But is it cutting income? The alternatives really are A) let AMD pay (say) only half the normal tax rate; or B) have AMD go somewhere else and pay nothing at all. Which decision will be the beneficial one for its constituents?
Besides, you do not need to look only to Europe for this kind of behavior; the recent Boeing localization circus in the US is just as bad.
You may "STRONGLY disagree" - but it is the will of the local population that sets the goals for any government.
If, the voters does set the goal of it's govenment to be improvement of the lot of the people, then so be it. Who are you to disagree - unless you live there and have a right to vote, in which case you can make your views heard just fine.
Of course, they aren't really giving money away to AMD. It is rather in the form of tax rebates and the like - it is not losing any money, just not bringing in as much as if AMD had paid full rates on everything (and the reality is that likely AMD would have gone elsewhere and not paid a dime).
Acutally, I have yet to need a "full-featured database". From what I've seen of various apps, neither do most other people. By and large, most apps needing a form of database storage usually get by with DBM or equivalent functionality. 'Real', big database applications that need the kind of stuff you mention are few and far between - and in those cases, there are plenty of alternatives anyhow, like you say.
For me, MySQL is not a deficient implementation of the Likes of Oracle, but a full-featured, modern way of accomplishing what DBM did.
Not quite, actually. Miguel de Icaza started Gnome without regard for KDE; he just wanted to try out some different ideas on how to build a desktop. But Gnome got its initial surge of new developers when the qt license thing blew up, that is true.
Remember that the EU is actually as large (and maybe larger) a larger market for Microsoft as the US. The next penalty won't be a fine; it'll be a stop to selling their products until they've complied. It is really not something even a company as large as MS can ignore.
Well, I sort of agree with you in general; we have better sites for software announcements.
That said, release candidates for really major pieces - like a new Linux kernel or this FreeBSD update - deserve a place on/. as much or more than the actual releases. This is _really_ a case of the widest possible testing being beneficial for everybody, and if/. can help to corral more tester it can only be good.
So yes, agree in general, but not in this particular case.
Is QT so much better that all companies are willing to pay for QT for the next decade rather than assist GNU with improving GTK+?
No, not really. There's plenty of examples on non-free apps written for GTK and GTK2 out there (though most of the ones I know of are pretty specialized stuff like eye-tracking analysis and such).
Despite the regular foaming-at-the-mouth ranting of some KDE people on/., GTK2 is a very nice toolkit to write for, and the C++ and Python bindings especially are very, very good (no need for a custom preprocessor for C++, for instance). The Perl-GTK2 and Perl-Gnome2 bindings look very promising as well, though they were completed fairly recently, so there's bound to be rough spots, still.
In terms of technical specifications, they are just about equal, though the KDE component system is more lightweight and somewhat nicer. Both projects typically leapfrog each other in stuff like this, though.
In usability terms, KDE tends to be more Windows-like; of course, you can tweak most aspects of either desktop to look and feel almost any way you want. As the Siemens study showed, however, "Windows-like" tends to be a drawback, not a benefit when moving people over - with great similarity comes implicit expectations that it work exactly like Windows, and confusion and frustration ensues whenever it does not. Gnome's long work on usability issues and support for assistive technologies generally makes it a better desktop usability-wise.
All in all, they're both good, solid desktops. Unfortunately, the large amount of rabid, unreasonable, hateful KDE trolls that pop up whenever you try to even have a rational discussion is keeping me solidly away from ever actually recommending KDE to anybody. We are all supposed to be sort-of on the same side here, helping each other out, not stab each other in the back. Flinging feces at the other group like a deranged chimp is just immature, counterproductive, and makes people not like you very much anymore. I can well imagine a Windows or Mac user taking a look at something like this slashdot story and exclaim "you want me to join that?!". As long as KDE keeps up with these anonymous (and not so anonymous - *cough*ShawnGordon*cough*) trolls, I will stay away.
