I found that listening to the DVD commentary also works wonders. There were a heap of jokes in there that I never would have appreciated without hearing the writers and producers being unable to contain their laughter at their own jokes.
This is also true for older episodes of The Simpsons which had a lot of hidden jokes -- I guess a lot of the production staff just moved over and brought all their maths and Star Trek jokes with them.
..understood as to why Futurama never really took off to the mainstream as Simpsons did. Especially with the declining quality of the latter and the pretty much consistent high quality of the former.
But Futurama only lasted for four seasons (or five, depending on how you split it). Staying consistent inside that time-frame is much easier, and The Simpsons has stayed consistent for that long on several occasions.
I stopped bothering to watch new Simpsons episodes ages ago, after I started to find it boring. The style I grew up with mostly existed between about seasons 2 and 10, when I think it was in full flight. After that, I haven't really connected with a lot of the episodes or found them especially funny.
I know some people, though, who still really enjoy The Simpsons. They're usually younger people, although a know a bunch of other people who'll just watch it for a laugh if it's on. Keep in mind that for anyone who's a teenager, The Simpsons has been going for as long as they've been alive. They probably only started watching it when they were about 7 or 8. Usually they mostly enjoy the more recent episodes that came at about the time when I stopped, and that's the style that The Simpsons means to them.
In later episodes, there aren't any serious attempts to develop the characters because they're all so well known, even if different viewers think they know them differently. Homer frequently steals the show by acting like an idiot without boundaries, and the main focus of the show is wondering just how outrageously stupid Homer can be. Other characters are mostly limited to regurgitating their associated cliche's, or alternatively doing things wildly out of character for a quick laugh. Personally I think it's lower quality, but people who are used to it just watch it for what it is, and enjoy it because it matches what they like.
Throw an older episode at many of these people (and I have), such as an episode where Homer leads a strike at work to get back the dental plan and pay for Lisa's braces, and they just don't get it. Homer's a bit lazy and has silly ideas, but he has limitations and isn't a total idiot. The other characters also have defining limitations to how they act, and there's still space to develop their characters. Many people used to the more recent episodes just find it drab and boring, though, and don't really understand what makes it so great.
Declining quality or not, The Simpsons adapts to match what's popular in the day that it's screening, and this is how it keeps an audience. Lately that's been things like reality TV and the audiences that go with it. Futurama wasn't around long enough to see if it would have gone down this track, and I really hope it doesn't after it comes back again. I like Futurama as it was when it was canned.
I have to admit that regardless of what else they churn out, the BBC's produced some of the best television journalism I've seen. My favourite example is a 1981 Horizon interview with Richard Feynman. The entire clip (about an hour from memory) is just Richard Feynman continuously talking about his ideas and his life. No screen-time at all was wasted in showing an interviewer. Someone was obviously behind the camera to ask questions and guide topics, but those parts were edited out.
Granted that he wasn't a hostile interviewee which would (usually) make things more difficult, but I can't imagine ever seeing anything that even approaches that in local television.
Interestingly, a recent opinion poll in the UK suggested that younger people are less worried about media distortion of public events and people. I suggest this is a mistake. They should be.
With respect, it's necessary to put this in context by first studying whether younger people (whatever that entails) have ever been worried about media distortion in the past. You could be onto something, but it might just be that people become more concerned when they grow up and start actually caring about things.
Who ran the poll, and what has it been used to suggest?
Fair enough and thanks for the comment. I haven't seen HardTalk a lot, but I've enjoyed what I have seen. We just don't get anything like that in New Zealand.
"I'm not aware of any significant/recent examples of $COUNTRY's government being inept or corrupt, therefore it must be a beacon of hope in the world."
We definitely have immature politicians, including ones who act badly, try to cover things up, and whatever else, but the design of the system makes covering things up hard to do. If journalists, opposition politicians, or random people on the street, suspect politicians or government entities of something, there are lots of avenues for them to seek further information.
