HAHA yeah because no telecommunications company has a monopoly over your last mile infrastructure.... oh wait. Comms is a single service monopoly for 99% of people.
GIMP criticism is different to some of the other projects. GIMP is trying to make an artists tool and the problem is unless they completely rip off Photoshop's interface they will always face criticism for not being photoshop. Art tools are like religions. There is only one true way, and everyone has a different version of that way. That's why open source art tools are never going to be good enough until they've ripped off Paint shop Pro, Photoshop, 3D Studio MAX, MAYA, Lightwave, Caligari Truespace (my preferred tool), Rhino 3D etc etc. It's never going to be good enough to have one or some of those tools. It has to be all of them.
Yeah I bet he "personally" doesn't think the company is going to last, and wants to sell out before the stock completely tanks. Gotta lock in those gains!
Housing in Australia has several components to it which I will try to cover in this post. I live in Melbourne Australia and I want to provide insight to people interested in learning more.
1. The 1980s Hawke/Keating Market reforms set the country up for the past 30 years of economic growth. Anyone denying that is crazy. They floated the currency, freed up the market for global trade and set the nation on a path to long term wealth. They did however over stamp on the breaks in 1991 causing a short recession. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
2. Negative Gearing and the Capital Gains Tax concessions are two massive tax breaks for existing home owners. Their effects are huge and not to be underestimated. Negative gearing allows any loss on a property such as repair work or investment loss to be written off against the owner's taxable income. Originally it was introduced to boost investment in the housing market. The Capital gains discount allows a property owner to not pay tax on 50% of their profit on a property when they sell it. In the current market this has created a situation where it is better to leave a property empty, appreciating in value and then sell it without the hassle of dealing with tenants and property management firms. http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...
3. Foreign investment. Market research data from Vancouver shows that implementing a 15% tax on foreign property investment caused a property price drop of around 20%. Where that money is coming from doesn't really matter, the point is that foreign investment accounts for approximately 8-11% of properties purchased in the market. https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
4. Recent studies of water usage in Melbourne and Sydney show that upto 80,000 properties in Melbourne alone lie vacant.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ne... and http://www.afr.com/real-estate...
5. Immigration, 182,000 people migrated to Australia in 2015-16 the 2016-17 stats are not available http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats... This is a large number by Australian standards, but most immigrants are not rich enough to buy property outright. Mostly they increase competition in the rental market. Most of these people are settling in Sydney and Melbourne with an estimate of 70-80% of people moving to these two cities. http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...
6. The mining/resources boom. In the late 1990s/early 2000s the mining/resources boom brought a ton of wealth into Australia, this prevented a natural correction from occurring in the property market. More money flooded into the market which has helped to inflate prices and keep the cycle going.
Now, with all of these factors combining there are many things occurring in the domestic market. Yes the car industry is closing, but overall that's not a big deal so far, because we haven't been exporting many cars for years and it's been a government funded jobs program. Wages are stagnant and growth is quite low at the moment, at the same time we have seen layoffs increasing especially in the mineral states such as Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia. The biggest threat to the economy in my opinion is high house prices growth at a time of high unemployment growth. We are seeing areas which most people would not consider desirable to purchase housing in (traditionally poverty stricken high crime areas)
Seriously, pickup bash/python/C/C++ and get into Linux/shell. The demand is huge and isn't going anywhere. In case you haven't realised it, we're basically in a global recession. Most western economies are being propped up by unsustainable housing bubbles with a lot of money coming in from Chinese investors trying to land bank outside of China. Companies are not getting the investment they need and are looking to cut costs. Linux costs nothing to buy, and good engineers slash the cost of deployment. Companies are looking to automate processes and Linux is how many of them are doing it. I'm working in a team using Linux to automate migration from Cisco Call Manager Express to Cisco Unified Call Manager (centralising VoIP from routers to a core server) the entire project is being done with Linux and the pay is great. There's plenty of Linux work out there if you have the skills. Most businesses don't know howto implement Linux projects well so there's always work.
