Hey, I kind of agree with you. Learning everything in decimal units make imperial units seem illogical and annoying, and in a certain way this is a limitation of a decimal way of thinking. =) Usually I just take the easy route and make 1kg=2lb, 3ft=1m and so on. Despite the errors, it works fine for me since I can't tell apart a 4lb weight from a 2kg one. ^^ Since I was going to reply anyway, I decided to go the extra 1.6km =P and translate the units for people like me.
The summary is wrong. It defies common sense that someone would be flying a 907kg (2,000lb, for SI-impaired ones) anything on a kite. Actually, the camera had around 21kg (46lb), as stated by TFA. But the kite was flying around 610m (2,000ft) high, and this is where I think the figure came from.
I admit he's not *exactly* Maluf-like. Maluf is a traditional conservative politician, of course. But when he talks about his achievements as governor of São Paulo, his speech does sound pretty much like Maluf's, especially when talking about the stuff he built. Please forgive me if I don't quote him, but I wasn't very interested about how many hospitals he built and such. It did remind me, though, when Maluf was a presidential candidate and talked about the same subjects, in 1989.
I thank you for highlighting those Alckmin's proposals. Such proposals are clearly a neoliberal agenda, and I don't intend to say it as a criticism. I don't agree with those proposals, and I believe this is more of a matter of personal belief. Just to make clear, my political inclinations are completely opposite. But I think this doesn't prevent us from having a good talk.:) I really hope he is a honest man. I know people who know Lula personally and would say the same. Too bad we can't really know for sure. But even if Alckmin is more honest than Maluf (and I admit this is very likely), I still can't trust him, because I don't agree with his proposals and don't see them as the best for Brazil.
Heloísa Helena is another story. I used to sympathize with her, but when I noticed she waved some conservative banners despite her socialist upbringing, I grew very suspicious of her and her incoherences. I like the socialist ideology, but I don't like a lot of stuff some self-called socialists did in the past. For true ethical socialists (not that I'm one, mind you), fighting for the cause isn't anything-goes. I can't vote for PSol.
At least we agree on this: Geraldo Alckmin would be a major change of direction, but I think it would be for the worst!:P I don't expect him to do any different from Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and I don't think FHC's government was good, either. But if he is elected, I sincerely hope I'm wrong, for the good of Brazil.:)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, and please forgive me for my poor English skills. If you misunderstand me, it's my fault for being unable to perfectly express myself. I hope this doesn't get in the way of a respectful understanding (even if we disagree).:)
People do mind about honesty, but they're rather vote for someone who "steals, but does" like Maluf than a seemingly good-intended less-known politician. And people can't remember stuff for much longer than a goldfish. I live in Brasília and I'm completely ashamed to know that people here elected someone like Arruda as a Governor. He violated the secrecy of the electronic voting panel, a few years ago, and lied about not being responsible for it. When undeniable evidence was found later, he admitted having done it. He was likely to be prosecuted (and bound to be punished), but resigned and charges against hill were dropped. Ex-president Fernando Collor de Mello was elected senator for Alagoas. Paulo Maluf was elected congressman for São Paulo.
The Carta Capital weekly magazine made some researches about scandals in the last three governments: Lula's, Collor's and Fernando Henrique Cardoso's. Unlike most people seem to believe now, the scandals in the other two governments involved much bigger sums of money. The difference is that Fernando Henrique's was much quicker to react and cover the scandals up, and we all know how Collor ended up. Let us not forget that Marcos Valério worked for FHC people too, that the ambulances scandal began while José Serra (elected Governor of São Paulo) was Minister of Health for FHC, and that Roberto Jefferson, who started the first big scandal of Lula's government, was the biggest defender of Collor's misdoings.
This is a very dark time for Brazil. I'm not happy with Lula's government, but I voted for him since I can't trust Alckmin (he has a very Maluf-like way of doing politics), neither Heloísa Helena (she seemed to be angry all the time, could never give a good answer when asked HOW she intended to do the things she promised, and surprisingly has some conservative support), neither Cristovam (I know him, he was principal of University of Brasília and Governor here for four years) would make a better government. It's so difficult to advance that we have to make it by small steps. I believe Lula's government is one of those small steps. Probably you think otherwise, but I respect your opinion. Let us hope that the next government be better than the last ones.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. MSX did well, although not in the US. I don't have the exact figure, but millions of machines were sold even in so-called third-world countries like Brazil. It was the most popular 8-bit machine in Korea and Japan, and very popular in Europe and South America, too. The most interesting thing about MSX is that it was made with off-the-shelf parts. It didn't use any custom chips, and the hardware specs were open (and, if you look closely, very similar to the Colecovision). It even had three successors: the MSX2, the MSX2+ and the MSXturboR (this one was 16-bit). It is a nice machine, very easy to work with and very easy to extend.
