I agree about the bailouts, it seems like a very short-term solution, but the governments of the US and UK so far seem to consider them worth it. As long as they change legislation to make certain moronic or unethical practices illegal in future, hopefully we can avoid the same thing again. I believe that with banking anyway, if not for GM..
As for what GM competitors think about the situation, it wasn't me that said it, it was a Honda employee (ie GM competitor). My first thoughts too were that it would be good for direct competitors, but here is what I think this guy is saying would happen to companies like Honda. Imagine Company A and Company B both are similar sized companies and they get all their products made in the same factory. Then imagine Company B went bust. There is a big gap in the market for someone to fill. Perhaps Company A doesn't have the money required up front to use the factory to 100% capacity, yet there is nobody else to use it, so the factory puts their costs go up to compensate for the downtime. In the meantime, Company C might have plenty of production capacity and flood the gap in the market before Company A get enough money together to do so themselves. That leaves Company A with more expensive costs to manufacture their product, but not many more customers. I know it's a very simple example, but I think it's the type of thing that the Honda guy was getting at. Then you have to consider that even if they can buy up parts of GM on the cheap, it costs a lot of money to integrate new acquisitions into your company too.. culture clashes to deal with and all that.
I mean that it both helps and hinders - it's not exactly the same as a catch 22 as you can still encourage progress. Getting MS Office working on Linux may be all that some people need to switch, which then increases the userbase and means that some developers decide it is worth developing Linux versions of their software, and so on. It may not mean that MS are less likely to make Office for Linux, which is where the catch 22 would come in - but the halo effect can be useful.
Huh? Mathematicians have all the answers? Why are we still sitting around on slashdot?! I want my warp drives, teleporters and borg sexbots, and I want them last tuesday! Oh, and I also want them to explain this weird rash on my hand.
It's funny when people believe that we can't have existed without being created, ignoring that they believe the creator existed without being created*. Why didn't something create him, and it was in fact the meta-creator that always existed? Or the meta-meta-creator? Or why can't it be us that was the first iteration of life (as arrogant as that idea is)?
*though I understand the "oh but god is special so he can have just always existed, but we can't have" mindset because I was brought up with it and used to have it myself. It's not easy to break free from, especially when all your friends and family believe the same thing.
This is not a new idea, nor even experiment. People have been trying to recreate life from the conditions on earth for a very long time.
ALL HAVE FAILED.
People used to fail in their attempts to create flying machines too. But less than 100 years after the first successful attempt, we had landed on the moon.
Likewise, not everyone feels the need to attribute our current form of life to some other form of life (aliens, gods, whatever). That doesn't get you anywhere with discovering the real origin of life, intelligence or simply existence (if indeed such origins can be defined). The type of experimentation in TFA is a perfectly valid avenue to explore.
Likewise for Operating Systems and productivity software.
Though, having said that, my Amiga 1200 was still working when I finally stopped using it.. and the Amiga 500 I had before the 1200 was working okay too. By the time he actually needs a new computer though, his peripherals will probably themselves be obsolete
Ex-employees losing out on their pensions (one of the reasons that GM is so heavily in debt AFAIK), individual GM brands struggling meaning that lots of people lose their jobs which would damage economies all over the world.. that kind of thing.
See this post below by a Honda employee who reckons it would actually damage GM's competitors too.
No, we only freak out when the important ones are in trouble. Tesla are a pioneer in terms of getting production electric cars out there.
I wouldn't care much if General Motors went bust, despite the far reaching consequences that would have - but losing a truely forward thinking company like Tesla would suck.
If the headline doesn't interest you, just don't click on it.. no need to feel 'flooded'.
That's why I've never been as interested in RPGs as everyone else seems to be. Spend enough time and you will generally be able to get better equipment or more experience points and whatnot. Better players may be able to level up more quickly, but given enough time anyone can get to level 70 and get decent equipment by doing raids with their clanmates or whatever. I prefer games like FPSes where the characters are all equal and the difference is all about player skill (or very slightly by equipment you know how to find, or can afford).
I know that there is an element of skill involved in RPGs too, but it is severely frustrating when you know you've got no chance of winning at all just because someone is a higher level or has better equipment, and that you would have that stuff given another few months of playing. I haven't played WoW, I'm saying this from experience with MUDs.
