It seems a little unusual to me that Mattel is responding in such a consumer-friendly manner. They are going out of their way to help consumers remove this software, and to get the software out of the "suspicion spotlight".
Perhaps I'm being paranoid, and they are just good guys after all. Or perhaps they're doing it because they're nervous - nervous that somebody might reverse engineer the packets and find out what information they were really sending.
If it was just splash-screen jpeg's, why wouldn't a damage-control press release have been enough?
"it increases performance (especially over a network)"
I highly doubt that sending already rasterized anti-aliased text over a network can be more efficient than just sending the text and letting the client render the text anti-aliased. Particularly since most new PC's will be able to do the anti-aliasing in hardware.
Re:Why are americans suprised at acts like this?
on
Cookiegate Explained
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· Score: 1
"Otherwise, take responsibility for your own lives, or give up the facade and give the state what they want, a "camera in every house", not a "chicken in every pot". What, you're not doing anything _deviant_ or _sinful_ are you?"
Keep in mind that in probably about half of the states, gay sex is illegal.. "deviant" is in the eye of the beholder.
You do realise that Prozac has nearly no uplifting effect on people who aren't already clinically depressed? Just a little noradrenaline, but it's the SSRI's (serotonin re-uptake inhibitors) that do the actual treatment of depression, and they have absolutely no helpful effect whatsoever on people who aren't depressed. In fact chances are you will merely have to suffer some of the negative side effects, like flattened sex driver, dizziness, headaches, nausea, blah de blah blah, that current SSRI's cause.
Anyway, I'm not a humorless fart, I do get the humour in your post - I just want to prevent misinformation thats all.
"The entire program of systematic persecution of a large section of society who choose to enjoy themselves in a way that harms nobody is a true testament to the methods by which even Constiutional "protection" can be subverted in the name of the "greater good"."
More generally this practice is known as a "witchhunt", and I can't think of a time in man's history where people have not conducted them against some arbitrary group of people, and I'm not sure there will ever come a time when people don't. If such a moment ever arrives, I will consider "the dark ages" over.
About 85% of it is pure marketing fluff, but if you read carefully, you can sift some of the basic ideas out of it. In fact, the ideas embedded in this document are so innocuous that I suspect that they are deliberately trying to hide the ideas in generalised descriptions written to make them sound like something you want.
Here they complain about existing technology:
"Personalization consists of redundantly entering and giving up control of your personal information to every site you visit."
"Web sites are isolated islands and cannot communicate with each other on a user's behalf in any meaningful way"
Then presenting their "vision":
"It means, for example, that any change to your information -- whether input via your PC or handheld or smart credit card -- will instantly and automatically be available everywhere that information is needed."
"Information Agent-- Manages your identity and persona over the Internet and provides greater control of how Web sites and services interact with you. Maintains your history, context and preferences -- your past, present and future on the Internet. Supports privacy-enabling technologies such as P3P. Unlike today's Internet, your personal information remains under your control and you decide who can access it. Enables you to create your personal preferences just once, which you can then permit any Web site or service to use."
Basically what they are saying here is that corporations will be able to freely transfer your personal information amongst themselves (and of course this will be completely legal because of a click-through EULA, I guess.) They try to make it sound like you will be in control of your information - but you can bet your ass this "service" "won't look like the brochures" when it actually arrives.
This all sounds to me like MS wants companies to be able to know everything about you, and everyone's databases will be massively cross-linked. Naturally there will be unpublicised government back doors as well.
And of course MS will get some money every single time anybody does anything online.
Many of the other ideas that do sound positive (e.g. being able to access your "online profile" wherever you are) amount to precisely what Unix/Telnet/X11 have been delivering for over ten years now. Except that.net will require much more bandwidth and much faster computers than the Unix solutions, because Unix/Telnet/X11 were designed from the ground up to handle that.
"Stroustrup has approved the language by the way. Just thought you'd like to know."
OMG, All hail the great god of C++ Bjarne has said C# is "OK", therefore it must be OK, and can't be MS "embrace and extend".
