Sorry to say that, in my experience, the staunchly open source shops around here aren't just saving money on their software licenses. I found a shop that programs all their apps in Qt, and I happen to have been programming in Qt for the last 5 years - awesome fit, but when I interviewed, the head of software decided he liked me but then cut straight to salary discussion and frankly came out and told me that my last job (and the two before that) were paying 50% more than he was making, and he was making 50% more than any other software guy on staff (translation: other than him, software guys were making 44% of my previous salary level, and even he was only at 67%.)
It's a management decision thing, I could surely deliver massive return on their investment in my salary, but they choose to seek salary costs as low as they possibly can. Thankfully, I found a company willing to continue to support me and my family (and I still program in Qt), and we have a mutually beneficial relationship, they pay me better than the jerks down the road, and I deliver product they can sell for far more than they pay me.
So, Spark ships with Plasma Active pre-installed, which is nice.
Can't Plasma Active be installed on any number of tablets? I'm thinking of the RockBox / DD-WRT experience for tablets instead of Music players / Routers.
As for Win8 Arm gaining the walled garden "feature" of iOS... good luck with that. I'll write code for Win8 on Arm when I can do it using the Qt API.
What's that got to do with calculus? You can't even measure happiness (With what instrument? What's the SI unit?) so it'd be impossible to plot it as a function of income or anything else. Even if you could, that would say nothing about how it relates to the happiness of other people, and even if you could that wouldn't prove your assertion that it's a zero sum game.
You don't know what you're talking about. Just shut the fuck up.
P.S. Who is modding this uninformed bar-room philosophizing up?
You know, some days it's just fun to feed the trolls.
Maybe happiness is nebulous and unmeasureable, postulate that suicide is the inverse of happiness - that is clearly measurable, even if you choose to believe that attempted suicide or "suicidal ideation" proves nothing, successful suicide attempts are concrete.
Suicide is as prevalent among the wealthy as the poor, in-fact, it's a bathtub curve - increases at both ends of the wealth spectrum.
50 watt resistors and 10 watt zeners aren't free and may be a fire hazard. A more efficient converter will eventually save its tiny additional cost in fuel savings.
You are, of course, neglecting the cost of acquisition. If a regulator using a 50W resistor and 10W zener are in stores ready to use, they will be a couple of hundred thousand dollars cheaper (supplier qualification, approvals, etc.) to deploy than a new design. Not saying that a more advanced design isn't better from a technical standpoint, and justifiable by any rational thinking person, just that it might not be necessary or cost effective in the real world deployment.
Oh, please, the border is to the East (or South, or wherever) - if you didn't have that much situational awareness when you went down, you deserve to be captured.
A pocket compass, or the sun, is a hell of a lot better traveling companion on a 300km hike through the backwoods than an aviation chart.
I navigated the back roads of East Germany on a bicycle in 1990 - heads up awareness of the surroundings served me much better than heads down map reading - though it's kind of nice to have both, if you're trying for a point target, if you're just headed for the border, especially a covert border crossing, it's probably better to end up at a slightly random point instead of something predictable on a map.
Picture the electrical generating facility on a large military cargo jet. Having trouble? It's a freakin' turbine, putting out plenty of surplus power. Whether each iPad takes 7.5W or 42W to charge is really immaterial to the pounds of fuel per hour consumed by the generator. And, cooling air is usually available in abundance, too.
I'd bet the fuel savings calculation for the $1.2M/year from 70lbs per bag probably neglected the cost of charging the iPad while on-board, but 42W of electrical load is probably just about a wash with 70lbs of cargo - you certainly don't need 140lbs of fuel to generate an additional 42W for the duration of the flight.
Yeah, piracy didn't exist in the 90s. Do we get the don't copy that floppy guy back too?
I think my first "copy party experience" was in a church, in 1983ish... Everybody had their box of 100+ floppies and you'd walk around and see if there was anything you wanted, "borrow it" for 5 minutes to make a copy, rinse, lather, and repeat, for hours.
You've just described one dimension over a tiny region of a much larger, multi-dimensional curve that's far from flat overall. What is the longest you've gone without food?
About 6 days...
I presume we're talking about e-dating and the portion of society that has ready access to computers, food, shelter, etc. though, I haven't been on Match.com in over 14 years, so maybe there is a "homeless seeking shelter" contingent in there now? Is a significant portion of Slashdot destitute and insufficiently nourished? From where I view the world (and at least 1000km in any direction), the major problem is excessive caloric intake, with notable exceptions, but if somebody in the U.S. is lacking food, they're not trying very hard to get it.
Yes, happiness is a big word, but to make another sweeping generalization, overly pedantic people who readily point out ways that statements can be mis-interpreted tend to be lacking in happiness compared to their otherwise similar counterparts who go with the flow of a conversation and take a meaning as it was meant.
