It seems like it means different things in different contexts, and serves as a great lesson as to why you shouldn't use technical project names for your marketing efforts. 3G is a defined technical standard, but the same term is used in marketing to mean a different thing. According to the article, the technical term 3G could be applied to many cell networks, including EDGE, as well as the more current networks that are usually just called "3G". So, while people who pay attention to such things would notice that the actual 3G spec has been out and in use well before the existing 3G-labeled networks (and was in fact used in the previous generation networks), most people would say EDGE is 2G and our current networks are 3G, and the stuff that's just being rolled out now is 4G.
To the consumer, 2G means slow data rates, 3G means faster data rates, and 4G means even faster data rates, and that's it. They should think that, that's how it's been marketed to them. To cell network engineers, apparently, those terms mean something entirely different. Seems like a lesson in the value of not reusing the same terms for engineering and marketing.
Generally companies ask for a lot up front so they can get what they really want in a settlement. I'm sure Oracle would be just as happy with a settlement that involved a licensing fee for every Android device sold.
Besides, even if they were somehow to convince a jury to let them wipe all of the Android phones out there, I don't think it would hurt them as bad as all that. The people that make the decisions to buy stuff like Oracle are at the executive level, and most of those people are still using Blackberries, not Android phones.
They want to make it longer than the first 2 episodes, because the last 2 were short
That's all well and good, but the stated reason for releasing episodic content was so they could get shorter games out more frequently. Instead, we get shorter games that take forever to come out just like the longer games did. I get the feeling that Valve is fantastic at game development and unbelievably shitty at project management.
Exactly. Once the CEO has lost the confidence of the board he's better off taking the golden parachute and moving on, otherwise the bickering between the two entities can end up dragging the whole company down.
I agree with this wholeheartedly, and it doesn't mean she has to sit there and spend her last days writing her memoirs either. My great grandfather was never a big talker, and he never talked much about how he grew up. However, when he was in his late 90s and his health was fading, he was encouraged to write down his memories. What we got was three sheets of paper, writing on both sides, that told stories that we had never heard before. He talked about his childhood on the farm, how he met his first wife, and some of the many hardships he faced while raising his own children. These were stories that nobody had ever heard, and they were immensely valuable. The information contained in those three sheets of paper will be treasured forever.
I would give this advice to anyone, really: talk to your elders (even the not so old ones!) and listen to their stories. If we hadn't waited until my great grandfather was so old and in such poor health, who knows how much more we could have learned if we had just spent more time encouraging him to tell his stories. These stories may never have any value to the average person, but they can be of incredible value to the family.
I mean, if you were going to talk to ANYONE about it, why would it be the person who was the least involved? It's not like that girl came up with the idea or executed it.
Because she's hot and would look good on TV, and therefore more people would watch. Nobody wants to see a couple of nerds talk about their hoax, but lots of people want to see a hot girl talk about just about anything.
I think you're right about the guys doing this primarily to get attention, but most things people post on the Internet are there to get attention. Even if someone never reveals who they are, the purpose of putting almost anything on the Internet is so that people will see it, giving the poster some measure of validation, even if they never actually reveal their true identities.
The idea of it being manufactured so NBC could give some unknown actress her own sitcom is a little too loopy for me to take seriously, though.
I meant "we" as in "humans", not "Americans". I also didn't mean to imply that all people are like this, which is why I used phrases like "tend to" and "in most cases". I think your post applies to the one I was replying to more than it does to mine.
Aside from a few universally hated people like Hitler, we have a tendency to focus on the good in people when they die. I think there are a couple of reasons why we do this:
a.) Except in the case of the universally reviled, we tend to think of people when they die as more...human, and not so much as whatever caricature of them we've built up in our minds over the years. Death is the ultimate equalizer. When someone dies, it's easier to think of them as having been just like us, with all of our foibles and vulnerabilities, and it becomes easier to forget, or at least minimize, their bad qualities.
b.) In most cases, people leave behind mourners when they die, and it's seen as in poor taste to be overtly negative about the dead and risk causing further grief to people who are already grieving. This is probably related to the whole idea of the sins of the father not being visited upon the sons.
c.) In the immediate aftermath of a person's death, criticism of them really serves no purpose. After all, they're dead, and are therefore presumably not actively doing anything to harm anyone anymore. After the initial shock wears off, and we begin to think of that person's place in history, we tend to start criticizing again. However, even then the criticism tends to be more tempered than it likely was when they were alive.
