Crappy drivers may be slow, or they might have bugs, but they're drivers. ATI's hardware has always been good. Their drivers, OTOH, range all the way from "pretty good" to a "poke in the eye with a sharp stick."
Those pokes in the eye with sharp sticks are probably why you don't notice the image quality;-)
Oh. OK. You really are confused then, maintenance contracts are not tangible goods. Software is not a tangible good. Trying to create a business model around the fiction that it's a tangible good is a dead end.
So you're saying that individidual developers can only work as wage slaves? That doesn't sound much like freedom to me.
It seems like the GPL is freedom for Red Hat to use people's work and not pay for it, not freedom for the people who actually invent things to be independent of them. But they should be careful, because someone else can release their work for free or undercut them on support. Since they don't own what they're selling, they can't protect themselves against that.
That's a quote from the US constitution, and while it's an an admirable document it wasn't written by economists.
Economists justify IP laws based on the idea that people who invent things should have a monopoly on using them, just like if they were tangible property. For example, suppose I invent some process to speed up hard drives and there are no patents. Unless I actually work for a company who makes hard drives I'm screwed. As soon as I publish the secret all hard drive manufacturers will use it and not pay me. The best I can manage is to sign an agreement with one hard drive manufacturer, but that's risky. The manufacturer has better lawyers than me, and I need to explain the idea before they'll talk to me. But once I explain enough of it to convince them it will work, they could just get their own engineers to fill in the gaps. Even if I manage it, the idea will end up being a trade secret and only used by the company I negotiated with.
But if I patent it I can publish the idea without putting it into the public domain - and it is this ability to publish inventions that the people that wrote the US constiution used as a justification for allowing patents. But it is not in my mind the only one. Since I work for myself, the idea that I can make money out of ideas and that those ideas are property which I can rent out to numerous third parties is the one that appeals to me because it levels the playing field when I negotiate with large companies.
If you don't have laws like that, the only way I can make money is to essentially sell hours of my time, i.e. to be a wage slave.
Re:I'd only recommend the 360 version
on
BioShock Review
·
· Score: 1, Informative
The PC version runs fine on my Asus G1S after I updated the NVidia graphics drivers like they said
The interesting thing is you can download it from here
Ok, I'm heading rapidly for Ayn Rand territory by saying it, but it's not completely unfair. Proprietary software lets you get a return on your time investment. GPL software does not - once you release it as GPL other people can provide it for free. So the sustainable cost you can charge for it drops to zero quite fast. Not owning something tends to have that effect. And working for free is slavery.
I explained why they can't release the software as GPL and continue to sell licenses which is what they want to. I find it amazing that people with absolutely no experience of running a software business can tell people that do that if they give their software away they can still make money from "custom development workd and maintainance contracts". I think QNX knows more about whether that's possible or not than you do.
Instead they're chosing to try and hold on to a confused business model where they try to fool themselves and their customers into believing that the customers have to pay for the software.
That's hilarious. So you say their business model is "confused" because they "try to fool themselves and their customers into believing that the customers have to pay for the software". That actually sounds like the definition of a good business model to me - sell licenses for a fee.
Whereas in your business model they stop doing that and somehow karma will make sure they still get money from other things.
Seriously, I don't know how you can say that their business model is confused without seeing the irony.
Maybe you should try the same argument next time you see something you like in a shop. Tell the assistant that their business model is confused and outdated and they should give it to you for free and then make money out of a maintainance contract. Maybe you'll get some free stuff.
Incidentally, how much money have you spent on maintainance contracts for free software? Personally, I've spent exactly $0 over my entire life. I have paid a few thousand dollars for commercial software I like though. So if I'm typical, I'd say people people who want to go on selling licensed are onto a good thing and should ignore people like you trying to trick them into giving away their stuff. But I'm sure they're smart enough to know that anyway, just like this QNX guy does.
It's not FUD. If they released QNX under the GPL3 they'd have allow people to pass on copies for free. So one person could buy a copy of QNX, set up a CVS server and then fork it as FreeQNX. So then potential users can then choose between paying QNX for software or downloading it for free from the FreeQNX server. What effect would that have on the price QNX can charge? Oh and they have to license their patents in a non discriminatory way too, so if they license the patents to the one person who pays, they need to license them to all the freeloaders too.
Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version.
These two things together make the GPL3 suicide for them.
Actually his objections to the GPL in an embedded world are exactly what I've been saying for ages. Especially this one -
To enable these activities, QNX intends to publish all of its runtime component source code (some source code wont be published immediately because of third-party licensing or confiden-tiality restrictions)
They can't open the source code completely, because they don't own all the rights.
And this too actually -
Technology companies implement their fundamental business strategies through licensing their intellectual property. It is a subtle task. If a company gives too much away through overly generous grants of copyrights or patents, then its competitors and customers get a "free ride" on its products; the company loses its incentive to invest in research and development.
If they followed the GPL, they don't get that return - anyone can take the software QNX paid to develop and use it for free. This is the situation that IP laws like copyrights and patents were invented to prevent - the idea is that you can invest money creating software and then license it to people because you know the law stops people who haven't paid from using it. If the software was public domain or GPLd, you can't do that - once people have the software they don't need you anymore and can decide not to pay.
You can say IP is a bad concept all you like, but it exists for a reason. In fact it exists so companies like QNX can exist.
I'm sure they could spot suspicious activity. Imagine if you have an automated system which checks for keywords and a list of 'bad websites'. E.g millions of people mention Monty Python every day so you ignore that. But you know the London and Madrid bombers both used a website on bomb design by some guy in Canada. So as soon as anyone looks at that, you tag them for human surveillance. You can do the same for voice calls too, if you're the NSA.
There was a joke in the UK in the cold war that mentioning SOSUS on the telephone was caught by an automated keyword recognizer and so you heard a click as they started recording, and mentioning quiche caused them to stop so you heard another click. So people have been thinking about this sort of scheme for at least decades.
The problem is not that it's politically incorrect it's that this study is sloppy science. Sample size of 43 including 8 self described conservatives. And they turn it into a goofy media friendly conclusion.
Introverts have more neural activity than extroverts.
I'm guessing you're an introvert, right? And I suppose you can point to some study that proves this?
It seems that extroverts are so talkative because they don't have as much going on inside. Introverts are too busy talking to themselves to talk to others.
That's just a verbose way of saying introverts (like you and me) are smart and extroverts are dumb. We're pre-disposed to believe it because we prefer our own personality type.
This doesn't mean extroverts are dumb, it means they are not the same. And that's ok.
You describe a difference that most intelligent observers would describe as "my tribe is better" and then weasel out of it. Great.
And most studies I've read show Mac hardware is priced at a hefty premium.
Still I guess if you're a Mac user you'll rationalize all this away, much like owners of premium things always do. And whilst I don't like Macs personally I can see that they are well designed for technically unsophisticated users. Like musicians and liberal arts graduates, or damn hipster emo kids.
Because the XP doesn't have drivers included for the SATA chip, you either need to slipstream them into XP or use a USB floppy. It looks like you need to nuke the whole thing, repartition and install XP first and then Vista second too
All of which looks like too much trouble to be worthwhile. And it's not clear if G1S is even supported on XP. Shame really, and I still need to test stuff on XP occasionally and my ancient XP laptop is falling apart.
A lot of people asked why I thought it was awful science. And to be honest I suspected that because just seems bogus like the 19th Century scientific evidence that male middle class Europeans - coincidentally people like the experimenter - are innately superior.
I read that paper. In the sample of 43 people, of who 8 self-identified as conservative, and when making a snap-decision on whether to press a button or not, the liberals averaged 37% errors while the conservatives averaged 47%.
The sample size is tiny! There were only 8 conservatives involved - it's absurd to draw conclusions for all conservatives based on it.
I also don't think it controls for all variables - it's quite possible the experimenter and his friends are left wing and above average intelligence, and the few conservatives he managed to round up are much less so. So the tiny sample is non representative because it includes a correlation between intelligence and politics which is not present in the general population. But then again it's small enough that this correlation might just be a fluke.
Oh well, maybe someday we'll see a cool thing like Apple's hardware actually becoming as cost-efficient to own as normal x86 hardware...but I don't intend to hold my breath.
