I've never owned an Apple product in my life, just as I've never owned a BMW. But that doesn't stop me recognising that Apple has some great products or that BMW has the same too.
But, in the interest of fairness, why don't you point out where I've gone wrong in my "pretty obvious likelyhood" scenario, or any other holes in my reasoning?
Just so that you know, I've used virtually every incarnation of Windows, several versions of Unix, Linux and the MacOS. If you had asked me what was the best desktop OS out there a year ago, or perhaps even a week ago, then there's next to no chance that I would have said MacOS. But having seen Tiger in action and played around with it myself then I find it hard to argue that anything else that I've experienced even comes close, certainly not Windows and certainly not any Linux.
As someone who predominantly uses Windows and Linux, I suppose I could just fall into the trap of blindly cheerleading for those platforms, but why should I? Do people who avidly support the Cincinatti Bengals delude themselves into thinking that their team is the equal of the New England Patrioits?
If recognising that the other guy has the best toys makes me a fan boy, well then call me a fan boy. Personally, I prefer the label realist.
1. Buy an iPod 2. Go into Apple Store or browse Apple section of local computer store for the first time looking for iPod-related stuff. 3. Play around with an iMac. 4. Decide you like the iMac experience. 5. Think about buying one.
Seems like a pretty obvious likelyhood to me.
On a not entirely unrelated note, the next version of the MacOS, codenamed Tiger, is nothing short of fantastic. I saw a demo and played around with it a bit at last week's London Mac Expo and I can honestly say that it makes Windows look like something from the Stone Age.
I'm not an Apple fan boy by any stretch of the imagination but Apple really has a fantastic product range now and the best OS out there by miles.
Just how many do you think voluntarily have no health insurance? What kind of number do you put on that very small minority?
As for no health insurance not meaning no healthcare, well, know of at least one Slashdotter who is out of vital medication and is praying that he doesn't get really sick before the health benefits of his new job kick in. If he falls sick before then then he's basically fucked. This isn't an imaginary case, this is real life, and there are plenty more like him.
So what if the FT write-up makes it clear that it's little short of bribery? The real consequence of this action is the CCIA now can't take legal action against Microsoft and that Microsoft can carry on doing what it likes.
You think that the average guy buying his next PC or software in his local computer store cares whether Microsoft is "a clearly corrupt company" or not? It doesn't stop virtually every Fortune 500 company dealing with them, does it?
And as for the mainstream press, well, to them Microsoft is just another story, so why would they care that much? Journalists are paid to report the news, not make the news.
I think you really have no idea just how long Microsoft has been deliberately setting out to screw the competition (and everyone else) any way it can. Lotus, WordPerfect, Apple, Digital Research, Novell, IBM, Go, Netscape, Sendo - and those are just the ones that I can think of off the top of my head. Now, can you think of a single case in which Microsoft got its fair comeuppance?
Man, talk about a bargain. A lawsuit that could potentially bring Microsoft as we know it (one monolithic overreaching organisation) to an end and all it takes to make it go away is $20 million?
I bet the Microsoft people were popping champagne corks over that one. They would have thought nothing of spending $20 million defending themselves in court, so spending that much to make sure it never got that far was probably the easiest decision in the world.
As to where that $20 million went, well, that's another story. If half did go to Ed Black then it seems to me that he's got a lot of explaining to do.
So you're comfortable knowing that what level of treatment a sick kid gets is totally dependent on the financial status of its family? That the difference between life and death is sometimes when Daddy's health insurance lapsed?
Do you even know how many Americans have no health insurance? Would it even shock you that it's close to 50 million, which is more than one in six people? Do you even care?
If providing social healthcare is high on the agenda for the rebuilding of Iraq then why isn't it high on the agenda for the US?
Keep beating your chest about willingness to fight unnecessary wars. Anything so that you don't have to address those areas of your own society that are less than perfect, right?
Governments subsidies? For broadband rollouts? In the US?
Puh-leaze.
