I read that article to say that they did not want to sell because TPB only raised $20,000, which is much less than the asking price of one billion dollars. I bet if TPB put even one percent of the asking price on the table, those moral objections would have evaporated in a heartbeat. Moreover, he appears to be hoping for a movie deal with Hollywood. He could kiss that aspiration goodbye if he sold to them... which is probably also worth more than 20 grand.
So no, I stand by the assertion that they did not sell because TPB couldn't raise the money.
I went to school at the University of San Francisco. I worked in the Registrar's office. Every Friday we would make back up tapes of all the school records and drive them up to the a storage facility near Tahoe so that they would survive in case of an earthquake.
This was only 6 to 10 years ago, so obviously there are still some people who think that "modern building codes" don't cut it for earthquakes and are willing (or legally required, like we were) to take some pretty expensive countermeasures.
The real estate cost thing is a good point, though.
I think the real cost savings would be in heating, though... I mean, your entire data center is floating in a pool of coolant, all you have to do is pump it through radiators. It would not be glacial, but good enough. The summary seems to chalk this up to environmentalism, but cooling data centers costs big bucks...
Except that they appear to be researching their locations pretty carefully. San Francisco does not have hurricanes or tropical storms as the water around it is too shallow to hold all the energy. Besides, the Bay is just that: A bay. I don't know if you've ever been to SF, but pier 50 is way south well inside the bay. It is very safe.
The land in that area is another issue. San Francisco was nearly completely leveled a couple of times in the 20th century alone by earthquakes.
I think that the data-center on ships idea is great...
Because they once tried to buy the island-nation of Sealand to have a place free of legal authorities from which to operate. They could not raise enough money, or it was just a publicity stunt; who knows. Buying an off-shore data center seems like the next logical step to me (I know that these are not really off shore in the legal sense. It was a joke). You can read about it here.
The school will never put vista back on these boxes, I assure you. The first rule of IT support is "once the box is doing what it should be, don't fuck with it." So that concern is moot.
As for why they bought boxes with Vista instead of XP, anything we can come up with is pure speculation and pretty much worthless. However, I would guess that whoever made that decision, knowing that he would just ghost XP onto the boxes with the volume license, just took the cheapest option. Maybe there was a promotion on that particular configuration; who knows.
I would like to point out that nobody buys 200 computers from dell without going through the business division. Even the with the cheapest boxes, you are still looking at a $100,000 of expenditures. That is not huge volume, but it is enough to get draw attention from higher budgetary authorities in any institution, which means whoever is making the purchase has researched his options and is able to justify himself to that authority.
Try using a Mac sometime, or Linux Why is it that one can't say something positive about windows without somebody like you assuming that one must be ignorant?
Read my post. I am an avid linux user. I even mentioned Ubuntu and compiz and stated that I am a linux user. Debian is my flavor of choice, to be precise. I administer a variety of systems at work, including Debian, Ubuntu, Solaris (although that box bit the dust a few months ago), win2000, winXP, and Vista, which (obviously) means I have to be familiar with how they work. When I bought my last personal computer, I looked very seriously at Macs and I decided against it because I don't like the UI.
I am no user interface expert by any measure, but I am not ignorant on the issue.
You don't like Vista's eye candy. Fine. I don't either. That neither changes the fact that a lot of people like Vista's eye candy nor the fact that Vista's eyecandy does present some useful features to the user (like the mouse-over thumb nails I mentioned before). That also does not change the fact that on a technical level, Vista does have several improvements over XP.
Look, everybody trashes Vista because it's eyecandy takes up power. Well, guess what? For the overwhelming majority of PC users, you can put all of the technical improvements imaginable into an operating system, but if it does not look different and do something visual that they have never seen before, they are not going to notice the positive differences. I mean, even the leading linux distro (Ubuntu) has jumped through hoops to get compiz (read: eye candy) to work well enough to leave on by default. Why? People like to see spinning cubical desktops. It's fun. People also like clear window borders with shadows. It's fun.
What's more, if Microsoft does not change the UI across the board a bit, then people are not going to accept the differences that really are necessary for technical reasons. UAC (which is ultimately an improvement, even if it could have been done more gracefully) would never be acceptable to a non-technical user if it was just grafted on top of what looked like XP. For those of us who understand the difference between technical improvements and eyecandy and do not want the eyecandy, it is very easy to turn off. Once it is off, I find that, lack of driver support aside (for which I really can't blame MS), it is a nice incremental improvement over XP in a lot of ways. For example, the way limited privilege accounts are handled is vastly improved, which is really nice in a multi-user environment (businesses, universities, libraries).
