hyperbole 1. Rhet. A figure of speech consisting in exaggerated or extravagant statement, used to express strong feeling or produce a strong impression, and not intended to be understood literally.
Can't a guy poke fun at idiotic stereotypes without somebody actually thinking I seriously believe that all people who play D&D are male and will never feel the warmth of a woman's touch?
Seriously, are you really that incapable of parsing written English? Do I need to start add little disclaimers to everything I write?
DISCLAIMER: although the author (AAiP) questions your critical reading skills, under no circumstances does he mean to suggest that you are unintelligent, too literal, foolish, ugly, simple-minded, easily-duped, gullible, dense, or otherwise sub-par in any respect. For the purposes of this and future interactions, AAiP will assume that your social and intellecual traits are within one standard deviation of the mean, based on humanity as a whole, excepting those cases where your social and intellectual skills are substantially higher than said mean. Though one could infer that the tone of this disclaimer is decidedly snide, AAiP assures you that it really isn't. He just wants to make sure he's being absolutely, positively, perfectly crystal clear on this, beyond any suggestion of an inkling of a hint of a trace of a shadow of a doubt. Really. You're swell.
I think the IDF is going a little overboard, here. I mean, it's just D&D; it's not like they're going around eating cheeseburgers and shellfish, or something crazy like that.
Heck, you'd think they'd get a leg up for it--for example, as D&D precludes any and all contact with females, they run no risk of sexual transgression whatsoever!
The DS is just begging for homebrew "Download Play" games. As I don't know a great deal about the inner workings of the system, what are the odds of the homebrew hackers coming out with a guide on how to turn your friendly neighborhood WiFi card/router into a DS "broadcast hub"?
DS + Computer + WiFi + Skills = Homebrew game - (funky hardware * distribution hurdles)
I'm not convinced that the features are worth the extra cost. Is a tiny screen and the extra battery life really worth paying 50-100% more than the iPod shuffle?
The iPod isn't a blazing success because of technical superiority; the iPod isn't a blazing success because of crazy mad features. The iPod is a success because it does what it was designed to do very, very well--better than the players that boast eternal battery life, radio tuners, wireless, video playback, more storage, more audio formats, lower prices, and smaller packages.
It's about finding the right balance--and based on what I'm seeing, I don't think that Sony's upcoming offering will succeed at striking that balance.
Does anyone else fear that when gaming no longer has the "I'm MrWa. I'm a gamer" connotation and becomes mainstream that the development stage - and the fun with it - has ended?
Not really, no.
I mean, we've had books for--how many centuries, now? We burn through entire forests printing drivel that should never have been scrawled to a page in the first place, yet we still have brilliant authors producing everything from fun, entertaining stories to landmark works of literature.
One can argue that games require substantially greater investments in time and talent, but that hasn't stopped games like Counter-Strike from becoming mind-bogglingly successful. Every year brings new tools, new resources, and new venues of distribution for the small-time developer.
That the soulless content machine is waxing does not automatically mean that the creative spark must wane. It's still there, and it'll continue to give us give us good, fun games.
I've noticed that certain browsers do wonky things when you hover over the various DIVs on the page. I've reviewed my code on numerous occasions, and I'm reasonably certain that this isn't a code problem--it's a browser problem. There's nothing in the code to tell the browser to do wonky things to the div background on a mouseover.
As you're clearly upset by websites that open new browser windows, I recommend trying a browser called Mozilla Firefox, an excellent, open-source web browser that makes it trivially easy to stop links from opening automatically in new windows once and for all. Of course, Firefox is one of the browsers that has the "blue background" bug I mentioned earlier, but I'm hopeful that they'll hash that out before too long.
As for the need to scroll down to see the navigation buttons on magicchopstick.com, that's a fair enough complaint--but I'm not gonna fix it. Neener neener.
Am I the only one who remembers when Strider for Genesis was and Street Fighter II for SNES was $70?
No, you're not. Fact is, video games are a better deal now than they've ever been. Not only are prices for top titles surprisingly low (even before factoring in inflation!), you're getting a ton more entertainment value out of your average title than you ever did before. A game that takes ten hours to finish is considered "very short" these days. Even just ten years ago, a game that took ten hours to finish would have been considered epic in its scope.