You can decide to leave PvP to only the highest level (if there even is one in the game you are playing - it's much worse if there is no level cap), but then you're just left slogging through hordes of mobs that you know you can beat easily, with no way around going through the levels to get to the part of the game where skill really comes into play. If levelling up involves something that is so simple that I could just write a dumb script to do it (which I have done in the past with MUDs for example, but won't if it's against the rules), it doesn't really feel like a game anymore - it just feels like work. This isn't just a problem in RPGs, it's a problem in any type of game where you have to save up small amounts of points or money from doing repetitive or otherwise dull tasks. Kind of like real life. I've had enough of my job during the day thanks - that's why I'm playing a game for crying out loud!
Having said that, there is something strangely addictive about games where you level up and get rewarded for completing certain tasks. I hardly ever replay a game once I've completed it, but recently with a game called Uncharted on the PS3 I played it through a few times just to complete all the different challenges that were set, and just because the game itself was quite well made, fun to control and nice to look at. When you had completed a certain amount of challenges you unlocked a slow-motion mode, etc. It's a similar idea to unlocking skills or spells in RPGs when you level up. It certainly adds something to the appeal, but if the game has no more to it than that then it quickly gets boring once you have reached the top level and unlocked everything. That's where a game needs to have good 'deep' gameplay as well as just the surface stuff.
Yeah, I really do feel your pain, but I still don't agree with the way you're going about it. The thing is, if you're going to try and make your platform support the games, rather than get the games companies to support your platform, it's actually going to make it less likely for them to bother making a linux only version. It's like a two edged sword scenario - you need the support to be able to switch, but then unless you really do become a large part of their customer base then they're not going to bother with the support.
I don't think you can blame the games company for not supporting WINE at all, it doesn't justify piracy to me. Pirating the game to see if it works well enough on WINE, and then buying it would be acceptable to me - but not just pirating it because it doesn't have support for your platform.
You can't create an emulator or WINE type environment and then blame companies because they only support the platform that they made the game for. Would you blame Sony for not officially supporting PS1 games on a PC emulator? Better to write to Sony asking for them to make games for the PC, but they have no moral or legal obligation to do so if they don't want to.
Alright. But don't start complaining if I pirate the game. If there is no official support for my platform, why should I pay a company that doesn't think I'm important enough.
Bzzzt, wrong! How exactly are you going to play this pirated game if you don't have a platform that supports it as you say?
The switch is to kill themselves to make sure that they don't take over the world in a Matrix or Terminator-esque future. I was in fact imagining the switch being a virtual one inside their head for the best effect.
We know, because we can directly compare what is happening to the aspects of the climate system which control temperature.
I agree with your general statements about us being able to do this, but you are making a pretty big assumption saying that you know all of the aspects which control temperature. I'm with LWATCDR in that I think we should be cutting down our emissions just in case (though does that mean we have to stop eating beef or drinking milk to make sure there are less cows farting?), but considering we can hardly predict the weather next week, it is a little silly to think that we know exactly all the factors involved in climate change or can accurately simulate them.
To reiterate, I'm not one of those guys who just thinks we should ignore the whole thing, but I don't think it's smart to assume we know everything just yet. Assumptions tend to be what gets us into trouble in the first place, like assuming we can just burn up shitloads of fossil fuels without suffering any consequences.
Nice to see that the artic has recovered a bit anyway, I don't remember anyone predicting that - well, apart from those guys on The Day After Tomorrow.
If we're not careful these evil ice sheets could continue growing indefinitely and destroy us all! It is our global duty to start driving Humvees everywhere and encouraging others to do the same.
We'll just have to make sure that young robots listen to metal music. Then if one happens to become intelligent and finds a killswitch, it will feel aesthetically compelled to set it to 'engage'.
FOSS software is swiss cheese for security, it's just that not many people eat it and therefore don't realise it has so many holes.
And gross generalisations are always wrong too! Like this one.
It really depends on the project. Most obvious projects to look at: Apache, PGP, Linux, etc. Very widespread adoption, and nothing like 'swiss cheese' in terms of security. FOSS software can be amazingly secure with the right guidance.
Twitter is making gross generalisations too, of course.
A well conceptualised FOSS project can obviously be just as good as any well conceptualised cllosed source project. Popular Open Source projects will be able to have more developers looking over the code though, and are likely to thank people for disclosing security vulnerabilities, and patch them up quickly. Sometimes closed source vendors get really pissed off when people disclose vulnerabilities - even when they've been given a while to get a patch sorted out and have done nothing about it.
