The economy WILL bounce back. What we're going through is big and scary, but for every person (or company) that made big, crappy decisions in the last decade, there is another person (or company) that was smart, saved money, and will swoop in to buy whatever Person/Company A can no longer afford to maintain, be it a house or a bank. So overall, we'll be fine.
But the war... I really don't see why we should be spending billions of dollars to make the whole world hate us even more, no sense mentioning all the lives lost on both sides.
Q1: why are we fighting this war? A1: Because of 9/11. Q2: THEN WHAT THE FUCK DID WE DO TO PISS THEM OFF SO MUCH THEY FELT COMPELLED TO FLY PLANES INTO FOUR MAJOR BUILDINGS? I don't think we're making it any better.
It's not so much individual authors as much as it is the corporations that push infinite copyright. And the hypocrisy is mind-blowing. Not only did Disney build their empire largely on public-domain works (Snow White, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, to name just a few) but they also used PD works to fuel their late-80s/early-90s return to relevance! (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Tarzan.) Yet they are one of the largest, if not THE largest, proponents of eternal copyrights.
Actually, it sounds like they will. From TFA: "If it works on Windows Vista, it'll work in Windows 7. The move from Vista to Windows 7 we expect to be seamless."
This is funny. You're smart enough to post that explanation that I don't even quite understand, but you didn't View -> Source to see the answer to your question? He just padded with s. (No offense meant, you're not dumb at all, just really struck me as funny.)
Of course, you can always just
go() {
like } this
with the <ecode> tags and it'll turn spaces into s for you. See the list of 'Allowed HTML' below the comment box.
You can copy the song as many times as you want, including over the internet [how about sneakernet?] with friends, but you can't use the song until you obtain a license.
And how do you obtain a license? I presume over the Internet. What if the recipient doesn't have Internet access? What if I want to "use" the song in my car? What if the network is down? What if the servers aren't available? What if the license holder goes under? What happens to the media 100 years from now when the Internet as we know it has gone the way of gaslights?
Furthermore, to "activate" the license will ALWAYS require some kind of login/username/password/account thing... this CAN NOT be "invisible", ever.
Economizing the number of letters in a headline is driven by several factors, all of which apply onscreen as they do on paper- like the need to minimize the time it takes for a reader to take in the headline... [emphasis mine]
BUT--there is a HUGE difference between the amount of time it takes to "take in" (read) a headline and the time it takes to UNDERSTAND it. The worst headline I ever read, I read very quickly--it was just four words. Unfortunately, those words were "QUAKE'S RUINS YIELDS LIVES." Considering that the all-uppercase-ness of it hid the first word's apostrophe, it was a PAIN to parse because EVERY WORD could have been either a plural noun or a third-person present verb. And earthquakes almost ALWAYS ruin things--if they don't, they don't wind up in the paper. At first glance I thought it was about the quake ruining something. Things often die in earthquakes so I read it a second time thinking it was about something surviving (living) after a quake. I had to read it very carefully and think hard before I figured out what it meant.
No matter how many headlines I read, my brain still puts in a pause whenever I see a comma. A comma does NOT tell you exactly what is happening. "Microsoft and Google" is 100% unambiguous. "Microsoft," might be the beginning of "Microsoft, a large software company, is..." or "Microsoft, Google battle..."--two TOTALLY different types of sentences. My brain does NOT go into a fewer-rules mode--"OK, this is a headline, so a comma does NOT signify the start of an interrupter"--just because the text is big and at the top of the page.
If anything a web based article is even more limited that a dead tree version because of the faster pace of web browsing and sharply limited screen acreage.
I disagree 100%. Unless your headlines take up a whole screen's width and height (which, duh, it never will) it is NEVER a good idea to sacrifice clarity for the sake of brevity on the Web. Not to this extent. There's no reason to sacrifice clarity for those who care just to make it so idiots who are going to skim and misread ANYWAY can do so faster.
It's a new century. The Web is not as hard-pressed for inches as print is. PLEASE stop putting commas in headlines!
I too have done various types of print and screen layout, and while I've not had to do any serious headline writing, I do read The Slot.:-)
Microsoft isn't messing about when it says 'global' either. The list of 49 countries that Microsoft is targeting spans six continents...
