Please, I know what the terms mean -- I've actually done these things. But Localization and Internationalization are two parts of the same process. Especially in PHP-based applications, which are basically script-driven web pages.
My bet is that they're going to take another stab at micropayments. Only they won't call it that, because micropayments are one of those things "everybody knows" won't work.
Why should Google want to do micropayments? Because Google is in the content business. Right now, online content is sustained mainly by advertising, with a few sites selling subscriptions. Not all content is advertising-friendly, and most content isn't subscriber-friendly. Newspapers, for example, don't make enough from online advertising to justify the effort they put into their sites, and subscriptions don't work with the grazing-reading habits of online news junkies. (I read 10+ different news sites. If I had to pay $10 a month for each of them...) If there were a way to be charged a fraction of a cent every time you go to a certain page, there'd be a lot more online content.
...we were very surprised to find that there's not much organized information...
You shouldn't be. Internationalization (I'm a good typist, so I can dispense with that mysterious "18") only applies to human-readable stuff. In other words, documentation. (Yes, captions on forms are documentation too!) Is there anything software people are less motivated to deal with than documentation?
You mean their wasn't twisted nature to that book already?
Well, if you're a fan of Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice, then of course you know that the Alice books are full of death jokes and other dark stuff. But when I first read them at the age of 10, all that stuff went right by me -- it was just a cute story.
My two personal favorites: The Bread-And-Butter Fly, which lives on weak tea with cream in it. That's hard to get, so the BABF has a short life span. Then there's the Tweedle Brothers attempts to convince Alice that she's not real, which cause her to burst into tears. She insists that being able to cry proves that she exists. Their reply: "I hope you don't think those are real tears!"
But as much as I like Sarah Gellar, I'm not sure I can see her as Alice. I have to wonder if somebody didn't see that really lame post-shark episode of Buffy, the one where she thinks she's a mental patient dreaming she's a vampire slayer, and decided it was original and cool. God safe us from Hollywood "creativity"!
I'm used to commenters not RTFA, but it's getting a bit much when the posters can't be bothered either.
No, that's predictable. I'm sure most story submissions are crap, and always have been. That's why we have editors. Alas, the editors no longer feel the need to edit....
TFA isn't a review -- it's just a rehash of the IBM announcement. Plus it's on a site with zero Slashdot compatibility. Wny not link the IBM/Lenovo page directly? Probably because the submitter wanted to promote his site.
Actually, I don't think the Wikipedia does work. There's some good articles, but there's also rather a lot of crap. Most articles are collections of random trivia and jumbled brain dumps, done by people who aren't interested in doing serious research.
Then there's misinformation. There's actually less of this than you'd expect, since people tend to correct each other. But there's no way to tell which articles have had a proper fact check. People are supposed to cite their sources, by almost nobody does. Probably most articles are reliable, but that fact doesn't do you much good when you don't know which ones are and which ones aren't.
I've been participating in Wikipedia for a couple of months. I enjoyed it at first, but I'm just about ready to give up on it. It's too frustrating to deal with all the self-righteous idiots who know what they know, and don't want to be told they're wrong. A Wiki-based project only works when there's a cooperative spirit, and a common need to find consensus. Most Wikipedia contributors just don't have that attitude.
It's rather more dangerous than that, as any SF fan know. Maybe events will just conspire to prevent you from creating a paradox. (Your gun misfires, you have an accident on your way there, etc.) Or maybe the universe will create some massive disaster just to prevent you from travelling back in time. Larry Niven once wrote a short story that linked supernovas with the invention of time travel.
Frankly, I find the whole "cosmic puppeteer" model of time travel unsatisfying. Either time travel is impossible, or you create a new reality when you change the past. If we're going to believe in mysterious forces that control everybody's destiny, then we might as well all become flat-earther fundamentalists and be done with it!
You're one to talk about "intellectual inferiors" with your boilerplate Libertarianism and Social Darwinism. Especially when it isn't even relevent to what I was saying! I wasn't talking about Walmart's socioeconomic role, I was talking about their self-righteous stupidity in playing it!
Walmart's biggest problem seems to be that they can never admit to a mistake. Most companies, when an employee's misdeeds gets them sued, they say, "Gee, there must be something wrong with our training or policies." That would never occur to anybody at Walmart. Instead they say, "Those damn professional photographers are lawsuit hounds! They can just go somewhere else!"
All big-box stores have ethical issues -- it's the nature of the business. But Walmart seems just incapable of admitting it, no matter how blatently they're caught with their pants down. They spend a small fortune on TV commercials trying to convince people that they're good citizens -- with little effect. It would be a lot more productive to put that money into improving their labor practices. I mean, all those Walmart employees on food stamps, and going to emergency rooms because they can't afford health insurance is really bad for their image. But that would mean admiting another ethical failure. Never!
...you can't argue that the process didn't put pressure on you to switch hosting providers, or at least put pressure on your hosts to ensure that they never host another spammer again...
