The blogger could write them a letter disclosing his own identity, cash in the $10k himself, and when they publish the letter sue them for infringing upon his copyright on the letter.
OS X Intel does not work all that well on Thinkpads if you actually want to use them as a laptop. It installs just fine and some people actually use theirs that way. However, sleep mode doesn't work due to an incompatibility between OS X and the Thinkpad's ACPI implementation regarding power states S1 vs. S3; the computer will fail to wake up and give a BIOS error message that the system configuration has been tampered with, after which you need to go into BIOS setup, go out again and boot normally.
It would be sleek to have OS X reliably working on Thinkpads, but without sleep mode, the whole laptop thing kind of loses its point.
Or in other words, using a car metaphor, of course: "Nobody will ever buy a Porsche, because it's got only two seats and a minimal trunk space. For 50'000 EUR *less*, you'd get four seats, a pickup-sized cargo bay AND as much horsepowers, so the Porsche is clearly bad value."
Except that CmdrTaco's response is more like seeing a Porsche and then wanting a Porsche which is a little more aerodynamic and with more horsepower. So until Apple produces the equivalent of a Bugatti Veyron he won't be a MacBook Air customer.
Rolling in a little bit of mining truck won't hurt either as long as it doesn't spoil the form factor and of course it's Apple's problem how they do it.
"I think I'll have to wait for something with a bigger screen and a faster clock speed." is the 2008 version of "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame": (-1: Missed the point).
Military researchers are working to harness the 'human fear' pheromone to create a scent of terror.
Is this part of the $340 billion that the US as the largest, single, R&D-performing nation in the world is annually pumping into future-related technologies?
In my experience in Germany at least, the prices of books are entirely fixed by a cartel BY LAW and it's illegal to sell them below that cartel's set prices. Pretty sad in a country that values learning so highly.
Well, the same law has ensured the survival of bookshops in Germany.
I spent some time doing IT work for our institute library. We had a policy of placing our institute's book orders through a small bookshop in the vicinity of the institute that was specializing in science books for the humanities. Without the fixed price policy the shop would have died long ago, partly because some numbers of people would have bought books for 27 online instead of spending 29 at a shop, but mainly because the accounting department of our university would have forced our institute to do the same regardless of whether we considered it a good idea or not. This way, the bookshop survived and students had a great place to do their book shopping, where you could find a lot of interesting stuff just by looking at what was standing in the shelf next to what you were originally interested in. A lot better than a "Customers who bought this also looked at..." option in my opinion, and in the opinion of practically everybody else who had experience with both. If you want to be a couch potato you can still order at Amazon, but the only thing you get is a convenience advantage, not a price advantage.
So one might argue that a country that values learning so highly sees the added value of having a diverse range of bookshops, and hence sees the added value in having a policy that alloes them to survive.
This way, when he gets a $300 bill for over using his bandwidth, he'll most likely fix the damned problem and take steps to ensure it doesn't happen again so he doesn't get blindsided by a lage ISP bill.
Of course, the ISP could just do his own part by blocking outgoing SMTP traffic from residential ranges, but that way you can't send the customer $300 bills for overusing his bandwith.
You admin types win (less work) and the accountant types win (more money). Bring it on, TW!
No "divesting of shoes" anywhere I've traveled outside the USA.
I had to take my shoes off three of the four times I flew through Moscow over the last half year (twice in Sheremetyevo, once in Domodedovo), once in Frankfurt out of one flight, once in Berlin out of six flights and once in Tashkent out of two flights.
Diamond isn't stable, like glass, it just takes billions of years to lose it's shape, or something like that.
Or something.
What makes you think that glass isn't stable? (link, link)
I have an archeologist friend who works with Roman glass found along the Silk Road. Looks perfectly stable to me (well, at least those pieces that aren't smashed to bits).
Turn off the Nazi grammar feature and it pretty well leaves you alone to do what you want. If you aren't creative, Word won't make you so. If you are creative, Word isn't going to regiment you into not being so. To claim otherwise is an excuse. Maybe you just aren't, like, creative at all.
In fact you can get a pretty decent minimal editing environment out of Word with a few simple steps, such as:
Switching off all the autocorrection, autoreplace and autoformatting features.
Using a concept font (Extras -> Options -> View, at the bottom)
Switching to white-on-blue text (Extras -> Options -> General)
Editing in full-screen mode (View -> Full screen)
The result looks a lot like Word 4.x under DOS and presents you with a nicely uncluttered view. It's not that bad if you want to concentrate on content, especially if the user interface distracts you otherwise. (The options might be called slightly differently, I just tried it on a German version of Word 2003).
