Yeah pub food is generally pretty bland and predictable, although it's generally hot, greasy, starchy and salty enough to be satisfying after 12 pints.
Keira Knightley has a fat arse, and no talent. Chicken Tikka masala is bland and foreign. Hurricanes and Tornadoes are fun as they kill rednecks in trailers. Shame there isn't a British equivalent which kills townies on council estates.
Which is why Britain is globally recognised as being home to many of the world's top chefs, right?
That's completely irrelevent to what most people eat. For every 'top chef' there are a million people eating bland chip butties or boiled vegetables or frozen pizza.
Though honesty is important as well. Google's motto is do no wrong, and I for one am inclind to believe them.
Well done, you've bought all the carefully crafted PR designed to make people think they're a company descended from heaven, and to raise an army of rabid fanboys who excuse all their failures (whilst condemning identical failures of other companies).
You might think they have this 'aura' of being non-evil, with a goal of benefiting mankind, but the best PR is the sort that makes people feel like they've come up with the opinion of the company themselves.
There's a programme like the Office or Black Books perhaps every two or three years. In between that there are a million 'filler' programmes: cookery programmes, soaps, DIY programmes, fly-on-the-wall documentaries, chat-shows, gardening programmes, repeats, old shitty films, shitty forgettable crime dramas, more repeats etc. Occasionally there's the odd decent documentary, but it's dumbed down beyond belief. Also not forgetting the 'Robert Winston' bloke's programmes which consist of 5 minutes of content stretched out into a 90 minute bore.
The BBC probably releases two DVD's worth of decent content a year. Is it worth £120+ for that?
That doesn't make it cheap, it just means that in the US the European Championships are an obscure foreign event that hardly anyone wants to watch, so it's on an obscure pay-per-view channel.
Also you're not taking into account that the only reason the BBC got the coverage and not Sky was because the government effectively granted it the rights. If it was an open bidding war, the BBC would never get near any live football.
I'm not so sure about that. $200 a year for two channels*. That's $100 a year per channel, $2 a week per channel. In the last week, I watched a total of three BBC programmes. That's over $1 per programme. Doesn't look such value for money now does it? Of those programmes, I didn't even watch one all the way through. A pay-per-view service would be a lot cheaper than that.
* Yes there are more channels than that. There are obscure digital channels requiring a 'set top box' to access. I bought such a box, and it didn't work. Even then, the channels are worthless. BBC3 and BBC4, absolutely no content whatsoever. The BBC use it to put new programmes on, to try and 'force' people to get a digital box. For every Little Britain, there are a million programmes which never see the light of day. And even Little Britain could have been showed straight away on BBC2. They just don't have enough content to fill that many channels. Take out all the repeats and shitty soaps, and they don't even have enough content to fill ONE channel.
I'll pass on food. Climate is not that bad compared to most of Canada,
Well, there's not as much rain as there is in really bad climates, like in rainforests and such, and it's not as cold as Canada or Russia, and it's not extremely windy, but it's just rainy enough, just cold enough, and just windy enough to be constantly grey and horrible all year round. Not enough to set any records, but just enough to make living here a complete misery.
The food's generally pretty bland, but that's not much of a criticism coming from Americans, where cooking consists of taking some food, soaking it in sugar, covering it in cheese and deep frying it.
Yeah, the women are ugly. Fat, pale, rotting teeth, loud-mouthed and vulgar, pregnant at 13, drug addicted at 15, going out at night half-naked with their giant stretch-marked guts wobbling in the breeze But I'm not listening to criticisms from Americans. The American women on TV might look good, but in real life, think about the 99% obesity rate, and think of Oprah Winfrey extrapolated over 300 million people.
Except, those things are only in the new version, which has enough awfulness to CANCEL OUT all the good new features. The right hand giveth, the left hand taketh away. That seems to be Google's philosophy at least. And I think we can safely say that the 'Don't be Evil' motto is well and truly obsolete.
