Badly phrased, I'll agree; the intended meaning was something more akin to "enjoy *the* domination of American English while it lasts"- which in turn didn't mean the US dominating American English, but rather American English dominating the language as a whole.:-)
I swear... sometimes it really makes me smile that the Brits are OUR colonists now.
That really doesn't make sense. The European settlers of the Americas were the original colonists, but what new lands are the British "colonising" on "your" behalf?
You really didn't think that one out... did you?:-)
Anyway, while I think it's very likely that English will continue to be *the* global language, it's fairly apparent that the days of it "belonging to", or even being primarily shaped by the US (and/or the UK and the Commonwealth's remaining influence) is numbered. It's one of India's two main languages, and there are a *lot* of Indians, but Indian English has its own idiosyncracies, and as India becomes more powerful, expect *them* to have more influence on the language.
Similarly, expect the pidgin-esque utilitarian bastardisations (*) of English used in Africa and South East Asia to make their way into English and parts of them become more commonly accepted.
What I'm saying is, enjoy your domination of American English while it lasts, because the language is going global and won't belong to you- or anyone else- after that. (^_^)
(*) Not an insult per se; English *is* essentially a bastardised language, which some might say is its strength.
Well, you're sure as hell not getting it via 140-byte SMS text messages, which is what I was talking about!
Now, while I'll concede that my argument was in truth more about the principle of the thing (rather than SMS specifically) and you *are* getting something for nothing, I'd argue that they're doing this in the expectation- or hope- that you'll probably use their paid Skype services(?) or other services(?) at some point.
Then again, I suppose they could also give away SMS for free to encourage people to use their phones in general, so it would depend what point one wanted to make anyway. (^_^)
You wouldn't be using that on a commercial device, though.
Well, obviously- that's exactly what I said in the second paragrap!
On the contrary, you were the one who originally said that SMS was "free", which I pointed out only applied to certain consumer tariffs, then went on to say that such devices sure as heck wouldn't be using those tariffs anyway...!
Does anyone remember it? Even real companies were spending money to build their spaces there. How long ago was that? And now? Just tumbleweed...
Except that I don't think that Second Life was *ever* anywhere near as popular or widely used in reality as its prominence in the media would have suggested.
Even at the time it was pretty obvious that this had more to do with it being the "next big thing" that the traditional print and broadcast media had latched onto and fallen in love with. Whether this was because they genuinely thought it was cool, because aspects of it appealed to their cod-intellectual streak, or they were basically just trying to avoid being seen as out of touch by latching onto what they thought would be important, who knows?
Any apparent deflation in its prominence probably has more to do with loss of media interest and them moving on to obsessing about Twitter.
Not defending Facebook, but it isn't really in the same situation as Second Life at all- it *does* have a very real popularity.
(*) Which admittedly *does* have massive real-life popularity, but was still tediously obsessed over by the media who suddenly noticed it at one point and decided it was the future of communication, a tool for freedom, blah blah, rather than a glorified messaging service in Web 2.0 packaging
Here is what I've heard by talking to real people: Facebook is pimping out their data. People are increasingly putting up fake information and entering fake information into FB's forms in order to get their accounts - all that personal information. AND this requirement for cell phone numbers.
Data mining is improving all the time- it's already more advanced than most people realise. Facebook no doubt know that people are going to supply them with false info, but if you supply them with enough info (theoretically untied to your real-life ID) under a given account, there's a good chance that they're going to be able to join the dots with other accounts and information, one or more if which *will* contain your real name or a fairly good clue to it. And the more info and links they have, the more chance of this happening- and only one of those accounts needs to have your real name somehow associated with it.
This can be used to Facebook's advantage- people are going to be freer with their info if they think it's truly "anonymous" when it isn't.
Teen girls grow up, get boyfriends, move on. Adults, with few exceptions, don't really use facebook in a way markedly different from a blog or even an email newsletter.
