The way it's written up in the Slate article, I would never want to participate in this scheme. Who would decide when the price would go up or down and by how much? the Record companies? Apple? The reason stock exchanges work is peopel get ownership of a real product (ie. a company) when they purchase stock. As written in slate, this Sounds more like a plan to get the most profit out of a song, squeezing as many consumers as possible. You want the new 50Cent? that'll be 4.99 oops 5.50. This would never work, unless...
The Record company actually floated parts of the song rights on the market. They might float 30-40% of Jay-lo's new album. J-Lo herself would own 10-20%, and the record company would still own 40-50% of the track, so they'd get about half of the profits from the track. Their could be an IPO and it would otherwise work as a normal stock with a certain percentage going towards dividends for stock holders and the rest being reinvested to sign new talent and groom new artists. As tracks get older the record company could float more of the track to raise profits, or make strategic buybacks, etc...
This would be a real market. Consumers would have a real product, actual ownership of the songs they adore.
The flip side to this is to have the MMORPG's have auction sites within the game. Rather than listing your stuff on ebay, you list it on the auction site within the MMORPG. You have a paypal like account with the game company who takes a paypal like percentage off of every transaction. Both buyer and seller are safer, because the transaction is guaranteed safe by the game. No more getting cheated, the game company increases their profits.. everyone is happy.
Macromedia Flash isn't installed on my Mozilla. I NEVER see those ads or any other annoying ads using Flash. If I need to look at a flash enabled page I just use IEView to open it up.
I realized years ago that Flash is mostly useful for viewing ads. Since I don't want to view those ads, I don't install it.
Once, I decided to try not installing flash on IE, but on just about every page, I'd get asked to install Flash 2-6 times.
I'm currently there. One thing to be aware of is different locations have different restrictions. Beijing and SHanghai will likely have the least restrictions, and hotels will probably have less restrictions than other ISPs. ISPs all seem to block slightly different material.
BBC News is still inaccessible. Google News is inaccessible 95% of the time. Small - Medium US newspapers are quite often blocked.
This past few days I couldn't access NYtimes or slashdot (maybe because of the dead ex-leader). China will cut access of during sensitive times like this. Yahoo news never seems to be affected though, so you could always get the AP stories.
But on the plus side, if you can read Chinese there are plenty of wonderful bittorent sites that have not been shut down. after the major BT closures I switched to Chinese sites and am still able to find everything I want. My time-shifted TV programs now have Chinese subtitles as an added bonus!!
This poster is correct. The easiest way to get a long-term visa in China is to simply pay someone 1000yuan or so to get a long-term visa. It is a lot easier then getting your job to get one for you and less problematic than marrying a Chinese person (which won't always get you a long-term visa easily anyway.).
Most people I know in China on a long term basis either go to HK every few months or have somehow illegally acquired a long term visa.
I'm in China and read (past tense) google news regularly until about 3 weeks ago. One day it dissappeared. I'm suffering from withdrawal. 3 painful weeks without googlenews. does anyone know of other news aggregators that are similar? can anyone come up with any way I'd be able to read my google news? help me, please. please.
I've been living in China for over 2 years, and have travelled extensively there. I hate crap articles that for the most part aren't true. I'll take this one step by step:
intro:
supermarket spills - alas, they don't bother to disenfect anything at the average supermarket. Some recent imports, Carefour etc., might do better, but simply moving the spill around with water and then drying it might not seem hygenic to some.
free head-and-shoulder massages w/ haircut: this is true. And it's an excellent service. But I usually cut my own hair cause I don't want it to look jacked. You can also get handjobs and blowjobs for 30-100 yuan more. Great services. The Chinese are way ahead of us here.
free movie ticket couriers: true. All couriers for services are free in my experience. Currently their online stores also use these couriers. You order online and a guy comes on a bike with your books and you pay him. quite nice.
duvet covers (even in rural china): yes. it's true. but, if they are freshly laundered, why do they smell so bad? Most of the time you feel like the blankets have been sitting in a smelly closet for weeks, not like they just came in off the line.
automated lockers: they're starting to use them in some stores. Most have places where you check your bag with a person.
taxis, subways, etc with panels and tv: true for about 1% of all taxis (if that much) the buses with tv are pretty annoying but they are thankfully few and far between (there are many more buses with wooden floors with holes where you can see the road)
electronic fly swatter: this is so cool! some are shaped like a small tennis racket. you push a little button and electricity runs through the wire strings. great fun killing bugs and for using on friends when they're drunk.
magnetic-levitation train: it's amazing. so is there space program. So is the realization that they are doing this despite the fact that so many of their people live in complete poverty and would love to have a better life.