Government entities are required (by law) to provide any information requested of them by a citizen, unless they can specifically justify why it shouldn't be provided... and then they have to convince an ombudsman that it's justified. (Here's a more complete discussion in a Sydney Morning Herald journalist's weblog.) The whole environment leads to government departments that have an entire culture of transparency, and of publication whenever possible rather than withholding information whenever possible, because it's just a whole lot easier that way. It also means that politicians who try to manipulate the system don't tend to stay around very long.
But yeah, if it's revealed one day that New Zealand has a closed an corrupt national government, I'll be happy to withdraw my statement.
Wait, did you just use the phrase "quality journalism" in the same paragraph with "television news"?
Thanks and I can appreciate where you're coming from. The only reason I brought up television news as an issue is because it's the television journalists who are most affected by this ruling to restrict what they can show (on TV) of what's going on in New Zealand's parliament.
Previously, they could show politicians swearing at each other, sleeping during sessions, making rude gestures to each other, and whatever else didn't look good for the politicians. Personally I think it's bad that these restrictions are being imposed, because I like to be able to see who's paying attention to what and how people are acting in parliament. There are some situations where it's a very significant issue.
That aside, the television media frequently goes out of its way to abuse its privileges, often showing things out of context and for no reason other than getting ratings at the expense of conveying accurate news. I don't agree with the restrictions being imposed, but it's no surprise given the way they act.
As a New Zealander I've found this very disappointing. Normally I associate New Zealand as having a very open and non-corrupt national government with an open information policy (written into law through New Zealand's Official Information Act), and without too many layers of bureaucracy. I'd much rather have an environment where the media is free to take what pictures they like. To put it in context though, the main section of New Zealand's television media, which is most directly affected by this, really is hopeless. Personally I think the un-professionalism of many of the journalists has really encouraged parliament to add some limitations, appropriate or not.
There are only two major providers of television news in New Zealand -- one state-owned (TV1) and another private (TV3, owned by CanWest). Neither actually invests in quality journalism any more. They invest in news that can double as entertainment to sell commercials in a prime-time entertainment slot. The way they advertise their own news programmes makes this obvious, and on television there's no alternative. TV3, in particular, spends a lot of time trying to stress how much better it is than TV1. Any story that has anything to do with that is promoted to the front of its bulletin.
Most reporters are young and inexperienced, with the experienced journalists having either lost their jobs, retired or moved overseas for better opportunities. A lot of reports seem to be more about making sure people know who the reporter is and adding superlatives, annoying clichés, metaphors, and background music that just distract from the actual information. The only reason I bother to watch locally produced television news programmes in New Zealand these days (with a few exceptions) is to get some pictures, but I cringe at the commentary that comes with them. Many of those who are left have an attitude where they like to claim they're hugely important, but in general they're not actually providing quality journalism to back it up. I've found it quite sickening watching this whole thing play out, because the media that's kicking up such a storm isn't actually demonstrating that it's worthy of the right it's wanting.
I'm quite amazed when I flick over to BBC and see something like Hard Talk, which is just amazing in comparison to what we have locally produced. I really wish we could have that kind of quality in a local production, but I suspect the country just isn't large enough to have the resources for a reliable media.
If you are in New Zealand, try listening to MediaWatch on National Radio (or stream it if you prefer). Personally I think it's one of the most insightful commentaries on the New Zealand media available. (The show on 1st July actually covered this issue.)
I wonder what does BusinessWeek gain by being pro-Microsoft. Are they owned by the software giant? Is their growth somehow tied to that of proprietary software? Do they think their licenses will be terminated if they show disrespect for MS? The real question BusinessWeek should address is not how to make Microsoft more implanted in the developing nations but why they think that situation would be a good thing.
I've been wondering exactly the same thing. I can't figure out who BusinessWeek is targeting with this article.
Surely they're not trying to influence Microsoft, who would almost certainly have considered all of this and thought it through long ago. The only other logical reason for this article that comes to mind (besides flaimbait) is that BusinessWeek is trying to convince other readers that if Microsoft tries to dominate and control the software world, it's somehow good for everyone.
I tried to find something in the article that would explain why a Microsoft-dominated world is good for anyone except Microsoft, including typical readers of BusinessWeek, but I couldn't.