Of course not. The whole point of Apple making custom hardware and tying the OS to it is so that they can charge a premium for both. The premium survives because people who want OS X don't have an alternative.
Of course you could run pirate OS X on commodity hardware, but then I'd expect the Apple equivalent of the black screen of death to make doing so inconvenient.
Actually, that's yet another problem. At this instant in history in the US, the Republicans have royally screwed up Iraq and don't have much in the way of policy for anything else. It's quite possible that their remaining supporters who defend them will tend to be stubborn to the point of idiocy. But if there was an unpopular Democrat administration clinging to unpopular policies, maybe you'd find the innovative thinkers would tend to be Republican.
Certainly in the UK at the point when Thatcher won the election it seemed like the smart money was on them because people believed that Keynesianism was failing. So Labour had essentially found itself supporting policies which most intelligent people believed to be wrong. Of course, that turned out to be mostly spin on behalf of the Tories - it's not like they really tried monetarist policies for the first few years they were in power and when they did the economy tanked. Arguably it was the Blair Labour party in the 2000's which moved away from Keynesianism - the Tories just talked about it.
Presumably you wouldn't have a problem with that:)
No, really I don't. I've seen the dire effects of people trying to 'improve' software by changing behaviour that customer to rely on. The only people that notice the change will be the ones who it inconveniences - the vast majority of people who just want things not to break after they upgrade.
The point is that a few percent of people rely of 39013 representing some particular date.
It's a recurring theme with Microsoft - pretty much any internal glitch they expose is relied on by a few people, and so the glitch must never be changed. Look at Raymond Chen's blog for more examples. Open source code doesn't take that approach - source code purity is more important than user friendliness.
And after thinking about it for a while, I prefer the Microsoft approach. Most people of course don't understand any of this. But they would notice and be annoyed if their spreadsheets stopped working after they upgraded because something like this changed. So it turns out they prefer the Microsoft approach too.
Yes - it's better to keep it unchanged. It's a bug which affects no one and changing it will break things. It comes from Lotus 1-2-3 it turns out - Excel needed to be 100% compatible with Lotus 1-2-3 then and everything needs to be 100% compatible with Excel now so it is possible for people to use formula like this -
No my argument is that it should be possible to round trip from Excel to ODF and back again. And the best way to do that is for ODF to support the features that Excel does. Whether Excel should work that way or not is beside the point.
What makes me angry is that ODF in this case has been defined based on the prejudice that any arbitrary choice Excel makes must be a bug which needs correcting, which makes round tripping harder as I explain. The ODF is purposely defined in this case to make life hard for Microsoft, despite the fact that they have almost all of the market. The whole point is that they reject it and then people can criticize them for doing so - it's the triumph of politics and tribal identity, which I despise, over pragmatic engineering, which I enjoy.
And as one of the commenters in the Brazilian link pointed out, Excel's ceiling just works differently from Ceiling defined by mathworld, yet the argument that Excel is wrong is completely bogus -
The mathematical notion of ceiling doesn't involve a second parameter. So I don't think it makes sense to say that CEILING(-2.5,-1) "doesn't follow the mathematical definition". There *is* no standard two-argument ceiling function in mathematics. How do you expand the mathematical notion, explained on the Mathworld page, above to one which does deal with fractional values? There are multiple ways, but one way is to say CEILING(x,p) gives you the value k*p where k is the smallest integer with k >= x/p. I think that pretty much gives you Excel's behavior. Seems pretty reasonable to me, except for some reason Excel won't let you do CEILING(-2.5,1). If it did, then *that* would be the one I would expect to match mathemetics and return -2.
I predict it doesn't matter though - people pay money for Office because it does the job. OpenOffice and so on have a negligable market share despite being free. Whining about how Excel is non standard and mathematically incorrect won't change that situation. And not because it's bullshit - which it is and why it annoys me - but because they just want something which can read the documents they have. And from my experience OpenOffice is really bad at doing that with Microsoft document formats.
But I wrote all this in my first post, and since you've ignored that it's reasonable to assume you'll ignore this too.
Ask a woman in which country? I bet you'd get different results in Sweden or Taiwan than you would in the UK or US. I'm not saying there aren't differences, just that once I travelled to more egalitarian countries I found they were less than I was expecting based on the UK. And wiring up a plug is not a very lucrative skill - there are other more important things that women seem a bit better at on average. Like management which is mostly about people skills. They also tend to do better academically, at least in the UK.