Oh, and the MSX wasn't designed by Microsoft. It was designed by ASCII, and had its BASIC provided by Microsoft.:) And MSX-DOS looked like MS-DOS, but it was compatible with CP/M (you could even run CP/M programs without modifications, although the disks were MS-DOS compatible).
Our Lord, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, must be pleased with the creation of the Pirate Party. We must join and form Pirate Parties all around the world, and stop global warming!
By the way, at first glance I thought this is about a party, with drinks, music and stuff. This, of course, would also please Our Lord, the great Flying Spaghetti Monster. May his noodly appendage touch everyone.
Yes, you're probably right. It seems to be a problem with the Windows version of the Quicktime plug-in. I tried it with IE and it crashed, too, but this time I noticed it was trying to load ipodfeatures.mov (or something like that). Mine is 7.0.2. I bet Opera would crash too, but I'm tired of crashing my browsers. =P
You can always archive them as soon as they arrive, and some weeks later search for them and trash them all. Last time I checked, searching was quite fast.:)
Friend, I appreciate the sentiment. But I live in a so-called third world country and not every "intended customers" here are worried about feeding themselves and not getting shot at. In fact, a big part of this country is really poor, but not that violent. So, please, don't generalize, ok?:)
I make $5,000 per year. Not too shabby, considering I am a public worker in Brazilian education area. =) I'm a bit skeptic about the unit's cost here, since imported goods (especially computer-related) are heavily taxed in Brazil. My income makes me a probable target for the PIC, although I already have a fair computer (which I painstakingly bought with months of savings).
Although I already have a PC, I'd like to sink my teeth in one of these. If I could install Linux in it, it would be the ideal test bed for all sorts of crazy stuff I have in mind; since I can only afford one computer, I can't do most of this stuff in my main computer (and things like VMWare are off-limits to me, because they aren't the fastest thing around and require a lot of memory and storage I can't spare).
But then, I'm just a relatively poor geek. This product wasn't made for me. I can only dream if it were... =)
I always open everything in background. I think it's a bit annoying, but so far I can live with it. =) It can be reproduced this way: try to open simultaneously a lot of websites (in background, foreground, it doesn't matter). Some of these will probably load before the others, right? Select an already loaded website while others are still loading. Sometimes, a form or password box in other website will steal the keyboard focus. It is more likely to happen with the rightmost tabs, but I have no idea why.
Although they list Mozilla*.* vulnerabilities as not very serious, they must be acknowledged anyway. One is fairly trivial, I've seen it many times: typing in a text box in a tab may send keypresses to a text box in another tab. It happens when I open many tabs at once; the last tab to load usually steals the focus. It's a minor annoyance, though, and can be easily noticed looking at the screen, since typing doesn't appear where it should. However, spoofing dialog boxes can be more serious. Although suspending script execution in inactive tabs could solve this problem, it can break other things.
At any rate, I'm fairly confident this will be solved in a sensible way by Mozilla*.* developers.
I'm amazed no one remembered this. Or so it seems. I don't mean to make fun of this; although the movie probably looks campy today, the idea of a car with a mind of his own is scary. I'm sure the original news article doesn't do justice to how much scared the driver was. He was lucky to keep his life, 200km/h is just too much.
Timing couldn't be better. Until the end of the year, we'll have Firefox 1.0 ready. A Brazilian Portuguese version should be ready not long after. I'm happy with this, because I work as a network admin in a public school in Brazil, and this situation will enable me to mandate a no-IE policy in our LAN. We only have licenses for Windows 2000, therefore we aren't eligible for IE updates. IE6, by itself, is already dangerous, despite the fact SP2 is a step in the right direction. But an unmaintained IE6 is nothing but trouble, and I think it will be easy to convince the school's principal of this. I foresee this happening in many other places, now.
