I very much agree. I thought Keaton was quite good as Batman -- he certainly played a much more convincing Bruce Wayne than the others. Val Kilmer sucked -- too much of the playboy type, rather than the tragic figure that Wayne was supposed to be. George Clooney could have been okay, but again he tried too much to be the sex god rather than the dark figure that Batman and Bruce Wayne really are. Keaton got the brooding, darker side of Batman/Wayne much better than the others did. (And the Batman movies just weren't the same without Tim Burton's vision anyway.)
Keaton's choice was also greeted with skepticism by fans, but I think he did a good job. Which is why I would be willing to give Keanu Reeves the benefit of the doubt. But unfortunately Keanu is a lousy actor IMO -- he did okay in Matrix, but he stunk in just about everything else (his "performance" in Much Ado About Nothing was embarrassing).
Maybe the Hollywood execs thought they were 'honoring' Christoper Reeve by having an actor with nearly the same last name play Reeve's most memorable role.;-P
But Christopher Reeve will always be the "real" Superman for me -- he was born to play that role IMO.
Those of you who have web pages, look at your web stats, where are most people coming from? US probably. I know my webstats still show majority from US.
That isn't necessarily true. Remember that.com != US. I have quite a few visitors from Europe with.com,.net and.org addresses, for example. I just happen to recognize the DNS entries as being from European ISPs.
Also, European visitors don't necessarily frequent US sites, and vice versa -- as an example, Germans are going to be all over spiegel.de, stern.de and so on, but probably won't bother much with cnn.com, news.com or wired.com for their news.
English-language sites still dominate the Net, but the vast majority of non-English speakers of course prefer to read things in their own language, even if they speak English. So your site, presumably in English, won't have that many non-English speaking visitors.
Actually, there were other fonts designed specifically for the screen long before Verdana. Susan Kare did the fonts Chicago, Monaco, Geneva, New York and so on for the original Macintosh in 1984 -- I believe long before Verdana and the others in Microsoft's library came out.
Verdana was one of the first scalable fonts specifically designed for the screen, that is true.
Also, as others have pointed out, Verdana, Tahoma and so on are not "lost" per se. Microsoft's own license on those fonts allows for free unlimited distribution (so long as the distributor does not derive profit from their distribution), and they also come pre-installed on Windows and Mac systems; anyone that installs Internet Explorer also gets them free.
"Who provides unlimited mobile calling (outbound) for one flat monthly fee to the public? I'd be willing to bet noone."
My experiences with this came from numerous angry europeans (from Germany in this case) who were enraged when I said that having a pre-determined number of minutes to use your mobile phone per month was not the same as a plan with no 'gotchas' and they told be about paying one price to use it as much as they want (for local calls)... just like land lines in the USA and Canada.
Also someone else mentioned http://www.boomerangwireless.com/.
Oh, come on. That's nothing at all like what's available in Europe. Boomerang is only in a handful of cities, limits you to one kind of phone ( and you can't use your existing phone) and has only very basic features.
I don't get charged when someone calls me (as long as I'm in Germany). If I'm outside Germany, I have to pay for the call to be forwarded to me via another carrier, but even then the rates aren't that bad.
My choice of phone (most any model from Nokia, Siemens, Ericcson, Sony, Motorola, Alcatel...), most of which are more advanced than those in the States anyway. FWIW I have the Nokia 6210, which is a real workhorse.
WAP, GPRS, HSCSD.
SMS (19 Eurocents per message) with e-mail function. (I just send an SMS starting with an e-mail addy to 0177-SMSMAIL, and it gets sent.)
49 Eurocents per minute to anyone in Germany during the day, 9 cents per minute evenings and weekends.
95% network coverage of all of Germany, with similar coverage in other European countries. (And, of course, it's all GSM, so I don't need to change cellphones at the border.) FYI, Germany is about the size of Minnesota and a goodly chunk of Wisconsin.
There just isn't any comparison. Yes, Boomerang has a flat monthly rate -- but then they suck in just about everything else.
And I have no "gotchas" with my phone...so, sad to say, American cellphones really do suck. I shudder when I visit my family in the States and see what stuff they are using.
Then I salivate over their cable modem...ah well, you can't have it all.;-)
What I don't understand is, in pre-OS X versions they DID support CVS (in combination with MacCVS). Since OS X, that support is gone.
Of course, MacCVS and the UN*X CVS included with Mac OS X work rather differently -- MacCVS would write the CVS tag info in the resource fork of each file, whereas UN*X CVS has a directory "CVS" to store that same info. But I can't imagine that it would be that hard to change BBEdit's old CVS support to look in a directory named "CVS" rather than in the resource fork.
For that to make sense, you have to believe that cellphones have not been widely adopted in the U.S. And that is simply not true.
I make no such assumption. What I am saying is that people often feel unsure about what they are actually paying for the services they use (have I exceeded my minute limit? have I exceeded my airtime limit? am I in a different roaming zone? etc.) and get sticker shock when the first bill arrives.
The system in Europe is just so much simpler, and has achieved much higher rates of acceptance (which is NOT the same as rates of deployment, which is what you're talking about).
Think about it. If you had only three different rates (in-network, local area, nationwide), no minute limit, no airtime fees (so you only pay when you call), simple and standardized fees for WAP/SMS/GPRS/HSCSD and so on, you would probably feel a lot better about using your cellphone as a real alternative to your fixed-line phone.