Right. Please people, learn to developer your own opinions. Experts can be wrong too, we can't just slobberingly agree to whatever somebody says just because their name is "Bjarne Stroustrup" or "Linus Torvalds" or "Bill Gates" (yes there are many people who hang on his every word too.)
If it's not "embrace and extend" then give us some technical reasons why it is not, not a "Linus says it is so, therefore it so" type of argument (replace "Linus" with famous expert of choice depending on context.)
My boss told me that he has a general principle regarding works of art, that he tries not to find out anything about the artist, since inevitably, learning about the artist changes one's opinion of the art. I guess this applies here.
Go to Microsoft's MSDN site..DOC files do use what are called "docfiles" and they are proprietary, fact.
And with regard to MS API's, I've programmed with DirectX, Win32, MFC, Windows sockets, Windows CE API's, and for every single one of those there have been blatant errors and inconsistencies in the documentation.
"I don't know how long it was since you were in highschool"
I don't live in the US, as I said, my country imports a lot of American TV/movies, and as far I can tell, it's packed with propaganda. I based my opinions on that, and the opinions on the school system also from TV/movies. As far as I can tell, from a very young age Americans are told repeatedly how great their country is.
I agree with you though, with regard to human rights and oppression, the situation in the West is not comparable to China, and I'm not arguing against that. I just wish more US citizens could see (as I'm sure the intelligent ones can) that government propaganda isn't something that "happens in other corrupt countries" only - that their opinions are also manipulated by the press.
I'm sure that in China there is much bad press about the US of A. And in the USA there is much bad press about evil imperialistic and totalitarian countries like Iraq and China.
Why should we believe either one? Remember, the majority of Chinese citizens feel just as strongly about the US whenever their government places an anti-US propaganda piece in their media, as the US citizens do when it's government does the same.
There is no government in the world that does not produce significant amounts of propaganda in the press (and specifically in the schooling system, children are far more impressionable). There never has been one, and I doubt there ever will be. The USA is not an exception.
In my country we get quite a lot of American TV shows and movies, and quite frankly, I cannot bring myself to believe that a completely free press can produce so many movies and TV shows that are so blindly adoring of the US government. Almost every single TV show/movie makes some reference to how wonderfully great the US of A is, and how wonderfully "free" it is, and depicts anyone from any other country as just feeling that life has no meaning because they aren't US citizens. (If you don't believe me, start watching out for it next time you go the movies or watch telly. You might be surprised. Check your schooling system as well.)
The only movie I can think of that didn't do this is Bulworth. I'm sure there are more, but they are very few and far between.
I can't believe that a truely free press can produce so much patriotic propaganda. A free press normally produces material that is far more critical of its government's practices.
A country needs to define some sort of enemy in order to (a) maintain a sense of patriotism, and (b) to justify pouring ever more money into expanding its military power. The US press goes out of its way to make it's citizens feel like they are just "the good guys", morally superior to others - but there needs to be a "bad guy" in order to maintain that. During the Cold War Russia was "the enemy", but now that the Cold War is over, the US needs a new "bad guy" to rally its people against, and it seems to me that China is the candidate.
Now, I'm not trying to argue that China isn't imperialistic, or that they don't engage in many human rights violations - they probably are, but that isn't my point. My point is that when Vice President Gore steps up there denouncing China, he isn't doing it because he happens to feel strongly about human rights violations. He is doing it because the issue is a handy "political pawn" with which he can rally up the support and patriotism of US citizens.
Hmm.. well I think its a bit silly then, *of course* you can crash Linux when you're root, I'm sure theres hundreds of ways (just dump anything random onto/dev/mem for example). Why is that a big enough deal to be boldly pronounced in someone's sig? Now if someone had found a way to crash Linux as a user (other than a fork bomb) then that might be worth proclaiming...
