I almost feel sorry for the NSA goons who had to splice all that fiber optic cable to create PRISM.
Don't worry. I'm sure they didn't have to do any of the work themselves. The telcos were probably more than happy to do it for three times the usual rate, paid for by the government (the taxpayers being spied on in other words).
Well half of the acronyms/abbreviations you just rattled off are container formats and VP8/9 are video codecs, so you're comparing a fruit salad to an apple, so to speak. You mentioned Matroska (MKV) and that very well could contain VP9 video, but I think you're more likely to find VP8/9 in a file ending in.webm as h264/Hi10P are more likely to be packaged in an MKV file.
Technician comes to your home and fixes you car right then? That's a big improvement over leaving the car and having to walk/taxi home, having the car not even be looked at for anywhere from a few hours to a couple days depending on how busy the shop is, then walk/taxi back to pick it up.
The reason is not the recoup the development costs - the reason is Price Discrimination: The ability to charge a different price in different markets. The optimal price for Windows in the US is much different than the optimal price for Windows in China - and if you can charge different prices here, Microsoft will make more money. Restricting language change is one mechanism to avoid Americans paying Chinese prices.
I haven't seen the multilingual pricing of Windows in years, but it was an add-on iirc. You didn't have to pay $WindowsChina + $WindowsEn-US to get a version that could be switched between both.
You bring up a good point, language locking would allow region-locking (in a loose way), but I still feel development costs are also a factor in this. Professional translators aren't cheap and sometimes dialog and menu commands (and interface element sizes) get changed as words/phrasing that does not directly translate from the original English. Not to mention legal text having to be adapted to the market's local laws. Microsoft doesn't have a group of people doing this for free like a FOSS OS would.
I found I could not change the language from Chinese. Some research showed I was expected to pay for an upgrade to get Windows, that I paid for, to actual be usable. Microsoft really don't promote legal use of their products with such attitudes!
I don't quite understand, you were surprised by this? You were in China and bought a netbook locally, of course it's going to be the Chinese version of Windows. I understand the interfaces used on many Linux distros come with support for a large number of languages out of the box, but Windows comes in different versions for different languages and the ability to change the entire operating system to a different language is a feature you have to buy. It's always been that way and I'm not sure if that even changed in Windows 8. I'm sure part of this is to recoup the development costs with translating and localizing the OS.
Most customers can't read another language fluently enough and have the desire to change their computer OS to it, so it's not really something that drives people to piracy. You can still run programs in other languages in the operating system often (given you added the necessary keyboard support for input/fonts), it's just Windows itself that's stuck in one tongue.
Have you asked HR how many applicants they're actually getting for the jobs? Maybe you should have them ease up and let a larger number through the gates to the real hiring managers.
>Can you sight a case of right-wingers cutting social services, causing mentally ill people to be loose on the streets?
The recent government "sequester" wasn't a Democrat-caused one last time I checked, and it was over healthcare and funding. Or do you think Obamacare only covers cuts and bruises?
All the recent mass murders in the U.S. have got the right wing blogosphere screaming for a crackdown on the mentally ill.
Should we point out to them that all these mentally ill people are loose on the streets and not getting proper treatment because these same right-wingers are insisting on social service cutbacks?
With everyone out making a day of shopping for themselves -- er I mean, their families, lots of folks eat lunch out since they're in a shopping area already at that time of day. Restaurants are normally packed, too. And packed with tired kids that got dragged along by their parents and people with shopping bags they aren't keeping out of walkways.
You can expect the same level of warranty service that you've always received from OCZ.
Yes, that is a stupid supposition for the summary to make.
The warranty is a legal obligation, and one a company would have a responsibility to fulfill, and if the company is bought by someone else, it becomes their obligation.
Handling and photographing (the lighting) artwork irrevocably damages it a little each time.
In what way does a camera on a tripod pointed at an exhibit taking a long exposure with the museum's existing light damage the exhibit?
It doesn't. But pictures of artwork professionally taken rarely are done that way. They have light stands and reflectors and the lighting done under the photographer's control, not the museum's. Generally at least two lights, projecting at 45 degree angles to the work to evenly light but bounce in a way that wont cause glare.
If you needed to get to the airport, you got there like everybody else--you drove your car.