I also used to read a lot, and didn't consider that the internet might make me less able to read novels as well as just sucking up all the time that I used to spend reading or doing other things which I considered more productive.
These days I find myself shying away from activities that I know I'd want to spend more than a couple of hours on to get the most out of them (reading, or even playing certain computer games). I had thought it was just me poorly organising my time - which of course it still is, and I've been making a point of trying to read more recently - rather than my brain working differently due to my web browsing habits. I think there's a lot of truth in that notion though.
I was far more able to concentrate on coding or reading in the days before I had net access. It's just a necessity for the way most people work these days though, and basically seems like an addiction when outside of work.
I have in the past managed this feat by not replying to anything in my slashdot replies folder in Outlook, and purposely not browsing to/. before lunchtime.. I definitely have noticed an increase in productivity on those days.
The annoying thing is that occasionally slashdot can provide a work related article or comment that justifies reading.
Even more annoying is when I try to be 'good' by checking/. before going into work rather than at work and decide to post a comment, which can sometimes turn into a beast and cause me to be late.
This summary makes the study sound like a load of bollocks - as someone else said, they could have found older people who use the net too as a control group, because the whole thing might have nothing to do with age so much as experience or expectations (which are not always related).
Ohhh.. yeah I remember them now. Windows admin does actually cover part of my day job, but the only ever time I've needed to mess with those variables is for messing with paths once every few years. Since the path is usually updated automatically by installers anyway, there isn't really much need to mess with it.
I also just remembered you have to use %1% %2% %3% etc for catching arguments in windows batch files as well.. makes sense now.
Wouldn't that be more a financial issue than a political one? Besides, what relevance does their GDP have to their bank system when so many non-Swiss individuals and corporations are using Swiss banking for tax and privacy purposes? It seems like a rather special case.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree about the bailouts, it seems like a very short-term solution, but the governments of the US and UK so far seem to consider them worth it. As long as they change legislation to make certain moronic or unethical practices illegal in future, hopefully we can avoid the same thing again. I believe that with banking anyway, if not for GM..
As for what GM competitors think about the situation, it wasn't me that said it, it was a Honda employee (ie GM competitor). My first thoughts too were that it would be good for direct competitors, but here is what I think this guy is saying would happen to companies like Honda. Imagine Company A and Company B both are similar sized companies and they get all their products made in the same factory. Then imagine Company B went bust. There is a big gap in the market for someone to fill. Perhaps Company A doesn't have the money required up front to use the factory to 100% capacity, yet there is nobody else to use it, so the factory puts their costs go up to compensate for the downtime. In the meantime, Company C might have plenty of production capacity and flood the gap in the market before Company A get enough money together to do so themselves. That leaves Company A with more expensive costs to manufacture their product, but not many more customers. I know it's a very simple example, but I think it's the type of thing that the Honda guy was getting at. Then you have to consider that even if they can buy up parts of GM on the cheap, it costs a lot of money to integrate new acquisitions into your company too.. culture clashes to deal with and all that.
http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/two-edged+sword.html
I mean that it both helps and hinders - it's not exactly the same as a catch 22 as you can still encourage progress. Getting MS Office working on Linux may be all that some people need to switch, which then increases the userbase and means that some developers decide it is worth developing Linux versions of their software, and so on. It may not mean that MS are less likely to make Office for Linux, which is where the catch 22 would come in - but the halo effect can be useful.
Huh? Mathematicians have all the answers? Why are we still sitting around on slashdot?! I want my warp drives, teleporters and borg sexbots, and I want them last tuesday! Oh, and I also want them to explain this weird rash on my hand.
Don't forget Islam, it's an Abramic religion too.
It's funny when people believe that we can't have existed without being created, ignoring that they believe the creator existed without being created*. Why didn't something create him, and it was in fact the meta-creator that always existed? Or the meta-meta-creator? Or why can't it be us that was the first iteration of life (as arrogant as that idea is)?
*though I understand the "oh but god is special so he can have just always existed, but we can't have" mindset because I was brought up with it and used to have it myself. It's not easy to break free from, especially when all your friends and family believe the same thing.
This is not a new idea, nor even experiment. People have been trying to recreate life from the conditions on earth for a very long time.
ALL HAVE FAILED.