On the other hand, it makes it so that people who aren't obsessive TV viewers who religiously watch every single episode, all in order, can't get into it. If you sit down and watch a single episode, you won't understand it. That doesn't make it a better programme, it doesn't 'raise it to a higher level', it just narrows its appeal, and turns it more into a soap.
Nah, web forums have some good features. The main one is that it's a lower barrier to entry, so you get to talk to more normal people about more normal things, rather than Usenet which has a mainly nerd slant. There are features like different categories, whereas in Usenet all posts are thrust into one big mess, so you end up digging through all the off-topic posts to get to the on-topic ones.
Also on web forums you don't have to download every single post, possibly thousands, just to get to the one you want. The worst part of Usenet is sitting there whilst hundreds of posts come down one by one, just so you can ignore 99% of them.
There's also only one decent Usenet client: Agent, which you have to pay for. All the rest are unusable garbage.
Many years ago I used to love Usenet. I'd sit there all night downloading hundreds of posts, going through every single one, participating in every single flamewar, but it gets boring after a while. Sometimes you just want to get to the point and get to the topics you're interested in rather than sifting through pigshit for pearls.
1) There's no way to follow threads properly. When you go into a group, it doesn't mark which ones you've already read or not, so you have to go through the entire lot. 2) It doesn't show long posts all at once, you need to click on 'Read the rest of this message' to read it all, which is fucking torture on long threads. 3) You can't change your settings once you've signed up. 4) Frames. 5) Different threads with identical subjects are lumped together. 6) Posts with no-archive set don't appear at all, making a lot of threads completely unreadable.
And that's just with the old version. The new version is a hundred times worse. They haven't fixed the problems with the old one, but they've taken away all the GOOD bits instead. The previously simple, compact thread-list which made browsing the newsgroup pretty easy, is now replaced with a completely bloated list which takes up EIGHT lines per thread, rather than the usual ONE.
You can go to the old version at groups.google.co.uk, but they've crippled it so you can't reply to a post. When you try to reply, it gives an error about not being able to retrieve the post you're replying to. I mean come on, all those fucking genius PHDs and master-programmers, and they can't get something right that Deja was doing right ten years ago? I can't believe that a company that constantly boasts how clever and talented they are, can actually make an interface go BACKWARDS.
The motive is obvious: profit. If they dumb it down, fuck over all the 'old' users, and try to attract the drooling masses with a bloated cartoon interface, they can get more ad-hits. Bollocks to usability or functionality, bollocks to the integrity of one of the Internet's oldest services, nothing is sacred from the latest dot-com raping it for profit.
People are always saying how great the gmail interface is, but I don't see how that can be when google groups is so poor, unless they're concentrating all their resources on gmail, because it's the new 'glamour' service. Although I suppose eventually it will go the same way as google groups: They'll come out with a new and improved 'beta' version, with a crippled awful interface ten times worse than the original, then put some bug in the old one so people can't go back to it.
Yes, not all of us live in an area with better access, nor can afford it. You fucking arrogant elitist bastard.
but Linux works with most Winmodems these days.
No it doesn't. It doesn't even work properly with modems it supports. I have a modem with a proper Linux driver, and it still crashes all the time, and only connects at half speed. Linux in 2005 is worse than Windows in 1995.
Whether MS Office or OpenOffice is better really depends on the features.
No, it depends on the interface. OpenOffice looks like the programmers put the interface on as an afterthought when they'd rather be thinking about 'cool' features... When you're using a program for hours a day, doing the same operations over and over, it's not acceptable for the interface to be designed in a braindead way that pisses you off and makes things less fluent.
Er, as I mentioned earlier, Linux on a PC has the advantage of being able to play Windows games
It plays a handful of games. Arguing whether Linux or the Mac are better for games is like arguing which dwarf is tallest.
Note: I use Linux almost exclusively, so my opinions are based on fact and I am not biased against Linux.
You can take a Linux box out of the box, plug it in, and be on the Internet doing whatever you want to do in about five minutes.
