I'd say all beaches in Europe are topless beaches, but I'm not sure if you can drop everything. Maybe you can do it, but at least it's not common where I've been.
There are nudist beaches, though, where you *must* be nude. Usually they are on less populated areas of a normal beach, but I've never seen any clear frontiers between the two.
While it is true that in some countries you can see naked women (as in, bare breasts, not genitalia) in advertising in broad daylight and afternoon tv, I've yet to see anyone with their tits out in public, and I've been basically everywhere in Europe. I'm no lawyer, but I think it's illegal everywhere here.
Exception made to the fore-mentioned nude beaches and parks.
Basically, restirctions to nudity are more relaxed here than in the US, but they still exist. On the other hand, violence is more strictly controled here, specially in the central germanic countries. Though I must say that if I had to choose between blood and tits, I'd rather take the second:-)
That's so true! It really disgusts me, but that is also happening for CS students. At my university (ISEL), since the Bologna process, all of the IT related courses have been shifting towards Microsoft solutions. Students aren't faced with any alternative OS or open source concepts and are discouraged of using alternative tools, all because of these deals they signed with them.
It's got nothing to do with the Bologna process. I know the head of the MS academic connection in Portugal personally, and for all his efforts, he keeps complaining that universities aren't very receiving when he comes knocking (most academics in technical universities, it seems, are fans of OSS, or at least are serious enough to demand software diversity).
His one success, he likes to remind constantly, is with ISEL. Apparently he has very good connections there and has managed to infiltrate his software there with offers and promotions and whatever else he can promise.
Make no mistake, the Bologna process has nothing to do with this situation. It's just MS recognizing that universities are the best place to promote lock-in (if all that the students know is MS, it's what they will want to use later), and investing accordingly.
By the way, some more information regarding stock Ubuntu on the NC10:
The webpage you mentioned gives a lot of useful information, but some of it is outdated (or at least I had a different experience).
For example, audio worked out of the box. Then after updating the system, I lost audio out -- for some reason the PCM volume was set to 0. Just go to the volume control panel and reset it to the desired level. My suggestion is to simply jump over the audio "fixes".
The fix for wireless in that page worked perfectly. Some other sites recomend weird stuff like compiling your drivers, and mention that you may get low wifi performance and kernel upgrades break the driver. Performance on my network is good, though I haven't been through a kernel update since installing (I first installed all updates, and then applied the wireless fix).
Internal mic is working perfectly, but I found that when I plug in my headset, it doesn't take over. In the volume control panel you can choose which mic you want to use.
Hotkeys have a lot of problems. They either don't work or they work poorly. Last time I was at that site they just suggested patching the kernel, which I decided was too much work for me. Now I see that it's possible to install the kernel for Jaunty. I'll probably try that once I get home.
The touchpad horizontal and vertical sensitivities are screwed-up. I tried to apply the xorg.conf they suggest, but it didn't work for me. My "fix" was to get used to it (I know -- sucks) until a proper fix was posted. Now I see that they have some more suggestions, I guess I have to try them when I get home.
For me: 1. It's pretier 2. It was available last month and I didn't want to wait anymore (I think you still can't get the 1000HE) 3. I think it's smaller, not sure though
By the way, if you're ready to wait a bit, Samsung is releasing an update to the NC10 with longer-lasting battery.
Do I think these guys really believe in the freedom of information, in the freedom of speech, in the "free format" garbage that gets spewed all over this and other websites? No, of course not. But, their followers certainly do, and that's all that matters here.
Dude, they founded a political party whose main goal is to reform/abolish copyright law.
How much more do you need in order to believe their ideals? Self-immolation?
I think it's Firefox's cross-platform drawing libraries. I experience the same problems with a NVidia card and, recently, with the much-praised Intel GM450.
The code in that library must be optimized for Windows or something, because it sucks ass on Linux (with compiz -- don't know if the problems exist without compositing).
I even noticed that it was causing problems with my system. I was having some problems with the NVidia drivers in one of my laptops (periodic screen flickering, and sometimes corruption), and I noticed that even though it would happen kind of randomly, it was way more common when I was browsing with Firefox.
I'm ok with losing some CPU cycles to the anti-virus, that's why I have two fast CPUs.
My problem is that the av likes to trash my hard disk, which is not only much slower than my CPU, but it also doesn't have any redundancy.
Whenever my computer slows down I check the disk usage and it's always the same damn av process checking something. I've heard a lot of bad things about Symantec and I can now confirm most of them.
I'm seriously considering nuking the software a installing something leaner, but I think IT would probably get pissed off about changing security software in the company computer.