There are plenty of things to complain about when it comes to modern games, but frankly, cost is not one of those things...
"There's no question that the graphics are going to be a huge upgrade," he commented. "You know, people are such snobs, with this 'oh, it's not about graphics' thing. That's such nonsense. It's totally about graphics. What's the difference between the first Metal Gear Solid and the latest Metal Gear Solid? Right, it's - wow, the graphics!"
Well, duh. When your pony's one trick is looking good, you're not about to go trumpeting the virtue of speedy ponies, strong ponies, or clever ponies, are you?
I mean, c'mon. Take a look at the content of Epic Games' front page navigation box:
Unreal Championship 2
Unreal Tournament 2004
Unreal Championship
Unreal 2
Unreal Tournament
Unreal
Unreal Engine
Unreal Developer Network
Unreal Technology Site
Epic Classic Games
This is akin to the VP of 3DO saying, "Of course it's about little plastic military figurines--and anyone who says otherwise is just a jerk with a silver spoon up his ass!"
Linux and Mac have something Windows doesnt; a captive audience.
Bingo.
For supporting evidence, I invite you to compare the PC and Mac top 25 weekly downloads sections at Download.com.
Pay particular attention to the "Number of weeks on chart" statistic--nealy half of the titles for the Mac have been on the "top downloads" list for over two years, whereas nearly half of the titles for the PC have spent under three months on the list.
The Mac is gaining ground in the gaming department, but there are still pretty hefty opportunities there. If you make a Pretty Good game for PC, odds are it'll disappear beneath Even Better games; with the Mac, you've got a lot better chance of getting some traction...
I guess it's a start, but there are some pretty major omissions to this list. For example, they managed to overlook both Paris Hilton and Jenna Jameson.
I don't think they can call this guide "concise" until they address these gaping holes...
Thomas Young's double-slit experiment is a classic experiment that helped establish the wave-like nature of light. Since then, it has been done with atoms, buckyballs, and biomolecules.
A fair point--and a trap I've had to haul myself out of on a number of occasions, too...
Perhaps a better way to put it is that people should be able to recognize bad algorithm choices and go with something which, while perhaps not optimal, will work quickly for the application at hand.
This is marginally away from the submitter's question, but it warrnats attention:
The sad truth is that, as far as optimization goes, this isn't where attention is most needed.
Before we start worrying about things like saving two cycles here and there, we need to start teaching people how to select the proper algorithm for the task at hand.
There are too many programmers who spend hours turning their code into unreadable mush for the sake of squeezing a few milliseconds out of a loop that runs on the order of O(n!) or O(2^n).
For 99% of the coders out there, all that needs to be known about code optimization is: pick the right algorithms! Couple this with readable code, and you'll have a program that runs several thousand times faster than it'll ever need to and is easy to maintain--and that's probably all you'll ever need.
Hey, hello again--I hadn't recognized your username!
No apology necessary--it was an honest misunderstanding, and I could have been more explicit in addressing the labs rather than the institutions. (I also could have been a bit less snide--sorry 'bout that.) I forget that not everybody is married to a biologist--and that it -isn't- common knowledge as to how federal grants are doled out to research labs and institutions...
...you indisputably implied that something like, e.g., an academic institution would lose all of its federal funding if it or any of its researchers wanted to pursue embryonic stem cell research, in the same vein that a state would lose federal highway money if it had a drinking age lower than 21. Don't worry, your point about highway money isn't lost on me.
I disagree--I thought I was being quite clear that I was speaking at the level of an individual research laboratory. Consider that my list of "consequences" focused entirely on a single PI's lab and livelihood.
But the analogy doesn't transfer. The University of Wisconsin and its star stem cell researchers like Jamie Thompson are indeed pursuing this research, by working around the restrictions. Will the research technically be "private", and, technically and legally, not associated with the "University of Wisconsin"? Sure. But everyone knows this is being done to keep the University of Wisconsin on the forefront of this type of research, and keep researchers like Thompson around. Creating a private "institute" is as simple as some legal wrangling and some declarations by the University and state.
