I agree that the issue is semantic -- I think the trouble is that you are taking definitions such that your thesis (Apple invented everything) works out as true, whereas the other guy is taking ordinary definitions.
However, it is certainly true that Mac users tend to distinguish between 'worstations', by which they mean more powerful desktops typically found in the workplace and used for art or other work, and 'desktops' by which they mean less powerful desktops found in the home or on secretary's desks and only used for email and Word. Non-mac users just tend to see 'a desktop computer of some sort'. Actually, it is probably possible to rile up a Mac user by referring to their cherished 'workstation' as a mere 'desktop'.
Why this is important to them I do not know -- I think it goes back to when creative staff often had expensive Macs and administrators / grannies / uncool people had litte macs or PCs.
Ridiculous, of course.
They should all have been using BeBoxes, if they couln't find a NeXT box.
That's a typical micro$oft tactic, create a new, incompatible, standard and keep changing it, to force people to upgrade.
You're so right. They have no business creating a product and enhancing it as time goes on and new gpus become available. That's what a company that was trying to make a profit by filling a market niche would do! Ew! They should have donated all their efforts to some other product.
Every single Russian in the world believes (incorrectly, as it happens) that Russia has never attempted to wipe out the Ingushes (who live in Ingushetia, north of Chechnya, not like anyone cares).
Every single Ingush believes (correctly, as it happens) that the Russians have indeed done this repeatedly, which is why there are now only about 220,000 Ingushes alive.
There are at least 1,000 times as many Russians as Ingushes.
Now do you see why information in a publically editable repository tends to wind up inaccurate?
If the answer to the above question is 'no', you have difficulty with analytical thought.
PS I do not give a good gosh damn about either Russians or Ingushes, that's why I picked them as an example.
Okay, not a joke per se but kind of funny/sad -- RMS objected to the use of 'win' as a prefix to function names in the windows-specific source files in emacs. Seems the connotations of 'win' are too positive to be used in a function name that will only be called on an MS OS.
I forget whether they were changed, as that was the thing that made me give up on emacs:)
I agree. It sucks but it's acceptable considering the level of random crime in the UK. I assume the government will abuse it but that's pretty much a lost battle anyway in the UK, so given the choice I'd rather obtain a little temporary safety. It was easy for Benjamin Franklin to talk -- even in the war of 1776, both sides loved him!
The extremely pro-defendant legal system in the UK makes it _very_ hard to get a conviction for a violent crime such as assault without the use of these cameras. This is a very important factor. Even _with_ the cameras it is still probably harder to get rid of eg the local mugger in the UK than in the US.
So, we see here how a liberal law (making it hard for the police to convict someone for 'just being a scumbag') actually leads to an authoritarian situation when the need comes to make the system actually work.
Not that I particularly object to the cameras, compared to some other Blair-era changes to the UK system...
I don't think the UK counts, because of the weirdly submissive and undemanding nature of the population. The reason there isn't X in the UK is simply than nobody has demanded X (where X is dentistry, rail transport, etc).
It's better to compare countries that have demand and can reasonably be expected to be trying to progress.
P.S. This post (while factually true IMHO) is nasty, snide, and unhelpful and should likely be modded as 'Troll'. But you have to admit, at least I don't AC!
I'm very happy to be living in within a structure of a decentralized broadband access where each individual state dictates the best method of communication
So, you'd be QUITE HAPPY to have the means of communication DICTATED BY THE STATE eh comrade? Why, you COMMUNIST!
Nah, seriously, the reasons why the US has somewhat slower broadband probably relate to how much higher the actual demand for it is in SK and Sweden. You don't have to start raging against the monster of socialism every time the US isn't #1.
While some of the results here are interesting (but old), the fact that the entire study focuses on exactly 1 script and 1 language basically renders the conclusions worthless (as conclusions about cognition in general... I suppose they still have value as conclusions about English and the Latin script).
What has happened here is:
1 -- Observe people reading a given language/script
2 -- See how they make use of features of that particular language/script, such as tall letters, case, and the occurrence of 'skippable' words such as articles
3 -- Describe the way they use these local features, and call that a theory of reading in general.
I don't really understand how to apply a theory of reading based on word and letter shapes when there are so many people reading text in which:
--There are no letter boundaries, and/or --There are no word boundaries, and/or --Letters all have the same form factor
The experiments described would probably generalize very well to arabic and greek scripts, pretty well to cyrillic (no tall/short letters to speak of), badly to devanagari-type scripts, very badly to Chinese and Japanese, and not at all to hieroglyphics (though I agree that there may never have been a reader of hieroglyphics who was fluent by modern standards).
To pretend that these experiments apply to humanity in general rather than the author's own language/script choice is silly. It's an interesting article and I'm glad the research was done but unfortunately a certain failure to 'get' the multilingual nature of humanity, which I don't really expect to find in MS work, is in evidence here.