That said, this article really is classic flamebait. The whole structure of the article is designed to frame Linux and Open Source to look like some kind of enemy, with Microsoft being the valient allies out to crush it. I'd laugh if I didn't think some people might actually take it seriously.
Hey, I know! Let's cut U.S. farm subsidies to the levels farmers get in Australia and New Zealand. Surely American farmers aren't so incompetent that even with the advantage of cheap Mexican immigrant labor they can't compete on an even footing with Australians, right?
With respect, you seem to be under the false impression that US Farm subsidies actually go to American farmers in the first place. I'm not an expert (and stand to be corrected), but after a few minutes of anecdotal looking around, it seems to me that they don't. eg. [1][2]
So in other words, American farmers probably could shoulder a massive cut in American farm subsidies. Ironically, they might even benefit from it.
That seems to contradict the main thesis of the article. Basically, for important things like business and/or sponsors Martina uses e-mail? The e-mail is not dead, or as the article claims like, soooo dead.
This is true. To put it in context, though, email was never taken seriously when I was introduced to it during the '90's, either. I used it to communicate with friends, but for important things I still had to chop down trees (snail mail, facsimile, etc), because nobody important was using email.
Personally I don't think social networking communication will take off for such important things unless there's a way for organisations to store and protect it themselves. One big advantage of email is that they're as persistent as the organisation on either end wants them to be. Emails are standardised both in their storage formats, and their transfer formats. Now that email is better understood by regular people, organisations can manage and store email exactly to their liking, and fit it into their filing systems. If I add a comment to a photo on Flickr, it's basically owned by Yahoo. It's one of a million non-standard communication formats, and it will only survive for as long as Flickr remains available.
This certainly doesn't mean that some form of social networking system won't eventually be used for serious stuff, but I don't think that will happen until it's in a form that organisations can have control over themselves.
Gotta love free enterprise. Corporations don't care where the money comes from; this is proved time and again by Western corporations sucking up to the Chinese government.
Neither to private individuals, apparently, given that they continue to suck up to corporations that suck up to the Chinese government... in exchange for cheaper products.
The reality is that most people buying computers with no OS are putting a pirated version Windows on them. That's obvious.
But this is entirely due to some very dubious licensing practices which say that an instance of software is only licensed to be used on a single PC, ever, even if that PC is no longer used.
It used to be perfectly okay for me to take the software, OS and all, from an old PC, and install it on my new one. I could even install it on two or three working PC's at a time as long as I (the licensed user) was only ever using it in a single place. Now software companies want to tell me that this is illegal.
Seriously though, it might effect how many people choose to advertise through Google. Advertisers go for websites that they think are popular.
Personally I'd like to know if Nielsen/Netratings plans to measure the time people spend actually looking at a site, rather than having it open in a background window, or leaving it open while they do something else.
the standard mythology is that cameras everywhere is all about the government controlling you. but with google maps, with cell phone cameras, etc., we are actually seeing the rodney king effect: that governments suddenly have to get used to a new democratic form of transparency that they never had to deal with before
But surely the Chinese government would have known that the sub would be fully visible to the world by now. Google Maps hasn't exactly been secret, and similar satellite images were available to the public even before that. It would have been natural for the Chinese government, or any other government, to map out all the areas in which activities are no longer secret.
The sub is only in plain view to be seen in Google Maps because the Chinese government doesn't mind it being seen. Perhaps they even want it to be seen.
The issue is that it's inefficient to switch between multiple input devices so one should design GUIs that allow users to go with the flow rather than forcing them to constantly switch in the middle of their workflow. But the article obsesses with trying to argue that the keyboard is far superior to the mouse rather than saying the keyboard is better for applications that focus on text entry.
Try creating Powerpoint slides without a mouse - or navigating the web - or playing games - or anything except for text-entry centric apps. It's a ridiculous premise to argue that the mouse is obsolete.
I agree with most of what you've said, but in response to your last paragraph: All of these applications were designed with the mouse in mind as the primary input device, so it's little wonder that they would be difficult to use without a mouse. Go back 20 years to when the mouse wasn't in widespread use, and you'd find that nearly all applications were much easier to use with a keyboard.