But my point still stands. Sure, going down a bit in the foodchain is not nearly as 'bad' as fast food service work, but the person with the foreign experience will still tend to look like much better value for an employer.
I fail to see how the idea of moving abroad can be so upsetting. Academics pretty much have to do it as a matter of course; after your PhD, you typically need 4-10 years of post-doc positions to qualify for a permanent position somewhere (and even longer periods are becoming more common). It means staying 1-3 years at one place, then relocate to wherever you find a new position. And the way the market is looking now, you may well look forward to never having a permanent job anywhere.
Point is, academics can move to where the jobs are, and have for many many years; what is so horrible about other professionals doing so?
Yes, it _is_ better. When applying for a job in the US, will the employer rather have:
a) A guy with extensive experience of Indian culture and business environment, has a working knowlwedge of Hindi (or other major Indian languages), and has shown the drive and independence to relocate to a differenct continent in the first place; or
b) A guy who knows how to handle the deep fryer at McDonalds?
However, Brookwood believes that Intel will wait for the appearance of Prescott's successor, called Tejas, which is due in early 2005. The reason for the wait, Brookwood believes, is that the Prescott designs were complete before Intel had access to AMD's approach, meaning that software tuned for one wouldn't work on the other.
"They need that compatibility now," Brookwood said. "I believe that Tejas is coming so hard on Prescott's heels, (because) Tejas has the compatibility that is not in Prescott and Prescott derivatives."
In other words, it does seem like it, though no definitive word from Intel itself, obviously.
People would rent time on huge (and hugely expensive) supercomputing centers; greatly simplify the models, knowing they introduce oversimplifications and errors; or, simply, not do the modeling they really wanted to do at all. A friend is working in a chip design company, and his simulations regularily run over an entire weekend, despite the hefty hardware they have.
In some areas (like climate modeling and some kinds of neural simulations), people can _still_ not do the kind of modeling they would really like to do, 64 bit clusters or not.
On the third hand, a lot of people dive directly into the comments and really do find short summaries like that very useful. And people don't skip the article just because they're lazy either; you might want to go directly to the comments on this story to see comments from people actually trying the drivers, for example, rather than read a pre-chewed press release that will not really tell you how well it actually works.
So no, I don't think most karma-whoring is a bad thing either.
And again, I fully agree with you - they are horrible, kludgy, ad-hoc and messy. And as you say, they persist in changing important parts of the functionality in incompatible ways between versions - right now I have four different versions of automake installed (1.4 to 1.7) because the devels can evidently not be bothered to actually keep compatibility between minor versions.
That said, having a build system to handle all Unix-like OS:es _will_ be complex and messy - not nearly as complex and messy as the sorry excuse we have now, but still significantly more complex than a tool made for one, tightly controlled common group of OS:es.
Well, if you remove the requirement of being cross-platform or being very configurable, it isn't all that hard to create a simple build system anymore, now is it? Most of the mess that is in the (horrible, I agree) auto* tools is due to those two requirements.
You do know that most competitors to US steelmakers are in other heavily industrialized countries, don't you? Nothing stopping Sweden, Japan and so on from implementing the same process.
Re:This another area the US could get left behind.
on
The State of IPv6
·
· Score: 1
And again, nodoby would argue that the US mobile system isn't pretty messed up in urban areas as well. When people talk about USA lagging behind in mobile phone technology and deployment, it is not rural coverage they are talking about.
As for the coverage, both Finland and Sweden have areas with high population density, as well as very large areas with very low population density - a situation not unlike the US but on a smaller scale. Yet they manage to cover pretty much all populated areas.
Re:This another area the US could get left behind.
on
The State of IPv6
·
· Score: 1
Two of the most best covered countries in Europe for mobile phones - Sweden and Finland - are arguably as sparsely populated as the US.
Besides, I doubt your parent poster was referring to cell coverage in the Alaskan wilderness. Seems the US market has made a pretty good mess of the thing in dense urban areas as well.
