with wine. So close..)
Only problem is, where do you find an oo database with a good index and search implementation, that don't cost to much that when you ask the company for a price, they don't even want to reply.
If you have a schema does isn't merely a nested aggregation, then you'd see that an OOP database becomes sticky. For example, in real books any given story or book can have *multiple* authors. You would then no longer have a simple de-composition hierarchy.
Why should that be a problem? An author has a method getBooks() that return all books he have writen, and a book has an getAuthors() that return all authors. It is true that our graph is now no longer a tree, but I don't se why that should be a problem.
You don't know that. Perhaps their internal reporting is quite complicated. There's a lot of complexity behind the scenes that one may not consider by merely looking at a single reply tree.
Slashcode is opensource so I could have look to find out:} But it does not matter, for there is no reason that the reporting facilities of an oop database should be less usefull then for a relational database. OQL does show how it can be done, even thou I don't really like OQL, because the designers made it by taking sql, and then redefining the semantic to be on objects.
And an other problem with OQL is that I don't think that anybody have even made an implementation of it.
When I have problems with the relational model, it is always because while I really like to query the relational model, I don't want to get the data back in a grid. I want the result back as a hierarchy.
Example: Imagine I have a database with the tables:
user,story,comment Where each user can have multiple stories and each story can have multiple comments.
Now i want to get a list of all users that have a story, with a comment that contain the word xkcd. The query is easy: Just select from comment, join story and then join user.
But the presentation is difficult if I want to list the stories together with the user they belong to. Just imagine I already have a function that can show an user. What input could such a function take? It can't take a user object, because I have no easy way to get the the result from the sql database to a user. It can't take the sql result directly, because it contain the same user far to many times.
Or an even worse problem: Imagine a page, that can display either "all users, all their stories" or "all users all their stories and all comments for all stories"
Writing such a function is difficult, because you need to show each user and story only once. The only solutin I can come up with, is to sort the result, by user,story and then skip the show user/show story code, if the user for this story is the same as the user for the previous story. And a presentation function, that require that data are sorted a specific way is not good.
This is the reason that most web developers, really want an oop database. That is: A database that you can query as a relational database, but which can give you back data in a hierarchy. And a hierarchy that can be walked by the application, so that if the query you issued just gave you a list of users, but you for a single user need all his stories, you can just get call getStories() and then a new query will be issued. (But if the original query also fetched the stories, then that list would be returned. But it sholud be transparent for the application developer if a new query was sendt to the database).
The problem with this oop database, is mainly that nobody have written it. (And you get some issues with locking and transactions).
The best solution I have seen so far(In java) is to use an oop mapper such as Torque, where I can define the database in sql, and then torque will based on the database and the foreign keys create java classes and methods for me. So in the example above, there would be a foreign key linking a story to a user, so torque will on my user object create a getStories() method that will get all stories for that user.
I know this problem might be special for web applications, because most web application very much presentation data and simple input/output work, and relative little advanced query operations.
Just look at slashdot very much input/output and simple query/overview page. But no pages that require special or complicated sql.
But inclusion of a library should not mean that any distributions should have to include it. It just mean that the program can query "is this library installed". So the only thing they really need to agree on is what to call the library. I think they can agree on that.
So if you have a minimum linux distribution that just include the kernel and a static linked bash, you might have a correct implementation, that just return null to any library query.
But the point is that there are 2 different and independent problems that need to be solved.
1: How do an application query about the existens of software(library, compiler, awk and so on), default paths and other operations that differ from distribution to distribution.
2: How do we ensure that the distributions include needed libraries.
My solution would only solve problem 1, but I really think that is the big problem. Most distributions are good at including libraries, and when I run into problems with applications needing a library, the problem for me is not "Hmm, is this included in Fedora core" but more like " I know this library is here someware, but I really have no knowledge about what package contain it. ).
If a user is running "Fedora core 2" which only include qt3, and my program require qt4 the only solution is to tell the user to upgrade his linux distribution, or install the library himself.