You'd be lucky if the modem worked with Linux. Also Linux is a real hassle to configure, especially where hardware is concerned. If you think Linux user-friendliness comes close to OSX, you're wrong. Linux is good because it's customisable and powerful, not because it's user-friendly. If you want a user-friendly alternative to Microsoft, that's what Macs are for.
There's a proper firewall turned on by default
If you're lucky. Lucky if a) It works, b) It doesn't cut off services you want to use later. iptables is a hack.
It comes with great personal productivity software: Thunderbird, Evo, OpenOffice, and in many cases, Totem / MPlayer.
Open Office is poor compared to MS Office which runs on the Mac. It may have the features, but as far as usability is concerned, MS Office is user-friendly and nice to work with. The interface in OO gets in the way of using it effectively. Also it is slow and bloated, and still opens all at once rather than seperate programs. Doesn't that go against the old philosophy of each program doing something specific and well, rather than an all-in-one program? Some Linux distros don't even play mp3s out of the box.
Then, of course, you can play a lot more games on Linux on a PC than you can with OSX
99% of those are tetris clones or nethack clones or hunt the wumpus.
Given that Linux does so much
A new slogan: Linux does a lot, badly. OSX does just as much, and does it a lot better.
What's ICQ? What's Ogg Vorbis When did you get Internet access?
He's taking the piss. ICQ is past it, Ogg Vorbis is dead in the water. It's completely irrelevent.
When have you used GNU/Linux with any graphical UI? And what was the distribution? I think you haven't seen any modern desktops. In past 15 years I have used all kinds of operating systems Windows, OS/2, GNU/Linux distributions, Solaris, Irix, Mac Os classic and Mac Os X. They all habe usable GUI's but on my humble opinion Os X is one of the strangest of them all. Integrating software totally into operatings systems own GUI messes things up I think.
It's not about how integrated it is, it's about how consistent it is. When you have different 'suites' or 'desktops' of software, programs are consistent within themselves, but when you mix them up, the result is a disaster.
If Linux follows usability guidelines, I'd have loved to be a fly on the wall in the meeting where they decided on such guidelines:
"OK, rather than having every program use the same toolkit to give a consistent look and feel, let's have several different toolkits, all incompatible." "Yeah, let's have a couple, let's called them 'Gnome' and 'KDE'. We can make it so that if you use Gnome and install a theme, the theme doesn't come up on the KDE programs, or when you change a usability setting on KDE, it doesn't work in Gnome programs." "Good idea, that's sure to improve user-friendliness." "We should have several sets of redundant software, say 30 text editors, and 5 mail programs, and 8 word processors, all incompatible, so you can't copy and paste properly between them." "And we can put them all in the program menus!" "Yes, the user will love the massive choice on offer!" "Don't forget to have two different backgrounds, so if you set a background in KDE, and then use a Gnome program, say xchat, with transparency, the KDE background doesn't show through the xchat window." "Ah yes, having multiple backgrounds gives the user choice, this can only be a roaring success." "And the icing on the cake, let's have an office suite, say Open Office, which doesn't have seperate programs, but all opens at once, to slow the user down and get in the way of using the program." "And the icing on the cake: Make it so that when you install Open Office, it doesn't come up in the KDE menu, so the user has to open it via the command line, or make an icon manually." "Surely this year is the year of the Linux Desktop!"
Just email me (or anybody else with a gmail account), and you'll get an invite. You don't have to use it forever, just try it.
It's ok, I already have an e-mail account. In fact several. I never use most of them. They're pretty much all the same. The main distinguishing feature of this gmail thing is pure hype, combined with rabid fanboyism.
What other _free_ webmail system you've seen that offers:
All those features are pretty unimpressive. Most of them are worthless. I've no need for a gigabyte of mail. Neither does gmail, other than for spying on your past email. If I wanted that I'd just print out all my email and sellotape it to my front door. My other webmail accounts give me hundreds of megabytes, I never use more than a couple at a time.
