which is why companies like IBM use the hell out of contractors. EG: My little brother was on the dev team for the P6 chip, the whole US side of the team (most of it) was contractors with a few management folks to herd the cats in the right direction. There are a lot of reason to use contractors, but efficiency on all levels is high on the list.
The actual research seems to indicate that reading things that are blurry, have information gaps, (including missing or unreadable letters) make the reader "work" harder in the reading process so that they have to focus more attention on the comprehension process. Fair enough, but the jump made by bloggers and others in the science reporting business (undoubtedly in search of a catchy headline) is crass commercial bullshit.
The simple facts of the research do not point to this conclusion, this conclusion is drawn ONLY by doing a google analytic on popular titles that attract reader attention and choosing "ebook reader, kindle, sony e-reader" from the list because the writer could stretch a tangential connection to that hook.
A few months ago I saw something like that on Discovery news where they used a headline that used the iPad in the title. It was so overwhelmingly clear that an editor added one sentence to include "iPad" so that they could use that in the title to attract attention. Naturally the article that was being referenced AND the actual story written by the journalist had nothing to do with an iPad. I wrote a nasty-gram to the comments which was, of course, ignored. Like what a stupid thing to complain about, twisting a story, i mean really, how stupid could i be?
I live in Mainland China and our students are told the same thing. In fact they are told to surrender their phones on entry. We usually catch 2 or 3 out of 50 with active phones during a 2 hour exam. 2 Weeks ago, during exams I just went around the room and chose the likely suspects and insisted that they surrender their phones to me. I got 5 out of 6 that I guessed at. Still think the other one had it though.
Cheating is endemic here in Asia, when i first came here the professors at the university i taught in would spend exam review (revision for the Brits and their minions) would spend the week regaling students about how they cheated when they were students and how they tricked the system. Just Google cheating and Asia to kill a few hours with hilarity.
I agree 100% but, what are people doing? When I investigated the crapware that my bank put on a virtual copy of winXP (required by the bank so that it could connect to the bank site with IE6, no this is not a joke) it quickly became apparent that I should not/ could not use the USB dongle they SOLD me for the connection. The dongle had no real use beside triggering IE6 to download a certificate and a few other "programs" necessary for the connection. I used it once and it was so unfriendly and stupid i threw it away.
Ah, yes, then I uninstalled the 4 different programs that had been installed and purged the certificate from my system. All gone? Anti-virus check on the system showed that what remained were two virus/ trojans as well as "virus writing" software. WTF? My guess is that the bank used viruses to install stuff into the registry so that they didn't have to get permissions through the admin or from windows but could just use a virus to get in. These viruses and the software were all in hidden folders that had been created by and for the banking software, so there was little question about their provenance.
Did it screw the system? damned if i know or care. not like it really mattered to me, it was just a virtual copy of windows that didn't count for doodly squat, but the principle was stunning.
no, i'm not going to argue that, but here in China (where the hackers can get into almost anything they chose to attack whenever they want to) the viruses, trojans and other malware (in this i am afraid i have to include legitimate banking software as well) are all windows based because of the low-hanging fruit principle. Why bother messing with a mac when there are 10,000 windows PCs for every mac?. And linux, same same only very different.
Don't get me wrong, i run linux at home (4 PCs) and work (my office box) but i also don't assume the inability to get malware: i use avast, rkhunter, and firefox security plugins on all the browsers. And still assume risks
I've embedded myself in the middle of an argument that is like so may i have seen here in the past: This "a" that is considered totally awesome in the US (but is useless or unused or too expensive or whatever for the rest of the world) is going to achieve world domination because EVERYONE (which is to say all the.... ladies and gentlemen of my acquaintance...) bought one and think it is wonderful.
Sorry but your little slice of the universe, no matter how hyped by the ad-people, who are trying to get YOU to buy their shite, feed your sense that you are center of the universe even though you aren't really a microbe in the ocean.