Cellphone use in Europe has gotten so widespread that it could really replace fixed-line phones in the next few years. There are already hybrid phones in wide use here -- while you're at home, it charges you fixed-line rates; while you're away it charges cellphone rates -- and this could lead to the subsumation of fixed-line phones. With the chaotic fees and competing technologies in the US, this could just not happen.
...you just pay $x.xx/month for so many minutes...
You're missing the point. The German plans don't have a minute limit. It works exactly like a fixed-line phone -- you pay for the time you call someone, and that's all.
The minute limit is just one "gotcha" I'm talking about. I pay one monthly fee for unlimited time, and I don't pay any airtime fees (so I don't pay if someone calls me). This is the standard way of doing it over here -- the providers compete on price on only two areas: monthly fee and per-second fee. Nothing else.
Which, as I said, is precisely how fixed-line connections work. So why not with cellphones?
The biggest reason why cellphones have not taken off in the US in comparison to Europe, at least, is simply price -- or in particular the *way* they are priced.
In Germany (and, I believe, in most other European countries), cellphones are charged exactly the same way a fixed-line phone is charged. You pay a basic monthly fee, and you pay per second or 10 seconds for calls you make. There are no "airtime" fees or other gotchas. The rates are also easy to understand, more or less -- for a call within your provider's network, you pay a "local" call; calls within your country are "long-distance"; and calls outside of your country are international. Quite rational.
My provider also has the added perk that I can choose either five fixed-line numbers or one area code to get discounted calls. So if I choose Berlin's area code -- 030 -- I can call anyone in Berlin for a much lower rate.
In comparison, my family in the States has a blizzard of confusing fee schedules, with plenty of "gotchas" built-in.
Another problem is the lack of standards across the States. Europe has the GSM standard, and your phone will work across nearly all of Europe. The USA has no such common standard, and even if you're smart enough to get a dual-band or tri-band cellphone, you get hammered on the roaming charges in the States.
I'm actually not that much of a fan of cellphones-as-portals, though -- WAP seems such an abortion of an idea and so far navigating the Web with a keypad is just a non-starter (and, like the article says, Americans tend to drive and not take public transport, so they have less time to fiddle with the things). But it is often a nice option to have. I use it to check what movies are playing (and to reserve tix), check train times (OK, that's not too useful in the States;-P ) and sometimes to check the news, but that's about it -- I would never buy anything with it, because the technology is so far rather insecure.
i-Mode was also recently introduced in Germany by my provider (they licensed the technology from NTT-DoCoMo), so Europe is close to Japan's level now, though it remains to be seen if i-Mode and other 2.5G technologies take off in Europe (let alone 3G).
GPRS and HSCSD are also well-established, so I can go online at 56K digital with my Nokia and Powerbook via infrared and OS X (haven't gotten it to work with Linux, tho). GPRS is *very* expensive, though -- 2.5 Eurocents per 1K of data -- but HSCSD is fairly reasonable (why the difference, I don't know -- both give you the same speed AFAIK).
... except the massive flood which lasted 40 days and 40 nights was on mars not earth! now i wonder what happened to noah and all the animals?
That's easy. Noah's Ark was a spaceship. Duh!
Which reminds me of a German cartoon (http://www.nichtlustig.de/) recently: one sees the Ark in the background, and in the foreground is a small raft with a prophet-like guy and two unicorns. The caption reads "Noah's rival Ishmael was rather less successful", and one of the unicorns says to Ishmael, "By the way, we're gay."
Here in Germany, where high-speed trains are fairly common (the ICE2 goes up to something like 280 km/h, or about 170 mph, though only on top-quality track), there has been some debate for some years about building a maglev passenger train -- but the usual NIMBY problems keep coming up.
To add to the irony, the Greens -- who you would think would want to support mass transit, especially one like maglev -- have often blocked its implementation in Germany on environmental grounds (disturbing habitats, etc.).
There there is the situation in the USA.
On the other hand, maglev could in theory revive passenger train service in the USA. I believe that one of the main reasons it has failed in the States is simply economics -- because of the greater distances involved, the net cost per mile of track, the total cost to maintain a (much onger) average stretch of track, and therefore the ticket price for getting from point A to point B is higher than in Europe, where population density is far higher and a greater potential for train service exists. Another drawback in the States is again because of the distance: with Amtrak's usual trains (which are abysmally slow by European standards) it takes forever to get anywhere. So you pay more for worse (slower) service, and the train company has less surplus money to invest in new technology or track improvements. No wonder Amtrak is so terrible.
(Consider the irony that the USA is generally considered to have the most modern freight rail in the world -- but passenger rail is a joke.)
The initial cost of a maglev line is probably a lot higher, but I would imagine that its TCO would be much lower than conventional trains -- and given its far higher potential speeds, it could really compete with airliners (at least on the East and West Coasts, where there is a high enough population density to pay for it).
But the whole train-related mass transit infrastructure is missing in most American cities (thanks in part to the American love of cars) -- okay, so you got to the main station, but then what? How do you get around? Is there a well-integrated tram/bus/subway/coach system? Most cities just don't have that (certainly nothing like in Germany or France). So even if someone is willing to take the (substantial) financial risk and heavy investment load of building a maglev network in the States, there are still a lot of practical issues to deal with beyond just the train lines.