But this just comes right back to how BART is stupid. Because when you build public transportation, it's going to be used by people who don't have cars, and to not take them into account is fucking stupid.
Maybe the assumption was if you couldn't afford a car, you probably couldn't afford to be going on many flights either. Keep in mind air fare was a bit pricier in the 60's and gas was quite a bit cheaper. Financial bar for car ownership was lower.
Why was a weekday selected for this software update?
The same reason your cable company does maintenance in the middle of the day when at night they would disrupt far fewer customers -- the managers are tightwads and don't want to pay the rank-and-file employees for the extra hours outside their normal schedules, and the ones on salary are among that group that refuses to work outside 9-5 M-F.
They cost more upfront & most people don't think past the now.
Many people can't afford to. They buy whatever they can barely afford, so they aren't going to have extra room for EV technologies. It's easier to pay a large bill when it's spread over a length of time -- total cost of ownership for a car is the same way.
Doesn't sound ironic to me. Sounds like an example of why trickle-down economics doesn't work.
The gap between the rich and the poor and the loss of a true middle-class is creating an automotive marketplace that can't support mass adoption of electric cars. Long-term ROI means nothing to the people living paycheck-to-paycheck. They need a car they can afford now, and the up-front cost of an electric/hybrid car is too much for people on the side of the economic pyramid that's getting heavier, making the potential customer base for those vehicles shrink as time goes on.
Slashdot Mirror
Torrents are for sweaty people.
Nobody's staying cool and dry with all this Steam.
I almost feel sorry for the NSA goons who had to splice all that fiber optic cable to create PRISM.
Don't worry. I'm sure they didn't have to do any of the work themselves. The telcos were probably more than happy to do it for three times the usual rate, paid for by the government (the taxpayers being spied on in other words).
Well half of the acronyms/abbreviations you just rattled off are container formats and VP8/9 are video codecs, so you're comparing a fruit salad to an apple, so to speak. You mentioned Matroska (MKV) and that very well could contain VP9 video, but I think you're more likely to find VP8/9 in a file ending in .webm as h264/Hi10P are more likely to be packaged in an MKV file.
Technician comes to your home and fixes you car right then? That's a big improvement over leaving the car and having to walk/taxi home, having the car not even be looked at for anywhere from a few hours to a couple days depending on how busy the shop is, then walk/taxi back to pick it up.
Bitcoin has proven popular with criminals already thanks to Silk Road so I'm not surprised Bank of America is interested in it.
The reason is not the recoup the development costs - the reason is Price Discrimination: The ability to charge a different price in different markets. The optimal price for Windows in the US is much different than the optimal price for Windows in China - and if you can charge different prices here, Microsoft will make more money. Restricting language change is one mechanism to avoid Americans paying Chinese prices.
I haven't seen the multilingual pricing of Windows in years, but it was an add-on iirc. You didn't have to pay $WindowsChina + $WindowsEn-US to get a version that could be switched between both.
You bring up a good point, language locking would allow region-locking (in a loose way), but I still feel development costs are also a factor in this. Professional translators aren't cheap and sometimes dialog and menu commands (and interface element sizes) get changed as words/phrasing that does not directly translate from the original English. Not to mention legal text having to be adapted to the market's local laws. Microsoft doesn't have a group of people doing this for free like a FOSS OS would.
I found I could not change the language from Chinese. Some research showed I was expected to pay for an upgrade to get Windows, that I paid for, to actual be usable. Microsoft really don't promote legal use of their products with such attitudes!
I don't quite understand, you were surprised by this? You were in China and bought a netbook locally, of course it's going to be the Chinese version of Windows.
I understand the interfaces used on many Linux distros come with support for a large number of languages out of the box, but Windows comes in different versions for different languages and the ability to change the entire operating system to a different language is a feature you have to buy. It's always been that way and I'm not sure if that even changed in Windows 8. I'm sure part of this is to recoup the development costs with translating and localizing the OS.
Most customers can't read another language fluently enough and have the desire to change their computer OS to it, so it's not really something that drives people to piracy. You can still run programs in other languages in the operating system often (given you added the necessary keyboard support for input/fonts), it's just Windows itself that's stuck in one tongue.
a truck driver
You believe a UPS worker getting paid $12/hr is going to stop someone with a gun who wants to take his fully insured company truck?