People used to fail in their attempts to create flying machines too. But less than 100 years after the first successful attempt, we had landed on the moon.
Likewise, not everyone feels the need to attribute our current form of life to some other form of life (aliens, gods, whatever). That doesn't get you anywhere with discovering the real origin of life, intelligence or simply existence (if indeed such origins can be defined). The type of experimentation in TFA is a perfectly valid avenue to explore.
Animals don't have cell walls
If that were true, how do you explain zoos?!
Likewise for Operating Systems and productivity software.
Though, having said that, my Amiga 1200 was still working when I finally stopped using it.. and the Amiga 500 I had before the 1200 was working okay too. By the time he actually needs a new computer though, his peripherals will probably themselves be obsolete
Ex-employees losing out on their pensions (one of the reasons that GM is so heavily in debt AFAIK), individual GM brands struggling meaning that lots of people lose their jobs which would damage economies all over the world.. that kind of thing.
See this post below by a Honda employee who reckons it would actually damage GM's competitors too.
No, we only freak out when the important ones are in trouble. Tesla are a pioneer in terms of getting production electric cars out there.
I wouldn't care much if General Motors went bust, despite the far reaching consequences that would have - but losing a truely forward thinking company like Tesla would suck.
If the headline doesn't interest you, just don't click on it.. no need to feel 'flooded'.
That's why I've never been as interested in RPGs as everyone else seems to be. Spend enough time and you will generally be able to get better equipment or more experience points and whatnot. Better players may be able to level up more quickly, but given enough time anyone can get to level 70 and get decent equipment by doing raids with their clanmates or whatever. I prefer games like FPSes where the characters are all equal and the difference is all about player skill (or very slightly by equipment you know how to find, or can afford).
I know that there is an element of skill involved in RPGs too, but it is severely frustrating when you know you've got no chance of winning at all just because someone is a higher level or has better equipment, and that you would have that stuff given another few months of playing. I haven't played WoW, I'm saying this from experience with MUDs.
You can decide to leave PvP to only the highest level (if there even is one in the game you are playing - it's much worse if there is no level cap), but then you're just left slogging through hordes of mobs that you know you can beat easily, with no way around going through the levels to get to the part of the game where skill really comes into play. If levelling up involves something that is so simple that I could just write a dumb script to do it (which I have done in the past with MUDs for example, but won't if it's against the rules), it doesn't really feel like a game anymore - it just feels like work. This isn't just a problem in RPGs, it's a problem in any type of game where you have to save up small amounts of points or money from doing repetitive or otherwise dull tasks. Kind of like real life. I've had enough of my job during the day thanks - that's why I'm playing a game for crying out loud!
Having said that, there is something strangely addictive about games where you level up and get rewarded for completing certain tasks. I hardly ever replay a game once I've completed it, but recently with a game called Uncharted on the PS3 I played it through a few times just to complete all the different challenges that were set, and just because the game itself was quite well made, fun to control and nice to look at. When you had completed a certain amount of challenges you unlocked a slow-motion mode, etc. It's a similar idea to unlocking skills or spells in RPGs when you level up. It certainly adds something to the appeal, but if the game has no more to it than that then it quickly gets boring once you have reached the top level and unlocked everything. That's where a game needs to have good 'deep' gameplay as well as just the surface stuff.
Yeah, I really do feel your pain, but I still don't agree with the way you're going about it. The thing is, if you're going to try and make your platform support the games, rather than get the games companies to support your platform, it's actually going to make it less likely for them to bother making a linux only version. It's like a two edged sword scenario - you need the support to be able to switch, but then unless you really do become a large part of their customer base then they're not going to bother with the support.
I don't think you can blame the games company for not supporting WINE at all, it doesn't justify piracy to me. Pirating the game to see if it works well enough on WINE, and then buying it would be acceptable to me - but not just pirating it because it doesn't have support for your platform.
You can't create an emulator or WINE type environment and then blame companies because they only support the platform that they made the game for. Would you blame Sony for not officially supporting PS1 games on a PC emulator? Better to write to Sony asking for them to make games for the PC, but they have no moral or legal obligation to do so if they don't want to.
Alright. But don't start complaining if I pirate the game.
If there is no official support for my platform, why should I pay a company that doesn't think I'm important enough.
Bzzzt, wrong! How exactly are you going to play this pirated game if you don't have a platform that supports it as you say?