I love Linux and run in wherever possible, but even after years of experience I always feel that I don't really understand 80% of what's happening under the hood.
If it weren't for Ubuntu's terrific work streamlining and simplifying the OS, I would still be running Windows in my desktop and maybe text-mode Linux in a headless server doing simple tasks (it was the only way I was able to make some sense of Linux 10 years ago and keep it from becoming overwhelmingly complex).
I used to use BeOS back in the day, and even coded one or two applications for it which were hopelessly crappy, given it was when I was learning programming.
I could make sense of BeOS, it was just simple. For example, the kernel was a small file somewhere and drivers were separate small files somewhere else. The kernel would monitor the driver directory and if you dropped there a new driver file, the kernel would check it to see if it matched your hardware, and if so, activate it.
Media support was enabled by using a centralized codec system. Kind of like Windows does for video (and audio?) codecs, or GStreamer in Gnome, except in BeOS the codecs spanned every kind of file format, from images to office suite documents.
The OS wasn't perfect, and it wasn't always easy to do some of the more complex stuff, but what worked, worked wonderfully.
In these days where browser-based applications are becoming more advanced, I can see Haiku becoming a serious option at least for leisure computing. I sure as hell would love to be able to use Haiku on my netbook, and if it were up to me, I'd be concentrating my development efforts into making that possible. I really think that this might be the killer application for Haiku -- a light OS which has all the basic functionality you use on the go (web, media, documents, chat).
Unfortunately, I don't have the programming chops, the time or the motivation to contribute, so I'll just have to keep cheering from the sidelines (Go, guys!)
The thing they have here which is kind of cool is that the yellow light goes on just before the green, so you can go as soon as the green light is turned on -- makes intersections more efficient. (btw when going red-to-green the yellow and red lights are simultaneously activated, sou you can easily distinguish those from green-to-red)
I've seen traffic lights with digital countdowns, but I don't remember exactly where. I think somewhere in eastern Europe.
It's eye opening, and it explains how tiered pricing works to maximize sales and profit.
Basically, the lower/crippled versions of the product are sold below production cost while the top versions pay a hefty premium -- the users which need the most features are subsidizing those who don't need them because those who don't need the features wouldn't buy the product for the original price.
Usually this is done in order to increase sales, and thus, make production runs benefit from scale. For example, when Intel made their Pentiums with and without a mathematical co-processor. Actually all the processors had a math co-processor, just that the lower versions had the connections to that part of the silicon cut by laser:-)
In the case of software it's similar -- the development costs are fixed, so you will try to sell as many copies as possible. The more you sell, the lower is the price of production per copy.
You may think this is a crappy system, but it actually works in everybody's favour: instead of producing 1000 units of a specialized product, the manufacturer can produce 100,000. The people who can't afford, or don't want full features have a product available for them, while the rich, or those who really need the features pay less for the product than they would for a specialized version.
3. It's the best at keeping track of kernel and xorg changes. They're not, sometimes support for new interfaces and whatnot comes slowly. nVidia hooks into X lots of places to do what they do, and it can mess up things. If all you want is a simple driver that can show you a pretty picture, there are better options. Their strength is when there's something serious to do in the driver that you're not getting from the rest.
I don't know. Intel seems to have been doing well in keeping their open source driver up to date (except in the case of this story). Maybe their hardware sucks harder than nVidia's, but at least the driver doesn't have a history of bugs and slow adaptation like it's closed-source counterparts.
But keep your blindfolds on, man. They look comfortable on you.
What they have delivers is addition to hardware is a great closed source driver which have simply been the best in terms of perforamnce, features and quality for anything better than integrated graphics
Really? I my laptop I keep getting little drawing errors here and there (window borders are weird, etc), and sometimes the whole screen becomes corrupted to hell. I have to close the laptop screen and reopen it.
I've been having problems with nVidia drivers since I got this laptop 2 years ago, and thorugh all the versions of drivers, kernels and compiz, there was always something which was breaking.
Comparatively, this computer with the open source driver, or my other computers with Intel drivers work perfectly with exactly the same software and configuration.
Maybe nVidia is suplying the best drivers in existence, but I'm just not getting them here. For me it's simple, my next computer won't have nVidia hardware anywhere near it (same deal as with Via hardware, same reasons).
In any case, given the previous study, it is quite over the top for the French scientist to call it charlatanism, since there are other studies that show it helps. It would be nicer and more accurate to say, "the issue is more nuanced than often implied."
Were you really expecting a Frenchman not to be arrogant?