I don't know what the ideal input device is, and to be honest I don't think it's in widespread use at the moment. Keyboards aren't exactly brilliant, and I've yet to be convinced that touch screens are that great in the way that they're currently marketed.
My biggest gripe with the mouse is that it takes a great human instrument for manuplation -- two hands on extended arms with ten fingers -- and dumbs the whole thing down to a single pointing device that gets dragged over a 2D surface. It's a high tech way of waving an arm around the screen and whacking things. The biggest reason I prefer a keyboard when possible isn't because it's great, but because it actually lets me use a fuller range of movement with my hands to communicate input. It's possible to enter information much more quickly.
I can't quite visualise it just yet, but I'd love to have an input device that mimics human movement much more closely, and that actually makes use of a much wider range of possible input signals.
I haven't RTFA yet, but I thought the reason they didn't have many wind turbines in the ocean was because of the wildlife issues associated with it.
I can't comment about other parts of the world, but in New Zealand the main resistance to wind farms is that nobody wants them in their back yard. They're big, ugly, and noisy, they tend to restrict public access to the surrounding land, and they cause the all-important property values of private individuals to plummet. Lately we've seen several local large wind farm projects either heavily toned down, or completely scuttled. Each has been worth between hundreds of millions and billions of dollars, but small groups of locals have put a lot of effort into blocking them.
Even though I have mixed feelings, I do actually sympathise with many of the complaints. Society (here at least) has been built to encourage people to value personal property and what they own, and property ownership is a very traditional and encouraged way for people to invest for their future. People here have their retirement funds in their property, and suddenly seeing that value plummet by 50% or more because the local council or government decides that it might allow a wind farm nearby can be quite devestating. 20 years ago, nobody would have guessed that there would be an incentive to build giant noisy ugly structures all over the countryside, and there's only so much forward thinking that can be done.
Even if it's kind of silly and inefficient, putting wind farms out at sea conveniently places them in a location which isn't the back yard of anyone likely to complain.
Sales, marketing and distribution is horrendously expensive and gets a far bigger chunk of the budget then R&D.
I can completely appreciate this, and one of the reasons I dislike buying many heavily hyped commercial products is because I resent paying mostly for a company to tell me how good something is.
One thing about marketing, though, it that it's probably far more predictible than research in many cases. It's easy to blow lots of money on research and come out with nothing, especially since it typically requires some very specialised skills that are often hard to find. Marketing results are a bit easier to predict, though.
Well Grissom was in the Apollo programme, but strictly speaking it the mission he died in wasn't called Apollo 1 until after the accident. Before that, it was AS-204, and Apollo 1 would have been the flight they went on later. (This is my understanding of it at least, and I welcome corrections.)
So how did Microsoft 'compete'? First, by deliberately sabotaging the cross-platform nature of Java, and Second by implying that their Java clone was cross-platform as well.
It might appear that Microsoft competed by implying that DotNet was cross-platform, but I'm not so sure that it had much effect. From my own perspective, it seems that Microsoft's competed much more frequently by convincing people that they don't need to be cross-platform, because all their customers who matter either use Windows, or are on the other end of a web server. (No argument about the earlier sabotaging of the Java spec, though. That really was bad.)
Do you know of any Java shops that switched to DotNet because they honestly thought it would be cross-platform? I know of dev shops that have switched because DotNet was more suited to what they were doing, and also ones that switched because they had managers who just liked Microsoft, but I certainly don't know of anyone who switched with expectations of it being cross-platform. Anyone I've know who's used DotNet has quite consciously made a decision based on an assumption that they're unlikely to have a cross-platform product once they've done it.
Personally I think that Microsoft's main goal with DotNet has been to hold on to the Microsoft developers that they already had, as well as providing a decent managed platform for people who just want to develop Windows apps. Not everyone cares about cross-platform code, even if it's to their eventual peril.
Before DotNet came out, the only real options for coding in Windows were a mish-mash of ugly scripting languages such as VBScript, badly designed Microsoft languages (VBA), the unmanaged and less secure platforms such as C++, and platforms that weren't controlled by Microsoft -- such as Java.