The University of Wisconsin, as you are well aware, is an exceptional research institution. It's one of the best in the nation--and by extension, one of the best in the world. It is home to some of the most talented scientists in the world. It is situated in a community that reveres the university and greatly values scientific progress. It is one of the few institutions with enough money, political clout, and talent to consider building an independently-funded research facility for projects that cannot receive federal funding. Similarly, the State of California generates more money than most first-world nations; it is one of the few states that can afford to launch this sort of endeavour. Most state universities--even ones with strong programs in the biological sciences--cannot meet the financial, political, and technical benchmarks required to launch this type of effort on such a grand scale as UW-Madison or California. What's more, UW-Madison's efforts are still in the planning stages--it'll be years before the research facilies are even constructed.
I was careful to express that there did exist these caveats, as I'm perfectly well aware of the fact that there do exist labs capable of functioning without federal funding. If I was not explicit enough in directing my comments at the laboratory level as opposed to the institutional level, then permit me to explicitly state that I am referring specifically to individual laboratories and not the institutions that house them.
Research institutions with federal funding are already easily working around the federal funding restrictions.
Like I said, there do exist a bare handful of labs that can run without federal funding. The vast majority of labs, however, don't have this luxury. There are only so many facilities like the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery in the country, after all. Don't try call me on something I didn't claim.
I'm sorry, but you're completely and utterly wrong.
No, what I said is accurate. You simply chose to ignore essential elements of my statement for the sake of launching an inflammatory response.
Kindly respond to what I actually wrote, not what you'd like me to have written.
- There isn't a "ban" on any kind of stem cell research in the US. There is a restriction on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research - entities are still free to perform embryonic stem cell research (see California's recent US$3 billion bond initiative to support such research in the state)
...and for those of you who still refuse to acknowledge it:
Saying that there is no ban on embryonic stem cell research is like saying the federal government didn't require states to set the drinking age to twenty-one back in 1984.
Technically, it's true--technically, states were free to set the drinking age to whatever they saw fit, and technically, research labs are free to conduct embryonic stem cell research on new cell lines.
In practice, the federal government's actions were and are tantamount to banning the practice. "Say, Mississippi, you've kept the drinking age at eighteen? Hey, fine, great! Whoops--looks like you're gonna have to do without some of these federal funds for highways. Tough break, that. What? You can't afford to lose those millions of dollars? Well gosh, I just wonder what you could possibly do to resolve this situation!"
So no, in the strictest, most absolute sense of the word, the federal government has not "banned" new embryonic stem-cell lines. That said, kindly stop pretending that what the government has done is somehow anything less significant than an outright ban.
There exist only a bare handful of labs who can afford to lose government funding. When the government says "Do this or you'll lose your federal funding", a PI can either do what the government says or close up shop--which means losing years of research, losing his livelihood, and firing a group of highly trained, carefully sought-after and brilliant scientists.
Saying it isn't a "ban" is on par with arguing over what the definition of "is" is. Quit playing with semantics and acknowledge the reality of the situation.
I'm probably in the minority here but I think that the iPod photo is overkill.
Heck, the classic iPod is overkill, too. That overkill is what makes it such a great little device. Think about it--when the original iPod came out, more than a few people were saying "who in their right mind pays several hundred dollars for a glorified Walkman?"
Thing is, though, the iPod really re-introduced us to portable music. Yeah, there were other high-capacity players on the market first, but it was the iPod that really got the ball rolling. Looking back, I'm struck by how non-portable 'portable' music used to be. Now, I have my entire music library with me wherever I go--and I take it for granted that I don't need to lug a bigass CD folder and swap disks to get the music I want. It seems like a small difference, but the net effect is quite significant. With just a slight reduction in the overall space and inconvenience of listening to music on the go, I've found that I'm listening to a whole lot more music--and really enjoying it.
The iPod Photo may just end up doing much the same thing for photographs (and, in another few years, movies.) Right now, my photographs are split between "old" photos in boxes and bulky albums, and "new" photos on a comparatively small laptop. The laptop is nice, but it's still significantly more of a pain to carry with me than an iPod.
It isn't that much of a leap of the imagination to see the iPod Photo doing the same thing for your photo albums as the iPod did for your CD collection. Going to grandma's? Load up the baby pictures on the same miniscule device as the driving music (and 'Bananaphone' to keep Junior happy). Plug it into her TV, and you've got an instant, large-format slideshow that grandma doesn't need to squint at through her reading glasses. Got a slideshow to go along with your thesis presentation? Don't bother with the laptop, just bring your iPod. Hell, just wanna show your friends that fish you caught on vacation? It's already on your iPod, which you'll have on you for the drive, anyhow!
