I find their letters incredibly annoying. Inevitably, when you move house there's one waiting for you on the mat; I generally have no objection to paying the license fee as I find the BBC's programming to be of value, but those letters infallibly make me angry and resentful.
I never quite got why "average" games deserve 7/10 (except for kickbacks from the industry...) Surely a bog-standard average game should get 5, a totally awful one should edge towards 0 and a magnificant one should edge towards 10 - currently the low numbers are under-used, and the ones at the top end (8 and 9 especially) provide insufficient room for reviewers to differentiate. Then again, perhaps trying to judge whether a game is worth 8 or 9 is pointless anyway and reviewers should stick to thumbs up, thumbs down or couldn't care less.
Well fuck me with an oil-rig drill tip; there's something I never thought I'd hear anyone say. They're moving to Intel because Intel chips have low power consumption? I take it Steve Jobs drives a Humvee because he heard they get pretty good mileage?!
Will your notebook or desktop PC someday sport quantum innards? It's unlikely, at least in the immediate future. Researchers believe quantum systems will be much more efficient at rock-solid cryptography and mass database searches than running the latest version of Doom.
Yeah, because nobody has any use for rock solid cryptography on a notebook or desktop PC... Oh, wait.
While I agree that (to take an example) the guys running Sony's DRM program are sleazebags for doing what they do, people also need to take more responsibility for their own computer systems; this means learning how to use root or Administrator accounts properly. Even on Windows it's possible to let your children use the computer without letting them have the ability to install random crapware on it. People like the convenience of doing everything as root, but it's just dumb.
The bloke thought the doctors had made a pretty devastating mistake. In that case there was no wonderful research to be done, he had just never had AIDS. I think most people would sue the people responsible if they'd had their lives ruined by being told they had AIDS when in fact the test was just wrong. A test with such an impact is something you have to take time over and be damned sure you get right, or face the legal consequences.
When it turned out that both tests were correct, and that there was truly something extraordinary going on, then he was very eager to help.
My point is that Type Managers can be very useful if a given activity only uses one application or type of file (e.g., rip/mix/burn/listen with music). But when the activity spans multiple types it drives the user back to using a general file manager. In such situations, existing Type Managers fragment the user's access to files and become a hinderance
Absolutely. So perhaps what would work best is a kind of combination: a file manager that, when you start dealing with particular types of files, can notice, and offer "type manager" functionality. I think Konqueror is kind of half-way there with kparts, which let another program take over the interface to an extent, but the current state of Konqueror is a mess. On one hand, it does a reasonable job of turning into a PDF "type manager" when you click on a pdf (though better support for navigating between different PDFs from inside the kpart would be good); on the other hand, it does a horrible job with music files -- even an intelligent, mimetype-sensitive sidebar would be a reasonable step forward. I think they are on the right lines - a filemanager with an attempt to embrace mimetype-specific functionality - but there is still a long way to go.
The summary is very misleading. The man has now said, in two national newspapers, that he will help research in any way he can.
He did earlier refuse to help, but that was at the point where he was still considering suing the doctors because of the initial positive test - obviously you don't expect a second test to come up negative because AIDS generally doesn't just go away, so when it did he naturally thought the first test had been wrong and was pissed off with the doctors. However, later his health authority confirmed that there had been no mistake with either test and he changed his mind and now wishes to help by undergoing further tests.
So ease off the guy, okay? It's the guy who didn't research the story properly before writing the summary that's the asshole here, not the cured-of-AIDS guy.
I just wish KDE could learn from Apple in this regard. Not in the sense of slavish copying, I hasten to add; I just wish that as KDE is becoming more powerful it could also become simpler. At least by default, even if the whole configuration jibjab could be accessed by clicking on an "Advanced" button. I use it all the time, but while I like the configurability I find the "complex by default" approach annoying.
Only if they release it. They can use a proprietary fs in-house as much as they like. It's only if they were selling some kind of google-in-a-box which ran their filesystem: then they would need to provide the source, as they would be distributing it. Running a filesystem on their own machines does not count as distributing it, regardless of how many people are accessing the data on it; therefore they do not need to release the code as GPL (indeed, at all).
Having read this man's column off and on for years (why, I ask myself...) I can safely say that he is a chimp and 95% of his opinion can be discounted (the 5% is solely attributable to the random-monkey-with-typewriter effect).