Having said all that, I think people do tend to get unnecessarily sensitive about these things after the death of a public figure. It's to be expected after a death of this type that people are going to make jokes and snide remarks, especially while cloaked in the pseudo (or sometimes total) anonymity of the Internet. Criticizing that or seeking to stop it in any way is pointless.
I applaud you for wading through that. The summary was so unreadable I didn't think I could click the link without losing my sanity in a dense forest of unnecessary prose. This thing is written by someone who is far more impressed with his own writing than anyone else will ever be.
That cave you've been living in must have been cramping.
In many cases marketing can be at least partially blamed for product failures, but in this case I think that's just the developer trying to shift blame from himself. Marketing can only get people to try something, but the product itself has to get them to stay. From what I've heard and seen, the usual cadre of geeks that follow everything Google does jumped on Wave just like they jump on everything else Google does. They tried it, and they couldn't see how it was worthwhile and stopped trying it. That's the fault of the product, not the marketing.
Wave was a solution to a problem nobody had, that's why it failed. Marketing is just an excuse.
The problem is the only reasons I'm hearing for the single space is because that's the way you do it in professional typesetting. Well, I'm not a professional typesetter, the stuff I write is not intended to be blown up huge or put into a paperback novel. It's generally for reading from a screen or printing out on paper with ragged right margins. In both of those cases, the double space helps readability. The major argument for the single space that I can see is that it allows typesetters to more easily play with the exact spacing to get things to look right in whatever medium they're working in. For me, that argument is completely irrelevant to anything I do. The argument *for* two spaces, that it makes the ends of sentences more clear, is a lot more logical to me.
The fact that HTML decides for you is irrelevant anywhere that isn't using HTML. HTML strips out any repeated whitespace, regardless of whether or not it's at the end of a sentence. HTML also does all sorts of other nutty things with formatting that may or may not make any sense depending on what you're trying to do.
Correct according to who? I've taken college classes as recently as this semester (taking one tonight, actually) where the form taught is two spaces after each sentence. The one space thing seems like a wholly unnecessary change to an already established standard. I'm actually surprised that the wikipedia page says the single space standard has been around so long, because in all of my schooling I had never heard of it and I'm only in my early 30s.
I disagree. Even with proportional fonts one space at the end of a period makes the text look crowded. I like to have an easily distinguishable end to a sentence, and a tiny period (which can be nearly invisible depending on the typeface, size, and which letter immediately precedes the period) followed by a single space can be very difficult to distinguish, especially in a relatively large (more than 5 or 6 lines) block of text.
I don;t know about anyone else, but when I was learning to write by hand (before anyone except aspiring secretaries learned typing in school) I was taught to leave more space after a period than between individual words. The two-space convention is more a reflection of that need for separation between sentences than something necessitated by fixed width fonts, and that need is not diminished (if anything, it's even more pronounced) with proportional fonts.
There's more to technology than "high tech." Anything that applies practical science to industry or commerce is technology. The wheel is technology. The automobile is technology, and yes a bus is a piece of technology. Really, you should be complaining about all the computer geeks trying to hijack the term "technology" and narrow its definition down to just high tech computers and robotics.
I agree with this. To me the most striking thing about modern European cities contrasted with what they were in 1945 is how utterly destroyed they were then and how completely they've been rebuilt. Hence, it would have been nicer to see more of the architecture behind the soldiers in before/after form. Seeing the soldiers is interesting, but having 15 pictures of old soldiers walking down modern streets with no other contrast is a little monotonous.
How can one know what an FBI seal looks like if he has NEVER seen one?
I can see it now:
An FBI agent knocks on some guy's door. The guy asks to see some ID, and the FBI agent produces his official FBI badge. The guy takes one look at it and says, "You can't fool me, that's a fake...it looks nothing like the ones on the X-Files!"
In my experience that's more like what college used to be like rather than how it is now. Tenure positions have all but disappeared in many universities, and most of the professors doing the actual teaching are adjunct faculty. While this means they usually get paid a lot less, they're often people who are doing it because they want to teach and not because they want to conduct research and are forced to teach. They usually run their classes with lots of discussion and seem genuinely interested in their students.