Also don't be surprised to see most of those features disappear from the 'free' version when they start charging for it.
labels instead of folders, so you can have orthogonal categories without extra effort
Think long hot DRY summers - crop failure, famine, death and disease.
Ah....long hot summers, I can't wait. As for dry and crop failure, that's what we have water for. It generally counteracts the effects of dryness. Also, there are countries with warm sunny climates and they haven't died of famine, in fact they'r thriving. What are you talking about? Are you saying that Italy for instance is an arid wasteland, where not even olives can grow?
Think of Europe having much colder winters because of the lack of a thermocline to drive the gulf stream currents.
That comment lacks a basis in reality. You have no evidence of the gulf stream being disrupted. Please stick to facts in this discussion.
Think of rising oceans as the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps melt, and as the waters around the earth rise due to thermal expansion.
That will be insignificant. Also the temperature will not have to rise high enough to melt the ice caps in order to give us a nice climate.
Think of recurring global catastrophies that make the recent tidal wave look like "just another day".
That is pure speculation, the same as your comment about cold winters. You have no evidence for this, you have given no details. Claiming the sky is falling doesn't make a coherent argument against global warming. You have nothing to say.
Think of what we're handing our kids.
A warmer, nicer place to live? What a great legacy.
At any rate, there's nothing we can do about it anyway, so just sit back, crack open a cool can of beer, warm up the barbecue, slap on the sun-cream and enjoy it.
I'm sick of living under constant cold and rain, this news is fantastic. If only we humans could influence and accelerate this global warming thing, rather than it being just a natural variation, it would be fantastic! Long hot summers, warm winters, sunny springs and autumns, life would be a hundred times better.
gmail gave me 50 invites. pretty much everyone i know of has (or doesn't want) a gmail account.
Hmmm, if everyone who wants an account has one, why do they have the 'invite' system? Why not just let everyone sign up and take it out of 'beta'? I personally can't get an account, and by the sounds of things I don't want one, I don't like the idea of some corporation spying on my entire e-mail history. Also it doesn't really seem to offer anything over the other webmail systems.
it's probably some smart marketing strategy. i just haven't been able to figure it out yet
Apparently if they put 'beta' in the corner, if absolves them from taking responsibility for it, like when it all goes wrong they can say 'well it was only in a testing stage so fuck you all'. Or perhaps they just don't have the balls to say 'this system works'.
Where the hell does the money go? It can't be in the acting, or the writing, or direction, or editing, or sets, or special effects, or anything related to the quality of the programme.
What sort of program costs $50 million per episode? I don't think even Friends cost that much, and that's with paying their over-rated 'actors' millions per episode. Personally if I were in charge of Friends I'd have sacked the lot of them many years sooner, and used the money on paying writers to come up with something decent.
Could probably save a pretty penny by not having to pay so many executives
Have you ever thought that executives are there for a reason? Because they are effective at running things? Without executives, what are you going to do? Have a vote between ten thousand people on every little thing? Or elect executives who would work for free? This would mean having people there who were most popular rather than who were any good at the job.
Nobody's going to send Google's founders to the poorhouse, if that's what your goal is.
Where in my post did I say or imply that I had some sort of 'goal' regarding Google? I am merely stating the irrelevence of Slashdot.
If Google did something to shut down or reduce support of Wikipedia, they would lose all that public relations gold, and they would gain nothing, because negative information about Google is not going to be hard to find, ever.
Google's success depends on relations with two people: advertisers and investors. Neither give a damn about Slashdot, or any of the geek fanboys who masturbate over every latest 'beta' service from google. As long as people keep buying adverts (which they will), Google's success is guaranteed.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah pub food is generally pretty bland and predictable, although it's generally hot, greasy, starchy and salty enough to be satisfying after 12 pints.
Keira Knightley has a fat arse, and no talent.
Chicken Tikka masala is bland and foreign.
