I wouldn't call Unity bloated, I'd call it inappropriately feature rich for low-end hardware.
Would be nice if there were a "I'm on a crappy little ARM core" switch in Ubuntu that reconfigures it to a more Raspbian like system hardware requirement.
But please realize that not everyone can have a desirable job.
My mom was a school teacher, in the summer sometimes she did telemarketing for a little extra cash - she eventually decided that the money wasn't worth the slime factor and found better ways to spend her time.
People should really demand higher pay for the stress, leave the job immediately when opportunity to do so presents, and even prank the damn company on the way out the door for providing such sleazebag work. I realize that some people get put in a position where they need to sell their body on the street for a little quick cash; but really, most people who are there could do something else if they really wanted to.
Not exactly for sales calls, but when I'm stuck with tech support and they feed me some "got to reload the OS from scratch" B.S. that's going to take forever (for no reason), I find that putting the phone on speaker and setting it down next to a laptop cooling fan is at least some small measure of revenge.
If the call is routed from Bangladesh VOIP to a call center in Nebraska before hitting the POTS, I'm cool with that, the ID can read Nebraska.
What I'm not cool with are the calls from different random area codes and numbers, over and over from the very same marketing scheme (claiming to "Update your Google Listing"), which change from pressing 2, 9, 7 or whatever to be removed from their list and only tell you that after 45 seconds of BS, and within a week you're getting another call with the same scam from yet another random number. That kind of practice needs a heavy penalty, easily imposed, or they shouldn't be allowed to show a U.S. origin caller ID at all.
Sadly, this Randian generation you speak of may be the first to significantly extend the lifespans of their most rich and powerful - for all our sakes' lets hope Kurzweil's time frame is as fantastical as it seems to be.
The typical big company model is indeed to acquire new/original ideas from smaller companies - and these often do not come cheaply. So, next time you're hit up with $100 fee for a copy of your operating system, feel good about the hundreds of "little guys" who landed multi-million dollar buyout deals from the big fish, and try not to think about the billions being hoarded in offshore tax havens.
Before any "original thinking" indoctrination, I think that the young inventors of the world need to be introduced to the "Melancholy Elephants" http://www.spiderrobinson.com/... - there are Billions of educated people who have come before you, and independently developing an idea is far different from developing an original idea that _should be_ eligible for protection as intellectual property.
Consider that they only really need to find that 1-2% who are doing this
I think you overestimate the geek potential in the world... sure, maybe 1-2% of their users _could_ muster the technical skills to make this happen, but of them, I doubt even 1% would bother - putting the true abuse rate down around 1/10,000 or more.
Nor does it change that fact that those who claim the winner was declared by the supreme court are misinformed. Nor does it change the fact that by the rules in place before the election, and by the altered rules requested by Gore, Bush would still have won. Nor does it change the fact that the controversy and recount are secondary effects, that the true cause for Gore's loss was the ballots designed and deployed by the Democrats.
Which of these facts are you disputing?
All three, they are opinions backed up by incomplete data gathered and reported by partisans.
Then you prove yourself wrong. The Supreme Court did not declare a winner, they let the rulings stand of the state officials who were originally empowered to decide matters of counts and recounts and deadlines. These state officials decided the election, declared the winner, not the US Supreme Court. The Supreme Court merely let them perform their appointed roles. And then there is the butterfly ballot designed and deployed by Democrats, with this there would have been no dispute nor recount, and Gore would have won. That you can not accept such simple facts proves you are the person with partisan issues. As for the partisanship of the recounts, it was done by the media, if anything the deck was stacked in Gore's favor.
Semantics, by choosing not to decide the Supreme Court still has made a choice (to paraphrase Geddy Lee). The Supreme Court had the power to choose to intervene - they elected not to, but were indeed players in the game. Any projections about the potential impact of a different decision from the Supreme Court are speculative. Any opinions as to the correctness of the Supreme Court's decision are irrelevant under the Constitution.
In Germany they commonly install large "BlumenPot" across one lane of residential streets for this purpose. Thoroughly screws up two way traffic, on purpose.
How much texting while driving do you have in the UK? In the US texting is just the latest in a long string of traditional driver distractions - we have a "multi-tasking ethos" that deludes many people here into thinking that they can actually pay attention to the road ahead while doing all manner of other things.