Also, having this library, would make it easy for an 3. party developer to find out what distributions have all the needed library, so the "Get all distributions that have all needed libraries" could be a simple, but very helpfull tool. Then the developer can either do a "This is good enough" or static link the libraries that are not common enough. But having to static link to the qt3 library, because the application can't ask the distribution to install it if it is missing(With user accept ofcause), or because there are so many places the library can be located. That is stupid.
And once someone have implemented this library, it would be easy to define a set of "Standard Desktop linux 2008 libraries and tools" that the distributions could support.
Slashdot Mirror
But you are forgetting that they may not be paying dividends now, but they can always choose to do it later. And this choice is really made by the stockholders(Maybe indirectly by voting for the board).
If I own 10% of a company with 10 million in cash, then the value of my investment will be at least a million, even if the company is not currently paying any dividends.
So you may think of the value of a stock as the ability of the company to pay dividends. And if they choose not to do it now, it is in a way the same as you lending money to the company.
If the company is in a high growth marked, then investing all the money now might allow the company to pay much more dividends later, and thus be a good thing. The companies that pay dividends are normally companies that are in a stable marked where they don't need all invest all their profit.
You do know that the T Series, were actuelly X86_64 cpu until Sun bought it, and changed the instruction set to sparc right?
Personally I think that change, was the biggest mistake that sun have done in recent years.
But the big problem is that EA refuse to say exactly what it does.
They don't even want to say what consist a new computer and thus requiring a new install, and I could not even get the Spore license from their webiste(Despite the fact that the box say to go to their website and download it before buying the game).
After 3 mails to EA tech support I have simply given up finding out exactly what what the license for Spore is, what exactly SecuROM does and if it overwrite my boot sector(There were some versions of SecuROM that did that).
So now all we know is that it will install some software that can't be removed, and which for some users prevent other software from running.
Exactly what it does, how it affect the users and what hardware changes require a new install, is as deep secret.
Martin
Most likely, the problem is with the driver. If you use the opensource nvidia/ati driver you really miss a lot of hardware acceleration and speed(And not just for 3d graphics2 2d graphics suffer as well).
I had to install the binary nvidia driver, because scrolling in firefox, and xterm was to slow otherwise, but now I have fast scrolling, and no graphics artifact when scrolling.
Dam, I did not know that Denmark had been accepted as a new state in USA. Now I only have a few days to find out which president candidate to vote for.
Why was I not informed before.
Example: Try to listen to Tori Amos Winter
http://www.mtvmusic.com/video/?id=47577
And then compare to the youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnboUbOGDOM
The Mtv version got a really bad 'noice' in the background in the beginning of the song.
Or maybe it's just a problem with their player and Linux.
Is it me, or is the music quality really really bad?
It almost sound like they encoded the music as 96Kbit/sec mp3 and then added noise.
One big problem with this is that copyright is not only about the money, but also about controlling what the work is used for.
Example: Imagine that I wrote some nice music 20(Or whatever the limit is) year ago. Anybody who would want to buy it have already done so, so I would lose money by registration for a new longer copyright. But if I let the work fall into public domain $EVIL_CORPORATION* could use it to advertise their new product. And I would have that.
And if I wrote a book, I would hate to have to have a film made out of it without me having a say in who/how it was made. (Just imagine what would happend if Uwe boll could have made a "Lord of the rings" while Tolkien was still alive. That might have given Tolkien a nightmare that no man should have.
So what we need is a new copyright category where work after 20 year, becomes "Free to use for private non-business use" only.
*(Microsoft,The church,Walmart/Political party/My evil enemy)
But why should rewriting the sql to a new database be any less work then rewriting the stored procedures?
That was nice of him to do, but how and where exactly did he do that?
Example: Here http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-21.3-bin-i386.tar.gz (Sorry, windows binary, but that was the only binary I could find) is a link to emacs. Where does anyone(Other then the gpl itself) grant me the right to run software?
If the fact that the file is online online and can be downloaded is enough to grant me access to run it,
can it not then be argued, that I also have the right to run and use the ati drivers(https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/firegl/firegl_8_502_xp32_driver_only_065657.exe) without accepting the eula?
This is 2 different files, and I can't see any difference other then the license. And if I reject the license, I should have the same right to use/not use both files.