If Microsoft hadn't introduced DotNet, all of those developers who were loyal to Microsoft would eventually have had to migrate to better platforms that were not only not controlled by Microsoft, but which were controlled by competitors such as Sun. This would have given companies like Sun a lot more control over Microsoft.
It's true that the marketroids at Microsoft skewed and mis-represented DotNet as they always do, but strategically I think DotNet was really a catch-up maneuver to make sure that Microsoft could keep what it already had.
I've played with PowerShell a little, and it looks very impressive from what I've seen. The thing that's prevented me most from using it properly, though, is the same thing that prevents me from using the old Windows Command Shell -- Windows presents it inside an awful, inflexible window. It's impossible to resize horizontally, only goes a limited distance vertically, and it's very difficult to customize.
I'm sure there must be a way to use a Windows shell in a better terminal Window than that horrible thing that pops up by default, but I haven't been able to find anything yet. Can anyone suggest anything that's a bit more friendly for typing commands?
My favourite command shell in Windows is still bash through a Cygwyn-compiled xterm, which is good, but I'd really like to try out the interactive part of PowerShell properly.
Slashdot Mirror
I found that listening to the DVD commentary also works wonders. There were a heap of jokes in there that I never would have appreciated without hearing the writers and producers being unable to contain their laughter at their own jokes.
This is also true for older episodes of The Simpsons which had a lot of hidden jokes -- I guess a lot of the production staff just moved over and brought all their maths and Star Trek jokes with them.
But Futurama only lasted for four seasons (or five, depending on how you split it). Staying consistent inside that time-frame is much easier, and The Simpsons has stayed consistent for that long on several occasions.
I stopped bothering to watch new Simpsons episodes ages ago, after I started to find it boring. The style I grew up with mostly existed between about seasons 2 and 10, when I think it was in full flight. After that, I haven't really connected with a lot of the episodes or found them especially funny.
I know some people, though, who still really enjoy The Simpsons. They're usually younger people, although a know a bunch of other people who'll just watch it for a laugh if it's on. Keep in mind that for anyone who's a teenager, The Simpsons has been going for as long as they've been alive. They probably only started watching it when they were about 7 or 8. Usually they mostly enjoy the more recent episodes that came at about the time when I stopped, and that's the style that The Simpsons means to them.
In later episodes, there aren't any serious attempts to develop the characters because they're all so well known, even if different viewers think they know them differently. Homer frequently steals the show by acting like an idiot without boundaries, and the main focus of the show is wondering just how outrageously stupid Homer can be. Other characters are mostly limited to regurgitating their associated cliche's, or alternatively doing things wildly out of character for a quick laugh. Personally I think it's lower quality, but people who are used to it just watch it for what it is, and enjoy it because it matches what they like.
Throw an older episode at many of these people (and I have), such as an episode where Homer leads a strike at work to get back the dental plan and pay for Lisa's braces, and they just don't get it. Homer's a bit lazy and has silly ideas, but he has limitations and isn't a total idiot. The other characters also have defining limitations to how they act, and there's still space to develop their characters. Many people used to the more recent episodes just find it drab and boring, though, and don't really understand what makes it so great.
Declining quality or not, The Simpsons adapts to match what's popular in the day that it's screening, and this is how it keeps an audience. Lately that's been things like reality TV and the audiences that go with it. Futurama wasn't around long enough to see if it would have gone down this track, and I really hope it doesn't after it comes back again. I like Futurama as it was when it was canned.
I have to admit that regardless of what else they churn out, the BBC's produced some of the best television journalism I've seen. My favourite example is a 1981 Horizon interview with Richard Feynman. The entire clip (about an hour from memory) is just Richard Feynman continuously talking about his ideas and his life. No screen-time at all was wasted in showing an interviewer. Someone was obviously behind the camera to ask questions and guide topics, but those parts were edited out.
Granted that he wasn't a hostile interviewee which would (usually) make things more difficult, but I can't imagine ever seeing anything that even approaches that in local television.
With respect, it's necessary to put this in context by first studying whether younger people (whatever that entails) have ever been worried about media distortion in the past. You could be onto something, but it might just be that people become more concerned when they grow up and start actually caring about things.
