I worked for 6 years at a US research institute on an academic H1B. I got a new job offer and would have loved to stay but couldn't get a commercial H1B (lost in the H1B visa lottery: my chances were 1 in 3).
So I moved to Switzerland last year. I'm still working for an American company, but I won't pay any taxes, buy products or use services in the US any more. And a US citizen still won't have my job, it went overseas.
If the US decreases the H1B cap even more, you'll see more stories like this. You can't keep jobs in America this way.
Some functionality is not accessible without a mouse (maximizing and restoring minimized windows for example).
Some functionality takes a lot more keystrokes. E.g. navigating application menus.
Dialog boxes don't have keyboard shortcuts (the kind that you activate with Alt+KEY on Windows and Linux). Some don't even have tab navigation -- I'm looking at you, iTunes delete dialog.
For me, Mac OS X is unusable without a mouse or trackpad, which makes me less productive than I was on Windows/Linux. There are things I like though, but this was a disappointment.
Having complete hoax or misleading articles on somewhat obscure topics is not the real problem. The true problem is that the bullshit can freely mix with the trustworthy content even in the same sentence and the end user has no way of guessing how much they can trust a specific piece of information in any article.
No, real world encyclopedias don't cite all their sources, but they do double check every statement they make in the article. Here's a podcast from Wikimania 2006, where the editor in chief(?) of Worldbook talks about their fact-checking process. He clearly states that they check every fact and statement in at least two reliable sources.
In a fantasy setting its easy to explain why you need to fight the enemy up-close (swords, battle-axes are a "natural" part of a fantasy environment).
In sci-fi environments you need to have a convoluted story about why I cant shoot someone from a mile away with my *laser* weapon instead of beating him on the head from a few feet.
You would be right if it wasn't for Blizzard's current implementation of PvP.
Player versus Player matches are organized into brackets every 10 levels, so everyone fights people against whom they have a reasonable chance of winning. In theory.
In practice, because a raider or twink can get uber-gear, character levels don't really count, they can easily take on 2-3 (sometimes 4) players of the opposing teams in inferior gear.
Blizzard doesn't yet have a system that takes this gear-imbalance into account. Several solutions exist each with its own pros and cons, but I think any of these would be better than practically shutting out all casuals who don't like to be steamrolled by hard-core raiders in uber-gear in the Battlegrounds:
1) standardized gear: it would be like an FPS team match, but people who spent a long time (often several months) getting their current gear don't like it.
2) gear-matching: you would fight people in similar gear.
3) rank matching: you would fight people who's win/loss ratio is close to yours.
I'd like to PvP, but building a properly geared character takes a long time and is pretty boring for me. I can't justify paying for this when I can play Enemy Territory for free where gears is balanced and these problems don't exist at all.
I was a longtime FireFox user but when it started eating memory and freezing for several long seconds every couple of minutes I switched to Opera just a few weeks ago.
The one feature from FireFox that I miss the most is the Adblock extension. There are solutions for this in Opera, but none of them seemed as intuitive and easy to use as Adblock.
I'm 28 and have a GameCube as my only console.
I own more than 30 GC games and my all time favorites were:
Zelda
Soul Calibur 2
Super Mario Sunshine
Metroid
Super Smash Brothers
Pikmin 1-2.
Donkey Konga
First I wanted to buy an XBox, but I realized that it had very few family friendly games (the kinds we can play together with my son) and its strength is mostly genres that I can play on my PC.
I often organize parties where my colleagues, friends and their wives/gfs drum away in Donkey Konga or smash each other up in Soul Calibur or Def Jam Fight for NY. Drinking lots of beer, white russian and whiskey before, after and during gaming...;)
The GameCube is great and has many more AA titles than I have time for.
nyenyec
As an initially very enthusiastic Wikipedia editor spending his wikivacation I can testify that he is absolutely right saying that trolls scare good people away.
I've seen it first hand several times. What's really surprising is how much damage a single aggressive troll can do.