See, when _I_ pointed this out in a previous article, _I_ was immediately modded through the floor by the 'Open Source IS CREATIVE IT JUST IS BAD MAN GO AWAY' crowd, so much so that I required several week's rest on a quiet Greek island before I could resume normal activity.
Whereas _you_, by way of contrast, are at +4.;_; _so_ unfair.
By the letter of the law, my using Bittorrent to download the latest Adam Sandler flick is stealing.
NO. IT IS COPYRIGHT VIOLATION.
EVERY time a story like this comes along a THOUSAND brave volunteers leap up and point out the difference between intellectual and physical property laws, and STILL there remains this hard core that simply cannot Get It.
If you're going to talk about the 'letter of the law', shouldn't you read at least a brief overview of said law first?
Yet, hope is eternal and so on this day I do my part in the eternal struggle, by saying again in a loud, clear voice:
It is not STEALING but COPYRIGHT VIOLATION. Not the THEFT of MATERIAL PROPERTY but the UNLICENSED DUPLICATION of INFORMATION.
It is 'mebius', not 'mobius' in Japanese. You will recall that the original is Moebius, which is difficult to type, so people tend to pick either the o or the e.
I agree -- the C1 form factor was superb, allowing effective typing and reading on a computer that could still be kept in a (large) jacket pocket, and the general layout and construction of the series was great.
Except for the HD. Those seem to break easily. And the customer support, which is typical Sony...
So, er, do you know where I can get a HD for a C1?
Good movies are coming out at an alarming rate. In fact, I would say that for the first time since the 60s it is now possible to go to a mainstream cinema and have a high chance of finding a real grownup movie on. Even wide-appeal movies like the Kill Bill movies, Lost in Translation and so on are grown up in the way that 80's movies never were. We have more 'pure art' movies available than ever before, now that Japanese, Chinese and Korean movies are finally actually being shown on screens (admittedly only in big cities). And even the summer blockbusters, lowest of the low in pure trash terms, sometimes contain depths (LoTR, Spiderman, pity about Troy though) that nobody would have dreamed of bothering to add in in the 1980s.
What's more, from a technical point of view there has never been a greater reserve of knowhow and skilled professionals available. Even a flop like Van Helsing was able to call on cinematography that was really a work of art in it's own right.
You want Real Art? The usual suspects are doing it: Talk To Her, Dolls. Hollywood's doing it too: The Others, Donnie Darko. But even if you don't want Real Art, the average quality of every grade of movie has moved up SO far since 20 years ago...
The movies are not dying. Watch a week's worth of multiscreen fodder from 1984 and you will agree with me!
Please bear in mind, this is not a victory of honest folk over spammers, but a victory of spammers who are members of the DMA over their competitors. The DMA got a law passed which allows them to keep spamming but can be used to make business harder for non-DMA members. That's good business and I think the DMA have done _very_ well for a lobby with no initial political clout or connections.
Just don't interpret this as some new ideological initiative. It's simply an investment by the DMA which favors the DMA and hurts their competitors
Aaah, I _do_ know something about that. Specifically I remember the years of waiting for ISO to come up with sets that actually had needed characters while MS at the same time was listening to users and making the appropriate character sets, sticking as close to ISO as they could while still actually empowering users to communicate with each other.
THAT, and not 'financial clout' and 'tantrums', is why SJIS based sets are still standard in Japan -- because MS just plain made useful sets and encodings where the ISO and (lord help us) JIS had failed to do so in a reasonable time frame.
That is also why the Euro symbol causes problems -- people needed it, MS added it, and it then took the ISO literally years to come up with ISO-8859-15 (Latin 9) in which they finally included _some_ of the characters MS had introduced as a response to actual need -- although even then they gave the 'international ccy sign' codepoint to the euro, just to break compatibility with 8859-1.
Now, hush up about tantrums, financial clout and the big conspiracy. Consider that sometimes de-facto standards emerge because someone has made them work, in the absence of a 'real' standard that works. Learn the history of said standards (this will take some time). Consider that 'immature technogeek' is a label that can apply to many of us, but not generally to MS management.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that the issue is semantic -- I think the trouble is that you are taking definitions such that your thesis (Apple invented everything) works out as true, whereas the other guy is taking ordinary definitions.
However, it is certainly true that Mac users tend to distinguish between 'worstations', by which they mean more powerful desktops typically found in the workplace and used for art or other work, and 'desktops' by which they mean less powerful desktops found in the home or on secretary's desks and only used for email and Word. Non-mac users just tend to see 'a desktop computer of some sort'. Actually, it is probably possible to rile up a Mac user by referring to their cherished 'workstation' as a mere 'desktop'.