I'm not arguing it destroys everything that came before, but it puts it in a crappy perspective.
For example, now when you see the Star Wars original trilogy (IV, V and VI) you hear these guys talking about the force, and the mysticism is ruined. You can't take that back.
It doesn't ruin the movie altogether, but it does crappify it, even if just a little bit.
Not that I like the original trilogy anymore -- I tried seeing it again a few years ago and that Luke guy is unbearable. I was just using it as an example.
Still I agree with the point about bad sequels ruining a story. For example, Star Wars ep. 1 was pretty good (I hope I don't get crucified for saying this). Not excellent, but good.
Now I've been a fan of Star Wars ever since I watched the first three episodes as a child. I'd imagine having a lightsaber and fighting the evil sith on cool places like the top of a bridge, and stuff like that.
When I saw Jar Jar I thought it was stupid, but so were the Ewoks, that's ok, maybe Lucas wants to appeal to children.
But when he introduced the stuff with the midichlorians I was a bit pissed. It kind of ruined the mysticism of the star wars lore right there. I wasn't completely mad, it was nothing that a light dose of healthy denial couldn't solve, but still I was pissed that the universe I had come to love since I was a child was being disrespected so callously.
And that's the problem. It's like Tolkien stopping Lord of the Rings one chapter short and having everyone breaking into a happy dance with Sauron as the uncoordinated comic relief -- it puts the whole story you were enjoying in a crappy perspective.
Yeah, you can just ignore the movie altogether, but that would be like not reading the last chapter of LOTR. I won't stop doing something because I'm afraid of a possible disappointment, and in any case, for me curiosity will always kill the cat.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh. Where?
I know that in Portugal and Germany the law forbids it with exceptions in some places (beaches and some parks).
That includes topless men, btw.
I'd say all beaches in Europe are topless beaches, but I'm not sure if you can drop everything. Maybe you can do it, but at least it's not common where I've been.
There are nudist beaches, though, where you *must* be nude. Usually they are on less populated areas of a normal beach, but I've never seen any clear frontiers between the two.
Methinks you have the wrong idea about Europe.
While it is true that in some countries you can see naked women (as in, bare breasts, not genitalia) in advertising in broad daylight and afternoon tv, I've yet to see anyone with their tits out in public, and I've been basically everywhere in Europe. I'm no lawyer, but I think it's illegal everywhere here.
Exception made to the fore-mentioned nude beaches and parks.
Basically, restirctions to nudity are more relaxed here than in the US, but they still exist. On the other hand, violence is more strictly controled here, specially in the central germanic countries. Though I must say that if I had to choose between blood and tits, I'd rather take the second :-)
You counted the paragraphs?
That's so true! It really disgusts me, but that is also happening for CS students. At my university (ISEL), since the Bologna process, all of the IT related courses have been shifting towards Microsoft solutions. Students aren't faced with any alternative OS or open source concepts and are discouraged of using alternative tools, all because of these deals they signed with them.
It's got nothing to do with the Bologna process. I know the head of the MS academic connection in Portugal personally, and for all his efforts, he keeps complaining that universities aren't very receiving when he comes knocking (most academics in technical universities, it seems, are fans of OSS, or at least are serious enough to demand software diversity).
His one success, he likes to remind constantly, is with ISEL. Apparently he has very good connections there and has managed to infiltrate his software there with offers and promotions and whatever else he can promise.
Make no mistake, the Bologna process has nothing to do with this situation. It's just MS recognizing that universities are the best place to promote lock-in (if all that the students know is MS, it's what they will want to use later), and investing accordingly.
By the way, some more information regarding stock Ubuntu on the NC10:
The webpage you mentioned gives a lot of useful information, but some of it is outdated (or at least I had a different experience).
For example, audio worked out of the box. Then after updating the system, I lost audio out -- for some reason the PCM volume was set to 0. Just go to the volume control panel and reset it to the desired level. My suggestion is to simply jump over the audio "fixes".
The fix for wireless in that page worked perfectly. Some other sites recomend weird stuff like compiling your drivers, and mention that you may get low wifi performance and kernel upgrades break the driver. Performance on my network is good, though I haven't been through a kernel update since installing (I first installed all updates, and then applied the wireless fix).
Internal mic is working perfectly, but I found that when I plug in my headset, it doesn't take over. In the volume control panel you can choose which mic you want to use.
Hotkeys have a lot of problems. They either don't work or they work poorly. Last time I was at that site they just suggested patching the kernel, which I decided was too much work for me. Now I see that it's possible to install the kernel for Jaunty. I'll probably try that once I get home.
