> Maybe for home / school / small business users. But not large "enterprise" users.
Actually, I would say the exact opposite is true. The need for sophisticated data analysis and graphing is fairly niche and more typical of academic or research work than what goes on in a large enterprise. I've worked at two large companies so far, and I would say 99% of users simply use a spreadsheet as a convenient way to tabulate stuff and apply some formatting, more as a specialized word processor than anything else. In fact, much of what most people do in Excel could almost as easily be done in Word with its table feature. Given that, I would say that Excel's power is serious overkill for most users, and a lesser tool would work equally well. Those with serious data analysis needs tend to use different tools anyway, such as SPSS or perhaps even Mathematica. While just about anything is doable in Excel, once you move beyond the built-in functionality into the realm of custom VBA data processing, there are more specialized and convenient tools around.
> Do you believe that openness is the best policy when it comes to managing such threats while humanity is contained to a single planet?
Absolutely, because the people hiding the machinery of death from you cannot be trusted any more than any other human beings, just because they say "we only want your best, trust us!" Your argument could always be made ever since the first ape picked up a bone and used it as a weapon, and ever since the first fire was lit that could annihilate all known civilization at the time. Humanity has always been capable of completely wiping itself off the face of this planet, only the ease of doing so has changed--along with the sophistication of the arguments used by some for why freedom today isn't the same as freedom yesterday, and why the rules of democracy have to constantly be redefined.
> where it points out that the only people who don't have a problem with it... blah, blah, blah...
Frankly, I don't think you originally linked to the Wikipedia article to point out this contested usage, but rather under the assumption that the poster had committed a logical fallacy simply by using that phrase. The contested usage is basically just an easy to miss footnote on that page, and if that's what you meant, you would have clarified that. You're just trying to weasel out now, which frankly you don't really have to bother with since you're posting anonymously anyway. That shows me that you didn't understand much on that page. Follow some of the links in the contested usage paragraph and you will find that the main objection is that in logics it already has a well-established meaning and this modern usage essentially overloads that expression with new meaning. It is quite obvious that as used in this thread, "begs the question" does not refer to a logical fallacy but is just hyperbole for "raises the question." It seems quite obvious how that expression may have been arrived at by someone who wanted to express an urgency higher than "raises": this does not merely raise a question, it literally begs it, it implores for the question.
Well, I wouldn't consider NJ too different from some German or French rural areas, and certainly not Sweden or Finland. I think what most people that invoke the "vast distances" in the US have in mind are Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and so on, where a small town or village is literally hundreds of miles from the nearest larger urban area.
I looked up those figures recently from the last census, and while I don't have links right now, around 77% of the US population lives within what is termed metropolitan areas. While the definition of a metro area differs between countries, it is sufficiently similar to distinguish between inhabitants of extended conurbations versus those living out in Shitsville. The trend line looked like the 80% mark would be reached by the end of the decade. So basically around 80% of the US population lives in very similar density conditions as Europe or Japan. This means that the old argument that the US has crappy services because of the vast distances involved is getting old and tired. Within an urban area the cost of providing service is roughly the same across countries. Backbones between major metro areas are either serviced via line-of-sight wireless (e.g. microwave), or more recently fiber. Because of the massive bandwidth and shared access of the backbone it gets amortized fairly quickly and shouldn't contribute significantly to the overall cost of providing service. The real cost is the last mile stretch, and there the US doesn't have a major disadvantage anymore.
> The US lags because we set up our telcom infrastructure the first
LOL, what a crock. Besides, you chose the wrong countries to compare to. While some telephone deployments in the US may have been a few years ahead of anyone else, Germany and France were pioneers in the field in their own right and were right up there in rolling out infrastructure. We're talking about technology that's over one hundred years old, a few years here or there would most certainly not explain the current state of affairs.
Besides, I doubt copper rolled out in 1900 is even in use anywhere in the US. My house is in one of the oldest neighborhoods of our town and was built sometime in the mid-1890s. It still was fully piped for gas lighting and also had knob-and-tube wiring throughout when we gutted it. Yet the telephone lines running to it had probably been replaced many times throughout the years, with the latest run not being older than 20 years or so. I think you will find that to be the case for any last-mile runs in the US.
