My first problem is partly that as a name, "GNU/Linux" simply is not good. At all. My second problem is the not-so-hidden assumption that only GNU (or FSF) is important enough to appear in the name with Linux - there are many other notable components (like X) without which Linux would be nothing. So we either acknowledge all of them (resulting in something of a monstrosity of a name) or none.
You know, "middle-men" aren't all bad. The basic business idea was really pretty sound if executed differently. Other middle-men:
Banks. It really would be no fun, and very risky, to arrange loans/savings on an individual basis.
Food distributors and grocery stores. Sure, buying from the farmer sounds rustic and neat, but it would be a pain to drive around the countryside for a whole day to get your basic foods. It would be a _real_ pain to leave for South America or North Africa every time you felt like having a banana.
Newspapers and news wire services. Yes, ferreting out the news youself can be a lot of fun. You'd be spending all day, every day, doing it, though, and still miss almost all that is going on. Imagine trying to collect reasonably comprehensive news on the net without online newspapers and wire services?
The DaVinci Code is not really all that good. The basic premise is fascinating, and the euthor may or may not be very knowledgeable about his subject matter, but the story itself is just too full with very tired thriller cliches - I mean, a six-foot tall Albino as the immediate villain? Please./Janne
And sometimes ideas come back, or thrive in different places. Our high-speed trains in Sweden lean into the curves, just as the one you mention, and they are quite common and popular here (well, once the leaning was adjusted a bit to reduce the incidence of motion sickness).
If you view anything with a reasonable hardness and a real or potential edge or point as a weapon (which, realistically, it is), then the only way to secure a flight is to not let anybody at all on it (and that includes the pilots).
Thing is, if you relinquish all trust, then you will end up with no travel at all. Oh, and "passenger profiling" is not trust - it is rather making "no-gooders" more, rather than less, likely on a given flight.
"any force known to man" -> "most forces known to man, in reasonable amounts and not too close, and assuming no help from a disgruntled member of staff"
In a response, AMD announced development of "stressed silicon", while VIA reportedly has only managed to "get their silicon slightly worried", according to one unnamed source. China, meanwhile, announced a multi-million dollar project to have silicon going into hysterics within five years.
Outsourcing? The exact same arguments you do for outsourcing, you can do for selecting a local company rather than a foreign one for similar products.
And while there is outsourcing going on to places like China and India from here as well, it is not as pronounced (nor as widely discussed) as in the US. One reason may be that the salary difference is not as large as it is for the US to these countries.
And, in the end, if we lose a large amount of IT business here in Europe, I far prefer that money to go to a place like India rather than to the US. The products are cheaper, and it's rather more meaningful to let your money work to help a struggling, up and coming country rather than propping up one of the richest nations on earth.
Would be a nice list. That way I can avoid any company that does not produce its stuff in Sweden, or other parts of Europe. Don't want my money to fatten up American workers when European ones can get it instead.
The idea goes both ways...
Re:Give us drivers...
on
The Return of S3
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
No "freedom tax". It is a somewhat lower performance card, with a lower price tag.
This may come as a bit of a chock, I know, but there are some of us out there actually _not_ willing to have the bleeding edge in graphics performance at great cost (in money, noise and power draw). My main machine is currently a laptop with an NVIDIA GF4 420 GO with 32Mb memory. It can handle anything I throw at it with no problems. True, I do not play the latest "QuakerDoom 40,000 - Bloody Dismemberement" - if gaming was the primary focus for me, I'd have a Windows partition (or, preferably, a PS/2).
Oh, and about "the right thing": you are right - they are a hardware company. Their business is selling hardware to people. Drivers are a cost, not a source of revenue. Anything they do is geared towards driving hardware sales and lowering the cost of providing said hardware. If releasing drivers or specs for Linux will increase sales more than it costs them to do the release, it is a net win.
What is becoming apparent is that a smallish, vocal fanboy group is prepared to tear any project apart if they do not include their favorite project. The people surrounding the KDE project is actually the largest reason I have never considered using it "for real".
If true, that would be ba absolutely horrifying. If some people do not like a certain work, the answer does not lie in mutilating the work, but in those people simply refraining from reading it. I would certainly never touch such a revision.
Actually, the heavy-handed smearing of christian admonishments throughout the series largely puts me off what could otherwise have been a very enjoyable story. Not that Lewis is to blame; he was a product of his time and place, after all.
I'm not sure how much difference there is between 'decriminalise' and 'turn a blind eye', because the laws still forbid those decriminalised things.
