Seems to me that Dish wants their customers to think that Viacom caved. The whole statement reeks of a cover-up.
I don't think anyone in their right mind thought that Dish could win this, anyhow. The timing couldn't have been worse, with the NCAA tournament and all. As much as I hate their guts, there was no way Viacom was gonna blink first.
Mind you, I've not been unhappy with Dish over the four (IIRC) years we've had them: they beat the wireless cable we had before, hands down. However, I do think they sometimes try to pull the wool over their customers' eyes. Of course, that seems to be S.O.P. for all media companies these days, and none of it excuses Viacom from what they did.
From the Dish Network statement:
Everyone at DISH Network will continue to fight to provide the best possible programming and services at the lowest possible price, every day.
One of the things I figured out over the last two days is that they actually use creative tactics to be able to claim lower prices than DirecTV. Take the Dish 120 channel package versus the DirecTV 125 channel package, for instance: $34.99 vs. 36.99, respectively, BUT (and this is a big "but") to get local channels you have to pay Dish $5.99 a month more. DirecTV includes those channels for just $3. Add that up, and suddenly Dish costs just one cent less for five fewer channels. I'm pretty sure the only thing keeping us with Dish right now is that DirecTV doesn't carry our locals yet.
Evidence for this would be that Dish did the exact same thing to them a while back, but much more quietly. We lost ESPNClassic, because Echostar wouldn't pay for it. They never gave us any warning, mind you, it was just gone. We had to actually call customer service to find out where it went. About six months later, just as unceremoniously, it was back. We were very upset at the time, because Classic carries some of the better programming that ESPN actually has.
I have to wonder whether the same thing would have happened this time, had Viacom not broadcast that marquee. Dirty pool is being played on both sides, I say.
Well, living in the sticks, I can hapilly say I didn't lose CBS myself - which is good, cause we can't get it off-air anymore. I don't watch much of the network programming, actually, but I'd hate to lose some of the local stuff.
I'm still trying to sort out exactly what we lost. The article mentions ten networks, but doesn't list them. I can only count eight, unless Nick-at-Nite is considered as seperate from Nickelodeon, which IIRC it is. We still have SpikeTV, HGTV, CMT, and TVLand. At the same time, they have given us no new channels over what we had (we have the 120 channel package). Too bad, I was hoping we'd get Boomerang.
Actually, I don't miss any of the ones we lost other than ComedyCentral, but I've been rather worried that we'll lose SpikeTV before it's all over with. I wouldn't care six days and 22 hours a weeek, but I'd hate to lose Monday night RAW.
DirecTV doesn't carry our local stations yet, so my parents aren't likely to switch. OTOH, I really don't care unless I lose my wrestling.
The problem with the way Word does it is that it takes time to learn. Reveal Codes is easy. It is also a hell of a lot more intuitive (doing things essentially the same way typesetters always have done). You ought to be able to use the manual formatting features without "asking for trouble." You shouldn't need to learn to use a poorly documented feature to write a simple document. In that respect, WP has less of a learning curve - the buttons that are there on the toolbar, which everyone is going to use by default, work properly. And when you do screw up, there is an easy-to-use (and to learn) feature to fix it.
For the long-term Unix veteran, or the ones (like myself), who just think more like Unix, a word-processor is really nothing more than a fancy graphical font-end to a combination text editor and typesetter. Most people who think that way would like more access to the actual typesetter markup codes than Word gives you (these are the same folks who still write HTML in Notepad/vi/Emacs, or at least tweak it with those while mostly using a WYSIWYG HTML editor). Some people still write word-processing documents (complete with markup) in text editors and run them through troff/TeX for this very reason.
So you see, Reveal Codes makes things easier for newbies and power-users alike. Unlike Word, which, in typical Microsoft fashion, is only really fun for intermediate users, and a pain for both extremes.
Now, if only they would make a decent Linux version.
You're confusing a single economic policy with an entire socio-economic political philosophy there. The governments of most countries were protectionist prior to the mid-XIX century (for instance, England had the infamous "Corn Laws" and "Navigation Acts"; and, in the U.S., the New England States nearly seceded in the late 1820's over tariffs), but that didn't make these governments socialist in the least. It was classical liberalism (today's conservatism, at least in economics) that proposed free trade. Quite the contrary, as modern socialism didn't even exist then.