1) Cellphones: coverage is extensive. prices aren't that cheap, but it is pay as you go. You pay for incoming and outgoing calls (the same for each)/ SMS messages (cheaper for incoming). on an average month I'll spend about 150-200RMB which works out to 20-25USD.(I like to SMS a lot and don't like using talking on the phone much--most of the time other people call me) It doesn't seem that much cheaper to me. Might have something to do with the Monopoly that is China Mobile.
2)Traffic Lights: this is true, and they are using them more and more. Beijing's use of them is pretty light (no more than 5% of all ligths-a VERY generous estimate as I've only seen 2 or 3), but in Southern cities like Guangzhou or Guilin, most traffic lights are of this type. Unfortunately in China red light means, "I can still go through the extension for the next five seconds."
3)transit debit cards: I haven't been to shanghai in a while, so I'll assume this is true. They do give a lot of nice things to Shanghai (they being the communist party). Taxi receipts are printed. One of the main reason is so that you can report a taxi driver who took you for a ride.
4)Adult playgrounds: true (at least for Beijing--I haven't seen them in small cities; a small city in china is still over 1million people). They also have an occasional program on TV on how to use these machinese. They range from things where you swing your legs and arms like a floating cross trainer, to weight lifting contraptions, to pull up bars, to ping pong tables in some places. And Chinese old people are more active than their western counterparts. But I'd hardly call the air fresh.
5)anti-theft slipcovers: ?????? this is to prevent theft? I never knew it was such a problem. I thought it was so that your clothes don't smell like smoke or get food on them. It's a nice touch. I like them. not in the average rundown restaurant. please note: this doesn't keep wait staff from stealing your cellphones off the table when you
The article was pretty decent at explaining tactics that the gov't and chinese bbs moderators use, but it didn't really go into how the government was into blocking SMS messages; it also didn't mention how exciting SMS might be for the Chinese people.
SMS offers the Chinese a fast and simple way to exchange information. The government, unles it where to shut down the whole SMS system, would be hard pressed to censor SMS in realtime. And with the rate at which messages can be sent, the dissemination of information can happen amazingly fast.
Protests during 1989 were said to have been organized by fax machine technology. Future protests will be organized through SMS-style technology.
It's a similar phenomenon to Japan's. It's a result of the skill sets needed to read characters and write characters being different. Word processing has helped people to forget how to write characters. I've had Chinese teachers in China who had to use dictionaries in class to look up how to write words. And of course there are the rural Chinese citizens, their reading skills are on a much lower level than urban residents (and their writing is even worse!).
I actually went to school there and learnt a lot about the Cathedral. Being interested in sculpture, it was a great place to be.
Darth is definitely on the Cathedral. They have a whole lot of other secrets everywhere in that building. It would make a nice coffee table book.
From my understanding all cathedrals have small little secrets like this. They are sort of like "Easter Eggs" in programs. Something spiffy and neat if you know where to look for it.
My favorite story about the National Cathedral (and 100% true)is that the faces for the "Genesis" sculpture on the front center doorway were modeled after strippers and waiters from an old Georgetown strip club.
Losing weight is a pretty simple thing and virtually every diet out there is the same. All diets try to limit calories whether they are low-fat diets or low-carb diets (like the popular Atkin's diet). Fewer calories is the key, and avoiding sodas, alchohol, high sugar foods, are an easy way to get rid of extra calories.
The thing to remember about low-calorie diets though si they stop working. At some point your body gets used to fewer calories; your body requires fewer calories. So you'll need to reduce your calories even more to lose more weight. (ie. your body requires 2000 calories a day. You go on a 1600 calorie/day diet. At somepoint your body will only require 1600 calories/day. At that point a 1600 calorie diet will not help you lose weight).
If you really want to lose weight, you'll also exercise. Exercise burns calories. You have to have a 3500 calorie deficit to lose one pound. If you exercise regularly and watch what you eat, this becomes rather easy. So take extra walks, walk that flight of stairs, restart your exercise regiment--it really makes a difference.
