Taking what's written in Wikipedia as sole proof of something being true is obviously not smart. However, that's also true of conventional media (books, TV, newspapers etc). The difference with Wikipedia is that it does allow all sides of a debate to put forward their point of view on a subject if they want.
Taking your Zionist/Anti-Zionist comment - the page on the holocaust is mostly devoted to the commonly accepted facts about what happened, but there is also a section at the bottom about holocaust deniers. This section does state that "These views are not accepted as credible by mainstream historians.", but does give enough reference material if you want to explore this theory yourself.
I suspect that most historical books (certainly the ones that I've read) cover the accepted facts, and rarely make any mention of the denial theories (and the books that do reference it will almost certainly be only presenting that belief).
If it's anything like my C500 (and just about every other phone I've had - apart from my old Startac), you'll notice the paint wearing off the answer and disconnect buttons after about 6 months though.
And there is the problem - you think that's all blatantly obvious terminology, but I've never heard those words uttered together in my life before (if it hadn't been for the context, I'd assume you were talking about broadcasting from the driveway outside my house). I've no idea if this is common terminology to everyone who drives (I don't), or just Americans (I'm not), but to me it's car jargon.
Don't know if I've cocked up some setting somewhere, but its IMAP directory support seems a little clunky to me. On Outlook/Thunderbird/Mac Mail etc, if I have a directory called "Mates" with sub-directories of "Tom","Dick" and "Harry", I see a nice tree, which I can expand/collapse just like a normal directory view. In Opera, I see totally separate directories called "Mates.Tom", "Mates.Dick" and "Mates.Harry".
Also, the browser does seem to support scroll-wheel emulation on my laptop's touchpad. On FF, and just about every other Windows app known to man, I can drag my finger up and down the right hand side of the touchpad and the window scrolls with me. Not Opera - I have to move the pointer over to the scroll bar. Works fine on real mouse scroll wheels, but not the touch pad.
Much as I like Opera, I'm not switching until I've got those two sorted.
No manager will listen to any talk of "but this what everyone uses" when the server crashed again due to memory allocation issues or yet another virus attack.
Oh, but they do. And there're certainly more likely to listen to that than "no one else uses it, but I like it" if something goes wrong with your preferred solution. It may not happen as often, but when it does, it'll be your neck on the line.
I'm not suggesting that this is a good thing, but it's why many people follow the herd when making these choices. If something goes wrong with the industry standard choice, then it's the industry's problem. If something goes wrong with your own, non-industry standard choice, then it's your problem. Remember the old "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM" slogan?.
It's quite funny really - they've taken the headline, chopped out one word (IBM) and then only quoted from the part of the article that refers to the word that they've removed.
The reference to open source is actually that they are designing their app server to operate more smoothly with open source frameworks like Spring and Hibernate, which in my view is a good thing (although not having really played much with the previous versions, I'm not sure what was preventing this in the first place, so it could just be throwing a few trendy buzzwords arounds).
5 minutes to pay by card? Are you the person I always seem to get stuck behind at the ATM?
It takes about 30 seconds at most to put a card in a slot, type a number in and get an auth back. How long does it take you/the cashier to find the right change?
Let's see - take the most relevant device, the mobile phone. I'm pretty sure if you've got a mobile phone it's got a clock on it - that's convergent. In the UK, it's almost certainly got SMS text messaging (don't know whether it's true in the US or not, but I'd guess it is) - that's convergence. I'd like to see someone try to sell a new mobile phone that couldn't do SMS, or an SMS-only device, but I'll bet that there were people 10 years ago saying that the two should stay as separate units.
Or take your car - not many come without built in radio/tape or CD these days - again convergence.
Or your average hi-fi with radio/CD/tape/amp all in one unit. sure you can buy them all separately, but I'll bet there's a considerably larger amount sold as convergent devices than as separates.
The thing is, by the time a convergent device becomes popular, no-one thinks of it in that way. It's just features of the object that you're buying.