Why this is important to them I do not know -- I think it goes back to when creative staff often had expensive Macs and administrators / grannies / uncool people had litte macs or PCs.
Ridiculous, of course.
They should all have been using BeBoxes, if they couln't find a NeXT box.
Since when has Microsoft, or Bill Gates, *led* the industry in anything new?
Can you really not think of anything?
You're completely correct; I think my comment was mistaken.
Woah, that's weird! I thought I was reading Slashdot but it must actually be some other site.
That's a typical micro$oft tactic, create a new, incompatible, standard and keep changing it, to force people to upgrade.
You're so right. They have no business creating a product and enhancing it as time goes on and new gpus become available. That's what a company that was trying to make a profit by filling a market niche would do! Ew! They should have donated all their efforts to some other product.
Look, think of this:
Every single Russian in the world believes (incorrectly, as it happens) that Russia has never attempted to wipe out the Ingushes (who live in Ingushetia, north of Chechnya, not like anyone cares).
Every single Ingush believes (correctly, as it happens) that the Russians have indeed done this repeatedly, which is why there are now only about 220,000 Ingushes alive.
There are at least 1,000 times as many Russians as Ingushes.
Now do you see why information in a publically editable repository tends to wind up inaccurate?
If the answer to the above question is 'no', you have difficulty with analytical thought.
PS I do not give a good gosh damn about either Russians or Ingushes, that's why I picked them as an example.
Dude, stop replying to the crank... I tend to compulsively read posts by cranks and it's annoying when they build up...
Okay, not a joke per se but kind of funny/sad -- RMS objected to the use of 'win' as a prefix to function names in the windows-specific source files in emacs. Seems the connotations of 'win' are too positive to be used in a function name that will only be called on an MS OS.
I forget whether they were changed, as that was the thing that made me give up on emacs
I agree. It sucks but it's acceptable considering the level of random crime in the UK. I assume the government will abuse it but that's pretty much a lost battle anyway in the UK, so given the choice I'd rather obtain a little temporary safety. It was easy for Benjamin Franklin to talk -- even in the war of 1776, both sides loved him!
The extremely pro-defendant legal system in the UK makes it _very_ hard to get a conviction for a violent crime such as assault without the use of these cameras. This is a very important factor. Even _with_ the cameras it is still probably harder to get rid of eg the local mugger in the UK than in the US.
So, we see here how a liberal law (making it hard for the police to convict someone for 'just being a scumbag') actually leads to an authoritarian situation when the need comes to make the system actually work.
Not that I particularly object to the cameras, compared to some other Blair-era changes to the UK system...
I don't think the UK counts, because of the weirdly submissive and undemanding nature of the population. The reason there isn't X in the UK is simply than nobody has demanded X (where X is dentistry, rail transport, etc).
It's better to compare countries that have demand and can reasonably be expected to be trying to progress.
P.S. This post (while factually true IMHO) is nasty, snide, and unhelpful and should likely be modded as 'Troll'. But you have to admit, at least I don't AC!
I'm very happy to be living in within a structure of a decentralized broadband access where each individual state dictates the best method of communication
So, you'd be QUITE HAPPY to have the means of communication DICTATED BY THE STATE eh comrade? Why, you COMMUNIST!
Nah, seriously, the reasons why the US has somewhat slower broadband probably relate to how much higher the actual demand for it is in SK and Sweden. You don't have to start raging against the monster of socialism every time the US isn't #1.
While some of the results here are interesting (but old), the fact that the entire study focuses on exactly 1 script and 1 language basically renders the conclusions worthless (as conclusions about cognition in general... I suppose they still have value as conclusions about English and the Latin script).
What has happened here is:
1 -- Observe people reading a given language/script
2 -- See how they make use of features of that particular language/script, such as tall letters, case, and the occurrence of 'skippable' words such as articles
3 -- Describe the way they use these local features, and call that a theory of reading in general.
I don't really understand how to apply a theory of reading based on word and letter shapes when there are so many people reading text in which:
--There are no letter boundaries, and/or
--There are no word boundaries, and/or
--Letters all have the same form factor
The experiments described would probably generalize very well to arabic and greek scripts, pretty well to cyrillic (no tall/short letters to speak of), badly to devanagari-type scripts, very badly to Chinese and Japanese, and not at all to hieroglyphics (though I agree that there may never have been a reader of hieroglyphics who was fluent by modern standards).
To pretend that these experiments apply to humanity in general rather than the author's own language/script choice is silly. It's an interesting article and I'm glad the research was done but unfortunately a certain failure to 'get' the multilingual nature of humanity, which I don't really expect to find in MS work, is in evidence here.