I kind of agree with you- those teen girls *will* move on, and it'd be unwise to automatically assume that they're going to use Facebook as much and/or in the same way.
However, when you talk about the way "adults" use Facebook, you're talking about the way that people who're *currently* adults (and probably got into Facebook as "adults") use it- those who didn't have Facebook, or possibly even the Internet, as teens.
It can't be assumed that those teen girls who've grown up using Facebook will behave the same way (as those existing adults do) when they grow up in a few years time.
Yes you can. Doctor Dre can call himself "Doctor" because there is no law forbidding him to do so.
The question is whether he could get away with that if it wasn't obviously a part of his stage name, and (more significantly) if he was using it in a context where the designation "Doctor" would be expected to hold some weight.
In many cases if you just want to send control and status messages you'd just use SMS, which is free.
Perhaps they are on your plan, but not on the pay-as-you-go one I have on my antique Nokia. Yeah, I'm sure you get SMS "free" if you're already paying a fixed monthly rate for calls and GPRS, so if you're only intending using SMS anyway it's hardly free, is it?! (*)
And for non-phone devices using the GSM network for "control and status [SMS] messages" only, it's not likely that they'd be using either of the above tariffs- or anything other that they're likely to sell Joe Public- so they'd probably have a custom agreement with the operator(s), as the OP kind of implied.
(*) I know that the cost is probably negligible to the operators, but they're not going to give it to *you* for nothing if you're not buying anything else off them!
Typical american chauvinism. Im sure the US has absolutely no political corruption and that everyone in the government is absolutely trustworthy. Fuck you!
You're either stupid or trolling if you think he was claiming the US was better.
In fact, his sarcastic "just like there are no relations in America between officials and the selection of companies like Haliburton, L-3, and various FDA fast-tracks" proves the exact opposite.
He wouldn't trust such a scheme *if* it was run in the US- but the Bulgarians currently *do* run such a scheme, and he's expressing scepticism towards it for the same reason. *Unless* the Bulgarian government really is so much more trustworthy than the US- which they should be if they're running such a scheme.
Yo do not need a medical degree to call yourself a doctor. Everyone with a PhD calls themselves a doctor. It's legal for them to do so. It is the practice of medicine that is regulated, not the title.
Yeah, I see the point you're making- but the title *is* regulated insofar as you wouldn't get away legally with calling yourself "Doctor" without having a PhD, even if it wasn't in medicine.
Not in the US. Sorry, the entire world doesn't work the way your country works. No license needed.
Please read this on professional engineer licensing in the US
That refers to a specific title, "Professional Engineer" (note that the article capitalises it- I assume as a proper noun), i.e. one specific use of the word.
I see nothing saying that professionals (or non-professionals!) without that specific accreditation can't describe themselves as "engineers" (or even "Engineers"), merely that they can't specifically call themselves by the title "Professional Engineer".
How long will it be before we will see the first motherboards with FPGA emerge?
A desktop CPU in an FPGA will always cost more and perform worse (i.e. slower clock rate) than a full custom chip from Intel or AMD.
Sure, but no-one's going to do that anyway- if the OP thought that, then he missed the potential of his own idea.
I thought up something similar a few years back, and realised that, yes, the performance would obviously be horribly uncompetitive and pointless if you simply tried to reproduce (e.g.) an x86 chip's circuitry with an FPGA. The obvious idea (or rather, my idea, which I suspect countless other people also figured out independently) is that the FPGA *circuit* implemented in hardware replaces the *program logic* or software. So you could improve performance for a specific task by programming the FPGA with a direct hardware-based circuit.
Of course, I'm no expert in the area, and as you can see from the reply to this post where I suggested the idea, there are a number of serious problems with it. While I had anticipated that reconfiguration time and sharing the unit between multiple tasks would be issues, Tacvek points out that since we're talking about hardware circuits, it would be quite possible with malicious programming to damage your computer.
I'm guessing (and *only* guessing) that while it might be possible to restrict what "programming" could be carried out on the FPGA, this would seriously limit and cut down the potential.