So, sad to say, even though maglev technology was developed to a large degree in America, I don't see it happening in the near future. In spite of the problems mentioned above in Germany, I do think that there will be several trunk lines running maglev service in Germany in the next few years (probably Cologne-Hannover-Berlin and Hamburg-Hannover-Frankfurt-Munich at the least).
By the way, one of the main companies working on maglev is TransRapid. Check out their site (especially the Projects section) for a lot of info about the subject, including about possible maglev lines in the States.
Well, what you're talking about is pretty much how it is done in many German cities. I live in Hannover, where the system is very straightforward. You buy a ticket which covers all transit types (street tram, subway, bus, regional train) and it simply has a time limit -- usually 90 minutes, but you can also get day passes, monthly passes and so on. The price is then based on the number of zones, but the "zones" are so huge that you can almost always get away with buying a simple one-zone ticket (the "zones" are concentric rings around downtown Hannover, and the central zone covers basically the entire city and inner suburbs). For one zone, you pay €1.70 (about US$1.60) and you can travel all you want for 90 minutes in the central zone -- no transfers needed.
(Hannover is of course the home of the CeBIT computer fair, if you're wondering. For CeBIT visitors it's even easier -- the fare is included in the price of the CeBIT ticket.)
The way the ticket itself works is simple, too. It just shows where you bought the ticket, in what zone, and when. When the ÜSTRA employees check your ticket, all they have to do is look at the zone and time, and they know if you've paid correctly.
You can also pay for your tickets with your GeldKarte (cashcard), which is a smart card used for paying small amounts -- you book money onto it at any cash machine, and it literally carries your money (up to €100, if I remember right) without having your bank account info stored on it. (The "cash" has a unique digital watermark with the data used to verify if the cash is real -- which of course opens up all kinds of possibilities for tracking its use...)
Not all German cities have this worked out, though. Hamburg, for example, also has a centralized system, but the "system" is total chaos because of their rather bizarre zones. Like in Hannover, you pay for a set amount of time and number of zones, but in Hamburg the zones are miniscule. When I lived there, if I took the public transport from my flat to work, there were three different ways of getting there, all involving one transfer and all travelling the same distance and taking about the same amount of time -- yet each cost a wildly different amount. Of course, once I got a monthly pass it wasn't so bad, but I was still restricted to one part of the city with that passcard.
One thing about Hamburg's system that is relevant to what you said is that Hamburg also has a number of private companies running its transit system (Deutsche Bahn runs the S-Bahn, Hamburger Hochbahn and several others do the U-Bahn and several companies run the bus system), but you still have one fare system and one ticketing system. Same goes for Berlin. (Hannover just has one state-sponsored company, the ÜSTRA, that does everything.)
Berlin's system is similar to Hamburg's as well. Again you pay for one ticket regardless of what transit type you use (and no trasnfers needed), but at the departure stop, you have to look at a *huge* table of destinations to find the fare you need to pay (if you're leaving from Kurfürstendamm and travelling to Alexanderplatz, it costs so-and-so much). But the system works and doesn't need any high-tech at all, which has its advantages as well.
What about Apple? Were there any cases where a company was forced into submission by Apple over their usage of the word "Apple" in a product's title?
Yes, Apple sued Apple, but not in the way you think.
Apple Records, the Beatles' record company, sued Apple Computer over the name. If I remember right, both Apples settled out of court. The agreement basically said that Apple Computer would keep the name "Apple Computer" and that Apple Computer would never get into the music recording business.
This is, by the way, the origin of the system sound on Macs called "Sosumi". Apple Records was not happy when Apple Computer started adding all kinds of sound capabilities to Macs, which Apple Records thought may violate the agreement. Ergo the cheeky name for the sound -- "so sue me".
In a strange result of the September 2002 general election in Germany caused by an unknown quirk in the software, Linus Torvalds was elected Chancellor, with Richard M. Stallman foreign minister. Thanks to Stallman's diplomatic skills, 104 countries declared war on the recently-renamed GNU/Germany. Film at 11.
That is not an urban legend. Kennedy technically did call himself a jelly filled pastry, but people understood what he meant since it wasn't an obvious error to people who don't speak German. The correct way to say "I am a Berliner" is "Ich bin Berliner." The "a" or "an" is implied when stating that you are a citizen of a particular place. It is a minor error, and most people will still understand the intent of the sentence.
This has been discussed to death by a lot of German linguists. Any native speaker will tell you (and my wife is one, and I speak German fluenty as well) that the form "ich bin ein Berliner" is perfectly acceptable, indeed in the sense in which Kennedy was speaking, it was the *only* correct way of saying it.
A German would say of a person who *is* from Berlin, "er ist Berliner" (without the article "ein"). But a German who means figuratively that a person is from Berlin would say "er ist EIN Berliner". Kennedy was not from Berlin, therefore he had to say "ich bin ein Berliner". There was no error, except on the part of non-German speakers who thought they caught Kennedy making an embarrassing mistake.
Furthermore, a person from Hamburg says "ich bin Hamburger". But no one would really think twice about saying it. A person from Frankfurt says "ich bin Frankfurter". So what? Just about any German city has a kind of food -- sausage (Braunschweiger, Frankfurter), beer (Dortmunder, or Berliner -- yes, it's also a type of beer) and so on -- associated with the name. That's not a reason to avoid saying "ich bin [insert city name here]". That's ridiculous. If the Wall had been in Rüdesheim instead of Berlin, Kennedy would in your theory have been saying "ich bin ein Rüdesheimer" and therefore saying he's a German version of Irish coffee -- which is silly. And wrong. If that were the case, there are a lot of German Irish coffees running around.