Missed a point there, I think
on
Mattel Spyware
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· Score: 1
"Constantly? You're kidding, right? If it really bothers you, just go into your options and disable all downloading of plugins, signed or not. If not, it seems like a pretty accurate warning, giving you the option to install plugins that you might want, like from Macromedia, but telling you that installing one from somebody you know nothing about might not be such a hot idea"
I think you may have missed the guy's point about IE warning you constantly about untrusted stuff, he wasn't saying that that bothered him, his point was that he found it surprising that even though people get warned a lot not to trust stuff from Joe Company, that they still trust stuff from Joe Company.
"My brother-in-law will happily rent the goriest action videos for his kids, with profanity, gore, mayhem, etc, but it better not show much in the way of nudity"
I heard a nice expression once that sums up this attitude, something like "it's OK to bare arms but not to bare breasts".
It's quite ridiculous actually, the idea that its OK to let your child watch hundreds of people get shot up and blown to bits in graphically violent movies, but God forbid that the poor child be morally corrupted by being allowed to see a Woman's nipple.
"Even for cable modems you shouldn't be needing much more than 5KB/sec. 10KB/sec at most"
In general you shouldn't need more than a few kilobytes per player. However, since Quake uses a unicast model (*), the number of packets flying around on the network grows exponentially with each player that joins the network. A Quake game with between 8 and 16 players can easily chew up more than half the available bandwidth on a 10/100 Mb LAN, never mind the internet.
"If say 30 players try to do 10kbytes/sec to a 1.5Mbps server there'll be packet loss problems - 30 x 10kbytes x 8= 2.4 Mbps"
With unicast, a game server has to send the positions off all players to all other players individually, thats why the required bandwidth grows exponentially. So with 30 players, it's more like 30x10kbytesx30 - thats more like 270 Mbps. Of course, 10kbytes is no doubt an overestimate, it's probably more like 2 or 3 KB: 30x30x2KB = 18 Mbps. I don't think I've ever seen a quake server with more than about 10 players on. 10 players gives you 2 Mbps, which is about where it starts to become reasonable. Servers like Counterstrike can handle more players at a time because its a much slower game, needs fewer packets.
Basically, with anything less than DSL/Cable, Quake will use up all your available bandwidth, and most of it with the higher bandwidth connections. All the time you're on. It's not easy to use so much just by downloading porn, unless you set up your box to auto-download entire newsgroups in the background (i.e. downloading lots of porn, what Signal 11 was complaining about.)
(*) Three options with sockets - unicast, broadcast and multicast. broadcast only means anything on a LAN, and will totally waste any subnet, so virtually no games use it. Multicast can also waste LAN's, and doesn't give you enough advantage to use on the Internet. So Quake uses Unicast.
My job involves writing these types of sockets applications, so I do have some idea what I'm talking about, at least I would like to think so:)
Well when Apple developed the tech it was for ancient screens that used green and magenta instead of RGB. Today's screens use RGB. That was 20 years ago.
ClearType does add some new stuff to the old tech, as far as I can tell, they do some Fourier analysis to determine more optimal colour distribution. So there is some "original" stuff in ClearType.
I'm not saying that there is nothing original about ClearType. What I'm saying is that when you spend $5 billion a year on R&D, then a minor extension to a 20-year old algo for improving the look of fonts on LCD's should not be your biggest innovation announcement at the biggest computer show in the world from the biggest software company in the world. I would expect something just a tad more groundbreaking.
"People like you must learn to deal with the fact that sooner or later, someone is going to challenge your preconceptions and remind you that there is a whole world full of stuff that you don't know about"
I was challenging a desire to censor others. My request was for less censorship. I can handle other people's opinions, but the one that I cannot tolerate is the promotion of any form of censorship (particularly the worst kind, self-censorship).
"Insular, closed-minded Americans like you"
I was born in Africa and have never set a foot off the continent. Remember, 'assumption is the mother of all f-ups'.
I have no desire to defend Americans whatsoever; in fact, I particularly enjoyed the comment "teach retarded American kids to count syllables", it made me laugh out loud and was the high point of the post, and you could have stopped your post there (since that was all that was required) and made much more of an impact. But requests for self-censorship in the name of being "Politically Correct" are plain and simply wrong.