Finally, there is the fact that eye candy can actually improve the usability of the OS. I find that the way vista gives me a little thumbnail of minimized or covered windows when I mouse of the task bar really useful.
I'm typically a Linux user, but as "the IT guy" at the small business where I work, I have to administer a couple vista boxes. I've bought a computer with Vista for my inlaws. They like it. The people where I work like it. Yes, the eyecandy takes power, but eyecandy always takes power, and eyecandy is what the overwhelming majority of PC users want.
Face it folks, for the market at large, Vista is an improvement.
Yeah, except that it's not Firefox: it's writing to THE W3C STANDARD which Firefox and almost every other browser that exists (including Opera and khtml based browsers such as Konqueror and Safari) just happen to render correctly (with a couple of caveats).
IE, on the other hand, is a freaking nightmare. I find that IE7 works pretty well; in general I can fix its small bugs by changing the css in ways that don't break the standard or break rendering in other browsers, but IE6 is so horridly in compliant that even for a lot of really common css tasks that were around long before IE6 was released and that Microsoft helped to write are totally broken. Things like the:hover pseudo class and default element margins and padding are totally broke. Floats act funny. You cannot fix it without breaking compliance with the standard and other browsers, which means that you have to write a special css file for IE6. It's not even consistent within versions of IE: IE5.5 and 5.5 for Macs don't render the same code in the same way.
So, IE7 finally mostly works, but MS fucked the user interface up so bad that everybody wants to stick with IE6, which is still the world's most common browser over a year after IE7's release. Do you realize how bad that is? How many people haven't upgraded from Firefox 1.5 to Firefox 2?
I can only conclude that Microsoft does this kind of stuff on purpose. They have a standard for trident: their web development products always produce code that renders perfectly in all versions of IE. Rendering the w3c standard is not hard: a bunch of hobbyists and a small company in Norway have both separately proven that you can do it on relatively limited resources. The only reason they could possibly have for their horribly broken browser is that they have an interest in web standards being broken.
It doesn't appear slashdotted to me, but just in case:
In March of 2006 my wife Mary and I owned about 3,500 books. We both have eclectic interests, voracious appetites for knowledge, and a great love of used bookstores. The problem was that we had no idea what books we had or where any of them were. We lost books all the time, cursed late into the night digging through piles for that one book we knew must be there, and even bought books only to find that we already owned them. There were books on random shelves, books on the floor, we were tripping over books when we walked up and down the stairs. In short, we had a mess.
We needed to get organized. We needed a way to store all of our books so they were easily accessible. We also needed to integrate the two separate book collections which represented one of the remaining holdouts of our single lives. We got together and came up with a list of requirements for our new system....and yes we are both engineers.
It needs to be easy to find a book.
It needs to be easy to add a book to the system.
The systems needs to handle foreign language books.
It needs to be easy to maintain the system going forward.
The initial cataloging effort can't take forever.
To complete this project we needed a system to organize all of the books, a way to quickly add books to that system, and a place to store all of the books.
A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place
Our first task was to decide what system we should use for ordering the books. Most of the systems used to organize books are based on combinations of the author's name, the title of the book, and the category of the subject matter. Some of the systems provide a general outline for where a book should be and other systems are very specific. We considered three different systems: alphabetical, Dewey Decimal, and Library of Congress.
Alphabetizing
Probably the most common system used for organizing home libraries is alphabetizing. Books are arranged in alphabetical order by title or author's name. This makes books reasonably easy to find, but puts Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie next to Runner's World Guide to Injury Prevention by Dagny Scott Barrios. This organization makes it difficult to browse books.
Adding categorization to alphabetical sorting can fix that problem. This system organizes books into categories and then alphabetically within those categories. In this system the book Three Seductive Ideas by Jerome Kagan might end up next to The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker because they are both about psychology. This system makes browsing by subject possible, but it requires you to create categories for each book. Should The State, War, and the State of War by Kalevi J. Holsti be categorized as international relations, warfare, or politics? Creating categories which will work well with a set of unknown books is very difficult. We needed a system with established categories.
Dewey Decimal
Dewey Decimal is familiar to just about everyone who came through the American educational system. There is a good chance the library from your grade school used Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC for short). DDC assigns each book a number based on its subject matter. DDC organized all categories into three levels. The system has 10 main classes, 100 divisions and 1000 sections. The book Larousse Gastronomique edited by Prosper Montagne may have a DDC number of 641.3/003 21 - 600 the main class for technology, 641 is the division for food and drink, and 3/003 21 indicates the specific subsection specified in that library.