I have yet to hear a German say that Kennedy was wrong to say it the way he did -- on the contrary, all Germans I've spoken to (and given that I have lived in Germany for years, that's a lot) think it was a great speech.
This is, in fact, a classic urban legend. In other words, something that has been repeated so often that people believe it regardless of what the evidence may show -- and in spite of the fact that it's just plain wrong.
The "Ich bin ein Berliner" thing is actually inaccurate. Yes, there is a pastry in Germany called a "Berliner" which is sort of like a jelly doughnut -- for that matter, there is also a pastry called an "Amerikaner", which is like a large frosted cookie (don't ask). But Germans actually roll their eyes when American tourists laugh about Kennedy's quote, because the Germans not only perfectly understood what Kennedy meant, but also Berliners actually *do* call themselves Berliners.
Technically, he could have said "ich komme aus Berlin" (I come from Berlin) to avoid the theoretical confusion, but in the context of the speech it wouldn't have made any sense.
The Germans still revere Kennedy for having had the balls to stand up to Khrushchev and the DDR for putting up the Wall (or the "anti-fascist protection barrier" as the East Germans called it). Many German cities have a road or park named for him, more than any other American president or other foreign leader I can think of. There's even a memorial to Kennedy near the site of the Wall, which of course has "Ich bin ein Berliner" in huge letters on it. They hardly thought the quote was embarrassing. In context, it was a very stirring speech, one of the best he gave.
(Compare that to Clinton's rather lame "Amerika steht an Ihrer Seite, jetzt und fuer immer" -- "America stands at your side, now and for ever". Grammatically correct, but boring. Reagan didn't bother with German, but his "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" is at least more memorable.)
I recently got a used K6-3/400 PC, which I promptly wiped. Problem was, I had no clue as to what was inside the thing (I originally thought it was a Duron 600 until Red Hat told me otherwise). and installed Red Hat 7.2. It installed like a charm -- hardware all recognized and correctly configured, Net configured and away we go.
Then I decided to install Windows 98 SE, which I need to test websites (other than this PC, I only have Macs running either Linux or Mac OS X). It was a nightmare -- constant reboots (usually without warning me or waiting for a confirmation) and it failed to recognize both the video card and the Ethernet card. I ended up having to reboot into Linux, do cat/proc/pci to find out what kind of cards they were (hardly anything exotic -- an old TNT video card and a Realtek Ethernet card) and trying to install drivers. The ones from the Windows CD refused to work, and of course with no Ethernet I couldn't easily download them...
So I ended up booting again into Red Hat (damn, GRUB is nice), downloading current drivers there, copying them to the Windows partition, rebooting and reinstalling -- and it *still* didn't work at first (with a reboot in between each attempt, of course). Eventually it finally decided to cooperate (I still don't know what happened -- after one of the many reboots the video card and Ethernet card suddently started working).
Red Hat took me about 30-45 minutes to install and configure (I just did a standard workstation install), mostly just waiting on the files to copy over to the hard drive. Windows 98 SE took over two and a half hours of PITA work.
OK, granted, Red Hat 7.2 is much newer than 98 SE. But remember that a *huge* number of people still use 98 SE as their primary system, and it's still more or less the standard most users look to. I'd say Linux has come a looooong way already as far as easy installation goes.
Best of all, my wife, who up till now has only used Macs and is techno-phobic, saw the GNOME desktop, got curious and soon I had her playing Civilization: Call to Power on Linux. And she fiddled around with surfing in no time.
I am now fantasizing about romantic evenings with my wife recompiling kernels.;-)
Funny, I live in Germany and am married to a German woman who just *loves* Hogan's Heroes. (Dubbed into German, of course.) And she's not the only German I know who likes it or quotes from it. (For the record, Col. Klink is dubbed with a Saxon accent; Sgt. Schultz is dubbed with a thick Bavarian accent. Which is actually kinda cute.)
There's no accounting for taste, anyway.
The obvious point is, if it's shown on German TV and Germans apparently like to watch it, it doesn't seem to be too insulting to Germans, now does it? (So much for your attempt at political correctness.)
You want to see something *really* politically incorrect about WWII? Try the British comedy "Allo Allo"...you know, the series with the "Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies by Van Klump", a gay German tank commander, a Prussian general whose idea of politics is to shoot French peasants and so on. (And again, my wife loves it, as do I.)
A couple of years ago, some students tried the same tactic. Germany's third- or fourth-largest party, the Free Democrats (basically a business-friendly, semi-quasi-libertarian party) have only a very small membership, but have a lot more "punch" than their size would otherwise allow, because the two big parties (the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats) rarely are able to get a majority on their own.
So some students in effect overwhelmed the Berlin office of the FDP by joining it en masse. The FDP, though, actually welcomed it (what *else* could they do) and interestingly chose to start to work with the students, and now they have been in effect absorbed into the party with little effect other than to cheer up the FDP. (Which is not really a bad thing anyway. The two big parties are full of idiots, especially the Christian Democrats.) Some of the students stayed and were assimilated, many lost interest and left, but in the end it had little real effect.