If you are so over-sensitive that a competition to create haiku truly offends you, then I'm afraid I can only offer one piece of advice:
Get over it
People must learn to deal with the fact that sooner or later in the course of your life, something or someone is going to say or do something that offends you.
I find the whole "lets make everything politically correct in case we offend someone" movement nauseating and disgusting. It really is only a tiny handful of whiny, weak individuals who become distraught whenever they hear something that they don't want to hear, and I find the idea of restructuring society and culture to accomodate this whiny minority offensive.
Why don't you just face up to the fact that you are going to hear opinions that differ with yours, and that you are going to find people with morals that differ from yours, and a culture that differs from yours, and learn to deal with it.
Anyway, I somehow doubt that the emotional stability of the majority of japanese people is as strongly tied to a single type of poem as yours is. Who appointed you to speak on behalf of millions of Japanese people anyway?
I can only assume you had a really over-protective mother, who made sure you never saw or heard anything that might upset you, since you obviously don't know how to handle it.
"Now this comes across with what sounds like samples made using the exact algos that MS is touting as their great new innovation"
MS spends $5 billion a year on research and development. They had to try show something.
I find it incredible that for all that R&D money spent over the past several years, the most innovative thing they've managed to come up with is a rehash of an Apple technique for rendering fonts (oh, yes, and the dancing paperclip). The mind boggles at how little incentive there must really be at MS to innovate if thats the best they can do.
Slashdot Mirror
<conspiracy theory mode on>
It seems a little unusual to me that Mattel is responding in such a consumer-friendly manner. They are going out of their way to help consumers remove this software, and to get the software out of the "suspicion spotlight".
Perhaps I'm being paranoid, and they are just good guys after all. Or perhaps they're doing it because they're nervous - nervous that somebody might reverse engineer the packets and find out what information they were really sending.
If it was just splash-screen jpeg's, why wouldn't a damage-control press release have been enough?
<conspiracy theory mode off>
"it increases performance (especially over a network)"
I highly doubt that sending already rasterized anti-aliased text over a network can be more efficient than just sending the text and letting the client render the text anti-aliased. Particularly since most new PC's will be able to do the anti-aliasing in hardware.
"Otherwise, take responsibility for your own lives, or give up the facade and give the state what they want, a "camera in every house", not a "chicken in every pot". What, you're not doing anything _deviant_ or _sinful_ are you?"
Keep in mind that in probably about half of the states, gay sex is illegal .. "deviant" is in the eye of the beholder.
You do realise that Prozac has nearly no uplifting effect on people who aren't already clinically depressed? Just a little noradrenaline, but it's the SSRI's (serotonin re-uptake inhibitors) that do the actual treatment of depression, and they have absolutely no helpful effect whatsoever on people who aren't depressed. In fact chances are you will merely have to suffer some of the negative side effects, like flattened sex driver, dizziness, headaches, nausea, blah de blah blah, that current SSRI's cause.
Anyway, I'm not a humorless fart, I do get the humour in your post - I just want to prevent misinformation thats all.
"The entire program of systematic persecution of a large section of society who choose to enjoy themselves in a way that harms nobody is a true testament to the methods by which even Constiutional "protection" can be subverted in the name of the "greater good"."
More generally this practice is known as a "witchhunt", and I can't think of a time in man's history where people have not conducted them against some arbitrary group of people, and I'm not sure there will ever come a time when people don't. If such a moment ever arrives, I will consider "the dark ages" over.
About 85% of it is pure marketing fluff, but if you read carefully, you can sift some of the basic ideas out of it. In fact, the ideas embedded in this document are so innocuous that I suspect that they are deliberately trying to hide the ideas in generalised descriptions written to make them sound like something you want.
Here they complain about existing technology:
"Personalization consists of redundantly entering and giving up control of your personal information to every site you visit."