There is a professor at my old uni (The University of Virginia, not a dodgy kind of place at all) who has spent over 30 years studying reincarnation. He has used as many scientific metrics as he can apply, he maintained skepticism, he claims, only until the last 15 years or so when the evidence he had collected became overwhelming.
This is not to say that he can explain the mechanism, or that he is trying to. What he has done is to collect the statements, often recorded, of children who can remember specific people, places and things from previous lives. On investigation he has been able to find those things and to prove that those children and their "new family" have no connection in time, place or manner with the previous experience that the child reports.
He has studied cases from all cultures, socio-economic groups etc, etc, etc. to try to find some other causal link that could even shed light (not explain the congruence, just to give a direction for research to refute the evidence) and has failed. for these reasons, against his best judgment and personal opinion he says that there seems to be some grounds to believe in reincarnation.
SO, to simply refuse to accept anything, because "science" doesn't prove it is no longer a rational approach. While I will state unequivocally that "Science just works, bitches" I also say that with the understanding that a simplistic understanding of "science" is about as stupid as a simplistic approach to anything. This universe is not simple, that's why we need science. The failure of religion is in its lovely simplicity, the universe just doesn't support that simplistic view.
Ditto that. I work around kids whose expensive international school requires them to buy a mac. They have the money, and frankly, letting kids like this loose with a virus vacuum like W7 would be suicidal for everyone involved.
How do I know? the kids at the university where I teach all have WinXP, Veesta and 7. I have to use a portable apps copy of clamav to check the Kaspersky installed to make sure that the classroom computers (used only for class presentations and teacher stuff) stay clean. Kaspersky slows the box down so much that it can take 2 or 3 minutes to mount a USB drive.
Still, just two weeks ago there was a classroom box that had such a nasty one that it shut down Kaspersky, crippled my clamav and installed in the USB drive. I called IT and they are still trying to kill the sucker. Do we really want teenagers without a clue to be carrying this stuff around? Give them all macs and then tell them that "when they grow up" they can have linux. This will solve a whole lot of problems both now and the future and assure the final "year of the Linux" desktop in a decade or so.
a little over ten years ago i was helping out a Chinese researcher who was working on his PhD thesis. I edited his thesis paper with him, something to do with a breed of mice he created (in a race with other researchers around the world) that had a particular genetic heart defect that he needed in order to test therapies for that particular kind of heart defect. The thesis was over my head but I could at least follow his reasoning as he explained it to me.
The point of this, in this story, is that he was the first to create these mice, he could replicate the process in the lab and make more, but no one else was able to do it (at that time anyway). Maybe others have since then, but it was one of his biggest worries for his defense was the simple fact that even though he had the evidence, it was not replicable by others even under his supervision.
I probably ought to do this as an AC but i'm not important enough for anyone to really care. I go into a Samsung factory twice a week and I agree. These guys are making some outstanding products, they challenge themselves to innovate on a regular basis and they are proud of their work. I bought a Samsung 19inch monitor for my daughter before this contract and wish I had bought it for myself. I have to put off any tech purchase until i move again but i'll have Samsung at the top of my list in the future.
Having said that, none of the guys and girls i work with use Samsung products. iPhone whores!!!!
Back in my day i had a trash 80 color with a cassette drive and a "special" computer cassette tape for a storage medium. And i wrote programs in Pascal and Basic and played pong and asteroids while the butts piled in the ashtray. Ah the GODs.
Who modded this to "insightful"? What "flower childs" is this fool talking about? I am old enough and have the creds to be an FC, and I live in China. I happen to think this is a dead idea because the Chinese ideas about how to be a power in the world today are bad for China and bad for the west. But wait! What "tech companies" does China want to buy? And why would they want to buy them?
This story sounds like some pols trying to create an issue using the dreaded "China" as a bugabear to frighten the peasants, yet again, since the Islamists are failing to use their oil cash to buy up Europe.