Pretty big difference. In the first case, you can not be prosecuted no matter what; in the second, it is ultimately up to the mood and whim of the police, prosecutor and court whether you will be punished.
THe difference between decriminalisation and allowability is, if I understand it - and I may not as I am not a legal professional - illustrated well by Swedish road crossing light rules.
In Sweden, it is indeed illegal to cross the road on foot when the light is red for pedestrians. It is, however, not a prosecutable offense. You can walk to and fro the light all day long, in front of a whole conference of traffic police with nothing happening. If, however, you get hit by a car while doing this, the fault is yours, not the driver's. You were doing something wrong, and it is your fault. You (or rather your insurance company) will even be required to pay for the damages to the front of the car.
In the case of gun manufacturers there the aspect that they seem to know that they are selling to channels that do illegal business. Likewise, there are a number of lawsuits in Europe for tobacco companies that knowingly sell their products to large-scale smuggling operations.
Corporations have their relative freedom to act from a legal recognition that a corporation is to have the legal rights of an individual. It must, however, then also recognize the legal obligations and responsibilities of an individual. In the case of these industries, many corporations do not.
Actually a different budget constraint ended up pushing NASA ahead; in the early sixties, the russian rockets were way more powerful than the american ones, so very tight weight and size constraints forced the american efforts to focus much harder on miniaturization. This, in the end, proved to be a much more effective edge than bigger launch vehicles.
I hate to say this (as I am a scientist myself, and appreciate funding as much as the next guy), but constraints are in many cases a great motivator and focusing lens on what is truly important. With a nearly unlimited monetary/time/resource-budget, you'd likely waste most of it on nonessentials; in many cases perhaps the essentials would never even be identified, but lost in the sea of nice-to-haves.
Naturally, the above does in no way affect my particular work, which is always essential and topical, so please do not hesitate to send me lots of money, ok?:)
Slashdot Mirror
My first problem is partly that as a name, "GNU/Linux" simply is not good. At all. My second problem is the not-so-hidden assumption that only GNU (or FSF) is important enough to appear in the name with Linux - there are many other notable components (like X) without which Linux would be nothing. So we either acknowledge all of them (resulting in something of a monstrosity of a name) or none.
You know, "middle-men" aren't all bad. The basic business idea was really pretty sound if executed differently. Other middle-men:
Banks. It really would be no fun, and very risky, to arrange loans/savings on an individual basis.
Food distributors and grocery stores. Sure, buying from the farmer sounds rustic and neat, but it would be a pain to drive around the countryside for a whole day to get your basic foods. It would be a _real_ pain to leave for South America or North Africa every time you felt like having a banana.
Newspapers and news wire services. Yes, ferreting out the news youself can be a lot of fun. You'd be spending all day, every day, doing it, though, and still miss almost all that is going on. Imagine trying to collect reasonably comprehensive news on the net without online newspapers and wire services?
Yes, I reacted to it as well. Bloddy unnessesary and pretty childish.
The DaVinci Code is not really all that good. The basic premise is fascinating, and the euthor may or may not be very knowledgeable about his subject matter, but the story itself is just too full with very tired thriller cliches - I mean, a six-foot tall Albino as the immediate villain? Please. /Janne
And sometimes ideas come back, or thrive in different places. Our high-speed trains in Sweden lean into the curves, just as the one you mention, and they are quite common and popular here (well, once the leaning was adjusted a bit to reduce the incidence of motion sickness).
And that's really the core issue.
If you view anything with a reasonable hardness and a real or potential edge or point as a weapon (which, realistically, it is), then the only way to secure a flight is to not let anybody at all on it (and that includes the pilots).
Thing is, if you relinquish all trust, then you will end up with no travel at all. Oh, and "passenger profiling" is not trust - it is rather making "no-gooders" more, rather than less, likely on a given flight.
"Perpetual Storage -> "Long term storage"
"Disaster-proof" -> "Disaster-resistant"
"any force known to man" -> "most forces known to man, in reasonable amounts and not too close, and assuming no help from a disgruntled member of staff"
Whatever happened to truth in advertising?
In a response, AMD announced development of "stressed silicon", while VIA reportedly has only managed to "get their silicon slightly worried", according to one unnamed source. China, meanwhile, announced a multi-million dollar project to have silicon going into hysterics within five years.
Nope. 'X' stands for "Treasure!". Haven't you ever played Moneky Island?
Note that it's 0.4 [i]percent[/i]. So that would make it on the order of 4 million people with dialup and 200.000 with broadband.
Just a few more:
DuPont is French, I believe
DaimlerChrysler is majority owned by German interests
The Irony Appreciation Train never did stop at your station, did it?