Have you asked HR how many applicants they're actually getting for the jobs? Maybe you should have them ease up and let a larger number through the gates to the real hiring managers.
Oh, wait it's even worse:
http://slashdot.org/story/13/05/15/023234/georgia-tech-and-udacity-partner-for-online-ms-in-computer-science
The editors must be still a bit hung over from the one-two punch of Thanksgiving and then crazy deal-chasing on Black Friday.
http://slashdot.org/story/13/08/18/219252/big-mooc-on-campus-georgia-techs-6600-ms-in-cs
1. Can you sight a case of right-wingers...
Btw, LRN2SPEL.
The work is "cite" -- HINT: It's a shortened form of CITATION.
1. Can you sight a case of right-wingers cutting social services, causing mentally ill people to be loose on the streets?
http://www.thenation.com/blog/176745/suicide-rate-climbs-30-percent-kansas-government-slashes-mental-health-budgets#
In Kansas, the government is the Republicans.
There's no one else the blame can be shifted to.
>Can you sight a case of right-wingers cutting social services, causing mentally ill people to be loose on the streets?
The recent government "sequester" wasn't a Democrat-caused one last time I checked, and it was over healthcare and funding.
Or do you think Obamacare only covers cuts and bruises?
All the recent mass murders in the U.S. have got the right wing blogosphere screaming for a crackdown on the mentally ill.
Should we point out to them that all these mentally ill people are loose on the streets and not getting proper treatment because these same right-wingers are insisting on social service cutbacks?
LOL.
With everyone out making a day of shopping for themselves -- er I mean, their families, lots of folks eat lunch out since they're in a shopping area already at that time of day. Restaurants are normally packed, too. And packed with tired kids that got dragged along by their parents and people with shopping bags they aren't keeping out of walkways.
You can expect the same level of warranty service that you've always received from OCZ.
Yes, that is a stupid supposition for the summary to make.
The warranty is a legal obligation, and one a company would have a responsibility to fulfill, and if the company is bought by someone else, it becomes their obligation.
* Porn rarely gets beaten up by pimps and johns.
I had an amusing mental image of a pimp punching VHS tapes there.
Handling and photographing (the lighting) artwork irrevocably damages it a little each time.
In what way does a camera on a tripod pointed at an exhibit taking a long exposure with the museum's existing light damage the exhibit?
It doesn't. But pictures of artwork professionally taken rarely are done that way. They have light stands and reflectors and the lighting done under the photographer's control, not the museum's. Generally at least two lights, projecting at 45 degree angles to the work to evenly light but bounce in a way that wont cause glare.
If you needed to get to the airport, you got there like everybody else--you drove your car.
But this just comes right back to how BART is stupid. Because when you build public transportation, it's going to be used by people who don't have cars, and to not take them into account is fucking stupid.
Maybe the assumption was if you couldn't afford a car, you probably couldn't afford to be going on many flights either. Keep in mind air fare was a bit pricier in the 60's and gas was quite a bit cheaper. Financial bar for car ownership was lower.
Why was a weekday selected for this software update?
The same reason your cable company does maintenance in the middle of the day when at night they would disrupt far fewer customers -- the managers are tightwads and don't want to pay the rank-and-file employees for the extra hours outside their normal schedules, and the ones on salary are among that group that refuses to work outside 9-5 M-F.
They cost more upfront & most people don't think past the now.
Many people can't afford to. They buy whatever they can barely afford, so they aren't going to have extra room for EV technologies.
It's easier to pay a large bill when it's spread over a length of time -- total cost of ownership for a car is the same way.
Doesn't sound ironic to me. Sounds like an example of why trickle-down economics doesn't work.
The gap between the rich and the poor and the loss of a true middle-class is creating an automotive marketplace that can't support mass adoption of electric cars. Long-term ROI means nothing to the people living paycheck-to-paycheck. They need a car they can afford now, and the up-front cost of an electric/hybrid car is too much for people on the side of the economic pyramid that's getting heavier, making the potential customer base for those vehicles shrink as time goes on.
Sorry, Geordi.
That's fine as long as it doesn't spread to my pants.
I agree, I can't afford to buy another pair of pants.
Another Tesla, however...