Re:I had hope for Loki Games..
on
Loki Games Closing?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This entire conversation - or rather, the reality that it represents - is one of the reason why linux gaming is so handicapped. SDL, Glide2, Glide3, Mesa, DRI, DRM, nvidia drivers, ggi - the web of interdependcies, conflicts, workarounds, kernel patching, and other nonsense you have to go through to get games (and only games - Linux is substantially easier to work with in just about every other domain) working is enough to drive one bald.
So a finished Windows product, ready for 95% of the gamers' PCs, sits in the warehouse for six to 12 months, its innovations starting to age and its market window being filled with competitors, until the Linux ports are finished? I don't think that's very realistic.
I think this is a lesson for everyone on the nature of network effects in markets.
An African American woman, Barbara, has an unofficial (but unanimously accepted) leadership role on the line. Initially drawn by HP's reputation and good work standards, she worked at another of its plants for nine years and seven months. She had planned to stay until she completed a full 10 years in order to be eligible for retirement benefits. Five months before her decade was up, HP moved the plant out of the Bay Area (to a place where labor is cheaper), depriving her of her retirement and her permanent job. Barbara has been temping in this particular job for four years. She's what's known in the industry as a "perma-temp."
No matter how you slice it, this is fucked up. You only have so many productive years in your life - being in constant retraining mode is a nice idea and all, but just being human has its limits. And it's definitely a class-based issue: you know that a management-class worker would have been given golden-parachutes, retraining packages, relocations packages and all sorts of goodies.
No, communism is in practice total state ownership of the means of production. A 10x salary cap is just a big regulation. Perhaps not a sensible one, but it isn't communism.
The differentials in pay between different classes of work are not simply functions of the utility of that work. There is a powerful psychological/social/cultural element in terms of the public expectations and tolerance for certain types of reimbursement. In Japan, for example, the differentials are much lower than they are in the US. Is this because Japanese CEO's are less productive or effective than US CEO's? No, it is ultimately because a cultural difference - such high differentials would simply feel wrong, and so boards don't authorize them and shareholders wouldn't approve of them.
I actually think that undoing the "Brazilification" of the US economy (which, it should be noted, is only occuring in the highest sectors of management) is going to be prerequisite for a real economic recovery. As long as people have the perception that their own buying power is inadequate, that the market is serving the wealthiest and that they need to conserve and save, demand will continue to drop.
You have just described the conditions which, as a whole, are called "a race to the bottom." If you think this a good thing, you have some very unusual ideas of the good.
You don't need to download anything to install a registry patch. Most registry patches are two or three lines of text, saved with a ".reg" extension, that you import into your registry. The fact that you can download that textfile and then double click on it is, generally, an increased convenience. The registry is essentially a single file that contains/etc and everything underneath it.
And using regedit, you can change it manually, too. You can add keys and values and screw things up like a 5 year-old with root, if you like.
The criticism of the registry model that is valid is two-fold: 1, it can be corrupted like any file, but since it is one file and not a directory like/etc, that can muck up your whole system (the registry can still be backed up and reinstalled) and 2, it is somewhat easier for malicious code to muck with the registry, since most Windows users work in some privileged mode.
The article notes that AMD has been proclaiming the bug in public for a while.
What irks me is this: I got hit with this bug. I posted bug reports to Debian, with NVidia, on different forum, report lock-ups in certain open-GL situations. I got generally hand-waving "read the fucking manual" responses.
As the article notes, this isn't just a problem with AMD. It suggests that there's an ongoing problem with troubleshooting and resolving the sorts of issues that desktop users are going to have in Linux. (And "paying for support" would not have resolved much, would it have? The problem is the lack of coordination, not the lack of money.)
I don't believe that high taxes per se are a clear marker of intrustion on civil liberties. I'm not a classic libertarian.
I did not choose those elements as examples. I simply noted that, even by that measure, there are freer societies. (I wouldn't avail myself of the speed limit example, actually.) By a number of measures, there are freer societies, for reasonable and acceptable values of the term "freer."