Obesity is a serious health problem around the world. By getting in shape, you are helping diminish the risk of many terrible illness (heart disease, diabetes, cancer).
Physicians who specialize in Bariatrics would be able to give you even more detail, and any physician can prescribe medications to curb your appetites. Good luck to everyone who wants to lose weight. You can do it.
The piracy of music in China is really ridiculous. My friend wanted to collect all of Faye Wong's CDs while in China, but ended up quiting after realizing that half of the CDs were just random assortments of her songs with (sometimes) new cover art.
Work is getting in the way of my proofing...
on
Just One Page a Day
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· Score: 1
Damn, work is getting in the way of my proof reading! Why can't I make my boss understand that Project Gutenberg is much more important than what I'm normally doing?
When I was in China I was glad to see that slashdot.org (about a year ago)wasn't blocked. Neither was the economist.com (which I found strange). But washington post, ny times, la times (and other major papers were blocked. ny times is not blocked now, right? Most of my news I could get from news.yahoo.com so I didn't really have any trouble with news sites, but virtually all free webhosting was blocked, and many universities were blocked as well. i used the Real-Time Testing link to test my old homepage at duke.edu and it said the link worked, but when I was in China the link definitely did not work.
also, it's mostly only the foreigners who have two prostitues sitting on their lap withing 5 minutes. It's because foreigners go to those places and pay for prostitutes, supply meets demand, and an ugly cycle begins. (I never met one chinese person who frequented prostitues. They either couldn't afford it or didn't need one)
I have an even better idea for introducing people to anime. Introduce it to them by genre. If they like comedy they are more likely to enjoy (Goldenboy, Lupin), romantic comedy(Kimagure Orange Road, Love Hina), sci-fi (Ghost in the Shell) psychological(Serial Experiments Lain, Perfect Blue),fantasy(Princess Mononoke), etc.
people will be much more receptive to anime once they realize it is a medium and not a genre. Also keep in mind that anime often slip between genres in ways that many american medium quite often don't (it's full of sci-fi romances[Vandread], and has some mecha-shoujo [Angelic Layer]for instance). Please also note that most of my suggestions are not personal favorites, but simply highly regarded series from particular genres.
The article is pretty out of touch with the real situation in china, as most of the linux in china articles are. Like most have said, piracy adn the ability to buy virtually any software for 1-3 dollars (at least in Beijing in 2001) make linux no cheaper than MS. The past year i was in china, i met zero people who use linux. The people who use linux in China are the same types of people who use Linux in America. If Linux really wants to gain marketshare on the desktop, it will have to address the same problems it has to address in America.
There's another dynamic, which I haven't seen mentioned: gaming. Gaming is getting pretty huge in the major cities with the highest percentage of people playing games that run on windows. It's pretty scary how popular it is; when i went to the internet cafe after I was done partying in the weekend, I'd find the place mostly full at 3am with people who had been glued to their screens playing games.
basically, this article is full of it.
Re:Now that they've won the desktop "war"
on
Microsoft's Future
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· Score: 1
Microsoft has done a lot research recently. In fact it has one of the largest (last time i checked it was the largest) pure research facillities in the corporate world. Their research goes beyond things that microsoft can sell, and even goes into fields that don't appear to have any links to the desktop,.NET, or computers.
i'm sorry to say it but once you hack into any other computer system, even if to just say, "I love you", it is a violation of the law and you are a criminal. You deserve to go to jail. how many of you have defaced a website or hacked into a private server? it is not acceptable behavior to do so.
In some cases i'd like to applaud white-hat hackers. but that, too, is illegal even though it's for a good purpose. to take a fictional example: batman. fights crime. does good. but he breaks the law to do it. he'd be in jail, just like all people who break into servers, hack computers, write viruses should be.
(if it weren't for you hackers, i'd be able to go at least one week without patching windows!!)
Under Section #1, Grant of License, the second paragraph headed "Restrictions" states in part: "You may not use the Software in connection with any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, or their products or services, infringe any intellectual property or other rights of these parties, violate any state, federal or international law, or promote racism, hatred or pornography." (Not only a stunning example of legal overreaching, in my opinion, but very poor grammar as well.)
Looking at this statement from a grammatical point of view, it is absolutely correct. It may seem long, but it is merely a sentence with compound verbs. last time I checked you didn't have to use seperate verbs in seperate sentences.