Prey exists to be eaten and predators exist to eat them.
No they don't. While I don't disagree with the assigned roles of predator and prey, the notion that they "exist" for a particular purpose is applying a value judgement to the way things simply are.
For the most part, it makes sense to take it as axiomatic that a particular species' "purpose" is to survive and reproduce as much as possible- though even that is ultimately just a consequence of the fact that those with a tendency to reproduce better tend to propogate(!) However, beyond that, it's questionable. If the prey species was to evolve better defences or ways of outwitting the predator, who's to say that it's not fulfilling the role it should be?
Wait... have I travelled back in time again? I thought 2010 started almost a year ago.
If you're counting decades as starting at year 1 AD (yes, it's very significant that there was no "year zero", 1 AD followed 1 BC) then the second decade started ten years after that, at the beginning of 11 BC, and the current decade ends with 31 December 2010.
So assuming you've already had it processed, it should last quite a long time then? Excellent... don't see how that's unfortunate at all!
BTW, in a sense Kodachrome ended 18 months ago when they discontinued it. This story is like an epilogue following the "proper" ending. It's a sort of.... Coda-chrome.
Ba-dum tssht! Thank you, I'll be here all week, waitress, tip, etc......
Alternative follow-on line..... YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!! Er, sorry.
He was making a joke about Chrome (the browser). Maybe a bit too subtle...
It doesn't really count as "subtle" if the reason that it wasn't obvious as a joke was that it was neither good, insightful nor funny.
I don't think "Kodachrome" and "Chrome" (whichever meaning of the latter you choose) are likely to get confused. No-one commonly nicknamed or abbreviated the former "Chrome", likely because it'd get confused with lots of other slide films whose names ended in "Chrome".
Hmm, yeah. I'd forgotten that they also do home furnishings- albeit in separate stores AFAICT- nowadays. Which still doesn't have a lot to do with computer-based technology, so yeah....!
I don't know- it depends how they're selling it. If it's in the clothes shops on the stand beside their wannabe-but-obviously-too-cheap-boys-toys and low-priced after shaves, I suspect that would reduce its chances of being taken seriously.
Obviously a 99 pound tablet isn't going to be that great compared to, say, the iPad.
Cue lots of Americans thinking "I'll say... the iPad is nowhere near that heavy!":-)
BTW, for those outside the UK (and those here who didn't realise the connection), "Next" in this case has nothing to do with NeXT, Steve Jobs' old company. (*) In fact, it's the name of the clothing chain who rebranded (I assume) the product under its own name! (No, I'm not mistaken- the logo on the back is the same, and you can even see it here at Next's website.)
Sounds strange, but as well as their main business of selling clothes- which are usually quite decent and mid-range- they also carry a small range of accessories and gadgets, which are generally quite cheap- and cheap-looking. I can only assume that the "Next tablet" is another addition to their range of electronic tat. Then again, as the parent says, it's only £99, what can you expect- it *is* very cheap- but as the other reply says, it's still unusably slow...
(*) Though I wonder if there are any trademark issues with using the "Next" name on a device like this.
True, the Wii is slow. That would explain why it has sold almost twice as many units as the Xbox 360 or the PS3.
Eh? That doesn't make any sense.
The Wii *is* pretty mediocre by the standards of its contemporaries- it sold well because Nintendo came up with some innovative and original approaches to gaming, and focused more on the casual gamer, breaking away from the same old technical-advancement-is-everything, hardcore-fanboy-aimed market.
Slashdot Mirror
The MCP line is D-E-D dead.
Yeah, it got de-rezzed a few years back.
Badly phrased, I'll agree; the intended meaning was something more akin to "enjoy *the* domination of American English while it lasts"- which in turn didn't mean the US dominating American English, but rather American English dominating the language as a whole. :-)
I swear... sometimes it really makes me smile that the Brits are OUR colonists now.
That really doesn't make sense. The European settlers of the Americas were the original colonists, but what new lands are the British "colonising" on "your" behalf?