Hurricanes and Tornadoes are fun as they kill rednecks in trailers. Shame there isn't a British equivalent which kills townies on council estates.
Which is why Britain is globally recognised as being home to many of the world's top chefs, right?
That's completely irrelevent to what most people eat. For every 'top chef' there are a million people eating bland chip butties or boiled vegetables or frozen pizza.
Though honesty is important as well. Google's motto is do no wrong, and I for one am inclind to believe them.
Well done, you've bought all the carefully crafted PR designed to make people think they're a company descended from heaven, and to raise an army of rabid fanboys who excuse all their failures (whilst condemning identical failures of other companies).
You might think they have this 'aura' of being non-evil, with a goal of benefiting mankind, but the best PR is the sort that makes people feel like they've come up with the opinion of the company themselves.
There's a programme like the Office or Black Books perhaps every two or three years. In between that there are a million 'filler' programmes: cookery programmes, soaps, DIY programmes, fly-on-the-wall documentaries, chat-shows, gardening programmes, repeats, old shitty films, shitty forgettable crime dramas, more repeats etc. Occasionally there's the odd decent documentary, but it's dumbed down beyond belief. Also not forgetting the 'Robert Winston' bloke's programmes which consist of 5 minutes of content stretched out into a 90 minute bore.
The BBC probably releases two DVD's worth of decent content a year. Is it worth £120+ for that?
That doesn't make it cheap, it just means that in the US the European Championships are an obscure foreign event that hardly anyone wants to watch, so it's on an obscure pay-per-view channel.
Also you're not taking into account that the only reason the BBC got the coverage and not Sky was because the government effectively granted it the rights. If it was an open bidding war, the BBC would never get near any live football.
I'm not so sure about that. $200 a year for two channels*. That's $100 a year per channel, $2 a week per channel. In the last week, I watched a total of three BBC programmes. That's over $1 per programme. Doesn't look such value for money now does it? Of those programmes, I didn't even watch one all the way through. A pay-per-view service would be a lot cheaper than that.
* Yes there are more channels than that. There are obscure digital channels requiring a 'set top box' to access. I bought such a box, and it didn't work. Even then, the channels are worthless. BBC3 and BBC4, absolutely no content whatsoever. The BBC use it to put new programmes on, to try and 'force' people to get a digital box. For every Little Britain, there are a million programmes which never see the light of day. And even Little Britain could have been showed straight away on BBC2. They just don't have enough content to fill that many channels. Take out all the repeats and shitty soaps, and they don't even have enough content to fill ONE channel.
I'll pass on food. Climate is not that bad compared to most of Canada,
Well, there's not as much rain as there is in really bad climates, like in rainforests and such, and it's not as cold as Canada or Russia, and it's not extremely windy, but it's just rainy enough, just cold enough, and just windy enough to be constantly grey and horrible all year round. Not enough to set any records, but just enough to make living here a complete misery.
The food's generally pretty bland, but that's not much of a criticism coming from Americans, where cooking consists of taking some food, soaking it in sugar, covering it in cheese and deep frying it.
Yeah, the women are ugly. Fat, pale, rotting teeth, loud-mouthed and vulgar, pregnant at 13, drug addicted at 15, going out at night half-naked with their giant stretch-marked guts wobbling in the breeze But I'm not listening to criticisms from Americans. The American women on TV might look good, but in real life, think about the 99% obesity rate, and think of Oprah Winfrey extrapolated over 300 million people.
Except, those things are only in the new version, which has enough awfulness to CANCEL OUT all the good new features. The right hand giveth, the left hand taketh away. That seems to be Google's philosophy at least. And I think we can safely say that the 'Don't be Evil' motto is well and truly obsolete.
On the other hand, it makes it so that people who aren't obsessive TV viewers who religiously watch every single episode, all in order, can't get into it. If you sit down and watch a single episode, you won't understand it. That doesn't make it a better programme, it doesn't 'raise it to a higher level', it just narrows its appeal, and turns it more into a soap.