Wrong on both counts. Blacklisters are so quick on the trigger, there are no safe providers. And how is a provider supposed to "ensure that they never host another spammer"? They can only act after a user has started spamming. Plus, they have to take some time to investigate spam complaints -- yanking someone's service without documenting their TOS violations is a good way to get sued. That delay always seems to convince blacklisters that the provider is "spam friendly".
I thought I saw a report that it had been uncancelled. But apparently it's just a rumor that Dick Wolf is still fighting to keep the show alive, either on NBC or TNT.
I probably didn't read the report carefully because I've come to thoroughly loathe the whole franchise. I used to enjoy it when it was a single show that tried to deal with interesting legal and social issues. But now it's just a depressing freak show.
Oh bullshit. There are plenty of ASP-based sites that can withstand the Slashdot effect. This meltdown probably has more to do with the overall capacity of the server. Which is probably a "shared host" serving dozens of virtual web sites.
I haven't seen the new BG (can't afford cable), but I'd be very suprised if it were that expensive to make. I'm sure there are a lot of expensive special effects -- but there's expensive and then there's expensive.
I know that (relatively) low production costs is why they bought Stargate and dumped Farscape. Which might seem strange, since Stargate obviously spends a lot of money on effects. But the overall cost is much lower. Probably the absence of fancy sets is a big factor.
And here's a detail: Sci FI didn't have to buy the rights to the original series, which GE essentially got for free when it bought various Vivendi Universal assets from the bankruptcy court. If they'd had to pay Universal Studios for the rights I very much doubt if the series would have happened.
Jeez, have you looked at the NBC schedule? Sitcoms and reality shows. Which are cheap to make. What dramas they do have are formulaic (four Law and Order shows!) and low-budget. Plus a notable absence of edgy ideas or sf/fantasy stories.
If Sci-Fi goes to NBC Universal management and asks for big bucks to buy the rights to Firefly from Fox, I think the answer is predictable. So it all comes down to whether Fox will let go of Firefly for a reasonable amount. Not impossible, but not the way the media industry tends to do things.
Both your theories assume that everybody at Sun has a common agenda. Not the case. When I worked there, the internecine battles were epic. To the outside world it looks like bizarre decision-making. On the inside, it's simply a matter of whoever's left standing getting to impose their particular policy.
If the Sci-Fi channel is showing the series, they would have had to buy out the broadcast contract from Fox.
Not at all. They could have simply bought permission to show the episodes once or twice. I would be very much suprised if Fox let all broadcast rights go for the amount of money Sci-Fi Channel can afford to pay. Note that Sci-Fidoes not have deep pockets any more. They did back when they bankrolled Farscape, but then their parent, Vivendi Univesal, went thoroughly bankrupt. Ever since then, they've refused to look at any big-budget project.
Of course, Firefly doesn't cost that much to make. But before Sci-Fi can make more episodes, they have to get Fox's permission, 'cause its their property. If Fox holds out for more than Sci-Fi can pay, that's the end of it.
You're saying, "But that's stupid! Firefly isn't making them any money for Fox sitting in a vault!" Perhaps. But media companies sit on properties all the time, and never give them up cheaply.
How can I convince an older generation of business leaders that FOSS is the way of the future?
Well, you can start by addressing their priorities. They're not the least bit interested in vague claims that open sourcing is "the way of the future" or that an FOSS project will pay for itself in good publicity. They want specifics: numbers, precedents, cost-benefit analyses. If you're not prepared to offer them these things, you're wasting your time.
And don't underestimate them either. Don't assume that they are just old stick-in-the-muds who can't make an important paradigm shift. If they read business magazines, they probably know all about the FOSS model of doing business -- it was all the rage a few years ago. And they might well know better than you the risks of that model. Recall that most companies that tried to profit from giving away software have either backed away from the concept or are out of business!
I think by the time Javascript came along, Sun had pretty much lost interest in TCL. I heard stories about people trying to license the Sun implementation of Tcl/Tk and getting a runaround. It's probably not a coincidence that Ousterhout left Sun (and took Tcl with him) at about the same time as Eric Schmidt, who brought Ousterhout on board in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Please, I know what the terms mean -- I've actually done these things. But Localization and Internationalization are two parts of the same process. Especially in PHP-based applications, which are basically script-driven web pages.
Why should Google want to do micropayments? Because Google is in the content business. Right now, online content is sustained mainly by advertising, with a few sites selling subscriptions. Not all content is advertising-friendly, and most content isn't subscriber-friendly. Newspapers, for example, don't make enough from online advertising to justify the effort they put into their sites, and subscriptions don't work with the grazing-reading habits of online news junkies. (I read 10+ different news sites. If I had to pay $10 a month for each of them...) If there were a way to be charged a fraction of a cent every time you go to a certain page, there'd be a lot more online content.