The truth is that China has the economic infrastructure and the intellectual elite to build and maintain their own tech companies, and they already have a lot already run and built by Chinese entrepreneurs. They could buy stuff if they wanted, and might if they thought it would help them, but what and when and from who? And, why go through the trouble when they can probably do it cheaper and easier at home. Who the hell do you think acts as the intellectual force behind Euro tech? China and India. Who makes the products that draw on the IP? China and SE Asia. What do they need from Europe? Cheap French wine from Carrefour? Sausages from Germany? get real.
no, they are not honest about being totalitarians, they spout the same "it's for your own good" shite here as they do there, while they shutdown Skype to support a Chinese made piece of crap system that has the advantage of built-in logging of every bit of traffic. Even my workplace is now required to log ALL incoming and outgoing net traffic at all times in case there is "an incident" that the government needs to investigate.
Ive had about enough, it's time for me to bust a move.
this all goes back to a situation/lawsuit 20 or more years ago. The situation was this: A man owned a house, but did not live in it. Since it was standing empty, but had some furnishings, people would break in and use/steal/otherwise mess up his property. He tried a number of things: lock changes, boards, etc. but the house was in a rural area and no one ever saw anything.
In desperation he (i forget whether he included a warning on the door for this last part) rigged up a shotgun on just above the floor in the front hallway aimed at the front door and triggered with a string from the door. Sure enough some damn fool broke in yet again and got shotgun pellets in his calves and ankles. owwey owwey
The property owner was sued and lost because he used excessive force to protect his property while his life and health were not at risk (at the same time risking the life and health of the criminal). Since that time there has been a reduction in the old "man's home is his castle" defense with different judges and different jurisdictions falling on different sides of the question.
Just last fall was the case of a man's car being bugged by a GPS device in his driveway (his personal property) by the FBI because of comments made by people who visited his Facebook page and had questionable political views (relating to Islam, US government and terrorism as this person and the commenters were all of middle-eastern extraction). The judge in the case ruled that the driveway was "public space." Ugly, folks, quite ugly.
At my (Chinese) uni laptops are banned for all the above reasons and more besides. Sometimes I find that it is a problem since I would like them to have and use them.
But then at my daughter's (Sino-Canadian) high school the English teacher bitched her out because she didn't bring/doesn't have a laptop. (she has a very high-end graphics workstation at home that she uses for various graphics projects and her portfolio -- at the moment she is sending off applications to art schools in the US). She was rather POed about a teacher in her program insisting that she "should" have a laptop, when her stuff is so far ahead of what is on the kiddietops around her while the Chinese half of the school does not allow laptops outside the dorm rooms, and does not provide wifi. The world is changing soooooo fast that these kids are going to be crunched in the changing expectations of the future.
I've used Avast for almost ten years now, free version only, and have been consistently pleased that they not only continue to provide a solid product FOR FREE, but that they are also pretty helpful and caring about their free subscribers.
Oh yes, i run fedora on my office and home machines and ubuntu on my wife and daughter's computers and UNR on the netbook, all with Avast home. (yeah i'm not a fool who thinks linux is "safe")
This just makes me more proud to use their product. Really, the paid edition only has a small number of improvements over the free "home" edition, improvements i've never "needed". I am guessing they, rightly looked at the simple fact that many of the people who"stole" the paid for edition were just home users who were just clueless about the fact they could have it for free. Smart move,good advertising, etc.
I am becoming more and more pro-piracy because of actions by the RIAA, the MPAA and now shite like this. Maybe I'm just too old, but my 60's/70's asshole hippiness is getting itchy.
Yes but in China we have a lovely way to deal with it.The government decides which pollution to monitor so if you have a pollution problem just stop monitoring that kind of pollution, then it isn't a problem.
i'm a ditto head on this, worked for a school with about 35 employees that had a sysadmin that wanted server experience for her resume. What a horrible waste of time, money resources as well as a nasty mess at the end. Even the guy they hired to help her set it up recognized the idiocy and put in a sub-domain that hosted his on-line store and retired to the beach on the money from that until a friend and i tried to figure out where all the bandwidth was going. When we cracked the stinking pile open the so called sysadmin started to cry. we lost.