Maybe the fact that most of my professors are adjunct is because I'm at a state university or because I'm at a satellite campus, but I've had zero complaints about the quality of the instruction thus far. Pure regurgitation type tests are either completely eliminated by the time you get to sophomore-level work or are weighted so that they are only a small portion of your grade. Group projects, writing assignments, and etc. are a far larger part of the grade than the multiple choice stuff.
A lot of people that complain about universities are people who got disillusioned by it and dropped out in the first year. First year courses are a lot like high school, only harder, because there are lots of people in them that, frankly, shouldn't be in college. The first year intro courses tend to weed these people out. By the time you get into the second and especially third year most of those people have dropped out and that's when you really start to learn new and interesting things.
That's not entirely true, and even if it was there are other benefits. I went to Boise State University. How many people here have ever even heard of Boise State in any other context than football? Probably not very many. The exposure the football program gets drives people to consider going to the university that never would have otherwise. The football program gives the university a level of prestige that, frankly, their academics would never warrant on their own.
Also, the bowl game payouts the University got went at least partially to their academic departments. They spent a good chunk of it on the football program, sure, and why not? The football program earned it. Part of it, though, was given to the general university fund and distributed out from there. Maybe universities that are accustomed to getting big payouts every year do it differently.
I don't know if New York-style pizza can properly be called "pizza" by the definition most other places use. I like to think of it more as a highly efficient grease delivery system.
The GP does have a good point though. A D, even if it's a failing grade, means "you didn't pass, but you came close. Just try a little harder and you can pass next time," whereas an F says "You weren't even close to passing. You really need to radically rethink your study strategy and/or go into a different field."
Many colleges don't give credit for some courses, especially courses in your major, if you get a D, but they still maintain the D grade.
There's also the fact that in a standard GPA calculation a D is worth 1 point and an F is worth 0. So, people who would have normally gotten a D in a class (hence a 1.00) will instead get an F (a 0.00), which will put more downward pressure on their GPA than they may deserve if they scored, say, a 68%.
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My sister had a Nazi Barbie, and it was her favorite toy. She always said playing with that doll was a real gas.
It seems like it means different things in different contexts, and serves as a great lesson as to why you shouldn't use technical project names for your marketing efforts. 3G is a defined technical standard, but the same term is used in marketing to mean a different thing. According to the article, the technical term 3G could be applied to many cell networks, including EDGE, as well as the more current networks that are usually just called "3G". So, while people who pay attention to such things would notice that the actual 3G spec has been out and in use well before the existing 3G-labeled networks (and was in fact used in the previous generation networks), most people would say EDGE is 2G and our current networks are 3G, and the stuff that's just being rolled out now is 4G.
To the consumer, 2G means slow data rates, 3G means faster data rates, and 4G means even faster data rates, and that's it. They should think that, that's how it's been marketed to them. To cell network engineers, apparently, those terms mean something entirely different. Seems like a lesson in the value of not reusing the same terms for engineering and marketing.
Generally companies ask for a lot up front so they can get what they really want in a settlement. I'm sure Oracle would be just as happy with a settlement that involved a licensing fee for every Android device sold.
Besides, even if they were somehow to convince a jury to let them wipe all of the Android phones out there, I don't think it would hurt them as bad as all that. The people that make the decisions to buy stuff like Oracle are at the executive level, and most of those people are still using Blackberries, not Android phones.
They want to make it longer than the first 2 episodes, because the last 2 were short
That's all well and good, but the stated reason for releasing episodic content was so they could get shorter games out more frequently. Instead, we get shorter games that take forever to come out just like the longer games did. I get the feeling that Valve is fantastic at game development and unbelievably shitty at project management.
Exactly. Once the CEO has lost the confidence of the board he's better off taking the golden parachute and moving on, otherwise the bickering between the two entities can end up dragging the whole company down.
I agree with this wholeheartedly, and it doesn't mean she has to sit there and spend her last days writing her memoirs either. My great grandfather was never a big talker, and he never talked much about how he grew up. However, when he was in his late 90s and his health was fading, he was encouraged to write down his memories. What we got was three sheets of paper, writing on both sides, that told stories that we had never heard before. He talked about his childhood on the farm, how he met his first wife, and some of the many hardships he faced while raising his own children. These were stories that nobody had ever heard, and they were immensely valuable. The information contained in those three sheets of paper will be treasured forever.