However, DDC has one big problem. The assigned numbers are not fixed. There is no central authority assigning DDC numbers to books and the same book can have a different number in two different libraries. We didn't want to spend time working out the right catalog number for each of our books; we just wanted
I ripped my whole CD collection in ogg about a year ago. Last week, I went to buy my first mp3 player, and I can't find a single one in my "budget" price range that has ogg support. I'm stuck re-ripping or downloading my entire library. I think that right there kills it for most people.
By the way, a lot of people here are focusing on the fact that ogg doesn't support DRM, but neither does mp3. Seems to be a rather tangential argument.
I've been to universities in 3 countries: the US, Belgium and Germany. In the US, the school I went to (University of San Francisco) is a second tier school, and I was a mediocre student. The two universities I've been to in Europe (UCL in Belgium and the Humbolt in Berlin) are both considered their countries' best schools in the field I am in.
The school in the US was very expensive... but you know what? It was really better. The class sizes are smaller (and I am comparing undergrad school in the US to grad school here), the course work was more demanding, the professors actually taught and counseled, the school had better facilities (the library, for example, had more books and journals, not to mention quality of life facilities). The result is that I am better prepared than any of my European peers to do just about any academic activity. I am one of the best students, without having changed my habits particularly from when I was in the US and despite the fact that none of my course work is in my native language and/b> that I have a full time job.
This may be a hard pill to swallow, you really do get what you pay for, even in education.
I find it interesting that you would say that Cheney was against the war. In every account I have heard he was one of the principal motors of this particular decision. Where can I read more?
NATO is in Afghanistan because it gave a variety of European countries (like Germany) the chance to deploy troops for the first time since WWII, setting a precedent. It was also a time when several European countries thought the best way to influence world events was to participate in them. Finally, it is important to remember that Afghanistan has a potentially much more interesting position from a geopolitical standpoint, given that western Europe in general is still scared shitless of the Russians. Furthermore, that was a time when the US still had enough political capital to push certain actions in the international arena, which our brave leaders have now managed to totally piss away with stupid "access of evil" speeches.
Plus if he were the president of any other country (say if Iran were to invade another country to halt its nuclear weapons program, for example) the US administration and media would surely call him a war criminal. The US administration would only be calling that person a war criminal if the US had a stake in the world thinking that that person is a war criminal, just as the Europeans are only calling Bush a war criminal because European leaders have a stake in their populations having a hostile stance against the US.
Since 1990, there have been major wars in Tajikistan, Sudan, Chad, Ivory coast, Chechnya, Congo, Thailand, Somalia, Israel and Lebanon, just to name the big ones. All of these wars must have had an aggressor, however the accusations of "War Criminal" are few and far between in Europe or the US (Rwanda and Kosovo are pretty much the only two). I wonder why?
Germany after WWI has nothing to do with imperialism. I was not talking about imperialism. I was responding to your accusation that disbanding the Iraqi army was a bad idea. Sorry about the miscommunication.
Anyway, the Germany army was left intact with an authorized strength of 100,000 men or so and the mission to defend the fatherland after WWI. This backfired because:
it was largely seen as an insult to German pride, allowing for extremist movements to rise
it was inadequate to provide for German self-defense (in terms of keeping internal order or defending the borders), yet was trusted with this mission, thus creating an unstable environment and allowing for extremist movements to rise
it provided a cadre of trained and able officers and NCOs to facilitate the rapid growth of the military under the Nazis
the restrictions were easily circumvented: the Germans just bought training space in Russia
Were there other factors that lead to the breakdown of the international system that we call WW2? Of course, but this is definitely among them.
I'm not aware of this interpretation being seriously disputed. Nobody disputes the definition. They dispute its application. Why Bush a war criminal and not, say, de Gaulle (attempting to re-establish French colonies in Indochina and annex Algeria)?
No shit. That's my fucking point, they don't even grasp 500 year old international relations theory. And my point (without swearing) was that they don't need to grasp 500 year old IR theory (kind of an anachronism to call it that...). Machiavelli is interesting to understand where the roots of our current theory comes from, but it really has no bearing on modern IR.