For that matter, I also ran as a delegate in the Democratic caucus in Minnesota in 1996 (I was a Tsongas guy, if you remember him). I easily got elected because, as you say, there was hardly anyone at the caucus in my district (and those that were there were all loony-left types worshipping Tom Harkin and/or Jerry Brown). But once I got to the district level, I was simply outnumbered by the usual party hacks and had little to do other than watch them elect the delegates they always elect. So again, in the end it really doesn't seem to make a difference long-term. (Sad to say.)
...it seems to me that Java has a lot going for it because of its versatility, like in embedded devices, as a web development platform and so on. I could be totally wrong here, but.NET and C# seem to be focused only on delivery of applications over a network -- not necessarily practical for many areas in which Java is currently used. Java also has a lot of heavyweights behind it *now* (IBM and Sun above all) and it is in widespread use *now*, giving it a lot more clout than.NET and C#, which are still essentially vaporware in comparison IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
Keaton's choice was also greeted with skepticism by fans, but I think he did a good job. Which is why I would be willing to give Keanu Reeves the benefit of the doubt. But unfortunately Keanu is a lousy actor IMO -- he did okay in Matrix, but he stunk in just about everything else (his "performance" in Much Ado About Nothing was embarrassing).
Maybe the Hollywood execs thought they were 'honoring' Christoper Reeve by having an actor with nearly the same last name play Reeve's most memorable role. ;-P
But Christopher Reeve will always be the "real" Superman for me -- he was born to play that role IMO.
Cheers,
Ethelred
That isn't necessarily true. Remember that .com != US. I have quite a few visitors from Europe with .com, .net and .org addresses, for example. I just happen to recognize the DNS entries as being from European ISPs.
Also, European visitors don't necessarily frequent US sites, and vice versa -- as an example, Germans are going to be all over spiegel.de, stern.de and so on, but probably won't bother much with cnn.com, news.com or wired.com for their news.
English-language sites still dominate the Net, but the vast majority of non-English speakers of course prefer to read things in their own language, even if they speak English. So your site, presumably in English, won't have that many non-English speaking visitors.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Actually, there were other fonts designed specifically for the screen long before Verdana. Susan Kare did the fonts Chicago, Monaco, Geneva, New York and so on for the original Macintosh in 1984 -- I believe long before Verdana and the others in Microsoft's library came out.
Verdana was one of the first scalable fonts specifically designed for the screen, that is true.
Also, as others have pointed out, Verdana, Tahoma and so on are not "lost" per se. Microsoft's own license on those fonts allows for free unlimited distribution (so long as the distributor does not derive profit from their distribution), and they also come pre-installed on Windows and Mac systems; anyone that installs Internet Explorer also gets them free.
Cheers,
Ethelred
My experiences with this came from numerous angry europeans (from Germany in this case) who were enraged when I said that having a pre-determined number of minutes to use your mobile phone per month was not the same as a plan with no 'gotchas' and they told be about paying one price to use it as much as they want (for local calls) ... just like land lines in the USA and Canada.
Also someone else mentioned http://www.boomerangwireless.com/.
Oh, come on. That's nothing at all like what's available in Europe. Boomerang is only in a handful of cities, limits you to one kind of phone ( and you can't use your existing phone) and has only very basic features.
Here's what I get from E-Plus in Germany:
There just isn't any comparison. Yes, Boomerang has a flat monthly rate -- but then they suck in just about everything else.
And I have no "gotchas" with my phone...so, sad to say, American cellphones really do suck. I shudder when I visit my family in the States and see what stuff they are using.
Then I salivate over their cable modem...ah well, you can't have it all. ;-)
Cheers,
Ethelred
What I don't understand is, in pre-OS X versions they DID support CVS (in combination with MacCVS). Since OS X, that support is gone.
Of course, MacCVS and the UN*X CVS included with Mac OS X work rather differently -- MacCVS would write the CVS tag info in the resource fork of each file, whereas UN*X CVS has a directory "CVS" to store that same info. But I can't imagine that it would be that hard to change BBEdit's old CVS support to look in a directory named "CVS" rather than in the resource fork.
Ah well...maybe they will have it again soon.
Cheers,
Ethelred
I look at a clock. Or maybe my (wind-up) wristwatch.
Sheesh. Geeks. If it ain't digital, it ain't.
Cheers,
Ethelred
For that to make sense, you have to believe that cellphones have not been widely adopted in the U.S. And that is simply not true.
I make no such assumption. What I am saying is that people often feel unsure about what they are actually paying for the services they use (have I exceeded my minute limit? have I exceeded my airtime limit? am I in a different roaming zone? etc.) and get sticker shock when the first bill arrives.
The system in Europe is just so much simpler, and has achieved much higher rates of acceptance (which is NOT the same as rates of deployment, which is what you're talking about).
Think about it. If you had only three different rates (in-network, local area, nationwide), no minute limit, no airtime fees (so you only pay when you call), simple and standardized fees for WAP/SMS/GPRS/HSCSD and so on, you would probably feel a lot better about using your cellphone as a real alternative to your fixed-line phone.
Cellphone use in Europe has gotten so widespread that it could really replace fixed-line phones in the next few years. There are already hybrid phones in wide use here -- while you're at home, it charges you fixed-line rates; while you're away it charges cellphone rates -- and this could lead to the subsumation of fixed-line phones. With the chaotic fees and competing technologies in the US, this could just not happen.