I would give this advice to anyone, really: talk to your elders (even the not so old ones!) and listen to their stories. If we hadn't waited until my great grandfather was so old and in such poor health, who knows how much more we could have learned if we had just spent more time encouraging him to tell his stories. These stories may never have any value to the average person, but they can be of incredible value to the family.
Here you go.
I mean, if you were going to talk to ANYONE about it, why would it be the person who was the least involved? It's not like that girl came up with the idea or executed it.
Because she's hot and would look good on TV, and therefore more people would watch. Nobody wants to see a couple of nerds talk about their hoax, but lots of people want to see a hot girl talk about just about anything.
I think you're right about the guys doing this primarily to get attention, but most things people post on the Internet are there to get attention. Even if someone never reveals who they are, the purpose of putting almost anything on the Internet is so that people will see it, giving the poster some measure of validation, even if they never actually reveal their true identities.
The idea of it being manufactured so NBC could give some unknown actress her own sitcom is a little too loopy for me to take seriously, though.
I meant "we" as in "humans", not "Americans". I also didn't mean to imply that all people are like this, which is why I used phrases like "tend to" and "in most cases". I think your post applies to the one I was replying to more than it does to mine.
Aside from a few universally hated people like Hitler, we have a tendency to focus on the good in people when they die. I think there are a couple of reasons why we do this:
a.) Except in the case of the universally reviled, we tend to think of people when they die as more...human, and not so much as whatever caricature of them we've built up in our minds over the years. Death is the ultimate equalizer. When someone dies, it's easier to think of them as having been just like us, with all of our foibles and vulnerabilities, and it becomes easier to forget, or at least minimize, their bad qualities.
b.) In most cases, people leave behind mourners when they die, and it's seen as in poor taste to be overtly negative about the dead and risk causing further grief to people who are already grieving. This is probably related to the whole idea of the sins of the father not being visited upon the sons.
c.) In the immediate aftermath of a person's death, criticism of them really serves no purpose. After all, they're dead, and are therefore presumably not actively doing anything to harm anyone anymore. After the initial shock wears off, and we begin to think of that person's place in history, we tend to start criticizing again. However, even then the criticism tends to be more tempered than it likely was when they were alive.
Having said all that, I think people do tend to get unnecessarily sensitive about these things after the death of a public figure. It's to be expected after a death of this type that people are going to make jokes and snide remarks, especially while cloaked in the pseudo (or sometimes total) anonymity of the Internet. Criticizing that or seeking to stop it in any way is pointless.
I applaud you for wading through that. The summary was so unreadable I didn't think I could click the link without losing my sanity in a dense forest of unnecessary prose. This thing is written by someone who is far more impressed with his own writing than anyone else will ever be.
You could hear that? I told her to be quiet...
That cave you've been living in must have been cramping.
In many cases marketing can be at least partially blamed for product failures, but in this case I think that's just the developer trying to shift blame from himself. Marketing can only get people to try something, but the product itself has to get them to stay. From what I've heard and seen, the usual cadre of geeks that follow everything Google does jumped on Wave just like they jump on everything else Google does. They tried it, and they couldn't see how it was worthwhile and stopped trying it. That's the fault of the product, not the marketing.
Wave was a solution to a problem nobody had, that's why it failed. Marketing is just an excuse.
The problem is the only reasons I'm hearing for the single space is because that's the way you do it in professional typesetting. Well, I'm not a professional typesetter, the stuff I write is not intended to be blown up huge or put into a paperback novel. It's generally for reading from a screen or printing out on paper with ragged right margins. In both of those cases, the double space helps readability. The major argument for the single space that I can see is that it allows typesetters to more easily play with the exact spacing to get things to look right in whatever medium they're working in. For me, that argument is completely irrelevant to anything I do. The argument *for* two spaces, that it makes the ends of sentences more clear, is a lot more logical to me.
The fact that HTML decides for you is irrelevant anywhere that isn't using HTML. HTML strips out any repeated whitespace, regardless of whether or not it's at the end of a sentence. HTML also does all sorts of other nutty things with formatting that may or may not make any sense depending on what you're trying to do.