You live in a country where it's considered communist to even suggest that it's in the country's best interest to provide healthcare to everyone (and therefore have a healthy, well-abled and productive population), so what makes you think that using government money to bring broadband to masses will be any more popular than using government money universal medical coverage?
If your government considers it inappropriate to help treat you when you're sick what makes you think that it would consider it any more appropriate to help you download MP3s at a faster rate?
I can't think of anything that I'd put anywhere close to those two.
I've said it previously on Slashdot (in someone's journal, if I remember correctly) but V for Vendetta would make a great movie. The only problem is that movies that have a terrorist attacking the machinery of a fascist state aren't exactly easy to sell in today's political climate.
Seriously, if you haven't read V for Vendetta (or Watchmen) then do whatever you have to to do so. I found copies of both at my library recently, together with a whole bunch of great graphic novels. which totally blew me away. Even the librarian who checked out my books remarked at how much she'd enjoyed them.
Water running for a tap isn't something enjoyed by 90 percent of the people in the world but if I install a tap in a remote African village then it hasn't suddenly become a novel idea. It might be new to them but it's not a new concept globally.
If you read the article again you'll find that it suggests that tabbed browsing.is a new concept in Firefox rather than a new concept to many of its newer users. There's a big difference between the two, and it's not as subtle as you might think.
In the context of browser design and innovation, which the article discusses freely, it would be far better to acknowledge that Firefox has borrowed the best of other browsers rather than pretend that it's somehow revolutionary in comparison to everything else out there, which is definitely the impression the article would give an uninformed reader.
There's a difference between editing that gives clarity and editing that oversimplifies. You can do the former without falling into the trap of doing the latter. Unfortunately, that's not what's happened in this particular instance.
I'm not saying that it was. What I am saying is that is if "the people who already know the story, know the story; the people who don't probably don't care, so why bother?" is the attitude you take to life in general then you're asking for trouble.
And as for this article specifically, well, as others have pointed out, it very much gives the impression that Firefox is something that the guy knocked up together with a couple of his friends rather than a bigger, more colaborative venture with contributions from many more people.
A lot of the article is made up of people giving personal opinions, some of which is also presented in a questionable manner, but which I didn't think it was fair to comment on because opinions are opinions, not facts. However, the article as a whole tends to present these opinions as facts, which is a dangerous thing to do, for obvious reasons.
With regards to my questioning its overall accuracy, I used the examples that I did because they were clearly being presented as facts rather than opinions but yet were either misleading (in the case of the name changes) or totally incorrect (in the case of tabbed browsing).
There are aspects of the article that I didn't poke at too hard because they weren't as black and white, so in those cases I cut the writer some slack, but if you think it's OK to shade or blur the truth for the sake of good copy then you've clearly got different expectations than I have of what's acceptable in journalism and what's not.
First of all, I did read that you'd been there: if you bothered to read my reply as well as I read your original comment you'd notice that I said that "I've been there and seen the country too", a clear acknowledgement of your claim.
Poor is a relative term. Of course there are poor people in India, just as there are poor people in the US, in the UK, and everywhere else in the world. India certainly doesn't have a monopoly on poor, and it certainly doesn't have "about a billion poor, illiterate and starving people" as you claim. If nothing else, the number of technology jobs being moved their from the US and elsewhere should blow your argument out of the water.
According to the CIA World Factbook, India has posted an average annual economic growth of 6 percent since 1990: see if you can find any other comparable nation that's making those sorts of strides. And the distribution of wealth isn't as bad as in, say, the US, with the bottom 10 percent of the population having 3.5 percent of the wealth (compared to 1.8 percent in the US). Life expectancy is rising just as it is in the West. Etc, etc. The idea that India is still a poor backward nation is just that, an idea, whereas the reality is very different.
As I've said twice now, once in my original post, once again in the previous paragraphs, I've been to India too. The reality is that I've never had a problem phoning the West (maybe 20 years ago, but not now) and the infrastructure is visibly improving year on year. Pollution, the other issue that you mention, is hardly something that's specific to India either: I've experienced smog-filled days in the developed as well as the developing world.