:-)
You really didn't think that one out... did you?
Anyway, while I think it's very likely that English will continue to be *the* global language, it's fairly apparent that the days of it "belonging to", or even being primarily shaped by the US (and/or the UK and the Commonwealth's remaining influence) is numbered. It's one of India's two main languages, and there are a *lot* of Indians, but Indian English has its own idiosyncracies, and as India becomes more powerful, expect *them* to have more influence on the language.
Similarly, expect the pidgin-esque utilitarian bastardisations (*) of English used in Africa and South East Asia to make their way into English and parts of them become more commonly accepted.
What I'm saying is, enjoy your domination of American English while it lasts, because the language is going global and won't belong to you- or anyone else- after that. (^_^)
(*) Not an insult per se; English *is* essentially a bastardised language, which some might say is its strength.
So how am I getting this service?
Well, you're sure as hell not getting it via 140-byte SMS text messages, which is what I was talking about!
Now, while I'll concede that my argument was in truth more about the principle of the thing (rather than SMS specifically) and you *are* getting something for nothing, I'd argue that they're doing this in the expectation- or hope- that you'll probably use their paid Skype services(?) or other services(?) at some point.
Then again, I suppose they could also give away SMS for free to encourage people to use their phones in general, so it would depend what point one wanted to make anyway. (^_^)
You wouldn't be using that on a commercial device, though.
Well, obviously- that's exactly what I said in the second paragrap!
On the contrary, you were the one who originally said that SMS was "free", which I pointed out only applied to certain consumer tariffs, then went on to say that such devices sure as heck wouldn't be using those tariffs anyway...!
Does anyone remember it? Even real companies were spending money to build their spaces there. How long ago was that? And now? Just tumbleweed...
Except that I don't think that Second Life was *ever* anywhere near as popular or widely used in reality as its prominence in the media would have suggested.
Even at the time it was pretty obvious that this had more to do with it being the "next big thing" that the traditional print and broadcast media had latched onto and fallen in love with. Whether this was because they genuinely thought it was cool, because aspects of it appealed to their cod-intellectual streak, or they were basically just trying to avoid being seen as out of touch by latching onto what they thought would be important, who knows?
Any apparent deflation in its prominence probably has more to do with loss of media interest and them moving on to obsessing about Twitter.
Not defending Facebook, but it isn't really in the same situation as Second Life at all- it *does* have a very real popularity.
(*) Which admittedly *does* have massive real-life popularity, but was still tediously obsessed over by the media who suddenly noticed it at one point and decided it was the future of communication, a tool for freedom, blah blah, rather than a glorified messaging service in Web 2.0 packaging
Here is what I've heard by talking to real people: Facebook is pimping out their data. People are increasingly putting up fake information and entering fake information into FB's forms in order to get their accounts - all that personal information. AND this requirement for cell phone numbers.
Data mining is improving all the time- it's already more advanced than most people realise. Facebook no doubt know that people are going to supply them with false info, but if you supply them with enough info (theoretically untied to your real-life ID) under a given account, there's a good chance that they're going to be able to join the dots with other accounts and information, one or more if which *will* contain your real name or a fairly good clue to it. And the more info and links they have, the more chance of this happening- and only one of those accounts needs to have your real name somehow associated with it.
This can be used to Facebook's advantage- people are going to be freer with their info if they think it's truly "anonymous" when it isn't.
You are never really gone from facebook, it is all still there
Yeah, you can check out any time you like... but you can never leave.
Welcome to the Hotel Facebookonia.
Teen girls grow up, get boyfriends, move on. Adults, with few exceptions, don't really use facebook in a way markedly different from a blog or even an email newsletter.
I kind of agree with you- those teen girls *will* move on, and it'd be unwise to automatically assume that they're going to use Facebook as much and/or in the same way.
However, when you talk about the way "adults" use Facebook, you're talking about the way that people who're *currently* adults (and probably got into Facebook as "adults") use it- those who didn't have Facebook, or possibly even the Internet, as teens.