In fact, IIRC, isn't Marxism opposed to tariffs, at least in theory? Aren't they mostly used to become economicly self-sustaining, so socialist states don't need to rely on their capitalist opponents? I could be wrong on that, it's been a long time since I delved very deep into the subject.
Best ad of the night, IMHO. That series was missing something before: they needed more recognizeable figures in the ad's. Getting an icon the caliber of Ali is one hell of a coup. Damn good work IBM!
Except that it's probably going to be "Ay-Rahd is bettah!" after this afternoon (an argument we can't possibly lose), though I personally hope they keep Nomar.
I rather hope it doesn't devolve into the standard NYC vs. Boston debate. Boston is, in several ways, a more suitable location for the con, especially given the proximity of Harvard and MIT. Of course, Boston is the better city, but that needn't enter into it.;)
However if the goal is to go after terrorist supporting states, the job will be almost impossible.
Very true. Add to that the legal/moral/ethical questionability of preemptive war, and you have a good case against even trying that. I find it interesting that we used as a justification in Afghanistan and Iraq, what we condemned Austria for during WWI - attacking a state which harbored terrorists against it.
...democratic reforms will not work, yet.
I'm not sure democratic "reforms" will ever work. Islam would seem to favor a monarchical system, perhaps even more than traditonal Christianity does.
Until the Arab people are united as Arab brothers, democracy will not work.
And therin lies the crux of the problem, that the Arabs never have been, and probably never will be, united in such a way. There are so many ethnic, cultural, and religious differences amongst the Arabs, that it's a joke that we even speak of them with such a monolithic term as "Arab." The only thing many of them have in common in language. There are several different major factions of Islam, not to mention the dozens of minor sects. There are also at half a dozen different branches of Christianity practiced by some Arabs. Most of the "Arabs" aren't even ethnically Arab. The Egyptians, the Turks, the Syrians, hell even the Iraqis, mostly aren't ethnic Arabs. This is not to mention the many non-Arab groups in the region, such as the Kurds, the Armenians, the Iranians, and so forth. The fact is that the only thing that does unite the Arabs is their hatred for the Jews, and I don't really think we want to be supporting societies that are based in hatred.
Well, I'm starting to rant, so I'll sum up. The point I keep coming back to is this: that region of the world has been in a more or less constant state of war for at least four thousand years; we shouldn't be so arrogant as to think that we can stop all that in a matter of months, or even decades.
But for Liberals and Democrats Hitler would have marched straight into Washington....
That's being a bit dramatic. In point of fact, if FDR hadn't handled the tariff stiuation with Japan so badly, they never would have bombed us (or would have delayed long enough to ensure German victory in Europe, at any rate). It is a near certainty that the U.S. would never have become involved in a purely European conflict - because both parties, and more importantly the public, were against unprovoked military action. FDR wasn't exactly a hawk - not pro-Nazi certainly, but not exactly a hawk either. Admittedly, though, some Republicans were not just isolationist, but actually pro-Nazi.
...historically republicans have been isolationist....
Well, I can't argue with that, although the Spanish-American War (a Republican conflict) stretched the limits of acting in national self-defense. Some would say the same of the War Between the States (both were Imperialist wars on the part of the U.S. if there ever was one). All that changed under Nixon, though, mostly because the GOP of Nixon and later has relied heavily on the support of people who were "Southern Democrats" before Kennedy alienated them (by espousing the previously Republican cause of civil-rights).
IMHO, the problem with this whole war is that we went in with the goal making Iraq democratic, as if that could fix all their ills; instead of simply saying that we were going to deal with Saddam, because he was in breach of the peace agreement. If the latter were the case, we could now say we're pretty much done. Instead, we're going to try and impose a democratic government on a country that doesn't necessarily want one. Since when is it absolute truth that democracy is the one right form of government, anyway.
Of course, I say that last bit as a monarchist, so take it for what you will. For the record, I'm not anti-war, but I think our reasons for going weren't the best. There were enough good reasons to go after Iraq, so why did Bush have to pick a bad one?