Arrrr, safe to assume that Antarctica be free of the thievin' scum? Set sail, me mateys! Thar be a vast untapped market just a-waitin' to be plundered!
I found the headline to be misleading, but in a different way. "Sony, Microsoft Begin Battle of Virtual Worlds" to me sounds like they're both going to create virtual worlds and there would be a big LotR-style battle between the two. Now that would be cool! I'd pay to join.... except that I wouldn't want to be on either side.:-) Make an Apple or Linux virtual world and we'll talk.
Nice. I dreamt of something similar when I realized that my 624 MHz, 96 MB RAM, 2 GB storage (via CF/SD cards) 640x480 Dell Axim X50v PDA was overall quite a bit more powerful than my first real computer--a 75 MHz, 24 MB RAM, 850 MB Dell OptiPlex, which was perfectly suitable for Web and Photoshop work under Win95 back in its day.
Anyway, that worked for me, and I got a dozen calls from parents asking me for follow-on advice, as their kids demanded tools to build their own sites.
Aha! You discovered the missing step 2 in the series 1) Give a presentation at my kid's school 2)... 3) Profit!
Now that this part of the NDA has been dropped, it seems to me that developing for iPhone is no better or worse than developing for any other closed-source platform--Windows, Palm, etc. Maybe not ideal, but not that bad.
Yeah, and GNU's Not UNIX. Have you SEEN these two apps? http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y162/neotheawakening/FreeTutsPhotoshopToolbox1.jpg http://math.hws.edu/eck/cs324/s04/lab1/gimp_toolbox.png The marquee, lasso, magic wand, eyedropper, mgnifying glass, paint bucket, pencil, brush, eraser, airbrush, clone, blur, dodge, and smudge tools all look remarkably similar. (This was even moreso the case a few years ago before both apps got more stylized.) Some, like a rectangular marquee, are generic, others, like the paint bucket, pen, lasso, are quite specific. And even if Susan Kare made them for MacPaint in the first place, there are other differences. Look at the exact arrangement of the color-choosing items: the foreground, background, default, and switch icons and their arrangement are IDENTICAL.
My work bought one of the first tablets PCs, a Compaq TC1000, with a 1 GHz Transmeta. We later bought a slightly newer model, the (now HP-branded) TC1100 with a 1 GHz Pentium M. Same speed, same RAM (IIRC), same everything.* Night-and-day difference. The Pentium was much faster at the things the tablet was built to do, like speech-to-text. When dictating, you could say a sentence, the Pentium would crunch for a second, and the text would appear. With the Transmeta it was more like a few seconds. I remember borrowing the old one once (the newer one was in my department) and I almost couldn't stand to work on it. Both had comparable battery life (low power draw was one of Transmeta's big points)--I never clocked them but it's not like the Transmeta got 2x the life or anything. Both were good for 3-4 hours of steady use, like at a conference or something. (Oh, how I loved to play Dots on that thing.) If they hadn't been Linus' first employer after he became famous I doubt we would have ever heard of them.
* the later one had 512 MB and I'm pretty sure the first did too. If not, then possibly discount everything I said about performance.:-) (Except for the part about battery life, that part would still be true.) Anyone else have a similar experience?
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously there's no single answer to everything but we didn't spend a trillion dollars after Oklahoma City.
The economy WILL bounce back. What we're going through is big and scary, but for every person (or company) that made big, crappy decisions in the last decade, there is another person (or company) that was smart, saved money, and will swoop in to buy whatever Person/Company A can no longer afford to maintain, be it a house or a bank. So overall, we'll be fine.
But the war... I really don't see why we should be spending billions of dollars to make the whole world hate us even more, no sense mentioning all the lives lost on both sides.
Q1: why are we fighting this war?
A1: Because of 9/11.
Q2: THEN WHAT THE FUCK DID WE DO TO PISS THEM OFF SO MUCH THEY FELT COMPELLED TO FLY PLANES INTO FOUR MAJOR BUILDINGS? I don't think we're making it any better.
Are you going to vote for Barack Obama or are you a racist?
Yes!