It can't be assumed that those teen girls who've grown up using Facebook will behave the same way (as those existing adults do) when they grow up in a few years time.
Yes you can. Doctor Dre can call himself "Doctor" because there is no law forbidding him to do so.
The question is whether he could get away with that if it wasn't obviously a part of his stage name, and (more significantly) if he was using it in a context where the designation "Doctor" would be expected to hold some weight.
In many cases if you just want to send control and status messages you'd just use SMS, which is free.
Perhaps they are on your plan, but not on the pay-as-you-go one I have on my antique Nokia. Yeah, I'm sure you get SMS "free" if you're already paying a fixed monthly rate for calls and GPRS, so if you're only intending using SMS anyway it's hardly free, is it?! (*)
And for non-phone devices using the GSM network for "control and status [SMS] messages" only, it's not likely that they'd be using either of the above tariffs- or anything other that they're likely to sell Joe Public- so they'd probably have a custom agreement with the operator(s), as the OP kind of implied.
(*) I know that the cost is probably negligible to the operators, but they're not going to give it to *you* for nothing if you're not buying anything else off them!
Typical american chauvinism. Im sure the US has absolutely no political corruption and that everyone in the government is absolutely trustworthy. Fuck you!
You're either stupid or trolling if you think he was claiming the US was better.
In fact, his sarcastic "just like there are no relations in America between officials and the selection of companies like Haliburton, L-3, and various FDA fast-tracks" proves the exact opposite.
He wouldn't trust such a scheme *if* it was run in the US- but the Bulgarians currently *do* run such a scheme, and he's expressing scepticism towards it for the same reason. *Unless* the Bulgarian government really is so much more trustworthy than the US- which they should be if they're running such a scheme.
Yo do not need a medical degree to call yourself a doctor. Everyone with a PhD calls themselves a doctor. It's legal for them to do so. It is the practice of medicine that is regulated, not the title.
Yeah, I see the point you're making- but the title *is* regulated insofar as you wouldn't get away legally with calling yourself "Doctor" without having a PhD, even if it wasn't in medicine.
Not in the US. Sorry, the entire world doesn't work the way your country works. No license needed.
Please read this on professional engineer licensing in the US
That refers to a specific title, "Professional Engineer" (note that the article capitalises it- I assume as a proper noun), i.e. one specific use of the word.
I see nothing saying that professionals (or non-professionals!) without that specific accreditation can't describe themselves as "engineers" (or even "Engineers"), merely that they can't specifically call themselves by the title "Professional Engineer".
But that wasn't what the OP was talking about.
1996 called, it wants its internet back.
Did it also ask for its "[year/era] called, it wants its [subject] back" cliche back? :-P
How long will it be before we will see the first motherboards with FPGA emerge?
A desktop CPU in an FPGA will always cost more and perform worse (i.e. slower clock rate) than a full custom chip from Intel or AMD.
Sure, but no-one's going to do that anyway- if the OP thought that, then he missed the potential of his own idea.
I thought up something similar a few years back, and realised that, yes, the performance would obviously be horribly uncompetitive and pointless if you simply tried to reproduce (e.g.) an x86 chip's circuitry with an FPGA. The obvious idea (or rather, my idea, which I suspect countless other people also figured out independently) is that the FPGA *circuit* implemented in hardware replaces the *program logic* or software. So you could improve performance for a specific task by programming the FPGA with a direct hardware-based circuit.
Of course, I'm no expert in the area, and as you can see from the reply to this post where I suggested the idea, there are a number of serious problems with it. While I had anticipated that reconfiguration time and sharing the unit between multiple tasks would be issues, Tacvek points out that since we're talking about hardware circuits, it would be quite possible with malicious programming to damage your computer.
I'm guessing (and *only* guessing) that while it might be possible to restrict what "programming" could be carried out on the FPGA, this would seriously limit and cut down the potential.