> The amiga had a separate "io" chip - the copper, which could be used to control the chips above without the CPU intervening.
Right, and I believe you loaded sprite and sound instructions into it as a sort of multimedia script, which then ran independently of the main CPU. That's why you could often find an Amiga locked up solid but with the sound and sometimes sprite animations still happily running. There's no way they could have done Dragon's Lair without all the co-processors.
You also forgot to mention the huge leap that was the AmigaOS over anything else in those days. Other than Unix there really was nothing like the AmigaOS around, with its preemptive multitasking and Unix influenced separation of OS and presentation layer. The file system was also way ahead for its day, although those flaky 3.5" floppies didn't do it any favors. The Atari ST OS (TOS) by comparison was a joke, a version of the GEM desktop. I think what made a lot of people think the ST was the superior machine was that gorgeously crisp monochrome screen, the relative lack of games, and the more no-nonsense and business-like look of the desktop. It looked and felt a lot like a Mac. The Amiga GUI always had a touch of gaudy about it, especially in the non-square pixel modes such as 640x240, but also given the cheesy color schemes and chunky graphics of many of the GUI elements. It only started looking the part much later with AmigaOS 2 and later. But from a programming point of view there was no contest. I still have some of the old ROM Kernel manuals somewhere, and just browsing through them and seeing the thoughtful design of the data structures, with an eye both towards compactness and reusability, it was a thing of beauty. It's amazing just how much functionality they packed into that smallish ROM and 256KB of RAM--although granted, that original 256K didn't take you too far.
> Everytime you hear crap about "saving our democracy" you ought to cringe. > Democracy and freedom are not the same thing.
True on both counts, but not for the reasons you cite.
> You can have a democracy or representative democracy and have a society that is all but a police state.
Explain. Just because a country like the ex-GDR called itself democratic didn't make it so. It is not about what a country CALLS itself, but how it FUNCTIONS. If its branches function along truly democratic processes that do represent the will of the people, how can it help but result in a freer society, at least by that society's definition of "free"?
Regarding the early days of the USA, back then the country was closer to an anarchy than a democracy or even a free country. Less than half the population was being represented, and the strongest were the rightest. About the best thing of those days was that the armed forces truly were defense forces and not forces of aggression and conquest.
>> In my experience Microsoft Office primarily consists of Word and either Excel or PowerPoint (or both) for most people > Then, the amount of your experience is trivial and not enough for you to formulate a proper opinion on.
Learn to parse English before letting loose with that aggression. I'm talking about most users' general perception of Office, not mine. I am well aware of what components constitute MS Office. You keep going on about me being an Office support person as if you knew me. Not that it matters for this discussion, but I'm a developer, not an Office tech, and I have written plenty of non-trivial VBA projects around Word and Excel that judging by your comments you would consider "advanced". I'm intimately familiar with Word's strengths and its infuriating limitations, particularly those relating to its object model. I also know that despite these limitations, the comprehensive integration of the VBA engine across all Office applications gives it a unique strength that OO currently cannot quite match. It is also what makes full compatibility with Office files very hard to impossible. While content is relatively easy to convert once file formats are reverse engineered, behavior much less so. VBA macros and applications, which are often a big part of custom templates in larger enterprise environments, usually have to be entirely dropped, limiting the usefulness of converted documents in such environments. Many companies for example use Excel spreadsheets that pull data in from external sources either via data source links or entirely programmatically using web services etc. For them the actual spreadsheet is really just a user interface to the data, it is not the data itself. Providing full support for such spreadsheet is a hopeless endeavor for OO unless it emulates Excel's entire object model, VBA engine, and various quirks. Microsoft is well aware of this and probably one of the reasons they're not as worried about OO as others think they should be.