To say that 40% of the people in prison are drug users says nothing: that is a measure of drug use in Sweden. The question is whether they were arrested for and sentenced for drug offences. The anti-drug policy you stated therein is a valid public health approach, and is cited as being consistent with its efforts at controlling alcoholism. Simply because a government engages on a public health program doesn't mean that it is violating civil liberties to do it.
I'm choosing two that are hands-down slam-dunk. The larger countries are easier to problematize, but frankly on many axes they too could be judged "freer."
Of course, there's a Napoleanic justice system at work in the US. It's what's essentially at work in Lousiana.
And you've engaged in a tautology. If you criminalize behaviours that are tolerated elsewhere, of course you are jailing "criminals" and increasing the crime rate that way. The fact that a large percentage of those incarcerated are incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses seems to escape your eye.
I consider the amount of actual state intervention a more important metric for freedom than the details of one's judicial rights.
In terms of the pragmatics of freedom, I'll illustrate it this way: the US has a larger percentage of its population in jail than any other developed country. Your property can be confiscated in the name of the war on drugs without indictment, without arrest, and then sold.
There have been cases of enforcement of sodomy law, and the Supreme Court has explicityly allowed the enforcement and prosecution of those laws to go through. (If I recall, the last case that went to the SCOTUS was an incident in Georgia in which a failed drug-raid did manage to catch a gay couple in flagrante, and they decided to prosecute on that basis, and succeeded.)
I have a model for you: nvidia. Closed-source binary drivers, and among the most popular, if not *the* most popular, video card for linux.
What if AOL directs RedHat's large development staff to make all *future* module development and device support in closed source binary form? Sure, the existing code-base remains GPL, but that code-base could start to fade into obsolesence, an open glue holding together large closed components, as AOL enters into partnerships with hardware manufacturers and net service providers.
In this context, calling someone an extremist really means accusing them of having the temerity of not sharing the assumptions on which you've based your viewpoint. You begin with the assumption that the evils of the Chinese government are categorically and essentially different, more sinister, and founded on the worst instincts, while those of Western governments are not. Anyone who does not begin with this political epistemology, it seems you label an extremist. If you can control the axioms by tarring anyone who doesn't share them, of course you can pretend to be the rational one.
Microsoft edged it out. Netscape lost its competitiveness. In a straight comparison, IE kicks Netscape's ass now. The innovation departed from Netscape.
This is a peeve of mine. I really don't care that much about innovation, at least in this context. I want *quality*. Netscape didn't fail to innovate - they had new features and functionality added to each version, just fine. They failed to create a stable, reliable, quality product that worked to my satisfaction. I want a client that nicely and quickly displays as close to all the content on the web as possible. I don't care whether it's using the latest whatevers, or whether it can give my cat shiatsu.
Even though I can hand-edit kernel source files according to needs, I don't want to. I don't feel a need to prove how long my geek-peter is by burning hours doing something that an automation tool will let me do in a couple minutes.
Right now, my S.O. is trying to install Turbolinux on her system: she's a web-type developer who is looking to grow past IIS/ASP/ecmascript and check out things like php and apache and perl. Now, I don't read a word of Japanese, and I don't use RedHat based distros, so she's kind of on her own - I can only give her general advice, and on Japanese-specific things none at all. I'm curious to see what her experience is going to be. But she fits the profile you mentioned - a non-newbie who doesn't need to be a techie if she can help it.
All the atrocities in the recorded human history have been carried out by the agents of whatever government has been in power at the time.
Just off the top of my head, the tradition of lynching is an old-fashioned just-plain-folks type of atrocity. Organized crime is responsible for plenty, too. And, of course, just what government flew airplanes into 2 skyscrapers last year?
Ah, the faith! The faith you have in the rational workings of the market! Perfect information, no network effects, no organization pressures to chose one vendor over another, no manipulation of buyers or manipulation of public perception, no outside factors, no cost of entry to enter a market with a dominant, very solvent competitor. What a marvelous world you live in!
Sadly, here on Earth Prime, things don't work that way. I'll requote Keynes: "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." And "in the long run, we're all dead."
Um, no we don't. The UCITA protects software vendors from being sued for damages.