I've been to India several times. My last trip to India covered everywhere from the northernmost states down to Mumbai and then onto Bangalore, and lasted 13 weeks. My next one, scheduled for early next year, will cover New Delhi, Agra, Rajasthan, Gujurat, Mumbai, Goa and Kerala over six weeks. My hindi is a bit poor in places, but my gujurati is spot on, and I can converse with the average man in the street anywhere in the country without a problem. So, please, don't presume to tell me I'm the one who's ignorant about the Indian subcontinent. Because what you know about India that I don't probably isn't worth one fucking rupee.
The people who already know the story, know the story; the people who don't probably don't care, so why bother?
Well if things are that damn simple then why bother to tell the truth about anything? Anyone who already knows the truth, knows the truth; the people who don't probably don't care, so why bother?
Their first browser came to be known as Phoenix. The duo promoted the browser to the Mozilla Foundation and began working on fixing the bugs, asking a group of volunteers around the world to help develop the software. Phoenix developed into another version, which they deemed Firebird, which developed into the final version, the now-famous Mozilla Firefox.
Unless I've blacked out and had my memories scrambled as a result, the reason for Pheonix becoming Firebird becoming Firefox were legal and other dificulties over the usage of those previous names. Anyone reading this article would be given the impression that those were desired name changes, not ones that were practically forced.
And if the article can't even get why Firefox is called Firefox right it makes you wonder what else it's less than accurate about.
Elsewhere in the article it says that "one of the novel features is the tab option, which allows users to open several Web sites at once in the same window." Well, if by "novel" you mean copied from another competing browser that has had that feature for ages, yeah, I guess it's novel.
Seriously, this article has some flaws and inaccuracies that you could drive a bus through.
1. You're ignorant. Sorry for being so blunt, but it's true.
India might have a population of a billion, but they're not all "poor, illiterate and starving", far from it. As for things like "an ancient infrastructure and horrible pollution", well I have two words for you: Union Carbide.
Seriously, put down Half-Life 2 for five minutes and read a book. Perhaps then you'll have a better understanding of the world beyond your own nation's borders. And perhaps you'd also appreciate that you don't even have to get a passport, or even get into a car, to see real abject poverty: I'm sure there are plenty of people living hand to mouth existences only a few miles from your doorstep.
2. You have no appreciation for the benefits that technology can have for even the simplest people, or the role of technology in elevating people from poverty.
Farmers benefiting from better weather forecasts is just one example of what I'm talking about. Solar panels providing electricity to even the remotest regions is another. Water filtration and recycling techniques are yet more.
Sorry, but the only thing that's asinine here is your attitude. I've been there and seen the country too, so I know that you're talking out of your backside.
You don't think that it's possible to intentionally sabotage an aircraft or spaceship by messing with its instrumentation? Wow, you have heard of software, right? And you do know that a few lines of code can wreak havoc to any piece of code, let alone a mission critical application, right?
Newsflash for you: there are more ways of bringing something down then just shooting it out of the sky.
First rule of combat: disable the enemies eyes and ears. If he's blinded because you took out his intelligence gathering satellites, he's not only lost what realtime intelligence he had coming in but he now also has to expend other resources (ie, manpower in the form of reconnaisance missions) to try and get some of that back. And with his communications satellites gone too, his ability to effectively manage is greatly diminished too.
You can't hit what you can't see. Sounds obvious but in warfare it can be the only difference between winning and getting spanked.
That's because what it looks like you're seeing in those pictures is the orbiter on its launch vehicle. The orbiter alone (the black thing, if I'm reading things correctly) is probably what those measurements you have are referring to, so that expains the disparity between the pictures and the numbers.
Dude, the internet is your friend. You can use it to look up all sorts of interesting information. The reason why you can't figure out how to get Graffiti to work on a Treo is because Treos don't support Graffiti. (Well, according to those official specifications they don't.)
Man, at least try to compare apples with apples rather than apples with oranges.