Who ran the poll, and what has it been used to suggest?
Fair enough and thanks for the comment. I haven't seen HardTalk a lot, but I've enjoyed what I have seen. We just don't get anything like that in New Zealand.
Fair enough if you want to think that, but I still disagree. NZ rates first equal on last year's Transparency International Corruption Perceptions index.
We definitely have immature politicians, including ones who act badly, try to cover things up, and whatever else, but the design of the system makes covering things up hard to do. If journalists, opposition politicians, or random people on the street, suspect politicians or government entities of something, there are lots of avenues for them to seek further information.
Government entities are required (by law) to provide any information requested of them by a citizen, unless they can specifically justify why it shouldn't be provided... and then they have to convince an ombudsman that it's justified. (Here's a more complete discussion in a Sydney Morning Herald journalist's weblog.) The whole environment leads to government departments that have an entire culture of transparency, and of publication whenever possible rather than withholding information whenever possible, because it's just a whole lot easier that way. It also means that politicians who try to manipulate the system don't tend to stay around very long.
But yeah, if it's revealed one day that New Zealand has a closed an corrupt national government, I'll be happy to withdraw my statement.
Thanks and I can appreciate where you're coming from. The only reason I brought up television news as an issue is because it's the television journalists who are most affected by this ruling to restrict what they can show (on TV) of what's going on in New Zealand's parliament.
Previously, they could show politicians swearing at each other, sleeping during sessions, making rude gestures to each other, and whatever else didn't look good for the politicians. Personally I think it's bad that these restrictions are being imposed, because I like to be able to see who's paying attention to what and how people are acting in parliament. There are some situations where it's a very significant issue.
That aside, the television media frequently goes out of its way to abuse its privileges, often showing things out of context and for no reason other than getting ratings at the expense of conveying accurate news. I don't agree with the restrictions being imposed, but it's no surprise given the way they act.
Thanks for confirming this. I've only lived here for 27 years, and I've had my suspicions.
As a New Zealander I've found this very disappointing. Normally I associate New Zealand as having a very open and non-corrupt national government with an open information policy (written into law through New Zealand's Official Information Act), and without too many layers of bureaucracy. I'd much rather have an environment where the media is free to take what pictures they like. To put it in context though, the main section of New Zealand's television media, which is most directly affected by this, really is hopeless. Personally I think the un-professionalism of many of the journalists has really encouraged parliament to add some limitations, appropriate or not.
There are only two major providers of television news in New Zealand -- one state-owned (TV1) and another private (TV3, owned by CanWest). Neither actually invests in quality journalism any more. They invest in news that can double as entertainment to sell commercials in a prime-time entertainment slot. The way they advertise their own news programmes makes this obvious, and on television there's no alternative. TV3, in particular, spends a lot of time trying to stress how much better it is than TV1. Any story that has anything to do with that is promoted to the front of its bulletin.
Most reporters are young and inexperienced, with the experienced journalists having either lost their jobs, retired or moved overseas for better opportunities. A lot of reports seem to be more about making sure people know who the reporter is and adding superlatives, annoying clichés, metaphors, and background music that just distract from the actual information. The only reason I bother to watch locally produced television news programmes in New Zealand these days (with a few exceptions) is to get some pictures, but I cringe at the commentary that comes with them. Many of those who are left have an attitude where they like to claim they're hugely important, but in general they're not actually providing quality journalism to back it up. I've found it quite sickening watching this whole thing play out, because the media that's kicking up such a storm isn't actually demonstrating that it's worthy of the right it's wanting.
I'm quite amazed when I flick over to BBC and see something like Hard Talk, which is just amazing in comparison to what we have locally produced. I really wish we could have that kind of quality in a local production, but I suspect the country just isn't large enough to have the resources for a reliable media.
If you are in New Zealand, try listening to MediaWatch on National Radio (or stream it if you prefer). Personally I think it's one of the most insightful commentaries on the New Zealand media available. (The show on 1st July actually covered this issue.)
I've been wondering exactly the same thing. I can't figure out who BusinessWeek is targeting with this article.