Thunderbird is my next target, I'm eagerly waiting for a full-feature, almost-no-bugs release. I had some trouble this week with some recalcitrant Outlook Express users and viruses, and I already managed to convince them to change the e-mail client. You can use good arguments to convince them, but downtime can usually be even stronger than your arguments. ^^
I second the parent. Around 50 SP4 installs in non-homogeneous machines and everything came out fine. A few installations under VMWare as well. I don't claim every machine was completely different from the other, but they were pretty mixed: Pentium MMX, Pentium II, Pentium III, Celeron slot 1, K6-2, Pentium 4, Duron, Athlon and Athlon XP endured it just fine. They used chipsets from a lot of vendors, like Intel, VIA and SiS. Memory chips were usually "generic" ones, varied capacity and memory sticks positioning. There was Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate, Western Digital and Fujitsu HDs, and videocards with nVidia, S3, SiS and Trident chipsets (including onboards). And an even wider sound chip selection. Never, never seen a hiccup in SP4 installation. Then, good-bye to uninstallation files... ^^
Just as a side comment, not every country is like this. I've never been in Japan, but some friends of mine told me some stories. It seems some Japanese people can be very scared if a foreigner approaches them speaking Japanese. This happened at a McDonald's.
Clerk: Hello, welcome! (with Japanese accent) Friend: Konnichiwa! Clerk:...
The clerk was completely shocked, and couldn't speak for a while, eyes wide open. Luckily, the manager was around and took her station, while she recovered. I would assume she'd had a heart attack if my friend tried some advanced sentences (he's majoring in Japanese language). I can imagine a lot of reasons for that, but I don't know what's the truth. ^^
Of course, Brazilians can be equally arrogant. I've seen (and felt ashamed by) loud and noisy Brazilians who thought everybody else should see how "fun", "friendly" and "entertaining" people they were. This happened to me in a ferry-boat, and I was glad I were not with them. =)
Re:It's not intended to be an *English* service...
on
Language Tempest At Orkut
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· Score: 2, Informative
Most Portuguese-speaking people can understand basic Spanish, although most Spanish-speaking people can't understand basic Portuguese. This has something to do with both langages' evolution... Portuguese has more vowel sounds, but vowel to consonant ration is lower than in Spanish. This means Spanish has more redundant information (by Portuguese standards), and Portuguese has more variations (which makes it harder to decode). Their grammars are very similar, although Portuguese is a bit easier.
That said, there's a transition language, called Portuñol, spoken in Brazilian borders, which can usually be understood by both Spanish and Portuguese speakers. And because of recent Mercosur expansion (and related economic opportunities), Spanish is being seriously considered as a second language by a lot of people in Brazil.
You mean if you're traveling randomly in the western world, because most of the Panamerican people really don't speak English. =) Just to be nitpicky.;)
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Hey, I kind of agree with you. Learning everything in decimal units make imperial units seem illogical and annoying, and in a certain way this is a limitation of a decimal way of thinking. =) Usually I just take the easy route and make 1kg=2lb, 3ft=1m and so on. Despite the errors, it works fine for me since I can't tell apart a 4lb weight from a 2kg one. ^^ Since I was going to reply anyway, I decided to go the extra 1.6km =P and translate the units for people like me.
The summary is wrong. It defies common sense that someone would be flying a 907kg (2,000lb, for SI-impaired ones) anything on a kite. Actually, the camera had around 21kg (46lb), as stated by TFA. But the kite was flying around 610m (2,000ft) high, and this is where I think the figure came from.
I admit he's not *exactly* Maluf-like. Maluf is a traditional conservative politician, of course. But when he talks about his achievements as governor of São Paulo, his speech does sound pretty much like Maluf's, especially when talking about the stuff he built. Please forgive me if I don't quote him, but I wasn't very interested about how many hospitals he built and such. It did remind me, though, when Maluf was a presidential candidate and talked about the same subjects, in 1989.
:) I really hope he is a honest man. I know people who know Lula personally and would say the same. Too bad we can't really know for sure. But even if Alckmin is more honest than Maluf (and I admit this is very likely), I still can't trust him, because I don't agree with his proposals and don't see them as the best for Brazil.
:P I don't expect him to do any different from Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and I don't think FHC's government was good, either. But if he is elected, I sincerely hope I'm wrong, for the good of Brazil. :)
:)
I thank you for highlighting those Alckmin's proposals. Such proposals are clearly a neoliberal agenda, and I don't intend to say it as a criticism. I don't agree with those proposals, and I believe this is more of a matter of personal belief. Just to make clear, my political inclinations are completely opposite. But I think this doesn't prevent us from having a good talk.
Heloísa Helena is another story. I used to sympathize with her, but when I noticed she waved some conservative banners despite her socialist upbringing, I grew very suspicious of her and her incoherences. I like the socialist ideology, but I don't like a lot of stuff some self-called socialists did in the past. For true ethical socialists (not that I'm one, mind you), fighting for the cause isn't anything-goes. I can't vote for PSol.