Wow, that may be the most plainly wrong statement I've ever read about such a nebulous and subjective concept.
Take a working couple with 2 kids, living in a 1600 square foot house in a modest neighborhood.
Give the man a 100K/year raise, no additional hours at the office required - wait 5 years.
Wife becomes stay at home mom, free to pursue her interests. Move to a 4500 sqft McMansion in that better subdivision across the street. New cars, no debt, free to travel and purchase whatever they desire (within reason) at will.
How long before the wife is actually less happy because she has time to contemplate all that is wrong with life, her life in particular?
I lived in this "Stay at home mom land" outside Houston, TX for a couple of years. Sure, they look happier than slum dwellers, they certainly have no right to complain, and yet, complain they do - often more than their less fortunate counterparts. And, it's not just surface problems, they really, genuinely lack happiness - some of them give lots of money to psychologists to try to figure it out, the ones that get SSRIs generally do improve their mood, if not their actual circumstances.
YMMV, these types of general statements do not apply to 100% of any population, but in my observation, the trend is there and clear.
Also interesting is the bathtub curve relating wealth to suicide, suicide rates increase significantly at both ends of the wealth spectrum - what do both ends of the wealth spectrum have in common? A lot of free time on their hands, for one.
I'm sure the SuperPoke EULA had provisions stating that all virtual currency purchased for use in-game was non-refundable, no matter what.
In light of that, it'll be interesting to see how this plays out in court. If Google doesn't settle, and loses, we could possibly see an EULA-affecting precedent come out of this.
Like a precedent that EULAs are unenforcable? That might actually make some sense.
Mod parent down. The Columbia disaster wasn't some pioneering venture gone wrong because people didn't understand it, it was a well polished technology that failed due to incompetence and mismanagement in spite of forewarning by the people who existed purely to keep it in check. The government doesn't do anything well but war - stick to your job and be happy when you are just on standby assholes.
I never thought of the Shuttle program as well polished technology, even after 100+ flights - the tiles falling off had a lot to do with that, but all in all, it's a highly orchestrated endeavor with very few actual complete executions. In 1986, it was definitely still raw.
To the Offtopic mod... the connection to topic is that the "acceptable risk" reference above was talking about the last age of exploration. There were high risks taken during the last age of exploration, but they were more acceptable mostly because the risk takers went out of sight and either returned triumphantly or didn't return at all. Even those who returned with tales of horror were relating stories of events that happened months ago, out of sight and largely unimaginable to the listener.
Live TV puts the situation right in everyone's face, immediate, real, and something they can empathize with. People watching Challenger blow felt the explosion themselves. It makes the risk less acceptable.
Live TV cut popular support out from under the Vietnam War - it was no more gruesome than WWII or WWI, but it was wholly less acceptable to the voting public - for many reasons of course, but having the war brought live to your living room has a way of making it just a little more important to your decision making processes.
And yet, there is no evidence that people are any happier.
Happiness is a differential function, it doesn't matter what you have in absolute terms, only relative.
So, if everybody is suddenly 1000% better off, happiness returns to baseline within a year or so, even while the improvement remains.
I think this, more than anything, explains Moore's law. Technological progress is often made in quantum leaps, but rather than delivering these leaps to the world, companies choose a slow steady increase - the engineering departments say it's safer that way, but marketing knows that they can sell far more widgets if they improve them a little at a time, making customers happy every time they get an improvement, instead of delivering all the improvements at once, making customers a little more happy once, but then complacent or even dissatisfied with the apparent lack of improvement.
OpenOffice is on every PC that I setup for anybody...
That doesn't change those people who "won't mess around with that open sores garbage" and insist on an $800 MS Office install before they'll put down their coffee and think about working.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to say that, in my experience, the staunchly open source shops around here aren't just saving money on their software licenses. I found a shop that programs all their apps in Qt, and I happen to have been programming in Qt for the last 5 years - awesome fit, but when I interviewed, the head of software decided he liked me but then cut straight to salary discussion and frankly came out and told me that my last job (and the two before that) were paying 50% more than he was making, and he was making 50% more than any other software guy on staff (translation: other than him, software guys were making 44% of my previous salary level, and even he was only at 67%.)
It's a management decision thing, I could surely deliver massive return on their investment in my salary, but they choose to seek salary costs as low as they possibly can. Thankfully, I found a company willing to continue to support me and my family (and I still program in Qt), and we have a mutually beneficial relationship, they pay me better than the jerks down the road, and I deliver product they can sell for far more than they pay me.
120 years ago 80% of Americans worked in farms now 2% do. Look at all those lost jobs.
