All most moms or anyone really needs is a 486--
maybe as much as a P-233.
Perhaps, but Intel isn't making them anymore. And even with its significantly lower transistor count, a 486 is about twice the size (and presumably, power consumption) of this chip; a 233 more than 4 times as big. You're probably getting close to the size where the wiring pads are a substantial fraction of the total chip size, so further reductions are pointless. And once you get power consumption below a certain level, further reductions are irrelevant compared to the power consumed by other pieces.
Or possibly they didn't want to give 3dfx ammo for their lawsuit with an open source driver. That would be the best reason, since with their purchase of 3dfx perhaps they could open the drivers?
Those that don't want to wear one only hurt themselves.
Seatbelts help keep the driver behind the wheel of the car; in many cases, this may reduce the severity of an accident on other drivers, as the driver may be able to make adjustments after the initial contact that reduce the damage of further contacts. Keeping the front seat passenger in his place also prevents him or her flying into the driver's lap. So it can possibly hurt me. Since the roads are a public resource, rules on what can be driven on them and how one muzt drive seem reasonable to me. (Build your own road and you can do whatever you please.)
Motorcycle helmet laws, on the other hand, serve just to protect the driver. Frankly, we could use the organ donors...
Empire, the multiplayer Unix game. I lost a month of my life to that thing, and I know others who lost far more. PC games just don't compare, because you can almost always save and come back to it.
Radio is also a much smaller search space. How many people would know about a local information page, or even if they did, expect it to be updated with any frequency? If you have radio, people who are stepping through the stations can find it, and get an instant snapshot.
There is no excuse for not exercising unless you're incarcerated.
Full-time job, wife who also works full-time, two small children -- and recently, a message from the top that we don't get our "Xmas" bonus until our next version is ready for release. Some of us have our own forms of incarceration...
Oh, and I was playing indoor soccer until I hyperextended my quadriceps, and walking during my lunch break until it got so d---ed cold around here. I can outrun and outlift most healthy adults.
In college, I was weightlifting twice a week, playing (serious) badminton four times a week, and soccer three times a week, all for an hour and a half or so at a time. With all that, I got down to the extreme top weight for my height on the insurance tables. My body is not the same as your body.
After all, all this pill does is simulate something we can do quite well on our own with a bit of willpower - eat less.
Spoken like a thin person.
Unlike an addiction to a drug or one of those trivial ailments, trying to cut down on taking in food has a withdrawal symptom (hunger) that NEVER GOES AWAY. Don't eat, and I'll be hungry from now until I go to bed, and then again when I wake up in the morning.
We're out of shape due to a lack of activity, which itself is mostly due to information technology professions exercising only one's fingers. Give me a job that gives me a good workout and I'd be in pretty good shape.
And his comments about "humanity" not knowing how to make software, or even what software is, were just plain over-dramatic, hippified philosobabble.
No, I think he has a point.
In 1920, humanity did not know how to make jet engines, whether they would work well, etc. Then
Frank Whittle invented them, and now "humanity" knows how to make them.
The same may be true for software. Over the years, we've developed ideas of abstraction, encapsulation, structured programming, object-oriented programming, BNF, program proving, and so forth. At one time these concepts didn't exist; now they're well-known and fairly well understood. There are no doubt concepts still undiscovered and unexplored that will improve our software development in future.
Yet another book about how the printing press sparked the rennaisance, how original.
The iron plow was probably at least as important.
The Roman scratch plow didn't make deep furrows, so planting had to wait until the weather was warmer and frost wouldn't kill the seedlings as often. With the iron plow (which itself was possible thanks to the metallurgical improvements made in the quest for better armor), farmers could be more productive and fewer farmers were needed. So more people were able to do non-farming things, including inventing the printing press.
The Windows CD player, at least as of 1996, also had similar functionality. I entered a large number of CD title/track lists, and then lost them when I got a new office machine and forgot to copy that file.
One possible way to start back might be with a counter-EULA. Something like "By clicking you agree never to be a party to any attempt at enforcement of EULAs that restrict the user's rights beyond the normal restrictions of copyright law when no EULA is present."
Re:You always give up a right in a contract.
on
EULA In Games
·
· Score: 1
This is how *all* contracts work
Absolutely not.
In all contracts, the terms are disclosed before any part of the deal goes through. This is not the case with EULAs.
If you want to contractually license your software to me, you can do so by giving me the contract terms (say, via a webpage), and me actively agreeing to those terms. *Then* the money changes hands. That's perfectly acceptable.
If I buy from a store, and *then* you add terms, I can't refuse the terms without significant inconvenience to me and the vendor. Vendors may refuse to take back stuff, may mischarge my card, lose the credit slip, etc.
You want to sell in a store? Live by the understood rules. Want to change the rules -- i.e., add an EULA? Don't sell in a store. It's *that* simple.
