I design things all days long, dangerous things to boot. Luckily, I have never personally had to compromise my vow to never make a product that will let someone down, because I keep far into the safe zone and have yet to be ordered otherwise, but I can assure you that safety is dropped in favour of cost all the time all around the world.
See, in some markets they don't give a shit about safety because they know that the users aren't likely to complain anyway. Like ultra-cheap chinese cars for example.
In other markets, manufacturers might be held accountable, but when time pass and this does not appear to happen they start to chew on the margins. The Challenger accident is a fine example. They skimped on something and nothing happened. Then they skimped on something else and no disaster struck. So they skimped a little more and the whole shebang blew to smithereens.
And in some cases they figure "Let 'em burn", confident that they will still get the money in the end minus a minuscule fine or the beheading of some corporate mannequin.
So no, there are plenty of evidence that companies can skip costs, gamble with safety and still get away with it.
And there is always someone somewhere that is defending this as being sound business practice because their primary loyalty lies with the stock holders.
I'm not an expert, but I have tried a dozen different distros in many version numbers over the last 9 years, and I keep coming back to Mandrake/iva (and Windows 2000). All end up broken within a week. Last time I tried, ubuntu kept throwing out my nvidia drivers between reboots, and I could not get it to record sound through the TV card from a VHS player.
Mandriva is the most polished and user friendly of all I have seen. It is not perfect, sometimes apps crash and I keep finding coredumps in strange places, but Drakxconf makes me forgive a lot. It's what Windows Control Panel should have been.
Some complain about package repositories. They do tend to disappear and you will have to check the box for another instead. Big deal. also, I have yet to encounter a generic RPM or tarball that has not worked well enough on Mandriva. If there were no Mandriva version of a software, any Red Hat or Fedora usually did the trick. I have had more problems with.deb than with.rpm over the years.
post all kinds of inventions on Slashdot - thereby making them "prior art" yet releasing them formally to the public - blocking others from patenting them in the future?
I find it scary that everyone is only speaking in terms of that the diod geek would harm himself.
What would happen if he accidentally burned out an eye of his kid? His wife who happened to lean over the desk? The neighbour next door through the window?
Or if someone would get the idea to blind some politician, ex-boss or ex-wife from a miles' distance with the use of a DVD laser and a sniper scope?
This is not a toy, this is a terrible weapon. At least a gun makes a bang and smell, requiring you to be somewhat present physically and is a heavy piece of steel that you can put a modicum of regulation and monitoring on.
I would think that the main problem with laser diods is not that they may cause an accident, I think the main problem is that they can and will be used maliciously.
is that you only see what people use NOW, not what they might want to use but does not work well.
I have sent E-mails to various websites over the years that only work with IE to complain about this fact, and received answers that "We focus on IE because according to our logs that is what people use". Well duh. I'd be surprised if you got any data at all on Mozilla then.
In this instance it would for example be folly to assume that DX10 is uninteresting since most people can only run DX9. It may well be the case that people are holding off both Vista and DX10 because Valve games don't use it - but the second they started implementing it on a broad scale people would buy 8800's by the dozen?
I find it ridiculous to propose a ban on biofuels because the current infrastructure - NOT built for biofuels - can't supply the demand.
It is strange how he glosses over any improvements in said infrastructure with "Farmers will respond to better prices by planting more, but it is not clear that they can overtake the booming demand for biofuel. Even if they do, they will catch up only by ploughing virgin habitat."
Translates to "supply will increase but I do not know to what extent, and it necessitates domestication".
It was not many years ago that EU was lamenting the "food mountain" that EU farmers were producing, the farmers lamenting the low price on crops because of the surplus, and governments basically paying farmers for not growing crops and adding to the problem.
If the current methods aren't good enough, make new methods. There are ways to make ethanol from entire trees, last time I heard BP bought a key patent and swore on their grannies' graves that they would not kill it.
Further, it is folly to state that producing ethanol consumes more energy than it produces. That is a backwards way of saying that the efficiency of the process is less than 50% - which is quite good actually as when looking at a whole you harvest ten units to get 4-5 in liquid shape - and considering that the ten units are basically free solar energy you don't actually LOSE anything.