Not just about this army thing, but about the Iraq invasion in general, just go back to what Villepin and Chirac said in 2002-2003 as to what was going to happen. It's not hindsight, it's "I TOLD YOU SO" in big fat red capitals. And not (just) from your fringe leftist nutbags. You cannot call it "I told you so" because European opposition was in itself a power play. Ever since the fall of the USSR the countries of the EU have been trying to assert themselves against a US that they no longer need to protect them, and European opposition was an expression of that diplomatic stance.
Furthermore, the failure (which is not yet a complete failure) is at least partially due to active European opposition (as opposed to passive opposition) against the United States position on a variety of plains, including the diplomatic one. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That's why it's kind of mind-boggling to see the US fail so miserably in its imperialist occupation in Iraq. Not at all. Great powers have been defeated repeatedly by insurgencies since Machiavelli wrote. Reading a slim tome on inter-state relations in renaissance Italy hardly gives one the understanding necessary to defeat a well-organized, well supplied insurgency in a hostile country. Also, characterizing this as an imperial action is stretching the term a bit... to the point that it seems you are using it for its pejorative
value rather than as an actual characterization of the war.
the part where they disbanded the Iraqi army instead of giving them at least tokens of power is especially laughable in this respect Hindsight is always 20/20 from our comfortable arm chairs. I can give you a dozen historical examples of where this strategy worked. (Germany & Japan in WWII, the South in the civil war, etc). I can also give you a dozen examples of where leaving the enemy's army intact in a token position backfired (Germany after WWI, Caesar after Pharsalus, etc).
it shows that Bush, along with his merry band of war criminals, is most certainly as stupid and ignorant as he looks. Bush is not a war criminal. Please do not cheapen the term.
Machiavelli laid this out in The Prince centuries ago. It's a very readable book While it is true that Machiavelli is, along with Hobbes, one of the founding authors of what is known as the "realist" school of thought in international relations as a study, his thought processes are largely obsolete. A number of things have changed since then, including the rise of nation states and the institution of sovereignty, the advent of international institutions, and the increasing importance of trans-frontier relations in the day to day lives of people. Most importantly, in my mind at least, is the fact that he assumes an uncrossable barrier between domestic and public spaces, which experience has shown not to reflect reality. I would really recommend that you read "Anarchy is what states make of it" by Alexander Wendt, "International Institutions: Two Approaches" by Robert Keohane and, of course, "Soft Power" by Joseph Nye if you would like to see a more modern interpretation of power politics.
Ghengis Khan did not build a government that could outlast the absence of his troops. His empire fell apart right after he died. The Khmer Rouge fell apart at the first sign of foreign intervention. The Germans did significant damage to their rear-area security on the Eastern front by terrorizing local populations and creating fertile ground from within which Soviet saboteurs could operate.
The Romans were mostly successful because they extensively employed the strategy of Pax Romana, which basically the antique equivalent of the modern concept of soft power. You see, for most of the peoples around the Roman Empire, war was endemic (for example, the Germanic tribes raided each other on an annual basis) and they knew that life would be longer, more prosperous, and more peaceful if they joined their larger neighbor.
There are many kinds of power (power being defined as the ability to influence events to your advantage). The ability to inflict damage is one, the ability to entice others to your position is another, the ability to bring economic factors into the game is another, political will is another, and so on. Also, power is non-fungible, that is, being powerful in one area does not compensate for a great weakness in another area. This is why the EU, which is a great economic power, is not considered a world power as it lacks the political will to act in concert. Similarly, India's large population and military might (they are a nuclear power) do not compensate for its economic weakness.
Fear works to some degree, but only in concert with other elements of power. You can only build a stable system if the majority of people within that system agree on its fundamental precepts (this is one aspect of political power). So, if we try to build a government in Iraq based on fear, we are going to run into problems that the power we exert in one arena (military might) will not compensate for our failure to exert power in other arenas, such as political will.
Developing a strategy that will bring several elements of power to bear is doable, but very difficult. That is why, in the future, we should avoid electing uneducated people (an MBA is not an education), or at least elect uneducated people who will appoint educated advisors and then listen to them instead of the veep.
Where I am at (Belgium), FNAC is mostly a book store, and a fine one at that. They also have a small technology section that sells a surprisingly high quality stock of wares. They have knowledgeable, courteous sales people in all of their departments and they don't try to shove special deals down your throat; the computers don't even have any nagware. It is expensive, but you get a great return on your investment.
I really thought that they were a company that "gets" the digital age; people looking for entertainment will pay if you have a value to add to that entertainment, which they provide, and the fact that their stores are always packed proves it.
