Maybe if Radioshack started selling electrical components/semiconductors again then they could keep some customers. Instead they are focusing on crappy cell phones and sub-par consumer electronics. I'm lucky if I can find an LED in a radioshack anymore, much less something like a 555/556 timer that would have been commonplace there a few years ago.
I am curious, as I rarely purchase linux related books, is there alot of distribution specific material? Or is it overly generic to avoid being tied to a certain setup?
For instance when dealing with the many tools i'm sure the book discusses, there could be KDE and GNOME specific implementations, as well as alot of differences on how you will find/install the tool depending on distribution. How is this sort of thing handled?
They are indeed HDMI ready. HDMI is basically a DVI signal, and all you need is the proper cord to get your DVI into HDMI, but the DVI port must output a proper digital signal and not just the analog signal that can also be carried on DVI.
In otherwords, the ATI cards are putting out analog and digital via their DVI ports, so all you need is a DVI to HDMI cable (which isn't a converter, simply a different connector) to hook up to an HDMI TV.
I'm doing it with my ATI card, and it works well.
Video card manufacturers rarely include all the adapters needed to access the feed in every connector style, so it doesn't bother me that they haven't included the rarely used HDMI adapter.
I have ALOT of experience with Laptops, I have 3 personal laptops and 1 provided by my company. I thought it might be helpful to some if I posted brief notes about two of them.
HP ZD8110 - 3Ghz P4 HT, Radeon X600 PCI-E 128MB, 2GB Ram, 17inch Widescreen, Ubuntu Breezy - This is a workhorse. It does overheat periodically if it does not get full venting from the three bottom mounted fans. It has even overheating during an overnight compile session once or twice. During heavy use acpi -V shows me CPU temps upwards of 67C. Battery life is rarely more than 30 minutes. 200watt power supply can't even run off of most dc-ac car power inverters. I do love this laptop, It is my main computer. But these powerful laptops are what they are.
IBM Thinkpad t42p - ~1.83ghz Pentium M, ATI FireGL, 2GB Ram, Windows Server 2k3 - I do all my Windows development on this laptop. During a normal days use I typically have 3 or 4 copies of Visual Studio running, a few instances of Visio, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2000, mySQL, IIS, and Apache2. This laptop stands up to a massive workload and never gives up, it always runs perfectly cool, and in power saving mode I can get as much as 7 hours of battery life using all the extra-size battery options available from IBM. I think the huge cache on the Pentium M helps this machine deal with so much multitasking, and I often feel it is more responsive than my P4 laptop, although obviously slower for floating point intensive work. This thing is light and easy to carry around. It is great for travel.
I guess the point I am trying to make here is that there are pro's and con's to power intensive and power saving styles, hopefully the few details I mentioned help others make a decision.
In my time in Japan I found that they work extrodinarly long work weeks, and even the lowest wage employees (McDonalds, Gas Station) conducted themselves with all the dignity and courtesty of a high-wage business man.
This is only the impression of a Western worker who was in an unfamiliar culture, but the motivation and quality of the people seen in all work environments seemed far above what I see in America. Maybe this is due to the fact that there are so many people, and such competition for even the lowest of jobs, that people take their jobs far more seriously than in the U.S.
Alot of silly Anti-Japanese comments I'm seeing here. I doubt any of these people have ever been to Japan or met a Japanese person.
The Japanese are an amazing people, they cherish work ethics, integrity, and family values.
If anything, the higher suicide rate is due to the huge dignity these people have. Becuase they are so dignified, they are more ashamed of failure than Americans (for example) might be.
The rest of the world could learn alot from the Japanese people. Remember, they've been over there for ~10,000 years, and substantially civilized for ~1500. They might just know something that us Americans haven't learned in our few hundred year reign.
All the posts so far seem to be joking about this, but it sorta freaks me out!
It seems to be strong evidence that parasites can control the behavior of a host in fairly complex ways, which opens up alot of sci-fi movies for a real life encore.
Anyone familiar with these parasites in more detail? Any information? Are there other parasites that humans have that do cause changes of behavior?
How do these things evolve? Are they complex lifeforms, or very very simple?
Honestly I don't see much of a logical reason to avoid the market. The only reason I can come up with is "We will get bad publicity". But I think that this is not a huge concern.
When I watch a news economy show, or read an article from an investment paper, I see that those buying stock in the company think that the China situation was the correct decision. (And of course anything that makes money will be the correct decision for this crowd).
When I look at googles dedicated following, I don't see many people bothered by this. The general consensus seems to be "Google has to abide by the laws of countries they do business in, just like everyone else".