If all software ran on all platforms. Windows would die and something like Linux/OSX would completely take over. One would be user friendly (osx-like) and the other would be designed for hardcore computer users.
Apple professional market??? Have you tried using a mac lately. The user experience has jumped off a cliff. No audio line in on the laptops, no support for multiple display chaining over display port. Apple has lost the plot. I am writing this on a 2015 Macbook Pro I was given by my employer and the thing is a piece of junk. My 2012 Macbook Pro (recently stolen from my house by thieves) was a much better laptop, and my 2009 Mac Pro tower was a much better workstation. I have given up on Apple. Until they announce products capable of multimedia and editing which people actually want. It's off to Linux and the open source media tools which admittedly can't hold a candle to the multimedia software on Apple but at least on Razer's 13" Laptop they still have Audio Line in and out. Why Apple has chosen to screw up the most basic multimedia connectivity shows they've completely abandoned all pretence of being a multimedia machine.
We control 1/3rd of the World's Uranium supply here in Australia, with some of the largest deposits in the world in the middle of our continent. Why should we have to bend over for anybody? We are legally able to pursue a nuclear weapons program as we conducted nuclear testing in the 1950s and the NPT specifically has an exception for countries that conducted testing before the treaty was signed. Now I am definitely not saying that Australia will go down that path. But personally, if it gets us free of US overreach into our internal affairs then hell yes that's a good thing. America is probably going to get Australia dragged into a war with China over issues which most people within Australia don't/won't want to understand. Why should we bleed and die to protect American corporate profits? We should be standing on our own two feet and a nuclear shield would be an excellent way to make both China and the US take Australia more seriously. We are happy to trade peacefully with the world but we shouldn't be rushing to get involved in American follies. Iraq showed us that US leadership is capable of dangerous incompetence and Trump is hammering that home even more. A protectionist America is dangerous for the Australian economy. We are a middle power, we cannot become a protectionist nation. We must trade with the world, our needs and America's needs have begun to diverge.
When it comes to what MY government does. You're goddamn right Citizens should have more rights. The Government exists to serve those who elected it. Everyone else can get in the back of the line behind us. That includes Americans and everyone else.
Looks like Moore's Law is starting to fall apart. There's what? 7nm, then Carbon transistors, then 3nm, then 1nm CPU processes left in the bag. Beyond that they can't make transistors smaller and clock speed on Carbon transistors is going to be massively heat bound. (Yes Carbon sublimates at 5000C, but your solder on your motherboard only goes to about 300-350C. Even assuming you could make Steel traces, that still only gets you to 1200C before your board traces melt let alone capacitors and other components). Interesting times.
I hope they succeed. Mostly because I think it's retarded that Zuckerberg is that rich at the moment. I want Facebook to implode. Aside from Facebook events. The entire user experience has gone to hell in the last few months/years. Ads are increasingly taking over the newsfeed and it's just a user interface mess.
I have a PSVR. Seriously this will become a massive revolution in gaming. VR is a complete overhaul of the space, racing and flight sim genres. If people haven't tried it yet I highly recommend playing the Star Wars Battlefront VR mission. This thing is insane, you're in an X-Wing cockpit, all the controls/buttons activate. You can even turn the targetting computer on/off just like in the movies! Turn around and your R2 is in the back working away. There is no gaming experience like it. In my 25 years of space gaming nothing comes close to it. 6 months ago I would have said that VR is a nice to have and that Star Citizen shouldn't focus on it too much. Now I'd argue that it's 100% essential. VR should be a core design component of any game where you sit for extended periods inside a vehicle.The realism is completely unmatched by any other medium.
Won't happen because it'll kill MSY, ASUS, and Gigabyte. The PC Motherboard vendors have 0 reason to comply same with the GPU manufacturers. Sealing the case and not allowing interop would kill literally thousands of companies. Do you really think if cases go sealed it won't become Intel/Microsoft, Apple, Google, Samsung hardware?