Very few people will have the time to argue with aggressive cranks, especially when what they write is obviously biased, they use personal attacks and never seem to run out of free time.
Sometimes even a look at the discussion page is enough to turn a potential contributor away...
This is especially bad in a much smaller Wikipedia, such as the Hungarian one, where unlike in EnWiki there is a shortage of contributors and expertise in specific fields is extremely scarce. This way, if a problem person can drive away the only expert in a field, he's going to have free reign over an article or an entire topic.
Wikipedia could be so much better if it had a better way to deal with this.
You're right, it was real -- although I would say not really significant for defeating Germany.
The reason I had to remind the original poster of the Eastern Front was this sentence: "That same US that saved Europe from Hitler...". Ironically, it was mostly the Soviet Union that saved Europe from Hitler (albeit with the military and most significantly economic aid of the US and Britain).
Quoting from the article I linked: "Even while the Allies were landing at Normandy, Germany kept moving divisions east to fight advancing Soviet forces. In spring, 1945, Germany still had 214 divisions on the Eastern Front and only 60 holding the Allies in France, the Low Countries and Italy. Germany's best units remained in the East."
"...in an opportunistic campaign at the end of the war , the USSR killed, wounded or captured 450,000 Japanese soldiers, 32% of Japan's total military losses."
I agree with you that the war on the Western Front was real (as it was in Africa). But saying that the US defeated Nazi Germany without mentioning the USSR would be like saying that the British defeated Saddam. Not exactly false, but very misleading.
It would probably be too harsh not to call it "a real war" but when it came to defeating Nazi Germany, the Western Front didn't really count that much.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked for 6 years at a US research institute on an academic H1B. I got a new job offer and would have loved to stay but couldn't get a commercial H1B (lost in the H1B visa lottery: my chances were 1 in 3).
So I moved to Switzerland last year. I'm still working for an American company, but I won't pay any taxes, buy products or use services in the US any more. And a US citizen still won't have my job, it went overseas.
If the US decreases the H1B cap even more, you'll see more stories like this. You can't keep jobs in America this way.
Keyboard navigation on the Mac suxx.
Some functionality is not accessible without a mouse (maximizing and restoring minimized windows for example).
Some functionality takes a lot more keystrokes. E.g. navigating application menus.
Dialog boxes don't have keyboard shortcuts (the kind that you activate with Alt+KEY on Windows and Linux). Some don't even have tab navigation -- I'm looking at you, iTunes delete dialog.
For me, Mac OS X is unusable without a mouse or trackpad, which makes me less productive than I was on Windows/Linux.
There are things I like though, but this was a disappointment.
I wrote about this here.
Having complete hoax or misleading articles on somewhat obscure topics is not the real problem. The true problem is that the bullshit can freely mix with the trustworthy content even in the same sentence and the end user has no way of guessing how much they can trust a specific piece of information in any article.
My faith in Wikipedia was seriously shaken when I spotted nonsense in the Adolf Hitler article that has been sitting there for quite a while.
No, real world encyclopedias don't cite all their sources, but they do double check every statement they make in the article.
Here's a podcast from Wikimania 2006, where the editor in chief(?) of Worldbook talks about their fact-checking process. He clearly states that they check every fact and statement in at least two reliable sources.
MP3
In a fantasy setting its easy to explain why you need to fight the enemy up-close (swords, battle-axes are a "natural" part of a fantasy environment).
In sci-fi environments you need to have a convoluted story about why I cant shoot someone from a mile away with my *laser* weapon instead of beating him on the head from a few feet.
You would be right if it wasn't for Blizzard's current implementation of PvP.
Player versus Player matches are organized into brackets every 10 levels, so everyone fights people against whom they have a reasonable chance of winning. In theory.
In practice, because a raider or twink can get uber-gear, character levels don't really count, they can easily take on 2-3 (sometimes 4) players of the opposing teams in inferior gear.