The only people raising trouble appear to be politicians looking for an issue to help get them reelected, or politicians angry that Google is not complying with their request for search history information. (So the government doesn't have to do its own research).
But on the point we were speaking about, I figure it's probably possible that a shareholder could have sued Google if Google's only explanation was "We dont think its the right thing to do". And I suppose there is also some small chance this suit would have been successful. But that does seem to be an extremely unlikely thing... Just the same, I posted it becuase it seemed like a very interesting point of view.
Profit Maximization. In Anglo-American jurisdictions, for-profit corporations are generally required to serve the best interests of the shareholders, a rule that courts have interpreted to mean the maximization of share value, and thus profits. Corporate directors are prohibited by corporate law from sacrificing profits to serve some other interest, including such areas as environmental protection, or the improvement of the welfare of the community. For example, when Henry Ford cut dividends and reduced car prices in order to increase the number of people who could afford to buy his cars, his brother-in-law, Mr. Dodge, a shareholder, sued him for having harmed profitability: Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 170 N.W 688 (Mich.S.C. 1919). Mr. Dodge succeeded and went on to form his own car company with the proceeds of the suit. Modern corporate law is settled and clear that corporate directors are only allowed to act in the best interests of the corporation, and that this means maximization of profits (see for example J.A. VanDuzer The Law of Partnerships and Corporations (Irwin Law: 2003, Toronto) at pp. 271-2). Corporations may be able to make charitable contributions to society, but only where this will enable profit maximization (e.g. if the public relations value of the contribution would boost profits more than any other potential use of the funds).
Something to keep in mind, that was mentioned last time we had an article like this:
There are very strict and clear legal precedents about publicly traded companies. They are required by law to make all decisions in such a way that will maximize profit. I think people are forgetting that Google is not a private company, there is not one man making the business decisions.
They are responsible to millions of shareholders, a large board of directors, and many private investors.
If Google took actions (i.e. avoiding Chinese market) that significantly reduced profits, for no logical reason, they could easily be facing massive litigation from shareholders.
If i'm not horribly mistaken, I think the Dodge Car Company was started with money the Dodge brothers received from Ford Motor Company when they sued Ford for keeping their car prices low instead of maximizing profits. (Dodge brothers were investors in Ford). Maybe someone else can provide more detail about this.
People get so excited/concerned when they hear things like 'warmest in 1200 years'. I suppose if your a bible-thumper that seems like a long time, since the earth has only been around for a few thousand years.
For the rest of us, 1200 years is less than a fraction of a percent of the age of our planet. Hence the warmest in 1200 years shouldn't lead anyone to believe it's abnormally warm at all.
Maybe when I hear "The warmest in 500 million years" I'll likely say to myself, "Damn, that's not good."
1. AssHat Inc. Makes a cell phone using Windows CE
2. Miser LLC. Makes a very similar cell phone using Windows CE
3. AssHat Inc. Sues Miser LLC. for copying their Windows CE use case.
4. Microsft Inc. comes to the rescue and stomps all over the AssHats.
5. Profit!
The idea here is certain device manufacturers were afraid to make windows ce devices for fear of infringing on existing devices. Now they don't have to worry. Microsoft is essentially trying to remove the IP rights of their customers, to increase customer base.
I think most suits are brought under the assumption an agreement will be made, and a hefty sum of money paid, to avoid even more expensive legal costs.
Likely Microsoft's idea here, is that by standing behind these people, no one will even try to sue them in the first place.
Most lawyers are aware of how hard it would be to beat Microsoft in court, and most companies don't have that kind of capital to spend trying.
If your a religious asshat, then you have a valid point.
Those of us who make decisions logically know that in the real world, Goliath wins 99.9% of the time. Especially against the crap lawsuits that David is wielding.
I suppose you could always pray for protection from litigation.
Some people have said that a patent holder should have to be actively developing a patent for it to be valid. I don't think this is the case. A patent protects the idea/plan/mechanism, and patenting your product and then never building the product is fine, you are more than welcome to make your income by licensing out use of your idea. The company should however have to actively protect the patent, like a trademark. If a company patents something and hides it in a drawer until a handfull of fortune 500 companies are using it, then whips it out for a lawsuit, the patent should be invalidated.
The real problem here is the granting of patents for obvious ideas, such as queuing an email that cannot yet be delivered.
Tech patents need to be fairly short-term, and need to have an incredibly difficult obviousness test to pass.