Sure, it's easy to say that it's "overkill"--but then again, so much about the iPod is already overkill. A CD player is perfectly adequate for playing music on the go, after all. What makes the iPod so successful, though, is that this "overkill" is just enough to make a pretty radical change in one's music listening habits. Jobs is betting that it can do the same with your photo viewing habits--and to be honest, he may be right. Luckily for him, even if he's dead wrong, it's still the same awesome music player it has always been--and the added photo functionality isn't likely to turn many people off...
Hoo, boy, do I miss French restaurant service--you had to go and remind me!
Not only do they wait to bring you the bill, they wait 'till you're done with your current course before bringing you the next one. What's more, they actually wait on their tables--they'll hover out-of-range of your group, but the moment a single head bobs up searchingly, they're right there, asking what they can do for you.
A little trick for folks faced with a snooty French waiter: ask him what he recommends off the menu and order it. Not only did this always instantly warm the waiter to your group, it rarely resulted in anything less than an excellent meal. The kicker about snooty waiters is that they're snooty because they think they're the shit, and you're just another goddamn noisy, boisterous American tourist whose idea of flavor is "add more salt!". Once you break that little myth, your cold-and-distant waiter turns almost instantly into your very bestest of friends for the next three hours.
(That's the other thing...I miss the three-hour dinner. Mealtime is sacred over there--the very concept of trying to chivvy your party out the door to fill your table with a new check is offensive...dammit, you had to go and make me miss the place! *grin*)
From my experience, they don't. They even wonder why we Americans think that the French hate us. They were really confused by the freedom-fries debacle. OTOH, the Parisians are different, and more difficult, but that's not just towards Americans.
My own experience is a few years stale, but I'll echo this. Parisians do come off as brusque and cold, but I have a theory as to why this is.
When the city you live in is home to several million people and the population density hovers around 25,000 people per square mile, personal space becomes very, very valuable. To this end, you don't want to interact with each of the hundred-odd strangers you pass in the street on your daily commute; you'd be nodding, greeting, and interacting every step of the way. Now, once you actually 'break the ice' and start talking to somebody, they tend to be amazingly friendly and accomodating--it's just that most folks in Paris value their privacy and understand that it makes everybody's life a little easier if we're not all waving, gawking, and engaging strangers in small talk all the time. For what it's worth, it works--I could stand in a metro car literally packed with other Parisians and feel like I had my own little personal space. You really need that kind of thing in such close quarters--you'd go nuts otherwise.
"France National Library Attacks Google Book Effort"? What?
If you'd have bothered to read the editorial, you'd find that "attack" is perhaps not the most appropriate word to use. Rather, M. Jeanneney calls on his own country to get its act together and do the same sort of thing as Google for the sake of keeping the Internet from becoming even more of a monoculture than it is today. What, exactly, is so bad about that?
He's not attacking Google. His main point is "look at what Google is doing--we should be doing the same thing, for the sake of preserving our culture!"
Can the inflammatory headline. It's designed to get a cheap rise out of simple-minded people, and it doesn't make Slashdot look good. There's nothing wrong with what this guy is saying--and if he's attacking anybody, it's his own countrymen, not Google.
Slashdot Mirror
Setting aside the "because I can" and "because it's Linux" arguments, what is the benefit of running YDL instead of OS X on one's Mac?
Can't a guy poke fun at idiotic stereotypes without somebody actually thinking I seriously believe that all people who play D&D are male and will never feel the warmth of a woman's touch?
Seriously, are you really that incapable of parsing written English? Do I need to start add little disclaimers to everything I write?
DISCLAIMER: although the author (AAiP) questions your critical reading skills, under no circumstances does he mean to suggest that you are unintelligent, too literal, foolish, ugly, simple-minded, easily-duped, gullible, dense, or otherwise sub-par in any respect. For the purposes of this and future interactions, AAiP will assume that your social and intellecual traits are within one standard deviation of the mean, based on humanity as a whole, excepting those cases where your social and intellectual skills are substantially higher than said mean. Though one could infer that the tone of this disclaimer is decidedly snide, AAiP assures you that it really isn't. He just wants to make sure he's being absolutely, positively, perfectly crystal clear on this, beyond any suggestion of an inkling of a hint of a trace of a shadow of a doubt. Really. You're swell.