There's hundreds more examples, some obvious - like washer/driers, some less obvious - my keyring has a handy little torch on it, but they're all around you if you know where to look.
My Windows smartphone has an MP3 player and charges through USB - it's very handy when I'm walking to and from work (around 45 mins each way) without needing to lug my complete MP3 collection with me. It's got more than enough storage for that time, it charges while it syncs with my PC when I get to work, and as I'm already going to be taking a phone with me, it's taking up no extra pocket space.
It wouldn't replace my 60GB MP3 player for long trips, but for short journeys it's extremely handy.
Similar to the camera, I wouldn't but a phone just because it's got that feature, but it's handy to have.
The point is that they are not excuses - it's simply a case of government spin, and if you associate the Chinese regime with real Communism you're falling for it.
If you're going to abuse your citizens then you're more likely to get away with it by claiming to be doing it for their own good under the banner of 'socialism' or 'communism', even when in most cases it's nothing of the sort. If you want to understand what real Communism is, try reading something like 'The Communist Manifesto'.
You've not addressed the point that every country that's ever had the word 'Democratic' in the title (or at least the ones that I can think of) is also nothing of the sort.
I can pretty much guarantee you wouldn't do it in one go. I completely reloaded my mp3 player with around 45GB of music (via USB 2) the other week. It got so hot that I ended up doing in about 4 stints (I think it was around 1-2 hours actual copying time, but it took me around 6 hours in total).
At the moment 120 would probably be more than I need, but I will more than fill up my 60GB player when I've finished ripping my CDs. The 41-83 days thing is a bit of a red herring TBH. I'm not planning on sitting down and listening to my entire collection from beginning to end, but I have it on random most of the time and it's great to have that much variety for it to chose from. Also, when I go on holiday, it's handy not to try to guess up front what music I'm likely to be in the mood for during the trip.
And what's that got to do with communism? I don't remember Marx or Engels promoting the killing of dissidents with tuberculosis. Could you point me to a reference?
A party that used the name 'Communist' may have done that, but as I mentioned in the previous post, that's about as relevant as associating the policies of the German Democratic Republic (or the Democratic Republic of Congo, or most countries that have the word Democratic in their name) with real democracy.
Just because the party calls itself "The Communist Party" it doesn't mean that it's particularly following real communist policy - any more than the German Democratic Republic (old East Germany) was actually democratic.
Maybe I didn't make myself very clear - the "This is not the case" referred to having no knowledge of the console apart from the amount of games available.
However, for the PSP (and the DS), I know considerably more than that. I know (for instance) that there are currently 4 games that I would like for the PSP (two of which I've already got) and 3 more coming out before Christmas (and that I'm unlikely to be watching too many movies on it). I don't know (and don't care) how many other games there are for it, because I'm not going to be buying them.
I also know that there's not a single DS-only game that particularly appeals to me at the moment and that I can already play all of the GBA games on my GBA. If, at some point, a couple of 'must-have' games come out on the DS, then I'll probably get one of those as well, but I won't be bothered one way or another whether there's 100 other games available for it.
In theory I'd agree, but then I also had a PlayStation and an N64. The PS probably had about 10 times as many (maybe even more) games as the N64, but the N64 had GoldenEye, Mario 64, Zelda and (for most of their respective lives) far better football (soccer) games. I struggle to remember anything I played on the PS apart from Grand Turismo (others may disagree and be able to name loads of great PS games, but that was my experience of the platforms).
If I had absolutely no knowledge of the specific games that had come out for two different consoles, but knew that one had 10 games available and one had 100 then I would almost certainly go for the one with 100. But this is not the case with the PSP. There already seem to be at least 4 'good' games for it (and at least 3 more due in the next couple of months that I'm interested in), so above those it's unlikely to matter one way or the other how many other games come out for it.
How many games there are is pretty irrelevant to me - how good the games are is far more important.
I only own 4 games for my X-Box, and around 6 for my PS2 (and 3 of those are PES1,2 and 3), yet I play on both of them very regularly.