Bullshit. I'm a software engineer in a company that writes monitoring software for mission critical back end systems. In my personal life, I've grown more and more and more frustrated at the utter shit I have to put up with in software on my home computer.
That's as maybe, but it doesn't change the fact that the article presents hardware issues as examples to support claims about the shoddy quality of software engineering. A few bits from, say, Daikatana would have been a better choice. Or something about the reported 65K bugs in Windows 2000.
Alternatively, open a Slashdot story with a fair number of comments in flat mode using Netscape under Windows 98. That's my favorite quick way to crash 98, and a quick and easy example. (Mozilla doesn't crash it though.)
Show me a corporate setup where users save documents to the hard drive?
Mine. LAN performance just isn't up to snuff for performance intensive stuff. (We use revision control to store permanent, group stuff.)
I have yet to find another person at our company with their main project directory on the same path.
I have never met a user who has a particular problem with a setup where they have a home drive mapped. In fact it makes sense to them.. home is in H:
I searched for "Windows home drive" on Google, and the only letter mentioned there was Z:. Either you don't know the standard, or they don't, or there is no standard, not even a de facto one. So how is a software developer supposed to know?
Of course, the file was set to r--r--r--. Do you think that any end user is going to understand this?
Perhaps not, but the average Windows user would use the file explorer to check and change the permissions. Couldn't you just set up these people in Linux with KExplorer or one of the many other graphical file explorers?
It seems to me that the file system is really where Linux users have the edge. No horrible drive letters, no matter what machine you're on your stuff generally goes to ~username. Compare this to Windows, where user configuration for the GUI gets put into a subdirectory of the Windows directory, documents go to c:\my documents or more likely just C:\, or D:\, or the directory where the app is running, or... And with multiple users on a single machine, it gets even worse.
Windows wins with the apps and by having a complete set of completed UI elements. But its file system is a horrible kludge.
Can anyone come up with a system that will "eliminate the middle man" whilst allowing an artist to have a decent living?
Mp3.com already has. The 18 year old who performs as "The Cynic Project" has made nearly $80,000 in payback earnings from MP3.com in the last year or so, and that doesn't count CD sales. Online selling of music can work, and growth of higher-bandwidth connections, MP3 players, etc. mean potential future profits are much higher.
Although it says that it will block the playback when connected to a VCR and it won't when connected to a TV, I can't see how it can differentiate between the two.
It doesn't. The current crop of consumer VCRs react to a macrovision-scrambled input, and don't display it properly. This is by design, unfortunately.
The software industry rewards companies for quick production, not quality results.
Not true!
The software customers reward companies for quick production. So what does that mean? It means people are willing to make the tradeoff of having a less reliable product for less now, rather than paying more (for a longer development cycle) for a more reliable product later.
So then you really have to ask: are people stupid for making this tradeoff? I work on a program that has its bugs, but our users do lots of useful work with the program. They may not have been better served if we delayed our releases until they were nigh-bug-free. And, in the end, it may have been counterproductive. We have often removed whole sections of code as our design concepts have improved, as OS and hardware changes have changed what our program needs to do, what tradeoffs we need to make, and what interfaces we need to work with. It may be that it's only reasonable to focus on cleaning up the code once the feature set has become nearly complete.
The only reason some of the features are included are to give people more options and as selling points.
I worked on a program where we'd had creeping featurism to the point that the program was rather bloated and fragile. Our distributors kept telling us we should stop worrying so much about new features and clean up the base application.
So we did so. During the beta testing of the new version, one of those same distributors sent us an e-mail telling us how the clean-up and interface improvements were great, but couldn't we add some more new features?
If I can record onto SuperVHS, what's the problem with recording to disk from a digital source?
Once it's digital, it can be transferred over the internet. Apparently the concept that a video capture card could do the same thing to the NTSC output (presumably macrovisioned, but that's disableable) doesn't seem to have entered the MPAA's collective semi-consciousness yet.
I don't like this kind of BS in which they remotely disable a piece of software that you've
downloaded.
It apparently simply checks the date, and refuses to run after that time. Couldn't some enterprising soul simply create a program/library/whatever that reports the date as being earlier than it is whenever Framemaker starts up? (Not that I would suggest doing such a thing, of course. That Would Be Wrong.)
[...] how else are you going to prevent someone from totally ripping off your design?
There's a legal concept known as trade dress, which is similar to trademark but not identical. It's rather fuzzy, unfortunately, but essentially if someone copies your layout to the point that a consumer would assume a relationship between yours and theirs, they are misappropriating your trade dress.
Slashdot Mirror
All most moms or anyone really needs is a 486--
maybe as much as a P-233.
