Sports are only as important as you make it to be, no more, no less. You're not interested, well, the whole concept of athletic competition could be outlawed and you couldn't care less.
Note that there is a fundamental difference between "sports" (ie. competitive atcletics) and "exercise". You do emphatically _not_ need to participate in a sport to get exercise. And it is exercise that is important for your health and well-being, not competition. A surprising number of geek friends that loathe the idea of sports (and that cut PE classes) are nevertheless avid exercisers; they just don't wish to compare performance with others.
There are a number of athletic activities available that are not competitive but very beneficial - and that tends to appeal to geeks: Walking rather than riding a bus or car; rock climbing; cycling (as transport of enjoyment, not racing); weight lifting and gymnastics (good for your back); dancing - classical or ballroom; hiking. there are many others of course, all with the common denominator of not having to induce an unhealthy competitive element.
If school gymknastics were to emphasize the joy of exercise rather than just ranking people on their ability to throw a ball then maybe there wouldn't be so much disdain towards it from the less talented.
What do you mean "have to"? Just continue to play with the version 3 ruleset; the books won't suddenly turn into dust just because there's a new version out.
And as important for Apple, the niche market Apple has has been slowly eroding. New customers didn't appear at a high enough rate to compensate for those that disappeared. So growing into new markets is not al luxury for them - it's a necessity, both to get customers in new markets, but also because the perception of growth is necessary to keep the customers in their current niche.
Market. Share. Is. Not. Necessarily. An. Indication. Of. A. Company's. Success.
Why can't people understand this?
Maybe the suprefluous punctuation is confusing them?:)
More seriously, for the most part you are right. If marketshare were the only criterion for viable business, we'd only have one company in each market total. One building company, one flashlight company, one airline and so on. All those dotcoms frantically rushing for "eyeballs" and "first-mover advantage" believed this, and wanted to be the company in their market that built the most marketshare.
That said, relative market share does have _some_ importance (how much depends on the kind of market you are looking at). For stuff like computing platforms it is not negligble. The trick is of course to define a new market - a niche if you will. Apple has done this well. Their problem now lies in that they have to poke their heads out of that cozy niche if they want to grow, and that's what they've been doing for the past year or so. This, of course, makes them more exposed than they previously were.
The downside is that just about every user, regardless of need or skill level, will choose the highest level out of fear of missing something important. This, of course, removes the whole point of skill levels in the first place. To a lesser - but still large - extent, the same problem appears with splitting options into basic and advanced screens.
Of course, Gnome2 does have a concept of levels; it's just well hidden. The settings available from the various UI screens are basic, while advanced stuff is accessible using gconf-editor. That one is non-obvious enough that casual users will not stumble into it and get into trouble.
The privacy laws are pretty strict; when the data is used for research purposes it will always be deidentified if at all possible; if not, the researchers need to get written consent from the patient. All research using patient data also need to be approved by a board looking specifically for privacy issues. You also have a right to tell your physician/hospital that your data is not to be used in research.
I was basically saying that Swedish isn't all that silly once you're used to it,and that the Bork translations look a lot more like Dutch than Swedish (we basically never have two identical vocals next to each other, for example).
Svenska är inte det minsta lustigt - så länge man ignorerar hur det låter, iofs:) Med det sagt ser operas filtrerade text mer ut som holländska snarare än svenska.
Completing a selection with the right button rather than shift-left has a couple of problems.
First, using shift-left mirrors the equivalent operation in other contexts (like using shift-left to select a range in a list).
Second, you can get to the awkward state where you unwittingly have a bit selected above the visible screen area, and right-click to get the menu. Suddenly half your terminal contents are selected instead. This may not sound like a big problem for the terminal (and for most it isn't), but as the meachanism should be the same for equivalent operations as far as doable, this problem can have greater repercussions in other contexts where popping up a right-click menu is more common.
Look at webservers, however. Apache is twice as popular as IIS, and yet there are several times more security issues with IIS than with Apache. That can not be explained by relative obscurity.