But having travelled a bit I'm skeptical that the biological differences between men and women are very great at all - mostly they're culturally determined. Biologically I think both men and women are capable of most jobs - maybe the difference is that preferences for jobs have a gender bias, not ability to do them if there is no alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
Crappy drivers may be slow, or they might have bugs, but they're drivers. ATI's hardware has always been good. Their drivers, OTOH, range all the way from "pretty good" to a "poke in the eye with a sharp stick."
;-)
,-)
Those pokes in the eye with sharp sticks are probably why you don't notice the image quality
Or in your case
Oh. OK. You really are confused then, maintenance contracts are not tangible goods. Software is not a tangible good. Trying to create a business model around the fiction that it's a tangible good is a dead end.
So you're saying that individidual developers can only work as wage slaves? That doesn't sound much like freedom to me.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=295451&cid=20582255
It seems like the GPL is freedom for Red Hat to use people's work and not pay for it, not freedom for the people who actually invent things to be independent of them. But they should be careful, because someone else can release their work for free or undercut them on support. Since they don't own what they're selling, they can't protect themselves against that.
That's a quote from the US constitution, and while it's an an admirable document it wasn't written by economists.
Economists justify IP laws based on the idea that people who invent things should have a monopoly on using them, just like if they were tangible property. For example, suppose I invent some process to speed up hard drives and there are no patents. Unless I actually work for a company who makes hard drives I'm screwed. As soon as I publish the secret all hard drive manufacturers will use it and not pay me. The best I can manage is to sign an agreement with one hard drive manufacturer, but that's risky. The manufacturer has better lawyers than me, and I need to explain the idea before they'll talk to me. But once I explain enough of it to convince them it will work, they could just get their own engineers to fill in the gaps. Even if I manage it, the idea will end up being a trade secret and only used by the company I negotiated with.
But if I patent it I can publish the idea without putting it into the public domain - and it is this ability to publish inventions that the people that wrote the US constiution used as a justification for allowing patents. But it is not in my mind the only one. Since I work for myself, the idea that I can make money out of ideas and that those ideas are property which I can rent out to numerous third parties is the one that appeals to me because it levels the playing field when I negotiate with large companies.
If you don't have laws like that, the only way I can make money is to essentially sell hours of my time, i.e. to be a wage slave.
The PC version runs fine on my Asus G1S after I updated the NVidia graphics drivers like they said
The interesting thing is you can download it from here
http://www.direct2drive.com/
What about Freedom as in Slavery ;-)
Ok, I'm heading rapidly for Ayn Rand territory by saying it, but it's not completely unfair. Proprietary software lets you get a return on your time investment. GPL software does not - once you release it as GPL other people can provide it for free. So the sustainable cost you can charge for it drops to zero quite fast. Not owning something tends to have that effect. And working for free is slavery.
I explained why they can't release the software as GPL and continue to sell licenses which is what they want to. I find it amazing that people with absolutely no experience of running a software business can tell people that do that if they give their software away they can still make money from "custom development workd and maintainance contracts". I think QNX knows more about whether that's possible or not than you do.
Instead they're chosing to try and hold on to a confused business model where they try to fool themselves and their customers into believing that the customers have to pay for the software.
That's hilarious. So you say their business model is "confused" because they "try to fool themselves and their customers into believing that the customers have to pay for the software". That actually sounds like the definition of a good business model to me - sell licenses for a fee.
Whereas in your business model they stop doing that and somehow karma will make sure they still get money from other things.
Seriously, I don't know how you can say that their business model is confused without seeing the irony.
Maybe you should try the same argument next time you see something you like in a shop. Tell the assistant that their business model is confused and outdated and they should give it to you for free and then make money out of a maintainance contract. Maybe you'll get some free stuff.
Incidentally, how much money have you spent on maintainance contracts for free software? Personally, I've spent exactly $0 over my entire life. I have paid a few thousand dollars for commercial software I like though. So if I'm typical, I'd say people people who want to go on selling licensed are onto a good thing and should ignore people like you trying to trick them into giving away their stuff. But I'm sure they're smart enough to know that anyway, just like this QNX guy does.