Prey exists to be eaten and predators exist to eat them.
No they don't. While I don't disagree with the assigned roles of predator and prey, the notion that they "exist" for a particular purpose is applying a value judgement to the way things simply are.
For the most part, it makes sense to take it as axiomatic that a particular species' "purpose" is to survive and reproduce as much as possible- though even that is ultimately just a consequence of the fact that those with a tendency to reproduce better tend to propogate(!) However, beyond that, it's questionable. If the prey species was to evolve better defences or ways of outwitting the predator, who's to say that it's not fulfilling the role it should be?
Out of curiosity, does anybody know where this meme (assuming it is actually a meme and not just a single comment people keep reposting) came from?
Yeah, I do- it came from stupid managers. ;-)
That why she sues in Dollars. With every nanosecond they keep the trial hanging, the sum goes up and up in their local currency.
Not if she was suing in Zimbabwean Dollars, dumbass. And how do you know she *was* suing in (non-local) "Dollars" anyway?
Wait... have I travelled back in time again? I thought 2010 started almost a year ago.
If you're counting decades as starting at year 1 AD (yes, it's very significant that there was no "year zero", 1 AD followed 1 BC) then the second decade started ten years after that, at the beginning of 11 BC, and the current decade ends with 31 December 2010.
So do I. Unfortunately, it's on Kodachrome.
So assuming you've already had it processed, it should last quite a long time then? Excellent... don't see how that's unfortunate at all!
BTW, in a sense Kodachrome ended 18 months ago when they discontinued it. This story is like an epilogue following the "proper" ending. It's a sort of.... Coda-chrome.
Ba-dum tssht! Thank you, I'll be here all week, waitress, tip, etc......
Alternative follow-on line..... YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!! Er, sorry.
He was making a joke about Chrome (the browser). Maybe a bit too subtle...
It doesn't really count as "subtle" if the reason that it wasn't obvious as a joke was that it was neither good, insightful nor funny.
I don't think "Kodachrome" and "Chrome" (whichever meaning of the latter you choose) are likely to get confused. No-one commonly nicknamed or abbreviated the former "Chrome", likely because it'd get confused with lots of other slide films whose names ended in "Chrome".
Hmm, yeah. I'd forgotten that they also do home furnishings- albeit in separate stores AFAICT- nowadays. Which still doesn't have a lot to do with computer-based technology, so yeah....!
I don't know- it depends how they're selling it. If it's in the clothes shops on the stand beside their wannabe-but-obviously-too-cheap-boys-toys and low-priced after shaves, I suspect that would reduce its chances of being taken seriously.
Obviously a 99 pound tablet isn't going to be that great compared to, say, the iPad.
Cue lots of Americans thinking "I'll say... the iPad is nowhere near that heavy!" :-)
BTW, for those outside the UK (and those here who didn't realise the connection), "Next" in this case has nothing to do with NeXT, Steve Jobs' old company. (*) In fact, it's the name of the clothing chain who rebranded (I assume) the product under its own name! (No, I'm not mistaken- the logo on the back is the same, and you can even see it here at Next's website.)
Sounds strange, but as well as their main business of selling clothes- which are usually quite decent and mid-range- they also carry a small range of accessories and gadgets, which are generally quite cheap- and cheap-looking. I can only assume that the "Next tablet" is another addition to their range of electronic tat. Then again, as the parent says, it's only £99, what can you expect- it *is* very cheap- but as the other reply says, it's still unusably slow...
(*) Though I wonder if there are any trademark issues with using the "Next" name on a device like this.
True, the Wii is slow. That would explain why it has sold almost twice as many units as the Xbox 360 or the PS3.
Eh? That doesn't make any sense.
The Wii *is* pretty mediocre by the standards of its contemporaries- it sold well because Nintendo came up with some innovative and original approaches to gaming, and focused more on the casual gamer, breaking away from the same old technical-advancement-is-everything, hardcore-fanboy-aimed market.