Blizzard doesn't yet have a system that takes this gear-imbalance into account. Several solutions exist each with its own pros and cons, but I think any of these would be better than practically shutting out all casuals who don't like to be steamrolled by hard-core raiders in uber-gear in the Battlegrounds:
1) standardized gear: it would be like an FPS team match, but people who spent a long time (often several months) getting their current gear don't like it.
2) gear-matching: you would fight people in similar gear.
3) rank matching: you would fight people who's win/loss ratio is close to yours.
I'd like to PvP, but building a properly geared character takes a long time and is pretty boring for me. I can't justify paying for this when I can play Enemy Territory for free where gears is balanced and these problems don't exist at all.
Blod-clotting, speciation and all these long words make my head hurt.
The truth is plain and simple, just take look at a banana!
I was a longtime FireFox user but when it started eating memory and freezing for several long seconds every couple of minutes I switched to Opera just a few weeks ago.
= 102270
The one feature from FireFox that I miss the most is the Adblock extension. There are solutions for this in Opera, but none of them seemed as intuitive and easy to use as Adblock.
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id
So I still keep Firefox around and for occasions when I need to go to ad-heavy sites.
nyenyec
- Zelda
- Soul Calibur 2
- Super Mario Sunshine
- Metroid
- Super Smash Brothers
- Pikmin 1-2.
- Donkey Konga
First I wanted to buy an XBox, but I realized that it had very few family friendly games (the kinds we can play together with my son) and its strength is mostly genres that I can play on my PC. I often organize parties where my colleagues, friends and their wives/gfs drum away in Donkey Konga or smash each other up in Soul Calibur or Def Jam Fight for NY. Drinking lots of beer, white russian and whiskey before, after and during gaming...Very few people will have the time to argue with aggressive cranks, especially when what they write is obviously biased, they use personal attacks and never seem to run out of free time.
Sometimes even a look at the discussion page is enough to turn a potential contributor away...
This is especially bad in a much smaller Wikipedia, such as the Hungarian one, where unlike in EnWiki there is a shortage of contributors and expertise in specific fields is extremely scarce. This way, if a problem person can drive away the only expert in a field, he's going to have free reign over an article or an entire topic.
Wikipedia could be so much better if it had a better way to deal with this.
Nyenyec
I tried Inkscape 0.39 but it crashes on me all the time.
Thanks,
Nyenyec
The reason I had to remind the original poster of the Eastern Front was this sentence: "That same US that saved Europe from Hitler...". Ironically, it was mostly the Soviet Union that saved Europe from Hitler (albeit with the military and most significantly economic aid of the US and Britain).
Quoting from the article I linked:
"Even while the Allies were landing at Normandy, Germany kept moving divisions east to fight advancing Soviet forces. In spring, 1945, Germany still had 214 divisions on the Eastern Front and only 60 holding the Allies in France, the Low Countries and Italy. Germany's best units remained in the East."
"...in an opportunistic campaign at the end of the war , the USSR killed, wounded or captured 450,000 Japanese soldiers, 32% of Japan's total military losses."
I agree with you that the war on the Western Front was real (as it was in Africa). But saying that the US defeated Nazi Germany without mentioning the USSR would be like saying that the British defeated Saddam. Not exactly false, but very misleading.
Cheers,
Nyenyec
and here's an article: The Real War was in the East - Eric Margolis
Cheers,
Nyenyec
I often find it frustrating how Americans often forget about the huge difference in scale between the Western and Eastern Fronts.
a lt ies_of_war.htm
Here's a link that helps to put it into perspective, please scroll down:
http://www.rationalrevolution.net/articles/casu
It would probably be too harsh not to call it "a real war" but when it came to defeating Nazi Germany, the Western Front didn't really count that much.
Cheers,
Nyenyec
There was this thing called the Soviet Union in WW2 which fought the real war against the Third Reich on the Eastern Front.
Then in the 80s it imploded, cause it was a rotten, economically stagnant system that no one believed in any more.
God bless the American myths.
Cheers,
Nyenyec
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/
Or maybe the US needs the equivalent of the BBC?
Nyenyec
AFAIK Mozilla doesn't support XSL yet.