"Crashed"? Come on, quit with the exaggerations. Look at this graph. Thus far they have sunk $1 per share or ~20%. When your stock value is that low it's easy to lose a large percentage over a small amount.
A 20% decline in the valuation of a company is a pretty big fall. The price of a single share is not really relevant, and should not make it any easier or harder to lose or gain a given percentage of value, unless the price-per-share is in really crazy territory (sub-dollar, or multiple hundreds of dollars).
I find it strange that Red Hat's stock is higher than Sun's and yet Sun brings in billions every quarter and has 6.6 billion in the bank. I think it says a lot about the relavance of using stock prices as a note for discussion.
The price of a single share of Red Hat stock is higher than the price of a single share of Sun stock. However, that's not really relevant, because Sun has so many more shares outstanding. Red Hat's market cap is around $1.1B, whereas Sun's is around $12B.
The price of a single share tells you nothing. After all, Microsoft's current share price is around the $26 mark, but there are many smaller companies who have stock valuations significantly in excess of that per share, they just have far fewer shares outstanding.
Basically, what's important is percentage changes in the overall valuation of the company.
Sure, he may have been toying with the idea before MS employed him. But they funded his research - don't they get some credit for that?
I'd also point out that all companies are made up of individuals. When MS Research come up with something cool, it's a little bit unfair to say that MS as a whole doesn't deserve any credit because it was just one individual that had the idea.
I'd bet that if, instead of Microsoft, it was some "Slashdot approved" company that came up with this, nobody here would be jumping through hoops to explain why it didn't really count.
It may have been intended for that purpose. However, I'll wager that a sizeable number of BitTorrent users just use it for pirating movies and music. If you believe otherwise, you are deluding yourself.
Well, there's all this stuff seeping out now about how the intelligence data was pretty shaky in the first place. It's hitting the media much more in Britain than in the US (judging by the BBC website, at any rate). I don't think it's much of a stretch to think that the advice was "Well, Mr. President, we have some sketchy circumstantial stuff, but we don't know for sure that he doesn't have any WMD." Bush made the call that he was going to go to war anyway, and instead of just telling it straight, he made out that the evidence was highly compelling.
The whole thing really did have a feel that Bush wanted to go to war, he had a timetable, and he was going to stick to it regardless of what the evidence was or wasn't, what the Iraqis did or didn't do, or what any of America's allies happened to think of it. That's not really responsible leadership.
You have good examples (although I rebut some of them below). However, don't you find it at least slightly bizarre that the biggest political danger Clinton was in was a row over whether he got a blow-job from an intern? Anyway, some rebuttals:
1) Why do you think that cutting military funding is intrinsically "un-American"? America spends vastly more per capita on the military than any other nation on Earth. Cutting that back a bit (like to where the US is only spending 2 or 3 times as much as anyone else) would seem like sound fiscal policy to me. At any rate, regardless of whether you agree with the policy, it's somewhat far-fetched to regard it as "un-American".
2) There were definitely blunders in the handling of the Bosnian-Serb conflict, although I think it's a stretch to describe them as war-criminal (the indictements notwithstanding), and I don't think there was any gross misleading of the public.
3) Relaxing export restrictions could again be seen as sane policy. After all, the US has an appalling current-account deficit, so it might be a good idea to start exporting some stuff. It's not like the Chinese couldn't have got computers from other places instead. In any event, regardless of whether you agree with the policy, it hardly qualifies as "un-American". (Indeed, isn't free trade an American value?). You can also hardly blame Clinton for spys at Los Alamos - that's a failure of execution, not a failure of policy. (Contrast with Bush, who was given the intelligence data that the evidence was shaky, but chose to go ahead with a policy of misleading the public.)
4) And Bush was funded by the US oil industry, who had most to gain from an Iraqi invasion. In effect, Bush was bribed by private enterprise to go to war.
5) I don't know enough about that to comment
6) Yup, that was pretty shameful. No argument there. However, it's still not, in my opinion, on the same order of magnitude as taking the country to war on a false pretext.
7) Again, I don't know enough about that to comment.
George W. may be stupid, but I'm struggling to imagine a scenario where merely being slightly slow-witted would account for his actions.
Before the war, we were led to believe that Iraq was full of actual weapons of mass destruction, and that no doubt we find them the minute our troops set foot in the country.
Now of course, we haven't found so much as test-tube, despite having had the run of the country for months, and there's now emerging evidence that perhaps the intelligence data wasn't quite so clear-cut as we were originally led to believe.