When you take chemical energy in the shape of carbohydrates and convert it to another carrier - in this case chemical energy in the shape of alcohol - you obviously lose a bit in the process. But when the source you are tapping largely grows by itself, it is all a net gain anyway.
If not then producing food would be a net loss, wouldn't it?
The problem with voting with your wallet is that the sellers aren't informed about WHY you chose like you did. So they are free to draw whatever conclusions suits them.
Like RIAA - if we all stop buying music because we are fed up with their mafiaa practices, they are quick to claim that the resulting loss in sales is because we are likely pirating instead (because we must of course still consume 9.7 albums per year!), and thus we need a good leash.
The reason why Firewire still kicks ass, while USB harddrives require you to find two independently powered USB ports and use a split cable.. And can't power a 3.5" HDD even then.
Would it had been so hard to include the SATA power line together with the signal connector?
not adults. So keep your knee-jerks in check. You will get to see your gore, only late at night.
I'm a grown-up man who has watched action movies all my life, and I am getting pretty sick of the violence. It sometimes seems like directors try to one-up each other with titillating depictions of evil and suffering.
I'm pretty sure mankind doesn't have an innate NEED to hurt each other despite what some psychologists hypothesized a hundred years ago - rather that it is a quick problem-"solving" (ego-scratching) solution that many stick to - and I'm pretty sure that if you expose people to violence all their lives they will become violent. Monkey see, monkey do.
Another interesting thing is that in Sweden we have only a fraction of the level of violent crimes as compared to USA. I don't think we are by nature a more docile people, it's rather probably the result of a lack of handguns and generations of limited media violence. And we haven't had a war in 200 years.
For 2D it is probably the best out there. For 3D it is a joke.
I'm using Mechanical Desktop at the moment and the MS Paint/Photoshop analogy is quite appropriate. It is a suicide-prone and retarded cro-magnon midget compared to übermench like Pro/Engineer and Solidworks, at least as long as 3D is regarded.
It is excellent for 2D markup though.
Autodesk have always been the Microsoft of the CAD business and tried to crush the competitors using this kind of scemes for as long as I have known them, which is about 15 years.
There are at least a dozen half-baked CADs out there that can read and write DWG files, but usually there is something that goews awry in the process. I had a backsplash the other month when I recieved a DWG and looked at it in TurboCAD. All was well except that the table with all the important data was missing, which made our communication about the job rather confusing.
It's not Microsoft per se that is the root of the dislike they gather.
If one company dominates a field completely, using its size to crush their enemies, and defends its acts by referring to capitalistic market philosophies that basically says that might makes right, then they are bound to gather glowing coals upon their head. It doesn't help if their products are kinda crummy and they treat their customers like enemies either.
Every company is flavoured by the attitudes of their leadership. Judging by that theory, the leadership of Microsoft are socially inept bullies. Kinda rings a bell when you look at Bill and Monkeyboy. It could change though, given a change of leadership.
there was a high incidence of people in jail with a first name ending with y.
Thing is, among certain working class demographics, it was popular to name boys things like "Conny", "Ronny", "Johnny", "Tony", "Tommy" and so on. Presumably mostly a generation fashion wave of sorts.
And men stemming from that population were more inclined to do violence, since (as popular prejudice indicates) such families were not uncommonly abusive, alcoholic and peers to criminals.
Eerie.
This is of course not saying that all people named "Conny" are criminal. Only that statistically, guys named Conny are more likely to be in jail than guys named Torbjörn.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't pick up and carry a player in Everquest.
Also, a paralyze works for like 5 seconds or some such.
Gripe eloquently on Slashdot?
I design things all days long, dangerous things to boot. Luckily, I have never personally had to compromise my vow to never make a product that will let someone down, because I keep far into the safe zone and have yet to be ordered otherwise, but I can assure you that safety is dropped in favour of cost all the time all around the world.
See, in some markets they don't give a shit about safety because they know that the users aren't likely to complain anyway. Like ultra-cheap chinese cars for example.
In other markets, manufacturers might be held accountable, but when time pass and this does not appear to happen they start to chew on the margins. The Challenger accident is a fine example. They skimped on something and nothing happened. Then they skimped on something else and no disaster struck. So they skimped a little more and the whole shebang blew to smithereens.