Even if you figures are true, which I doubt, "most PocketPC devices" are just PDAs, where as the Treo 600/650 is a phone/PDA combo. What that means is that when you're not using a PocketPC directly it consumes no power but when you're not using a Treo 600/650 directly, it's still consuming power because it's communicating with your mobile phone network.
If you want a fair comparison, use a Tungsten C/E/T3/T5 as your example, not a Treo.
Comparing a Treo to "most PocketPC devices" and then attacking the Treo's battery life is like comparing a swiss army knife to a screwdriver and then saying that the screwdriver is better than the knife when it comes to unscrewing something.
Resolution is another area where you conveniently forget to compare like with like. Of course the Treos don't have 640 by 480 resolution screens: they have built-in keyboards in a similar (if not smaller) form factor, so they hardly need any area for you to write in, do they?
Some of your other points border on ridiculous too. Every PocketPC ever made can play MP3s and WMA files? So what? Every Palm model made in the last two years plus (apart from the cut down, dirt cheap $99 Zire 21) can play MP3s too. Are you really suggesting that playing music on a Palm is a problem?
And as for the size of apps, wow. Again, I'll take your word on the actual numbers but are you really saying that 5MB isn't big enough for any application that you'd want to run on a PDA?
Sorry, but I disagree. The adverts I've seen for environmentally-friendly vehicles don't just emphasise their fuel consumption, they also stress how recyclable the cars are.
Making anything takes time, resources and energy, and something like a car, however green it is, is going to require a fair amount of all three in its manufacture. The start of a car's life, when it's built, isn't going to be where the best non-fuel-related savings are going to be made: even the most efficient build process wouldn't be much improvement over the efficiency that car manufacturers already display.
The biggest savings are to be made at the other end, at the end of a car's usefulness, when it can be either scraped (as in the case with most cars nowadays) or recycled (as will be the case with newer, greener cars when they are retired).
But, let's face it, only a small percentage of car buyers think about anything before or beyond their use of their vehicle. To most people, a car's initial cost, fuel efficiency, maintenance and resale value are the only things that matter. Given that, it's natural that fuel efficiency becomes the environmental selling point, because it's about the money in your pocket now, which is a concept that most people grasp straight away.
Bottom line: people are looking at those areas that you mention, and they have done something about it but you don't sell a Toyota Prius over a Hummer on the basis of how easy it will be to junk in 10, 15 or 20 years' time.
I love this comment. I'm sure there are a bunch of people who read it and nodded along in agreement as they did so.
Now, let's just see what happens if we replace one word of your post:
Wow. I can appreciate the importance of anonymous posting of news titles, but not for news stories like this. One person's hearsay, without even real documentation of the errors? Not only is this story useless, it looks like a great way to turn a lot of people off MSIE without just cause. I can appreciate the need for timely news regarding upgrades, but without any supporting information, this article looks vaguely sneaky and evil in a way I can't quantify. News sources have a responsibility to do a little research before putting something on the front page.
I wonder how many of those people would nod along now?
Sorry, but it seems to me that if you're going to cut Firefox so much more slack than you would MSIE then you can't complain if someone was to suggest that you lack objectivity.
If you decide to play a game at work and you get sacked for it, dont blame the game developer: they didn't come to your office, force you to install it on your work PC and then play it there, did they?
Do you turn around and blame Ford when you get ticketed for speeding 30mph over the limit? Do you turn around and blame Wal-Mart when you burn your the chicken you were making for dinner? Do you blame the local hardware store when you hammer a nail through a water pipe?
I really hope your post was a poor attempt at humour. Becuase if threatening to sue someone is how you deal with life everytime you screw up then you really need medical rather than legal help.
Either the story summary just changed or I misread it completely as saying that nForce chipsets would no longer be available for AMD users. It's probably the latter, so feel free to call me an idiot, but given that it's Slashdot, I wouldn't be surprised if it was the former.
Regardless, even as it stands now, it's hardly the least ambiguous story summary I've ever read.
Slashdot Mirror
Presentation and design, perhaps?
I've never owned an Apple product in my life, just as I've never owned a BMW. But that doesn't stop me recognising that Apple has some great products or that BMW has the same too.
