Would you prefer that those in low-income areas simply be priced out of the product? Sucks to be them but price discrimination just helps perpetuate the price disparity that is pushing you the westerner out of the job market.
that may be part of it but it isn't that unusual to see products that are priced at $x in the USA priced at arround £x in the uk. VAT is nowhere near 100%.
copyright is a government granted monopoly. If you want a legal copy of a copyrighted work (with a few minor exceptions) you have no choice but to deal with the copyright holder and his cronies. Cartels of major copyright holders create region lockout systems which you have to buy into if you want thier content.
there is a diffence between not supporting and actively blocking.
This is the problem with "software as a service" and "product activation", rather than your actions being judged by a judge of the law and a jury of your peers they are judged by a software company looking to enforce region segmentation.
Firstly I presume when you said 9mm you meant 3.5mm.
Secondly most seperate turntables give a very weak output and therefore require either a seperate turntable preamp or a device with one built in. You can get turntables with line level outputs but they are the exception not the rule.
resistive electric heating is very inefficiant, heat pumps are nice but expensive.
Also when considering the clenliness of electricity you have to look at the clenliness of the extra generation that would be brought online to satisfy extra electricity demand not the average clenliness of electricity generation.
What IMO doesn't make any sense is that anyone or anything connected to your phone line (and make no mistake phone lines are NOT physically secure) can make arbiterally expensive calls with no authentication requirement.
The first problem is if you can do the wrong thing app vendors *will* do the wrong thing. It is sad but true.
The second problem is that app vendors consider fixing issues that should never have been there in the first place a way to make more money. This makes moving to vista a lot more expensive that it first appears.
MS is stuck between a rock and a hard place on this one, if they don't break stuff then it will never be fixed. If they stick with the status quo they will retain thier reputation for poor security.
Borrowing 8 times your salary at 9% interest would mean spending the vast majority of your income (indeed if you are in a place where income is usually quoted gross maybe more than your net income) or mortgage interest alone. Sorry but that is not responsible lending whereever you happen to be.
I guess most people in your city whi buy houses do so as couples, that would make the house price only 4x the average couples combined salary.
... I remember reading articles in 1997 saying how 56k was the top-whack copper could provide. Then you were reading articles written by incompetants.
the 56k limit was and still is imposed primerally by the digital side of the phone network and how it is interconnected to the analog local loop. To break that limit requires special equipment to be installed at the local telephone exchange.
It would travel to the break in the line, hit the end, and travel back towards the source all discontinuities cause some degree of reflection and it can be a big issue as frequencies get higher. Telco wiring is likely to be full of discontinuities (cross connect panels, different cable types etc).
destroying everything in it's path. Luckilly it doesn't destroy everything in it's path. It destroys some frequencies attenuates others and boosts others. Oh and it causes some nasty phase effects too. It is a very similar effect to that of multipath distortion in radio systems. The fact that primitive systems like thinnet couldn't cope with this doesn't mean it is impossible to do so.
What has really changed (and continues to change) is the systems we can put on the end of a line. DSP chips get ever more powerfull and with them ever more complex encoding schemes become availible. Systems can split the availible bandwidth into narrow bands an then tailor the encoding perameters to match what is going on in each band.
There are advantages to doing some construction work in space, mainly that you don't have to design stuff to survive storage on earth then a launch then conditions in space. Also there is the issue that some projects may need more than a single booster can lift.
The real problem is that switching between orbits can often take as much delta-v as going from the ground and the more delta-v you use in a mission the harder it is to add more so any construction station would be limited to particular types of mission.
Are there any good alternatives for the access application arround?
Access is a nice tool for experimenting with and teaching databases IMO. One of thee best things about it is the whole database is contained within one file so it can be handled like any other office suite document. Then as your needs grow you can use it as a client with a database server.
"Nobody's locked out of anything, the source is there and you are welcome to fix it.
It used to be that people complained about lack of specs useful for writing drivers. Now people complain about the vendor not writing the actual driver! Kids these days..."
In response to a post that was clearly talking about fglrx, the source to fglrx is NOT publically availible and neither is proper specs for the cards.
If the user doesn't have a choice, it's usually because they're using it in a corporate environment, meaning that someone else is the person actually dealing with issues like these, not the user. The home user goes out to a large computer chain and buys a new computer, it will almost certainly have come with vista home basic or vista home premium. Having done so thier only fully legit downgrade option is to buy XP full retail (somewhere arround £160 for home edition).
Even if they were savvy enough to get buisness or ultimate they still have to have suitable media availible for doing the downgrade with. Some OEMs are now providing XP media after MS relented but for those who don't the must already have at least one copy of XP pro and that copy has to be either corp, retail, whitebox OEM or the correct brand of big brand OEM. If it is the wrong brand of big brand OEM they are out of luck. If it is retail or whitebox OEM they will have to phone activate.
and even once the customer is in a postition license/media wise to downgrade they still have the problem of trying to find drivers for all thier hardware.