Surely they're not trying to influence Microsoft, who would almost certainly have considered all of this and thought it through long ago. The only other logical reason for this article that comes to mind (besides flaimbait) is that BusinessWeek is trying to convince other readers that if Microsoft tries to dominate and control the software world, it's somehow good for everyone.
I tried to find something in the article that would explain why a Microsoft-dominated world is good for anyone except Microsoft, including typical readers of BusinessWeek, but I couldn't.
That said, this article really is classic flamebait. The whole structure of the article is designed to frame Linux and Open Source to look like some kind of enemy, with Microsoft being the valient allies out to crush it. I'd laugh if I didn't think some people might actually take it seriously.
With respect, you seem to be under the false impression that US Farm subsidies actually go to American farmers in the first place. I'm not an expert (and stand to be corrected), but after a few minutes of anecdotal looking around, it seems to me that they don't. eg. [1] [2]
So in other words, American farmers probably could shoulder a massive cut in American farm subsidies. Ironically, they might even benefit from it.
This is true. To put it in context, though, email was never taken seriously when I was introduced to it during the '90's, either. I used it to communicate with friends, but for important things I still had to chop down trees (snail mail, facsimile, etc), because nobody important was using email.
Personally I don't think social networking communication will take off for such important things unless there's a way for organisations to store and protect it themselves. One big advantage of email is that they're as persistent as the organisation on either end wants them to be. Emails are standardised both in their storage formats, and their transfer formats. Now that email is better understood by regular people, organisations can manage and store email exactly to their liking, and fit it into their filing systems. If I add a comment to a photo on Flickr, it's basically owned by Yahoo. It's one of a million non-standard communication formats, and it will only survive for as long as Flickr remains available.
This certainly doesn't mean that some form of social networking system won't eventually be used for serious stuff, but I don't think that will happen until it's in a form that organisations can have control over themselves.
Neither to private individuals, apparently, given that they continue to suck up to corporations that suck up to the Chinese government... in exchange for cheaper products.
But this is entirely due to some very dubious licensing practices which say that an instance of software is only licensed to be used on a single PC, ever, even if that PC is no longer used.
It used to be perfectly okay for me to take the software, OS and all, from an old PC, and install it on my new one. I could even install it on two or three working PC's at a time as long as I (the licensed user) was only ever using it in a single place. Now software companies want to tell me that this is illegal.
Seriously though, it might effect how many people choose to advertise through Google. Advertisers go for websites that they think are popular.
Personally I'd like to know if Nielsen/Netratings plans to measure the time people spend actually looking at a site, rather than having it open in a background window, or leaving it open while they do something else.
But surely the Chinese government would have known that the sub would be fully visible to the world by now. Google Maps hasn't exactly been secret, and similar satellite images were available to the public even before that. It would have been natural for the Chinese government, or any other government, to map out all the areas in which activities are no longer secret.
The sub is only in plain view to be seen in Google Maps because the Chinese government doesn't mind it being seen. Perhaps they even want it to be seen.
I agree with most of what you've said, but in response to your last paragraph: All of these applications were designed with the mouse in mind as the primary input device, so it's little wonder that they would be difficult to use without a mouse. Go back 20 years to when the mouse wasn't in widespread use, and you'd find that nearly all applications were much easier to use with a keyboard.
I don't know what the ideal input device is, and to be honest I don't think it's in widespread use at the moment. Keyboards aren't exactly brilliant, and I've yet to be convinced that touch screens are that great in the way that they're currently marketed.
My biggest gripe with the mouse is that it takes a great human instrument for manuplation -- two hands on extended arms with ten fingers -- and dumbs the whole thing down to a single pointing device that gets dragged over a 2D surface. It's a high tech way of waving an arm around the screen and whacking things. The biggest reason I prefer a keyboard when possible isn't because it's great, but because it actually lets me use a fuller range of movement with my hands to communicate input. It's possible to enter information much more quickly.
I can't quite visualise it just yet, but I'd love to have an input device that mimics human movement much more closely, and that actually makes use of a much wider range of possible input signals.
Yes I have, and they are kind of ugly. Where do you live?