Re:The job category that'll never get outsourced..
on
Giant Sucking Noise
·
· Score: 1
Well, no.
A 7 or 8 figure CEO ought to be able to see the relationship between laid-off workers and the economy that's prompting furthre layoffs.
A CEO may well see the relationship you outline, but for the company, it is better to lay of than to refrain. If he didn't, the economy would still tank due to everyone else laying off, so of course he will too.
A 7 or 8 figure CEO ought to understand more about the macroeconomic nature of the US, and bear partial responsibility for it.
And that's where you (unfortunately) are really wrong. A CEO (or a boardmember) has a responsibility only to the company's owners (the shareholders). They do not have a responsibility towards the national economy - in fact, if they did take it as part of their responsibility to the detriment of the company performance, they could get sued by their shareholders for mismanagement, or would get fired themselves at the least. This is the result of allowing corporativism emerge as the dominant flavor of capitalism today.
And don't forget that the important part - the server stuff - is of course desktop agnostic; you run kmail or evolution or whatever client you want (including outlook for windows holdouts) that supports the relevant protocols.
That is really the big part of this story; clients we have already, and others are coming along, but a free server for the small to medium organization has been sorely lacking. Let's just hope the devels realize this fully and do not do something silly like tie the server to just the KDE client stuff, or require X and KDE on the server for management.
Um, no, it doesn't. If the PC-based utilities were written as ineffectively as the mac code was (not an unreasonable assumption), then we're back to the same conclusion as the original article made.
Just to be clear, I'n not slamming Mac or anything here; I like them. I'm just saying that this really does not prove anything at all until a similar, optimized piece of software has been tested on a PC. And even then it proves very little beyond each machines ability to perform in this very specific task.
There's an old truth that the only benchmark that counts is the performance of your applications. This stands today as it did before. The new thing today is that for a lot of garden-variety computing added performance really doesn't matter anymore.
I very recently got myself a laptop which I'm running Linux on. It needs ACPI to handle CPU throttling, which I have not yet patched in. Just a couple of days ago I looked through the startup log and discovered that the bios sets the cpu in full-speed or power-saving mode at startup depending on whether it's connected to a power supply at startup. This setting is then kept for as long as the machine is running. It's a clock speed difference of 1.2 Ghz vs. 1.8Ghz. Thing is, I never noticed this. The machine has felt just as fast and as respponsive whether I happened to start it on battery power or with the mains adapter. Had I not looked at the logs I would never have suspected it.
The truth is, what's limiting computers today have more to do with disk speed and memory management strategies than with cpu speed. Yes, in some cases CPU speed does matter, but even with such applications, most of the time is generally spent waiting for other stuff once you lift the perspective from just one component of the task at hand.
Of course, there is no saying what speed increase a PC would get with a similarily optimized dedicated app for the same task. This proves nothing either way.
A major - and often overlooked - factor is the quality of the microphone used. The build-in mics of webcams or the mic of cheapskate headsets are really too lousy to make for decent sound quality, as they introduce so much distortion and noise that the codec is ill-equipped to handle.
Um, to me that sounds like a good plan for everyone. It's one of the points of open source that while you release your stuff, you can make money on your own extensive knowledge of said stuff. After all, since the format and basic tools are open you do not need to use their (hypothetical) proprietary versions if you do not want to.
The font is the Vera family; there's links in other comments to pictures.
And yes, it _is_ a big deal. Slapping together a half-decent font able to show the 7-bit ascii characters in a few sizes isn't all that much work. Making a high-quality, well designed font that will work over the entire iso8859-1 (or even Unicode) with proper hinting and good visibility over a large range of sizes and resolutions, takes a _lot_ of time and effort.
Ten fonts will be released for use under a special open license agreement, giving advanced font capabilities to all free and open source software developers and users.
and
"The donation of these fonts to the free software community is the final piece that will give full functionality to projects like Freetype, XFT2 and X Render extensions of the XFree86 project, Pango, KDE and Trolltechs QT, among many others." said Jim Gettys of HP and GNOME Foundation board member.