And in some cases they figure "Let 'em burn", confident that they will still get the money in the end minus a minuscule fine or the beheading of some corporate mannequin.
So no, there are plenty of evidence that companies can skip costs, gamble with safety and still get away with it.
And there is always someone somewhere that is defending this as being sound business practice because their primary loyalty lies with the stock holders.
I'm not an expert, but I have tried a dozen different distros in many version numbers over the last 9 years, and I keep coming back to Mandrake/iva (and Windows 2000). All end up broken within a week. Last time I tried, ubuntu kept throwing out my nvidia drivers between reboots, and I could not get it to record sound through the TV card from a VHS player.
.deb than with .rpm over the years.
Mandriva is the most polished and user friendly of all I have seen. It is not perfect, sometimes apps crash and I keep finding coredumps in strange places, but Drakxconf makes me forgive a lot. It's what Windows Control Panel should have been.
Some complain about package repositories. They do tend to disappear and you will have to check the box for another instead. Big deal. also, I have yet to encounter a generic RPM or tarball that has not worked well enough on Mandriva. If there were no Mandriva version of a software, any Red Hat or Fedora usually did the trick. I have had more problems with
post all kinds of inventions on Slashdot - thereby making them "prior art" yet releasing them formally to the public - blocking others from patenting them in the future?
Seems to me that what people need more than flying cars is streetable planes.
How about a fuselage like a car where the wings pop off and can be stored in racks at the airport?
Mail me if you get funding, I'll design it for you.
of the phrase
"idiot-proof for users who don't care a whit about what OS they're using."
used in conjunction with "Linux user" or "OEM Linux customer".
I find it scary that everyone is only speaking in terms of that the diod geek would harm himself.
What would happen if he accidentally burned out an eye of his kid? His wife who happened to lean over the desk? The neighbour next door through the window?
Or if someone would get the idea to blind some politician, ex-boss or ex-wife from a miles' distance with the use of a DVD laser and a sniper scope?
This is not a toy, this is a terrible weapon. At least a gun makes a bang and smell, requiring you to be somewhat present physically and is a heavy piece of steel that you can put a modicum of regulation and monitoring on.
I would think that the main problem with laser diods is not that they may cause an accident, I think the main problem is that they can and will be used maliciously.
So what stops evildoers from blinding their favourite objects of hate from afar on a wide scale now?
How long until people start wearing eye-burners in their keychain for "protection"?
Write well-formulated outrage on Slashdot?
is that you only see what people use NOW, not what they might want to use but does not work well.
I have sent E-mails to various websites over the years that only work with IE to complain about this fact, and received answers that "We focus on IE because according to our logs that is what people use". Well duh. I'd be surprised if you got any data at all on Mozilla then.
In this instance it would for example be folly to assume that DX10 is uninteresting since most people can only run DX9. It may well be the case that people are holding off both Vista and DX10 because Valve games don't use it - but the second they started implementing it on a broad scale people would buy 8800's by the dozen?
I find it ridiculous to propose a ban on biofuels because the current infrastructure - NOT built for biofuels - can't supply the demand.
It is strange how he glosses over any improvements in said infrastructure with "Farmers will respond to better prices by planting more, but it is not clear that they can overtake the booming demand for biofuel. Even if they do, they will catch up only by ploughing virgin habitat."
Translates to "supply will increase but I do not know to what extent, and it necessitates domestication".
It was not many years ago that EU was lamenting the "food mountain" that EU farmers were producing, the farmers lamenting the low price on crops because of the surplus, and governments basically paying farmers for not growing crops and adding to the problem.
If the current methods aren't good enough, make new methods. There are ways to make ethanol from entire trees, last time I heard BP bought a key patent and swore on their grannies' graves that they would not kill it.
Further, it is folly to state that producing ethanol consumes more energy than it produces. That is a backwards way of saying that the efficiency of the process is less than 50% - which is quite good actually as when looking at a whole you harvest ten units to get 4-5 in liquid shape - and considering that the ten units are basically free solar energy you don't actually LOSE anything.
When you take chemical energy in the shape of carbohydrates and convert it to another carrier - in this case chemical energy in the shape of alcohol - you obviously lose a bit in the process. But when the source you are tapping largely grows by itself, it is all a net gain anyway.