Sharepoint is a totally awesome ingredient of the MS Kool-Aid that is hyped by everyone (especially by publications of the former FTC now known by its real name Redmond Media Group) and used by none. Seriously, who the HELL actually uses it?! I've seen it much more often in the context of some incredibly righteous.NET coding example out to show how few lines of code you need to accomplish some obscure task if you rely entirely on Microsoft software and infrastructure, than I have actually seen real world deployments and heavy users of Sharepoint. Some may use it as a poor man's electronic document management and workflow system, but it's hardly scalable and flexible enough when compared to the 900 lb gorillas of the EDM world, FileNET and Documentum. But hey, it fills out the MSDN nicely to the fifty gazillion CDs that make it up nowadays.
> What about all the back-end collaboration tools?
Oh, really? Do go on about those back-end collaboration tools and the ten people in the world that use them. Unless you strictly mean Exchange, there's only a handful of people that even know what Sharepoint or any of the other even more obscure Backoffice components do. In my experience Microsoft Office primarily consists of Word and either Excel or PowerPoint (or both) for most people, with Access, FrontPage and Publisher barely registering on anyone's radar. All I can say about OO is that the spreadsheet and presentation components are not as strong or user friendly as the MS Office parts, but the word processor is definitely up there.
> Again, whether that is a good or a bad POV is not, actually, relevant.
That is a nice way to muddy the waters of our very existence. Taking your approach leads down the road of questioning even the most basic and well established theories and facts about life, the universe and everything. Nothing in their funding stipulates the advancement of a certain POV, they are essentially funding scientists at large (within Germany anyway) to contribute whatever their professional views are to Wikipedia, which can eventually lead to a sort of peer reviewing process in a public forum. Nothing prevents dissenters from disputing any material presented on a Wikipedia page, the hope is that over time these battles of authority will result in a more authoritative Wikipedia, and will perhaps also let them refine an authority-based editing system. The only ones that should be afraid of a rational discourse in a public forum should be those without a rational basis.
That's EXACTLY what this funding is about, to get scientists that are reputable in their field (in this case environmental sciences) to edit Wikipedia articles in order to inject some level of authority that so many claim is lacking. There is a fundamental philosophical difference between most western governments and the US (at least as exemplified by the current administration): while most governments prefer to spend public funds on public projects that benefit the greater good, and also prefer to cooperate with other nations in doing so both to spread the costs and pool the knowledge, our current administration prefers to take a more isolationist approach that benefits at best the "American People", is often colored by special interests through private funding, and favors a pseudo-scientific platform that tries to inject plausible uncertainty into unpopular but otherwise pretty well established scientific subject areas.
Yeah, they will probably totally buy into and disseminate propaganda such as "Global Warming" and other such nonsense that clearly only exists to further the German government's grip on power. Those bastards!
The difference is that while Adobe doesn't try to sell you an entire OS along with lots of heavy and expensive software infrastructure to go with Flash, Microsoft does. Silverlight is basically a stripped down.NET runtime and uses XAML for the GUI. The whole cross platform and cross browser song and dance is just a bait and switch tactic to get a lot of people to write content against Silverlight. Want to bet that V2 of Silverlight and later on IE will start pulling ahead of the other platforms, eventually leaving them in the dust? By then in the worst case you would have a significant portion of a Microsoft Silverlight-on-Windows only web. And Microsoft will own the web. At that point it will be too late to turn back, just like today way too many IE specific sites don't bother to become cross browser compatible because it's too much work.
Silverlight is basically a Microsoft attempt to extend their proprietary new (and ever exploding) Windows APIs onto the web. Sure, right now they're position it with a focus on video and as an alternative to Flash, but if you look closer at its underpinnings (.NET subset, XAML, etc.) it's really a complete application delivery platform. That it runs within a plugin within a browser is almost incidental, because it doesn't appear to use much browser infrastructure at all. They could also write a Silverlight application that IS the browser, and that can only access that particular part of the web written for Silverlight. Once you start coding to Microsoft APIs for a while, those other "cross platform" and "cross browser" plugins will inexplicably start drifting behind in compatibility and currency. If you think this is paranoia, keep in mind that Microsoft have always looked for ways to make the Web theirs, one way or another. Flash has been bad enough, but at least they're not trying to sell you an OS along with an entire software infrastructure to go along with it.