What you get out of Writeroom in effect looks not much different, only that Writeroom doesn't read Office files and has a very distracting gradient in the middle of the screen. Creativity is not really a function of the tool. If you don't know your tools, it will be hard to be creative at any rate, and if you know them, you can be creative with any tool. I am not a Word enthusiast in the least, doing most of my writing with Emacs and TeX - but as you say, the way in which these people claim that it's Word hindering their artistic ambitions sounds suspiciously like (a) it's more about being different than about being creative, (b) they haven't bothered to take a look at what their tools are capable of, which in this case wouldn't have been overly difficult even with Word, and (c) it's more a matter of principle than of getting some creative output into place.
Too bad it's not available for the most common desktop operating systems.
Maybe haven't really been paying attention to them for like three years or so, but there are versions both for Windows and MacOS X, if those are the operating systems you had in mind. Those have been available for quite some time, since they switched the user interface to Qt.
they don't appear to understand the inherent tension between standardization, interoperability and DRM break once, copy everywhere.
Well to be honest that sounds like a good thing. If the industry is forced to do their DRM in an interoperable way it will be better than the present situation where DRMed content is practically not interoperable at all. And if the industry is forced to get their act together and actually do it right, because if they implement some kind of half-assed scheme that gets broken everywhere at once and forever, it doesn't sound too bad either. So maybe they do understand it.
I'm not a friend of DRM, but it's likely to stay around for a while, and in that case I'd rather have it implemented well than what we see at present.
I will say that when the foss community puts their weight behind something, you can usually expect results.
True. Usually you can expect not only results, but multiple incompatible results, with major flamewars going on between them on licensing issues and minor technicalities. Examples include free Unix-like operating systems, desktop environments or Linux package managers.
Competition and choice can be good things, but so is coherence, and excessive partisanship, fragmentation and compartmentalisation of the available workforce are almost always bad things. I see this as the major roadblock towards success of open source software in general and Linux in particular. (The other is forwards, backwards and cross-distribution binary compatibility, partly because of the same fragmentation, partly because of a lack of interest of developers in having stable binary interfaces to things.)
It's about using two extra shift keys for the non-ASCII characters. On his keyboard, he calls them "Shift2" and "Ng". This is a nice way to do languages that use the latin alphabet with a few abnormal extra characters.
It's not like the mode switch key used for Arabic. There, you press the key once to switch modes. (more like a caps lock)
It's not like the dead keys often used for European accents. There, you press an accent key followed by a letter key. The accent key does nothing until you press the letter.
It's not like the combining accent keys used in Microsoft Word. There, you press the accent key after the letter key. (so the software must display your "A" before knowing if it needs an accent)
It's not like the fancy stuff used for Chinese, etc.
It is like the use of the right Alt key on European keyboards to get extra accented characters. The key is called "Alt Gr" on many European keyboards. On a German keyboard, you press Alt Gr + some other key to get things like the Euro sign, the backslash, the pipe character, the tilde character, curly braces, or the @ sign.
I've written a couple of keyboard macros back in the WordPerfect days that used Alt Gr plus other keys to get extra accented characters for transcription of Arabic (and, ironically, for Yoruba, which is one of the major languages of Nigeria), which I'm ready to submit as prior art if it should have to come to that.
The president of Turkmenistan is an egomaniac who makes Kim Jong Il look positively humble, though he seems content to keep to his own frontiers.
The man you refer to, Saparmurat "Turkmenbashi" Niyazov, has been dead since December 2006. His successor, Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov, is certainly not the strongest man in the world, but one has to hold to his credit that the personality cult around Turkmenbashi has been cut down a little and that the country is opening up somewhat.
...for the payment of a debt. In order for this situation to arise, the debt already has to be there. If Apple says "If you want to pay in cash, we won't sell you an iPhone", then no sale takes place in the first place. Consequently, you don't have a debt with them, and there is nothing to pay for with your legal tender.
You can search in Cyrillic (and in other alphabets too), but it only looks for the exact words in the query, i.e. no morphological search.
This is actually not true anymore. For example, you can do a Google search for "Putin", and it will highlight results in other grammatical cases than the nominative as well. It has been like this for a year or so. It's still not very far advanced yet, but Google apparently realized that they've got catching up to do.