The touchpad horizontal and vertical sensitivities are screwed-up. I tried to apply the xorg.conf they suggest, but it didn't work for me. My "fix" was to get used to it (I know -- sucks) until a proper fix was posted. Now I see that they have some more suggestions, I guess I have to try them when I get home.
Finally, you'll probably want to optimize your environment. Gnome takes way too many liberties with how it uses your screen real-estate. This page gives some helpful advice: http://nc10linux.wordpress.com/2008/12/29/maximizing-screen-space
For me:
1. It's pretier
2. It was available last month and I didn't want to wait anymore (I think you still can't get the 1000HE)
3. I think it's smaller, not sure though
By the way, if you're ready to wait a bit, Samsung is releasing an update to the NC10 with longer-lasting battery.
This is sort of like the FTC ordering GM to bla bla bla
GM doesn't have a monopoly in the auto business.
You're a real man.
And I don't mean that sarcastically. Thanks for the perspective.
You owe me a new sarcasm detector.
Do I think these guys really believe in the freedom of information, in the freedom of speech, in the "free format" garbage that gets spewed all over this and other websites? No, of course not. But, their followers certainly do, and that's all that matters here.
Dude, they founded a political party whose main goal is to reform/abolish copyright law.
How much more do you need in order to believe their ideals? Self-immolation?
I think it's Firefox's cross-platform drawing libraries. I experience the same problems with a NVidia card and, recently, with the much-praised Intel GM450.
The code in that library must be optimized for Windows or something, because it sucks ass on Linux (with compiz -- don't know if the problems exist without compositing).
I even noticed that it was causing problems with my system. I was having some problems with the NVidia drivers in one of my laptops (periodic screen flickering, and sometimes corruption), and I noticed that even though it would happen kind of randomly, it was way more common when I was browsing with Firefox.
I'm ok with losing some CPU cycles to the anti-virus, that's why I have two fast CPUs.
My problem is that the av likes to trash my hard disk, which is not only much slower than my CPU, but it also doesn't have any redundancy.
Whenever my computer slows down I check the disk usage and it's always the same damn av process checking something. I've heard a lot of bad things about Symantec and I can now confirm most of them.
I'm seriously considering nuking the software a installing something leaner, but I think IT would probably get pissed off about changing security software in the company computer.
But they do change the menu daily, right?
The variety is still there, just in a different manner.
Here, here.
I love Linux and run in wherever possible, but even after years of experience I always feel that I don't really understand 80% of what's happening under the hood.
If it weren't for Ubuntu's terrific work streamlining and simplifying the OS, I would still be running Windows in my desktop and maybe text-mode Linux in a headless server doing simple tasks (it was the only way I was able to make some sense of Linux 10 years ago and keep it from becoming overwhelmingly complex).
I used to use BeOS back in the day, and even coded one or two applications for it which were hopelessly crappy, given it was when I was learning programming.
I could make sense of BeOS, it was just simple.
For example, the kernel was a small file somewhere and drivers were separate small files somewhere else. The kernel would monitor the driver directory and if you dropped there a new driver file, the kernel would check it to see if it matched your hardware, and if so, activate it.
Media support was enabled by using a centralized codec system. Kind of like Windows does for video (and audio?) codecs, or GStreamer in Gnome, except in BeOS the codecs spanned every kind of file format, from images to office suite documents.
The OS wasn't perfect, and it wasn't always easy to do some of the more complex stuff, but what worked, worked wonderfully.
In these days where browser-based applications are becoming more advanced, I can see Haiku becoming a serious option at least for leisure computing.
I sure as hell would love to be able to use Haiku on my netbook, and if it were up to me, I'd be concentrating my development efforts into making that possible. I really think that this might be the killer application for Haiku -- a light OS which has all the basic functionality you use on the go (web, media, documents, chat).
Unfortunately, I don't have the programming chops, the time or the motivation to contribute, so I'll just have to keep cheering from the sidelines (Go, guys!)
Are crappy support and drivers also part of those joys?
I've written off VIA a long time ago.
Really? I live in Germany and I've never seen it.
The thing they have here which is kind of cool is that the yellow light goes on just before the green, so you can go as soon as the green light is turned on -- makes intersections more efficient. (btw when going red-to-green the yellow and red lights are simultaneously activated, sou you can easily distinguish those from green-to-red)
I've seen traffic lights with digital countdowns, but I don't remember exactly where. I think somewhere in eastern Europe.
If you want the long answer to that, read Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy.