Or do you imply that this should be licensed for the use in KDE only?
I'd rather look at my neighbours yard than "top gun". Come to think of it, I'd rather watch paint dry than "top gun". But sure, it's a nifty idea to put those large flat surfaces to some use rather than having to empty out a part of a wall for a projection tv. As an added bonus, the couch and chairs will be facing the windows with a view outside rather than a dingy corner of the room with a tv.
I did not say it'd stop all (or any) ordnance. My post was a refutation of a parent post saying GPS jammers would be worthless as you could target them with EMR missiles; I argue that it would be stupid on many levels to do so.
In fact, GPS is used heavily in only a few armies today, and even there almost only in a troop orienting capacity. Jamming a military theatre would not (or, at least, should not) actually noticeably decrease the effectiveness of either combatant; the military angle on this story is a red herring.
The practical use of a GPS jammer rather lies in stuff other posters here have touched on, like inhibiting travel logs of vehicles.
As for economics, yes, that is a factor. You only have so many of a weapon, for instance, not because you couldn't make use for more of them, but because the added cost is better spent elsewhere. For a down-to-earth example, compare the equipment a soldier receives and the equipment a well-to-do hiker can purchase for him- or herself. While top-notch (not necessarily the most expensive) equipment would make the soldier more effective, it is rightly deemed as a waste of limited resources. As another example, there was a piece in TheAtlantic (I believe; it could have been nytimes) about how the limited number of cargo aircraft limits the parameters of deployment of US troops in the arabian peninsula. With limited resources you have to choose where to best spend them.
Slashdot Mirror
Sports are only as important as you make it to be, no more, no less. You're not interested, well, the whole concept of athletic competition could be outlawed and you couldn't care less.
Note that there is a fundamental difference between "sports" (ie. competitive atcletics) and "exercise". You do emphatically _not_ need to participate in a sport to get exercise. And it is exercise that is important for your health and well-being, not competition. A surprising number of geek friends that loathe the idea of sports (and that cut PE classes) are nevertheless avid exercisers; they just don't wish to compare performance with others.
There are a number of athletic activities available that are not competitive but very beneficial - and that tends to appeal to geeks: Walking rather than riding a bus or car; rock climbing; cycling (as transport of enjoyment, not racing); weight lifting and gymnastics (good for your back); dancing - classical or ballroom; hiking. there are many others of course, all with the common denominator of not having to induce an unhealthy competitive element.
If school gymknastics were to emphasize the joy of exercise rather than just ranking people on their ability to throw a ball then maybe there wouldn't be so much disdain towards it from the less talented.
What do you mean "have to"? Just continue to play with the version 3 ruleset; the books won't suddenly turn into dust just because there's a new version out.
And as important for Apple, the niche market Apple has has been slowly eroding. New customers didn't appear at a high enough rate to compensate for those that disappeared. So growing into new markets is not al luxury for them - it's a necessity, both to get customers in new markets, but also because the perception of growth is necessary to keep the customers in their current niche.
Market. Share. Is. Not. Necessarily. An. Indication. Of. A. Company's. Success.
:)
Why can't people understand this?
Maybe the suprefluous punctuation is confusing them?
More seriously, for the most part you are right. If marketshare were the only criterion for viable business, we'd only have one company in each market total. One building company, one flashlight company, one airline and so on. All those dotcoms frantically rushing for "eyeballs" and "first-mover advantage" believed this, and wanted to be the company in their market that built the most marketshare.
That said, relative market share does have _some_ importance (how much depends on the kind of market you are looking at). For stuff like computing platforms it is not negligble. The trick is of course to define a new market - a niche if you will. Apple has done this well. Their problem now lies in that they have to poke their heads out of that cozy niche if they want to grow, and that's what they've been doing for the past year or so. This, of course, makes them more exposed than they previously were.