Where's the room for stupidity? Bush clearly knew that there was basically no real evidence in support of his assertions, but told the public a different story so that he could have his war. That's not stupidity, that's gross malfeasence.
If people considered impeaching Clinton because of a dumb lie about a blow-job, they should sure as hell get rid of someone who put American servicemen in harms way, at the cost of billions of dollars, on a shaky pretext, which they lied to the public about.
What "un-American" activities are you referring to? The thing that the Republicans seemed to get their panties in the biggest knot about Clinton was his lying about getting a blow-job from an intern. I guess that's somehow considered a more serious matter than, for example, lying to the public about the evidence for taking the country to war?
To be even more precise, it's the number-one way to whack a system written in C running on a machine with a downwards-growing stack.
I've always wondered about this. Why do stacks grow downwards? It seems to me that it wouldn't be any less efficient for them to grow upwards, and growing upwards would have the handy side-effect that buffer overflows would be less likely to be exploitable. Of course, it's a bit late to change how the most popular processors in the world work now...
Except that it's perfectly legal under the current standard. It would be thoroughly annoying to make it illegal, potentially breaking existing code, just to disambiguate a poorly-conceived convenience extension.
IANAL, but I think the 'balance of hardships' is about whether to grant a preliminary injunction, pending a ruling on the actual legal question. In other words, the judge is saying because of the balance of hardships, it's better to suspend enforcement of the bill pending a decision. If he'd thought the balance of hardships was the other way, he'd have ruled to keep the bill pending a decision. I don't think it necessarily reflects on what the final decision about the legality of the bill will be.
Yes, you could do all those things. But, of course, you'd have to in order to get at the source code.
If someone made some cool kernel mods that they shipped in their embedded device, they would not be under any obligation to release the source to those mods were it not for the GPL. Without copyright law, no GPL, and without GPL you'd have to go to all that reverse engineering effort if you wanted to know how it worked.
In effect, it would turn the GPL into more like the BSD license. The two are very clearly not equivalent. (Want to know what changes MS made to the BSD TCP/IP stack? Tough, they don't have to tell you.)
I'd bet that many users never install any software that didn't come with the machine. If it's got a web browser and comes pre-installed with an office suite, they're good to go.
I was trying to make the point that the software average users use most frequently comes pre-installed on many systems. The user isn't around at install time to select from options.
How is Joe Sixpack supposed to make an informed choice between Mozilla and Opera? And, more to the point, why should he have to give a flying fuck in the first place? Forcing users to make choices which they don't understand, and which they don't care about, is a step backwards in usability.
Virus scanners and firewalls are mysterious voodoo to the average user. If you give them options, they will select the default, and then worry that maybe they did it wrong. Bundling that stuff with the basic pre-install of the system, in a way that the average user doesn't have to screw with is a good thing. Knowledgeable users can always install whatever they feel like later on.
But when is "install time"? Most people buy their PCs with the OS (and other software) pre-installed. Or should the consumer have to go through some kind of half-assed selection procedure the first time they boot it up? I think Joe Blow wants to buy a computer, plug it in, and have it just work without having to answer dozens of questions which he neither understands nor cares about.
You sit with the screen of your handheld game much closer than you sit to your TV. I would guess that the number of radians per pixel (the only relevant quantity) is broadly similar.
In any event, as a graphics professional, I can assure you that having reasonably high resolution textures is going to make a noticeable quality difference, even on the size of display they are contemplating.
The original post was asserting that the storage size was a waste because of the size of the display. There are so many ways in which that statement is flat out wrong. Let me enumerate a few of them:
- High resolution textures are still relevant
- You don't have to load all your textures at once, you might want to stream them (e.g. racing games) or load different sections of the environment as the game progresses (e.g. RPGs), or load up different subsets depending on user selections (e.g. sports games). With bigger storage you therefore enable longer tracks, bigger environments, and more user selections. Surely a good thing.
- The storage might well be used for things other than textures. For example, video clips easily get bulky, and audio is huge (think of all the commentary in sports games).
I can tell you're not a graphics developer. The stated screen resolution, at 480x272 is not so vastly lower than the 640x480 that the average console game outputs. And console games certainly do use fairly high resolution textures, and plenty of them. The constraining factor is not that making them higher resolution doesn't buy you anything, it's that you run out of memory.
Anyway, depending on the game genre, the storage is just as likely to be for audio data or streaming videos as it is for graphics. For example, in sports games, the main bulk of data on the DVD is streamed commentary, not textures.
Even where textures are the bulk of the data, you don't load it all at once. Taking sports games again - you only load the textures you need for the stadium and teams that happen to be playing, but you have maybe 30 times that amount sitting on the disk, because you have to have all the different teams and arenas available for people to select.