Next week in Comp Sci 101: OR vs XOR. :-)
Hell, I'm just happy Slashdot managed to post this before the damn promo ended. I read about this yesterday on TUAW.
It's not so much individual authors as much as it is the corporations that push infinite copyright. And the hypocrisy is mind-blowing. Not only did Disney build their empire largely on public-domain works (Snow White, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, to name just a few) but they also used PD works to fuel their late-80s/early-90s return to relevance! (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Tarzan.) Yet they are one of the largest, if not THE largest, proponents of eternal copyrights.
The U.S. Constitution says the point of copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times [emphasis added] to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" The Copyright Act of 1790 "...secured an author the exclusive right to publish and vend "maps, charts and books" for a term of 14 years, with the right of renewal for one additional 14 year term if the author was still alive" clearly showing what they meant by "limited" back then. It doesn't say anything along the lines of "write a hit song/movie/book once and you and your descendants will never have to work like everyone else on the planet does."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disney_feature_films
http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html
Actually, it sounds like they will. From TFA: "If it works on Windows Vista, it'll work in Windows 7. The move from Vista to Windows 7 we expect to be seamless."
America's #1 Free Wireless ISP. Nationwide, and now #1 in London too!
P.S. How did you indent your code on Slashdot?
This is funny. You're smart enough to post that explanation that I don't even quite understand, but you didn't View -> Source to see the answer to your question? He just padded with s. (No offense meant, you're not dumb at all, just really struck me as funny.)
Of course, you can always just
with the <ecode> tags and it'll turn spaces into s for you. See the list of 'Allowed HTML' below the comment box.
the site has been updated and now has the torrent download link.
You can copy the song as many times as you want, including over the internet [how about sneakernet?] with friends, but you can't use the song until you obtain a license.
And how do you obtain a license? I presume over the Internet. What if the recipient doesn't have Internet access? What if I want to "use" the song in my car? What if the network is down? What if the servers aren't available? What if the license holder goes under? What happens to the media 100 years from now when the Internet as we know it has gone the way of gaslights?
Furthermore, to "activate" the license will ALWAYS require some kind of login/username/password/account thing... this CAN NOT be "invisible", ever.
It's not so much "verified" as it is "cleaned up": "This list of articles was then manually sorted for relevance to children, and adult topics were removed... SOS Children volunteers then checked and tidied up the contents, first by selecting historical versions of articles free from vandalism and then by removing unsuitable sections"
Economizing the number of letters in a headline is driven by several factors, all of which apply onscreen as they do on paper- like the need to minimize the time it takes for a reader to take in the headline... [emphasis mine]
BUT--there is a HUGE difference between the amount of time it takes to "take in" (read) a headline and the time it takes to UNDERSTAND it. The worst headline I ever read, I read very quickly--it was just four words. Unfortunately, those words were "QUAKE'S RUINS YIELDS LIVES." Considering that the all-uppercase-ness of it hid the first word's apostrophe, it was a PAIN to parse because EVERY WORD could have been either a plural noun or a third-person present verb. And earthquakes almost ALWAYS ruin things--if they don't, they don't wind up in the paper. At first glance I thought it was about the quake ruining something. Things often die in earthquakes so I read it a second time thinking it was about something surviving (living) after a quake. I had to read it very carefully and think hard before I figured out what it meant.
No matter how many headlines I read, my brain still puts in a pause whenever I see a comma. A comma does NOT tell you exactly what is happening. "Microsoft and Google" is 100% unambiguous. "Microsoft," might be the beginning of "Microsoft, a large software company, is..." or "Microsoft, Google battle..."--two TOTALLY different types of sentences. My brain does NOT go into a fewer-rules mode--"OK, this is a headline, so a comma does NOT signify the start of an interrupter"--just because the text is big and at the top of the page.
If anything a web based article is even more limited that a dead tree version because of the faster pace of web browsing and sharply limited screen acreage.
I disagree 100%. Unless your headlines take up a whole screen's width and height (which, duh, it never will) it is NEVER a good idea to sacrifice clarity for the sake of brevity on the Web. Not to this extent. There's no reason to sacrifice clarity for those who care just to make it so idiots who are going to skim and misread ANYWAY can do so faster.