<br><br>Microsoft sucks, creates bloated software and takes advantage of their consumers is much better than saying: Microsoft sucks. Microsoft creates bloated software. Microsoft takes advantage of consumers. <br><br>
Learn grammatical rules before you criticize them. If you want to see comma usage and sentences even crazier than this one check out "Lord Jim" by Conrad.
I think the problem with Linux is one that hasn't been addressed (though it's been talked about for ages) fully. Usability. I am not a Linux user. I've tried it and I continue to tinker with it, but the simple fact remains that to affectively capture Home Users (and possibly businesses as well) is to make Linux usable for the "average" user (ie. if it's not on the desktop or the "Start" menu they aren't using it). I'm not saying that linux needs drastic changes, but how about a link on the desktop or on the menu? Linux has just about all the applications that a normal user desires, but Linux developers need to make sure that their programs have the same ease of use as win/mac programs. That starts with offering easily accessible links (i don't want to search/usr/bin/blahblahblah for the location of anything. period) and goes to a more important question: Do Linux Programmers want it to be a main stream program? If they do, they'll have to make GUI's and they'll have to work with the stupidest m$ users in the world. Once they can use it people will come, cause it is a cheaper alternative, a stable product, and a nice design. but somewhere along there the function gets lost.
i'm serious. the implications for this are astounding. not only will they be able to create character profiles of your behavior (what sites you like, what appeals to your eye, what interests you), but eventually they'll combine this with psychological profiles and analysis.
local gov'ts will force isp's to utilize the technology trying to seek out criminals (whose mouse behavior has been proven to act differently from others) and give them help or indiscriminantly arrest them.
then there are also weirdos like me who move there mice in circles constantly, while skimming a page and even reading it. they could tell the difference between wethere i'm reading or skimming a page (due to that handy universall scroll), but i'm not sure they'd get much more out of me except for the fact that i move my mouse around an awful lot.
eventually these technologies will lead to many interesting developments. yahoo will be able to do a psychological survey of you just by logging your keystroke information and your mouse behavior. I wonder if they could stop child pedophiles and deviant behavior with this technology... it has so many interesting possibilities.
Slashdot Mirror
The way it's written up in the Slate article, I would never want to participate in this scheme. Who would decide when the price would go up or down and by how much? the Record companies? Apple? The reason stock exchanges work is peopel get ownership of a real product (ie. a company) when they purchase stock. As written in slate, this Sounds more like a plan to get the most profit out of a song, squeezing as many consumers as possible. You want the new 50Cent? that'll be 4.99 oops 5.50. This would never work, unless...
The Record company actually floated parts of the song rights on the market. They might float 30-40% of Jay-lo's new album. J-Lo herself would own 10-20%, and the record company would still own 40-50% of the track, so they'd get about half of the profits from the track. Their could be an IPO and it would otherwise work as a normal stock with a certain percentage going towards dividends for stock holders and the rest being reinvested to sign new talent and groom new artists. As tracks get older the record company could float more of the track to raise profits, or make strategic buybacks, etc...
This would be a real market. Consumers would have a real product, actual ownership of the songs they adore.
We are getting it! thank you customizegoogle people!
The flip side to this is to have the MMORPG's have auction sites within the game. Rather than listing your stuff on ebay, you list it on the auction site within the MMORPG. You have a paypal like account with the game company who takes a paypal like percentage off of every transaction. Both buyer and seller are safer, because the transaction is guaranteed safe by the game. No more getting cheated, the game company increases their profits.. everyone is happy.
Macromedia Flash isn't installed on my Mozilla. I NEVER see those ads or any other annoying ads using Flash. If I need to look at a flash enabled page I just use IEView to open it up.
I realized years ago that Flash is mostly useful for viewing ads. Since I don't want to view those ads, I don't install it.
Once, I decided to try not installing flash on IE, but on just about every page, I'd get asked to install Flash 2-6 times.
I'm currently there. One thing to be aware of is different locations have different restrictions. Beijing and SHanghai will likely have the least restrictions, and hotels will probably have less restrictions than other ISPs. ISPs all seem to block slightly different material.
BBC News is still inaccessible.
Google News is inaccessible 95% of the time.
Small - Medium US newspapers are quite often blocked.
This past few days I couldn't access NYtimes or slashdot (maybe because of the dead ex-leader). China will cut access of during sensitive times like this. Yahoo news never seems to be affected though, so you could always get the AP stories.