A room of experts on the subject should be fully and entirely briefed on the problem, and list obvious solutions. If any of the solutions they list coincide with the pending patent, then it must be declined.
Well, typically this is occuring becuase the company realized that 30% of their payroll was a bunch of Bozo's that weren't pulling their weight.
Or in the case of the large US Car manufacturers doing this lately, becuase they realized 100% of their (Unionized) payroll was a bunch of Bozo's that weren't pulling their weight.
Often in these situations the company will actually be more productive (i.e. get more work done) after all these people are gone.
Of course in other situations the company is just completely out of money, and goes around firing all the highest paid people regardless of consideration for talent/worth. That just means the company won't be a company too much longer.
I do feel bad for all these people, and hope most of them were given significant notice of this impending doom. But the sense of entitlement is uncalled for, the jobs were a privilege not a right. And besides, Oracle must look great on a resume, usually I put it in the 'Skills' section, but these people can put it under 'Work History' also! I bet if they are worth their weight in salt they'll find a new job real quick.
Touchscreens have always been touched by fingers. Go to your local fast food vendor and see all the greasy teenagers poking at the touch screen point of sale system all day long. It never breaks, in fact the screen remains quite content.
Basically what I'm saying is that they've got the touchscreen thing down pretty good at this time, and if you use the right type it can be very durable and reliable.
I agree with you. My point is merely that the general public will not realize what is happening until it messes with their day to day lives. It is very much similar to DRM in that respect, although DRM issues seem to have progressed a bit further, and since things like Sony's rootkit people are beginning to wake up.
It will take a "Rootkit" before people realize what the Patriot Act is doing.
I'll also add a little note to say that I do support a few parts of the patriot act, it is the areas regarding secret subpoenas and lack of oversight that scare me.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe if Radioshack started selling electrical components/semiconductors again then they could keep some customers. Instead they are focusing on crappy cell phones and sub-par consumer electronics. I'm lucky if I can find an LED in a radioshack anymore, much less something like a 555/556 timer that would have been commonplace there a few years ago.
That was a well written review!
The book sounds cool, I might go pick up a copy.
I am curious, as I rarely purchase linux related books, is there alot of distribution specific material? Or is it overly generic to avoid being tied to a certain setup?
For instance when dealing with the many tools i'm sure the book discusses, there could be KDE and GNOME specific implementations, as well as alot of differences on how you will find/install the tool depending on distribution. How is this sort of thing handled?
They are indeed HDMI ready. HDMI is basically a DVI signal, and all you need is the proper cord to get your DVI into HDMI, but the DVI port must output a proper digital signal and not just the analog signal that can also be carried on DVI.
In otherwords, the ATI cards are putting out analog and digital via their DVI ports, so all you need is a DVI to HDMI cable (which isn't a converter, simply a different connector) to hook up to an HDMI TV.
I'm doing it with my ATI card, and it works well.
Video card manufacturers rarely include all the adapters needed to access the feed in every connector style, so it doesn't bother me that they haven't included the rarely used HDMI adapter.
Too bad he most of the country voted for him. You lost. Twice. Get the fuck over it and better luck next time.
I have ALOT of experience with Laptops, I have 3 personal laptops and 1 provided by my company. I thought it might be helpful to some if I posted brief notes about two of them.
HP ZD8110 - 3Ghz P4 HT, Radeon X600 PCI-E 128MB, 2GB Ram, 17inch Widescreen, Ubuntu Breezy - This is a workhorse. It does overheat periodically if it does not get full venting from the three bottom mounted fans. It has even overheating during an overnight compile session once or twice. During heavy use acpi -V shows me CPU temps upwards of 67C. Battery life is rarely more than 30 minutes. 200watt power supply can't even run off of most dc-ac car power inverters. I do love this laptop, It is my main computer. But these powerful laptops are what they are.
IBM Thinkpad t42p - ~1.83ghz Pentium M, ATI FireGL, 2GB Ram, Windows Server 2k3 - I do all my Windows development on this laptop. During a normal days use I typically have 3 or 4 copies of Visual Studio running, a few instances of Visio, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2000, mySQL, IIS, and Apache2. This laptop stands up to a massive workload and never gives up, it always runs perfectly cool, and in power saving mode I can get as much as 7 hours of battery life using all the extra-size battery options available from IBM. I think the huge cache on the Pentium M helps this machine deal with so much multitasking, and I often feel it is more responsive than my P4 laptop, although obviously slower for floating point intensive work. This thing is light and easy to carry around. It is great for travel.