But, in the interest of fairness, why don't you point out where I've gone wrong in my "pretty obvious likelyhood" scenario, or any other holes in my reasoning?
Just so that you know, I've used virtually every incarnation of Windows, several versions of Unix, Linux and the MacOS. If you had asked me what was the best desktop OS out there a year ago, or perhaps even a week ago, then there's next to no chance that I would have said MacOS. But having seen Tiger in action and played around with it myself then I find it hard to argue that anything else that I've experienced even comes close, certainly not Windows and certainly not any Linux.
As someone who predominantly uses Windows and Linux, I suppose I could just fall into the trap of blindly cheerleading for those platforms, but why should I? Do people who avidly support the Cincinatti Bengals delude themselves into thinking that their team is the equal of the New England Patrioits?
If recognising that the other guy has the best toys makes me a fan boy, well then call me a fan boy. Personally, I prefer the label realist.
1. Buy an iPod
2. Go into Apple Store or browse Apple section of local computer store for the first time looking for iPod-related stuff.
3. Play around with an iMac.
4. Decide you like the iMac experience.
5. Think about buying one.
Seems like a pretty obvious likelyhood to me.
On a not entirely unrelated note, the next version of the MacOS, codenamed Tiger, is nothing short of fantastic. I saw a demo and played around with it a bit at last week's London Mac Expo and I can honestly say that it makes Windows look like something from the Stone Age.
I'm not an Apple fan boy by any stretch of the imagination but Apple really has a fantastic product range now and the best OS out there by miles.
Just how many do you think voluntarily have no health insurance? What kind of number do you put on that very small minority?
As for no health insurance not meaning no healthcare, well, know of at least one Slashdotter who is out of vital medication and is praying that he doesn't get really sick before the health benefits of his new job kick in. If he falls sick before then then he's basically fucked. This isn't an imaginary case, this is real life, and there are plenty more like him.
So what if the FT write-up makes it clear that it's little short of bribery? The real consequence of this action is the CCIA now can't take legal action against Microsoft and that Microsoft can carry on doing what it likes.
You think that the average guy buying his next PC or software in his local computer store cares whether Microsoft is "a clearly corrupt company" or not? It doesn't stop virtually every Fortune 500 company dealing with them, does it?
And as for the mainstream press, well, to them Microsoft is just another story, so why would they care that much? Journalists are paid to report the news, not make the news.
I think you really have no idea just how long Microsoft has been deliberately setting out to screw the competition (and everyone else) any way it can. Lotus, WordPerfect, Apple, Digital Research, Novell, IBM, Go, Netscape, Sendo - and those are just the ones that I can think of off the top of my head. Now, can you think of a single case in which Microsoft got its fair comeuppance?
Man, talk about a bargain. A lawsuit that could potentially bring Microsoft as we know it (one monolithic overreaching organisation) to an end and all it takes to make it go away is $20 million?
I bet the Microsoft people were popping champagne corks over that one. They would have thought nothing of spending $20 million defending themselves in court, so spending that much to make sure it never got that far was probably the easiest decision in the world.
As to where that $20 million went, well, that's another story. If half did go to Ed Black then it seems to me that he's got a lot of explaining to do.
So you're comfortable knowing that what level of treatment a sick kid gets is totally dependent on the financial status of its family? That the difference between life and death is sometimes when Daddy's health insurance lapsed?
Do you even know how many Americans have no health insurance? Would it even shock you that it's close to 50 million, which is more than one in six people? Do you even care?
If providing social healthcare is high on the agenda for the rebuilding of Iraq then why isn't it high on the agenda for the US?
Keep beating your chest about willingness to fight unnecessary wars. Anything so that you don't have to address those areas of your own society that are less than perfect, right?
Governments subsidies? For broadband rollouts? In the US?
Puh-leaze.
You live in a country where it's considered communist to even suggest that it's in the country's best interest to provide healthcare to everyone (and therefore have a healthy, well-abled and productive population), so what makes you think that using government money to bring broadband to masses will be any more popular than using government money universal medical coverage?