Oh, and the Culture ships also have way cooler names. How many SW ships have names like What are the civilian applications? or Anticipation of a new lover's arrival or No more mister nice guy ?
Slashdot Mirror
A 20% decline in the valuation of a company is a pretty big fall. The price of a single share is not really relevant, and should not make it any easier or harder to lose or gain a given percentage of value, unless the price-per-share is in really crazy territory (sub-dollar, or multiple hundreds of dollars).
I find it strange that Red Hat's stock is higher than Sun's and yet Sun brings in billions every quarter and has 6.6 billion in the bank. I think it says a lot about the relavance of using stock prices as a note for discussion.
The price of a single share of Red Hat stock is higher than the price of a single share of Sun stock. However, that's not really relevant, because Sun has so many more shares outstanding. Red Hat's market cap is around $1.1B, whereas Sun's is around $12B.
The price of a single share tells you nothing. After all, Microsoft's current share price is around the $26 mark, but there are many smaller companies who have stock valuations significantly in excess of that per share, they just have far fewer shares outstanding.
Basically, what's important is percentage changes in the overall valuation of the company.
Control panel / Display / Appearance, adjust the Font Size combo-box.
What's the problem?
I'd also point out that all companies are made up of individuals. When MS Research come up with something cool, it's a little bit unfair to say that MS as a whole doesn't deserve any credit because it was just one individual that had the idea.
I'd bet that if, instead of Microsoft, it was some "Slashdot approved" company that came up with this, nobody here would be jumping through hoops to explain why it didn't really count.
It may have been intended for that purpose. However, I'll wager that a sizeable number of BitTorrent users just use it for pirating movies and music. If you believe otherwise, you are deluding yourself.
Riiiight....
The whole thing really did have a feel that Bush wanted to go to war, he had a timetable, and he was going to stick to it regardless of what the evidence was or wasn't, what the Iraqis did or didn't do, or what any of America's allies happened to think of it. That's not really responsible leadership.
1) Why do you think that cutting military funding is intrinsically "un-American"? America spends vastly more per capita on the military than any other nation on Earth. Cutting that back a bit (like to where the US is only spending 2 or 3 times as much as anyone else) would seem like sound fiscal policy to me. At any rate, regardless of whether you agree with the policy, it's somewhat far-fetched to regard it as "un-American".
2) There were definitely blunders in the handling of the Bosnian-Serb conflict, although I think it's a stretch to describe them as war-criminal (the indictements notwithstanding), and I don't think there was any gross misleading of the public.
3) Relaxing export restrictions could again be seen as sane policy. After all, the US has an appalling current-account deficit, so it might be a good idea to start exporting some stuff. It's not like the Chinese couldn't have got computers from other places instead. In any event, regardless of whether you agree with the policy, it hardly qualifies as "un-American". (Indeed, isn't free trade an American value?). You can also hardly blame Clinton for spys at Los Alamos - that's a failure of execution, not a failure of policy. (Contrast with Bush, who was given the intelligence data that the evidence was shaky, but chose to go ahead with a policy of misleading the public.)
4) And Bush was funded by the US oil industry, who had most to gain from an Iraqi invasion. In effect, Bush was bribed by private enterprise to go to war.
5) I don't know enough about that to comment
6) Yup, that was pretty shameful. No argument there. However, it's still not, in my opinion, on the same order of magnitude as taking the country to war on a false pretext.
7) Again, I don't know enough about that to comment.
Now of course, we haven't found so much as test-tube, despite having had the run of the country for months, and there's now emerging evidence that perhaps the intelligence data wasn't quite so clear-cut as we were originally led to believe.
Where's the room for stupidity? Bush clearly knew that there was basically no real evidence in support of his assertions, but told the public a different story so that he could have his war. That's not stupidity, that's gross malfeasence.
If people considered impeaching Clinton because of a dumb lie about a blow-job, they should sure as hell get rid of someone who put American servicemen in harms way, at the cost of billions of dollars, on a shaky pretext, which they lied to the public about.
What "un-American" activities are you referring to? The thing that the Republicans seemed to get their panties in the biggest knot about Clinton was his lying about getting a blow-job from an intern. I guess that's somehow considered a more serious matter than, for example, lying to the public about the evidence for taking the country to war?
Seems like it would be a security win to switch to upwards-growing stacks in future. Or am I missing something?
I've always wondered about this. Why do stacks grow downwards? It seems to me that it wouldn't be any less efficient for them to grow upwards, and growing upwards would have the handy side-effect that buffer overflows would be less likely to be exploitable. Of course, it's a bit late to change how the most popular processors in the world work now...