Oh, yeah, pointing out that America is going to have to address the fact that it isn't going to be the dominant world power forever is soo anti-American. Face it, throughout history no dominant power has remained dominant for very long. Obviously linear extrapolation is a shitty economic forecasting technique, which is partly why I paid so little attention to providing any kind of accurate figures. But there are other reasons than current economic growth rates to suppose that China (and, for that matter, India) will be key world economic powers by the middle of the century. I'm not sure that your "the people will want freedom" argument holds either; there have been plenty of successful powers in history where people haven't had much freedom yet haven't revolted in a catastrophic way, and even if they do revolt and kick out the current administration, who's to say that it would harm the country economically? I don't see that it's beyond the realms of possibility that a quick bloodless coup followed by an economically prudent government could actually accelerate economic growth. Also, I don't see what your argument about China's regrettable gender imbalance has to do with the economy. It's certainly a problem, but I don't see that it is primarily an economic one. Note that were China or India to become an economic superpower in the timeframe I mentioned, it would almost certainly be a very different one to the current USA; most of its power would come through size, with the per capita GNP being lower than in current western countries. But the probable effects of such a country being dominant are either huge trade wars and Western isolationism or a considerable lowering of per capita GNP in western countries as we struggle to compete in a free(ish) market. I can't really be bothered to argue the point further, particularly with someone who takes such a mild comment as damning evidence of my total anti-USianism (?!?? heck, I'm probably a damn pinko (NOT!)), but I suspect that the world of 2100 will look surprisingly different to that of 1900 or 2000.
NEWSFLASH: Growth rate of US economy: not much. A few percent possibly. Growth rate of China's economy: huge. About 11% IIRC.
Which means China is on course to become the largest economy in the world in about 30 years' time. (Figures all OTOH, but there or thereabouts.)
The US and Europe may be far and away the biggest economic blocs in the world at the moment, but we're going to have to get used to sharing economic might sooner than some people realize. And I doubt China (and India) will have the same ideas about where the centres of world power should be that we do.
Good point - I put off buying The Wall for ages because of its outrageous price, and eventually summoned up the cheek to ask for it for my birthday:-) And in the end I still prefer Dark Side of the Moon, which is about half the price:-/
If Red Hat are genuinely aiming to provide a platform capable of mixing restricted, secret and TS material on the same system then good luck to them. But I don't see any real users with material genuinely warranting those classifications being ready to trust such a system until a long time and a vast amount of validation work have been done.
That's the best suggestion I've heard so far. Even if 99 is the lowest the music industry wants to go, what about 99 for stuff older than 5 years, $1.25 for newer stuff and $1.50 for top 100 stuff? It might get people to look a bit more broadly than whatever's on the radio today, and in so doing realise what dross most of the top 100 is, compared to stuff that has stood the test of time. And if not, well at least the record industry's mammoth profits are mostly at the expense of people with poor taste;-)
The books are probably shit too, more aimed at reaping profit and constantly changing so that each year's edition is subtly different. The whole textbook publisher / US university relationship is a scandal that should have become the cause of public outrage years ago. The bribery and corruption involved would make mobsters blush. Feynmann commented on the whole sorry saga years ago. I was lucky - my course (Oxford university) used long-standing textbooks selected on merit. There was a thriving second-hand market and the colleges even bought supplies of the textbooks that were loaned to students for the year. Now that's a sensible approach to textbooks, particularly in rich institutions like many US universities. Perhaps in biochemistry and so on the subject material changes drastically from year to year, but at undergraduate level the material being taught does not fundamentally change on anything like that kind of timescale.
Check your contract. If it doesn't state a number of hours per week (certainly in the UK most do), then you're probably SOOL. But if it does, then work to those hours - contracts do sometimes work in your favour you know! If your boss asks you to work longer hours, wave your employment contract under his nose. Hey, it may not be the road to fast promotion (!) but they can't kick you out for sticking to what your contract says.
Slashdot Mirror
we may have to meet these bug-eyed freaks sometime in our lifetime.
Yeah. Shortly after Duke Nukem Forever hits the streets.
I find their letters incredibly annoying. Inevitably, when you move house there's one waiting for you on the mat; I generally have no objection to paying the license fee as I find the BBC's programming to be of value, but those letters infallibly make me angry and resentful.