Cheers,
Ethelred
You're missing the point. The German plans don't have a minute limit. It works exactly like a fixed-line phone -- you pay for the time you call someone, and that's all.
The minute limit is just one "gotcha" I'm talking about. I pay one monthly fee for unlimited time, and I don't pay any airtime fees (so I don't pay if someone calls me). This is the standard way of doing it over here -- the providers compete on price on only two areas: monthly fee and per-second fee. Nothing else.
Which, as I said, is precisely how fixed-line connections work. So why not with cellphones?
Cheers,
Ethelred
The biggest reason why cellphones have not taken off in the US in comparison to Europe, at least, is simply price -- or in particular the *way* they are priced.
In Germany (and, I believe, in most other European countries), cellphones are charged exactly the same way a fixed-line phone is charged. You pay a basic monthly fee, and you pay per second or 10 seconds for calls you make. There are no "airtime" fees or other gotchas. The rates are also easy to understand, more or less -- for a call within your provider's network, you pay a "local" call; calls within your country are "long-distance"; and calls outside of your country are international. Quite rational.
My provider also has the added perk that I can choose either five fixed-line numbers or one area code to get discounted calls. So if I choose Berlin's area code -- 030 -- I can call anyone in Berlin for a much lower rate.
In comparison, my family in the States has a blizzard of confusing fee schedules, with plenty of "gotchas" built-in.
Another problem is the lack of standards across the States. Europe has the GSM standard, and your phone will work across nearly all of Europe. The USA has no such common standard, and even if you're smart enough to get a dual-band or tri-band cellphone, you get hammered on the roaming charges in the States.
I'm actually not that much of a fan of cellphones-as-portals, though -- WAP seems such an abortion of an idea and so far navigating the Web with a keypad is just a non-starter (and, like the article says, Americans tend to drive and not take public transport, so they have less time to fiddle with the things). But it is often a nice option to have. I use it to check what movies are playing (and to reserve tix), check train times (OK, that's not too useful in the States ;-P ) and sometimes to check the news, but that's about it -- I would never buy anything with it, because the technology is so far rather insecure.
i-Mode was also recently introduced in Germany by my provider (they licensed the technology from NTT-DoCoMo), so Europe is close to Japan's level now, though it remains to be seen if i-Mode and other 2.5G technologies take off in Europe (let alone 3G).
GPRS and HSCSD are also well-established, so I can go online at 56K digital with my Nokia and Powerbook via infrared and OS X (haven't gotten it to work with Linux, tho). GPRS is *very* expensive, though -- 2.5 Eurocents per 1K of data -- but HSCSD is fairly reasonable (why the difference, I don't know -- both give you the same speed AFAIK).
Cheers,
Ethelred
That's easy. Noah's Ark was a spaceship. Duh!
Which reminds me of a German cartoon (http://www.nichtlustig.de/) recently: one sees the Ark in the background, and in the foreground is a small raft with a prophet-like guy and two unicorns. The caption reads "Noah's rival Ishmael was rather less successful", and one of the unicorns says to Ishmael, "By the way, we're gay."
Cheers,
Ethelred
Here in Germany, where high-speed trains are fairly common (the ICE2 goes up to something like 280 km/h, or about 170 mph, though only on top-quality track), there has been some debate for some years about building a maglev passenger train -- but the usual NIMBY problems keep coming up.
To add to the irony, the Greens -- who you would think would want to support mass transit, especially one like maglev -- have often blocked its implementation in Germany on environmental grounds (disturbing habitats, etc.).
There there is the situation in the USA.
On the other hand, maglev could in theory revive passenger train service in the USA. I believe that one of the main reasons it has failed in the States is simply economics -- because of the greater distances involved, the net cost per mile of track, the total cost to maintain a (much onger) average stretch of track, and therefore the ticket price for getting from point A to point B is higher than in Europe, where population density is far higher and a greater potential for train service exists. Another drawback in the States is again because of the distance: with Amtrak's usual trains (which are abysmally slow by European standards) it takes forever to get anywhere. So you pay more for worse (slower) service, and the train company has less surplus money to invest in new technology or track improvements. No wonder Amtrak is so terrible.
(Consider the irony that the USA is generally considered to have the most modern freight rail in the world -- but passenger rail is a joke.)
The initial cost of a maglev line is probably a lot higher, but I would imagine that its TCO would be much lower than conventional trains -- and given its far higher potential speeds, it could really compete with airliners (at least on the East and West Coasts, where there is a high enough population density to pay for it).
But the whole train-related mass transit infrastructure is missing in most American cities (thanks in part to the American love of cars) -- okay, so you got to the main station, but then what? How do you get around? Is there a well-integrated tram/bus/subway/coach system? Most cities just don't have that (certainly nothing like in Germany or France). So even if someone is willing to take the (substantial) financial risk and heavy investment load of building a maglev network in the States, there are still a lot of practical issues to deal with beyond just the train lines.
So, sad to say, even though maglev technology was developed to a large degree in America, I don't see it happening in the near future. In spite of the problems mentioned above in Germany, I do think that there will be several trunk lines running maglev service in Germany in the next few years (probably Cologne-Hannover-Berlin and Hamburg-Hannover-Frankfurt-Munich at the least).