Except they don't run Linux, and for me that's a non-negotiable option. Either it runs Linux or I don't buy it. That's for both desktops and laptops. Consoles are not content creation devices and they won't become content creation devices. You need more powerful hardware to target graphics for console hardware that's due in 1-3 years time. Only a PC can do that. Maya is PC only. You can port all the unity/cryengine toolkits you want. Without modeling/animation/rigging software the engines are useless.
Boring, the Motorola Atrix did this first. Good concept poor execution. Phones will need 4-16GB of RAM to be useful. The Atrix had 1GB of ram and ran a Linux desktop. The experience was pitiful. They had the best concept by far for running phone apps in a window next to your desktop apps but the phone just didn't have the RAM to keep up. Firefox could open 1-3 tabs before it'd run out of ram and close. A full X11 stack running on Android is a good idea but only if the environment is unlocked in exactly the opposite way to how Android currently locks down the environment. You need to be able to add/remove desktop software to your phone for the concept to work.
Ok so my take on it is this: Apple without Jobs is stale/boring/useless. They were going in a bad direction when they axed the professional lines, and now that they've completely ditched the professional market there's nothing interesting there. They used to be a media powerhouse, now it's a glorified browser machine. Yuck. Windows is still doing it's boring old thing of plodding along as an annoying mess with an interface you're stuck with and no access to the guts. Linux has become more useful as an entertainment system, but still pretty horrid for media creation. Recent bright spots include Krita, and the video editing stack which seems to finally be getting somewhere. We still need an equivalent to the video compositing features of Quartz on the Mac.Now to the wider tech space. VR is exciting but this insane focus on performance over content is slowly killing it. What's needed is something like X-Wing Alliance or Freespace 2 to gain VR support so that the VR platform has something compelling which isn't over in 30 seconds going for it. On the Open source gaming front it's better than ever with Unity/Unreal 4/Cryengine all being open source but more can be done. Tools Tools Tools is the name of the game, we need more modellers, more editors etc.Microsoft/Mac are the problem but Linux seems to be holding its own and improving compared to those two platforms.
Yeah the Director is right. They should update the laws. TO STRENGTHEN CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTIONS. The judges should be coming down on this shit hard. Your e-mail is exactly the same as your private mail. They couldn't open it then and they shouldn't open it now. It's not rocket science. Your communications are yours and not the governments. Is the post office allowed to read your mail? Fuck no.
No, VR works, but the killer apps for it are racing, flight, and space flight simulation. But if you think Mario would suck in VR, I suggest you checkout the VR Playroom on Playstation. It's great. You are correct in that FPS/running games are completely stupid in VR. But the medium has a lot of promise in other titles.
Nintendo is going to miss the VR wave. This is a massive mistake. As someone who owns a PSVR and has played the Battlefront X-Wing demo. Nintendo is missing a massive opportunity here, remember Factor 5 and the Star Wars games? This is the perfect time for that style of game and they're going to miss it. There are games in the VR Playroom which definitely tread on Nintendo's turf, the mini robot games in particular feel so much like a modern take on Mario it's ridiculous. Nintendo has lost the plot.
Most likely the cause is fracking. Mining companies have been under-reporting and trying to cover up the levels of methane released by fracking for the past decade. We know this from several scientists in the United States that have done ground water testing and shown entire water supplies which can be lit by a match.
Metalicarap is the real 3D printing revolution: http://reprap.org/wiki/Metalic... It can print solar panels which means it can power itself. It can double as an electron microscope, and importantly it can refine, recycle and print metals. When complete Metalicarap is going to disrupt the entire world. The plastic 3D printers were never going to be more than toys. Eventually you might have both in your house, but the Metal 3D printers are the real game changers.
This is why Trump is telling Europe to step up on military or lose support. America is doing too much heavy lifting and can't afford to keep spending on it.
Everyone is in it to make money, what part of that don't you understand? Why stay private and have a few hundred million dollars when you can go public and rake in the billions.
Slashdot Mirror
HAHA yeah because no telecommunications company has a monopoly over your last mile infrastructure.... oh wait. Comms is a single service monopoly for 99% of people.