"Web sites are isolated islands and cannot communicate with each other on a user's behalf in any meaningful way"
Then presenting their "vision":
"It means, for example, that any change to your information -- whether input via your PC or handheld or smart credit card -- will instantly and automatically be available everywhere that information is needed."
"Information Agent-- Manages your identity and persona over the Internet and provides greater control of how Web sites and services interact with you. Maintains your history, context and preferences -- your past, present and future on the Internet. Supports privacy-enabling technologies such as P3P. Unlike today's Internet, your personal information remains under your control and you decide who can access it. Enables you to create your personal preferences just once, which you can then permit any Web site or service to use."
Basically what they are saying here is that corporations will be able to freely transfer your personal information amongst themselves (and of course this will be completely legal because of a click-through EULA, I guess.) They try to make it sound like you will be in control of your information - but you can bet your ass this "service" "won't look like the brochures" when it actually arrives.
This all sounds to me like MS wants companies to be able to know everything about you, and everyone's databases will be massively cross-linked. Naturally there will be unpublicised government back doors as well.
And of course MS will get some money every single time anybody does anything online.
Many of the other ideas that do sound positive (e.g. being able to access your "online profile" wherever you are) amount to precisely what Unix/Telnet/X11 have been delivering for over ten years now. Except that .net will require much more bandwidth and much faster computers than the Unix solutions, because Unix/Telnet/X11 were designed from the ground up to handle that.
"Stroustrup has approved the language by the way. Just thought you'd like to know."
OMG, All hail the great god of C++ Bjarne has said C# is "OK", therefore it must be OK, and can't be MS "embrace and extend".
Right. Please people, learn to developer your own opinions. Experts can be wrong too, we can't just slobberingly agree to whatever somebody says just because their name is "Bjarne Stroustrup" or "Linus Torvalds" or "Bill Gates" (yes there are many people who hang on his every word too.)
If it's not "embrace and extend" then give us some technical reasons why it is not, not a "Linus says it is so, therefore it so" type of argument (replace "Linus" with famous expert of choice depending on context.)
My boss told me that he has a general principle regarding works of art, that he tries not to find out anything about the artist, since inevitably, learning about the artist changes one's opinion of the art. I guess this applies here.
And in what way was that "flamebait"????
Stupid moderators.
Go to Microsoft's MSDN site. .DOC files do use what are called "docfiles" and they are proprietary, fact.
And with regard to MS API's, I've programmed with DirectX, Win32, MFC, Windows sockets, Windows CE API's, and for every single one of those there have been blatant errors and inconsistencies in the documentation.
So how the hell was that flamebait?
"I don't know how long it was since you were in highschool"
I don't live in the US, as I said, my country imports a lot of American TV/movies, and as far I can tell, it's packed with propaganda. I based my opinions on that, and the opinions on the school system also from TV/movies. As far as I can tell, from a very young age Americans are told repeatedly how great their country is.
I agree with you though, with regard to human rights and oppression, the situation in the West is not comparable to China, and I'm not arguing against that. I just wish more US citizens could see (as I'm sure the intelligent ones can) that government propaganda isn't something that "happens in other corrupt countries" only - that their opinions are also manipulated by the press.
Uh - how is porn illegal?
"That's what corrupt governments do"
That's what all governments do. The USA is no exception.
I'm sure that in China there is much bad press about the US of A. And in the USA there is much bad press about evil imperialistic and totalitarian countries like Iraq and China.
Why should we believe either one? Remember, the majority of Chinese citizens feel just as strongly about the US whenever their government places an anti-US propaganda piece in their media, as the US citizens do when it's government does the same.
There is no government in the world that does not produce significant amounts of propaganda in the press (and specifically in the schooling system, children are far more impressionable). There never has been one, and I doubt there ever will be. The USA is not an exception.