Well, in the book, when a certain hobbit used the stone, "his lips moved soundlessly for a while." [found in ch.11 of TTT, Book I; on p.615 in the single volume]
Of course, we never do see Saruman using the stone in the book (we only know that he did), so I suppose that could be different.
Sorry, but your comparison is not apt. The MS case was a federal anti-trust prosecution, while this case is a private lawsuit. The fed's backed down in the MS case, but here the government is not a party. Howard Dean is not going to interfere in a private lawsuit (even if elected, and it appears from the polls - in our pro-Dean press, I might add - that his own state isn't going to vote for him). Bush won't interfere either. Even the president has no legal authority for that. In fact, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this being tried in Utah state courts?
Actually, no, "Sharky" is what Saruman was called by his underlings (I think Tolkien said it might have meant "old man" in the Black Speech).
It makes no sense at all to leave Saruman out of ROTK. Books aside, Audiences are going to want to know what happened to him, as he was so important to the first two films. Certainly, that's just bad film-making.
Unfortunately, an awfull lot of people think that chapter should have been dropped from the book. My cousin tells me that a friend of hers told her it didn't fit, and that the book should have just ended with Aragorn on the throne. I'm different. I actually wish the book had included the epilogue (which only appears in Christopher Tolkien's "History of Middle Earth" series). The epilogue deals with Sam's life after the last chapter.
I agree with you about change for the sake of change. That's pretty much what I've been telling my mother and sister for two years now. They have both read the book multiple times (my sister has read it even more times than I have), and enjoy the films nonetheless. They have an easier time separating the books from the film than I do. I nearly walked out of TTT when they changed the Faramir storyline, even though I'd sat through all the Aragorn/Arwen crap that wasn't in the books. On that point, my sister (who's a big fan of Faramir in the books) agreed, though.
That said, I still think that many of the changes for brevity would not have been needed if they had made six two-hour (with two-and-a-half for special edition) films, one for each book. After all, LOTR was originally supposed to be six volumes. Printing it in three volumes was a publisher's decision.
I certainly remember the days when it wasn't a PC if it didn't say IBM on it. My family's first comp was "90% PC-compatible," IIRC (it was a Sanyo - still runs, actually, but it overheats easily and the "i" key on the keyboard is broken).
Part of the problem today is standards like MS/Intel's PC97 (or was it PC99) that defined a PC as utilizing a single Intel/Intel-compatible processor and capable of running an MS DOS/Windows. For that reason, some folks still don't like to call a Mac a PC.
I wasn't aware of that. Certainly, any unit utilizing a microprocessor should probably be considered a microcomputer. Some folks still wouldn't call it a "PC," but then that is just a marketspeak term in origin, anyway.
IIRC, though, the definition of a microcomputer includes that it must utilize a microprocessor - which wasn't invented until '71 (the Intel 4004).
As to PC, it all depends on who you ask, as the Wintel crowd insists a PC must use an Intel or compatable proc. Accroding to that argument, Apples/Mac's, SPARC/Alpha/etc. workstations, and other non-Intel compatibles are micros but not PC's. The MCM/70 used an Intel 8008, so even Wintel bigots consider that a PC.
The PDP-8 would probably be considered a mini, especially since the whole PDP line was marketed as mini (at least after DEC's investors let them use the word "computer"). It certainly has everything but the microprocessor, though. Gotta love those old DEC machines.
Actually, I'm an American - from Vermont. I've never even been to Britain (or Canada, for that matter - which is pathetic, since I'm only 2 hours from there). I have no idea why I say "billions" when there's more than one, I guess it just seems more natural to me. I am not sure what they call a thousand billions in Europe (wish I knew, actually) - probably a thousand billions.
P.S. "The BBC have...," sounds strange to me, too. I suppose they are right, though - they did invent the language.
The prefixes kilo, giga, mega, etc. are well known, well defined SI standards and are not redefined anywhere else.
I beg to differ. No less authority than ESR's jargon file indicates that, for binary use, the commonly accepted standard is 1K=2^10, 1M=2^20, 1G=2^30, 1T=2^40, and so on. If you don't like that, deal with it. That practice is a half-century old, and certainly deserves deference at this point.