Now, my friend's in Beijing and I'm in Shanghai, the sysadmin is still there running that ridiculous mess.
there was no reason in the world to host all that stuff in house, case closed.
What does this have to do with the lede? BTW, the Chinese legal system is quite robust, as is often said over here: China is a country of laws. The difference, as explained to me by my lawyer (who charges more than a western lawyer) is that China's laws are ALL legislated while western laws are based in court precedence. In other words our laws are tried and tested in the courts while Chinese laws are not tested anywhere and you have no recourse to the court if you feel a law is unfair. In court the judge reads the law and decides based on the law who should be at fault. Whether the law is unfair, contradictory or downright wrong-headed is beside the point: it is the law.
I suggest that I prefer the western system that at least considers right and wrong.
Mistaken thinking my friend. What I am waiting for is a meego tab/pad/slate with 4G so that i can carry that in my manpurse, my little clip-on blue tooth headset with minimal controls on it and there I am. If i need to call I tap in my commands on the tab/pad/slate unit, the bluetooth picks up automatically both in and out, one tap on the control answers the phone, i can have all the goodness of 4G when i want it, all the ease of a bluetooth phone headset (which i use the hell out of right now with my 4 year old sony ericssen) and don't have to do any dorky brick to the head sh*t. no, you are totally not seeing how it will be used.
The only drawback is the same one i have now, people freaking because i am walking down the sidewalk talking to the air and obviously have something i am talking about (like picking up groceries for dinner or other domestic stuff) that is not loony talk.
Yes, i agree, (and i am a professional linguist (BA 2000, UVA, MA 2007 USQ Aus)). this is a quite succinct explanation of the descriptive process as well as the word accretion process in English. While we do say 'oxen' sometimes, we could equally well understand and accept 'oxes' simply because it is analogous to most plurals.
Another example worth considering is 'fish'. its plural is 'fish' of course, except when it isn't. I theorize that the plural will be 'fishes' within the next 100 years.
Put that together and I sound like a champion fence-sitter, and i am! The truth is that most people who have need of the plural could use either 'virii' or 'viruses' and be understood without difficulty. Therefore, as with words that are (while not neologisms they have discovered a new context and use) new in some sense, the plural is still not settled. I believe that it will 'regularize' to 'viruses' within the next 20-40 years, just as 'fish' will regularize to 'fishes' in the next 100 years or so (more opposition to the "wrong" form).
Finally, in reply to the subject "don't use made up words". ALL words are made up, that is the past, present and future of all languages.
Very much in agreement. It is just a matter of how the word"pirate" and the idea of "piracy" has a particular negative connotation in the west while here it is not negative it is good business. Westerners only see "you are stealing from us" while Chinese see "you want the prices that our practices allow"> I see a larger picture where the consumerist culture is using these terms to keep people blinded to the reality of their chains.
Opinion only here: I like the shell. I tried it back a year+ ago and it was hard to wrap my mind around. Tried again with a more theoretical foundation of what they wanted and still couldn't feel good about it. Tried it a third time and fell for it so heavy i bought a graphics card for my box at work, added RAM and have not looked back.
Now, the theoretical understanding that i hold is that the shell is based on "doing" rather than the traditional workspace "having" things. I found, as i adapted to it that this theory and the shell helped me work faster and with more focus and success. Obviously it took some time to adapt, but it also took me time to adapt to Linux, to fedora, to Ubuntu, to Mandriva. My daughter took the time to adapt to kde and loves it (i didn't take the time and stumble over it.)
Is it perfect? no. Is it for everyone? no, and that is why the existing "gnome panel" will still be available FOR EVERYONE. not just Ubuntu. This announcement seems to be just that Ubuntu will not use the shell, they'll use the panel. cool, you, as a Ubuntu user will (i assume) still be able to use the shell if you choose. Look folks, we are gnu/Linux people, we will have another option (actually, it is there in beta right now if you wish) which is what we all love, so where is the story?
Slashdot Mirror
which is why companies like IBM use the hell out of contractors. EG: My little brother was on the dev team for the P6 chip, the whole US side of the team (most of it) was contractors with a few management folks to herd the cats in the right direction. There are a lot of reason to use contractors, but efficiency on all levels is high on the list.
