I will not allow my son to attend school today due to your policy of allowing profit-based "special interest groups" such as the RIAA to use your classroom as a forum to brainwash kids so they get richer.
The claimed aim of the filter to justify its existence is to block child pornography, but only half of all blocked sites are porn-related, less than 1/3 are actually related to child porn. I'd like to know more about what is on the other sites and why they are blocked. It sounds like this is yet another case of yet another government claiming they're doing something reasonable just to get the mechanism in place, just to abuse that trust and use it to attack their own citizens key constitutional rights such as freedom of speech.
All countries should have a law that prevents their governments from being allowed to repeatedly reattempt to pass a law the got turned down once already. Especially when the law has already been found to be unconstitutional.
This smells of yet another obviously transparent excuse to take one more step towards a police state.
What they actually want is an ifrastructure to spy on everyones actual location in realtime. This whole taxed road usage is just a cover story to get it implemented.
If they really just wanted to just know a cars mileage, they could just take an odometer reading. No need for a GPS. They could even do that when you go for a smog check, so no actual justification for road sensors either. Its obviously a scam.
Why did it take you 3 days? All Geforce cards (yours included) use the same nvidia linux driver. Its just dead easy to install the nvidia Linux driver under Ubuntu. You don't even need to open a browser, surf to the nvidia website and manually download the driver like you do with windows.
>> publishers feel safe when they publish to Steam because they know the chance of piracy is way down.
Yeah but its as a result of publishers being ignorant of facts and wanting to believe, rather than actual reality. Go look on Pirate Bay. A lot of games there are originally a steam downloads that have been stripped of protection.
The bottom line is that people just don't like any kind of limitations on the stuff they bought, as they see it as being theirs to do with as they like.
>> Linux is cool, but it's too cheap and free to complement five figure tuition costs.:-)
The cheapness of Linux is in no way relative to its usability or freely availble functionality, which is orders of magnitude higher than both Mac and Windows. Why do you think network admins etc, choose Linux?
Your observation of a five figure tuition cost is relevant. But perhaps like most of us parents, hers cant afford high tuition fees and also to waste money on something as pointless and shallow as an underpowered laptop with an overpriced brand-marketing image. Not to mention the cost of the extra suite of commercial productivity software they'd also have to buy just because they bought a mac.
>> Why handicap her just to make a "I use free stuff" statement, The real handicap would be to buy her a Mac. Your undeserved low opinion of Linux is very misguided. Linux is way more usable and powerful than Windows and Mac. Furthermore with Linux she can freely download and use new apps as and when she needs them. Cant do that with a Mac unless you got daddys gold card.
>> College is about learning new things. Learn OSX! At college you need all the time you have to study your chosen subject. The last thing you need to deal with is having to learn a new OS too.
Cable company DVRs come with an exrta rental charge. Also they dont skip adverts. That functionality is explicitly disabled. Also my mythbox is the core of a whole home entertainment system that has way more features than any cable company dvr.
Yeah I already use a pcHDTV card. If I got rid of cable and went OTA I'd also have figure out what to do about my internet. I'd have to go DSL (yuk) or something.
If they do anything that stops me using my mythbox to record tv I will totally cancel cable. I'm too busy and my time is too valuable to me to only watch live broadcast at their start times, mostly because of all the commercial breaks, but also usually I'm just too busy to be around a a set time. A normal 90 minute movie on cable takes like 3 hours even though they have cut the movie down 'for content' which is a PC way of saying 'removed good content to make more space for advertising breaks'. Cable is already too expensive and has so terrible programming quality that I need mythbox to filter out all the commercials and shitty shows so I get anything worth watching at all. If they break my ability to use mythbox I'm seriously gone from TV. Netflix, Hulu etc here I come. Good job there MPAA on killing the cash cow.