Perhaps, but Intel isn't making them anymore. And even with its significantly lower transistor count, a 486 is about twice the size (and presumably, power consumption) of this chip; a 233 more than 4 times as big. You're probably getting close to the size where the wiring pads are a substantial fraction of the total chip size, so further reductions are pointless. And once you get power consumption below a certain level, further reductions are irrelevant compared to the power consumed by other pieces.
Or possibly they didn't want to give 3dfx ammo for their lawsuit with an open source driver. That would be the best reason, since with their purchase of 3dfx perhaps they could open the drivers?
Those that don't want to wear one only hurt themselves.
Seatbelts help keep the driver behind the wheel of the car; in many cases, this may reduce the severity of an accident on other drivers, as the driver may be able to make adjustments after the initial contact that reduce the damage of further contacts. Keeping the front seat passenger in his place also prevents him or her flying into the driver's lap. So it can possibly hurt me. Since the roads are a public resource, rules on what can be driven on them and how one muzt drive seem reasonable to me. (Build your own road and you can do whatever you please.)
Motorcycle helmet laws, on the other hand, serve just to protect the driver. Frankly, we could use the organ donors...
After all, if a nutcase like Perot can do it, so can someone who presents a real alternative (*cough*McCain*cough).
Umm, *cough*McCain*cough* introduced this amendment. He's a real alternative to himself?
There is NOTHING stopping you from going up to the proxy's admin and asking that a perfectly valid site be exempted from the filtering.
If you can't see it, how can you know it exists for the filtering to be removed?
Empire, the multiplayer Unix game. I lost a month of my life to that thing, and I know others who lost far more. PC games just don't compare, because you can almost always save and come back to it.
Radio is also a much smaller search space. How many people would know about a local information page, or even if they did, expect it to be updated with any frequency? If you have radio, people who are stepping through the stations can find it, and get an instant snapshot.
There is no excuse for not exercising unless you're incarcerated.
Full-time job, wife who also works full-time, two small children -- and recently, a message from the top that we don't get our "Xmas" bonus until our next version is ready for release. Some of us have our own forms of incarceration...
Oh, and I was playing indoor soccer until I hyperextended my quadriceps, and walking during my lunch break until it got so d---ed cold around here. I can outrun and outlift most healthy adults.
In college, I was weightlifting twice a week, playing (serious) badminton four times a week, and soccer three times a week, all for an hour and a half or so at a time. With all that, I got down to the extreme top weight for my height on the insurance tables. My body is not the same as your body.
After all, all this pill does is simulate something we can do quite well on our own with a bit of willpower - eat less.
Spoken like a thin person.
Unlike an addiction to a drug or one of those trivial ailments, trying to cut down on taking in food has a withdrawal symptom (hunger) that NEVER GOES AWAY. Don't eat, and I'll be hungry from now until I go to bed, and then again when I wake up in the morning.
We're out of shape due to a lack of activity, which itself is mostly due to information technology professions exercising only one's fingers. Give me a job that gives me a good workout and I'd be in pretty good shape.
And his comments about "humanity" not knowing how to make software, or even what software is, were just plain over-dramatic, hippified philosobabble.
No, I think he has a point.
In 1920, humanity did not know how to make jet engines, whether they would work well, etc. Then
Frank Whittle invented them, and now "humanity" knows how to make them.
The same may be true for software. Over the years, we've developed ideas of abstraction, encapsulation, structured programming, object-oriented programming, BNF, program proving, and so forth. At one time these concepts didn't exist; now they're well-known and fairly well understood. There are no doubt concepts still undiscovered and unexplored that will improve our software development in future.
Yet another book about how the printing press sparked the rennaisance, how original.
The iron plow was probably at least as important.
The Roman scratch plow didn't make deep furrows, so planting had to wait until the weather was warmer and frost wouldn't kill the seedlings as often. With the iron plow (which itself was possible thanks to the metallurgical improvements made in the quest for better armor), farmers could be more productive and fewer farmers were needed. So more people were able to do non-farming things, including inventing the printing press.
The Windows CD player, at least as of 1996, also had similar functionality. I entered a large number of CD title/track lists, and then lost them when I got a new office machine and forgot to copy that file.
One possible way to start back might be with a counter-EULA. Something like "By clicking you agree never to be a party to any attempt at enforcement of EULAs that restrict the user's rights beyond the normal restrictions of copyright law when no EULA is present."
This is how *all* contracts work
Absolutely not.
In all contracts, the terms are disclosed before any part of the deal goes through. This is not the case with EULAs.
If you want to contractually license your software to me, you can do so by giving me the contract terms (say, via a webpage), and me actively agreeing to those terms. *Then* the money changes hands. That's perfectly acceptable.
If I buy from a store, and *then* you add terms, I can't refuse the terms without significant inconvenience to me and the vendor. Vendors may refuse to take back stuff, may mischarge my card, lose the credit slip, etc.