If not then producing food would be a net loss, wouldn't it?
And ironically, it is apparently not "costly" as there is apparently a net profit to be made.
I'm thinking this of nuclear waste as well - in the future, our descendants will curse us for hiding that sweet burned-out fuel so deep...
You mean
"Gaming is more like work nowadays"
?
improved spectrum vision that reaches into the IR/UV wavelengths.
Would make nighttime driving safer and I would understand technological equipment an thermodynamic processes better.
What can anybody do about it? Gripe on Slashdot?
"From the abyss of my parent's basement, I strike at thee with my nerd forum debating skills!"
The problem with voting with your wallet is that the sellers aren't informed about WHY you chose like you did. So they are free to draw whatever conclusions suits them.
Like RIAA - if we all stop buying music because we are fed up with their mafiaa practices, they are quick to claim that the resulting loss in sales is because we are likely pirating instead (because we must of course still consume 9.7 albums per year!), and thus we need a good leash.
... so that people will both get malaria from the old ones PLUS have to battle the new and improved non-malaria type?
Genius.
... the power supply.
The reason why Firewire still kicks ass, while USB harddrives require you to find two independently powered USB ports and use a split cable.. And can't power a 3.5" HDD even then.
Would it had been so hard to include the SATA power line together with the signal connector?
not adults. So keep your knee-jerks in check. You will get to see your gore, only late at night.
I'm a grown-up man who has watched action movies all my life, and I am getting pretty sick of the violence. It sometimes seems like directors try to one-up each other with titillating depictions of evil and suffering.
I'm pretty sure mankind doesn't have an innate NEED to hurt each other despite what some psychologists hypothesized a hundred years ago - rather that it is a quick problem-"solving" (ego-scratching) solution that many stick to - and I'm pretty sure that if you expose people to violence all their lives they will become violent. Monkey see, monkey do.
Another interesting thing is that in Sweden we have only a fraction of the level of violent crimes as compared to USA. I don't think we are by nature a more docile people, it's rather probably the result of a lack of handguns and generations of limited media violence. And we haven't had a war in 200 years.
For 2D it is probably the best out there. For 3D it is a joke.
I'm using Mechanical Desktop at the moment and the MS Paint/Photoshop analogy is quite appropriate. It is a suicide-prone and retarded cro-magnon midget compared to übermench like Pro/Engineer and Solidworks, at least as long as 3D is regarded.
It is excellent for 2D markup though.
Autodesk have always been the Microsoft of the CAD business and tried to crush the competitors using this kind of scemes for as long as I have known them, which is about 15 years.
There are at least a dozen half-baked CADs out there that can read and write DWG files, but usually there is something that goews awry in the process. I had a backsplash the other month when I recieved a DWG and looked at it in TurboCAD. All was well except that the table with all the important data was missing, which made our communication about the job rather confusing.
hidden bias is the problem.
To be upfront about your opinions is _honest_, to pay someone to pimp your opinion while pretending that they are not biased is _dishonest_.
It's not Microsoft per se that is the root of the dislike they gather.
If one company dominates a field completely, using its size to crush their enemies, and defends its acts by referring to capitalistic market philosophies that basically says that might makes right, then they are bound to gather glowing coals upon their head. It doesn't help if their products are kinda crummy and they treat their customers like enemies either.
Every company is flavoured by the attitudes of their leadership. Judging by that theory, the leadership of Microsoft are socially inept bullies. Kinda rings a bell when you look at Bill and Monkeyboy. It could change though, given a change of leadership.
there was a high incidence of people in jail with a first name ending with y.
Thing is, among certain working class demographics, it was popular to name boys things like "Conny", "Ronny", "Johnny", "Tony", "Tommy" and so on. Presumably mostly a generation fashion wave of sorts.
And men stemming from that population were more inclined to do violence, since (as popular prejudice indicates) such families were not uncommonly abusive, alcoholic and peers to criminals.
Eerie.
This is of course not saying that all people named "Conny" are criminal. Only that statistically, guys named Conny are more likely to be in jail than guys named Torbjörn.
Here - take a lesson from Sweden:
http://www.banknotes.com/se62.htm