Correct according to who? I've taken college classes as recently as this semester (taking one tonight, actually) where the form taught is two spaces after each sentence. The one space thing seems like a wholly unnecessary change to an already established standard. I'm actually surprised that the wikipedia page says the single space standard has been around so long, because in all of my schooling I had never heard of it and I'm only in my early 30s.
I disagree. Even with proportional fonts one space at the end of a period makes the text look crowded. I like to have an easily distinguishable end to a sentence, and a tiny period (which can be nearly invisible depending on the typeface, size, and which letter immediately precedes the period) followed by a single space can be very difficult to distinguish, especially in a relatively large (more than 5 or 6 lines) block of text.
I don;t know about anyone else, but when I was learning to write by hand (before anyone except aspiring secretaries learned typing in school) I was taught to leave more space after a period than between individual words. The two-space convention is more a reflection of that need for separation between sentences than something necessitated by fixed width fonts, and that need is not diminished (if anything, it's even more pronounced) with proportional fonts.
There's more to technology than "high tech." Anything that applies practical science to industry or commerce is technology. The wheel is technology. The automobile is technology, and yes a bus is a piece of technology. Really, you should be complaining about all the computer geeks trying to hijack the term "technology" and narrow its definition down to just high tech computers and robotics.
I agree with this. To me the most striking thing about modern European cities contrasted with what they were in 1945 is how utterly destroyed they were then and how completely they've been rebuilt. Hence, it would have been nicer to see more of the architecture behind the soldiers in before/after form. Seeing the soldiers is interesting, but having 15 pictures of old soldiers walking down modern streets with no other contrast is a little monotonous.
How can one know what an FBI seal looks like if he has NEVER seen one?
I can see it now:
An FBI agent knocks on some guy's door. The guy asks to see some ID, and the FBI agent produces his official FBI badge. The guy takes one look at it and says, "You can't fool me, that's a fake...it looks nothing like the ones on the X-Files!"
As it turns out, declining the Mars endorsement on their AAA coverage was a fatal mistake.
In my experience that's more like what college used to be like rather than how it is now. Tenure positions have all but disappeared in many universities, and most of the professors doing the actual teaching are adjunct faculty. While this means they usually get paid a lot less, they're often people who are doing it because they want to teach and not because they want to conduct research and are forced to teach. They usually run their classes with lots of discussion and seem genuinely interested in their students.
Maybe the fact that most of my professors are adjunct is because I'm at a state university or because I'm at a satellite campus, but I've had zero complaints about the quality of the instruction thus far. Pure regurgitation type tests are either completely eliminated by the time you get to sophomore-level work or are weighted so that they are only a small portion of your grade. Group projects, writing assignments, and etc. are a far larger part of the grade than the multiple choice stuff.
A lot of people that complain about universities are people who got disillusioned by it and dropped out in the first year. First year courses are a lot like high school, only harder, because there are lots of people in them that, frankly, shouldn't be in college. The first year intro courses tend to weed these people out. By the time you get into the second and especially third year most of those people have dropped out and that's when you really start to learn new and interesting things.
That's not entirely true, and even if it was there are other benefits. I went to Boise State University. How many people here have ever even heard of Boise State in any other context than football? Probably not very many. The exposure the football program gets drives people to consider going to the university that never would have otherwise. The football program gives the university a level of prestige that, frankly, their academics would never warrant on their own.
Also, the bowl game payouts the University got went at least partially to their academic departments. They spent a good chunk of it on the football program, sure, and why not? The football program earned it. Part of it, though, was given to the general university fund and distributed out from there. Maybe universities that are accustomed to getting big payouts every year do it differently.
I don't know if New York-style pizza can properly be called "pizza" by the definition most other places use. I like to think of it more as a highly efficient grease delivery system.
The GP does have a good point though. A D, even if it's a failing grade, means "you didn't pass, but you came close. Just try a little harder and you can pass next time," whereas an F says "You weren't even close to passing. You really need to radically rethink your study strategy and/or go into a different field."
Many colleges don't give credit for some courses, especially courses in your major, if you get a D, but they still maintain the D grade.
There's also the fact that in a standard GPA calculation a D is worth 1 point and an F is worth 0. So, people who would have normally gotten a D in a class (hence a 1.00) will instead get an F (a 0.00), which will put more downward pressure on their GPA than they may deserve if they scored, say, a 68%.