The downside is that just about every user, regardless of need or skill level, will choose the highest level out of fear of missing something important. This, of course, removes the whole point of skill levels in the first place. To a lesser - but still large - extent, the same problem appears with splitting options into basic and advanced screens.
Of course, Gnome2 does have a concept of levels; it's just well hidden. The settings available from the various UI screens are basic, while advanced stuff is accessible using gconf-editor. That one is non-obvious enough that casual users will not stumble into it and get into trouble.
The privacy laws are pretty strict; when the data is used for research purposes it will always be deidentified if at all possible; if not, the researchers need to get written consent from the patient. All research using patient data also need to be approved by a board looking specifically for privacy issues. You also have a right to tell your physician/hospital that your data is not to be used in research.
I was basically saying that Swedish isn't all that silly once you're used to it,and that the Bork translations look a lot more like Dutch than Swedish (we basically never have two identical vocals next to each other, for example).
Now that translation is so bad I didn't even understand it at first. Here's your translation translated back to English:
How cruel of self to pick on Sweden as it.
I _think_ you wanted to say something like "How cruel of me to pick on Sweden", which would be "Så grymt av mig att hacka på Sverige"
Svenska är inte det minsta lustigt - så länge man ignorerar hur det låter, iofs :) Med det sagt ser operas filtrerade text mer ut som holländska snarare än svenska.
:)
So now you know...
because nothing says 'you're hot!' like a new processor...
Well, it says "this is hot" about the new processor if nothing else...
Completing a selection with the right button rather than shift-left has a couple of problems.
First, using shift-left mirrors the equivalent operation in other contexts (like using shift-left to select a range in a list).
Second, you can get to the awkward state where you unwittingly have a bit selected above the visible screen area, and right-click to get the menu. Suddenly half your terminal contents are selected instead. This may not sound like a big problem for the terminal (and for most it isn't), but as the meachanism should be the same for equivalent operations as far as doable, this problem can have greater repercussions in other contexts where popping up a right-click menu is more common.
There is an everquest joke to be made here...
Nope; the piece is about smart mobs...
This is certainly a relevant point.
Look at webservers, however. Apache is twice as popular as IIS, and yet there are several times more security issues with IIS than with Apache. That can not be explained by relative obscurity.
Well, no.
A 7 or 8 figure CEO ought to be able to see the relationship between laid-off workers and the economy that's prompting furthre layoffs.
A CEO may well see the relationship you outline, but for the company, it is better to lay of than to refrain. If he didn't, the economy would still tank due to everyone else laying off, so of course he will too.
A 7 or 8 figure CEO ought to understand more about the macroeconomic nature of the US, and bear partial responsibility for it.
And that's where you (unfortunately) are really wrong. A CEO (or a boardmember) has a responsibility only to the company's owners (the shareholders). They do not have a responsibility towards the national economy - in fact, if they did take it as part of their responsibility to the detriment of the company performance, they could get sued by their shareholders for mismanagement, or would get fired themselves at the least. This is the result of allowing corporativism emerge as the dominant flavor of capitalism today.
2. The Kroupware is creating a new server for PIM applications called Kolab. AFAIK, this has no counterpart in evolution.
It is also not tied to KDE specifically; you can use evolution just as easily as Kmail et al. (or outlook for that matter).
And don't forget that the important part - the server stuff - is of course desktop agnostic; you run kmail or evolution or whatever client you want (including outlook for windows holdouts) that supports the relevant protocols.
That is really the big part of this story; clients we have already, and others are coming along, but a free server for the small to medium organization has been sorely lacking. Let's just hope the devels realize this fully and do not do something silly like tie the server to just the KDE client stuff, or require X and KDE on the server for management.
Um, no, it doesn't. If the PC-based utilities were written as ineffectively as the mac code was (not an unreasonable assumption), then we're back to the same conclusion as the original article made.