But on the plus side, if you can read Chinese there are plenty of wonderful bittorent sites that have not been shut down. after the major BT closures I switched to Chinese sites and am still able to find everything I want. My time-shifted TV programs now have Chinese subtitles as an added bonus!!
This poster is correct. The easiest way to get a long-term visa in China is to simply pay someone 1000yuan or so to get a long-term visa. It is a lot easier then getting your job to get one for you and less problematic than marrying a Chinese person (which won't always get you a long-term visa easily anyway.).
Most people I know in China on a long term basis either go to HK every few months or have somehow illegally acquired a long term visa.
I'm in China and read (past tense) google news regularly until about 3 weeks ago. One day it dissappeared. I'm suffering from withdrawal. 3 painful weeks without googlenews. does anyone know of other news aggregators that are similar? can anyone come up with any way I'd be able to read my google news? help me, please. please.
I've been living in China for over 2 years, and have travelled extensively there. I hate crap articles that for the most part aren't true. I'll take this one step by step:
intro:
supermarket spills - alas, they don't bother to disenfect anything at the average supermarket. Some recent imports, Carefour etc., might do better, but simply moving the spill around with water and then drying it might not seem hygenic to some.
free head-and-shoulder massages w/ haircut: this is true. And it's an excellent service. But I usually cut my own hair cause I don't want it to look jacked. You can also get handjobs and blowjobs for 30-100 yuan more. Great services. The Chinese are way ahead of us here.
free movie ticket couriers: true. All couriers for services are free in my experience. Currently their online stores also use these couriers. You order online and a guy comes on a bike with your books and you pay him. quite nice.
duvet covers (even in rural china): yes. it's true. but, if they are freshly laundered, why do they smell so bad? Most of the time you feel like the blankets have been sitting in a smelly closet for weeks, not like they just came in off the line.
automated lockers: they're starting to use them in some stores. Most have places where you check your bag with a person.
taxis, subways, etc with panels and tv: true for about 1% of all taxis (if that much) the buses with tv are pretty annoying but they are thankfully few and far between (there are many more buses with wooden floors with holes where you can see the road)
electronic fly swatter: this is so cool! some are shaped like a small tennis racket. you push a little button and electricity runs through the wire strings. great fun killing bugs and for using on friends when they're drunk.
magnetic-levitation train: it's amazing. so is there space program. So is the realization that they are doing this despite the fact that so many of their people live in complete poverty and would love to have a better life.
1) Cellphones: coverage is extensive. prices aren't that cheap, but it is pay as you go. You pay for incoming and outgoing calls (the same for each)/ SMS messages (cheaper for incoming). on an average month I'll spend about 150-200RMB which works out to 20-25USD.(I like to SMS a lot and don't like using talking on the phone much--most of the time other people call me) It doesn't seem that much cheaper to me. Might have something to do with the Monopoly that is China Mobile.
2)Traffic Lights: this is true, and they are using them more and more. Beijing's use of them is pretty light (no more than 5% of all ligths-a VERY generous estimate as I've only seen 2 or 3), but in Southern cities like Guangzhou or Guilin, most traffic lights are of this type. Unfortunately in China red light means, "I can still go through the extension for the next five seconds."
3)transit debit cards: I haven't been to shanghai in a while, so I'll assume this is true. They do give a lot of nice things to Shanghai (they being the communist party). Taxi receipts are printed. One of the main reason is so that you can report a taxi driver who took you for a ride.
4)Adult playgrounds: true (at least for Beijing--I haven't seen them in small cities; a small city in china is still over 1million people). They also have an occasional program on TV on how to use these machinese. They range from things where you swing your legs and arms like a floating cross trainer, to weight lifting contraptions, to pull up bars, to ping pong tables in some places. And Chinese old people are more active than their western counterparts. But I'd hardly call the air fresh.
5)anti-theft slipcovers: ?????? this is to prevent theft? I never knew it was such a problem. I thought it was so that your clothes don't smell like smoke or get food on them. It's a nice touch. I like them. not in the average rundown restaurant. please note: this doesn't keep wait staff from stealing your cellphones off the table when you
I'd love to read about how censorship is failing in China but I can't access BBC from Beijing.
The article was pretty decent at explaining tactics that the gov't and chinese bbs moderators use, but it didn't really go into how the government was into blocking SMS messages; it also didn't mention how exciting SMS might be for the Chinese people.