Looks like they have turned to the dark side, though. Back to Dell and Amazon.
That kind of mirrors the experience I have been having with the open-source alternative: GNU/Brain (its in the Debian repos). I get my head plugged into the USB port, mount my brain with GNU/Brain and cp -u/brain/*/dev/null, and after a couple hours it comes back with an exit status of 0, all fine and dandy. Yet, inexplicably, when I go to check on my backup, nothing is there. I lost the memory of my wedding day (although, mysteriously, my divorce is still quite intact).
This is the same thing that has been happening to my server backups. I think it might be time to give Microsoft a second chance.
Well, regardless of whether you liked him, the fact remains that he was enormously influential in English literature. He was the first (English) author to really treat romance seriously, he was the first (English) author to really explore human psychology (making him a true child of the renaissance), he was the first English author to really write about the people around him in the language that those people used (another renaissance concern for humanity), and he coined a great number of terms. He created the narrative nature of modern English literature. Most poets and authors who followed him for centuries tried to imitate him in some fashion.
The fact that most of his plots were the same is a cultural difference between today and his era. In his time, playwrights repeated the same memes over and over (a legacy of the middle ages, when most people preferred safe continuity to dangerous innovation in most aspects of their lives), using the variations within those basic story lines to communicate their message.
As for his prose, I even though I am no literary scholar, your assertion astounds me. The prose sections of Henry V are widely regarded as some of his best work. Of course, the fact that it is "unreadable" is perhaps related to the fact that is was intended for live performance (have you ever tried to read a movie script? not very enthralling) and to the fact that it was written in various English dialects from the 16th century.
Slashdot Mirror
I read that article to say that they did not want to sell because TPB only raised $20,000, which is much less than the asking price of one billion dollars. I bet if TPB put even one percent of the asking price on the table, those moral objections would have evaporated in a heartbeat. Moreover, he appears to be hoping for a movie deal with Hollywood. He could kiss that aspiration goodbye if he sold to them... which is probably also worth more than 20 grand.
So no, I stand by the assertion that they did not sell because TPB couldn't raise the money.
I went to school at the University of San Francisco. I worked in the Registrar's office. Every Friday we would make back up tapes of all the school records and drive them up to the a storage facility near Tahoe so that they would survive in case of an earthquake.
This was only 6 to 10 years ago, so obviously there are still some people who think that "modern building codes" don't cut it for earthquakes and are willing (or legally required, like we were) to take some pretty expensive countermeasures.
The real estate cost thing is a good point, though.
I think the real cost savings would be in heating, though... I mean, your entire data center is floating in a pool of coolant, all you have to do is pump it through radiators. It would not be glacial, but good enough. The summary seems to chalk this up to environmentalism, but cooling data centers costs big bucks...
Except that they appear to be researching their locations pretty carefully. San Francisco does not have hurricanes or tropical storms as the water around it is too shallow to hold all the energy. Besides, the Bay is just that: A bay. I don't know if you've ever been to SF, but pier 50 is way south well inside the bay. It is very safe.
The land in that area is another issue. San Francisco was nearly completely leveled a couple of times in the 20th century alone by earthquakes.
I think that the data-center on ships idea is great...
Because they once tried to buy the island-nation of Sealand to have a place free of legal authorities from which to operate. They could not raise enough money, or it was just a publicity stunt; who knows. Buying an off-shore data center seems like the next logical step to me (I know that these are not really off shore in the legal sense. It was a joke). You can read about it here.
I bet you could sell server space on one of these to thepiratebay...
The school will never put vista back on these boxes, I assure you. The first rule of IT support is "once the box is doing what it should be, don't fuck with it." So that concern is moot.
As for why they bought boxes with Vista instead of XP, anything we can come up with is pure speculation and pretty much worthless. However, I would guess that whoever made that decision, knowing that he would just ghost XP onto the boxes with the volume license, just took the cheapest option. Maybe there was a promotion on that particular configuration; who knows.
I would like to point out that nobody buys 200 computers from dell without going through the business division. Even the with the cheapest boxes, you are still looking at a $100,000 of expenditures. That is not huge volume, but it is enough to get draw attention from higher budgetary authorities in any institution, which means whoever is making the purchase has researched his options and is able to justify himself to that authority.