Just to be clear, I'n not slamming Mac or anything here; I like them. I'm just saying that this really does not prove anything at all until a similar, optimized piece of software has been tested on a PC. And even then it proves very little beyond each machines ability to perform in this very specific task.
There's an old truth that the only benchmark that counts is the performance of your applications. This stands today as it did before. The new thing today is that for a lot of garden-variety computing added performance really doesn't matter anymore.
I very recently got myself a laptop which I'm running Linux on. It needs ACPI to handle CPU throttling, which I have not yet patched in. Just a couple of days ago I looked through the startup log and discovered that the bios sets the cpu in full-speed or power-saving mode at startup depending on whether it's connected to a power supply at startup. This setting is then kept for as long as the machine is running. It's a clock speed difference of 1.2 Ghz vs. 1.8Ghz. Thing is, I never noticed this. The machine has felt just as fast and as respponsive whether I happened to start it on battery power or with the mains adapter. Had I not looked at the logs I would never have suspected it.
The truth is, what's limiting computers today have more to do with disk speed and memory management strategies than with cpu speed. Yes, in some cases CPU speed does matter, but even with such applications, most of the time is generally spent waiting for other stuff once you lift the perspective from just one component of the task at hand.
Of course, there is no saying what speed increase a PC would get with a similarily optimized dedicated app for the same task. This proves nothing either way.
A major - and often overlooked - factor is the quality of the microphone used. The build-in mics of webcams or the mic of cheapskate headsets are really too lousy to make for decent sound quality, as they introduce so much distortion and noise that the codec is ill-equipped to handle.
Because the sentences mean different things.
/Janne
"It is an interesting problem that some distro-compilers have to face."
talks about the problem facing distro compilers, whereas
"It's an interesting look into some of the kinds of less obvious problems that distro-compilers have to face."
Talks about the article adressing these problems.
Um, to me that sounds like a good plan for everyone. It's one of the points of open source that while you release your stuff, you can make money on your own extensive knowledge of said stuff. After all, since the format and basic tools are open you do not need to use their (hypothetical) proprietary versions if you do not want to.
The font is the Vera family; there's links in other comments to pictures.
And yes, it _is_ a big deal. Slapping together a half-decent font able to show the 7-bit ascii characters in a few sizes isn't all that much work. Making a high-quality, well designed font that will work over the entire iso8859-1 (or even Unicode) with proper hinting and good visibility over a large range of sizes and resolutions, takes a _lot_ of time and effort.
and
Or do you imply that this should be licensed for the use in KDE only?
I'd rather look at my neighbours yard than "top gun". Come to think of it, I'd rather watch paint dry than "top gun". But sure, it's a nifty idea to put those large flat surfaces to some use rather than having to empty out a part of a wall for a projection tv. As an added bonus, the couch and chairs will be facing the windows with a view outside rather than a dingy corner of the room with a tv.
I did not say it'd stop all (or any) ordnance. My post was a refutation of a parent post saying GPS jammers would be worthless as you could target them with EMR missiles; I argue that it would be stupid on many levels to do so.
In fact, GPS is used heavily in only a few armies today, and even there almost only in a troop orienting capacity. Jamming a military theatre would not (or, at least, should not) actually noticeably decrease the effectiveness of either combatant; the military angle on this story is a red herring.
The practical use of a GPS jammer rather lies in stuff other posters here have touched on, like inhibiting travel logs of vehicles.
As for economics, yes, that is a factor. You only have so many of a weapon, for instance, not because you couldn't make use for more of them, but because the added cost is better spent elsewhere. For a down-to-earth example, compare the equipment a soldier receives and the equipment a well-to-do hiker can purchase for him- or herself. While top-notch (not necessarily the most expensive) equipment would make the soldier more effective, it is rightly deemed as a waste of limited resources. As another example, there was a piece in TheAtlantic (I believe; it could have been nytimes) about how the limited number of cargo aircraft limits the parameters of deployment of US troops in the arabian peninsula. With limited resources you have to choose where to best spend them.