I went to have a look, out of curiosity, but privoxy killed it by size... Ho hum :-)
I never quite got why "average" games deserve 7/10 (except for kickbacks from the industry...) Surely a bog-standard average game should get 5, a totally awful one should edge towards 0 and a magnificant one should edge towards 10 - currently the low numbers are under-used, and the ones at the top end (8 and 9 especially) provide insufficient room for reviewers to differentiate.
Then again, perhaps trying to judge whether a game is worth 8 or 9 is pointless anyway and reviewers should stick to thumbs up, thumbs down or couldn't care less.
Well fuck me with an oil-rig drill tip; there's something I never thought I'd hear anyone say. They're moving to Intel because Intel chips have low power consumption?
I take it Steve Jobs drives a Humvee because he heard they get pretty good mileage?!
Will your notebook or desktop PC someday sport quantum innards? It's unlikely, at least in the immediate future. Researchers believe quantum systems will be much more efficient at rock-solid cryptography and mass database searches than running the latest version of Doom.
Yeah, because nobody has any use for rock solid cryptography on a notebook or desktop PC... Oh, wait.
While I agree that (to take an example) the guys running Sony's DRM program are sleazebags for doing what they do, people also need to take more responsibility for their own computer systems; this means learning how to use root or Administrator accounts properly. Even on Windows it's possible to let your children use the computer without letting them have the ability to install random crapware on it. People like the convenience of doing everything as root, but it's just dumb.
Sure, you could put a Trabant engine into a Ferrari, but why would you?... ;-)
The bloke thought the doctors had made a pretty devastating mistake. In that case there was no wonderful research to be done, he had just never had AIDS. I think most people would sue the people responsible if they'd had their lives ruined by being told they had AIDS when in fact the test was just wrong. A test with such an impact is something you have to take time over and be damned sure you get right, or face the legal consequences.
When it turned out that both tests were correct, and that there was truly something extraordinary going on, then he was very eager to help.
My point is that Type Managers can be very useful if a given activity only uses one application or type of file (e.g., rip/mix/burn/listen with music). But when the activity spans multiple types it drives the user back to using a general file manager. In such situations, existing Type Managers fragment the user's access to files and become a hinderance
Absolutely. So perhaps what would work best is a kind of combination: a file manager that, when you start dealing with particular types of files, can notice, and offer "type manager" functionality. I think Konqueror is kind of half-way there with kparts, which let another program take over the interface to an extent, but the current state of Konqueror is a mess. On one hand, it does a reasonable job of turning into a PDF "type manager" when you click on a pdf (though better support for navigating between different PDFs from inside the kpart would be good); on the other hand, it does a horrible job with music files -- even an intelligent, mimetype-sensitive sidebar would be a reasonable step forward. I think they are on the right lines - a filemanager with an attempt to embrace mimetype-specific functionality - but there is still a long way to go.
The summary is very misleading. The man has now said, in two national newspapers, that he will help research in any way he can.
He did earlier refuse to help, but that was at the point where he was still considering suing the doctors because of the initial positive test - obviously you don't expect a second test to come up negative because AIDS generally doesn't just go away, so when it did he naturally thought the first test had been wrong and was pissed off with the doctors. However, later his health authority confirmed that there had been no mistake with either test and he changed his mind and now wishes to help by undergoing further tests.
So ease off the guy, okay? It's the guy who didn't research the story properly before writing the summary that's the asshole here, not the cured-of-AIDS guy.
I know a few people who bought macs rather than PCs in the 90s. Funny, not one of them reckons their "idiosyncrasy" has cost them in the end...
I just wish KDE could learn from Apple in this regard. Not in the sense of slavish copying, I hasten to add; I just wish that as KDE is becoming more powerful it could also become simpler. At least by default, even if the whole configuration jibjab could be accessed by clicking on an "Advanced" button. I use it all the time, but while I like the configurability I find the "complex by default" approach annoying.
If thieves are going to go to the trouble of copying mp3s from your laptop, why wouldn't they just steal the laptop itself?
Only if they release it. They can use a proprietary fs in-house as much as they like. It's only if they were selling some kind of google-in-a-box which ran their filesystem: then they would need to provide the source, as they would be distributing it. Running a filesystem on their own machines does not count as distributing it, regardless of how many people are accessing the data on it; therefore they do not need to release the code as GPL (indeed, at all).