> they've been forced this year to essentially remove the roaming charges for calls between EU states
Well, not removed, but capped at something like 49 Euro cents/minute outgoing and 24 incoming, last I read.
Speaking of gangsta mobile operators, SMS charges are an utter racket, there's really no other way to describe that. At 15 cents per 160 byte message we're talking orders of magnitude higher fees than voice. The costs of transmitting a single SMS message are barely calculable, yet they're treated like proverbial gold. Here's some quick math using very broad stroked: assuming 13 kbps voice data rates for GSM, that's 97.5 KBytes a minute. Using T-Mobile's current 1000 minute plan for $39.99, that's roughly 100 MB of data for $40. Assuming for simplicity a 200 byte SMS message size (with header overhead etc.), that's around 500,000 SMS messages. Dividing the $40 by that, we get around 0.008 CENTS per SMS message. I guess the difference between that and the 15 cents charged must be the ADDED VALUE, or perhaps taxes and rounding errors. Keep in mind also that voice traffic must be provided at a higher QoS level than SMS, which is really quite asynchronous (at times, VERY "quite"), making you realize even more just what a racket SMS fees are.
In fact, considering just how cheap high QoS voice is per MB, I don't know how they can charge what they do per MB for plain GPRS data with a straight face either. But that's another argument.
> I mean, who votes for these Kings? I didn't vote for him!
Ok, that demands an obligatory Holy Grail quote:
King Arthur: You don't vote for kings. moehoward: Well how'd you become king then? [Angelic music plays... ] King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king. Dennis: [interrupting] Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Whatever, most people consider HTC one of the best OEMs period. I've loved most of the hardware that has come from HTC--most of the faults were with Microsoft's crappy OS. But considering the alternatives so far, what can you do?!
Slashdot Mirror
> Sounds like the article is saying that liberals are more gullible
Well, according to TFA you're not qualified to reach that conclusion.
> Maybe for home / school / small business users. But not large "enterprise" users.
Actually, I would say the exact opposite is true. The need for sophisticated data analysis and graphing is fairly niche and more typical of academic or research work than what goes on in a large enterprise. I've worked at two large companies so far, and I would say 99% of users simply use a spreadsheet as a convenient way to tabulate stuff and apply some formatting, more as a specialized word processor than anything else. In fact, much of what most people do in Excel could almost as easily be done in Word with its table feature. Given that, I would say that Excel's power is serious overkill for most users, and a lesser tool would work equally well. Those with serious data analysis needs tend to use different tools anyway, such as SPSS or perhaps even Mathematica. While just about anything is doable in Excel, once you move beyond the built-in functionality into the realm of custom VBA data processing, there are more specialized and convenient tools around.
> Do you believe that openness is the best policy when it comes to managing such threats while humanity is contained to a single planet?
Absolutely, because the people hiding the machinery of death from you cannot be trusted any more than any other human beings, just because they say "we only want your best, trust us!" Your argument could always be made ever since the first ape picked up a bone and used it as a weapon, and ever since the first fire was lit that could annihilate all known civilization at the time. Humanity has always been capable of completely wiping itself off the face of this planet, only the ease of doing so has changed--along with the sophistication of the arguments used by some for why freedom today isn't the same as freedom yesterday, and why the rules of democracy have to constantly be redefined.
> where it points out that the only people who don't have a problem with it ... blah, blah, blah...
Frankly, I don't think you originally linked to the Wikipedia article to point out this contested usage, but rather under the assumption that the poster had committed a logical fallacy simply by using that phrase. The contested usage is basically just an easy to miss footnote on that page, and if that's what you meant, you would have clarified that. You're just trying to weasel out now, which frankly you don't really have to bother with since you're posting anonymously anyway. That shows me that you didn't understand much on that page. Follow some of the links in the contested usage paragraph and you will find that the main objection is that in logics it already has a well-established meaning and this modern usage essentially overloads that expression with new meaning. It is quite obvious that as used in this thread, "begs the question" does not refer to a logical fallacy but is just hyperbole for "raises the question." It seems quite obvious how that expression may have been arrived at by someone who wanted to express an urgency higher than "raises": this does not merely raise a question, it literally begs it, it implores for the question.