GIMP criticism is different to some of the other projects. GIMP is trying to make an artists tool and the problem is unless they completely rip off Photoshop's interface they will always face criticism for not being photoshop. Art tools are like religions. There is only one true way, and everyone has a different version of that way. That's why open source art tools are never going to be good enough until they've ripped off Paint shop Pro, Photoshop, 3D Studio MAX, MAYA, Lightwave, Caligari Truespace (my preferred tool), Rhino 3D etc etc. It's never going to be good enough to have one or some of those tools. It has to be all of them.
Yeah I bet he "personally" doesn't think the company is going to last, and wants to sell out before the stock completely tanks. Gotta lock in those gains!
Housing in Australia has several components to it which I will try to cover in this post. I live in Melbourne Australia and I want to provide insight to people interested in learning more. 1. The 1980s Hawke/Keating Market reforms set the country up for the past 30 years of economic growth. Anyone denying that is crazy. They floated the currency, freed up the market for global trade and set the nation on a path to long term wealth. They did however over stamp on the breaks in 1991 causing a short recession. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... 2. Negative Gearing and the Capital Gains Tax concessions are two massive tax breaks for existing home owners. Their effects are huge and not to be underestimated. Negative gearing allows any loss on a property such as repair work or investment loss to be written off against the owner's taxable income. Originally it was introduced to boost investment in the housing market. The Capital gains discount allows a property owner to not pay tax on 50% of their profit on a property when they sell it. In the current market this has created a situation where it is better to leave a property empty, appreciating in value and then sell it without the hassle of dealing with tenants and property management firms. http://www.abc.net.au/news/201... 3. Foreign investment. Market research data from Vancouver shows that implementing a 15% tax on foreign property investment caused a property price drop of around 20%. Where that money is coming from doesn't really matter, the point is that foreign investment accounts for approximately 8-11% of properties purchased in the market. https://www.bloomberg.com/news... 4. Recent studies of water usage in Melbourne and Sydney show that upto 80,000 properties in Melbourne alone lie vacant. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ne... and http://www.afr.com/real-estate... 5. Immigration, 182,000 people migrated to Australia in 2015-16 the 2016-17 stats are not available http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats... This is a large number by Australian standards, but most immigrants are not rich enough to buy property outright. Mostly they increase competition in the rental market. Most of these people are settling in Sydney and Melbourne with an estimate of 70-80% of people moving to these two cities. http://www.abc.net.au/news/201... 6. The mining/resources boom. In the late 1990s/early 2000s the mining/resources boom brought a ton of wealth into Australia, this prevented a natural correction from occurring in the property market. More money flooded into the market which has helped to inflate prices and keep the cycle going. Now, with all of these factors combining there are many things occurring in the domestic market. Yes the car industry is closing, but overall that's not a big deal so far, because we haven't been exporting many cars for years and it's been a government funded jobs program. Wages are stagnant and growth is quite low at the moment, at the same time we have seen layoffs increasing especially in the mineral states such as Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia. The biggest threat to the economy in my opinion is high house prices growth at a time of high unemployment growth. We are seeing areas which most people would not consider desirable to purchase housing in (traditionally poverty stricken high crime areas)
Seriously, pickup bash/python/C/C++ and get into Linux/shell. The demand is huge and isn't going anywhere. In case you haven't realised it, we're basically in a global recession. Most western economies are being propped up by unsustainable housing bubbles with a lot of money coming in from Chinese investors trying to land bank outside of China. Companies are not getting the investment they need and are looking to cut costs. Linux costs nothing to buy, and good engineers slash the cost of deployment. Companies are looking to automate processes and Linux is how many of them are doing it. I'm working in a team using Linux to automate migration from Cisco Call Manager Express to Cisco Unified Call Manager (centralising VoIP from routers to a core server) the entire project is being done with Linux and the pay is great. There's plenty of Linux work out there if you have the skills. Most businesses don't know howto implement Linux projects well so there's always work.