Nah, web forums have some good features. The main one is that it's a lower barrier to entry, so you get to talk to more normal people about more normal things, rather than Usenet which has a mainly nerd slant. There are features like different categories, whereas in Usenet all posts are thrust into one big mess, so you end up digging through all the off-topic posts to get to the on-topic ones.
Also on web forums you don't have to download every single post, possibly thousands, just to get to the one you want. The worst part of Usenet is sitting there whilst hundreds of posts come down one by one, just so you can ignore 99% of them.
There's also only one decent Usenet client: Agent, which you have to pay for. All the rest are unusable garbage.
Many years ago I used to love Usenet. I'd sit there all night downloading hundreds of posts, going through every single one, participating in every single flamewar, but it gets boring after a while. Sometimes you just want to get to the point and get to the topics you're interested in rather than sifting through pigshit for pearls.
Google groups is fucking awful. For example:
1) There's no way to follow threads properly. When you go into a group, it doesn't mark which ones you've already read or not, so you have to go through the entire lot.
2) It doesn't show long posts all at once, you need to click on 'Read the rest of this message' to read it all, which is fucking torture on long threads.
3) You can't change your settings once you've signed up.
4) Frames.
5) Different threads with identical subjects are lumped together.
6) Posts with no-archive set don't appear at all, making a lot of threads completely unreadable.
And that's just with the old version. The new version is a hundred times worse. They haven't fixed the problems with the old one, but they've taken away all the GOOD bits instead. The previously simple, compact thread-list which made browsing the newsgroup pretty easy, is now replaced with a completely bloated list which takes up EIGHT lines per thread, rather than the usual ONE.
You can go to the old version at groups.google.co.uk, but they've crippled it so you can't reply to a post. When you try to reply, it gives an error about not being able to retrieve the post you're replying to. I mean come on, all those fucking genius PHDs and master-programmers, and they can't get something right that Deja was doing right ten years ago? I can't believe that a company that constantly boasts how clever and talented they are, can actually make an interface go BACKWARDS.
The motive is obvious: profit. If they dumb it down, fuck over all the 'old' users, and try to attract the drooling masses with a bloated cartoon interface, they can get more ad-hits. Bollocks to usability or functionality, bollocks to the integrity of one of the Internet's oldest services, nothing is sacred from the latest dot-com raping it for profit.
People are always saying how great the gmail interface is, but I don't see how that can be when google groups is so poor, unless they're concentrating all their resources on gmail, because it's the new 'glamour' service. Although I suppose eventually it will go the same way as google groups: They'll come out with a new and improved 'beta' version, with a crippled awful interface ten times worse than the original, then put some bug in the old one so people can't go back to it.
Yeah, it's so good you can post that same joke to Slashdot thousands and thousands of times, and people still think it's original!
You're still using a modem in 2005?
Yes, not all of us live in an area with better access, nor can afford it. You fucking arrogant elitist bastard.
but Linux works with most Winmodems these days.
No it doesn't. It doesn't even work properly with modems it supports. I have a modem with a proper Linux driver, and it still crashes all the time, and only connects at half speed. Linux in 2005 is worse than Windows in 1995.
Whether MS Office or OpenOffice is better really depends on the features.
No, it depends on the interface. OpenOffice looks like the programmers put the interface on as an afterthought when they'd rather be thinking about 'cool' features... When you're using a program for hours a day, doing the same operations over and over, it's not acceptable for the interface to be designed in a braindead way that pisses you off and makes things less fluent.
Er, as I mentioned earlier, Linux on a PC has the advantage of being able to play Windows games
It plays a handful of games. Arguing whether Linux or the Mac are better for games is like arguing which dwarf is tallest.
Note: I use Linux almost exclusively, so my opinions are based on fact and I am not biased against Linux.
You can take a Linux box out of the box, plug it in, and be on the Internet doing whatever you want to do in about five minutes.