Outsourcing? The exact same arguments you do for outsourcing, you can do for selecting a local company rather than a foreign one for similar products.
And while there is outsourcing going on to places like China and India from here as well, it is not as pronounced (nor as widely discussed) as in the US. One reason may be that the salary difference is not as large as it is for the US to these countries.
And, in the end, if we lose a large amount of IT business here in Europe, I far prefer that money to go to a place like India rather than to the US. The products are cheaper, and it's rather more meaningful to let your money work to help a struggling, up and coming country rather than propping up one of the richest nations on earth.
Would be a nice list. That way I can avoid any company that does not produce its stuff in Sweden, or other parts of Europe. Don't want my money to fatten up American workers when European ones can get it instead.
The idea goes both ways...
No "freedom tax". It is a somewhat lower performance card, with a lower price tag.
This may come as a bit of a chock, I know, but there are some of us out there actually _not_ willing to have the bleeding edge in graphics performance at great cost (in money, noise and power draw). My main machine is currently a laptop with an NVIDIA GF4 420 GO with 32Mb memory. It can handle anything I throw at it with no problems. True, I do not play the latest "QuakerDoom 40,000 - Bloody Dismemberement" - if gaming was the primary focus for me, I'd have a Windows partition (or, preferably, a PS/2).
Oh, and about "the right thing": you are right - they are a hardware company. Their business is selling hardware to people. Drivers are a cost, not a source of revenue. Anything they do is geared towards driving hardware sales and lowering the cost of providing said hardware. If releasing drivers or specs for Linux will increase sales more than it costs them to do the release, it is a net win.
What is becoming apparent is that a smallish, vocal fanboy group is prepared to tear any project apart if they do not include their favorite project. The people surrounding the KDE project is actually the largest reason I have never considered using it "for real".
And meanhwile, distros like Knoppix and Lindows do not include the Gnome libraries. I don't hear you complain about that...
If true, that would be ba absolutely horrifying. If some people do not like a certain work, the answer does not lie in mutilating the work, but in those people simply refraining from reading it. I would certainly never touch such a revision.
Actually, the heavy-handed smearing of christian admonishments throughout the series largely puts me off what could otherwise have been a very enjoyable story. Not that Lewis is to blame; he was a product of his time and place, after all.
I don't hear you being righteously indignant about Xandros or Linows not including GNOME...
Hypocrite.
Neither am I :)
I'm not sure how much difference there is between 'decriminalise' and 'turn a blind eye', because the laws still forbid those decriminalised things.
Pretty big difference. In the first case, you can not be prosecuted no matter what; in the second, it is ultimately up to the mood and whim of the police, prosecutor and court whether you will be punished.
THe difference between decriminalisation and allowability is, if I understand it - and I may not as I am not a legal professional - illustrated well by Swedish road crossing light rules.
In Sweden, it is indeed illegal to cross the road on foot when the light is red for pedestrians. It is, however, not a prosecutable offense. You can walk to and fro the light all day long, in front of a whole conference of traffic police with nothing happening. If, however, you get hit by a car while doing this, the fault is yours, not the driver's. You were doing something wrong, and it is your fault. You (or rather your insurance company) will even be required to pay for the damages to the front of the car.
In the case of gun manufacturers there the aspect that they seem to know that they are selling to channels that do illegal business. Likewise, there are a number of lawsuits in Europe for tobacco companies that knowingly sell their products to large-scale smuggling operations.
Corporations have their relative freedom to act from a legal recognition that a corporation is to have the legal rights of an individual. It must, however, then also recognize the legal obligations and responsibilities of an individual. In the case of these industries, many corporations do not.
Yep - they finally found a satellite design capable of leaking oil!
Seriously, the design and impetus is British, but the project is very much an european effort. Big congratulations to everyone.
Actually a different budget constraint ended up pushing NASA ahead; in the early sixties, the russian rockets were way more powerful than the american ones, so very tight weight and size constraints forced the american efforts to focus much harder on miniaturization. This, in the end, proved to be a much more effective edge than bigger launch vehicles.
:)
I hate to say this (as I am a scientist myself, and appreciate funding as much as the next guy), but constraints are in many cases a great motivator and focusing lens on what is truly important. With a nearly unlimited monetary/time/resource-budget, you'd likely waste most of it on nonessentials; in many cases perhaps the essentials would never even be identified, but lost in the sea of nice-to-haves.
Naturally, the above does in no way affect my particular work, which is always essential and topical, so please do not hesitate to send me lots of money, ok?