I would say that driving 50mph in normal (decent line of sight) neighborhood areas _can_ be done safely by a driver 100% focused on the task. That same driver in the same car traveling at 30mph can also react too late to a "situation" if their attention is elsewhere, with fatal results for involved persons not surrounded by a ton+ of metal, airbags, etc.
Appropriate speed is a matter of opinion, I lived in a neighborhood with narrow winding roads through a dense forest, with glass smooth pavement. Posted speed limit 20mph. Apparent opinion of appropriate speed (held by anyone who lived in the back half of the neighborhood - some over a mile from the entrance) was about 40-50mph.
In my non-scientific experience, most Florida squirrels have reflexes which will generally protect them from harm inflicted by motor vehicles traveling under 40mph (non-scientifically confirmed by the fact that all 6 or so squirrels I have observed being squashed while motoring over the years were struck by vehicles traveling at 45mph and up, whereas the 3 which were merely "clipped" were struck by vehicles traveling in the 38-42mph speed range, and never having observed a squirrel being struck by any vehicle traveling 35mph and under, having personally "played chicken" with literally thousands of squirrels, many in the neighborhood in question and roads nearby, and at speeds of 35mph and down having never so much as touched one of them.)
In the neighborhood in question, over the period of 8 years that I lived there, 2 cats were maimed, 3 killed outright, a dog lost a leg, 3 sturdy mailboxes were wiped out (more attributable to texting while driving than speed in that case), and we averaged 1 dead squirrel per month on the 3 miles of pavement. When confronted with the continuous animal and postal bloodbath, home & sports car owners in the back of the neighborhood continually shrugged off any concerns of what might happen to the children who also live in the neighborhood and play near/in the streets. The only "back end" neighbor who expressed any concern was the man whose wife had recently died rather tragically at the age of 50, of disease unrelated to speeding cars.
My point is that the basic fact: what the "true" count of ballots "would have been" under procedure A, B, C, or D, is just conjecture and extrapolation by people with a point to push - we followed a procedure, the deck was stacked for decades before the election by both sides, maneuvering after the election is, in fact, part of the process, and it played out as it played out. I'm not calling sour grapes, but no matter which way the election was decided, there were plenty of sour grapes in the process to go around for both sides - our system is arcane and far from a level playing field - it more resembles the sand dunes on the Sahara, slanted in both directions and always slowly shifting.
Gore failing to win did the Democrats a favor - whoever took over at that point in time was doomed to a bursting bubble economy and likely could not have avoided the 9-11 events even if they went full J. Edgar Hoover on their first day in office.
Nor does it change that fact that those who claim the winner was declared by the supreme court are misinformed. Nor does it change the fact that by the rules in place before the election, and by the altered rules requested by Gore, Bush would still have won. Nor does it change the fact that the controversy and recount are secondary effects, that the true cause for Gore's loss was the ballots designed and deployed by the Democrats.
Which of these facts are you disputing?
All three, they are opinions backed up by incomplete data gathered and reported by partisans. I would also count any "Gore would have won if..." facts as opinions, for the same reason.
All of this is buried in so much lies, puffery. misdirection and general "hurray for our side" partisan story spinning that the only thing anyone can really be sure of is this: the election was close, damn close. It was probably within the margin of normal error close. If you think you know "the true story," you're kidding yourself.
Thanks for the impassioned pile of gibberish, I did at least skim it;-)
And, the gist I get is that they are too stuck in their ways to even consider qualifying a competent font without the full round of payola, ahem, studies and approvals to back it up. Mine was just a reaction to the line in the summary that said they are concerned about having to pay $795 for the font, which seems like peanuts to me if this jurisdiction prints even one big highway sign with it (installation costs alone should be dwarfing that.) Next time, perhaps 40-50 years from now per your observations, maybe they can strike a better deal with the font maker if this per jurisdiction fee is their concern - just pay the cost of development 100% up front and let the world use their font... if the license fee was supposed to discourage people from being able to make "fake" signs, the past 20 years should have disabused them of that notion...
Do I expect anything related to DOT to hire me as a contractor for this type of work? hell no, but there was that summer intern job I had in 1987 where a major metro planning district handed me (19 years old, no degree, working for minimum wage) a spreadsheet with about $2B worth of projects laid out for the next 10-20 years and told me to pick and choose which ones to move forward to use the recent sales tax increase in the budget. I liked the moving sidewalk project at the airport, so it got moved forward about 5 years, as I recall.