We don't need new legislation. We need to remove the special protections that the software industry enjoys. And I would leave some of the protections intact for open software! That would motivate companies to move to the open model for two reasons: one, limited liability (after all, if you are distributing source, rather than binaries, you are distributing speech, not a product), and two, the inherent QA benefits.
Dick gets credit for the form, but of course more credit goes to... the Gnostics!
It's not a matter of credit/no credit, it's a matter of noting that the gnostic narrative seems to enjoy popularity in some periods of time, and not others. My personal theory is that a combination of an economic boom with a feet of clay, and the rise of a media monoculture that was responsible for virtually all the information that most people were getting (AOL Time Warner Disney ABC MSNBC) contributed to a vague sense that we were being fed our world, rather than living it - hence Matrix, Truman Show, Dark City and the like. Once the bubble burst, escaping from the real was no longer a horror, but instead a bonafide relief, and fantasy came charging in to provide it: Harry Potter, LOTR and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
This entire conversation - or rather, the reality that it represents - is one of the reason why linux gaming is so handicapped. SDL, Glide2, Glide3, Mesa, DRI, DRM, nvidia drivers, ggi - the web of interdependcies, conflicts, workarounds, kernel patching, and other nonsense you have to go through to get games (and only games - Linux is substantially easier to work with in just about every other domain) working is enough to drive one bald.
I think this is a lesson for everyone on the nature of network effects in markets.
No matter how you slice it, this is fucked up. You only have so many productive years in your life - being in constant retraining mode is a nice idea and all, but just being human has its limits. And it's definitely a class-based issue: you know that a management-class worker would have been given golden-parachutes, retraining packages, relocations packages and all sorts of goodies.
The differentials in pay between different classes of work are not simply functions of the utility of that work. There is a powerful psychological/social/cultural element in terms of the public expectations and tolerance for certain types of reimbursement. In Japan, for example, the differentials are much lower than they are in the US. Is this because Japanese CEO's are less productive or effective than US CEO's? No, it is ultimately because a cultural difference - such high differentials would simply feel wrong, and so boards don't authorize them and shareholders wouldn't approve of them.
I actually think that undoing the "Brazilification" of the US economy (which, it should be noted, is only occuring in the highest sectors of management) is going to be prerequisite for a real economic recovery. As long as people have the perception that their own buying power is inadequate, that the market is serving the wealthiest and that they need to conserve and save, demand will continue to drop.
You have just described the conditions which, as a whole, are called "a race to the bottom." If you think this a good thing, you have some very unusual ideas of the good.
And using regedit, you can change it manually, too. You can add keys and values and screw things up like a 5 year-old with root, if you like.
The criticism of the registry model that is valid is two-fold: 1, it can be corrupted like any file, but since it is one file and not a directory like /etc, that can muck up your whole system (the registry can still be backed up and reinstalled) and 2, it is somewhat easier for malicious code to muck with the registry, since most Windows users work in some privileged mode.
What irks me is this: I got hit with this bug. I posted bug reports to Debian, with NVidia, on different forum, report lock-ups in certain open-GL situations. I got generally hand-waving "read the fucking manual" responses.
As the article notes, this isn't just a problem with AMD. It suggests that there's an ongoing problem with troubleshooting and resolving the sorts of issues that desktop users are going to have in Linux. (And "paying for support" would not have resolved much, would it have? The problem is the lack of coordination, not the lack of money.)
I don't believe that high taxes per se are a clear marker of intrustion on civil liberties. I'm not a classic libertarian.
I did not choose those elements as examples. I simply noted that, even by that measure, there are freer societies. (I wouldn't avail myself of the speed limit example, actually.) By a number of measures, there are freer societies, for reasonable and acceptable values of the term "freer."
To say that 40% of the people in prison are drug users says nothing: that is a measure of drug use in Sweden. The question is whether they were arrested for and sentenced for drug offences. The anti-drug policy you stated therein is a valid public health approach, and is cited as being consistent with its efforts at controlling alcoholism. Simply because a government engages on a public health program doesn't mean that it is violating civil liberties to do it.
Of course, there's a Napoleanic justice system at work in the US. It's what's essentially at work in Lousiana.