Well, I wouldn't consider NJ too different from some German or French rural areas, and certainly not Sweden or Finland. I think what most people that invoke the "vast distances" in the US have in mind are Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and so on, where a small town or village is literally hundreds of miles from the nearest larger urban area.
I looked up those figures recently from the last census, and while I don't have links right now, around 77% of the US population lives within what is termed metropolitan areas. While the definition of a metro area differs between countries, it is sufficiently similar to distinguish between inhabitants of extended conurbations versus those living out in Shitsville. The trend line looked like the 80% mark would be reached by the end of the decade. So basically around 80% of the US population lives in very similar density conditions as Europe or Japan. This means that the old argument that the US has crappy services because of the vast distances involved is getting old and tired. Within an urban area the cost of providing service is roughly the same across countries. Backbones between major metro areas are either serviced via line-of-sight wireless (e.g. microwave), or more recently fiber. Because of the massive bandwidth and shared access of the backbone it gets amortized fairly quickly and shouldn't contribute significantly to the overall cost of providing service. The real cost is the last mile stretch, and there the US doesn't have a major disadvantage anymore.
> The US lags because we set up our telcom infrastructure the first
LOL, what a crock. Besides, you chose the wrong countries to compare to. While some telephone deployments in the US may have been a few years ahead of anyone else, Germany and France were pioneers in the field in their own right and were right up there in rolling out infrastructure. We're talking about technology that's over one hundred years old, a few years here or there would most certainly not explain the current state of affairs.
Besides, I doubt copper rolled out in 1900 is even in use anywhere in the US. My house is in one of the oldest neighborhoods of our town and was built sometime in the mid-1890s. It still was fully piped for gas lighting and also had knob-and-tube wiring throughout when we gutted it. Yet the telephone lines running to it had probably been replaced many times throughout the years, with the latest run not being older than 20 years or so. I think you will find that to be the case for any last-mile runs in the US.
> The amiga had a separate "io" chip - the copper, which could be used to control the chips above without the CPU intervening.
Right, and I believe you loaded sprite and sound instructions into it as a sort of multimedia script, which then ran independently of the main CPU. That's why you could often find an Amiga locked up solid but with the sound and sometimes sprite animations still happily running. There's no way they could have done Dragon's Lair without all the co-processors.
You also forgot to mention the huge leap that was the AmigaOS over anything else in those days. Other than Unix there really was nothing like the AmigaOS around, with its preemptive multitasking and Unix influenced separation of OS and presentation layer. The file system was also way ahead for its day, although those flaky 3.5" floppies didn't do it any favors. The Atari ST OS (TOS) by comparison was a joke, a version of the GEM desktop. I think what made a lot of people think the ST was the superior machine was that gorgeously crisp monochrome screen, the relative lack of games, and the more no-nonsense and business-like look of the desktop. It looked and felt a lot like a Mac. The Amiga GUI always had a touch of gaudy about it, especially in the non-square pixel modes such as 640x240, but also given the cheesy color schemes and chunky graphics of many of the GUI elements. It only started looking the part much later with AmigaOS 2 and later. But from a programming point of view there was no contest. I still have some of the old ROM Kernel manuals somewhere, and just browsing through them and seeing the thoughtful design of the data structures, with an eye both towards compactness and reusability, it was a thing of beauty. It's amazing just how much functionality they packed into that smallish ROM and 256KB of RAM--although granted, that original 256K didn't take you too far.
> decode the packets manually
Manually?! Wouldn't your hands be otherwise engaged?
Ah well, it was just a theory. I guess we've always had an evil streak after all...
> Everytime you hear crap about "saving our democracy" you ought to cringe.
> Democracy and freedom are not the same thing.
True on both counts, but not for the reasons you cite.
> You can have a democracy or representative democracy and have a society that is all but a police state.
Explain. Just because a country like the ex-GDR called itself democratic didn't make it so. It is not about what a country CALLS itself, but how it FUNCTIONS. If its branches function along truly democratic processes that do represent the will of the people, how can it help but result in a freer society, at least by that society's definition of "free"?