The bottom line is that it is very difficult for most home users to switch a machine away from vista and there are no warnings prior to purchase.
XP marginally improved support for old dos games (the main difference was that sound wen't from being completely unsupported to working badly) but it wasn't a huge change.
Afaict 32-bit windows games of the time ran just as well on 2K as on XP (i'm not sure if and when directx updates for 2K stopped, strangely the MS website lists the web installer as compatible with 2000 but the redistributable as not compatible).
Even today if you think gaming is the only reason to run windows then you are in denial.
I keep seeing this claim but never any real evidence to back it up. In fact the first link you give says "No stats are available on how much work is being done by developers on a payroll as opposed to community volunteers."
Yes the key developers on some high profile projects get paid by someone to work on thier projects. Linus gets paid by the "linux foundation" (which seems to be a trade organisation of firms with a vested interest in linux's sucess). The core devs of openoffice and java (which isn't fully opensource yet but is getting that way) are paid by sun. The commercial linux distros also put some paid development in the direction of projects that matter to them.
However I see no evidence that this is typical, all the smaller opensource projects I have been involved with them have been run by people who have a day job doing something else and propietry software for linux seems to be virtually nonexistant.
It all comes down to would the profits from selling OS-X to other vendors make up for the downturn in apple hardware sales it would almost certainly cause?
I wonder how many mac pros are sold to people who really don't need dual dual core xeons because there is no midrange tower that can officially run OS-X?
What they haven't said is what things will be like for third party developers. I think we can practically gaurantee that things won't be as open as they are on hacked early iphones (where your app was running as root and had the ability to reprogram the radio hardware to unlock the phone).
My guess is that at best we would end up with a system like the symbian phones from nokia have where some apps can be written and released without permission but a lot of stuff is locked out from such apps. At worst we would end up with a situtation where apples persmission is needed for every app released.
last I checked all that had been released were 2D specs which aren't worth much given that we already have an opensource 2D driver.
If ati releases usable opensource 3D drivers or even closed source ones that are better than nvidia maybe I will consider switching but not until then.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you prefer that those in low-income areas simply be priced out of the product?
Sucks to be them but price discrimination just helps perpetuate the price disparity that is pushing you the westerner out of the job market.
that may be part of it but it isn't that unusual to see products that are priced at $x in the USA priced at arround £x in the uk. VAT is nowhere near 100%.
copyright is a government granted monopoly. If you want a legal copy of a copyrighted work (with a few minor exceptions) you have no choice but to deal with the copyright holder and his cronies. Cartels of major copyright holders create region lockout systems which you have to buy into if you want thier content.
there is a diffence between not supporting and actively blocking.
This is the problem with "software as a service" and "product activation", rather than your actions being judged by a judge of the law and a jury of your peers they are judged by a software company looking to enforce region segmentation.
Firstly I presume when you said 9mm you meant 3.5mm.
Secondly most seperate turntables give a very weak output and therefore require either a seperate turntable preamp or a device with one built in. You can get turntables with line level outputs but they are the exception not the rule.
resistive electric heating is very inefficiant, heat pumps are nice but expensive.
Also when considering the clenliness of electricity you have to look at the clenliness of the extra generation that would be brought online to satisfy extra electricity demand not the average clenliness of electricity generation.
What IMO doesn't make any sense is that anyone or anything connected to your phone line (and make no mistake phone lines are NOT physically secure) can make arbiterally expensive calls with no authentication requirement.
or against protocols like irc that put in application level checks against that sort of thing.
I suspect /. is just looking for open proxies as a defensive measure, IRC networks have been doing this for years.
The first problem is if you can do the wrong thing app vendors *will* do the wrong thing. It is sad but true.
The second problem is that app vendors consider fixing issues that should never have been there in the first place a way to make more money. This makes moving to vista a lot more expensive that it first appears.
MS is stuck between a rock and a hard place on this one, if they don't break stuff then it will never be fixed. If they stick with the status quo they will retain thier reputation for poor security.
I'm pretty sure we brits also had some form of analog mobile phone system before GSM.
Borrowing 8 times your salary at 9% interest would mean spending the vast majority of your income (indeed if you are in a place where income is usually quoted gross maybe more than your net income) or mortgage interest alone. Sorry but that is not responsible lending whereever you happen to be.
I guess most people in your city whi buy houses do so as couples, that would make the house price only 4x the average couples combined salary.
... I remember reading articles in 1997 saying how 56k was the top-whack copper could provide.
Then you were reading articles written by incompetants.
the 56k limit was and still is imposed primerally by the digital side of the phone network and how it is interconnected to the analog local loop. To break that limit requires special equipment to be installed at the local telephone exchange.
