Linux will not gain wide acceptance outside of business until high street stores have shelves full of commercial games from the major development houses and publishers.
So no, you likely won't get many takers for the Linux install for $20, because most people who are interested would probably do it themselves.
Comcast have a monopoly under the current system, but systems evolve, and it's Google, not Comcast, who are making the right moves to be the big player when the net changes.
Whether we like it or not, there will need to be serious changes to the internet that mean anonymity is a thing of the past. At least as its thought of now. I don't mean all your private information being broadcast (or sold), I mean that it won't be possible to hide where you're coming from, or who you are, even if that 'who' is just a listing in a directory of net users.. This *has* to be done, or the internet will collapse as a platform for commerce, because online fraud and crime are big problems that we can't just ignore. It wasn't designed for commerce in the first place, but that's what it's become. We need it to survive as a commerce platform too, because that's been a good thing for all of us.
It's likely (or so I believe) that the sort of free internet we want will most likely be in the form of virtual internets that exist within game worlds. Think Second Life, only not as centralised, and not as, well, gay.
It seems stupid to me that they couldn't make their business model work
If you looked at their most contributing members, they were all uploading illegal content (as evidenced by joox.net). That's not a sustainable business model for a company that wants to be legit.
Hopefully divx will license out the stage6 browser plugin and serving infrastructure to other companies so the technology won't die
Why not let it die, they ripped off the open source community to get the code for it in the first place.
I don't know if anyone else found this, but when I installed the divx web player on my Vista machine, it killed Explorer, causing a constant cycle of 'explorer has stopped responding and will be restarted'.
I ended up having to re-install, and lost lots of data because I couldn't even get it to copy things off the machine.
I ask because the lack of sunlight in hospitals is a big issue here in the UK, where a lot of our hospitals are in very old buildings that just don't get enough light.
That's changing now, new wings tend to have lots of light.
Not quite enough sunlight to help with asepsis alas, but that's more because of things like cleaners carrying mops from ward to ward then anything else.
Well I'm not fighting anything alongside you unless you take a bath first.
Re:Why did they buy ATI?
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Personally I'm looking forward to the nVidia GPU+PhysX product.
That will finally be enough of a change to make me retire my 6200 with 512Mb ram.
Back on topic though, AMD profited mightily from the years when Microsoft's power was at its height, and the Wintel partnership was despised by many. I personally refused to buy an Intel chip for a long time because of the whole Wintel thing, and quite liked the faster and cheaper AMD products.
That's all old news now though. No-one really views the Wintel partnership as the PC market controlling giant it once was. AMD never got that essential buy in from the OEMs, so now the knee jerk anti Wintel thing is over, people are once again following the age old habit of following the winner. That's Intel, always has been really, even though they don't own the entire market.
You make the mistake of assuming that they care about these issues.
No knowledge of open source?
No caring, possibly. You'd likely be amazed how many people don't even know Linux exists. Computers run Windows, or they are Macs. Then there are people who know, but see the Linux crowd as a bunch of techie extremists who are adverse to easy interfaces. (Emacs, I'm looking at you, yes I am).
No knowledge of the LONG TERM issues of proprietary data formats?
It's more likely that they don't see it as important. This may be dumb to us in the know, but they are more likely thinking that since they use Microsoft products, it makes sense to store their data in Microsoft formats.
No knowledge of the lock in issues involved in mandating only one OS & hardware platform?
Like it or not, to the great majority of PC users, there *is* only one OS and computer type. That's not going to change any time soon. Perhaps when Ubuntu goes mainstream in a big way things might start to change, but that won't be quick.
You think the LOC IT department can't read the publications it gets every month?
Don't know, but I'm pretty certain the guys they hire to maintain this stuff are not the people having dinner and playing golf with the Microsoft Reps and deciding strategy.
Universal health care has a tendency to lower the average skill of the doctors, and I can only see such a thing as being detrimental to society.
What!
Lower the skill of doctors? How can allowing a doctor to try and treat anything they come across be detrimental?