This depends on where you are. In sweden it is for instance illegal for a nightclub to select their guests based on origin (there's been some cases of bouncers not admitting people from middle eastern or african origin).
On the other hand, I certainly have a reasonable expectation of not to have to wade through all that crap. I pretty much never browse at 0 or lower, and more and more often I have the filter set to +2.
There is a filtering mechanism here, but it is _voluntary_ to use. Anybody who wants to look at the stuff modded to -1 is perfectly free to do so. Anybody want to see +2 and above only is free to do that. A right to post/publish/whatever is _not_ a right to be read or seen.
That said, apart from discrimination laws, anybody with a server is of course free to treat its contents the way they want - as an owner, you can pretty much delete anything you want, for any reason (again, as long as you do not run afoul of discrimination issues - delete all posts by people of a certain race or gender will probably get you into well deserved trouble, for instance).
Freedom of speech does not give you any right to post whatever you want at another persons server; what it does is give you a right to post what you like (within the limits of the law) on your own server without being censored by your government. In the smae way, you have no right at all to write something and expect it to be published in your local paper. What you do have is the right to start your own, competing paper and publish whatever you want in it.
So if an entertainment company decides that some subject matter is out of bounds in their virtual world, they can do so. You are free to leave and start your own world. Similarily, if you really do not like the slashdot system, you are free to leave and start a competing system with the kind of policies you like. That is what freedom of speech (and, by and large, equivalent laws in other countries) means.
So your argument is basically that since Java isn't the right tool for every possible job it must be useless?
No, if you look back at the thread, it is all a response to some moron that more or less argues that Java is better than Perl in pretty much all circumstances (including an assertion that Java is faster). His argument is thus rather the fact that Perl is not slower, and may be a better language at least for small apps.
Re:Or, if this doesn't interest you
on
Paranoia
·
· Score: 1
Yep. Any novel titled "Paranoia" that isn't set in or around Alpha Complex is a source of treason. Please report immediately to the incineration units. Thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
But is it cutting income? The alternatives really are A) let AMD pay (say) only half the normal tax rate; or B) have AMD go somewhere else and pay nothing at all. Which decision will be the beneficial one for its constituents?
Besides, you do not need to look only to Europe for this kind of behavior; the recent Boeing localization circus in the US is just as bad.
You may "STRONGLY disagree" - but it is the will of the local population that sets the goals for any government.
If, the voters does set the goal of it's govenment to be improvement of the lot of the people, then so be it. Who are you to disagree - unless you live there and have a right to vote, in which case you can make your views heard just fine.
Of course, they aren't really giving money away to AMD. It is rather in the form of tax rebates and the like - it is not losing any money, just not bringing in as much as if AMD had paid full rates on everything (and the reality is that likely AMD would have gone elsewhere and not paid a dime).
Acutally, I have yet to need a "full-featured database". From what I've seen of various apps, neither do most other people. By and large, most apps needing a form of database storage usually get by with DBM or equivalent functionality. 'Real', big database applications that need the kind of stuff you mention are few and far between - and in those cases, there are plenty of alternatives anyhow, like you say.
For me, MySQL is not a deficient implementation of the Likes of Oracle, but a full-featured, modern way of accomplishing what DBM did.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
And just because you shouldn't, doesn't mean you won't.
History of humanity, really - poking into stuff you'd better leave alone, wondering what will happen.
Not quite, actually. Miguel de Icaza started Gnome without regard for KDE; he just wanted to try out some different ideas on how to build a desktop. But Gnome got its initial surge of new developers when the qt license thing blew up, that is true.
Remember that the EU is actually as large (and maybe larger) a larger market for Microsoft as the US. The next penalty won't be a fine; it'll be a stop to selling their products until they've complied. It is really not something even a company as large as MS can ignore.
Well, I sort of agree with you in general; we have better sites for software announcements.
/. as much or more than the actual releases. This is _really_ a case of the widest possible testing being beneficial for everybody, and if /. can help to corral more tester it can only be good.