The whole purpose of SI was to simplify arithmetic in a decimal environment. We are dealing here with a binary environment. To insist on using the decimal meaning of qauntifers, in a binary environment they weren't designed for is ludicrous.
However, "the world-wide standard" for gigabyte (not an SI unit, as I have said elsewhere on this topic) is 2^10 bytes. This has nothing to do with the U.S. here, other than that having been the place where much of the preliminary work was done on computers, and, hence, where this standard originated. This is about manufacturuers refusing to comply with a defined standard that dates to the early years of digital computers. SI be damned, the computer science community defined a kilobyte as 2^10 bytes over fifty years ago now. SI does not define the unit.
Regarding the U.S. and SI: the U.S. does use SI for most scientific work (for which it is a great help), but has never needlessly compelled its citizens to abandon their age-old customary units in their every day lives. There is nothing magic about the number ten, after all, and some of us just have an easier time thinking in terms of units with tangible meanings (e.g., feet)
rather than units defined in terms of wavelengths of red-orange light and the like.
Unless you're in Europe, where a billion is one million millions. A trillion there is one million billions (not one thousand), and so on with quardrillions (one million trillions) and the rest. A milliard is one thousand millions there. Thats why the SI quantifiers are defined in terms of powers of ten, not in millions and billions.
That's not a mis-statement by the drive manufacturer, that is controlled entirely by how you use the disk. The stated capacity on any drive is only it's potential capacity. Computer users are responsible for knowing how their use patterns, and choice of file system, affect disk utilization.
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I don't think anyone in their right mind thought that Dish could win this, anyhow. The timing couldn't have been worse, with the NCAA tournament and all. As much as I hate their guts, there was no way Viacom was gonna blink first.
Mind you, I've not been unhappy with Dish over the four (IIRC) years we've had them: they beat the wireless cable we had before, hands down. However, I do think they sometimes try to pull the wool over their customers' eyes. Of course, that seems to be S.O.P. for all media companies these days, and none of it excuses Viacom from what they did.
From the Dish Network statement:
One of the things I figured out over the last two days is that they actually use creative tactics to be able to claim lower prices than DirecTV. Take the Dish 120 channel package versus the DirecTV 125 channel package, for instance: $34.99 vs. 36.99, respectively, BUT (and this is a big "but") to get local channels you have to pay Dish $5.99 a month more. DirecTV includes those channels for just $3. Add that up, and suddenly Dish costs just one cent less for five fewer channels. I'm pretty sure the only thing keeping us with Dish right now is that DirecTV doesn't carry our locals yet.
Nor me (or my parents who actually pay the bill, for that matter).
For a company that supposedly cares so much about their customers, they do seem to rather be ignoring them a lot.
Evidence for this would be that Dish did the exact same thing to them a while back, but much more quietly. We lost ESPNClassic, because Echostar wouldn't pay for it. They never gave us any warning, mind you, it was just gone. We had to actually call customer service to find out where it went. About six months later, just as unceremoniously, it was back. We were very upset at the time, because Classic carries some of the better programming that ESPN actually has.
I have to wonder whether the same thing would have happened this time, had Viacom not broadcast that marquee. Dirty pool is being played on both sides, I say.
Well, living in the sticks, I can hapilly say I didn't lose CBS myself - which is good, cause we can't get it off-air anymore. I don't watch much of the network programming, actually, but I'd hate to lose some of the local stuff.
I'm still trying to sort out exactly what we lost. The article mentions ten networks, but doesn't list them. I can only count eight, unless Nick-at-Nite is considered as seperate from Nickelodeon, which IIRC it is. We still have SpikeTV, HGTV, CMT, and TVLand. At the same time, they have given us no new channels over what we had (we have the 120 channel package). Too bad, I was hoping we'd get Boomerang.
Actually, I don't miss any of the ones we lost other than ComedyCentral, but I've been rather worried that we'll lose SpikeTV before it's all over with. I wouldn't care six days and 22 hours a weeek, but I'd hate to lose Monday night RAW.
DirecTV doesn't carry our local stations yet, so my parents aren't likely to switch. OTOH, I really don't care unless I lose my wrestling.