I'm not a doctor of medicine, but I worked with many over the years. The most talented doctor I ever met is one I've known since childhood, when he was my family doctor. I then worked with him directly for almost a decade. he was always in the health service, and was, in my opinion, suberbly capable, his diagnostic abilities were excellent, and his creativity in finding solutions admirable. When working in NHS hospitals I also met many great doctors.
Your argument does not stand up to my own observations, and I was a clinical nurse specialist.
Since I must admit that there are imperfections in any system, I did meet an awful doctor who would never have made it to consultant in private healthcare. When I knew him he was an arrogant fool, and we had a huge argument in theatre when I refused to obay a crazy instruction regarding a patient about to undergo surgury. That particuler doctor went on 'extended leave' shortly after (I suspect as a result of my threatening he hospital that I would make my objection official, since he left the next week, try that in a private health system...), and came back a little better, almost good enough for me to consider working with him. He stands alone as the only example of the bad side of free healthcare, and it still may not be fair to use him as an example, since he clearly had problems that might have been unrelated to his position.
No system is perfect, but a system that denies treatment based on financial criteria is one that it inherently unfair.
I prefer to get my health care on a timely basis, from the doctor of my choosing, thankyouverymuch.
And if you lose your job and cannot pay health insurance, or are denied a payout on your health insurance, that's ok too?
Guess so.
It's interesting that most people who don't view the lack of universal health care as a problem, currently have health insurance.
Go ahead, say it's because of Micheal Moore that I say this.
Wrong...
I worked in social services here in the uk in the eighties. Back then I attended a lecture series on the US health system. This included details about people being left to die in parks after being dropped off by ambulance, denial of care based on it being 'experimental' (e.g. expensive), and many other points that he raised.
Outside of the US, many of his points are old, old news.
If your government collapsed, it's highly unlikely that you wouldn't be able to arm yourself. The possibility of governmental collapse at some hypothetical point in the future cannot be used as justification for universal gun ownership.
You've got the highest rate of gun related deaths in the western world. Like it or not, it's because there are so many guns in private ownership.
actually we should feel sorry for poor old Jack. He's stuck in a moral loop of his own devising that causes him to have no choice but to attack imaginary vectors of harm to society.
He's wrong, yes, but if he'd only redirect his attention to real problems, like the lack of universal helathcare, or the gun culture, his otherwise useless rhetoric (with which he has at least displayed reasonable competence) might actually be useful.
And from there it goes to kilotonnes and megatonnes, then I believe a thousand megatonnes is then commonly called a "shiteload" or, in the US, a "fuckload".
Actually I believe that when such large measures are used, it generally refers to the means to remove the odd troublesome city or two..
Then I suggest you fail to understand the purpose of versioning systems. Their purpose is not to store perfect code. The purpose is to store the latest changes to code.
As a rule, the working, most tested versions of code appear in stable releases. These may themselves be in a versioning system, but as a rule they are marked as distinct.
Making mistakes, finding them and fixing them makes a good coder, nothing else.
Sure the fix might not be great, it might be an ugly hack that needs to be refined, but you're only a bad coder if you don't fix your mistakes, not if you make them in the first place.
Certainly as a diligent one who actually cares about code quality.
Anyone who thinks they can produce bug free code first try is an idiot. Anyone willing to accept that there are always going to be bugs, and actively looks for them is a good coder.
Few commits means either you're Donald Knuth, or you're not that actively developing your code.
In Open Source active development does tend to mean a reduction in crapness, software wise.
What else it could say I don't know, but since there are few, if any definitive means by which code quality can be measured (and don't give me that lines of code versus man hours rubbish, I heard enough of that nonsense at uni), it's probably a reasonable metric.
Slashdot Mirror
It might be worth trying sprinkling salt on them...
THE POWER OF STALLMAN COMPELS YOU!!!111one.
Or something of that nature
Linux will not gain wide acceptance outside of business until high street stores have shelves full of commercial games from the major development houses and publishers.
So no, you likely won't get many takers for the Linux install for $20, because most people who are interested would probably do it themselves.
Ok they didn't port their own PDF tools, but they made the specs available so others could.
Comcast have a monopoly under the current system, but systems evolve, and it's Google, not Comcast, who are making the right moves to be the big player when the net changes.