See, when _I_ pointed this out in a previous article, _I_ was immediately modded through the floor by the 'Open Source IS CREATIVE IT JUST IS BAD MAN GO AWAY' crowd, so much so that I required several week's rest on a quiet Greek island before I could resume normal activity.
Whereas _you_, by way of contrast, are at +4.
I don't understand -- what does Scooby Doo have to do with it?
By the letter of the law, my using Bittorrent to download the latest Adam Sandler flick is stealing.
NO. IT IS COPYRIGHT VIOLATION.
EVERY time a story like this comes along a THOUSAND brave volunteers leap up and point out the difference between intellectual and physical property laws, and STILL there remains this hard core that simply cannot Get It.
If you're going to talk about the 'letter of the law', shouldn't you read at least a brief overview of said law first?
Yet, hope is eternal and so on this day I do my part in the eternal struggle, by saying again in a loud, clear voice:
It is not STEALING but COPYRIGHT VIOLATION. Not the THEFT of MATERIAL PROPERTY but the UNLICENSED DUPLICATION of INFORMATION.
It is 'mebius', not 'mobius' in Japanese. You will recall that the original is Moebius, which is difficult to type, so people tend to pick either the o or the e.
encyclopoedia
Sorry to nitpick, but if you are gonna correct others' spelling, you should look it up first...
Mm.
I agree -- the C1 form factor was superb, allowing effective typing and reading on a computer that could still be kept in a (large) jacket pocket, and the general layout and construction of the series was great.
Except for the HD. Those seem to break easily. And the customer support, which is typical Sony...
So, er, do you know where I can get a HD for a C1?
Here's a nickel, son -- buy yourself a proper phone.
*presses nickel into grubby outstretched hand*
1 -- plug phone into USB port
2 -- drag MP3 files into phone, unplug from USB port
3 -- set one of the MP3s as the ringtone
4 -- profit!
This seems to work pretty well for me... am I missing something?
Good movies are coming out at an alarming rate. In fact, I would say that for the first time since the 60s it is now possible to go to a mainstream cinema and have a high chance of finding a real grownup movie on. Even wide-appeal movies like the Kill Bill movies, Lost in Translation and so on are grown up in the way that 80's movies never were. We have more 'pure art' movies available than ever before, now that Japanese, Chinese and Korean movies are finally actually being shown on screens (admittedly only in big cities). And even the summer blockbusters, lowest of the low in pure trash terms, sometimes contain depths (LoTR, Spiderman, pity about Troy though) that nobody would have dreamed of bothering to add in in the 1980s.
What's more, from a technical point of view there has never been a greater reserve of knowhow and skilled professionals available. Even a flop like Van Helsing was able to call on cinematography that was really a work of art in it's own right.
You want Real Art? The usual suspects are doing it: Talk To Her, Dolls. Hollywood's doing it too: The Others, Donnie Darko. But even if you don't want Real Art, the average quality of every grade of movie has moved up SO far since 20 years ago...
The movies are not dying. Watch a week's worth of multiscreen fodder from 1984 and you will agree with me!
Most people don't need internationalization
I despair. I do not pass GO, I do not collect $200, I just despair.
This has been available for a long time, and (the client part) is available by default. mstsc.exe.
Please bear in mind, this is not a victory of honest folk over spammers, but a victory of spammers who are members of the DMA over their competitors. The DMA got a law passed which allows them to keep spamming but can be used to make business harder for non-DMA members. That's good business and I think the DMA have done _very_ well for a lobby with no initial political clout or connections.
Just don't interpret this as some new ideological initiative. It's simply an investment by the DMA which favors the DMA and hurts their competitors
.
Witness their history with XSL
Don't know anything about that.
Kerberos
Hm, don't know anything about that either.
ISO character sets
Aaah, I _do_ know something about that. Specifically I remember the years of waiting for ISO to come up with sets that actually had needed characters while MS at the same time was listening to users and making the appropriate character sets, sticking as close to ISO as they could while still actually empowering users to communicate with each other.
THAT, and not 'financial clout' and 'tantrums', is why SJIS based sets are still standard in Japan -- because MS just plain made useful sets and encodings where the ISO and (lord help us) JIS had failed to do so in a reasonable time frame.
That is also why the Euro symbol causes problems -- people needed it, MS added it, and it then took the ISO literally years to come up with ISO-8859-15 (Latin 9) in which they finally included _some_ of the characters MS had introduced as a response to actual need -- although even then they gave the 'international ccy sign' codepoint to the euro, just to break compatibility with 8859-1.
Now, hush up about tantrums, financial clout and the big conspiracy. Consider that sometimes de-facto standards emerge because someone has made them work, in the absence of a 'real' standard that works. Learn the history of said standards (this will take some time). Consider that 'immature technogeek' is a label that can apply to many of us, but not generally to MS management.
Tx.