By the way, one of the main companies working on maglev is TransRapid. Check out their site (especially the Projects section) for a lot of info about the subject, including about possible maglev lines in the States.
Cheers,
Ethelred
HTH
Ethelred
The story has been up on /. for 9 minutes, and still no "First Post".
Must be the network stoppage.
Therefore...
First Post!!!
Cheers,
Ethelred
Well, what you're talking about is pretty much how it is done in many German cities. I live in Hannover, where the system is very straightforward. You buy a ticket which covers all transit types (street tram, subway, bus, regional train) and it simply has a time limit -- usually 90 minutes, but you can also get day passes, monthly passes and so on. The price is then based on the number of zones, but the "zones" are so huge that you can almost always get away with buying a simple one-zone ticket (the "zones" are concentric rings around downtown Hannover, and the central zone covers basically the entire city and inner suburbs). For one zone, you pay €1.70 (about US$1.60) and you can travel all you want for 90 minutes in the central zone -- no transfers needed.
(Hannover is of course the home of the CeBIT computer fair, if you're wondering. For CeBIT visitors it's even easier -- the fare is included in the price of the CeBIT ticket.)
The way the ticket itself works is simple, too. It just shows where you bought the ticket, in what zone, and when. When the ÜSTRA employees check your ticket, all they have to do is look at the zone and time, and they know if you've paid correctly.
You can also pay for your tickets with your GeldKarte (cashcard), which is a smart card used for paying small amounts -- you book money onto it at any cash machine, and it literally carries your money (up to €100, if I remember right) without having your bank account info stored on it. (The "cash" has a unique digital watermark with the data used to verify if the cash is real -- which of course opens up all kinds of possibilities for tracking its use...)
Not all German cities have this worked out, though. Hamburg, for example, also has a centralized system, but the "system" is total chaos because of their rather bizarre zones. Like in Hannover, you pay for a set amount of time and number of zones, but in Hamburg the zones are miniscule. When I lived there, if I took the public transport from my flat to work, there were three different ways of getting there, all involving one transfer and all travelling the same distance and taking about the same amount of time -- yet each cost a wildly different amount. Of course, once I got a monthly pass it wasn't so bad, but I was still restricted to one part of the city with that passcard.
One thing about Hamburg's system that is relevant to what you said is that Hamburg also has a number of private companies running its transit system (Deutsche Bahn runs the S-Bahn, Hamburger Hochbahn and several others do the U-Bahn and several companies run the bus system), but you still have one fare system and one ticketing system. Same goes for Berlin. (Hannover just has one state-sponsored company, the ÜSTRA, that does everything.)
Berlin's system is similar to Hamburg's as well. Again you pay for one ticket regardless of what transit type you use (and no trasnfers needed), but at the departure stop, you have to look at a *huge* table of destinations to find the fare you need to pay (if you're leaving from Kurfürstendamm and travelling to Alexanderplatz, it costs so-and-so much). But the system works and doesn't need any high-tech at all, which has its advantages as well.
Anyway, I'll stop rambling for now...
Cheers,
Ethelred
Yes, Apple sued Apple, but not in the way you think.
Apple Records, the Beatles' record company, sued Apple Computer over the name. If I remember right, both Apples settled out of court. The agreement basically said that Apple Computer would keep the name "Apple Computer" and that Apple Computer would never get into the music recording business.
This is, by the way, the origin of the system sound on Macs called "Sosumi". Apple Records was not happy when Apple Computer started adding all kinds of sound capabilities to Macs, which Apple Records thought may violate the agreement. Ergo the cheeky name for the sound -- "so sue me".
cf. Wikipedia
Cheers,
Ethelred
In a strange result of the September 2002 general election in Germany caused by an unknown quirk in the software, Linus Torvalds was elected Chancellor, with Richard M. Stallman foreign minister. Thanks to Stallman's diplomatic skills, 104 countries declared war on the recently-renamed GNU/Germany. Film at 11.
This has been discussed to death by a lot of German linguists. Any native speaker will tell you (and my wife is one, and I speak German fluenty as well) that the form "ich bin ein Berliner" is perfectly acceptable, indeed in the sense in which Kennedy was speaking, it was the *only* correct way of saying it.
A German would say of a person who *is* from Berlin, "er ist Berliner" (without the article "ein"). But a German who means figuratively that a person is from Berlin would say "er ist EIN Berliner". Kennedy was not from Berlin, therefore he had to say "ich bin ein Berliner". There was no error, except on the part of non-German speakers who thought they caught Kennedy making an embarrassing mistake.
Take a look at http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/weekly/aa021 700b.htm to get the full explanation.
Furthermore, a person from Hamburg says "ich bin Hamburger". But no one would really think twice about saying it. A person from Frankfurt says "ich bin Frankfurter". So what? Just about any German city has a kind of food -- sausage (Braunschweiger, Frankfurter), beer (Dortmunder, or Berliner -- yes, it's also a type of beer) and so on -- associated with the name. That's not a reason to avoid saying "ich bin [insert city name here]". That's ridiculous. If the Wall had been in Rüdesheim instead of Berlin, Kennedy would in your theory have been saying "ich bin ein Rüdesheimer" and therefore saying he's a German version of Irish coffee -- which is silly. And wrong. If that were the case, there are a lot of German Irish coffees running around.