The actual research seems to indicate that reading things that are blurry, have information gaps, (including missing or unreadable letters) make the reader "work" harder in the reading process so that they have to focus more attention on the comprehension process. Fair enough, but the jump made by bloggers and others in the science reporting business (undoubtedly in search of a catchy headline) is crass commercial bullshit.
The simple facts of the research do not point to this conclusion, this conclusion is drawn ONLY by doing a google analytic on popular titles that attract reader attention and choosing "ebook reader, kindle, sony e-reader" from the list because the writer could stretch a tangential connection to that hook.
A few months ago I saw something like that on Discovery news where they used a headline that used the iPad in the title. It was so overwhelmingly clear that an editor added one sentence to include "iPad" so that they could use that in the title to attract attention. Naturally the article that was being referenced AND the actual story written by the journalist had nothing to do with an iPad. I wrote a nasty-gram to the comments which was, of course, ignored. Like what a stupid thing to complain about, twisting a story, i mean really, how stupid could i be?
I live in Mainland China and our students are told the same thing. In fact they are told to surrender their phones on entry. We usually catch 2 or 3 out of 50 with active phones during a 2 hour exam. 2 Weeks ago, during exams I just went around the room and chose the likely suspects and insisted that they surrender their phones to me. I got 5 out of 6 that I guessed at. Still think the other one had it though.
Cheating is endemic here in Asia, when i first came here the professors at the university i taught in would spend exam review (revision for the Brits and their minions) would spend the week regaling students about how they cheated when they were students and how they tricked the system. Just Google cheating and Asia to kill a few hours with hilarity.
I agree 100% but, what are people doing? When I investigated the crapware that my bank put on a virtual copy of winXP (required by the bank so that it could connect to the bank site with IE6, no this is not a joke) it quickly became apparent that I should not/ could not use the USB dongle they SOLD me for the connection. The dongle had no real use beside triggering IE6 to download a certificate and a few other "programs" necessary for the connection. I used it once and it was so unfriendly and stupid i threw it away.
Ah, yes, then I uninstalled the 4 different programs that had been installed and purged the certificate from my system. All gone? Anti-virus check on the system showed that what remained were two virus/ trojans as well as "virus writing" software. WTF? My guess is that the bank used viruses to install stuff into the registry so that they didn't have to get permissions through the admin or from windows but could just use a virus to get in. These viruses and the software were all in hidden folders that had been created by and for the banking software, so there was little question about their provenance.
Did it screw the system? damned if i know or care. not like it really mattered to me, it was just a virtual copy of windows that didn't count for doodly squat, but the principle was stunning.
no, i'm not going to argue that, but here in China (where the hackers can get into almost anything they chose to attack whenever they want to) the viruses, trojans and other malware (in this i am afraid i have to include legitimate banking software as well) are all windows based because of the low-hanging fruit principle. Why bother messing with a mac when there are 10,000 windows PCs for every mac?. And linux, same same only very different.
Don't get me wrong, i run linux at home (4 PCs) and work (my office box) but i also don't assume the inability to get malware: i use avast, rkhunter, and firefox security plugins on all the browsers. And still assume risks
But the kids, man the kids are sooooo clueless.
I've embedded myself in the middle of an argument that is like so may i have seen here in the past: This "a" that is considered totally awesome in the US (but is useless or unused or too expensive or whatever for the rest of the world) is going to achieve world domination because EVERYONE (which is to say all the .... ladies and gentlemen of my acquaintance...) bought one and think it is wonderful.
Sorry but your little slice of the universe, no matter how hyped by the ad-people, who are trying to get YOU to buy their shite, feed your sense that you are center of the universe even though you aren't really a microbe in the ocean.
There is a professor at my old uni (The University of Virginia, not a dodgy kind of place at all) who has spent over 30 years studying reincarnation. He has used as many scientific metrics as he can apply, he maintained skepticism, he claims, only until the last 15 years or so when the evidence he had collected became overwhelming.