For the long-term Unix veteran, or the ones (like myself), who just think more like Unix, a word-processor is really nothing more than a fancy graphical font-end to a combination text editor and typesetter. Most people who think that way would like more access to the actual typesetter markup codes than Word gives you (these are the same folks who still write HTML in Notepad/vi/Emacs, or at least tweak it with those while mostly using a WYSIWYG HTML editor). Some people still write word-processing documents (complete with markup) in text editors and run them through troff/TeX for this very reason.
So you see, Reveal Codes makes things easier for newbies and power-users alike. Unlike Word, which, in typical Microsoft fashion, is only really fun for intermediate users, and a pain for both extremes.
Now, if only they would make a decent Linux version.
You're confusing a single economic policy with an entire socio-economic political philosophy there. The governments of most countries were protectionist prior to the mid-XIX century (for instance, England had the infamous "Corn Laws" and "Navigation Acts"; and, in the U.S., the New England States nearly seceded in the late 1820's over tariffs), but that didn't make these governments socialist in the least. It was classical liberalism (today's conservatism, at least in economics) that proposed free trade. Quite the contrary, as modern socialism didn't even exist then.
In fact, IIRC, isn't Marxism opposed to tariffs, at least in theory? Aren't they mostly used to become economicly self-sustaining, so socialist states don't need to rely on their capitalist opponents? I could be wrong on that, it's been a long time since I delved very deep into the subject.
Best ad of the night, IMHO. That series was missing something before: they needed more recognizeable figures in the ad's. Getting an icon the caliber of Ali is one hell of a coup. Damn good work IBM!
I rather hope it doesn't devolve into the standard NYC vs. Boston debate. Boston is, in several ways, a more suitable location for the con, especially given the proximity of Harvard and MIT. Of course, Boston is the better city, but that needn't enter into it. ;)
Very true. Add to that the legal/moral/ethical questionability of preemptive war, and you have a good case against even trying that. I find it interesting that we used as a justification in Afghanistan and Iraq, what we condemned Austria for during WWI - attacking a state which harbored terrorists against it.
I'm not sure democratic "reforms" will ever work. Islam would seem to favor a monarchical system, perhaps even more than traditonal Christianity does.
And therin lies the crux of the problem, that the Arabs never have been, and probably never will be, united in such a way. There are so many ethnic, cultural, and religious differences amongst the Arabs, that it's a joke that we even speak of them with such a monolithic term as "Arab." The only thing many of them have in common in language. There are several different major factions of Islam, not to mention the dozens of minor sects. There are also at half a dozen different branches of Christianity practiced by some Arabs. Most of the "Arabs" aren't even ethnically Arab. The Egyptians, the Turks, the Syrians, hell even the Iraqis, mostly aren't ethnic Arabs. This is not to mention the many non-Arab groups in the region, such as the Kurds, the Armenians, the Iranians, and so forth. The fact is that the only thing that does unite the Arabs is their hatred for the Jews, and I don't really think we want to be supporting societies that are based in hatred.
Well, I'm starting to rant, so I'll sum up. The point I keep coming back to is this: that region of the world has been in a more or less constant state of war for at least four thousand years; we shouldn't be so arrogant as to think that we can stop all that in a matter of months, or even decades.
IMHO, the problem with this whole war is that we went in with the goal making Iraq democratic, as if that could fix all their ills; instead of simply saying that we were going to deal with Saddam, because he was in breach of the peace agreement. If the latter were the case, we could now say we're pretty much done. Instead, we're going to try and impose a democratic government on a country that doesn't necessarily want one. Since when is it absolute truth that democracy is the one right form of government, anyway.
Of course, I say that last bit as a monarchist, so take it for what you will. For the record, I'm not anti-war, but I think our reasons for going weren't the best. There were enough good reasons to go after Iraq, so why did Bush have to pick a bad one?
I'm pretty sure Linus' native tongue is Swedish, not Finnish. He's part of that Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, isn't he?
That aside, you are likely correct.
Well, in the book, when a certain hobbit used the stone, "his lips moved soundlessly for a while." [found in ch.11 of TTT, Book I; on p.615 in the single volume]
Of course, we never do see Saruman using the stone in the book (we only know that he did), so I suppose that could be different.