Whether we like it or not, there will need to be serious changes to the internet that mean anonymity is a thing of the past. At least as its thought of now. I don't mean all your private information being broadcast (or sold), I mean that it won't be possible to hide where you're coming from, or who you are, even if that 'who' is just a listing in a directory of net users..
This *has* to be done, or the internet will collapse as a platform for commerce, because online fraud and crime are big problems that we can't just ignore. It wasn't designed for commerce in the first place, but that's what it's become. We need it to survive as a commerce platform too, because that's been a good thing for all of us.
It's likely (or so I believe) that the sort of free internet we want will most likely be in the form of virtual internets that exist within game worlds. Think Second Life, only not as centralised, and not as, well, gay.
Which insensitive clod tagged this story Beagle3?
This entire thread will be kept behind until whoever did it owns up...
Come on, I can wait all day if necessary.
Russian Spaceships Fly Yo....
Oh wait, that's actually true..
Well, I can cover several tens of millions of those species in one sentence:
GGCAGGGGTCTATGGTGGCAGGAAGCTTGGCGTGCTAGAGGGTTGTGGTTGGGC
Specifically, a Core Promoter as shared by almost all Eukaryotes.
Where each species differs by one or two characters. I guess you could work it out in terms of Hamming Distance..
It seems stupid to me that they couldn't make their business model work
If you looked at their most contributing members, they were all uploading illegal content (as evidenced by joox.net). That's not a sustainable business model for a company that wants to be legit.
Hopefully divx will license out the stage6 browser plugin and serving infrastructure to other companies so the technology won't die
Why not let it die, they ripped off the open source community to get the code for it in the first place.
I don't know if anyone else found this, but when I installed the divx web player on my Vista machine, it killed Explorer, causing a constant cycle of 'explorer has stopped responding and will be restarted'.
I ended up having to re-install, and lost lots of data because I couldn't even get it to copy things off the machine.
What country do you live in?
I ask because the lack of sunlight in hospitals is a big issue here in the UK, where a lot of our hospitals are in very old buildings that just don't get enough light.
That's changing now, new wings tend to have lots of light.
Not quite enough sunlight to help with asepsis alas, but that's more because of things like cleaners carrying mops from ward to ward then anything else.
Well I'm not fighting anything alongside you unless you take a bath first.
Personally I'm looking forward to the nVidia GPU+PhysX product.
That will finally be enough of a change to make me retire my 6200 with 512Mb ram.
Back on topic though, AMD profited mightily from the years when Microsoft's power was at its height, and the Wintel partnership was despised by many. I personally refused to buy an Intel chip for a long time because of the whole Wintel thing, and quite liked the faster and cheaper AMD products.
That's all old news now though. No-one really views the Wintel partnership as the PC market controlling giant it once was. AMD never got that essential buy in from the OEMs, so now the knee jerk anti Wintel thing is over, people are once again following the age old habit of following the winner. That's Intel, always has been really, even though they don't own the entire market.
Excellent points sir. ... ...
I should like to take this opportunity to introduce you to a friend of mine.
The Paragraph break.
You make the mistake of assuming that they care about these issues.
No knowledge of open source?
No caring, possibly. You'd likely be amazed how many people don't even know Linux exists. Computers run Windows, or they are Macs. Then there are people who know, but see the Linux crowd as a bunch of techie extremists who are adverse to easy interfaces. (Emacs, I'm looking at you, yes I am).
No knowledge of the LONG TERM issues of proprietary data formats?
It's more likely that they don't see it as important. This may be dumb to us in the know, but they are more likely thinking that since they use Microsoft products, it makes sense to store their data in Microsoft formats.
No knowledge of the lock in issues involved in mandating only one OS & hardware platform?
Like it or not, to the great majority of PC users, there *is* only one OS and computer type. That's not going to change any time soon. Perhaps when Ubuntu goes mainstream in a big way things might start to change, but that won't be quick.
You think the LOC IT department can't read the publications it gets every month?
Don't know, but I'm pretty certain the guys they hire to maintain this stuff are not the people having dinner and playing golf with the Microsoft Reps and deciding strategy.
The best thing that could be done with Pakistan is to raise the number of books people read.
Many people there, if they read at all, read religious texts only.