This is not to say that he can explain the mechanism, or that he is trying to. What he has done is to collect the statements, often recorded, of children who can remember specific people, places and things from previous lives. On investigation he has been able to find those things and to prove that those children and their "new family" have no connection in time, place or manner with the previous experience that the child reports.
He has studied cases from all cultures, socio-economic groups etc, etc, etc. to try to find some other causal link that could even shed light (not explain the congruence, just to give a direction for research to refute the evidence) and has failed. for these reasons, against his best judgment and personal opinion he says that there seems to be some grounds to believe in reincarnation.
SO, to simply refuse to accept anything, because "science" doesn't prove it is no longer a rational approach. While I will state unequivocally that "Science just works, bitches" I also say that with the understanding that a simplistic understanding of "science" is about as stupid as a simplistic approach to anything. This universe is not simple, that's why we need science. The failure of religion is in its lovely simplicity, the universe just doesn't support that simplistic view.
Ditto that. I work around kids whose expensive international school requires them to buy a mac. They have the money, and frankly, letting kids like this loose with a virus vacuum like W7 would be suicidal for everyone involved.
How do I know? the kids at the university where I teach all have WinXP, Veesta and 7. I have to use a portable apps copy of clamav to check the Kaspersky installed to make sure that the classroom computers (used only for class presentations and teacher stuff) stay clean. Kaspersky slows the box down so much that it can take 2 or 3 minutes to mount a USB drive.
Still, just two weeks ago there was a classroom box that had such a nasty one that it shut down Kaspersky, crippled my clamav and installed in the USB drive. I called IT and they are still trying to kill the sucker. Do we really want teenagers without a clue to be carrying this stuff around? Give them all macs and then tell them that "when they grow up" they can have linux. This will solve a whole lot of problems both now and the future and assure the final "year of the Linux" desktop in a decade or so.
a little over ten years ago i was helping out a Chinese researcher who was working on his PhD thesis. I edited his thesis paper with him, something to do with a breed of mice he created (in a race with other researchers around the world) that had a particular genetic heart defect that he needed in order to test therapies for that particular kind of heart defect. The thesis was over my head but I could at least follow his reasoning as he explained it to me.
The point of this, in this story, is that he was the first to create these mice, he could replicate the process in the lab and make more, but no one else was able to do it (at that time anyway). Maybe others have since then, but it was one of his biggest worries for his defense was the simple fact that even though he had the evidence, it was not replicable by others even under his supervision.
Yeah, he got the paper.
I probably ought to do this as an AC but i'm not important enough for anyone to really care. I go into a Samsung factory twice a week and I agree. These guys are making some outstanding products, they challenge themselves to innovate on a regular basis and they are proud of their work. I bought a Samsung 19inch monitor for my daughter before this contract and wish I had bought it for myself. I have to put off any tech purchase until i move again but i'll have Samsung at the top of my list in the future.
Having said that, none of the guys and girls i work with use Samsung products. iPhone whores!!!!
Back in my day i had a trash 80 color with a cassette drive and a "special" computer cassette tape for a storage medium. And i wrote programs in Pascal and Basic and played pong and asteroids while the butts piled in the ashtray. Ah the GODs.
Who modded this to "insightful"? What "flower childs" is this fool talking about? I am old enough and have the creds to be an FC, and I live in China. I happen to think this is a dead idea because the Chinese ideas about how to be a power in the world today are bad for China and bad for the west. But wait! What "tech companies" does China want to buy? And why would they want to buy them?
This story sounds like some pols trying to create an issue using the dreaded "China" as a bugabear to frighten the peasants, yet again, since the Islamists are failing to use their oil cash to buy up Europe.