After all, scientists need monkeys to do their experiments on. The fact that these particular monkeys can pay for the mission is just a bonus!
Having read this man's column off and on for years (why, I ask myself...) I can safely say that he is a chimp and 95% of his opinion can be discounted (the 5% is solely attributable to the random-monkey-with-typewriter effect).
Oh, yeah, pointing out that America is going to have to address the fact that it isn't going to be the dominant world power forever is soo anti-American. Face it, throughout history no dominant power has remained dominant for very long. Obviously linear extrapolation is a shitty economic forecasting technique, which is partly why I paid so little attention to providing any kind of accurate figures. But there are other reasons than current economic growth rates to suppose that China (and, for that matter, India) will be key world economic powers by the middle of the century. I'm not sure that your "the people will want freedom" argument holds either; there have been plenty of successful powers in history where people haven't had much freedom yet haven't revolted in a catastrophic way, and even if they do revolt and kick out the current administration, who's to say that it would harm the country economically? I don't see that it's beyond the realms of possibility that a quick bloodless coup followed by an economically prudent government could actually accelerate economic growth. Also, I don't see what your argument about China's regrettable gender imbalance has to do with the economy. It's certainly a problem, but I don't see that it is primarily an economic one.
Note that were China or India to become an economic superpower in the timeframe I mentioned, it would almost certainly be a very different one to the current USA; most of its power would come through size, with the per capita GNP being lower than in current western countries. But the probable effects of such a country being dominant are either huge trade wars and Western isolationism or a considerable lowering of per capita GNP in western countries as we struggle to compete in a free(ish) market.
I can't really be bothered to argue the point further, particularly with someone who takes such a mild comment as damning evidence of my total anti-USianism (?!?? heck, I'm probably a damn pinko (NOT!)), but I suspect that the world of 2100 will look surprisingly different to that of 1900 or 2000.
> it isn't going to change anytime soon
NEWSFLASH:
Growth rate of US economy: not much. A few percent possibly.
Growth rate of China's economy: huge. About 11% IIRC.
Which means China is on course to become the largest economy in the world in about 30 years' time. (Figures all OTOH, but there or thereabouts.)
The US and Europe may be far and away the biggest economic blocs in the world at the moment, but we're going to have to get used to sharing economic might sooner than some people realize. And I doubt China (and India) will have the same ideas about where the centres of world power should be that we do.
Good point - I put off buying The Wall for ages because of its outrageous price, and eventually summoned up the cheek to ask for it for my birthday :-) :-/
And in the end I still prefer Dark Side of the Moon, which is about half the price
If Red Hat are genuinely aiming to provide a platform capable of mixing restricted, secret and TS material on the same system then good luck to them. But I don't see any real users with material genuinely warranting those classifications being ready to trust such a system until a long time and a vast amount of validation work have been done.
That's the best suggestion I've heard so far. Even if 99 is the lowest the music industry wants to go, what about 99 for stuff older than 5 years, $1.25 for newer stuff and $1.50 for top 100 stuff? It might get people to look a bit more broadly than whatever's on the radio today, and in so doing realise what dross most of the top 100 is, compared to stuff that has stood the test of time. And if not, well at least the record industry's mammoth profits are mostly at the expense of people with poor taste ;-)
Till then, it won't sell well to the good ol' boys :-)
(laugh. it's funny)
The books are probably shit too, more aimed at reaping profit and constantly changing so that each year's edition is subtly different. The whole textbook publisher / US university relationship is a scandal that should have become the cause of public outrage years ago. The bribery and corruption involved would make mobsters blush. Feynmann commented on the whole sorry saga years ago. I was lucky - my course (Oxford university) used long-standing textbooks selected on merit. There was a thriving second-hand market and the colleges even bought supplies of the textbooks that were loaned to students for the year. Now that's a sensible approach to textbooks, particularly in rich institutions like many US universities. Perhaps in biochemistry and so on the subject material changes drastically from year to year, but at undergraduate level the material being taught does not fundamentally change on anything like that kind of timescale.
Check your contract. If it doesn't state a number of hours per week (certainly in the UK most do), then you're probably SOOL. But if it does, then work to those hours - contracts do sometimes work in your favour you know! If your boss asks you to work longer hours, wave your employment contract under his nose. Hey, it may not be the road to fast promotion (!) but they can't kick you out for sticking to what your contract says.