Sorry, but your comparison is not apt. The MS case was a federal anti-trust prosecution, while this case is a private lawsuit. The fed's backed down in the MS case, but here the government is not a party. Howard Dean is not going to interfere in a private lawsuit (even if elected, and it appears from the polls - in our pro-Dean press, I might add - that his own state isn't going to vote for him). Bush won't interfere either. Even the president has no legal authority for that. In fact, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this being tried in Utah state courts?
Actually, no, "Sharky" is what Saruman was called by his underlings (I think Tolkien said it might have meant "old man" in the Black Speech).
It makes no sense at all to leave Saruman out of ROTK. Books aside, Audiences are going to want to know what happened to him, as he was so important to the first two films. Certainly, that's just bad film-making.
Unfortunately, an awfull lot of people think that chapter should have been dropped from the book. My cousin tells me that a friend of hers told her it didn't fit, and that the book should have just ended with Aragorn on the throne. I'm different. I actually wish the book had included the epilogue (which only appears in Christopher Tolkien's "History of Middle Earth" series). The epilogue deals with Sam's life after the last chapter.
I agree with you about change for the sake of change. That's pretty much what I've been telling my mother and sister for two years now. They have both read the book multiple times (my sister has read it even more times than I have), and enjoy the films nonetheless. They have an easier time separating the books from the film than I do. I nearly walked out of TTT when they changed the Faramir storyline, even though I'd sat through all the Aragorn/Arwen crap that wasn't in the books. On that point, my sister (who's a big fan of Faramir in the books) agreed, though.
That said, I still think that many of the changes for brevity would not have been needed if they had made six two-hour (with two-and-a-half for special edition) films, one for each book. After all, LOTR was originally supposed to be six volumes. Printing it in three volumes was a publisher's decision.
Just imagine: AT&T back in the Unix biz, and batling in court with SCO. That would be very interesting indeed. Probably not pretty for SCO, though.
For American readers, that's a Long-tailed Jaeger.
Anyway, yes, that was a cute tactic.
Part of the problem today is standards like MS/Intel's PC97 (or was it PC99) that defined a PC as utilizing a single Intel/Intel-compatible processor and capable of running an MS DOS/Windows. For that reason, some folks still don't like to call a Mac a PC.
I wasn't aware of that. Certainly, any unit utilizing a microprocessor should probably be considered a microcomputer. Some folks still wouldn't call it a "PC," but then that is just a marketspeak term in origin, anyway.
As to PC, it all depends on who you ask, as the Wintel crowd insists a PC must use an Intel or compatable proc. Accroding to that argument, Apples/Mac's, SPARC/Alpha/etc. workstations, and other non-Intel compatibles are micros but not PC's. The MCM/70 used an Intel 8008, so even Wintel bigots consider that a PC.
The PDP-8 would probably be considered a mini, especially since the whole PDP line was marketed as mini (at least after DEC's investors let them use the word "computer"). It certainly has everything but the microprocessor, though. Gotta love those old DEC machines.
Actually, I'm an American - from Vermont. I've never even been to Britain (or Canada, for that matter - which is pathetic, since I'm only 2 hours from there). I have no idea why I say "billions" when there's more than one, I guess it just seems more natural to me. I am not sure what they call a thousand billions in Europe (wish I knew, actually) - probably a thousand billions.
P.S. "The BBC have...," sounds strange to me, too. I suppose they are right, though - they did invent the language.
The whole purpose of SI was to simplify arithmetic in a decimal environment. We are dealing here with a binary environment. To insist on using the decimal meaning of qauntifers, in a binary environment they weren't designed for is ludicrous.
Regarding the U.S. and SI: the U.S. does use SI for most scientific work (for which it is a great help), but has never needlessly compelled its citizens to abandon their age-old customary units in their every day lives. There is nothing magic about the number ten, after all, and some of us just have an easier time thinking in terms of units with tangible meanings (e.g., feet) rather than units defined in terms of wavelengths of red-orange light and the like.
That's not a mis-statement by the drive manufacturer, that is controlled entirely by how you use the disk. The stated capacity on any drive is only it's potential capacity. Computer users are responsible for knowing how their use patterns, and choice of file system, affect disk utilization.