If your government considers it inappropriate to help treat you when you're sick what makes you think that it would consider it any more appropriate to help you download MP3s at a faster rate?
1. V for Vendetta
2. Watchmen
I can't think of anything that I'd put anywhere close to those two.
I've said it previously on Slashdot (in someone's journal, if I remember correctly) but V for Vendetta would make a great movie. The only problem is that movies that have a terrorist attacking the machinery of a fascist state aren't exactly easy to sell in today's political climate.
Seriously, if you haven't read V for Vendetta (or Watchmen) then do whatever you have to to do so. I found copies of both at my library recently, together with a whole bunch of great graphic novels. which totally blew me away. Even the librarian who checked out my books remarked at how much she'd enjoyed them.
Water running for a tap isn't something enjoyed by 90 percent of the people in the world but if I install a tap in a remote African village then it hasn't suddenly become a novel idea. It might be new to them but it's not a new concept globally.
If you read the article again you'll find that it suggests that tabbed browsing.is a new concept in Firefox rather than a new concept to many of its newer users. There's a big difference between the two, and it's not as subtle as you might think.
In the context of browser design and innovation, which the article discusses freely, it would be far better to acknowledge that Firefox has borrowed the best of other browsers rather than pretend that it's somehow revolutionary in comparison to everything else out there, which is definitely the impression the article would give an uninformed reader.
There's a difference between editing that gives clarity and editing that oversimplifies. You can do the former without falling into the trap of doing the latter. Unfortunately, that's not what's happened in this particular instance.
I'm not saying that it was. What I am saying is that is if "the people who already know the story, know the story; the people who don't probably don't care, so why bother?" is the attitude you take to life in general then you're asking for trouble.
And as for this article specifically, well, as others have pointed out, it very much gives the impression that Firefox is something that the guy knocked up together with a couple of his friends rather than a bigger, more colaborative venture with contributions from many more people.
A lot of the article is made up of people giving personal opinions, some of which is also presented in a questionable manner, but which I didn't think it was fair to comment on because opinions are opinions, not facts. However, the article as a whole tends to present these opinions as facts, which is a dangerous thing to do, for obvious reasons.
With regards to my questioning its overall accuracy, I used the examples that I did because they were clearly being presented as facts rather than opinions but yet were either misleading (in the case of the name changes) or totally incorrect (in the case of tabbed browsing).
There are aspects of the article that I didn't poke at too hard because they weren't as black and white, so in those cases I cut the writer some slack, but if you think it's OK to shade or blur the truth for the sake of good copy then you've clearly got different expectations than I have of what's acceptable in journalism and what's not.
First of all, I did read that you'd been there: if you bothered to read my reply as well as I read your original comment you'd notice that I said that "I've been there and seen the country too", a clear acknowledgement of your claim.
Poor is a relative term. Of course there are poor people in India, just as there are poor people in the US, in the UK, and everywhere else in the world. India certainly doesn't have a monopoly on poor, and it certainly doesn't have "about a billion poor, illiterate and starving people" as you claim. If nothing else, the number of technology jobs being moved their from the US and elsewhere should blow your argument out of the water.
According to the CIA World Factbook, India has posted an average annual economic growth of 6 percent since 1990: see if you can find any other comparable nation that's making those sorts of strides. And the distribution of wealth isn't as bad as in, say, the US, with the bottom 10 percent of the population having 3.5 percent of the wealth (compared to 1.8 percent in the US). Life expectancy is rising just as it is in the West. Etc, etc. The idea that India is still a poor backward nation is just that, an idea, whereas the reality is very different.
As I've said twice now, once in my original post, once again in the previous paragraphs, I've been to India too. The reality is that I've never had a problem phoning the West (maybe 20 years ago, but not now) and the infrastructure is visibly improving year on year. Pollution, the other issue that you mention, is hardly something that's specific to India either: I've experienced smog-filled days in the developed as well as the developing world.