You are wrong if you think language policies are liberal everywhere. For example, in France Breton-language schools are still forced to exist outside the normal school system because the state wants to keep the monopoly on one state language (in spite of Breton having something like half a million speakers) - France has a long tradition of laws against minority languages, up to the middle of the century in northern France you could see signs like "il est interdit de parler flamand et d'uriner sur les murs" ("It's forbidden to speak Flemish and to piss on the walls"). Or in Russia, the autonomous republic of Tatarstan wanted to switch the official alphabet for the Tatar language from Cyrillic to Latin to have more coherence with other Turkic languages, and they passed a law to that extent and started hanging up Latin-script streetsigns and everything, and then the Russian federal government forbade it because they want to keep the Cyrillic alphabet as a homogenous symbol of federal Russian identity. You can find plenty of cases like this; language policy is still a hot iron in many countries as of today.
Society likes uniformity to a degree and that is what is happening.
Wrong again. Society likes uniformity, but society also needs a certain amount of diversity - or rather people have their linguistic identity, and society has to cater to the identity of its members to some extent. Which is why the EU has directives on minority languages, and why the UK has Welsh-language television, and why in East Germany there are Sorbian-language schools - or to go outside the scope of Western democracies why in Xinjiang children are learning Uighur in school (because otherwise they'd be learning it in the mosque, which the Chinese government doesn't want), or why in Russia there are Tatar-language schools because otherwise some Tatars would sooner or later start to want to go the way of the Chechens.
Slashdot Mirror
That was the last straw.
They apparently used a helicopter instead of a series of kites, which makes the "recreation" somewhat boring.
The blogger could write them a letter disclosing his own identity, cash in the $10k himself, and when they publish the letter sue them for infringing upon his copyright on the letter.
OS X Intel does not work all that well on Thinkpads if you actually want to use them as a laptop. It installs just fine and some people actually use theirs that way. However, sleep mode doesn't work due to an incompatibility between OS X and the Thinkpad's ACPI implementation regarding power states S1 vs. S3; the computer will fail to wake up and give a BIOS error message that the system configuration has been tampered with, after which you need to go into BIOS setup, go out again and boot normally.
It would be sleek to have OS X reliably working on Thinkpads, but without sleep mode, the whole laptop thing kind of loses its point.
Cue the obligatory lets set so double the killer delete select all. :)
Except that CmdrTaco's response is more like seeing a Porsche and then wanting a Porsche which is a little more aerodynamic and with more horsepower. So until Apple produces the equivalent of a Bugatti Veyron he won't be a MacBook Air customer.
Rolling in a little bit of mining truck won't hurt either as long as it doesn't spoil the form factor and of course it's Apple's problem how they do it.
"I think I'll have to wait for something with a bigger screen and a faster clock speed." is the 2008 version of "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame": (-1: Missed the point).
Is this part of the $340 billion that the US as the largest, single, R&D-performing nation in the world is annually pumping into future-related technologies?
I spent some time doing IT work for our institute library. We had a policy of placing our institute's book orders through a small bookshop in the vicinity of the institute that was specializing in science books for the humanities. Without the fixed price policy the shop would have died long ago, partly because some numbers of people would have bought books for 27 online instead of spending 29 at a shop, but mainly because the accounting department of our university would have forced our institute to do the same regardless of whether we considered it a good idea or not. This way, the bookshop survived and students had a great place to do their book shopping, where you could find a lot of interesting stuff just by looking at what was standing in the shelf next to what you were originally interested in. A lot better than a "Customers who bought this also looked at..." option in my opinion, and in the opinion of practically everybody else who had experience with both. If you want to be a couch potato you can still order at Amazon, but the only thing you get is a convenience advantage, not a price advantage.
So one might argue that a country that values learning so highly sees the added value of having a diverse range of bookshops, and hence sees the added value in having a policy that alloes them to survive.
Of course, the ISP could just do his own part by blocking outgoing SMTP traffic from residential ranges, but that way you can't send the customer $300 bills for overusing his bandwith.
You admin types win (less work) and the accountant types win (more money). Bring it on, TW!
Maybe it's something about my shoes, though
What makes you think that glass isn't stable? (link, link)
I have an archeologist friend who works with Roman glass found along the Silk Road. Looks perfectly stable to me (well, at least those pieces that aren't smashed to bits).
In fact you can get a pretty decent minimal editing environment out of Word with a few simple steps, such as:
- Switching off all the autocorrection, autoreplace and autoformatting features.