Why the heck did they go with the lCD glasses technology? its the worst of the lot both in terms of cost and performance. I experimented extensively with this stuff with nvidia's first-time-round LCD shutter glasses 8(?) years ago. It suffers badly with cross-eye bleedover (as LCD panels even when black still let quite a lot of light through) and the 60hz alternating blinking in front of each eye gives most people killer migraine after about 15 minutes.
Why cant they go with the much better idea of alternately polarized pixels on the display itself? (similar to IMAX-style 3D). It gives much better results, much less eye strain (as theres no flickering), and would only require cheap passive glasses.
That cant be generally true otherwise all Chinese people would look identical. oh wait...
Devaluation of software engineering
on
Coders At Work
·
· Score: 1
Is it just me or does anyone else also hate being described as a coder? It seems to me that this label is just another devisive step in the general undermining of skilled Software Engineering.
>> he appears to have behaved like a raging asshole... which would coincide with my experiences of the usual attitude of nearly all sys admins at the companies I've worked at over the last 30+ years.
>> provides features you can only appreciate on a 120hz display
well thats a new one. There's not even slight technical merit to that statement but its certainly demonstrates the amusing creativity of ATi fanbois.
>> The 9800GT and 8800GT are the same price and the ATI card blows it out of the water
I have no argument that you should go with Ati if you're windows only and looking at cheaper-end cards.
Its totally irrelevant to me though as I go for best overall performance, decent drivers, and only consider cards that have drivers that work well with Linux. ATI suck on all counts in my areas of interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Principal,
I will not allow my son to attend school today due to your policy of allowing profit-based "special interest groups" such as the RIAA to use your classroom as a forum to brainwash kids so they get richer.
Wow, Dave Lee Roth is a slashdot member?
well have a time limit. So you can only submit a law for (re)consideration say once every 3 years.
The claimed aim of the filter to justify its existence is to block child pornography, but only half of all blocked sites are porn-related, less than 1/3 are actually related to child porn.
I'd like to know more about what is on the other sites and why they are blocked.
It sounds like this is yet another case of yet another government claiming they're doing something reasonable just to get the mechanism in place, just to abuse that trust and use it to attack their own citizens key constitutional rights such as freedom of speech.
All countries should have a law that prevents their governments from being allowed to repeatedly reattempt to pass a law the got turned down once already. Especially when the law has already been found to be unconstitutional.
>>> "Gravitational waves squash and stretch space as they travel through the universe
Gravitational waves are very useful in the kitchen. I use them for juicing oranges.
This smells of yet another obviously transparent excuse to take one more step towards a police state.
What they actually want is an ifrastructure to spy on everyones actual location in realtime. This whole taxed road usage is just a cover story to get it implemented.
If they really just wanted to just know a cars mileage, they could just take an odometer reading. No need for a GPS. They could even do that when you go for a smog check, so no actual justification for road sensors either. Its obviously a scam.
That would be a phone I would never buy.
Many judges clearly don't have the required tehcnical knowledge to make informed decisions in cases like this.
What we need is an addition to the current court system, to provide special courts with tech-savvy judges to hear cases that are technical in nature.
Why did it take you 3 days? All Geforce cards (yours included) use the same nvidia linux driver.
Its just dead easy to install the nvidia Linux driver under Ubuntu. You don't even need to open a browser, surf to the nvidia website and manually download the driver like you do with windows.
Thats funny. I paid nothing for Linux, its great, and I feel compelled to be a snob about that too :-)
>> publishers feel safe when they publish to Steam because they know the chance of piracy is way down.
Yeah but its as a result of publishers being ignorant of facts and wanting to believe, rather than actual reality.
Go look on Pirate Bay. A lot of games there are originally a steam downloads that have been stripped of protection.
The bottom line is that people just don't like any kind of limitations on the stuff they bought, as they see it as being theirs to do with as they like.
Performance per dollar is a stupid metric.
A crappy old pentium 3 from ebay wins every time, but is that really what you want to buy and use?
>> You won't be there to support her machine at 2am when she has a paper due the next morning.