That said, release candidates for really major pieces - like a new Linux kernel or this FreeBSD update - deserve a place on
So yes, agree in general, but not in this particular case.
Is QT so much better that all companies are willing to pay for QT for the next decade rather than assist GNU with improving GTK+?
/., GTK2 is a very nice toolkit to write for, and the C++ and Python bindings especially are very, very good (no need for a custom preprocessor for C++, for instance). The Perl-GTK2 and Perl-Gnome2 bindings look very promising as well, though they were completed fairly recently, so there's bound to be rough spots, still.
No, not really. There's plenty of examples on non-free apps written for GTK and GTK2 out there (though most of the ones I know of are pretty specialized stuff like eye-tracking analysis and such).
Despite the regular foaming-at-the-mouth ranting of some KDE people on
In terms of technical specifications, they are just about equal, though the KDE component system is more lightweight and somewhat nicer. Both projects typically leapfrog each other in stuff like this, though.
In usability terms, KDE tends to be more Windows-like; of course, you can tweak most aspects of either desktop to look and feel almost any way you want. As the Siemens study showed, however, "Windows-like" tends to be a drawback, not a benefit when moving people over - with great similarity comes implicit expectations that it work exactly like Windows, and confusion and frustration ensues whenever it does not. Gnome's long work on usability issues and support for assistive technologies generally makes it a better desktop usability-wise.
All in all, they're both good, solid desktops. Unfortunately, the large amount of rabid, unreasonable, hateful KDE trolls that pop up whenever you try to even have a rational discussion is keeping me solidly away from ever actually recommending KDE to anybody. We are all supposed to be sort-of on the same side here, helping each other out, not stab each other in the back. Flinging feces at the other group like a deranged chimp is just immature, counterproductive, and makes people not like you very much anymore. I can well imagine a Windows or Mac user taking a look at something like this slashdot story and exclaim "you want me to join that?!". As long as KDE keeps up with these anonymous (and not so anonymous - *cough*ShawnGordon*cough*) trolls, I will stay away.
I know at least two CS researchers going there for a year or two. They have some pretty good research universities there.
But my point still stands. Sure, going down a bit in the foodchain is not nearly as 'bad' as fast food service work, but the person with the foreign experience will still tend to look like much better value for an employer.
I fail to see how the idea of moving abroad can be so upsetting. Academics pretty much have to do it as a matter of course; after your PhD, you typically need 4-10 years of post-doc positions to qualify for a permanent position somewhere (and even longer periods are becoming more common). It means staying 1-3 years at one place, then relocate to wherever you find a new position. And the way the market is looking now, you may well look forward to never having a permanent job anywhere.
Point is, academics can move to where the jobs are, and have for many many years; what is so horrible about other professionals doing so?
Yes, it _is_ better. When applying for a job in the US, will the employer rather have:
a) A guy with extensive experience of Indian culture and business environment, has a working knowlwedge of Hindi (or other major Indian languages), and has shown the drive and independence to relocate to a differenct continent in the first place; or
b) A guy who knows how to handle the deep fryer at McDonalds?
From the article:
However, Brookwood believes that Intel will wait for the appearance of Prescott's successor, called Tejas, which is due in early 2005. The reason for the wait, Brookwood believes, is that the Prescott designs were complete before Intel had access to AMD's approach, meaning that software tuned for one wouldn't work on the other.
"They need that compatibility now," Brookwood said. "I believe that Tejas is coming so hard on Prescott's heels, (because) Tejas has the compatibility that is not in Prescott and Prescott derivatives."
In other words, it does seem like it, though no definitive word from Intel itself, obviously.
People would rent time on huge (and hugely expensive) supercomputing centers; greatly simplify the models, knowing they introduce oversimplifications and errors; or, simply, not do the modeling they really wanted to do at all. A friend is working in a chip design company, and his simulations regularily run over an entire weekend, despite the hefty hardware they have.