I guess the point I am trying to make here is that there are pro's and con's to power intensive and power saving styles, hopefully the few details I mentioned help others make a decision.
In my time in Japan I found that they work extrodinarly long work weeks, and even the lowest wage employees (McDonalds, Gas Station) conducted themselves with all the dignity and courtesty of a high-wage business man.
This is only the impression of a Western worker who was in an unfamiliar culture, but the motivation and quality of the people seen in all work environments seemed far above what I see in America. Maybe this is due to the fact that there are so many people, and such competition for even the lowest of jobs, that people take their jobs far more seriously than in the U.S.
Alot of silly Anti-Japanese comments I'm seeing here. I doubt any of these people have ever been to Japan or met a Japanese person.
The Japanese are an amazing people, they cherish work ethics, integrity, and family values.
If anything, the higher suicide rate is due to the huge dignity these people have. Becuase they are so dignified, they are more ashamed of failure than Americans (for example) might be.
The rest of the world could learn alot from the Japanese people. Remember, they've been over there for ~10,000 years, and substantially civilized for ~1500. They might just know something that us Americans haven't learned in our few hundred year reign.
That being said, I hate chopsticks.
All the posts so far seem to be joking about this, but it sorta freaks me out!
It seems to be strong evidence that parasites can control the behavior of a host in fairly complex ways, which opens up alot of sci-fi movies for a real life encore.
Anyone familiar with these parasites in more detail? Any information? Are there other parasites that humans have that do cause changes of behavior?
How do these things evolve? Are they complex lifeforms, or very very simple?
Honestly I don't see much of a logical reason to avoid the market. The only reason I can come up with is "We will get bad publicity". But I think that this is not a huge concern.
When I watch a news economy show, or read an article from an investment paper, I see that those buying stock in the company think that the China situation was the correct decision. (And of course anything that makes money will be the correct decision for this crowd).
When I look at googles dedicated following, I don't see many people bothered by this. The general consensus seems to be "Google has to abide by the laws of countries they do business in, just like everyone else".
The only people raising trouble appear to be politicians looking for an issue to help get them reelected, or politicians angry that Google is not complying with their request for search history information. (So the government doesn't have to do its own research).
But on the point we were speaking about, I figure it's probably possible that a shareholder could have sued Google if Google's only explanation was "We dont think its the right thing to do". And I suppose there is also some small chance this suit would have been successful. But that does seem to be an extremely unlikely thing... Just the same, I posted it becuase it seemed like a very interesting point of view.
This is stolen from another post from a few weeks ago:
From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation :
Profit Maximization. In Anglo-American jurisdictions, for-profit corporations are generally required to serve the best interests of the shareholders, a rule that courts have interpreted to mean the maximization of share value, and thus profits. Corporate directors are prohibited by corporate law from sacrificing profits to serve some other interest, including such areas as environmental protection, or the improvement of the welfare of the community. For example, when Henry Ford cut dividends and reduced car prices in order to increase the number of people who could afford to buy his cars, his brother-in-law, Mr. Dodge, a shareholder, sued him for having harmed profitability: Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 170 N.W 688 (Mich.S.C. 1919). Mr. Dodge succeeded and went on to form his own car company with the proceeds of the suit. Modern corporate law is settled and clear that corporate directors are only allowed to act in the best interests of the corporation, and that this means maximization of profits (see for example J.A. VanDuzer The Law of Partnerships and Corporations (Irwin Law: 2003, Toronto) at pp. 271-2). Corporations may be able to make charitable contributions to society, but only where this will enable profit maximization (e.g. if the public relations value of the contribution would boost profits more than any other potential use of the funds).
Something to keep in mind, that was mentioned last time we had an article like this:
There are very strict and clear legal precedents about publicly traded companies. They are required by law to make all decisions in such a way that will maximize profit. I think people are forgetting that Google is not a private company, there is not one man making the business decisions.
They are responsible to millions of shareholders, a large board of directors, and many private investors.
If Google took actions (i.e. avoiding Chinese market) that significantly reduced profits, for no logical reason, they could easily be facing massive litigation from shareholders.
If i'm not horribly mistaken, I think the Dodge Car Company was started with money the Dodge brothers received from Ford Motor Company when they sued Ford for keeping their car prices low instead of maximizing profits. (Dodge brothers were investors in Ford). Maybe someone else can provide more detail about this.
What is this "yesterday" you speak of?
touché good sir. touché.
I thought yesterday Slashdot told me there was no such thing as time. So 1200 years ago is actually now. I'm so confused.