Heck, you'd think they'd get a leg up for it--for example, as D&D precludes any and all contact with females, they run no risk of sexual transgression whatsoever!
DS + Computer + WiFi + Skills = Homebrew game - (funky hardware * distribution hurdles)
The iPod isn't a blazing success because of technical superiority; the iPod isn't a blazing success because of crazy mad features. The iPod is a success because it does what it was designed to do very, very well--better than the players that boast eternal battery life, radio tuners, wireless, video playback, more storage, more audio formats, lower prices, and smaller packages.
It's about finding the right balance--and based on what I'm seeing, I don't think that Sony's upcoming offering will succeed at striking that balance.
Not really, no.
I mean, we've had books for--how many centuries, now? We burn through entire forests printing drivel that should never have been scrawled to a page in the first place, yet we still have brilliant authors producing everything from fun, entertaining stories to landmark works of literature.
One can argue that games require substantially greater investments in time and talent, but that hasn't stopped games like Counter-Strike from becoming mind-bogglingly successful. Every year brings new tools, new resources, and new venues of distribution for the small-time developer.
That the soulless content machine is waxing does not automatically mean that the creative spark must wane. It's still there, and it'll continue to give us give us good, fun games.
Hmm--I hadn't considered that. Worth mucking about with, at the least. Thanks!
I've noticed that certain browsers do wonky things when you hover over the various DIVs on the page. I've reviewed my code on numerous occasions, and I'm reasonably certain that this isn't a code problem--it's a browser problem. There's nothing in the code to tell the browser to do wonky things to the div background on a mouseover.
As you're clearly upset by websites that open new browser windows, I recommend trying a browser called Mozilla Firefox, an excellent, open-source web browser that makes it trivially easy to stop links from opening automatically in new windows once and for all. Of course, Firefox is one of the browsers that has the "blue background" bug I mentioned earlier, but I'm hopeful that they'll hash that out before too long.
As for the need to scroll down to see the navigation buttons on magicchopstick.com, that's a fair enough complaint--but I'm not gonna fix it. Neener neener.
...and they were considered "epic" in scale, were they not?
No, you're not. Fact is, video games are a better deal now than they've ever been. Not only are prices for top titles surprisingly low (even before factoring in inflation!), you're getting a ton more entertainment value out of your average title than you ever did before. A game that takes ten hours to finish is considered "very short" these days. Even just ten years ago, a game that took ten hours to finish would have been considered epic in its scope.
There are plenty of things to complain about when it comes to modern games, but frankly, cost is not one of those things...
Well, duh. When your pony's one trick is looking good, you're not about to go trumpeting the virtue of speedy ponies, strong ponies, or clever ponies, are you?
I mean, c'mon. Take a look at the content of Epic Games' front page navigation box:
This is akin to the VP of 3DO saying, "Of course it's about little plastic military figurines--and anyone who says otherwise is just a jerk with a silver spoon up his ass!"
Bingo.
For supporting evidence, I invite you to compare the PC and Mac top 25 weekly downloads sections at Download.com.
Pay particular attention to the "Number of weeks on chart" statistic--nealy half of the titles for the Mac have been on the "top downloads" list for over two years, whereas nearly half of the titles for the PC have spent under three months on the list.
The Mac is gaining ground in the gaming department, but there are still pretty hefty opportunities there. If you make a Pretty Good game for PC, odds are it'll disappear beneath Even Better games; with the Mac, you've got a lot better chance of getting some traction...
I don't think they can call this guide "concise" until they address these gaping holes...
Not to mention flowers, too...
Perhaps a better way to put it is that people should be able to recognize bad algorithm choices and go with something which, while perhaps not optimal, will work quickly for the application at hand.
The sad truth is that, as far as optimization goes, this isn't where attention is most needed.
Before we start worrying about things like saving two cycles here and there, we need to start teaching people how to select the proper algorithm for the task at hand.
There are too many programmers who spend hours turning their code into unreadable mush for the sake of squeezing a few milliseconds out of a loop that runs on the order of O(n!) or O(2^n).