I always wondered about if accepting the gpl is required. If I decline the gpl license, what right does I have to use the software?
I mean I don't think I have any right to use any software, unless that right is explicit given to me.
Or is the fact that I am in possession of the software enough to also grant me right to run it?
If possession is enough, then I can also conclude that any software EULA is invalid, because I can just run the software without accepting the EULA.
There might just be a single Win32 api, BUT most applications are not using the gui widgets from that api. Microsoft office are not using it. Apple software is not using it. Adobe are not using it. Firefox are no using it.
Hell, windows don't even include a widget to make a split pane(You know, the thing where you have to widgets, and a thing between them you can drag, to set their size).
And a nice question: Does a popup menu in windows show when you press the right mouse, or when you release it? (Hint: It depend on the application, because well there is no uniform windows gui toolkit).
The day linux only have 2 toolkits, its userinterface wil be much better. But now we have gtk, qt3,qt4,tcl,motif/lesstif) and that wierd thing that emacs is using. (And all the applications that insist of including their own special designed toolkit.
But google newer claimed it was todays news, so what make you assume that they dated it as todays news??
You can't grow a file in the middle. There don't exists any filesystem call that can do that.
Fragmentation only happens if you append to a file, but that kind of fragmentation should not be a problem for ssd, because all blocks(Except the last) will be full, and ssd don't read the 'next' block, any faster then any other black.
There is a way :}
Set each container width to 50%. Each having no border, margin or padding.
In each of these containers, you can then add an other
.
You can then set border, mangin and padding on this div. (But don't set width!)
No problem at all :}
Why should he not be allowed out ever again?
How would the world be a better place if he was newer allowed to get out?
And let's just look at the alternative here.
If Cedega gave all the code back to wine, then wine would be as good as Cedega, and nobody would buy Cedega. Cedega would thus close down which would
leaving DirectX work under WINE frozen for several years.
I fail to se how that is a better solution.
You can get a fan less computer from deltatronic(www.deltatronic.de). They will sell you as something as fast as it get. They do have an
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 4 x 3,20 GHz 12288 (2x 6144) kB cache, FSB 1600 MHz, Yorkfield 45nm Quad Core, socket 775
Which you can pair up with a
NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT dual DVI-I with HDCP, 2 x Dual Link (or NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT)
But it's not cheep.
Try company of heroes. While it is realtime, clicking fast is not the way to win the game.
It got 3 features I really like:
1: Cover: Hiding behind a wall i a good thing, and units will in general use cover is if it close to their current position and they are fighting. (unit control is squad based, with a squad consisting of up to 6 men).
2: Direction - Some weapons such as machine gun, and anti-tank guns have a limited "field of fire" Which mean that they can only fire in a specific :}
direction. And to turn them around, take quite some time. (Enough that if you attack, a mg emplacement from the back, it can't turn around, before it is dead. This mean that flanking and so on, become very importent. (Remember to cover the flank with a tank
3: Infantry units can be pinned down. So if you attack an mg direct on, it does not really matter how many squads of infantry you have, because they will all cast them self down on the ground for cover and move very slowly only. This mean that you can create 'fields of control' where you know the enemy infantry can't really attack over.
Resources in the game are spread around the map like in dawn of war, so there are control points you need to touch, in order to get the resources).
So the way to win, is to get control of most of the map, fortify the land so when the enemy attack he will die :}
Very fun (And it almost works in linux with wine. So close..)
Only problem is, where do you find an oo database with a good index and search implementation, that don't cost to much that when you ask the company for a price, they don't even want to reply.
How exactly does an automatic generated property differ from the c++ solution, where you just have the variable public?
In both cases, you give the user of the class the ability to read/write a specific valiable.
If you have a schema does isn't merely a nested aggregation, then you'd see that an OOP database becomes sticky. For example, in real books any given story or book can have *multiple* authors. You would then no longer have a simple de-composition hierarchy.
Why should that be a problem? An author has a method getBooks() that return all books he have writen, and a book has an getAuthors() that return all authors. It is true that our graph is now no longer a tree, but I don't se why that should be a problem.