By Disney standards, it was creepy. By any real standards, it was standard Disney pablum.
My two personal favorites: The Bread-And-Butter Fly, which lives on weak tea with cream in it. That's hard to get, so the BABF has a short life span. Then there's the Tweedle Brothers attempts to convince Alice that she's not real, which cause her to burst into tears. She insists that being able to cry proves that she exists. Their reply: "I hope you don't think those are real tears!"
But as much as I like Sarah Gellar, I'm not sure I can see her as Alice. I have to wonder if somebody didn't see that really lame post-shark episode of Buffy, the one where she thinks she's a mental patient dreaming she's a vampire slayer, and decided it was original and cool. God safe us from Hollywood "creativity"!
TFA isn't a review -- it's just a rehash of the IBM announcement. Plus it's on a site with zero Slashdot compatibility. Wny not link the IBM/Lenovo page directly? Probably because the submitter wanted to promote his site.
Then there's misinformation. There's actually less of this than you'd expect, since people tend to correct each other. But there's no way to tell which articles have had a proper fact check. People are supposed to cite their sources, by almost nobody does. Probably most articles are reliable, but that fact doesn't do you much good when you don't know which ones are and which ones aren't.
I've been participating in Wikipedia for a couple of months. I enjoyed it at first, but I'm just about ready to give up on it. It's too frustrating to deal with all the self-righteous idiots who know what they know, and don't want to be told they're wrong. A Wiki-based project only works when there's a cooperative spirit, and a common need to find consensus. Most Wikipedia contributors just don't have that attitude.
Frankly, I find the whole "cosmic puppeteer" model of time travel unsatisfying. Either time travel is impossible, or you create a new reality when you change the past. If we're going to believe in mysterious forces that control everybody's destiny, then we might as well all become flat-earther fundamentalists and be done with it!
Two words for the same thing!
You're one to talk about "intellectual inferiors" with your boilerplate Libertarianism and Social Darwinism. Especially when it isn't even relevent to what I was saying! I wasn't talking about Walmart's socioeconomic role, I was talking about their self-righteous stupidity in playing it!
Less coffee, dude!
All big-box stores have ethical issues -- it's the nature of the business. But Walmart seems just incapable of admitting it, no matter how blatently they're caught with their pants down. They spend a small fortune on TV commercials trying to convince people that they're good citizens -- with little effect. It would be a lot more productive to put that money into improving their labor practices. I mean, all those Walmart employees on food stamps, and going to emergency rooms because they can't afford health insurance is really bad for their image. But that would mean admiting another ethical failure. Never!
I probably didn't read the report carefully because I've come to thoroughly loathe the whole franchise. I used to enjoy it when it was a single show that tried to deal with interesting legal and social issues. But now it's just a depressing freak show.
Cancelled, and then uncancelled. I guess they didn't have anything better to fill the slot!
I know that (relatively) low production costs is why they bought Stargate and dumped Farscape. Which might seem strange, since Stargate obviously spends a lot of money on effects. But the overall cost is much lower. Probably the absence of fancy sets is a big factor.
And here's a detail: Sci FI didn't have to buy the rights to the original series, which GE essentially got for free when it bought various Vivendi Universal assets from the bankruptcy court. If they'd had to pay Universal Studios for the rights I very much doubt if the series would have happened.
If Sci-Fi goes to NBC Universal management and asks for big bucks to buy the rights to Firefly from Fox, I think the answer is predictable. So it all comes down to whether Fox will let go of Firefly for a reasonable amount. Not impossible, but not the way the media industry tends to do things.
Both your theories assume that everybody at Sun has a common agenda. Not the case. When I worked there, the internecine battles were epic. To the outside world it looks like bizarre decision-making. On the inside, it's simply a matter of whoever's left standing getting to impose their particular policy.
Of course, Firefly doesn't cost that much to make. But before Sci-Fi can make more episodes, they have to get Fox's permission, 'cause its their property. If Fox holds out for more than Sci-Fi can pay, that's the end of it.
You're saying, "But that's stupid! Firefly isn't making them any money for Fox sitting in a vault!" Perhaps. But media companies sit on properties all the time, and never give them up cheaply.
So what? He's not disputing the company's right to profit from the software. He's just arguing over the best way of doing so.
And don't underestimate them either. Don't assume that they are just old stick-in-the-muds who can't make an important paradigm shift. If they read business magazines, they probably know all about the FOSS model of doing business -- it was all the rage a few years ago. And they might well know better than you the risks of that model. Recall that most companies that tried to profit from giving away software have either backed away from the concept or are out of business!
I think by the time Javascript came along, Sun had pretty much lost interest in TCL. I heard stories about people trying to license the Sun implementation of Tcl/Tk and getting a runaround. It's probably not a coincidence that Ousterhout left Sun (and took Tcl with him) at about the same time as Eric Schmidt, who brought Ousterhout on board in the first place.