For 99% of the coders out there, all that needs to be known about code optimization is: pick the right algorithms! Couple this with readable code, and you'll have a program that runs several thousand times faster than it'll ever need to and is easy to maintain--and that's probably all you'll ever need.
No apology necessary--it was an honest misunderstanding, and I could have been more explicit in addressing the labs rather than the institutions. (I also could have been a bit less snide--sorry 'bout that.) I forget that not everybody is married to a biologist--and that it -isn't- common knowledge as to how federal grants are doled out to research labs and institutions...
I disagree--I thought I was being quite clear that I was speaking at the level of an individual research laboratory. Consider that my list of "consequences" focused entirely on a single PI's lab and livelihood.
But the analogy doesn't transfer. The University of Wisconsin and its star stem cell researchers like Jamie Thompson are indeed pursuing this research, by working around the restrictions. Will the research technically be "private", and, technically and legally, not associated with the "University of Wisconsin"? Sure. But everyone knows this is being done to keep the University of Wisconsin on the forefront of this type of research, and keep researchers like Thompson around. Creating a private "institute" is as simple as some legal wrangling and some declarations by the University and state.
The University of Wisconsin, as you are well aware, is an exceptional research institution. It's one of the best in the nation--and by extension, one of the best in the world. It is home to some of the most talented scientists in the world. It is situated in a community that reveres the university and greatly values scientific progress. It is one of the few institutions with enough money, political clout, and talent to consider building an independently-funded research facility for projects that cannot receive federal funding. Similarly, the State of California generates more money than most first-world nations; it is one of the few states that can afford to launch this sort of endeavour. Most state universities--even ones with strong programs in the biological sciences--cannot meet the financial, political, and technical benchmarks required to launch this type of effort on such a grand scale as UW-Madison or California. What's more, UW-Madison's efforts are still in the planning stages--it'll be years before the research facilies are even constructed.
I was careful to express that there did exist these caveats, as I'm perfectly well aware of the fact that there do exist labs capable of functioning without federal funding. If I was not explicit enough in directing my comments at the laboratory level as opposed to the institutional level, then permit me to explicitly state that I am referring specifically to individual laboratories and not the institutions that house them.
Like I said, there do exist a bare handful of labs that can run without federal funding. The vast majority of labs, however, don't have this luxury. There are only so many facilities like the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery in the country, after all. Don't try call me on something I didn't claim.
I'm sorry, but you're completely and utterly wrong.
No, what I said is accurate. You simply chose to ignore essential elements of my statement for the sake of launching an inflammatory response.
Kindly respond to what I actually wrote, not what you'd like me to have written.
- There isn't a "ban" on any kind of stem cell research in the US. There is a restriction on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research - entities are still free to perform embryonic stem cell research (see California's recent US$3 billion bond initiative to support such research in the state)
Saying that there is no ban on embryonic stem cell research is like saying the federal government didn't require states to set the drinking age to twenty-one back in 1984.
Technically, it's true--technically, states were free to set the drinking age to whatever they saw fit, and technically, research labs are free to conduct embryonic stem cell research on new cell lines.
In practice, the federal government's actions were and are tantamount to banning the practice. "Say, Mississippi, you've kept the drinking age at eighteen? Hey, fine, great! Whoops--looks like you're gonna have to do without some of these federal funds for highways. Tough break, that. What? You can't afford to lose those millions of dollars? Well gosh, I just wonder what you could possibly do to resolve this situation!"
So no, in the strictest, most absolute sense of the word, the federal government has not "banned" new embryonic stem-cell lines. That said, kindly stop pretending that what the government has done is somehow anything less significant than an outright ban.
There exist only a bare handful of labs who can afford to lose government funding. When the government says "Do this or you'll lose your federal funding", a PI can either do what the government says or close up shop--which means losing years of research, losing his livelihood, and firing a group of highly trained, carefully sought-after and brilliant scientists.
Saying it isn't a "ban" is on par with arguing over what the definition of "is" is. Quit playing with semantics and acknowledge the reality of the situation.
Heck, the classic iPod is overkill, too. That overkill is what makes it such a great little device. Think about it--when the original iPod came out, more than a few people were saying "who in their right mind pays several hundred dollars for a glorified Walkman?"