You'd be lucky if the modem worked with Linux. Also Linux is a real hassle to configure, especially where hardware is concerned. If you think Linux user-friendliness comes close to OSX, you're wrong. Linux is good because it's customisable and powerful, not because it's user-friendly. If you want a user-friendly alternative to Microsoft, that's what Macs are for.
There's a proper firewall turned on by default
If you're lucky. Lucky if a) It works, b) It doesn't cut off services you want to use later. iptables is a hack.
It comes with great personal productivity software: Thunderbird, Evo, OpenOffice, and in many cases, Totem / MPlayer.
Open Office is poor compared to MS Office which runs on the Mac. It may have the features, but as far as usability is concerned, MS Office is user-friendly and nice to work with. The interface in OO gets in the way of using it effectively. Also it is slow and bloated, and still opens all at once rather than seperate programs. Doesn't that go against the old philosophy of each program doing something specific and well, rather than an all-in-one program? Some Linux distros don't even play mp3s out of the box.
Then, of course, you can play a lot more games on Linux on a PC than you can with OSX
99% of those are tetris clones or nethack clones or hunt the wumpus.
Given that Linux does so much
A new slogan:
Linux does a lot, badly.
OSX does just as much, and does it a lot better.
What's ICQ? What's Ogg Vorbis
When did you get Internet access?
He's taking the piss. ICQ is past it, Ogg Vorbis is dead in the water. It's completely irrelevent.
When have you used GNU/Linux with any graphical UI? And what was the distribution? I think you haven't seen any modern desktops. In past 15 years I have used all kinds of operating systems Windows, OS/2, GNU/Linux distributions, Solaris, Irix, Mac Os classic and Mac Os X. They all habe usable GUI's but on my humble opinion Os X is one of the strangest of them all. Integrating software totally into operatings systems own GUI messes things up I think.
It's not about how integrated it is, it's about how consistent it is. When you have different 'suites' or 'desktops' of software, programs are consistent within themselves, but when you mix them up, the result is a disaster.
If Linux follows usability guidelines, I'd have loved to be a fly on the wall in the meeting where they decided on such guidelines:
"OK, rather than having every program use the same toolkit to give a consistent look and feel, let's have several different toolkits, all incompatible."
"Yeah, let's have a couple, let's called them 'Gnome' and 'KDE'. We can make it so that if you use Gnome and install a theme, the theme doesn't come up on the KDE programs, or when you change a usability setting on KDE, it doesn't work in Gnome programs."
"Good idea, that's sure to improve user-friendliness."
"We should have several sets of redundant software, say 30 text editors, and 5 mail programs, and 8 word processors, all incompatible, so you can't copy and paste properly between them."
"And we can put them all in the program menus!"
"Yes, the user will love the massive choice on offer!"
"Don't forget to have two different backgrounds, so if you set a background in KDE, and then use a Gnome program, say xchat, with transparency, the KDE background doesn't show through the xchat window."
"Ah yes, having multiple backgrounds gives the user choice, this can only be a roaring success."
"And the icing on the cake, let's have an office suite, say Open Office, which doesn't have seperate programs, but all opens at once, to slow the user down and get in the way of using the program."
"And the icing on the cake: Make it so that when you install Open Office, it doesn't come up in the KDE menu, so the user has to open it via the command line, or make an icon manually."
"Surely this year is the year of the Linux Desktop!"
Just email me (or anybody else with a gmail account), and you'll get an invite. You don't have to use it forever, just try it.
It's ok, I already have an e-mail account. In fact several. I never use most of them. They're pretty much all the same. The main distinguishing feature of this gmail thing is pure hype, combined with rabid fanboyism.
What other _free_ webmail system you've seen that offers:
All those features are pretty unimpressive. Most of them are worthless. I've no need for a gigabyte of mail. Neither does gmail, other than for spying on your past email. If I wanted that I'd just print out all my email and sellotape it to my front door. My other webmail accounts give me hundreds of megabytes, I never use more than a couple at a time.