SMS offers the Chinese a fast and simple way to exchange information. The government, unles it where to shut down the whole SMS system, would be hard pressed to censor SMS in realtime. And with the rate at which messages can be sent, the dissemination of information can happen amazingly fast.
Protests during 1989 were said to have been organized by fax machine technology. Future protests will be organized through SMS-style technology.
It's a similar phenomenon to Japan's. It's a result of the skill sets needed to read characters and write characters being different. Word processing has helped people to forget how to write characters. I've had Chinese teachers in China who had to use dictionaries in class to look up how to write words. And of course there are the rural Chinese citizens, their reading skills are on a much lower level than urban residents (and their writing is even worse!).
It's a problem that will continue to grow.
I actually went to school there and learnt a lot about the Cathedral. Being interested in sculpture, it was a great place to be.
Darth is definitely on the Cathedral. They have a whole lot of other secrets everywhere in that building. It would make a nice coffee table book.
From my understanding all cathedrals have small little secrets like this. They are sort of like "Easter Eggs" in programs. Something spiffy and neat if you know where to look for it.
My favorite story about the National Cathedral (and 100% true)is that the faces for the "Genesis" sculpture on the front center doorway were modeled after strippers and waiters from an old Georgetown strip club.
Losing weight is a pretty simple thing and virtually every diet out there is the same. All diets try to limit calories whether they are low-fat diets or low-carb diets (like the popular Atkin's diet). Fewer calories is the key, and avoiding sodas, alchohol, high sugar foods, are an easy way to get rid of extra calories.
The thing to remember about low-calorie diets though si they stop working. At some point your body gets used to fewer calories; your body requires fewer calories. So you'll need to reduce your calories even more to lose more weight. (ie. your body requires 2000 calories a day. You go on a 1600 calorie/day diet. At somepoint your body will only require 1600 calories/day. At that point a 1600 calorie diet will not help you lose weight).
If you really want to lose weight, you'll also exercise. Exercise burns calories. You have to have a 3500 calorie deficit to lose one pound. If you exercise regularly and watch what you eat, this becomes rather easy. So take extra walks, walk that flight of stairs, restart your exercise regiment--it really makes a difference.
Obesity is a serious health problem around the world. By getting in shape, you are helping diminish the risk of many terrible illness (heart disease, diabetes, cancer).
Physicians who specialize in Bariatrics would be able to give you even more detail, and any physician can prescribe medications to curb your appetites. Good luck to everyone who wants to lose weight. You can do it.
The piracy of music in China is really ridiculous. My friend wanted to collect all of Faye Wong's CDs while in China, but ended up quiting after realizing that half of the CDs were just random assortments of her songs with (sometimes) new cover art.
Damn, work is getting in the way of my proof reading! Why can't I make my boss understand that Project Gutenberg is much more important than what I'm normally doing?
When I was in China I was glad to see that slashdot.org (about a year ago)wasn't blocked. Neither was the economist.com (which I found strange). But washington post, ny times, la times (and other major papers were blocked. ny times is not blocked now, right? Most of my news I could get from news.yahoo.com so I didn't really have any trouble with news sites, but virtually all free webhosting was blocked, and many universities were blocked as well. i used the Real-Time Testing link to test my old homepage at duke.edu and it said the link worked, but when I was in China the link definitely did not work.
also, it's mostly only the foreigners who have two prostitues sitting on their lap withing 5 minutes. It's because foreigners go to those places and pay for prostitutes, supply meets demand, and an ugly cycle begins. (I never met one chinese person who frequented prostitues. They either couldn't afford it or didn't need one)
"Also many people believe the media shouldn't be allowed to question the government in times of war..."
This solidifies one of my beliefs: many people are stupid.
I have an even better idea for introducing people to anime. Introduce it to them by genre. If they like comedy they are more likely to enjoy (Goldenboy, Lupin), romantic comedy(Kimagure Orange Road, Love Hina), sci-fi (Ghost in the Shell) psychological(Serial Experiments Lain, Perfect Blue),fantasy(Princess Mononoke), etc.
people will be much more receptive to anime once they realize it is a medium and not a genre. Also keep in mind that anime often slip between genres in ways that many american medium quite often don't (it's full of sci-fi romances[Vandread], and has some mecha-shoujo [Angelic Layer]for instance). Please also note that most of my suggestions are not personal favorites, but simply highly regarded series from particular genres.