Why do you think she can't support her own machine? THe article sounds like she has been using Linux for a while.
Anyway in my experience Linux is a lot easier than Windows (especially Vista) to get working right.
>> Linux is cool, but it's too cheap and free to complement five figure tuition costs. :-)
The cheapness of Linux is in no way relative to its usability or freely availble functionality, which is orders of magnitude higher than both Mac and Windows. Why do you think network admins etc, choose Linux?
Your observation of a five figure tuition cost is relevant. But perhaps like most of us parents, hers cant afford high tuition fees and also to waste money on something as pointless and shallow as an underpowered laptop with an overpriced brand-marketing image. Not to mention the cost of the extra suite of commercial productivity software they'd also have to buy just because they bought a mac.
>> Why handicap her just to make a "I use free stuff" statement,
The real handicap would be to buy her a Mac. Your undeserved low opinion of Linux is very misguided. Linux is way more usable and powerful than Windows and Mac. Furthermore with Linux she can freely download and use new apps as and when she needs them. Cant do that with a Mac unless you got daddys gold card.
>> College is about learning new things. Learn OSX!
At college you need all the time you have to study your chosen subject. The last thing you need to deal with is having to learn a new OS too.
Cable company DVRs come with an exrta rental charge. Also they dont skip adverts. That functionality is explicitly disabled. Also my mythbox is the core of a whole home entertainment system that has way more features than any cable company dvr.
Yeah I already use a pcHDTV card. If I got rid of cable and went OTA I'd also have figure out what to do about my internet. I'd have to go DSL (yuk) or something.
If they do anything that stops me using my mythbox to record tv I will totally cancel cable.
I'm too busy and my time is too valuable to me to only watch live broadcast at their start times, mostly because of all the commercial breaks, but also usually I'm just too busy to be around a a set time.
A normal 90 minute movie on cable takes like 3 hours even though they have cut the movie down 'for content' which is a PC way of saying 'removed good content to make more space for advertising breaks'.
Cable is already too expensive and has so terrible programming quality that I need mythbox to filter out all the commercials and shitty shows so I get anything worth watching at all. If they break my ability to use mythbox I'm seriously gone from TV. Netflix, Hulu etc here I come.
Good job there MPAA on killing the cash cow.
Why the heck did they go with the lCD glasses technology? its the worst of the lot both in terms of cost and performance.
I experimented extensively with this stuff with nvidia's first-time-round LCD shutter glasses 8(?) years ago.
It suffers badly with cross-eye bleedover (as LCD panels even when black still let quite a lot of light through) and the 60hz alternating blinking in front of each eye gives most people killer migraine after about 15 minutes.
Why cant they go with the much better idea of alternately polarized pixels on the display itself? (similar to IMAX-style 3D). It gives much better results, much less eye strain (as theres no flickering), and would only require cheap passive glasses.
That cant be generally true otherwise all Chinese people would look identical. oh wait...
Is it just me or does anyone else also hate being described as a coder?
It seems to me that this label is just another devisive step in the general undermining of skilled Software Engineering.
>> he appears to have behaved like a raging asshole ... which would coincide with my experiences of the usual attitude of nearly all sys admins at the companies I've worked at over the last 30+ years.
Yeah I really dont care that my drivers are just binary blobs. I have no desire to mess with my graphics driver anyway.
Even in the article she sounds really confrontational. I bet the email was just the last straw rather than the first offence.
>> provides features you can only appreciate on a 120hz display
well thats a new one. There's not even slight technical merit to that statement but its certainly demonstrates the amusing creativity of ATi fanbois.
>> The 9800GT and 8800GT are the same price and the ATI card blows it out of the water
I have no argument that you should go with Ati if you're windows only and looking at cheaper-end cards.
Its totally irrelevant to me though as I go for best overall performance, decent drivers, and only consider cards that have drivers that work well with Linux. ATI suck on all counts in my areas of interest.