You don't know that. Perhaps their internal reporting is quite complicated. There's a lot of complexity behind the scenes that one may not consider by merely looking at a single reply tree.
Slashcode is opensource so I could have look to find out :}
But it does not matter, for there is no reason that the reporting facilities of an oop database should be less usefull then for a relational database. OQL does show how it can be done, even thou I don't really like OQL, because the designers made it by taking sql, and then redefining
the semantic to be on objects.
And an other problem with OQL is that I don't think that anybody have even made an implementation of it.
When I have problems with the relational model, it is always because while I really like to query the relational model, I don't want to get the data back in a grid. I want the result back as a hierarchy.
Example:
Imagine I have a database with the tables:
user,story,comment
Where each user can have multiple stories and each story can have multiple comments.
Now i want to get a list of all users that have a story, with a comment that contain the word xkcd. The query is easy: Just
select from comment, join story and then join user.
But the presentation is difficult if I want to list the stories together with the user they belong to.
Just imagine I already have a function that can show an user. What input could such a function take? It can't take a user object, because I have no easy way to get the the result from the sql database to a user. It can't take the sql result directly, because it contain the same user far to many times.
Or an even worse problem:
Imagine a page, that can display either "all users, all their stories" or "all users all their stories and all comments for all stories"
Writing such a function is difficult, because you need to show each user and story only once. The only solutin I can come up with, is to sort the result, by user,story and then skip the show user/show story code, if the user for this story is the same as the user for the previous story.
And a presentation function, that require that data are sorted a specific way is not good.
This is the reason that most web developers, really want an oop database. That is: A database that you can query as a relational database, but which can give you back data in a hierarchy. And a hierarchy that can be walked by the application, so that if the query you issued just gave you a list of users, but you for a single user need all his stories, you can just get call getStories() and then a new query will be issued. (But if the original query also fetched the stories, then that list would be returned. But it sholud be transparent for the application developer if a new query
was sendt to the database).
The problem with this oop database, is mainly that nobody have written it. (And you get some issues with locking and transactions).
The best solution I have seen so far(In java) is to use an oop mapper such as Torque, where I can define the database in sql, and then torque will based on the database and the foreign keys create java classes and methods for me. So in the example above, there would be a foreign key linking a story to a user, so torque will on my user object create a getStories() method that will get all stories for that user.
I know this problem might be special for web applications, because most web application very much presentation data and simple input/output work, and relative little advanced query operations.
Just look at slashdot very much input/output and simple query/overview page. But no pages that require special or complicated sql.
Martin
We have QT4.3 that is a "decent cross-language GUI kit"
(Ok, I really think it's a really good OO toolkit, showing how to do MVC right :}. (But they also had qt3 as a training ground :}
But inclusion of a library should not mean that any distributions should have to include it. It just mean that the program can query "is this library installed". So the only thing they really need to agree on is what to call the library. I think they can agree on that.
So if you have a minimum linux distribution that just include the kernel and a static linked bash, you might have a correct implementation, that just return null to any library query.
But the point is that there are 2 different and independent problems that need to be solved.
1: How do an application query about the existens of software(library, compiler, awk and so on), default paths and other operations that differ from distribution to distribution.
2: How do we ensure that the distributions include needed libraries.
My solution would only solve problem 1, but I really think that is the big problem. Most distributions are good at including libraries, and when I run into problems with applications needing a library, the problem for me is not "Hmm, is this included in Fedora core" but more like " I know this library is here someware, but I really have no knowledge about what package contain it. ).
If a user is running "Fedora core 2" which only include qt3, and my program require qt4 the only solution is to tell the user to upgrade his linux distribution, or install the library himself.
Also, having this library, would make it easy for an 3. party developer to find out what distributions have all the needed library, so the "Get all distributions that have all needed libraries" could be a simple, but very helpfull tool. Then the developer can either do a "This is good enough" or static link the libraries that are not common enough. But having to static link to the qt3 library, because the application can't ask the distribution to install it if it is missing(With user accept ofcause), or because there are so many places the library can be located. That is stupid.
And once someone have implemented this library, it would be easy to define a set of "Standard Desktop linux 2008 libraries and tools" that the distributions could support.