Efficiency is good. It helps.
Watch Food. Inc. and get back to me on whether you still hold that opinion.
So, Spark ships with Plasma Active pre-installed, which is nice.
Can't Plasma Active be installed on any number of tablets? I'm thinking of the RockBox / DD-WRT experience for tablets instead of Music players / Routers.
As for Win8 Arm gaining the walled garden "feature" of iOS... good luck with that. I'll write code for Win8 on Arm when I can do it using the Qt API.
What's that got to do with calculus? You can't even measure happiness (With what instrument? What's the SI unit?) so it'd be impossible to plot it as a function of income or anything else. Even if you could, that would say nothing about how it relates to the happiness of other people, and even if you could that wouldn't prove your assertion that it's a zero sum game.
You don't know what you're talking about. Just shut the fuck up.
P.S. Who is modding this uninformed bar-room philosophizing up?
You know, some days it's just fun to feed the trolls.
Maybe happiness is nebulous and unmeasureable, postulate that suicide is the inverse of happiness - that is clearly measurable, even if you choose to believe that attempted suicide or "suicidal ideation" proves nothing, successful suicide attempts are concrete.
Suicide is as prevalent among the wealthy as the poor, in-fact, it's a bathtub curve - increases at both ends of the wealth spectrum.
Of course, the early documented forms of ECT were literally 60Hz 120V through a resistor to the skull.
They got better about using anesthesia to prevent the patients from breaking their own bones after a while...
Sarasota Florida had (has?) a dentist named "Royal Fink" - proudly emblazoned on the side of the building.
50 watt resistors and 10 watt zeners aren't free and may be a fire hazard. A more efficient converter will eventually save its tiny additional cost in fuel savings.
You are, of course, neglecting the cost of acquisition. If a regulator using a 50W resistor and 10W zener are in stores ready to use, they will be a couple of hundred thousand dollars cheaper (supplier qualification, approvals, etc.) to deploy than a new design. Not saying that a more advanced design isn't better from a technical standpoint, and justifiable by any rational thinking person, just that it might not be necessary or cost effective in the real world deployment.
it's dominated by a risk averse philosophy and pretty much only takes part in asymmetric warfare where it vastly overpowers the enemy.
What do you expect from an all volunteer force?
Oh, please, the border is to the East (or South, or wherever) - if you didn't have that much situational awareness when you went down, you deserve to be captured.
A pocket compass, or the sun, is a hell of a lot better traveling companion on a 300km hike through the backwoods than an aviation chart.
I navigated the back roads of East Germany on a bicycle in 1990 - heads up awareness of the surroundings served me much better than heads down map reading - though it's kind of nice to have both, if you're trying for a point target, if you're just headed for the border, especially a covert border crossing, it's probably better to end up at a slightly random point instead of something predictable on a map.
Really? Slashdot is going to argue over whether the military can figure out how to charge an iPad on a C-17? Really?
Slow morning... the infiltration by the Chinese thread was boring.
Picture the electrical generating facility on a large military cargo jet. Having trouble? It's a freakin' turbine, putting out plenty of surplus power. Whether each iPad takes 7.5W or 42W to charge is really immaterial to the pounds of fuel per hour consumed by the generator. And, cooling air is usually available in abundance, too.
I'd bet the fuel savings calculation for the $1.2M/year from 70lbs per bag probably neglected the cost of charging the iPad while on-board, but 42W of electrical load is probably just about a wash with 70lbs of cargo - you certainly don't need 140lbs of fuel to generate an additional 42W for the duration of the flight.
Like most other gadgets, the iPad can charge off of a USB port. That would be 5 Vdc.
Actually, the iPad can not be charged off a standard USB port while it is powered on. It draws 1.5 amps (more than the .5 amps of USB 2.0).
There are USB ports that will charge the iPad (if they support the Battery Charging v1.1 spec), but having those on a device is rare.
The iPad can charge slowly when it is asleep from a standard USB 2.0 port if there is nothing else drawing power.
My iPad 1 has been charging from the USB port on my Chumby since it was new - hasn't run down yet.
Adapters for 28V dc aircraft environments already exist: http://www.lonestaraviation.com/Power-Adapter-USB-Socket.html
That's a good thing, because if the military developed and built one for themselves, it would cost more than the iPad itself.
Yeah, no tension in North Korea...
Hey, let's go back to the way it was in the 90's
Yeah, piracy didn't exist in the 90s. Do we get the don't copy that floppy guy back too?
I think my first "copy party experience" was in a church, in 1983ish... Everybody had their box of 100+ floppies and you'd walk around and see if there was anything you wanted, "borrow it" for 5 minutes to make a copy, rinse, lather, and repeat, for hours.