It's a new century. The Web is not as hard-pressed for inches as print is. PLEASE stop putting commas in headlines!
I too have done various types of print and screen layout, and while I've not had to do any serious headline writing, I do read The Slot. :-)
Before someone invents (and uses) a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet I'd like to mention that my kid's school uses robo-calls to inform us of upcoming events (end of the quarter, statewide testing days, etc.) and it's great so let's give him the benefit of the doubt. :-)
Of course not! Everyone knows that's a huge privacy issue. :-)
Bah, you beat me to it... the first quote listed on the page.
Microsoft isn't messing about when it says 'global' either. The list of 49 countries that Microsoft is targeting spans six continents...
Arrrr, safe to assume that Antarctica be free of the thievin' scum? Set sail, me mateys! Thar be a vast untapped market just a-waitin' to be plundered!
... and went back to 2003! Twice!
"Kelvins" are units and have been for 40 years.
It's a great browser... for Windows. Which I don't use. Make it for OS X and I'll use it.
I found the headline to be misleading, but in a different way. "Sony, Microsoft Begin Battle of Virtual Worlds" to me sounds like they're both going to create virtual worlds and there would be a big LotR-style battle between the two. Now that would be cool! I'd pay to join.... except that I wouldn't want to be on either side. :-) Make an Apple or Linux virtual world and we'll talk.
Nice. I dreamt of something similar when I realized that my 624 MHz, 96 MB RAM, 2 GB storage (via CF/SD cards) 640x480 Dell Axim X50v PDA was overall quite a bit more powerful than my first real computer--a 75 MHz, 24 MB RAM, 850 MB Dell OptiPlex, which was perfectly suitable for Web and Photoshop work under Win95 back in its day.
Anyway, that worked for me, and I got a dozen calls from parents asking me for follow-on advice, as their kids demanded tools to build their own sites.
Aha! You discovered the missing step 2 in the series ...
1) Give a presentation at my kid's school
2)
3) Profit!
Now that this part of the NDA has been dropped, it seems to me that developing for iPhone is no better or worse than developing for any other closed-source platform--Windows, Palm, etc. Maybe not ideal, but not that bad.
GIMP is not... Adobe Photoshop
Yeah, and GNU's Not UNIX. Have you SEEN these two apps?
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y162/neotheawakening/FreeTutsPhotoshopToolbox1.jpg
http://math.hws.edu/eck/cs324/s04/lab1/gimp_toolbox.png
The marquee, lasso, magic wand, eyedropper, mgnifying glass, paint bucket, pencil, brush, eraser, airbrush, clone, blur, dodge, and smudge tools all look remarkably similar. (This was even moreso the case a few years ago before both apps got more stylized.) Some, like a rectangular marquee, are generic, others, like the paint bucket, pen, lasso, are quite specific. And even if Susan Kare made them for MacPaint in the first place, there are other differences. Look at the exact arrangement of the color-choosing items: the foreground, background, default, and switch icons and their arrangement are IDENTICAL.
My work bought one of the first tablets PCs, a Compaq TC1000, with a 1 GHz Transmeta. We later bought a slightly newer model, the (now HP-branded) TC1100 with a 1 GHz Pentium M. Same speed, same RAM (IIRC), same everything.* Night-and-day difference. The Pentium was much faster at the things the tablet was built to do, like speech-to-text. When dictating, you could say a sentence, the Pentium would crunch for a second, and the text would appear. With the Transmeta it was more like a few seconds. I remember borrowing the old one once (the newer one was in my department) and I almost couldn't stand to work on it. Both had comparable battery life (low power draw was one of Transmeta's big points)--I never clocked them but it's not like the Transmeta got 2x the life or anything. Both were good for 3-4 hours of steady use, like at a conference or something. (Oh, how I loved to play Dots on that thing.) If they hadn't been Linus' first employer after he became famous I doubt we would have ever heard of them.
* the later one had 512 MB and I'm pretty sure the first did too. If not, then possibly discount everything I said about performance. :-) (Except for the part about battery life, that part would still be true.) Anyone else have a similar experience?