Dude, just talking about the font files - the fact that they've already done the research, know what they want in a font, and are concerned that they are paying $795 per jurisdiction for privilege of using this knowledge they have already researched and paid for.
So, the perfectly legal workaround in this instance, due to the laws of the land which deny copyright protection to typefaces, is to copy the typeface - make a new font file that works like the other font file, but has different names. Use the tools that are readily available to provide the same typeface without the legal restrictions. Kind of like providing a different OS to run on your PC that doesn't require license fees, but way way simpler. Will it be identical? No. Will it satisfy the requirements? Yes. Because, regardless of kerning, and all the other vast complexities of the world of fonts, copying a typeface is not that damn difficult that we should be throwing in the towel on the modernized version because we're too damn lazy to make a copy and get out of the $795 per jurisdiction license fee. Furthermore, they have identified deficiencies in the licensed version which not only could, but should be addressed in the updated version, and they are under absolutely no obligation to go back and strike another bad deal with anyone to license the next set of fonts.
It's the way that typeface copyright law is written - you may have strong moral feelings about the "rightness" or "wrongness" of the law, but that doesn't change it. You might say that it is a clear cut black and white thing.
I suppose road = roof, and ugly is a point, but costs for non load bearing roofs, even with 30' clear span, run much lower than the costs for something like a pedestrian bridge, perhaps in the $40/sf range around here - whereas costs for high traffic road surfaces can easily top that, especially if it is supporting heavy trucks.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't call Unity bloated, I'd call it inappropriately feature rich for low-end hardware.
Would be nice if there were a "I'm on a crappy little ARM core" switch in Ubuntu that reconfigures it to a more Raspbian like system hardware requirement.
Whoever he is: $4000 doesn't sound like much of a prize to me.
But please realize that not everyone can have a desirable job.
My mom was a school teacher, in the summer sometimes she did telemarketing for a little extra cash - she eventually decided that the money wasn't worth the slime factor and found better ways to spend her time.
People should really demand higher pay for the stress, leave the job immediately when opportunity to do so presents, and even prank the damn company on the way out the door for providing such sleazebag work. I realize that some people get put in a position where they need to sell their body on the street for a little quick cash; but really, most people who are there could do something else if they really wanted to.
Not exactly for sales calls, but when I'm stuck with tech support and they feed me some "got to reload the OS from scratch" B.S. that's going to take forever (for no reason), I find that putting the phone on speaker and setting it down next to a laptop cooling fan is at least some small measure of revenge.
If the call is routed from Bangladesh VOIP to a call center in Nebraska before hitting the POTS, I'm cool with that, the ID can read Nebraska.
What I'm not cool with are the calls from different random area codes and numbers, over and over from the very same marketing scheme (claiming to "Update your Google Listing"), which change from pressing 2, 9, 7 or whatever to be removed from their list and only tell you that after 45 seconds of BS, and within a week you're getting another call with the same scam from yet another random number. That kind of practice needs a heavy penalty, easily imposed, or they shouldn't be allowed to show a U.S. origin caller ID at all.
Sadly, this Randian generation you speak of may be the first to significantly extend the lifespans of their most rich and powerful - for all our sakes' lets hope Kurzweil's time frame is as fantastical as it seems to be.
The typical big company model is indeed to acquire new/original ideas from smaller companies - and these often do not come cheaply. So, next time you're hit up with $100 fee for a copy of your operating system, feel good about the hundreds of "little guys" who landed multi-million dollar buyout deals from the big fish, and try not to think about the billions being hoarded in offshore tax havens.
Before any "original thinking" indoctrination, I think that the young inventors of the world need to be introduced to the "Melancholy Elephants" http://www.spiderrobinson.com/... - there are Billions of educated people who have come before you, and independently developing an idea is far different from developing an original idea that _should be_ eligible for protection as intellectual property.
According to my prof in 1987, doing a paper on Shannon's work puts you back in 1959. (Fuzzy logic was his thing, in 1987.)