And you've engaged in a tautology. If you criminalize behaviours that are tolerated elsewhere, of course you are jailing "criminals" and increasing the crime rate that way. The fact that a large percentage of those incarcerated are incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses seems to escape your eye.
I consider the amount of actual state intervention a more important metric for freedom than the details of one's judicial rights.
Holland. Sweden.
In terms of the pragmatics of freedom, I'll illustrate it this way: the US has a larger percentage of its population in jail than any other developed country. Your property can be confiscated in the name of the war on drugs without indictment, without arrest, and then sold.
There have been cases of enforcement of sodomy law, and the Supreme Court has explicityly allowed the enforcement and prosecution of those laws to go through. (If I recall, the last case that went to the SCOTUS was an incident in Georgia in which a failed drug-raid did manage to catch a gay couple in flagrante, and they decided to prosecute on that basis, and succeeded.)
What if AOL directs RedHat's large development staff to make all *future* module development and device support in closed source binary form? Sure, the existing code-base remains GPL, but that code-base could start to fade into obsolesence, an open glue holding together large closed components, as AOL enters into partnerships with hardware manufacturers and net service providers.
Yes, it was, and if I had found that link I bet I wouldn't have gotten modded down.
You see my new(Red)Hat? It's made of money!
No, many European countries would be freer. Sodomy laws are pretty damned personally invasive, if you ask me.
In this context, calling someone an extremist really means accusing them of having the temerity of not sharing the assumptions on which you've based your viewpoint. You begin with the assumption that the evils of the Chinese government are categorically and essentially different, more sinister, and founded on the worst instincts, while those of Western governments are not. Anyone who does not begin with this political epistemology, it seems you label an extremist. If you can control the axioms by tarring anyone who doesn't share them, of course you can pretend to be the rational one.
This is a peeve of mine. I really don't care that much about innovation, at least in this context. I want *quality*. Netscape didn't fail to innovate - they had new features and functionality added to each version, just fine. They failed to create a stable, reliable, quality product that worked to my satisfaction. I want a client that nicely and quickly displays as close to all the content on the web as possible. I don't care whether it's using the latest whatevers, or whether it can give my cat shiatsu.
Even though I can hand-edit kernel source files according to needs, I don't want to. I don't feel a need to prove how long my geek-peter is by burning hours doing something that an automation tool will let me do in a couple minutes.
Right now, my S.O. is trying to install Turbolinux on her system: she's a web-type developer who is looking to grow past IIS/ASP/ecmascript and check out things like php and apache and perl. Now, I don't read a word of Japanese, and I don't use RedHat based distros, so she's kind of on her own - I can only give her general advice, and on Japanese-specific things none at all. I'm curious to see what her experience is going to be. But she fits the profile you mentioned - a non-newbie who doesn't need to be a techie if she can help it.
Just off the top of my head, the tradition of lynching is an old-fashioned just-plain-folks type of atrocity. Organized crime is responsible for plenty, too. And, of course, just what government flew airplanes into 2 skyscrapers last year?
Um, Wild Ride.
Cool!
I'm worried about the dry-cleaning bill, though.
Sadly, here on Earth Prime, things don't work that way. I'll requote Keynes: "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." And "in the long run, we're all dead."
Yes, it's a well-known fact that several civilizations were wiped out when their stone roofs collapsed into the straw huts they put them on.
We don't need new legislation. We need to remove the special protections that the software industry enjoys. And I would leave some of the protections intact for open software! That would motivate companies to move to the open model for two reasons: one, limited liability (after all, if you are distributing source, rather than binaries, you are distributing speech, not a product), and two, the inherent QA benefits.
It's not a matter of credit/no credit, it's a matter of noting that the gnostic narrative seems to enjoy popularity in some periods of time, and not others. My personal theory is that a combination of an economic boom with a feet of clay, and the rise of a media monoculture that was responsible for virtually all the information that most people were getting (AOL Time Warner Disney ABC MSNBC) contributed to a vague sense that we were being fed our world, rather than living it - hence Matrix, Truman Show, Dark City and the like. Once the bubble burst, escaping from the real was no longer a horror, but instead a bonafide relief, and fantasy came charging in to provide it: Harry Potter, LOTR and the like.