I've got my PSP today with 2 games, which on first play both look like they will keep me happy until PES5 comes out. I don't care if there's 10 or 100 on the platform, if those other 90 are ones that I'm not going to play.
This would be a great scheme if it wasn't for the environmental waste that it produces.
If I could buy a printer/ink combo and tell them to "hold the printer" I'd take it, but I'm not happy throwing away a printer (no-one I know would want a new printer with no ink) and a huge load of packaging every time the cartrigde runs out.
Surely a "sexual offender" is by definition someone who has committed a sexual offence? What makes you say it's got to be against a child?
The link you sent was to specifically Florida legislation, and even within that, section 794.0235 was (as far as I could undestand - IANAL) talks about general sexual battery - nothing to do with children.
The thing is, my understanding of what it's doing suggests that it probably doesn't care at all whether it's "the book" or "a book" or even that a book is involved at all.
It cares that the word "wa" often appears after the word "watashi" at the start of sentences (presumably - I don't speak any Japanese), so when generating sentences, it will often put these together.
From what I could get from the article, I'm not sure this is attempting to do translation, or even real comprehension.
It's looking for common patterns in sentences (e.g., they often start with "The") and then creating it's own, following the same structure.
My wife's a teacher, and she's got a kids' game called Silly Sentences, which is basically a simple jigsaw puzzle that only allows you to put words in a particular order (adverbs will only fit before verbs etc), and this allows you to make sentences that are pretty much guaranteed to make grammatical sense, even if you don't understand what the words on the cards mean.
My guess is that the program is looking to get the equivalent of the jigsaw shapes of the words (i.e., where they are allowed to be placed relative to other words), not their actual meaning.
It's simply that press releases and lazy journalists need a simple soundbite to compare the product/service to something that the average reader will understand, and "killer" sounds more impressive than "rip-off" or "-a-like".
Slashdot Mirror
Taking what's written in Wikipedia as sole proof of something being true is obviously not smart. However, that's also true of conventional media (books, TV, newspapers etc). The difference with Wikipedia is that it does allow all sides of a debate to put forward their point of view on a subject if they want.
Taking your Zionist/Anti-Zionist comment - the page on the holocaust is mostly devoted to the commonly accepted facts about what happened, but there is also a section at the bottom about holocaust deniers. This section does state that "These views are not accepted as credible by mainstream historians.", but does give enough reference material if you want to explore this theory yourself.
I suspect that most historical books (certainly the ones that I've read) cover the accepted facts, and rarely make any mention of the denial theories (and the books that do reference it will almost certainly be only presenting that belief).
If it's anything like my C500 (and just about every other phone I've had - apart from my old Startac), you'll notice the paint wearing off the answer and disconnect buttons after about 6 months though.
And there is the problem - you think that's all blatantly obvious terminology, but I've never heard those words uttered together in my life before (if it hadn't been for the context, I'd assume you were talking about broadcasting from the driveway outside my house). I've no idea if this is common terminology to everyone who drives (I don't), or just Americans (I'm not), but to me it's car jargon.
I'd been through all of the links that I could find through Google, with no joy.
:(
However, I upgraded to the latest version last night and it's started working fine.
IMAP support's still poor though
Don't know if I've cocked up some setting somewhere, but its IMAP directory support seems a little clunky to me. On Outlook/Thunderbird/Mac Mail etc, if I have a directory called "Mates" with sub-directories of "Tom","Dick" and "Harry", I see a nice tree, which I can expand/collapse just like a normal directory view. In Opera, I see totally separate directories called "Mates.Tom", "Mates.Dick" and "Mates.Harry".
Also, the browser does seem to support scroll-wheel emulation on my laptop's touchpad. On FF, and just about every other Windows app known to man, I can drag my finger up and down the right hand side of the touchpad and the window scrolls with me. Not Opera - I have to move the pointer over to the scroll bar. Works fine on real mouse scroll wheels, but not the touch pad.
Much as I like Opera, I'm not switching until I've got those two sorted.