That's not my experience of Windows, and I'd guess that it isn't most people's since so many people use it.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html
These two things together make the GPL3 suicide for them.
Actually his objections to the GPL in an embedded world are exactly what I've been saying for ages. Especially this one -
They can't open the source code completely, because they don't own all the rights.
And this too actually -
If they followed the GPL, they don't get that return - anyone can take the software QNX paid to develop and use it for free. This is the situation that IP laws like copyrights and patents were invented to prevent - the idea is that you can invest money creating software and then license it to people because you know the law stops people who haven't paid from using it. If the software was public domain or GPLd, you can't do that - once people have the software they don't need you anymore and can decide not to pay.
You can say IP is a bad concept all you like, but it exists for a reason. In fact it exists so companies like QNX can exist.
And it's not possible that people disagree with your definition and use "open source" to mean "the source code is open"?
No it's not.
What will happen is more money will go to the NSA datamining as I mentioned in an earlier post.
The proposal is half assed, which is not surprising given the source.
But spooks do monitor web access, instant messaging and phone calls - watch this
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/6476207.stm
I'm sure they could spot suspicious activity. Imagine if you have an automated system which checks for keywords and a list of 'bad websites'. E.g millions of people mention Monty Python every day so you ignore that. But you know the London and Madrid bombers both used a website on bomb design by some guy in Canada. So as soon as anyone looks at that, you tag them for human surveillance. You can do the same for voice calls too, if you're the NSA.
There was a joke in the UK in the cold war that mentioning SOSUS on the telephone was caught by an automated keyword recognizer and so you heard a click as they started recording, and mentioning quiche caused them to stop so you heard another click. So people have been thinking about this sort of scheme for at least decades.
The problem is not that it's politically incorrect it's that this study is sloppy science. Sample size of 43 including 8 self described conservatives. And they turn it into a goofy media friendly conclusion.
Introverts have more neural activity than extroverts.
I'm guessing you're an introvert, right? And I suppose you can point to some study that proves this?
It seems that extroverts are so talkative because they don't have as much going on inside. Introverts are too busy talking to themselves to talk to others.
That's just a verbose way of saying introverts (like you and me) are smart and extroverts are dumb. We're pre-disposed to believe it because we prefer our own personality type.
This doesn't mean extroverts are dumb, it means they are not the same. And that's ok.
You describe a difference that most intelligent observers would describe as "my tribe is better" and then weasel out of it. Great.
But you don't just pay once for OS X, the point releases are all $129 so you end up paying that each year
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10-3.ars
Sort of like paying for service packs
And most studies I've read show Mac hardware is priced at a hefty premium.
Still I guess if you're a Mac user you'll rationalize all this away, much like owners of premium things always do. And whilst I don't like Macs personally I can see that they are well designed for technically unsophisticated users. Like musicians and liberal arts graduates, or damn hipster emo kids.
Actually Vista runs quite well on the G1S once you get rid of all the Asus bloatware and Symantic anti virus - it doesn't seem to be slower than XP.
Asus G1S is the same - you can run XP on them but you have to find the drivers yourself and it's a real pain to install.
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?id=20070731141139875&board_id=3&model=G1S&page=1&SLanguage=en-us
Because the XP doesn't have drivers included for the SATA chip, you either need to slipstream them into XP or use a USB floppy. It looks like you need to nuke the whole thing, repartition and install XP first and then Vista second too
http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/post-738142.html&sid=2379b1d8d49003d966b49652db3ee5d4
All of which looks like too much trouble to be worthwhile. And it's not clear if G1S is even supported on XP. Shame really, and I still need to test stuff on XP occasionally and my ancient XP laptop is falling apart.
But it turns out the study is flawed -
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/lumidek/453722461420850421/#883043
The sample size is tiny! There were only 8 conservatives involved - it's absurd to draw conclusions for all conservatives based on it.
I also don't think it controls for all variables - it's quite possible the experimenter and his friends are left wing and above average intelligence, and the few conservatives he managed to round up are much less so. So the tiny sample is non representative because it includes a correlation between intelligence and politics which is not present in the general population. But then again it's small enough that this correlation might just be a fluke.