In some areas (like climate modeling and some kinds of neural simulations), people can _still_ not do the kind of modeling they would really like to do, 64 bit clusters or not.
On the third hand, a lot of people dive directly into the comments and really do find short summaries like that very useful. And people don't skip the article just because they're lazy either; you might want to go directly to the comments on this story to see comments from people actually trying the drivers, for example, rather than read a pre-chewed press release that will not really tell you how well it actually works.
So no, I don't think most karma-whoring is a bad thing either.
And again, I fully agree with you - they are horrible, kludgy, ad-hoc and messy. And as you say, they persist in changing important parts of the functionality in incompatible ways between versions - right now I have four different versions of automake installed (1.4 to 1.7) because the devels can evidently not be bothered to actually keep compatibility between minor versions.
That said, having a build system to handle all Unix-like OS:es _will_ be complex and messy - not nearly as complex and messy as the sorry excuse we have now, but still significantly more complex than a tool made for one, tightly controlled common group of OS:es.
Well, if you remove the requirement of being cross-platform or being very configurable, it isn't all that hard to create a simple build system anymore, now is it? Most of the mess that is in the (horrible, I agree) auto* tools is due to those two requirements.
You do know that most competitors to US steelmakers are in other heavily industrialized countries, don't you? Nothing stopping Sweden, Japan and so on from implementing the same process.
And again, nodoby would argue that the US mobile system isn't pretty messed up in urban areas as well. When people talk about USA lagging behind in mobile phone technology and deployment, it is not rural coverage they are talking about.
As for the coverage, both Finland and Sweden have areas with high population density, as well as very large areas with very low population density - a situation not unlike the US but on a smaller scale. Yet they manage to cover pretty much all populated areas.
Two of the most best covered countries in Europe for mobile phones - Sweden and Finland - are arguably as sparsely populated as the US.
Besides, I doubt your parent poster was referring to cell coverage in the Alaskan wilderness. Seems the US market has made a pretty good mess of the thing in dense urban areas as well.
This depends on where you are. In sweden it is for instance illegal for a nightclub to select their guests based on origin (there's been some cases of bouncers not admitting people from middle eastern or african origin).
On the other hand, I certainly have a reasonable expectation of not to have to wade through all that crap. I pretty much never browse at 0 or lower, and more and more often I have the filter set to +2.
There is a filtering mechanism here, but it is _voluntary_ to use. Anybody who wants to look at the stuff modded to -1 is perfectly free to do so. Anybody want to see +2 and above only is free to do that. A right to post/publish/whatever is _not_ a right to be read or seen.
That said, apart from discrimination laws, anybody with a server is of course free to treat its contents the way they want - as an owner, you can pretty much delete anything you want, for any reason (again, as long as you do not run afoul of discrimination issues - delete all posts by people of a certain race or gender will probably get you into well deserved trouble, for instance).
Freedom of speech does not give you any right to post whatever you want at another persons server; what it does is give you a right to post what you like (within the limits of the law) on your own server without being censored by your government. In the smae way, you have no right at all to write something and expect it to be published in your local paper. What you do have is the right to start your own, competing paper and publish whatever you want in it.
So if an entertainment company decides that some subject matter is out of bounds in their virtual world, they can do so. You are free to leave and start your own world. Similarily, if you really do not like the slashdot system, you are free to leave and start a competing system with the kind of policies you like. That is what freedom of speech (and, by and large, equivalent laws in other countries) means.
So your argument is basically that since Java isn't the right tool for every possible job it must be useless?
No, if you look back at the thread, it is all a response to some moron that more or less argues that Java is better than Perl in pretty much all circumstances (including an assertion that Java is faster). His argument is thus rather the fact that Perl is not slower, and may be a better language at least for small apps.
Yep. Any novel titled "Paranoia" that isn't set in or around Alpha Complex is a source of treason. Please report immediately to the incineration units. Thank you.