Regarding the early days of the USA, back then the country was closer to an anarchy than a democracy or even a free country. Less than half the population was being represented, and the strongest were the rightest. About the best thing of those days was that the armed forces truly were defense forces and not forces of aggression and conquest.
>> In my experience Microsoft Office primarily consists of Word and either Excel or PowerPoint (or both) for most people
> Then, the amount of your experience is trivial and not enough for you to formulate a proper opinion on.
Learn to parse English before letting loose with that aggression. I'm talking about most users' general perception of Office, not mine. I am well aware of what components constitute MS Office. You keep going on about me being an Office support person as if you knew me. Not that it matters for this discussion, but I'm a developer, not an Office tech, and I have written plenty of non-trivial VBA projects around Word and Excel that judging by your comments you would consider "advanced". I'm intimately familiar with Word's strengths and its infuriating limitations, particularly those relating to its object model. I also know that despite these limitations, the comprehensive integration of the VBA engine across all Office applications gives it a unique strength that OO currently cannot quite match. It is also what makes full compatibility with Office files very hard to impossible. While content is relatively easy to convert once file formats are reverse engineered, behavior much less so. VBA macros and applications, which are often a big part of custom templates in larger enterprise environments, usually have to be entirely dropped, limiting the usefulness of converted documents in such environments. Many companies for example use Excel spreadsheets that pull data in from external sources either via data source links or entirely programmatically using web services etc. For them the actual spreadsheet is really just a user interface to the data, it is not the data itself. Providing full support for such spreadsheet is a hopeless endeavor for OO unless it emulates Excel's entire object model, VBA engine, and various quirks. Microsoft is well aware of this and probably one of the reasons they're not as worried about OO as others think they should be.
Sharepoint is a totally awesome ingredient of the MS Kool-Aid that is hyped by everyone (especially by publications of the former FTC now known by its real name Redmond Media Group) and used by none. Seriously, who the HELL actually uses it?! I've seen it much more often in the context of some incredibly righteous .NET coding example out to show how few lines of code you need to accomplish some obscure task if you rely entirely on Microsoft software and infrastructure, than I have actually seen real world deployments and heavy users of Sharepoint. Some may use it as a poor man's electronic document management and workflow system, but it's hardly scalable and flexible enough when compared to the 900 lb gorillas of the EDM world, FileNET and Documentum. But hey, it fills out the MSDN nicely to the fifty gazillion CDs that make it up nowadays.
> What about all the back-end collaboration tools?
Oh, really? Do go on about those back-end collaboration tools and the ten people in the world that use them. Unless you strictly mean Exchange, there's only a handful of people that even know what Sharepoint or any of the other even more obscure Backoffice components do. In my experience Microsoft Office primarily consists of Word and either Excel or PowerPoint (or both) for most people, with Access, FrontPage and Publisher barely registering on anyone's radar. All I can say about OO is that the spreadsheet and presentation components are not as strong or user friendly as the MS Office parts, but the word processor is definitely up there.
> Again, whether that is a good or a bad POV is not, actually, relevant.
That is a nice way to muddy the waters of our very existence. Taking your approach leads down the road of questioning even the most basic and well established theories and facts about life, the universe and everything. Nothing in their funding stipulates the advancement of a certain POV, they are essentially funding scientists at large (within Germany anyway) to contribute whatever their professional views are to Wikipedia, which can eventually lead to a sort of peer reviewing process in a public forum. Nothing prevents dissenters from disputing any material presented on a Wikipedia page, the hope is that over time these battles of authority will result in a more authoritative Wikipedia, and will perhaps also let them refine an authority-based editing system. The only ones that should be afraid of a rational discourse in a public forum should be those without a rational basis.
That's EXACTLY what this funding is about, to get scientists that are reputable in their field (in this case environmental sciences) to edit Wikipedia articles in order to inject some level of authority that so many claim is lacking. There is a fundamental philosophical difference between most western governments and the US (at least as exemplified by the current administration): while most governments prefer to spend public funds on public projects that benefit the greater good, and also prefer to cooperate with other nations in doing so both to spread the costs and pool the knowledge, our current administration prefers to take a more isolationist approach that benefits at best the "American People", is often colored by special interests through private funding, and favors a pseudo-scientific platform that tries to inject plausible uncertainty into unpopular but otherwise pretty well established scientific subject areas.