I've been to India several times. My last trip to India covered everywhere from the northernmost states down to Mumbai and then onto Bangalore, and lasted 13 weeks. My next one, scheduled for early next year, will cover New Delhi, Agra, Rajasthan, Gujurat, Mumbai, Goa and Kerala over six weeks. My hindi is a bit poor in places, but my gujurati is spot on, and I can converse with the average man in the street anywhere in the country without a problem. So, please, don't presume to tell me I'm the one who's ignorant about the Indian subcontinent. Because what you know about India that I don't probably isn't worth one fucking rupee.
The people who already know the story, know the story; the people who don't probably don't care, so why bother?
Well if things are that damn simple then why bother to tell the truth about anything? Anyone who already knows the truth, knows the truth; the people who don't probably don't care, so why bother?
Take this paragraph for example:
Their first browser came to be known as Phoenix. The duo promoted the browser to the Mozilla Foundation and began working on fixing the bugs, asking a group of volunteers around the world to help develop the software. Phoenix developed into another version, which they deemed Firebird, which developed into the final version, the now-famous Mozilla Firefox.
Unless I've blacked out and had my memories scrambled as a result, the reason for Pheonix becoming Firebird becoming Firefox were legal and other dificulties over the usage of those previous names. Anyone reading this article would be given the impression that those were desired name changes, not ones that were practically forced.
And if the article can't even get why Firefox is called Firefox right it makes you wonder what else it's less than accurate about.
Elsewhere in the article it says that "one of the novel features is the tab option, which allows users to open several Web sites at once in the same window." Well, if by "novel" you mean copied from another competing browser that has had that feature for ages, yeah, I guess it's novel.
Seriously, this article has some flaws and inaccuracies that you could drive a bus through.
From your post I can tell two things:
1. You're ignorant. Sorry for being so blunt, but it's true.
India might have a population of a billion, but they're not all "poor, illiterate and starving", far from it. As for things like "an ancient infrastructure and horrible pollution", well I have two words for you: Union Carbide.
Seriously, put down Half-Life 2 for five minutes and read a book. Perhaps then you'll have a better understanding of the world beyond your own nation's borders. And perhaps you'd also appreciate that you don't even have to get a passport, or even get into a car, to see real abject poverty: I'm sure there are plenty of people living hand to mouth existences only a few miles from your doorstep.
2. You have no appreciation for the benefits that technology can have for even the simplest people, or the role of technology in elevating people from poverty.
Farmers benefiting from better weather forecasts is just one example of what I'm talking about. Solar panels providing electricity to even the remotest regions is another. Water filtration and recycling techniques are yet more.
Sorry, but the only thing that's asinine here is your attitude. I've been there and seen the country too, so I know that you're talking out of your backside.
You don't think that it's possible to intentionally sabotage an aircraft or spaceship by messing with its instrumentation? Wow, you have heard of software, right? And you do know that a few lines of code can wreak havoc to any piece of code, let alone a mission critical application, right?
Newsflash for you: there are more ways of bringing something down then just shooting it out of the sky.
First rule of combat: disable the enemies eyes and ears. If he's blinded because you took out his intelligence gathering satellites, he's not only lost what realtime intelligence he had coming in but he now also has to expend other resources (ie, manpower in the form of reconnaisance missions) to try and get some of that back. And with his communications satellites gone too, his ability to effectively manage is greatly diminished too.
You can't hit what you can't see. Sounds obvious but in warfare it can be the only difference between winning and getting spanked.
That's because what it looks like you're seeing in those pictures is the orbiter on its launch vehicle. The orbiter alone (the black thing, if I'm reading things correctly) is probably what those measurements you have are referring to, so that expains the disparity between the pictures and the numbers.
Thanks for clarifying that. Weird that the official website seems to suggest no Graffiti support, but I suppose they mean no support out of the box.
Dude, the internet is your friend. You can use it to look up all sorts of interesting information. The reason why you can't figure out how to get Graffiti to work on a Treo is because Treos don't support Graffiti. (Well, according to those official specifications they don't.)