In my country we get quite a lot of American TV shows and movies, and quite frankly, I cannot bring myself to believe that a completely free press can produce so many movies and TV shows that are so blindly adoring of the US government. Almost every single TV show/movie makes some reference to how wonderfully great the US of A is, and how wonderfully "free" it is, and depicts anyone from any other country as just feeling that life has no meaning because they aren't US citizens. (If you don't believe me, start watching out for it next time you go the movies or watch telly. You might be surprised. Check your schooling system as well.)
The only movie I can think of that didn't do this is Bulworth. I'm sure there are more, but they are very few and far between.
I can't believe that a truely free press can produce so much patriotic propaganda. A free press normally produces material that is far more critical of its government's practices.
A country needs to define some sort of enemy in order to (a) maintain a sense of patriotism, and (b) to justify pouring ever more money into expanding its military power. The US press goes out of its way to make it's citizens feel like they are just "the good guys", morally superior to others - but there needs to be a "bad guy" in order to maintain that. During the Cold War Russia was "the enemy", but now that the Cold War is over, the US needs a new "bad guy" to rally its people against, and it seems to me that China is the candidate.
Now, I'm not trying to argue that China isn't imperialistic, or that they don't engage in many human rights violations - they probably are, but that isn't my point. My point is that when Vice President Gore steps up there denouncing China, he isn't doing it because he happens to feel strongly about human rights violations. He is doing it because the issue is a handy "political pawn" with which he can rally up the support and patriotism of US citizens.
Hmm .. well I think its a bit silly then, *of course* you can crash Linux when you're root, I'm sure theres hundreds of ways (just dump anything random onto /dev/mem for example). Why is that a big enough deal to be boldly pronounced in someone's sig? Now if someone had found a way to crash Linux as a user (other than a fork bomb) then that might be worth proclaiming ...
"Constantly? You're kidding, right? If it really bothers you, just go into your options and disable all downloading of plugins, signed or not. If not, it seems like a pretty accurate warning, giving you the option to install plugins that you might want, like from Macromedia, but telling you that installing one from somebody you know nothing about might not be such a hot idea"
I think you may have missed the guy's point about IE warning you constantly about untrusted stuff, he wasn't saying that that bothered him, his point was that he found it surprising that even though people get warned a lot not to trust stuff from Joe Company, that they still trust stuff from Joe Company.
"My brother-in-law will happily rent the goriest action videos for his kids, with profanity, gore, mayhem, etc, but it better not show much in the way of nudity"
I heard a nice expression once that sums up this attitude, something like "it's OK to bare arms but not to bare breasts".
It's quite ridiculous actually, the idea that its OK to let your child watch hundreds of people get shot up and blown to bits in graphically violent movies, but God forbid that the poor child be morally corrupted by being allowed to see a Woman's nipple.
"Even for cable modems you shouldn't be needing much more than 5KB/sec. 10KB/sec at most"
In general you shouldn't need more than a few kilobytes per player. However, since Quake uses a unicast model (*), the number of packets flying around on the network grows exponentially with each player that joins the network. A Quake game with between 8 and 16 players can easily chew up more than half the available bandwidth on a 10/100 Mb LAN, never mind the internet.
"If say 30 players try to do 10kbytes/sec to a 1.5Mbps server there'll be packet loss problems - 30 x 10kbytes x 8= 2.4 Mbps"
With unicast, a game server has to send the positions off all players to all other players individually, thats why the required bandwidth grows exponentially. So with 30 players, it's more like 30x10kbytesx30 - thats more like 270 Mbps. Of course, 10kbytes is no doubt an overestimate, it's probably more like 2 or 3 KB: 30x30x2KB = 18 Mbps. I don't think I've ever seen a quake server with more than about 10 players on. 10 players gives you 2 Mbps, which is about where it starts to become reasonable. Servers like Counterstrike can handle more players at a time because its a much slower game, needs fewer packets.
Basically, with anything less than DSL/Cable, Quake will use up all your available bandwidth, and most of it with the higher bandwidth connections. All the time you're on. It's not easy to use so much just by downloading porn, unless you set up your box to auto-download entire newsgroups in the background (i.e. downloading lots of porn, what Signal 11 was complaining about.)