It would travel to the break in the line, hit the end, and travel back towards the source
all discontinuities cause some degree of reflection and it can be a big issue as frequencies get higher. Telco wiring is likely to be full of discontinuities (cross connect panels, different cable types etc).
destroying everything in it's path.
Luckilly it doesn't destroy everything in it's path. It destroys some frequencies attenuates others and boosts others. Oh and it causes some nasty phase effects too. It is a very similar effect to that of multipath distortion in radio systems. The fact that primitive systems like thinnet couldn't cope with this doesn't mean it is impossible to do so.
What has really changed (and continues to change) is the systems we can put on the end of a line. DSP chips get ever more powerfull and with them ever more complex encoding schemes become availible. Systems can split the availible bandwidth into narrow bands an then tailor the encoding perameters to match what is going on in each band.
There are advantages to doing some construction work in space, mainly that you don't have to design stuff to survive storage on earth then a launch then conditions in space. Also there is the issue that some projects may need more than a single booster can lift.
The real problem is that switching between orbits can often take as much delta-v as going from the ground and the more delta-v you use in a mission the harder it is to add more so any construction station would be limited to particular types of mission.
Are there any good alternatives for the access application arround?
Access is a nice tool for experimenting with and teaching databases IMO. One of thee best things about it is the whole database is contained within one file so it can be handled like any other office suite document. Then as your needs grow you can use it as a client with a database server.
He said
"Nobody's locked out of anything, the source is there and you are welcome to fix it.
It used to be that people complained about lack of specs useful for writing drivers. Now people complain about the vendor not writing the actual driver! Kids these days..."
In response to a post that was clearly talking about fglrx, the source to fglrx is NOT publically availible and neither is proper specs for the cards.
Last I checked ati had released enough specs to do 2D but not to do 3D.
Does this radeonhd project have a website? have they got any kind of 3D support yet?
If the user doesn't have a choice, it's usually because they're using it in a corporate environment, meaning that someone else is the person actually dealing with issues like these, not the user.
The home user goes out to a large computer chain and buys a new computer, it will almost certainly have come with vista home basic or vista home premium. Having done so thier only fully legit downgrade option is to buy XP full retail (somewhere arround £160 for home edition).
Even if they were savvy enough to get buisness or ultimate they still have to have suitable media availible for doing the downgrade with. Some OEMs are now providing XP media after MS relented but for those who don't the must already have at least one copy of XP pro and that copy has to be either corp, retail, whitebox OEM or the correct brand of big brand OEM. If it is the wrong brand of big brand OEM they are out of luck. If it is retail or whitebox OEM they will have to phone activate.
and even once the customer is in a postition license/media wise to downgrade they still have the problem of trying to find drivers for all thier hardware.
The bottom line is that it is very difficult for most home users to switch a machine away from vista and there are no warnings prior to purchase.
XP marginally improved support for old dos games (the main difference was that sound wen't from being completely unsupported to working badly) but it wasn't a huge change.
Afaict 32-bit windows games of the time ran just as well on 2K as on XP (i'm not sure if and when directx updates for 2K stopped, strangely the MS website lists the web installer as compatible with 2000 but the redistributable as not compatible).
Even today if you think gaming is the only reason to run windows then you are in denial.
I keep seeing this claim but never any real evidence to back it up. In fact the first link you give says "No stats are available on how much work is being done by developers on a payroll as opposed to community volunteers."
Yes the key developers on some high profile projects get paid by someone to work on thier projects. Linus gets paid by the "linux foundation" (which seems to be a trade organisation of firms with a vested interest in linux's sucess). The core devs of openoffice and java (which isn't fully opensource yet but is getting that way) are paid by sun. The commercial linux distros also put some paid development in the direction of projects that matter to them.
However I see no evidence that this is typical, all the smaller opensource projects I have been involved with them have been run by people who have a day job doing something else and propietry software for linux seems to be virtually nonexistant.
It all comes down to would the profits from selling OS-X to other vendors make up for the downturn in apple hardware sales it would almost certainly cause?
I wonder how many mac pros are sold to people who really don't need dual dual core xeons because there is no midrange tower that can officially run OS-X?
What they haven't said is what things will be like for third party developers. I think we can practically gaurantee that things won't be as open as they are on hacked early iphones (where your app was running as root and had the ability to reprogram the radio hardware to unlock the phone).
My guess is that at best we would end up with a system like the symbian phones from nokia have where some apps can be written and released without permission but a lot of stuff is locked out from such apps. At worst we would end up with a situtation where apples persmission is needed for every app released.
last I checked all that had been released were 2D specs which aren't worth much given that we already have an opensource 2D driver.
If ati releases usable opensource 3D drivers or even closed source ones that are better than nvidia maybe I will consider switching but not until then.
What it DOES mean is that they should be able to tell when multiple counterfeits came from the same printer.
If they can tie crimes together then they can gather evidence from multiple crimes which means they are more likely to find the perpetrator.