Also don't be surprised to see most of those features disappear from the 'free' version when they start charging for it.
labels instead of folders, so you can have orthogonal categories without extra effort
Orthogonal? Ever thought of going into marketing?
Think long hot DRY summers - crop failure, famine, death and disease.
Ah....long hot summers, I can't wait. As for dry and crop failure, that's what we have water for. It generally counteracts the effects of dryness. Also, there are countries with warm sunny climates and they haven't died of famine, in fact they'r thriving. What are you talking about? Are you saying that Italy for instance is an arid wasteland, where not even olives can grow?
Think of Europe having much colder winters because of the lack of a thermocline to drive the gulf stream currents.
That comment lacks a basis in reality. You have no evidence of the gulf stream being disrupted. Please stick to facts in this discussion.
Think of rising oceans as the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps melt, and as the waters around the earth rise due to thermal expansion.
That will be insignificant. Also the temperature will not have to rise high enough to melt the ice caps in order to give us a nice climate.
Think of recurring global catastrophies that make the recent tidal wave look like "just another day".
That is pure speculation, the same as your comment about cold winters. You have no evidence for this, you have given no details. Claiming the sky is falling doesn't make a coherent argument against global warming. You have nothing to say.
Think of what we're handing our kids.
A warmer, nicer place to live? What a great legacy.
At any rate, there's nothing we can do about it anyway, so just sit back, crack open a cool can of beer, warm up the barbecue, slap on the sun-cream and enjoy it.
I think I speak for us all when I say:
BRING ON GLOBAL WARMING!
I'm sick of living under constant cold and rain, this news is fantastic. If only we humans could influence and accelerate this global warming thing, rather than it being just a natural variation, it would be fantastic! Long hot summers, warm winters, sunny springs and autumns, life would be a hundred times better.
gmail gave me 50 invites. pretty much everyone i know of has (or doesn't want) a gmail account.
Hmmm, if everyone who wants an account has one, why do they have the 'invite' system? Why not just let everyone sign up and take it out of 'beta'? I personally can't get an account, and by the sounds of things I don't want one, I don't like the idea of some corporation spying on my entire e-mail history. Also it doesn't really seem to offer anything over the other webmail systems.
it's probably some smart marketing strategy. i just haven't been able to figure it out yet
Apparently if they put 'beta' in the corner, if absolves them from taking responsibility for it, like when it all goes wrong they can say 'well it was only in a testing stage so fuck you all'. Or perhaps they just don't have the balls to say 'this system works'.
Where the hell does the money go? It can't be in the acting, or the writing, or direction, or editing, or sets, or special effects, or anything related to the quality of the programme.
Over 1,000 years of handwriting on paper
I feel sorry for the people who had to handwrite seriffed letters!!!
What sort of program costs $50 million per episode? I don't think even Friends cost that much, and that's with paying their over-rated 'actors' millions per episode. Personally if I were in charge of Friends I'd have sacked the lot of them many years sooner, and used the money on paying writers to come up with something decent.
Could probably save a pretty penny by not having to pay so many executives
Have you ever thought that executives are there for a reason? Because they are effective at running things? Without executives, what are you going to do? Have a vote between ten thousand people on every little thing? Or elect executives who would work for free? This would mean having people there who were most popular rather than who were any good at the job.
Nobody's going to send Google's founders to the poorhouse, if that's what your goal is.
Where in my post did I say or imply that I had some sort of 'goal' regarding Google? I am merely stating the irrelevence of Slashdot.
If Google did something to shut down or reduce support of Wikipedia, they would lose all that public relations gold, and they would gain nothing, because negative information about Google is not going to be hard to find, ever.
Google's success depends on relations with two people: advertisers and investors. Neither give a damn about Slashdot, or any of the geek fanboys who masturbate over every latest 'beta' service from google. As long as people keep buying adverts (which they will), Google's success is guaranteed.