The truth is that China has the economic infrastructure and the intellectual elite to build and maintain their own tech companies, and they already have a lot already run and built by Chinese entrepreneurs. They could buy stuff if they wanted, and might if they thought it would help them, but what and when and from who? And, why go through the trouble when they can probably do it cheaper and easier at home. Who the hell do you think acts as the intellectual force behind Euro tech? China and India. Who makes the products that draw on the IP? China and SE Asia. What do they need from Europe? Cheap French wine from Carrefour? Sausages from Germany? get real.
no, they are not honest about being totalitarians, they spout the same "it's for your own good" shite here as they do there, while they shutdown Skype to support a Chinese made piece of crap system that has the advantage of built-in logging of every bit of traffic. Even my workplace is now required to log ALL incoming and outgoing net traffic at all times in case there is "an incident" that the government needs to investigate.
Ive had about enough, it's time for me to bust a move.
this all goes back to a situation/lawsuit 20 or more years ago. The situation was this:
A man owned a house, but did not live in it. Since it was standing empty, but had some furnishings, people would break in and use/steal/otherwise mess up his property. He tried a number of things: lock changes, boards, etc. but the house was in a rural area and no one ever saw anything.
In desperation he (i forget whether he included a warning on the door for this last part) rigged up a shotgun on just above the floor in the front hallway aimed at the front door and triggered with a string from the door. Sure enough some damn fool broke in yet again and got shotgun pellets in his calves and ankles. owwey owwey
The property owner was sued and lost because he used excessive force to protect his property while his life and health were not at risk (at the same time risking the life and health of the criminal). Since that time there has been a reduction in the old "man's home is his castle" defense with different judges and different jurisdictions falling on different sides of the question.
Just last fall was the case of a man's car being bugged by a GPS device in his driveway (his personal property) by the FBI because of comments made by people who visited his Facebook page and had questionable political views (relating to Islam, US government and terrorism as this person and the commenters were all of middle-eastern extraction). The judge in the case ruled that the driveway was "public space." Ugly, folks, quite ugly.
At my (Chinese) uni laptops are banned for all the above reasons and more besides. Sometimes I find that it is a problem since I would like them to have and use them.
But then at my daughter's (Sino-Canadian) high school the English teacher bitched her out because she didn't bring/doesn't have a laptop. (she has a very high-end graphics workstation at home that she uses for various graphics projects and her portfolio -- at the moment she is sending off applications to art schools in the US). She was rather POed about a teacher in her program insisting that she "should" have a laptop, when her stuff is so far ahead of what is on the kiddietops around her while the Chinese half of the school does not allow laptops outside the dorm rooms, and does not provide wifi. The world is changing soooooo fast that these kids are going to be crunched in the changing expectations of the future.
I've used Avast for almost ten years now, free version only, and have been consistently pleased that they not only continue to provide a solid product FOR FREE, but that they are also pretty helpful and caring about their free subscribers.
Oh yes, i run fedora on my office and home machines and ubuntu on my wife and daughter's computers and UNR on the netbook, all with Avast home. (yeah i'm not a fool who thinks linux is "safe")
This just makes me more proud to use their product. Really, the paid edition only has a small number of improvements over the free "home" edition, improvements i've never "needed". I am guessing they, rightly looked at the simple fact that many of the people who"stole" the paid for edition were just home users who were just clueless about the fact they could have it for free. Smart move,good advertising, etc.
I am becoming more and more pro-piracy because of actions by the RIAA, the MPAA and now shite like this. Maybe I'm just too old, but my 60's/70's asshole hippiness is getting itchy.
Yes but in China we have a lovely way to deal with it.The government decides which pollution to monitor so if you have a pollution problem just stop monitoring that kind of pollution, then it isn't a problem.
As my Chinese friends say: "it is difficult"
i'm a ditto head on this, worked for a school with about 35 employees that had a sysadmin that wanted server experience for her resume. What a horrible waste of time, money resources as well as a nasty mess at the end. Even the guy they hired to help her set it up recognized the idiocy and put in a sub-domain that hosted his on-line store and retired to the beach on the money from that until a friend and i tried to figure out where all the bandwidth was going. When we cracked the stinking pile open the so called sysadmin started to cry. we lost.