You've just described one dimension over a tiny region of a much larger, multi-dimensional curve that's far from flat overall. What is the longest you've gone without food?
About 6 days...
I presume we're talking about e-dating and the portion of society that has ready access to computers, food, shelter, etc. though, I haven't been on Match.com in over 14 years, so maybe there is a "homeless seeking shelter" contingent in there now? Is a significant portion of Slashdot destitute and insufficiently nourished? From where I view the world (and at least 1000km in any direction), the major problem is excessive caloric intake, with notable exceptions, but if somebody in the U.S. is lacking food, they're not trying very hard to get it.
Yes, happiness is a big word, but to make another sweeping generalization, overly pedantic people who readily point out ways that statements can be mis-interpreted tend to be lacking in happiness compared to their otherwise similar counterparts who go with the flow of a conversation and take a meaning as it was meant.
"Happiness is a differential function."
Wow, that may be the most plainly wrong statement I've ever read about such a nebulous and subjective concept.
Take a working couple with 2 kids, living in a 1600 square foot house in a modest neighborhood.
Give the man a 100K/year raise, no additional hours at the office required - wait 5 years.
Wife becomes stay at home mom, free to pursue her interests. Move to a 4500 sqft McMansion in that better subdivision across the street. New cars, no debt, free to travel and purchase whatever they desire (within reason) at will.
How long before the wife is actually less happy because she has time to contemplate all that is wrong with life, her life in particular?
I lived in this "Stay at home mom land" outside Houston, TX for a couple of years. Sure, they look happier than slum dwellers, they certainly have no right to complain, and yet, complain they do - often more than their less fortunate counterparts. And, it's not just surface problems, they really, genuinely lack happiness - some of them give lots of money to psychologists to try to figure it out, the ones that get SSRIs generally do improve their mood, if not their actual circumstances.
YMMV, these types of general statements do not apply to 100% of any population, but in my observation, the trend is there and clear.
Also interesting is the bathtub curve relating wealth to suicide, suicide rates increase significantly at both ends of the wealth spectrum - what do both ends of the wealth spectrum have in common? A lot of free time on their hands, for one.
I'm sure the SuperPoke EULA had provisions stating that all virtual currency purchased for use in-game was non-refundable, no matter what.
In light of that, it'll be interesting to see how this plays out in court. If Google doesn't settle, and loses, we could possibly see an EULA-affecting precedent come out of this.
Like a precedent that EULAs are unenforcable? That might actually make some sense.
See the Memorial Tree Grove.
Mod parent down. The Columbia disaster wasn't some pioneering venture gone wrong because people didn't understand it, it was a well polished technology that failed due to incompetence and mismanagement in spite of forewarning by the people who existed purely to keep it in check. The government doesn't do anything well but war - stick to your job and be happy when you are just on standby assholes.
I never thought of the Shuttle program as well polished technology, even after 100+ flights - the tiles falling off had a lot to do with that, but all in all, it's a highly orchestrated endeavor with very few actual complete executions. In 1986, it was definitely still raw.
To the Offtopic mod... the connection to topic is that the "acceptable risk" reference above was talking about the last age of exploration. There were high risks taken during the last age of exploration, but they were more acceptable mostly because the risk takers went out of sight and either returned triumphantly or didn't return at all. Even those who returned with tales of horror were relating stories of events that happened months ago, out of sight and largely unimaginable to the listener.
Live TV puts the situation right in everyone's face, immediate, real, and something they can empathize with. People watching Challenger blow felt the explosion themselves. It makes the risk less acceptable.
Live TV cut popular support out from under the Vietnam War - it was no more gruesome than WWII or WWI, but it was wholly less acceptable to the voting public - for many reasons of course, but having the war brought live to your living room has a way of making it just a little more important to your decision making processes.
And yet, there is no evidence that people are any happier.
Happiness is a differential function, it doesn't matter what you have in absolute terms, only relative.
So, if everybody is suddenly 1000% better off, happiness returns to baseline within a year or so, even while the improvement remains.
I think this, more than anything, explains Moore's law. Technological progress is often made in quantum leaps, but rather than delivering these leaps to the world, companies choose a slow steady increase - the engineering departments say it's safer that way, but marketing knows that they can sell far more widgets if they improve them a little at a time, making customers happy every time they get an improvement, instead of delivering all the improvements at once, making customers a little more happy once, but then complacent or even dissatisfied with the apparent lack of improvement.
Columbus, Magellan and Bligh were not broadcast live on world-wide TV.
OpenOffice is on every PC that I setup for anybody...
That doesn't change those people who "won't mess around with that open sores garbage" and insist on an $800 MS Office install before they'll put down their coffee and think about working.
MPO, built in power supplies rock.