Consider that they only really need to find that 1-2% who are doing this
I think you overestimate the geek potential in the world... sure, maybe 1-2% of their users _could_ muster the technical skills to make this happen, but of them, I doubt even 1% would bother - putting the true abuse rate down around 1/10,000 or more.
If real people use it for real photos only, then practicality limits the amount of data to well within what Amazon can handle
You don't know my wife: cell phone with 10MP camera, averaging 100 shots per hour when she's not taking video...
.bmp, .png and most any other lossless image format being auto-translated to .jpg in 3...2...1....
Nor does it change that fact that those who claim the winner was declared by the supreme court are misinformed.
Nor does it change the fact that by the rules in place before the election, and by the altered rules requested by Gore, Bush would still have won.
Nor does it change the fact that the controversy and recount are secondary effects, that the true cause for Gore's loss was the ballots designed and deployed by the Democrats.
Which of these facts are you disputing?
All three, they are opinions backed up by incomplete data gathered and reported by partisans.
Then you prove yourself wrong. The Supreme Court did not declare a winner, they let the rulings stand of the state officials who were originally empowered to decide matters of counts and recounts and deadlines. These state officials decided the election, declared the winner, not the US Supreme Court. The Supreme Court merely let them perform their appointed roles. And then there is the butterfly ballot designed and deployed by Democrats, with this there would have been no dispute nor recount, and Gore would have won. That you can not accept such simple facts proves you are the person with partisan issues. As for the partisanship of the recounts, it was done by the media, if anything the deck was stacked in Gore's favor.
Semantics, by choosing not to decide the Supreme Court still has made a choice (to paraphrase Geddy Lee). The Supreme Court had the power to choose to intervene - they elected not to, but were indeed players in the game. Any projections about the potential impact of a different decision from the Supreme Court are speculative. Any opinions as to the correctness of the Supreme Court's decision are irrelevant under the Constitution.
In Germany they commonly install large "BlumenPot" across one lane of residential streets for this purpose. Thoroughly screws up two way traffic, on purpose.
How much texting while driving do you have in the UK? In the US texting is just the latest in a long string of traditional driver distractions - we have a "multi-tasking ethos" that deludes many people here into thinking that they can actually pay attention to the road ahead while doing all manner of other things.
I would say that driving 50mph in normal (decent line of sight) neighborhood areas _can_ be done safely by a driver 100% focused on the task. That same driver in the same car traveling at 30mph can also react too late to a "situation" if their attention is elsewhere, with fatal results for involved persons not surrounded by a ton+ of metal, airbags, etc.
Appropriate speed is a matter of opinion, I lived in a neighborhood with narrow winding roads through a dense forest, with glass smooth pavement. Posted speed limit 20mph. Apparent opinion of appropriate speed (held by anyone who lived in the back half of the neighborhood - some over a mile from the entrance) was about 40-50mph.
In my non-scientific experience, most Florida squirrels have reflexes which will generally protect them from harm inflicted by motor vehicles traveling under 40mph (non-scientifically confirmed by the fact that all 6 or so squirrels I have observed being squashed while motoring over the years were struck by vehicles traveling at 45mph and up, whereas the 3 which were merely "clipped" were struck by vehicles traveling in the 38-42mph speed range, and never having observed a squirrel being struck by any vehicle traveling 35mph and under, having personally "played chicken" with literally thousands of squirrels, many in the neighborhood in question and roads nearby, and at speeds of 35mph and down having never so much as touched one of them.)
In the neighborhood in question, over the period of 8 years that I lived there, 2 cats were maimed, 3 killed outright, a dog lost a leg, 3 sturdy mailboxes were wiped out (more attributable to texting while driving than speed in that case), and we averaged 1 dead squirrel per month on the 3 miles of pavement. When confronted with the continuous animal and postal bloodbath, home & sports car owners in the back of the neighborhood continually shrugged off any concerns of what might happen to the children who also live in the neighborhood and play near/in the streets. The only "back end" neighbor who expressed any concern was the man whose wife had recently died rather tragically at the age of 50, of disease unrelated to speeding cars.
My point is that the basic fact: what the "true" count of ballots "would have been" under procedure A, B, C, or D, is just conjecture and extrapolation by people with a point to push - we followed a procedure, the deck was stacked for decades before the election by both sides, maneuvering after the election is, in fact, part of the process, and it played out as it played out. I'm not calling sour grapes, but no matter which way the election was decided, there were plenty of sour grapes in the process to go around for both sides - our system is arcane and far from a level playing field - it more resembles the sand dunes on the Sahara, slanted in both directions and always slowly shifting.