Read my post. I am an avid linux user. I even mentioned Ubuntu and compiz and stated that I am a linux user. Debian is my flavor of choice, to be precise. I administer a variety of systems at work, including Debian, Ubuntu, Solaris (although that box bit the dust a few months ago), win2000, winXP, and Vista, which (obviously) means I have to be familiar with how they work. When I bought my last personal computer, I looked very seriously at Macs and I decided against it because I don't like the UI.
I am no user interface expert by any measure, but I am not ignorant on the issue.
You don't like Vista's eye candy. Fine. I don't either. That neither changes the fact that a lot of people like Vista's eye candy nor the fact that Vista's eyecandy does present some useful features to the user (like the mouse-over thumb nails I mentioned before). That also does not change the fact that on a technical level, Vista does have several improvements over XP.
Look, everybody trashes Vista because it's eyecandy takes up power. Well, guess what? For the overwhelming majority of PC users, you can put all of the technical improvements imaginable into an operating system, but if it does not look different and do something visual that they have never seen before, they are not going to notice the positive differences. I mean, even the leading linux distro (Ubuntu) has jumped through hoops to get compiz (read: eye candy) to work well enough to leave on by default. Why? People like to see spinning cubical desktops. It's fun. People also like clear window borders with shadows. It's fun.
What's more, if Microsoft does not change the UI across the board a bit, then people are not going to accept the differences that really are necessary for technical reasons. UAC (which is ultimately an improvement, even if it could have been done more gracefully) would never be acceptable to a non-technical user if it was just grafted on top of what looked like XP. For those of us who understand the difference between technical improvements and eyecandy and do not want the eyecandy, it is very easy to turn off. Once it is off, I find that, lack of driver support aside (for which I really can't blame MS), it is a nice incremental improvement over XP in a lot of ways. For example, the way limited privilege accounts are handled is vastly improved, which is really nice in a multi-user environment (businesses, universities, libraries).
Finally, there is the fact that eye candy can actually improve the usability of the OS. I find that the way vista gives me a little thumbnail of minimized or covered windows when I mouse of the task bar really useful.
I'm typically a Linux user, but as "the IT guy" at the small business where I work, I have to administer a couple vista boxes. I've bought a computer with Vista for my inlaws. They like it. The people where I work like it. Yes, the eyecandy takes power, but eyecandy always takes power, and eyecandy is what the overwhelming majority of PC users want.
Face it folks, for the market at large, Vista is an improvement.
Yeah, except that it's not Firefox: it's writing to THE W3C STANDARD which Firefox and almost every other browser that exists (including Opera and khtml based browsers such as Konqueror and Safari) just happen to render correctly (with a couple of caveats).
:hover pseudo class and default element margins and padding are totally broke. Floats act funny. You cannot fix it without breaking compliance with the standard and other browsers, which means that you have to write a special css file for IE6. It's not even consistent within versions of IE: IE5.5 and 5.5 for Macs don't render the same code in the same way.
IE, on the other hand, is a freaking nightmare. I find that IE7 works pretty well; in general I can fix its small bugs by changing the css in ways that don't break the standard or break rendering in other browsers, but IE6 is so horridly in compliant that even for a lot of really common css tasks that were around long before IE6 was released and that Microsoft helped to write are totally broken. Things like the
So, IE7 finally mostly works, but MS fucked the user interface up so bad that everybody wants to stick with IE6, which is still the world's most common browser over a year after IE7's release. Do you realize how bad that is? How many people haven't upgraded from Firefox 1.5 to Firefox 2?
I can only conclude that Microsoft does this kind of stuff on purpose. They have a standard for trident: their web development products always produce code that renders perfectly in all versions of IE. Rendering the w3c standard is not hard: a bunch of hobbyists and a small company in Norway have both separately proven that you can do it on relatively limited resources. The only reason they could possibly have for their horribly broken browser is that they have an interest in web standards being broken.
Ok. Rant over.
Don't bother with a book: W3Schools has got you covered.
In March of 2006 my wife Mary and I owned about 3,500 books. We both have eclectic interests, voracious appetites for knowledge, and a great love of used bookstores. The problem was that we had no idea what books we had or where any of them were. We lost books all the time, cursed late into the night digging through piles for that one book we knew must be there, and even bought books only to find that we already owned them. There were books on random shelves, books on the floor, we were tripping over books when we walked up and down the stairs. In short, we had a mess.
...and yes we are both engineers.
We needed to get organized. We needed a way to store all of our books so they were easily accessible. We also needed to integrate the two separate book collections which represented one of the remaining holdouts of our single lives. We got together and came up with a list of requirements for our new system.