I can't comment about other parts of the world, but in New Zealand the main resistance to wind farms is that nobody wants them in their back yard. They're big, ugly, and noisy, they tend to restrict public access to the surrounding land, and they cause the all-important property values of private individuals to plummet. Lately we've seen several local large wind farm projects either heavily toned down, or completely scuttled. Each has been worth between hundreds of millions and billions of dollars, but small groups of locals have put a lot of effort into blocking them.
Even though I have mixed feelings, I do actually sympathise with many of the complaints. Society (here at least) has been built to encourage people to value personal property and what they own, and property ownership is a very traditional and encouraged way for people to invest for their future. People here have their retirement funds in their property, and suddenly seeing that value plummet by 50% or more because the local council or government decides that it might allow a wind farm nearby can be quite devestating. 20 years ago, nobody would have guessed that there would be an incentive to build giant noisy ugly structures all over the countryside, and there's only so much forward thinking that can be done.
Even if it's kind of silly and inefficient, putting wind farms out at sea conveniently places them in a location which isn't the back yard of anyone likely to complain.
There really has to be a good Ed-209 joke in here somewhere.
I can completely appreciate this, and one of the reasons I dislike buying many heavily hyped commercial products is because I resent paying mostly for a company to tell me how good something is.
One thing about marketing, though, it that it's probably far more predictible than research in many cases. It's easy to blow lots of money on research and come out with nothing, especially since it typically requires some very specialised skills that are often hard to find. Marketing results are a bit easier to predict, though.
Well Grissom was in the Apollo programme, but strictly speaking it the mission he died in wasn't called Apollo 1 until after the accident. Before that, it was AS-204, and Apollo 1 would have been the flight they went on later. (This is my understanding of it at least, and I welcome corrections.)
Neat, thanks for the tip. It'd still be nice to just have draggably-resizable borders, but this is better than not having anything.
It might appear that Microsoft competed by implying that DotNet was cross-platform, but I'm not so sure that it had much effect. From my own perspective, it seems that Microsoft's competed much more frequently by convincing people that they don't need to be cross-platform, because all their customers who matter either use Windows, or are on the other end of a web server. (No argument about the earlier sabotaging of the Java spec, though. That really was bad.)
Do you know of any Java shops that switched to DotNet because they honestly thought it would be cross-platform? I know of dev shops that have switched because DotNet was more suited to what they were doing, and also ones that switched because they had managers who just liked Microsoft, but I certainly don't know of anyone who switched with expectations of it being cross-platform. Anyone I've know who's used DotNet has quite consciously made a decision based on an assumption that they're unlikely to have a cross-platform product once they've done it.
Personally I think that Microsoft's main goal with DotNet has been to hold on to the Microsoft developers that they already had, as well as providing a decent managed platform for people who just want to develop Windows apps. Not everyone cares about cross-platform code, even if it's to their eventual peril.
Before DotNet came out, the only real options for coding in Windows were a mish-mash of ugly scripting languages such as VBScript, badly designed Microsoft languages (VBA), the unmanaged and less secure platforms such as C++, and platforms that weren't controlled by Microsoft -- such as Java.
If Microsoft hadn't introduced DotNet, all of those developers who were loyal to Microsoft would eventually have had to migrate to better platforms that were not only not controlled by Microsoft, but which were controlled by competitors such as Sun. This would have given companies like Sun a lot more control over Microsoft.
It's true that the marketroids at Microsoft skewed and mis-represented DotNet as they always do, but strategically I think DotNet was really a catch-up maneuver to make sure that Microsoft could keep what it already had.
I've played with PowerShell a little, and it looks very impressive from what I've seen. The thing that's prevented me most from using it properly, though, is the same thing that prevents me from using the old Windows Command Shell -- Windows presents it inside an awful, inflexible window. It's impossible to resize horizontally, only goes a limited distance vertically, and it's very difficult to customize.
I'm sure there must be a way to use a Windows shell in a better terminal Window than that horrible thing that pops up by default, but I haven't been able to find anything yet. Can anyone suggest anything that's a bit more friendly for typing commands?
My favourite command shell in Windows is still bash through a Cygwyn-compiled xterm, which is good, but I'd really like to try out the interactive part of PowerShell properly.