Man, at least try to compare apples with apples rather than apples with oranges.
Even if you figures are true, which I doubt, "most PocketPC devices" are just PDAs, where as the Treo 600/650 is a phone/PDA combo. What that means is that when you're not using a PocketPC directly it consumes no power but when you're not using a Treo 600/650 directly, it's still consuming power because it's communicating with your mobile phone network.
If you want a fair comparison, use a Tungsten C/E/T3/T5 as your example, not a Treo.
Comparing a Treo to "most PocketPC devices" and then attacking the Treo's battery life is like comparing a swiss army knife to a screwdriver and then saying that the screwdriver is better than the knife when it comes to unscrewing something.
Resolution is another area where you conveniently forget to compare like with like. Of course the Treos don't have 640 by 480 resolution screens: they have built-in keyboards in a similar (if not smaller) form factor, so they hardly need any area for you to write in, do they?
Some of your other points border on ridiculous too. Every PocketPC ever made can play MP3s and WMA files? So what? Every Palm model made in the last two years plus (apart from the cut down, dirt cheap $99 Zire 21) can play MP3s too. Are you really suggesting that playing music on a Palm is a problem?
And as for the size of apps, wow. Again, I'll take your word on the actual numbers but are you really saying that 5MB isn't big enough for any application that you'd want to run on a PDA?
Sorry, but I disagree. The adverts I've seen for environmentally-friendly vehicles don't just emphasise their fuel consumption, they also stress how recyclable the cars are.
Making anything takes time, resources and energy, and something like a car, however green it is, is going to require a fair amount of all three in its manufacture. The start of a car's life, when it's built, isn't going to be where the best non-fuel-related savings are going to be made: even the most efficient build process wouldn't be much improvement over the efficiency that car manufacturers already display.
The biggest savings are to be made at the other end, at the end of a car's usefulness, when it can be either scraped (as in the case with most cars nowadays) or recycled (as will be the case with newer, greener cars when they are retired).
But, let's face it, only a small percentage of car buyers think about anything before or beyond their use of their vehicle. To most people, a car's initial cost, fuel efficiency, maintenance and resale value are the only things that matter. Given that, it's natural that fuel efficiency becomes the environmental selling point, because it's about the money in your pocket now, which is a concept that most people grasp straight away.
Bottom line: people are looking at those areas that you mention, and they have done something about it but you don't sell a Toyota Prius over a Hummer on the basis of how easy it will be to junk in 10, 15 or 20 years' time.
I love this comment. I'm sure there are a bunch of people who read it and nodded along in agreement as they did so.
Now, let's just see what happens if we replace one word of your post:
Wow. I can appreciate the importance of anonymous posting of news titles, but not for news stories like this. One person's hearsay, without even real documentation of the errors? Not only is this story useless, it looks like a great way to turn a lot of people off MSIE without just cause. I can appreciate the need for timely news regarding upgrades, but without any supporting information, this article looks vaguely sneaky and evil in a way I can't quantify. News sources have a responsibility to do a little research before putting something on the front page.
I wonder how many of those people would nod along now?
Sorry, but it seems to me that if you're going to cut Firefox so much more slack than you would MSIE then you can't complain if someone was to suggest that you lack objectivity.
If you decide to play a game at work and you get sacked for it, dont blame the game developer: they didn't come to your office, force you to install it on your work PC and then play it there, did they?
Do you turn around and blame Ford when you get ticketed for speeding 30mph over the limit? Do you turn around and blame Wal-Mart when you burn your the chicken you were making for dinner? Do you blame the local hardware store when you hammer a nail through a water pipe?
I really hope your post was a poor attempt at humour. Becuase if threatening to sue someone is how you deal with life everytime you screw up then you really need medical rather than legal help.
Either the story summary just changed or I misread it completely as saying that nForce chipsets would no longer be available for AMD users. It's probably the latter, so feel free to call me an idiot, but given that it's Slashdot, I wouldn't be surprised if it was the former.
Regardless, even as it stands now, it's hardly the least ambiguous story summary I've ever read.