To complete this project we needed a system to organize all of the books, a way to quickly add books to that system, and a place to store all of the books.
A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place
Our first task was to decide what system we should use for ordering the books. Most of the systems used to organize books are based on combinations of the author's name, the title of the book, and the category of the subject matter. Some of the systems provide a general outline for where a book should be and other systems are very specific. We considered three different systems: alphabetical, Dewey Decimal, and Library of Congress.
Alphabetizing
Probably the most common system used for organizing home libraries is alphabetizing. Books are arranged in alphabetical order by title or author's name. This makes books reasonably easy to find, but puts Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie next to Runner's World Guide to Injury Prevention by Dagny Scott Barrios. This organization makes it difficult to browse books.
Adding categorization to alphabetical sorting can fix that problem. This system organizes books into categories and then alphabetically within those categories. In this system the book Three Seductive Ideas by Jerome Kagan might end up next to The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker because they are both about psychology. This system makes browsing by subject possible, but it requires you to create categories for each book. Should The State, War, and the State of War by Kalevi J. Holsti be categorized as international relations, warfare, or politics? Creating categories which will work well with a set of unknown books is very difficult. We needed a system with established categories.
Dewey Decimal
Dewey Decimal is familiar to just about everyone who came through the American educational system. There is a good chance the library from your grade school used Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC for short). DDC assigns each book a number based on its subject matter. DDC organized all categories into three levels. The system has 10 main classes, 100 divisions and 1000 sections. The book Larousse Gastronomique edited by Prosper Montagne may have a DDC number of 641.3/003 21 - 600 the main class for technology, 641 is the division for food and drink, and 3/003 21 indicates the specific subsection specified in that library.
However, DDC has one big problem. The assigned numbers are not fixed. There is no central authority assigning DDC numbers to books and the same book can have a different number in two different libraries. We didn't want to spend time working out the right catalog number for each of our books; we just wanted
I ripped my whole CD collection in ogg about a year ago. Last week, I went to buy my first mp3 player, and I can't find a single one in my "budget" price range that has ogg support. I'm stuck re-ripping or downloading my entire library. I think that right there kills it for most people.
By the way, a lot of people here are focusing on the fact that ogg doesn't support DRM, but neither does mp3. Seems to be a rather tangential argument.
I've been to universities in 3 countries: the US, Belgium and Germany. In the US, the school I went to (University of San Francisco) is a second tier school, and I was a mediocre student. The two universities I've been to in Europe (UCL in Belgium and the Humbolt in Berlin) are both considered their countries' best schools in the field I am in.
The school in the US was very expensive... but you know what? It was really better. The class sizes are smaller (and I am comparing undergrad school in the US to grad school here), the course work was more demanding, the professors actually taught and counseled, the school had better facilities (the library, for example, had more books and journals, not to mention quality of life facilities). The result is that I am better prepared than any of my European peers to do just about any academic activity. I am one of the best students, without having changed my habits particularly from when I was in the US and despite the fact that none of my course work is in my native language and/b> that I have a full time job.
This may be a hard pill to swallow, you really do get what you pay for, even in education.
I find it interesting that you would say that Cheney was against the war. In every account I have heard he was one of the principal motors of this particular decision. Where can I read more?
NATO is in Afghanistan because it gave a variety of European countries (like Germany) the chance to deploy troops for the first time since WWII, setting a precedent. It was also a time when several European countries thought the best way to influence world events was to participate in them. Finally, it is important to remember that Afghanistan has a potentially much more interesting position from a geopolitical standpoint, given that western Europe in general is still scared shitless of the Russians. Furthermore, that was a time when the US still had enough political capital to push certain actions in the international arena, which our brave leaders have now managed to totally piss away with stupid "access of evil" speeches.
Since 1990, there have been major wars in Tajikistan, Sudan, Chad, Ivory coast, Chechnya, Congo, Thailand, Somalia, Israel and Lebanon, just to name the big ones. All of these wars must have had an aggressor, however the accusations of "War Criminal" are few and far between in Europe or the US (Rwanda and Kosovo are pretty much the only two). I wonder why?