You want to sell in a store? Live by the understood rules. Want to change the rules -- i.e., add an EULA? Don't sell in a store. It's *that* simple.
Bullshit. I'm a software engineer in a company that writes monitoring software for mission critical back end systems. In my personal life, I've grown more and more and more frustrated at the utter shit I have to put up with in software on my home computer.
That's as maybe, but it doesn't change the fact that the article presents hardware issues as examples to support claims about the shoddy quality of software engineering. A few bits from, say, Daikatana would have been a better choice. Or something about the reported 65K bugs in Windows 2000.
Alternatively, open a Slashdot story with a fair number of comments in flat mode using Netscape under Windows 98. That's my favorite quick way to crash 98, and a quick and easy example. (Mozilla doesn't crash it though.)
Why aren't we looking into making voice over IP an option.
People are. But in the interim, we need the phones running.
Show me a corporate setup where users save documents to the hard drive?
Mine. LAN performance just isn't up to snuff for performance intensive stuff. (We use revision control to store permanent, group stuff.)
I have yet to find another person at our company with their main project directory on the same path.
I have never met a user who has a particular problem with a setup where they have a home drive mapped. In fact it makes sense to them.. home is in H:
I searched for "Windows home drive" on Google, and the only letter mentioned there was Z:. Either you don't know the standard, or they don't, or there is no standard, not even a de facto one. So how is a software developer supposed to know?
Of course, the file was set to r--r--r--. Do you think that any end user is going to understand this?
Perhaps not, but the average Windows user would use the file explorer to check and change the permissions. Couldn't you just set up these people in Linux with KExplorer or one of the many other graphical file explorers?
It seems to me that the file system is really where Linux users have the edge. No horrible drive letters, no matter what machine you're on your stuff generally goes to ~username. Compare this to Windows, where user configuration for the GUI gets put into a subdirectory of the Windows directory, documents go to c:\my documents or more likely just C:\, or D:\, or the directory where the app is running, or... And with multiple users on a single machine, it gets even worse.
Windows wins with the apps and by having a complete set of completed UI elements. But its file system is a horrible kludge.
Can anyone come up with a system that will "eliminate the middle man" whilst allowing an artist to have a decent living?
Mp3.com already has. The 18 year old who performs as "The Cynic Project" has made nearly $80,000 in payback earnings from MP3.com in the last year or so, and that doesn't count CD sales. Online selling of music can work, and growth of higher-bandwidth connections, MP3 players, etc. mean potential future profits are much higher.
Although it says that it will block the playback when connected to a VCR and it won't when connected to a TV, I can't see how it can differentiate between the two.
It doesn't. The current crop of consumer VCRs react to a macrovision-scrambled input, and don't display it properly. This is by design, unfortunately.
The software industry rewards companies for quick production, not quality results.
Not true!
The software customers reward companies for quick production. So what does that mean? It means people are willing to make the tradeoff of having a less reliable product for less now, rather than paying more (for a longer development cycle) for a more reliable product later.
So then you really have to ask: are people stupid for making this tradeoff? I work on a program that has its bugs, but our users do lots of useful work with the program. They may not have been better served if we delayed our releases until they were nigh-bug-free. And, in the end, it may have been counterproductive. We have often removed whole sections of code as our design concepts have improved, as OS and hardware changes have changed what our program needs to do, what tradeoffs we need to make, and what interfaces we need to work with. It may be that it's only reasonable to focus on cleaning up the code once the feature set has become nearly complete.
The only reason some of the features are included are to give people more options and as selling points.
I worked on a program where we'd had creeping featurism to the point that the program was rather bloated and fragile. Our distributors kept telling us we should stop worrying so much about new features and clean up the base application.
So we did so. During the beta testing of the new version, one of those same distributors sent us an e-mail telling us how the clean-up and interface improvements were great, but couldn't we add some more new features?
If I can record onto SuperVHS, what's the problem with recording to disk from a digital source?
Once it's digital, it can be transferred over the internet. Apparently the concept that a video capture card could do the same thing to the NTSC output (presumably macrovisioned, but that's disableable) doesn't seem to have entered the MPAA's collective semi-consciousness yet.
I don't like this kind of BS in which they remotely disable a piece of software that you've
downloaded.
It apparently simply checks the date, and refuses to run after that time. Couldn't some enterprising soul simply create a program/library/whatever that reports the date as being earlier than it is whenever Framemaker starts up? (Not that I would suggest doing such a thing, of course. That Would Be Wrong.)
[...] how else are you going to prevent someone from totally ripping off your design?
There's a legal concept known as trade dress, which is similar to trademark but not identical. It's rather fuzzy, unfortunately, but essentially if someone copies your layout to the point that a consumer would assume a relationship between yours and theirs, they are misappropriating your trade dress.