Except that it's perfectly legal under the current standard. It would be thoroughly annoying to make it illegal, potentially breaking existing code, just to disambiguate a poorly-conceived convenience extension.
Until somebody adds a member called 'j' to foo, at which point your code still compiles fine, but is no longer doing what you intended.
IANAL, but I think the 'balance of hardships' is about whether to grant a preliminary injunction, pending a ruling on the actual legal question. In other words, the judge is saying because of the balance of hardships, it's better to suspend enforcement of the bill pending a decision. If he'd thought the balance of hardships was the other way, he'd have ruled to keep the bill pending a decision. I don't think it necessarily reflects on what the final decision about the legality of the bill will be.
If someone made some cool kernel mods that they shipped in their embedded device, they would not be under any obligation to release the source to those mods were it not for the GPL. Without copyright law, no GPL, and without GPL you'd have to go to all that reverse engineering effort if you wanted to know how it worked.
In effect, it would turn the GPL into more like the BSD license. The two are very clearly not equivalent. (Want to know what changes MS made to the BSD TCP/IP stack? Tough, they don't have to tell you.)
Uh, no. Perhaps you should stop getting your political reporting from Fox News?
I was trying to make the point that the software average users use most frequently comes pre-installed on many systems. The user isn't around at install time to select from options.
How is Joe Sixpack supposed to make an informed choice between Mozilla and Opera? And, more to the point, why should he have to give a flying fuck in the first place? Forcing users to make choices which they don't understand, and which they don't care about, is a step backwards in usability.
Virus scanners and firewalls are mysterious voodoo to the average user. If you give them options, they will select the default, and then worry that maybe they did it wrong. Bundling that stuff with the basic pre-install of the system, in a way that the average user doesn't have to screw with is a good thing. Knowledgeable users can always install whatever they feel like later on.
But when is "install time"? Most people buy their PCs with the OS (and other software) pre-installed. Or should the consumer have to go through some kind of half-assed selection procedure the first time they boot it up? I think Joe Blow wants to buy a computer, plug it in, and have it just work without having to answer dozens of questions which he neither understands nor cares about.
Yeah, but that's because Joe Ballamer is just an intern tester. Oh, wait, you were talking about Steve Ballmer...
You sit with the screen of your handheld game much closer than you sit to your TV. I would guess that the number of radians per pixel (the only relevant quantity) is broadly similar.
In any event, as a graphics professional, I can assure you that having reasonably high resolution textures is going to make a noticeable quality difference, even on the size of display they are contemplating.
The original post was asserting that the storage size was a waste because of the size of the display. There are so many ways in which that statement is flat out wrong. Let me enumerate a few of them:
- High resolution textures are still relevant
- You don't have to load all your textures at once, you might want to stream them (e.g. racing games) or load different sections of the environment as the game progresses (e.g. RPGs), or load up different subsets depending on user selections (e.g. sports games). With bigger storage you therefore enable longer tracks, bigger environments, and more user selections. Surely a good thing.
- The storage might well be used for things other than textures. For example, video clips easily get bulky, and audio is huge (think of all the commentary in sports games).
Anyway, depending on the game genre, the storage is just as likely to be for audio data or streaming videos as it is for graphics. For example, in sports games, the main bulk of data on the DVD is streamed commentary, not textures.
Even where textures are the bulk of the data, you don't load it all at once. Taking sports games again - you only load the textures you need for the stadium and teams that happen to be playing, but you have maybe 30 times that amount sitting on the disk, because you have to have all the different teams and arenas available for people to select.
You've been lucky. Accessory outlets are still not available on all (or even most?) flights.
Triumph: Okay, trivia time. What was Han Solo frozen in?
Crowd: Carbonite!
Triump: No, the correct answer is: who gives a fuck?
Oh, and the Culture ships also have way cooler names. How many SW ships have names like What are the civilian applications? or Anticipation of a new lover's arrival or No more mister nice guy ?
What's a GCV? IIRC the Culture has:
GSV = General Systems Vehicle. The big-ass mother-of-all-ships (literally) thing, in various different classes (e.g. Continent-class, Plate-class).
GCU = General Contact Unit. Your general purpose spaceship thingy.
ROU = Rapid Offensive Unit. Warship.
LOU = Limited Offensive Unit. Warship.
VFP = Very Fast Picket. IIRC this is a demiliterised ROU.
Although I certainly agree that the average Culture ship could thorougly trash even the nastiest thing from the SW or ST universes.