Anyway, the Germany army was left intact with an authorized strength of 100,000 men or so and the mission to defend the fatherland after WWI. This backfired because:
- it was largely seen as an insult to German pride, allowing for extremist movements to rise
- it was inadequate to provide for German self-defense (in terms of keeping internal order or defending the borders), yet was trusted with this mission, thus creating an unstable environment and allowing for extremist movements to rise
- it provided a cadre of trained and able officers and NCOs to facilitate the rapid growth of the military under the Nazis
- the restrictions were easily circumvented: the Germans just bought training space in Russia
Were there other factors that lead to the breakdown of the international system that we call WW2? Of course, but this is definitely among them.Furthermore, the failure (which is not yet a complete failure) is at least partially due to active European opposition (as opposed to passive opposition) against the United States position on a variety of plains, including the diplomatic one. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Ghengis Khan did not build a government that could outlast the absence of his troops. His empire fell apart right after he died. The Khmer Rouge fell apart at the first sign of foreign intervention. The Germans did significant damage to their rear-area security on the Eastern front by terrorizing local populations and creating fertile ground from within which Soviet saboteurs could operate.
The Romans were mostly successful because they extensively employed the strategy of Pax Romana, which basically the antique equivalent of the modern concept of soft power. You see, for most of the peoples around the Roman Empire, war was endemic (for example, the Germanic tribes raided each other on an annual basis) and they knew that life would be longer, more prosperous, and more peaceful if they joined their larger neighbor.
There are many kinds of power (power being defined as the ability to influence events to your advantage). The ability to inflict damage is one, the ability to entice others to your position is another, the ability to bring economic factors into the game is another, political will is another, and so on. Also, power is non-fungible, that is, being powerful in one area does not compensate for a great weakness in another area. This is why the EU, which is a great economic power, is not considered a world power as it lacks the political will to act in concert. Similarly, India's large population and military might (they are a nuclear power) do not compensate for its economic weakness.
Fear works to some degree, but only in concert with other elements of power. You can only build a stable system if the majority of people within that system agree on its fundamental precepts (this is one aspect of political power). So, if we try to build a government in Iraq based on fear, we are going to run into problems that the power we exert in one arena (military might) will not compensate for our failure to exert power in other arenas, such as political will.
Developing a strategy that will bring several elements of power to bear is doable, but very difficult. That is why, in the future, we should avoid electing uneducated people (an MBA is not an education), or at least elect uneducated people who will appoint educated advisors and then listen to them instead of the veep.
He is obviously trying to get you to get your "inoculation" so that you will become one of them. Just don't sleep.
uh, Oxford doesn't have a department of nuclear physics.
My personal favorite was when I searched for "French Military Victories" using the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button...
Where I am at (Belgium), FNAC is mostly a book store, and a fine one at that. They also have a small technology section that sells a surprisingly high quality stock of wares. They have knowledgeable, courteous sales people in all of their departments and they don't try to shove special deals down your throat; the computers don't even have any nagware. It is expensive, but you get a great return on your investment.
I really thought that they were a company that "gets" the digital age; people looking for entertainment will pay if you have a value to add to that entertainment, which they provide, and the fact that their stores are always packed proves it.
Looks like they have turned to the dark side, though. Back to Dell and Amazon.
/*sigh...*/
That kind of mirrors the experience I have been having with the open-source alternative: GNU/Brain (its in the Debian repos). I get my head plugged into the USB port, mount my brain with GNU/Brain and cp -u /brain/* /dev/null, and after a couple hours it comes back with an exit status of 0, all fine and dandy. Yet, inexplicably, when I go to check on my backup, nothing is there. I lost the memory of my wedding day (although, mysteriously, my divorce is still quite intact).
This is the same thing that has been happening to my server backups. I think it might be time to give Microsoft a second chance.
Well, regardless of whether you liked him, the fact remains that he was enormously influential in English literature. He was the first (English) author to really treat romance seriously, he was the first (English) author to really explore human psychology (making him a true child of the renaissance), he was the first English author to really write about the people around him in the language that those people used (another renaissance concern for humanity), and he coined a great number of terms. He created the narrative nature of modern English literature. Most poets and authors who followed him for centuries tried to imitate him in some fashion.
The fact that most of his plots were the same is a cultural difference between today and his era. In his time, playwrights repeated the same memes over and over (a legacy of the middle ages, when most people preferred safe continuity to dangerous innovation in most aspects of their lives), using the variations within those basic story lines to communicate their message.
As for his prose, I even though I am no literary scholar, your assertion astounds me. The prose sections of Henry V are widely regarded as some of his best work. Of course, the fact that it is "unreadable" is perhaps related to the fact that is was intended for live performance (have you ever tried to read a movie script? not very enthralling) and to the fact that it was written in various English dialects from the 16th century.