The real question is - are they going to bother updating their desktop browser any more if their profits all come from the mobile version?
Oh, but they do. And there're certainly more likely to listen to that than "no one else uses it, but I like it" if something goes wrong with your preferred solution. It may not happen as often, but when it does, it'll be your neck on the line.
I'm not suggesting that this is a good thing, but it's why many people follow the herd when making these choices. If something goes wrong with the industry standard choice, then it's the industry's problem. If something goes wrong with your own, non-industry standard choice, then it's your problem. Remember the old "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM" slogan?.
It's quite funny really - they've taken the headline, chopped out one word (IBM) and then only quoted from the part of the article that refers to the word that they've removed.
The reference to open source is actually that they are designing their app server to operate more smoothly with open source frameworks like Spring and Hibernate, which in my view is a good thing (although not having really played much with the previous versions, I'm not sure what was preventing this in the first place, so it could just be throwing a few trendy buzzwords arounds).
5 minutes to pay by card? Are you the person I always seem to get stuck behind at the ATM?
It takes about 30 seconds at most to put a card in a slot, type a number in and get an auth back. How long does it take you/the cashier to find the right change?
Whether you like communism as a theory is irrelevant. The point was - did you find any reference to the killing of dissidents?
"Devices don't converge"? Who's he trying to kid?
Let's see - take the most relevant device, the mobile phone. I'm pretty sure if you've got a mobile phone it's got a clock on it - that's convergent. In the UK, it's almost certainly got SMS text messaging (don't know whether it's true in the US or not, but I'd guess it is) - that's convergence. I'd like to see someone try to sell a new mobile phone that couldn't do SMS, or an SMS-only device, but I'll bet that there were people 10 years ago saying that the two should stay as separate units.
Or take your car - not many come without built in radio/tape or CD these days - again convergence.
Or your average hi-fi with radio/CD/tape/amp all in one unit. sure you can buy them all separately, but I'll bet there's a considerably larger amount sold as convergent devices than as separates.
The thing is, by the time a convergent device becomes popular, no-one thinks of it in that way. It's just features of the object that you're buying.
There's hundreds more examples, some obvious - like washer/driers, some less obvious - my keyring has a handy little torch on it, but they're all around you if you know where to look.
My Windows smartphone has an MP3 player and charges through USB - it's very handy when I'm walking to and from work (around 45 mins each way) without needing to lug my complete MP3 collection with me. It's got more than enough storage for that time, it charges while it syncs with my PC when I get to work, and as I'm already going to be taking a phone with me, it's taking up no extra pocket space.
It wouldn't replace my 60GB MP3 player for long trips, but for short journeys it's extremely handy.
Similar to the camera, I wouldn't but a phone just because it's got that feature, but it's handy to have.
The point is that they are not excuses - it's simply a case of government spin, and if you associate the Chinese regime with real Communism you're falling for it.
If you're going to abuse your citizens then you're more likely to get away with it by claiming to be doing it for their own good under the banner of 'socialism' or 'communism', even when in most cases it's nothing of the sort. If you want to understand what real Communism is, try reading something like 'The Communist Manifesto'.
You've not addressed the point that every country that's ever had the word 'Democratic' in the title (or at least the ones that I can think of) is also nothing of the sort.
I can pretty much guarantee you wouldn't do it in one go. I completely reloaded my mp3 player with around 45GB of music (via USB 2) the other week. It got so hot that I ended up doing in about 4 stints (I think it was around 1-2 hours actual copying time, but it took me around 6 hours in total).
At the moment 120 would probably be more than I need, but I will more than fill up my 60GB player when I've finished ripping my CDs. The 41-83 days thing is a bit of a red herring TBH. I'm not planning on sitting down and listening to my entire collection from beginning to end, but I have it on random most of the time and it's great to have that much variety for it to chose from. Also, when I go on holiday, it's handy not to try to guess up front what music I'm likely to be in the mood for during the trip.