- Using a concept font (Extras -> Options -> View, at the bottom)
- Switching to white-on-blue text (Extras -> Options -> General)
- Editing in full-screen mode (View -> Full screen)
The result looks a lot like Word 4.x under DOS and presents you with a nicely uncluttered view. It's not that bad if you want to concentrate on content, especially if the user interface distracts you otherwise. (The options might be called slightly differently, I just tried it on a German version of Word 2003).What you get out of Writeroom in effect looks not much different, only that Writeroom doesn't read Office files and has a very distracting gradient in the middle of the screen. Creativity is not really a function of the tool. If you don't know your tools, it will be hard to be creative at any rate, and if you know them, you can be creative with any tool. I am not a Word enthusiast in the least, doing most of my writing with Emacs and TeX - but as you say, the way in which these people claim that it's Word hindering their artistic ambitions sounds suspiciously like (a) it's more about being different than about being creative, (b) they haven't bothered to take a look at what their tools are capable of, which in this case wouldn't have been overly difficult even with Word, and (c) it's more a matter of principle than of getting some creative output into place.
Well to be honest that sounds like a good thing. If the industry is forced to do their DRM in an interoperable way it will be better than the present situation where DRMed content is practically not interoperable at all. And if the industry is forced to get their act together and actually do it right, because if they implement some kind of half-assed scheme that gets broken everywhere at once and forever, it doesn't sound too bad either. So maybe they do understand it.
I'm not a friend of DRM, but it's likely to stay around for a while, and in that case I'd rather have it implemented well than what we see at present.
True. Usually you can expect not only results, but multiple incompatible results, with major flamewars going on between them on licensing issues and minor technicalities. Examples include free Unix-like operating systems, desktop environments or Linux package managers.
Competition and choice can be good things, but so is coherence, and excessive partisanship, fragmentation and compartmentalisation of the available workforce are almost always bad things. I see this as the major roadblock towards success of open source software in general and Linux in particular. (The other is forwards, backwards and cross-distribution binary compatibility, partly because of the same fragmentation, partly because of a lack of interest of developers in having stable binary interfaces to things.)
Thank goodness the porn folder starts with "p"
It is like the use of the right Alt key on European keyboards to get extra accented characters. The key is called "Alt Gr" on many European keyboards. On a German keyboard, you press Alt Gr + some other key to get things like the Euro sign, the backslash, the pipe character, the tilde character, curly braces, or the @ sign.
I've written a couple of keyboard macros back in the WordPerfect days that used Alt Gr plus other keys to get extra accented characters for transcription of Arabic (and, ironically, for Yoruba, which is one of the major languages of Nigeria), which I'm ready to submit as prior art if it should have to come to that.
The man you refer to, Saparmurat "Turkmenbashi" Niyazov, has been dead since December 2006. His successor, Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov, is certainly not the strongest man in the world, but one has to hold to his credit that the personality cult around Turkmenbashi has been cut down a little and that the country is opening up somewhat.
Some people have peanut allergy allergies so severe that even being in the same room with a person with peanut allergy is potentially fatal.
...that his career is finnished, I guess.
(Thanks, thanks, I'll be here all week.)
I think that's what we have to put up with as long as there is no "+1, Grim Reality" moderation option.
You are wrong if you think language policies are liberal everywhere. For example, in France Breton-language schools are still forced to exist outside the normal school system because the state wants to keep the monopoly on one state language (in spite of Breton having something like half a million speakers) - France has a long tradition of laws against minority languages, up to the middle of the century in northern France you could see signs like "il est interdit de parler flamand et d'uriner sur les murs" ("It's forbidden to speak Flemish and to piss on the walls"). Or in Russia, the autonomous republic of Tatarstan wanted to switch the official alphabet for the Tatar language from Cyrillic to Latin to have more coherence with other Turkic languages, and they passed a law to that extent and started hanging up Latin-script streetsigns and everything, and then the Russian federal government forbade it because they want to keep the Cyrillic alphabet as a homogenous symbol of federal Russian identity. You can find plenty of cases like this; language policy is still a hot iron in many countries as of today.
Wrong again. Society likes uniformity, but society also needs a certain amount of diversity - or rather people have their linguistic identity, and society has to cater to the identity of its members to some extent. Which is why the EU has directives on minority languages, and why the UK has Welsh-language television, and why in East Germany there are Sorbian-language schools - or to go outside the scope of Western democracies why in Xinjiang children are learning Uighur in school (because otherwise they'd be learning it in the mosque, which the Chinese government doesn't want), or why in Russia there are Tatar-language schools because otherwise some Tatars would sooner or later start to want to go the way of the Chechens.