Thing is, though, the iPod really re-introduced us to portable music. Yeah, there were other high-capacity players on the market first, but it was the iPod that really got the ball rolling. Looking back, I'm struck by how non-portable 'portable' music used to be. Now, I have my entire music library with me wherever I go--and I take it for granted that I don't need to lug a bigass CD folder and swap disks to get the music I want. It seems like a small difference, but the net effect is quite significant. With just a slight reduction in the overall space and inconvenience of listening to music on the go, I've found that I'm listening to a whole lot more music--and really enjoying it.
The iPod Photo may just end up doing much the same thing for photographs (and, in another few years, movies.) Right now, my photographs are split between "old" photos in boxes and bulky albums, and "new" photos on a comparatively small laptop. The laptop is nice, but it's still significantly more of a pain to carry with me than an iPod.
It isn't that much of a leap of the imagination to see the iPod Photo doing the same thing for your photo albums as the iPod did for your CD collection. Going to grandma's? Load up the baby pictures on the same miniscule device as the driving music (and 'Bananaphone' to keep Junior happy). Plug it into her TV, and you've got an instant, large-format slideshow that grandma doesn't need to squint at through her reading glasses. Got a slideshow to go along with your thesis presentation? Don't bother with the laptop, just bring your iPod. Hell, just wanna show your friends that fish you caught on vacation? It's already on your iPod, which you'll have on you for the drive, anyhow!
Sure, it's easy to say that it's "overkill"--but then again, so much about the iPod is already overkill. A CD player is perfectly adequate for playing music on the go, after all. What makes the iPod so successful, though, is that this "overkill" is just enough to make a pretty radical change in one's music listening habits. Jobs is betting that it can do the same with your photo viewing habits--and to be honest, he may be right. Luckily for him, even if he's dead wrong, it's still the same awesome music player it has always been--and the added photo functionality isn't likely to turn many people off...
Not only do they wait to bring you the bill, they wait 'till you're done with your current course before bringing you the next one. What's more, they actually wait on their tables--they'll hover out-of-range of your group, but the moment a single head bobs up searchingly, they're right there, asking what they can do for you.
A little trick for folks faced with a snooty French waiter: ask him what he recommends off the menu and order it. Not only did this always instantly warm the waiter to your group, it rarely resulted in anything less than an excellent meal. The kicker about snooty waiters is that they're snooty because they think they're the shit, and you're just another goddamn noisy, boisterous American tourist whose idea of flavor is "add more salt!". Once you break that little myth, your cold-and-distant waiter turns almost instantly into your very bestest of friends for the next three hours.
(That's the other thing...I miss the three-hour dinner. Mealtime is sacred over there--the very concept of trying to chivvy your party out the door to fill your table with a new check is offensive...dammit, you had to go and make me miss the place! *grin*)
My own experience is a few years stale, but I'll echo this. Parisians do come off as brusque and cold, but I have a theory as to why this is.
When the city you live in is home to several million people and the population density hovers around 25,000 people per square mile, personal space becomes very, very valuable. To this end, you don't want to interact with each of the hundred-odd strangers you pass in the street on your daily commute; you'd be nodding, greeting, and interacting every step of the way. Now, once you actually 'break the ice' and start talking to somebody, they tend to be amazingly friendly and accomodating--it's just that most folks in Paris value their privacy and understand that it makes everybody's life a little easier if we're not all waving, gawking, and engaging strangers in small talk all the time. For what it's worth, it works--I could stand in a metro car literally packed with other Parisians and feel like I had my own little personal space. You really need that kind of thing in such close quarters--you'd go nuts otherwise.
If you'd have bothered to read the editorial, you'd find that "attack" is perhaps not the most appropriate word to use. Rather, M. Jeanneney calls on his own country to get its act together and do the same sort of thing as Google for the sake of keeping the Internet from becoming even more of a monoculture than it is today. What, exactly, is so bad about that?
He's not attacking Google. His main point is "look at what Google is doing--we should be doing the same thing, for the sake of preserving our culture!"
Can the inflammatory headline. It's designed to get a cheap rise out of simple-minded people, and it doesn't make Slashdot look good. There's nothing wrong with what this guy is saying--and if he's attacking anybody, it's his own countrymen, not Google.
It's stupidiotic, and it's getting irritannoying.