If all software ran on all platforms. Windows would die and something like Linux/OSX would completely take over. One would be user friendly (osx-like) and the other would be designed for hardcore computer users.
Apple professional market??? Have you tried using a mac lately. The user experience has jumped off a cliff. No audio line in on the laptops, no support for multiple display chaining over display port. Apple has lost the plot. I am writing this on a 2015 Macbook Pro I was given by my employer and the thing is a piece of junk. My 2012 Macbook Pro (recently stolen from my house by thieves) was a much better laptop, and my 2009 Mac Pro tower was a much better workstation. I have given up on Apple. Until they announce products capable of multimedia and editing which people actually want. It's off to Linux and the open source media tools which admittedly can't hold a candle to the multimedia software on Apple but at least on Razer's 13" Laptop they still have Audio Line in and out. Why Apple has chosen to screw up the most basic multimedia connectivity shows they've completely abandoned all pretence of being a multimedia machine.
We control 1/3rd of the World's Uranium supply here in Australia, with some of the largest deposits in the world in the middle of our continent. Why should we have to bend over for anybody? We are legally able to pursue a nuclear weapons program as we conducted nuclear testing in the 1950s and the NPT specifically has an exception for countries that conducted testing before the treaty was signed. Now I am definitely not saying that Australia will go down that path. But personally, if it gets us free of US overreach into our internal affairs then hell yes that's a good thing. America is probably going to get Australia dragged into a war with China over issues which most people within Australia don't/won't want to understand. Why should we bleed and die to protect American corporate profits? We should be standing on our own two feet and a nuclear shield would be an excellent way to make both China and the US take Australia more seriously. We are happy to trade peacefully with the world but we shouldn't be rushing to get involved in American follies. Iraq showed us that US leadership is capable of dangerous incompetence and Trump is hammering that home even more. A protectionist America is dangerous for the Australian economy. We are a middle power, we cannot become a protectionist nation. We must trade with the world, our needs and America's needs have begun to diverge.
When it comes to what MY government does. You're goddamn right Citizens should have more rights. The Government exists to serve those who elected it. Everyone else can get in the back of the line behind us. That includes Americans and everyone else.
Looks like Moore's Law is starting to fall apart. There's what? 7nm, then Carbon transistors, then 3nm, then 1nm CPU processes left in the bag. Beyond that they can't make transistors smaller and clock speed on Carbon transistors is going to be massively heat bound. (Yes Carbon sublimates at 5000C, but your solder on your motherboard only goes to about 300-350C. Even assuming you could make Steel traces, that still only gets you to 1200C before your board traces melt let alone capacitors and other components). Interesting times.
I hope they succeed. Mostly because I think it's retarded that Zuckerberg is that rich at the moment. I want Facebook to implode. Aside from Facebook events. The entire user experience has gone to hell in the last few months/years. Ads are increasingly taking over the newsfeed and it's just a user interface mess.
I have a PSVR. Seriously this will become a massive revolution in gaming. VR is a complete overhaul of the space, racing and flight sim genres. If people haven't tried it yet I highly recommend playing the Star Wars Battlefront VR mission. This thing is insane, you're in an X-Wing cockpit, all the controls/buttons activate. You can even turn the targetting computer on/off just like in the movies! Turn around and your R2 is in the back working away. There is no gaming experience like it. In my 25 years of space gaming nothing comes close to it. 6 months ago I would have said that VR is a nice to have and that Star Citizen shouldn't focus on it too much. Now I'd argue that it's 100% essential. VR should be a core design component of any game where you sit for extended periods inside a vehicle.The realism is completely unmatched by any other medium.
Won't happen because it'll kill MSY, ASUS, and Gigabyte. The PC Motherboard vendors have 0 reason to comply same with the GPU manufacturers. Sealing the case and not allowing interop would kill literally thousands of companies. Do you really think if cases go sealed it won't become Intel/Microsoft, Apple, Google, Samsung hardware?