(*) Three options with sockets - unicast, broadcast and multicast. broadcast only means anything on a LAN, and will totally waste any subnet, so virtually no games use it. Multicast can also waste LAN's, and doesn't give you enough advantage to use on the Internet. So Quake uses Unicast.
My job involves writing these types of sockets applications, so I do have some idea what I'm talking about, at least I would like to think so :)
Anyway, cheers ..
Well when Apple developed the tech it was for ancient screens that used green and magenta instead of RGB. Today's screens use RGB. That was 20 years ago.
ClearType does add some new stuff to the old tech, as far as I can tell, they do some Fourier analysis to determine more optimal colour distribution. So there is some "original" stuff in ClearType.
I'm not saying that there is nothing original about ClearType. What I'm saying is that when you spend $5 billion a year on R&D, then a minor extension to a 20-year old algo for improving the look of fonts on LCD's should not be your biggest innovation announcement at the biggest computer show in the world from the biggest software company in the world. I would expect something just a tad more groundbreaking.
"People like you must learn to deal with the fact that sooner or later, someone is going to challenge your preconceptions and remind you that there is a whole world full of stuff that you don't know about"
I was challenging a desire to censor others. My request was for less censorship. I can handle other people's opinions, but the one that I cannot tolerate is the promotion of any form of censorship (particularly the worst kind, self-censorship).
"Insular, closed-minded Americans like you"
I was born in Africa and have never set a foot off the continent. Remember, 'assumption is the mother of all f-ups'.
I have no desire to defend Americans whatsoever; in fact, I particularly enjoyed the comment "teach retarded American kids to count syllables", it made me laugh out loud and was the high point of the post, and you could have stopped your post there (since that was all that was required) and made much more of an impact. But requests for self-censorship in the name of being "Politically Correct" are plain and simply wrong.
If you are so over-sensitive that a competition to create haiku truly offends you, then I'm afraid I can only offer one piece of advice:
Get over it
People must learn to deal with the fact that sooner or later in the course of your life, something or someone is going to say or do something that offends you.
I find the whole "lets make everything politically correct in case we offend someone" movement nauseating and disgusting. It really is only a tiny handful of whiny, weak individuals who become distraught whenever they hear something that they don't want to hear, and I find the idea of restructuring society and culture to accomodate this whiny minority offensive.
Why don't you just face up to the fact that you are going to hear opinions that differ with yours, and that you are going to find people with morals that differ from yours, and a culture that differs from yours, and learn to deal with it.
Anyway, I somehow doubt that the emotional stability of the majority of japanese people is as strongly tied to a single type of poem as yours is. Who appointed you to speak on behalf of millions of Japanese people anyway?
I can only assume you had a really over-protective mother, who made sure you never saw or heard anything that might upset you, since you obviously don't know how to handle it.
"Now this comes across with what sounds like samples made using the exact algos that MS is touting as their great new innovation"
MS spends $5 billion a year on research and development. They had to try show something.
I find it incredible that for all that R&D money spent over the past several years, the most innovative thing they've managed to come up with is a rehash of an Apple technique for rendering fonts (oh, yes, and the dancing paperclip). The mind boggles at how little incentive there must really be at MS to innovate if thats the best they can do.
Please
Anyway, service providers shouldn't advertise an amount of bandwidth that they can't supply.
Problem is, you can't "decide" to believe in God "just in case" he exists .. that makes no sense.
.. dont seem to like having their faults pointed out to them. They become very defensive. Sometimes I wish they'd open their eyes/minds.
American arrogance is the belief that if an alien spacecraft lands somewhere other than the US, then the aliens must be lost.
If they want to charge such outrageous amounts for the developers kit then I'm afraid to say, this venture has failed even before it has begun.
At current rand-to-dollar rate I would have to about R700 for it. Thats quite a lot of money. They have lost one possible developer here.
The only way for an OS to gain any ground these days is to have lots of developer support, and it isn't going to happen this way.