The article is pretty out of touch with the real situation in china, as most of the linux in china articles are. Like most have said, piracy adn the ability to buy virtually any software for 1-3 dollars (at least in Beijing in 2001) make linux no cheaper than MS. The past year i was in china, i met zero people who use linux. The people who use linux in China are the same types of people who use Linux in America. If Linux really wants to gain marketshare on the desktop, it will have to address the same problems it has to address in America.
There's another dynamic, which I haven't seen mentioned: gaming. Gaming is getting pretty huge in the major cities with the highest percentage of people playing games that run on windows. It's pretty scary how popular it is; when i went to the internet cafe after I was done partying in the weekend, I'd find the place mostly full at 3am with people who had been glued to their screens playing games.
basically, this article is full of it.
Microsoft has done a lot research recently. In fact it has one of the largest (last time i checked it was the largest) pure research facillities in the corporate world. Their research goes beyond things that microsoft can sell, and even goes into fields that don't appear to have any links to the desktop, .NET, or computers.
Come up with a valid reason to bash microsoft.
i'm sorry to say it but once you hack into any other computer system, even if to just say, "I love you", it is a violation of the law and you are a criminal. You deserve to go to jail. how many of you have defaced a website or hacked into a private server? it is not acceptable behavior to do so.
In some cases i'd like to applaud white-hat hackers. but that, too, is illegal even though it's for a good purpose. to take a fictional example: batman. fights crime. does good. but he breaks the law to do it. he'd be in jail, just like all people who break into servers, hack computers, write viruses should be.
(if it weren't for you hackers, i'd be able to go at least one week without patching windows!!)
Under Section #1, Grant of License, the second paragraph headed "Restrictions" states in part: "You may not use the Software in connection with any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, or their products or services, infringe any intellectual property or other rights of these parties, violate any state, federal or international law, or promote racism, hatred or pornography." (Not only a stunning example of legal overreaching, in my opinion, but very poor grammar as well.)
Looking at this statement from a grammatical point of view, it is absolutely correct. It may seem long, but it is merely a sentence with compound verbs. last time I checked you didn't have to use seperate verbs in seperate sentences.
<br><br>Microsoft sucks, creates bloated software and takes advantage of their consumers is much better than saying: Microsoft sucks. Microsoft creates bloated software. Microsoft takes advantage of consumers. <br><br>
Learn grammatical rules before you criticize them. If you want to see comma usage and sentences even crazier than this one check out "Lord Jim" by Conrad.
I think the problem with Linux is one that hasn't been addressed (though it's been talked about for ages) fully. Usability. I am not a Linux user. I've tried it and I continue to tinker with it, but the simple fact remains that to affectively capture Home Users (and possibly businesses as well) is to make Linux usable for the "average" user (ie. if it's not on the desktop or the "Start" menu they aren't using it). I'm not saying that linux needs drastic changes, but how about a link on the desktop or on the menu? Linux has just about all the applications that a normal user desires, but Linux developers need to make sure that their programs have the same ease of use as win/mac programs. That starts with offering easily accessible links (i don't want to search /usr/bin/blahblahblah for the location of anything. period) and goes to a more important question: Do Linux Programmers want it to be a main stream program? If they do, they'll have to make GUI's and they'll have to work with the stupidest m$ users in the world. Once they can use it people will come, cause it is a cheaper alternative, a stable product, and a nice design. but somewhere along there the function gets lost.
i'm serious. the implications for this are astounding. not only will they be able to create character profiles of your behavior (what sites you like, what appeals to your eye, what interests you), but eventually they'll combine this with psychological profiles and analysis.
local gov'ts will force isp's to utilize the technology trying to seek out criminals (whose mouse behavior has been proven to act differently from others) and give them help or indiscriminantly arrest them.
oh the future looks bright.
then there are also weirdos like me who move there mice in circles constantly, while skimming a page and even reading it. they could tell the difference between wethere i'm reading or skimming a page (due to that handy universall scroll), but i'm not sure they'd get much more out of me except for the fact that i move my mouse around an awful lot.
eventually these technologies will lead to many interesting developments. yahoo will be able to do a psychological survey of you just by logging your keystroke information and your mouse behavior. I wonder if they could stop child pedophiles and deviant behavior with this technology... it has so many interesting possibilities.