I have yet to hear a German say that Kennedy was wrong to say it the way he did -- on the contrary, all Germans I've spoken to (and given that I have lived in Germany for years, that's a lot) think it was a great speech.
This is, in fact, a classic urban legend. In other words, something that has been repeated so often that people believe it regardless of what the evidence may show -- and in spite of the fact that it's just plain wrong.
Cheers,
Ethelred
The "Ich bin ein Berliner" thing is actually inaccurate. Yes, there is a pastry in Germany called a "Berliner" which is sort of like a jelly doughnut -- for that matter, there is also a pastry called an "Amerikaner", which is like a large frosted cookie (don't ask). But Germans actually roll their eyes when American tourists laugh about Kennedy's quote, because the Germans not only perfectly understood what Kennedy meant, but also Berliners actually *do* call themselves Berliners.
Technically, he could have said "ich komme aus Berlin" (I come from Berlin) to avoid the theoretical confusion, but in the context of the speech it wouldn't have made any sense.
The Germans still revere Kennedy for having had the balls to stand up to Khrushchev and the DDR for putting up the Wall (or the "anti-fascist protection barrier" as the East Germans called it). Many German cities have a road or park named for him, more than any other American president or other foreign leader I can think of. There's even a memorial to Kennedy near the site of the Wall, which of course has "Ich bin ein Berliner" in huge letters on it. They hardly thought the quote was embarrassing. In context, it was a very stirring speech, one of the best he gave.
(Compare that to Clinton's rather lame "Amerika steht an Ihrer Seite, jetzt und fuer immer" -- "America stands at your side, now and for ever". Grammatically correct, but boring. Reagan didn't bother with German, but his "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" is at least more memorable.)
Anyway, see http://www.watzmann.net/scg/faq-25.html for a discussion of this.
Cheers,
Ethelred
I recently got a used K6-3/400 PC, which I promptly wiped. Problem was, I had no clue as to what was inside the thing (I originally thought it was a Duron 600 until Red Hat told me otherwise). and installed Red Hat 7.2. It installed like a charm -- hardware all recognized and correctly configured, Net configured and away we go.
Then I decided to install Windows 98 SE, which I need to test websites (other than this PC, I only have Macs running either Linux or Mac OS X). It was a nightmare -- constant reboots (usually without warning me or waiting for a confirmation) and it failed to recognize both the video card and the Ethernet card. I ended up having to reboot into Linux, do cat /proc/pci to find out what kind of cards they were (hardly anything exotic -- an old TNT video card and a Realtek Ethernet card) and trying to install drivers. The ones from the Windows CD refused to work, and of course with no Ethernet I couldn't easily download them...
So I ended up booting again into Red Hat (damn, GRUB is nice), downloading current drivers there, copying them to the Windows partition, rebooting and reinstalling -- and it *still* didn't work at first (with a reboot in between each attempt, of course). Eventually it finally decided to cooperate (I still don't know what happened -- after one of the many reboots the video card and Ethernet card suddently started working).
Red Hat took me about 30-45 minutes to install and configure (I just did a standard workstation install), mostly just waiting on the files to copy over to the hard drive. Windows 98 SE took over two and a half hours of PITA work.
OK, granted, Red Hat 7.2 is much newer than 98 SE. But remember that a *huge* number of people still use 98 SE as their primary system, and it's still more or less the standard most users look to. I'd say Linux has come a looooong way already as far as easy installation goes.
Best of all, my wife, who up till now has only used Macs and is techno-phobic, saw the GNOME desktop, got curious and soon I had her playing Civilization: Call to Power on Linux. And she fiddled around with surfing in no time.
I am now fantasizing about romantic evenings with my wife recompiling kernels. ;-)
Cheers,
Ethelred
There's no accounting for taste, anyway.
The obvious point is, if it's shown on German TV and Germans apparently like to watch it, it doesn't seem to be too insulting to Germans, now does it? (So much for your attempt at political correctness.)
You want to see something *really* politically incorrect about WWII? Try the British comedy "Allo Allo"...you know, the series with the "Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies by Van Klump", a gay German tank commander, a Prussian general whose idea of politics is to shoot French peasants and so on. (And again, my wife loves it, as do I.)
Cheers,
Ethelred
Cheers,
Ethelred
Ethelred
So some students in effect overwhelmed the Berlin office of the FDP by joining it en masse. The FDP, though, actually welcomed it (what *else* could they do) and interestingly chose to start to work with the students, and now they have been in effect absorbed into the party with little effect other than to cheer up the FDP. (Which is not really a bad thing anyway. The two big parties are full of idiots, especially the Christian Democrats.) Some of the students stayed and were assimilated, many lost interest and left, but in the end it had little real effect.
For that matter, I also ran as a delegate in the Democratic caucus in Minnesota in 1996 (I was a Tsongas guy, if you remember him). I easily got elected because, as you say, there was hardly anyone at the caucus in my district (and those that were there were all loony-left types worshipping Tom Harkin and/or Jerry Brown). But once I got to the district level, I was simply outnumbered by the usual party hacks and had little to do other than watch them elect the delegates they always elect. So again, in the end it really doesn't seem to make a difference long-term. (Sad to say.)
Cheers,
Ethelred
Cheers,
Ethelred
(OK, I've been reading LOTR again...)
Cheers,
Ethelred