Now, my friend's in Beijing and I'm in Shanghai, the sysadmin is still there running that ridiculous mess.
there was no reason in the world to host all that stuff in house, case closed.
What does this have to do with the lede? BTW, the Chinese legal system is quite robust, as is often said over here: China is a country of laws. The difference, as explained to me by my lawyer (who charges more than a western lawyer) is that China's laws are ALL legislated while western laws are based in court precedence. In other words our laws are tried and tested in the courts while Chinese laws are not tested anywhere and you have no recourse to the court if you feel a law is unfair. In court the judge reads the law and decides based on the law who should be at fault. Whether the law is unfair, contradictory or downright wrong-headed is beside the point: it is the law.
I suggest that I prefer the western system that at least considers right and wrong.
Mistaken thinking my friend. What I am waiting for is a meego tab/pad/slate with 4G so that i can carry that in my manpurse, my little clip-on blue tooth headset with minimal controls on it and there I am. If i need to call I tap in my commands on the tab/pad/slate unit, the bluetooth picks up automatically both in and out, one tap on the control answers the phone, i can have all the goodness of 4G when i want it, all the ease of a bluetooth phone headset (which i use the hell out of right now with my 4 year old sony ericssen) and don't have to do any dorky brick to the head sh*t. no, you are totally not seeing how it will be used.
The only drawback is the same one i have now, people freaking because i am walking down the sidewalk talking to the air and obviously have something i am talking about (like picking up groceries for dinner or other domestic stuff) that is not loony talk.
Yes, i agree, (and i am a professional linguist (BA 2000, UVA, MA 2007 USQ Aus)). this is a quite succinct explanation of the descriptive process as well as the word accretion process in English. While we do say 'oxen' sometimes, we could equally well understand and accept 'oxes' simply because it is analogous to most plurals.
Another example worth considering is 'fish'. its plural is 'fish' of course, except when it isn't. I theorize that the plural will be 'fishes' within the next 100 years.
Put that together and I sound like a champion fence-sitter, and i am! The truth is that most people who have need of the plural could use either 'virii' or 'viruses' and be understood without difficulty. Therefore, as with words that are (while not neologisms they have discovered a new context and use) new in some sense, the plural is still not settled. I believe that it will 'regularize' to 'viruses' within the next 20-40 years, just as 'fish' will regularize to 'fishes' in the next 100 years or so (more opposition to the "wrong" form).
Finally, in reply to the subject "don't use made up words". ALL words are made up, that is the past, present and future of all languages.
Very much in agreement. It is just a matter of how the word"pirate" and the idea of "piracy" has a particular negative connotation in the west while here it is not negative it is good business. Westerners only see "you are stealing from us" while Chinese see "you want the prices that our practices allow"> I see a larger picture where the consumerist culture is using these terms to keep people blinded to the reality of their chains.
Opinion only here: I like the shell.
I tried it back a year+ ago and it was hard to wrap my mind around. Tried again with a more theoretical foundation of what they wanted and still couldn't feel good about it. Tried it a third time and fell for it so heavy i bought a graphics card for my box at work, added RAM and have not looked back.
Now, the theoretical understanding that i hold is that the shell is based on "doing" rather than the traditional workspace "having" things. I found, as i adapted to it that this theory and the shell helped me work faster and with more focus and success. Obviously it took some time to adapt, but it also took me time to adapt to Linux, to fedora, to Ubuntu, to Mandriva. My daughter took the time to adapt to kde and loves it (i didn't take the time and stumble over it.)
Is it perfect? no. Is it for everyone? no, and that is why the existing "gnome panel" will still be available FOR EVERYONE. not just Ubuntu. This announcement seems to be just that Ubuntu will not use the shell, they'll use the panel. cool, you, as a Ubuntu user will (i assume) still be able to use the shell if you choose. Look folks, we are gnu/Linux people, we will have another option (actually, it is there in beta right now if you wish) which is what we all love, so where is the story?
I don't know when I will be able to stop laughing about this one, i mean, i mean, I MEAN, hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah, etc
OMG, JC on a pogo stick, oh no, oh no.......