And what's that got to do with communism? I don't remember Marx or Engels promoting the killing of dissidents with tuberculosis. Could you point me to a reference?
A party that used the name 'Communist' may have done that, but as I mentioned in the previous post, that's about as relevant as associating the policies of the German Democratic Republic (or the Democratic Republic of Congo, or most countries that have the word Democratic in their name) with real democracy.
Just because the party calls itself "The Communist Party" it doesn't mean that it's particularly following real communist policy - any more than the German Democratic Republic (old East Germany) was actually democratic.
Maybe I didn't make myself very clear - the "This is not the case" referred to having no knowledge of the console apart from the amount of games available.
However, for the PSP (and the DS), I know considerably more than that. I know (for instance) that there are currently 4 games that I would like for the PSP (two of which I've already got) and 3 more coming out before Christmas (and that I'm unlikely to be watching too many movies on it). I don't know (and don't care) how many other games there are for it, because I'm not going to be buying them.
I also know that there's not a single DS-only game that particularly appeals to me at the moment and that I can already play all of the GBA games on my GBA. If, at some point, a couple of 'must-have' games come out on the DS, then I'll probably get one of those as well, but I won't be bothered one way or another whether there's 100 other games available for it.
In theory I'd agree, but then I also had a PlayStation and an N64. The PS probably had about 10 times as many (maybe even more) games as the N64, but the N64 had GoldenEye, Mario 64, Zelda and (for most of their respective lives) far better football (soccer) games. I struggle to remember anything I played on the PS apart from Grand Turismo (others may disagree and be able to name loads of great PS games, but that was my experience of the platforms).
If I had absolutely no knowledge of the specific games that had come out for two different consoles, but knew that one had 10 games available and one had 100 then I would almost certainly go for the one with 100. But this is not the case with the PSP. There already seem to be at least 4 'good' games for it (and at least 3 more due in the next couple of months that I'm interested in), so above those it's unlikely to matter one way or the other how many other games come out for it.
How many games there are is pretty irrelevant to me - how good the games are is far more important.
I only own 4 games for my X-Box, and around 6 for my PS2 (and 3 of those are PES1,2 and 3), yet I play on both of them very regularly.
I've got my PSP today with 2 games, which on first play both look like they will keep me happy until PES5 comes out. I don't care if there's 10 or 100 on the platform, if those other 90 are ones that I'm not going to play.
This would be a great scheme if it wasn't for the environmental waste that it produces.
If I could buy a printer/ink combo and tell them to "hold the printer" I'd take it, but I'm not happy throwing away a printer (no-one I know would want a new printer with no ink) and a huge load of packaging every time the cartrigde runs out.
Surely a "sexual offender" is by definition someone who has committed a sexual offence? What makes you say it's got to be against a child?
The link you sent was to specifically Florida legislation, and even within that, section 794.0235 was (as far as I could undestand - IANAL) talks about general sexual battery - nothing to do with children.
The thing is, my understanding of what it's doing suggests that it probably doesn't care at all whether it's "the book" or "a book" or even that a book is involved at all.
It cares that the word "wa" often appears after the word "watashi" at the start of sentences (presumably - I don't speak any Japanese), so when generating sentences, it will often put these together.
From what I could get from the article, I'm not sure this is attempting to do translation, or even real comprehension.
It's looking for common patterns in sentences (e.g., they often start with "The") and then creating it's own, following the same structure.
My wife's a teacher, and she's got a kids' game called Silly Sentences, which is basically a simple jigsaw puzzle that only allows you to put words in a particular order (adverbs will only fit before verbs etc), and this allows you to make sentences that are pretty much guaranteed to make grammatical sense, even if you don't understand what the words on the cards mean.
My guess is that the program is looking to get the equivalent of the jigsaw shapes of the words (i.e., where they are allowed to be placed relative to other words), not their actual meaning.
It's simply that press releases and lazy journalists need a simple soundbite to compare the product/service to something that the average reader will understand, and "killer" sounds more impressive than "rip-off" or "-a-like".