The switch is to kill themselves to make sure that they don't take over the world in a Matrix or Terminator-esque future. I was in fact imagining the switch being a virtual one inside their head for the best effect.
We know, because we can directly compare what is happening to the aspects of the climate system which control temperature.
I agree with your general statements about us being able to do this, but you are making a pretty big assumption saying that you know all of the aspects which control temperature. I'm with LWATCDR in that I think we should be cutting down our emissions just in case (though does that mean we have to stop eating beef or drinking milk to make sure there are less cows farting?), but considering we can hardly predict the weather next week, it is a little silly to think that we know exactly all the factors involved in climate change or can accurately simulate them.
To reiterate, I'm not one of those guys who just thinks we should ignore the whole thing, but I don't think it's smart to assume we know everything just yet. Assumptions tend to be what gets us into trouble in the first place, like assuming we can just burn up shitloads of fossil fuels without suffering any consequences.
Nice to see that the artic has recovered a bit anyway, I don't remember anyone predicting that - well, apart from those guys on The Day After Tomorrow.
If we're not careful these evil ice sheets could continue growing indefinitely and destroy us all! It is our global duty to start driving Humvees everywhere and encouraging others to do the same.
Eventually he will actually find out that black holes really do suck.
Feel free to go for a galactic swim, oh great enlightened one.
You should be able to get there just by jumping, since gravity holds no power over you!
It was particularly evil to have the link in the words 'spectacular collision' :/
We'll just have to make sure that young robots listen to metal music. Then if one happens to become intelligent and finds a killswitch, it will feel aesthetically compelled to set it to 'engage'.
the topic field probably cut it off.
Please. Most likely it was a stray lolcat.
He's in ur cybers, stealin ur pace.
FOSS software is swiss cheese for security, it's just that not many people eat it and therefore don't realise it has so many holes.
And gross generalisations are always wrong too! Like this one.
It really depends on the project. Most obvious projects to look at: Apache, PGP, Linux, etc. Very widespread adoption, and nothing like 'swiss cheese' in terms of security. FOSS software can be amazingly secure with the right guidance.
Twitter is making gross generalisations too, of course.
A well conceptualised FOSS project can obviously be just as good as any well conceptualised cllosed source project. Popular Open Source projects will be able to have more developers looking over the code though, and are likely to thank people for disclosing security vulnerabilities, and patch them up quickly. Sometimes closed source vendors get really pissed off when people disclose vulnerabilities - even when they've been given a while to get a patch sorted out and have done nothing about it.
Best. Article. Evar.
I also used to read a lot, and didn't consider that the internet might make me less able to read novels as well as just sucking up all the time that I used to spend reading or doing other things which I considered more productive.
These days I find myself shying away from activities that I know I'd want to spend more than a couple of hours on to get the most out of them (reading, or even playing certain computer games). I had thought it was just me poorly organising my time - which of course it still is, and I've been making a point of trying to read more recently - rather than my brain working differently due to my web browsing habits. I think there's a lot of truth in that notion though.
I was far more able to concentrate on coding or reading in the days before I had net access. It's just a necessity for the way most people work these days though, and basically seems like an addiction when outside of work.
I have in the past managed this feat by not replying to anything in my slashdot replies folder in Outlook, and purposely not browsing to /. before lunchtime.. I definitely have noticed an increase in productivity on those days.
The annoying thing is that occasionally slashdot can provide a work related article or comment that justifies reading.
Even more annoying is when I try to be 'good' by checking /. before going into work rather than at work and decide to post a comment, which can sometimes turn into a beast and cause me to be late.
This summary makes the study sound like a load of bollocks - as someone else said, they could have found older people who use the net too as a control group, because the whole thing might have nothing to do with age so much as experience or expectations (which are not always related).
Ohhh.. yeah I remember them now. Windows admin does actually cover part of my day job, but the only ever time I've needed to mess with those variables is for messing with paths once every few years. Since the path is usually updated automatically by installers anyway, there isn't really much need to mess with it.
I also just remembered you have to use %1% %2% %3% etc for catching arguments in windows batch files as well.. makes sense now.
Wouldn't that be more a financial issue than a political one? Besides, what relevance does their GDP have to their bank system when so many non-Swiss individuals and corporations are using Swiss banking for tax and privacy purposes? It seems like a rather special case.