That's your problem. If they had a wider experience in the written word, they wouldn't be so easily led by Clerics with an agenda.
Universal health care has a tendency to lower the average skill of the doctors, and I can only see such a thing as being detrimental to society.
What!
Lower the skill of doctors? How can allowing a doctor to try and treat anything they come across be detrimental?
I'm not a doctor of medicine, but I worked with many over the years. The most talented doctor I ever met is one I've known since childhood, when he was my family doctor. I then worked with him directly for almost a decade. he was always in the health service, and was, in my opinion, suberbly capable, his diagnostic abilities were excellent, and his creativity in finding solutions admirable. When working in NHS hospitals I also met many great doctors.
Your argument does not stand up to my own observations, and I was a clinical nurse specialist.
Since I must admit that there are imperfections in any system, I did meet an awful doctor who would never have made it to consultant in private healthcare. When I knew him he was an arrogant fool, and we had a huge argument in theatre when I refused to obay a crazy instruction regarding a patient about to undergo surgury. That particuler doctor went on 'extended leave' shortly after (I suspect as a result of my threatening he hospital that I would make my objection official, since he left the next week, try that in a private health system...), and came back a little better, almost good enough for me to consider working with him. He stands alone as the only example of the bad side of free healthcare, and it still may not be fair to use him as an example, since he clearly had problems that might have been unrelated to his position.
No system is perfect, but a system that denies treatment based on financial criteria is one that it inherently unfair.
I prefer to get my health care on a timely basis, from the doctor of my choosing, thankyouverymuch.
And if you lose your job and cannot pay health insurance, or are denied a payout on your health insurance, that's ok too?
Guess so.
It's interesting that most people who don't view the lack of universal health care as a problem, currently have health insurance.
Go ahead, say it's because of Micheal Moore that I say this.
Wrong...
I worked in social services here in the uk in the eighties. Back then I attended a lecture series on the US health system. This included details about people being left to die in parks after being dropped off by ambulance, denial of care based on it being 'experimental' (e.g. expensive), and many other points that he raised.
Outside of the US, many of his points are old, old news.
Oh come on. No really, how utterly stupid.
If your government collapsed, it's highly unlikely that you wouldn't be able to arm yourself. The possibility of governmental collapse at some hypothetical point in the future cannot be used as justification for universal gun ownership.
You've got the highest rate of gun related deaths in the western world. Like it or not, it's because there are so many guns in private ownership.
actually we should feel sorry for poor old Jack. He's stuck in a moral loop of his own devising that causes him to have no choice but to attack imaginary vectors of harm to society.
He's wrong, yes, but if he'd only redirect his attention to real problems, like the lack of universal helathcare, or the gun culture, his otherwise useless rhetoric (with which he has at least displayed reasonable competence) might actually be useful.
And from there it goes to kilotonnes and megatonnes, then I believe a thousand megatonnes is then commonly called a "shiteload" or, in the US, a "fuckload".
Actually I believe that when such large measures are used, it generally refers to the means to remove the odd troublesome city or two..
Then I suggest you fail to understand the purpose of versioning systems. Their purpose is not to store perfect code. The purpose is to store the latest changes to code.
As a rule, the working, most tested versions of code appear in stable releases. These may themselves be in a versioning system, but as a rule they are marked as distinct.
killer site design....
What?
You can't be a very good coder yourself.
Making mistakes != stupid coder.
Making mistakes, finding them and fixing them makes a good coder, nothing else.
Sure the fix might not be great, it might be an ugly hack that needs to be refined, but you're only a bad coder if you don't fix your mistakes, not if you make them in the first place.
Certainly as a diligent one who actually cares about code quality.
Anyone who thinks they can produce bug free code first try is an idiot. Anyone willing to accept that there are always going to be bugs, and actively looks for them is a good coder.
It's as good a measure as any.
Few commits means either you're Donald Knuth, or you're not that actively developing your code.
In Open Source active development does tend to mean a reduction in crapness, software wise.
What else it could say I don't know, but since there are few, if any definitive means by which code quality can be measured (and don't give me that lines of code versus man hours rubbish, I heard enough of that nonsense at uni), it's probably a reasonable metric.