Except they don't run Linux, and for me that's a non-negotiable option. Either it runs Linux or I don't buy it. That's for both desktops and laptops. Consoles are not content creation devices and they won't become content creation devices. You need more powerful hardware to target graphics for console hardware that's due in 1-3 years time. Only a PC can do that. Maya is PC only. You can port all the unity/cryengine toolkits you want. Without modeling/animation/rigging software the engines are useless.
Boring, the Motorola Atrix did this first. Good concept poor execution. Phones will need 4-16GB of RAM to be useful. The Atrix had 1GB of ram and ran a Linux desktop. The experience was pitiful. They had the best concept by far for running phone apps in a window next to your desktop apps but the phone just didn't have the RAM to keep up. Firefox could open 1-3 tabs before it'd run out of ram and close. A full X11 stack running on Android is a good idea but only if the environment is unlocked in exactly the opposite way to how Android currently locks down the environment. You need to be able to add/remove desktop software to your phone for the concept to work.
Ok so my take on it is this: Apple without Jobs is stale/boring/useless. They were going in a bad direction when they axed the professional lines, and now that they've completely ditched the professional market there's nothing interesting there. They used to be a media powerhouse, now it's a glorified browser machine. Yuck. Windows is still doing it's boring old thing of plodding along as an annoying mess with an interface you're stuck with and no access to the guts. Linux has become more useful as an entertainment system, but still pretty horrid for media creation. Recent bright spots include Krita, and the video editing stack which seems to finally be getting somewhere. We still need an equivalent to the video compositing features of Quartz on the Mac.Now to the wider tech space. VR is exciting but this insane focus on performance over content is slowly killing it. What's needed is something like X-Wing Alliance or Freespace 2 to gain VR support so that the VR platform has something compelling which isn't over in 30 seconds going for it. On the Open source gaming front it's better than ever with Unity/Unreal 4/Cryengine all being open source but more can be done. Tools Tools Tools is the name of the game, we need more modellers, more editors etc.Microsoft/Mac are the problem but Linux seems to be holding its own and improving compared to those two platforms.
Yeah the Director is right. They should update the laws. TO STRENGTHEN CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTIONS. The judges should be coming down on this shit hard. Your e-mail is exactly the same as your private mail. They couldn't open it then and they shouldn't open it now. It's not rocket science. Your communications are yours and not the governments. Is the post office allowed to read your mail? Fuck no.
No, VR works, but the killer apps for it are racing, flight, and space flight simulation. But if you think Mario would suck in VR, I suggest you checkout the VR Playroom on Playstation. It's great. You are correct in that FPS/running games are completely stupid in VR. But the medium has a lot of promise in other titles.
Nintendo is going to miss the VR wave. This is a massive mistake. As someone who owns a PSVR and has played the Battlefront X-Wing demo. Nintendo is missing a massive opportunity here, remember Factor 5 and the Star Wars games? This is the perfect time for that style of game and they're going to miss it. There are games in the VR Playroom which definitely tread on Nintendo's turf, the mini robot games in particular feel so much like a modern take on Mario it's ridiculous. Nintendo has lost the plot.
Dual 24 - 27" monitors. It helps with productivity.
Most likely the cause is fracking. Mining companies have been under-reporting and trying to cover up the levels of methane released by fracking for the past decade. We know this from several scientists in the United States that have done ground water testing and shown entire water supplies which can be lit by a match.
Let's try an experiment. You give me $20 million, and we'll see if I show up to work next year. No takers? didn't think so.
Metalicarap is the real 3D printing revolution: http://reprap.org/wiki/Metalic... It can print solar panels which means it can power itself. It can double as an electron microscope, and importantly it can refine, recycle and print metals. When complete Metalicarap is going to disrupt the entire world. The plastic 3D printers were never going to be more than toys. Eventually you might have both in your house, but the Metal 3D printers are the real game changers.
This is why Trump is telling Europe to step up on military or lose support. America is doing too much heavy lifting and can't afford to keep spending on it.
Everyone is in it to make money, what part of that don't you understand? Why stay private and have a few hundred million dollars when you can go public and rake in the billions.