Oh well, maybe someday we'll see a cool thing like Apple's hardware actually becoming as cost-efficient to own as normal x86 hardware...but I don't intend to hold my breath.
Of course not. The whole point of Apple making custom hardware and tying the OS to it is so that they can charge a premium for both. The premium survives because people who want OS X don't have an alternative.
Of course you could run pirate OS X on commodity hardware, but then I'd expect the Apple equivalent of the black screen of death to make doing so inconvenient.
Actually, that's yet another problem. At this instant in history in the US, the Republicans have royally screwed up Iraq and don't have much in the way of policy for anything else. It's quite possible that their remaining supporters who defend them will tend to be stubborn to the point of idiocy. But if there was an unpopular Democrat administration clinging to unpopular policies, maybe you'd find the innovative thinkers would tend to be Republican.
Certainly in the UK at the point when Thatcher won the election it seemed like the smart money was on them because people believed that Keynesianism was failing. So Labour had essentially found itself supporting policies which most intelligent people believed to be wrong. Of course, that turned out to be mostly spin on behalf of the Tories - it's not like they really tried monetarist policies for the first few years they were in power and when they did the economy tanked. Arguably it was the Blair Labour party in the 2000's which moved away from Keynesianism - the Tories just talked about it.
Presumably you wouldn't have a problem with that :)
No, really I don't. I've seen the dire effects of people trying to 'improve' software by changing behaviour that customer to rely on. The only people that notice the change will be the ones who it inconveniences - the vast majority of people who just want things not to break after they upgrade.
The point is that a few percent of people rely of 39013 representing some particular date.
It's a recurring theme with Microsoft - pretty much any internal glitch they expose is relied on by a few people, and so the glitch must never be changed. Look at Raymond Chen's blog for more examples. Open source code doesn't take that approach - source code purity is more important than user friendliness.
And after thinking about it for a while, I prefer the Microsoft approach. Most people of course don't understand any of this. But they would notice and be annoyed if their spreadsheets stopped working after they upgraded because something like this changed. So it turns out they prefer the Microsoft approach too.
And get the same answer.
It was raised here
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/10/25/spreadsheetml-dates.aspx
People criticized the decision to do things like this but reading their alternative suggestions makes me think it was actually the right decision.
I think he put the words "essential" and "temporary" in there for a reason.
Showed the importance of eavesdropping in stopping some terrorists from blowing up a supermarket
You can watch the whole thing here -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/6476207.stm
What makes me angry is that ODF in this case has been defined based on the prejudice that any arbitrary choice Excel makes must be a bug which needs correcting, which makes round tripping harder as I explain. The ODF is purposely defined in this case to make life hard for Microsoft, despite the fact that they have almost all of the market. The whole point is that they reject it and then people can criticize them for doing so - it's the triumph of politics and tribal identity, which I despise, over pragmatic engineering, which I enjoy.
And as one of the commenters in the Brazilian link pointed out, Excel's ceiling just works differently from Ceiling defined by mathworld, yet the argument that Excel is wrong is completely bogus -
I predict it doesn't matter though - people pay money for Office because it does the job. OpenOffice and so on have a negligable market share despite being free. Whining about how Excel is non standard and mathematically incorrect won't change that situation. And not because it's bullshit - which it is and why it annoys me - but because they just want something which can read the documents they have. And from my experience OpenOffice is really bad at doing that with Microsoft document formats.
But I wrote all this in my first post, and since you've ignored that it's reasonable to assume you'll ignore this too.
Ask a woman in which country? I bet you'd get different results in Sweden or Taiwan than you would in the UK or US. I'm not saying there aren't differences, just that once I travelled to more egalitarian countries I found they were less than I was expecting based on the UK. And wiring up a plug is not a very lucrative skill - there are other more important things that women seem a bit better at on average. Like management which is mostly about people skills. They also tend to do better academically, at least in the UK.
But having travelled a bit I'm skeptical that the biological differences between men and women are very great at all - mostly they're culturally determined. Biologically I think both men and women are capable of most jobs - maybe the difference is that preferences for jobs have a gender bias, not ability to do them if there is no alternative.