It's eye opening, and it explains how tiered pricing works to maximize sales and profit.
Basically, the lower/crippled versions of the product are sold below production cost while the top versions pay a hefty premium -- the users which need the most features are subsidizing those who don't need them because those who don't need the features wouldn't buy the product for the original price.
Usually this is done in order to increase sales, and thus, make production runs benefit from scale. For example, when Intel made their Pentiums with and without a mathematical co-processor. Actually all the processors had a math co-processor, just that the lower versions had the connections to that part of the silicon cut by laser :-)
In the case of software it's similar -- the development costs are fixed, so you will try to sell as many copies as possible. The more you sell, the lower is the price of production per copy.
You may think this is a crappy system, but it actually works in everybody's favour: instead of producing 1000 units of a specialized product, the manufacturer can produce 100,000. The people who can't afford, or don't want full features have a product available for them, while the rich, or those who really need the features pay less for the product than they would for a specialized version.
3. It's the best at keeping track of kernel and xorg changes. They're not, sometimes support for new interfaces and whatnot comes slowly. nVidia hooks into X lots of places to do what they do, and it can mess up things. If all you want is a simple driver that can show you a pretty picture, there are better options. Their strength is when there's something serious to do in the driver that you're not getting from the rest.
I don't know. Intel seems to have been doing well in keeping their open source driver up to date (except in the case of this story). Maybe their hardware sucks harder than nVidia's, but at least the driver doesn't have a history of bugs and slow adaptation like it's closed-source counterparts.
But keep your blindfolds on, man. They look comfortable on you.
What they have delivers is addition to hardware is a great closed source driver which have simply been the best in terms of perforamnce, features and quality for anything better than integrated graphics
Really? I my laptop I keep getting little drawing errors here and there (window borders are weird, etc), and sometimes the whole screen becomes corrupted to hell. I have to close the laptop screen and reopen it.
I've been having problems with nVidia drivers since I got this laptop 2 years ago, and thorugh all the versions of drivers, kernels and compiz, there was always something which was breaking.
Comparatively, this computer with the open source driver, or my other computers with Intel drivers work perfectly with exactly the same software and configuration.
Maybe nVidia is suplying the best drivers in existence, but I'm just not getting them here. For me it's simple, my next computer won't have nVidia hardware anywhere near it (same deal as with Via hardware, same reasons).
In any case, given the previous study, it is quite over the top for the French scientist to call it charlatanism, since there are other studies that show it helps. It would be nicer and more accurate to say, "the issue is more nuanced than often implied."
Were you really expecting a Frenchman not to be arrogant?
I laugh at you and your innocent naivety.
I'm not arguing it destroys everything that came before, but it puts it in a crappy perspective.
For example, now when you see the Star Wars original trilogy (IV, V and VI) you hear these guys talking about the force, and the mysticism is ruined. You can't take that back.
It doesn't ruin the movie altogether, but it does crappify it, even if just a little bit.
Not that I like the original trilogy anymore -- I tried seeing it again a few years ago and that Luke guy is unbearable. I was just using it as an example.
I was making a more general point, but ok.
Still I agree with the point about bad sequels ruining a story. For example, Star Wars ep. 1 was pretty good (I hope I don't get crucified for saying this). Not excellent, but good.
Now I've been a fan of Star Wars ever since I watched the first three episodes as a child. I'd imagine having a lightsaber and fighting the evil sith on cool places like the top of a bridge, and stuff like that.
When I saw Jar Jar I thought it was stupid, but so were the Ewoks, that's ok, maybe Lucas wants to appeal to children.
But when he introduced the stuff with the midichlorians I was a bit pissed. It kind of ruined the mysticism of the star wars lore right there. I wasn't completely mad, it was nothing that a light dose of healthy denial couldn't solve, but still I was pissed that the universe I had come to love since I was a child was being disrespected so callously.
And that's the problem. It's like Tolkien stopping Lord of the Rings one chapter short and having everyone breaking into a happy dance with Sauron as the uncoordinated comic relief -- it puts the whole story you were enjoying in a crappy perspective.
Yeah, you can just ignore the movie altogether, but that would be like not reading the last chapter of LOTR. I won't stop doing something because I'm afraid of a possible disappointment, and in any case, for me curiosity will always kill the cat.
You're right.
You should never take chances. It's safer that way.
You're right. I was thinking about walking and jogging because that's what I do.
My sprinting speed sucks too much for competing.
Well, my jogging speed/resistance also sucks for competition, but at least I can manage not finishing mini-marathons in last :-)