Which one?! I'm confused!
Yeah, they will probably totally buy into and disseminate propaganda such as "Global Warming" and other such nonsense that clearly only exists to further the German government's grip on power. Those bastards!
The difference is that while Adobe doesn't try to sell you an entire OS along with lots of heavy and expensive software infrastructure to go with Flash, Microsoft does. Silverlight is basically a stripped down .NET runtime and uses XAML for the GUI. The whole cross platform and cross browser song and dance is just a bait and switch tactic to get a lot of people to write content against Silverlight. Want to bet that V2 of Silverlight and later on IE will start pulling ahead of the other platforms, eventually leaving them in the dust? By then in the worst case you would have a significant portion of a Microsoft Silverlight-on-Windows only web. And Microsoft will own the web. At that point it will be too late to turn back, just like today way too many IE specific sites don't bother to become cross browser compatible because it's too much work.
Silverlight is basically a Microsoft attempt to extend their proprietary new (and ever exploding) Windows APIs onto the web. Sure, right now they're position it with a focus on video and as an alternative to Flash, but if you look closer at its underpinnings (.NET subset, XAML, etc.) it's really a complete application delivery platform. That it runs within a plugin within a browser is almost incidental, because it doesn't appear to use much browser infrastructure at all. They could also write a Silverlight application that IS the browser, and that can only access that particular part of the web written for Silverlight. Once you start coding to Microsoft APIs for a while, those other "cross platform" and "cross browser" plugins will inexplicably start drifting behind in compatibility and currency. If you think this is paranoia, keep in mind that Microsoft have always looked for ways to make the Web theirs, one way or another. Flash has been bad enough, but at least they're not trying to sell you an OS along with an entire software infrastructure to go along with it.
LOL, you beat me to it. That within an otherwise flawlessly edited video was certainly poignant, intentionally or not.
> they've been forced this year to essentially remove the roaming charges for calls between EU states
Well, not removed, but capped at something like 49 Euro cents/minute outgoing and 24 incoming, last I read.
Speaking of gangsta mobile operators, SMS charges are an utter racket, there's really no other way to describe that. At 15 cents per 160 byte message we're talking orders of magnitude higher fees than voice. The costs of transmitting a single SMS message are barely calculable, yet they're treated like proverbial gold. Here's some quick math using very broad stroked: assuming 13 kbps voice data rates for GSM, that's 97.5 KBytes a minute. Using T-Mobile's current 1000 minute plan for $39.99, that's roughly 100 MB of data for $40. Assuming for simplicity a 200 byte SMS message size (with header overhead etc.), that's around 500,000 SMS messages. Dividing the $40 by that, we get around 0.008 CENTS per SMS message. I guess the difference between that and the 15 cents charged must be the ADDED VALUE, or perhaps taxes and rounding errors. Keep in mind also that voice traffic must be provided at a higher QoS level than SMS, which is really quite asynchronous (at times, VERY "quite"), making you realize even more just what a racket SMS fees are.
In fact, considering just how cheap high QoS voice is per MB, I don't know how they can charge what they do per MB for plain GPRS data with a straight face either. But that's another argument.
> I mean, who votes for these Kings? I didn't vote for him!
Ok, that demands an obligatory Holy Grail quote:
King Arthur: You don't vote for kings.
moehoward: Well how'd you become king then?
[Angelic music plays... ]
King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king.
Dennis: [interrupting] Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Whatever, most people consider HTC one of the best OEMs period. I've loved most of the hardware that has come from HTC--most of the faults were with Microsoft's crappy OS. But considering the alternatives so far, what can you do?!
> Demonstrate that it screws OPEC and Oil and Power Corporations
Itching to meet Guido The Protector, are you?
> Make it tax exempt for the first 10 years (thus demonstrating you are screwing the Government, as well
Oh, forget Guido, you're going straight to Guantanamo for that one, boy! They're just putting the finishing touches on the new cage blocks.