Gore failing to win did the Democrats a favor - whoever took over at that point in time was doomed to a bursting bubble economy and likely could not have avoided the 9-11 events even if they went full J. Edgar Hoover on their first day in office.
Nor does it change that fact that those who claim the winner was declared by the supreme court are misinformed.
Nor does it change the fact that by the rules in place before the election, and by the altered rules requested by Gore, Bush would still have won.
Nor does it change the fact that the controversy and recount are secondary effects, that the true cause for Gore's loss was the ballots designed and deployed by the Democrats.
Which of these facts are you disputing?
All three, they are opinions backed up by incomplete data gathered and reported by partisans. I would also count any "Gore would have won if..." facts as opinions, for the same reason.
2^6 = 64, that's not even in 1% territory yet.
Such a counting procedure is so obviously biased
You mean, like this:
https://www.google.com/search?...
?
All of this is buried in so much lies, puffery. misdirection and general "hurray for our side" partisan story spinning that the only thing anyone can really be sure of is this: the election was close, damn close. It was probably within the margin of normal error close. If you think you know "the true story," you're kidding yourself.
Thanks for the impassioned pile of gibberish, I did at least skim it ;-)
And, the gist I get is that they are too stuck in their ways to even consider qualifying a competent font without the full round of payola, ahem, studies and approvals to back it up. Mine was just a reaction to the line in the summary that said they are concerned about having to pay $795 for the font, which seems like peanuts to me if this jurisdiction prints even one big highway sign with it (installation costs alone should be dwarfing that.) Next time, perhaps 40-50 years from now per your observations, maybe they can strike a better deal with the font maker if this per jurisdiction fee is their concern - just pay the cost of development 100% up front and let the world use their font... if the license fee was supposed to discourage people from being able to make "fake" signs, the past 20 years should have disabused them of that notion...
Do I expect anything related to DOT to hire me as a contractor for this type of work? hell no, but there was that summer intern job I had in 1987 where a major metro planning district handed me (19 years old, no degree, working for minimum wage) a spreadsheet with about $2B worth of projects laid out for the next 10-20 years and told me to pick and choose which ones to move forward to use the recent sales tax increase in the budget. I liked the moving sidewalk project at the airport, so it got moved forward about 5 years, as I recall.
Dude, just talking about the font files - the fact that they've already done the research, know what they want in a font, and are concerned that they are paying $795 per jurisdiction for privilege of using this knowledge they have already researched and paid for.
So, the perfectly legal workaround in this instance, due to the laws of the land which deny copyright protection to typefaces, is to copy the typeface - make a new font file that works like the other font file, but has different names. Use the tools that are readily available to provide the same typeface without the legal restrictions. Kind of like providing a different OS to run on your PC that doesn't require license fees, but way way simpler. Will it be identical? No. Will it satisfy the requirements? Yes. Because, regardless of kerning, and all the other vast complexities of the world of fonts, copying a typeface is not that damn difficult that we should be throwing in the towel on the modernized version because we're too damn lazy to make a copy and get out of the $795 per jurisdiction license fee. Furthermore, they have identified deficiencies in the licensed version which not only could, but should be addressed in the updated version, and they are under absolutely no obligation to go back and strike another bad deal with anyone to license the next set of fonts.
It's the way that typeface copyright law is written - you may have strong moral feelings about the "rightness" or "wrongness" of the law, but that doesn't change it. You might say that it is a clear cut black and white thing.
So, your provider contract model is broken - making your existing phone obsolete for no reason whatsoever.
That lower case a absolutely sucks for the criteria they are trying to address... but, point taken, do the same for the new style.
Hell, for $7.95 per jurisdiction, I'll make all the font families for them (payment up front, minimum 1000 jurisdictions).
I suppose road = roof, and ugly is a point, but costs for non load bearing roofs, even with 30' clear span, run much lower than the costs for something like a pedestrian bridge, perhaps in the $40/sf range around here - whereas costs for high traffic road surfaces can easily top that, especially if it is supporting heavy trucks.