What kind of mathematics introduces numbers 'less than a fraction'?
... Which of course is redundant, but that emphasizes the smallness :)
None. But rather the english language use of the word that is defined as "A small bit." according to Mr. Webster and his dictionary.
Hence I was saying "Less than a small amount"
I was looking for a +1 Funny modifier, One can only look to the slashdot moderators for an explanation of my comment being Interesting or Insightful.
That being said, Your obviously an asshat too.
People get so excited/concerned when they hear things like 'warmest in 1200 years'. I suppose if your a bible-thumper that seems like a long time, since the earth has only been around for a few thousand years.
For the rest of us, 1200 years is less than a fraction of a percent of the age of our planet. Hence the warmest in 1200 years shouldn't lead anyone to believe it's abnormally warm at all.
Maybe when I hear "The warmest in 500 million years" I'll likely say to myself, "Damn, that's not good."
No, let me give an example of what they mean:
1. AssHat Inc. Makes a cell phone using Windows CE
2. Miser LLC. Makes a very similar cell phone using Windows CE
3. AssHat Inc. Sues Miser LLC. for copying their Windows CE use case.
4. Microsft Inc. comes to the rescue and stomps all over the AssHats.
5. Profit!
The idea here is certain device manufacturers were afraid to make windows ce devices for fear of infringing on existing devices. Now they don't have to worry. Microsoft is essentially trying to remove the IP rights of their customers, to increase customer base.
I think most suits are brought under the assumption an agreement will be made, and a hefty sum of money paid, to avoid even more expensive legal costs.
Likely Microsoft's idea here, is that by standing behind these people, no one will even try to sue them in the first place.
Most lawyers are aware of how hard it would be to beat Microsoft in court, and most companies don't have that kind of capital to spend trying.
If your a religious asshat, then you have a valid point.
Those of us who make decisions logically know that in the real world, Goliath wins 99.9% of the time. Especially against the crap lawsuits that David is wielding.
I suppose you could always pray for protection from litigation.
In my understanding, the rule of equivalents meant that an item could infringe on a patent if it was even remotely equivalent.
But this is no longer valid, see this article.
Some people have said that a patent holder should have to be actively developing a patent for it to be valid. I don't think this is the case. A patent protects the idea/plan/mechanism, and patenting your product and then never building the product is fine, you are more than welcome to make your income by licensing out use of your idea. The company should however have to actively protect the patent, like a trademark. If a company patents something and hides it in a drawer until a handfull of fortune 500 companies are using it, then whips it out for a lawsuit, the patent should be invalidated.
The real problem here is the granting of patents for obvious ideas, such as queuing an email that cannot yet be delivered.
Tech patents need to be fairly short-term, and need to have an incredibly difficult obviousness test to pass.
A room of experts on the subject should be fully and entirely briefed on the problem, and list obvious solutions. If any of the solutions they list coincide with the pending patent, then it must be declined.
Well, typically this is occuring becuase the company realized that 30% of their payroll was a bunch of Bozo's that weren't pulling their weight.
Or in the case of the large US Car manufacturers doing this lately, becuase they realized 100% of their (Unionized) payroll was a bunch of Bozo's that weren't pulling their weight.
Often in these situations the company will actually be more productive (i.e. get more work done) after all these people are gone.
Of course in other situations the company is just completely out of money, and goes around firing all the highest paid people regardless of consideration for talent/worth. That just means the company won't be a company too much longer.
I do feel bad for all these people, and hope most of them were given significant notice of this impending doom. But the sense of entitlement is uncalled for, the jobs were a privilege not a right. And besides, Oracle must look great on a resume, usually I put it in the 'Skills' section, but these people can put it under 'Work History' also! I bet if they are worth their weight in salt they'll find a new job real quick.
Touchscreens have always been touched by fingers. Go to your local fast food vendor and see all the greasy teenagers poking at the touch screen point of sale system all day long. It never breaks, in fact the screen remains quite content.
Basically what I'm saying is that they've got the touchscreen thing down pretty good at this time, and if you use the right type it can be very durable and reliable.
You mean only Vista and Wine?
We will find a way.
I agree with you. My point is merely that the general public will not realize what is happening until it messes with their day to day lives. It is very much similar to DRM in that respect, although DRM issues seem to have progressed a bit further, and since things like Sony's rootkit people are beginning to wake up.
It will take a "Rootkit" before people realize what the Patriot Act is doing.
I'll also add a little note to say that I do support a few parts of the patriot act, it is the areas regarding secret subpoenas and lack of oversight that scare me.