At least we agree on this: Geraldo Alckmin would be a major change of direction, but I think it would be for the worst!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, and please forgive me for my poor English skills. If you misunderstand me, it's my fault for being unable to perfectly express myself. I hope this doesn't get in the way of a respectful understanding (even if we disagree).
Best regards
People do mind about honesty, but they're rather vote for someone who "steals, but does" like Maluf than a seemingly good-intended less-known politician. And people can't remember stuff for much longer than a goldfish. I live in Brasília and I'm completely ashamed to know that people here elected someone like Arruda as a Governor. He violated the secrecy of the electronic voting panel, a few years ago, and lied about not being responsible for it. When undeniable evidence was found later, he admitted having done it. He was likely to be prosecuted (and bound to be punished), but resigned and charges against hill were dropped. Ex-president Fernando Collor de Mello was elected senator for Alagoas. Paulo Maluf was elected congressman for São Paulo.
The Carta Capital weekly magazine made some researches about scandals in the last three governments: Lula's, Collor's and Fernando Henrique Cardoso's. Unlike most people seem to believe now, the scandals in the other two governments involved much bigger sums of money. The difference is that Fernando Henrique's was much quicker to react and cover the scandals up, and we all know how Collor ended up. Let us not forget that Marcos Valério worked for FHC people too, that the ambulances scandal began while José Serra (elected Governor of São Paulo) was Minister of Health for FHC, and that Roberto Jefferson, who started the first big scandal of Lula's government, was the biggest defender of Collor's misdoings.
This is a very dark time for Brazil. I'm not happy with Lula's government, but I voted for him since I can't trust Alckmin (he has a very Maluf-like way of doing politics), neither Heloísa Helena (she seemed to be angry all the time, could never give a good answer when asked HOW she intended to do the things she promised, and surprisingly has some conservative support), neither Cristovam (I know him, he was principal of University of Brasília and Governor here for four years) would make a better government. It's so difficult to advance that we have to make it by small steps. I believe Lula's government is one of those small steps. Probably you think otherwise, but I respect your opinion. Let us hope that the next government be better than the last ones.
Cheers!
Wikipedia knows something about this drama. Its short account is here:
e gal_issues
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris#History_and_l
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. MSX did well, although not in the US. I don't have the exact figure, but millions of machines were sold even in so-called third-world countries like Brazil. It was the most popular 8-bit machine in Korea and Japan, and very popular in Europe and South America, too. The most interesting thing about MSX is that it was made with off-the-shelf parts. It didn't use any custom chips, and the hardware specs were open (and, if you look closely, very similar to the Colecovision). It even had three successors: the MSX2, the MSX2+ and the MSXturboR (this one was 16-bit). It is a nice machine, very easy to work with and very easy to extend.
:) And MSX-DOS looked like MS-DOS, but it was compatible with CP/M (you could even run CP/M programs without modifications, although the disks were MS-DOS compatible).
Oh, and the MSX wasn't designed by Microsoft. It was designed by ASCII, and had its BASIC provided by Microsoft.
Our Lord, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, must be pleased with the creation of the Pirate Party. We must join and form Pirate Parties all around the world, and stop global warming!
By the way, at first glance I thought this is about a party, with drinks, music and stuff. This, of course, would also please Our Lord, the great Flying Spaghetti Monster. May his noodly appendage touch everyone.
Yes, you're probably right. It seems to be a problem with the Windows version of the Quicktime plug-in. I tried it with IE and it crashed, too, but this time I noticed it was trying to load ipodfeatures.mov (or something like that). Mine is 7.0.2. I bet Opera would crash too, but I'm tired of crashing my browsers. =P
You're not the only one. I also had it crashing... And it didn't crash before.
You can always archive them as soon as they arrive, and some weeks later search for them and trash them all. Last time I checked, searching was quite fast. :)
Most people in Brazil call this planet Terra. Those who use Earth are just a minority... :)
I'm not one who usually asks for karma, but please guys, mod the parent up. It answers (very concisely) a lot of questions people are asking around.
Friend, I appreciate the sentiment. But I live in a so-called third world country and not every "intended customers" here are worried about feeding themselves and not getting shot at. In fact, a big part of this country is really poor, but not that violent. So, please, don't generalize, ok? :)
I make $5,000 per year. Not too shabby, considering I am a public worker in Brazilian education area. =) I'm a bit skeptic about the unit's cost here, since imported goods (especially computer-related) are heavily taxed in Brazil. My income makes me a probable target for the PIC, although I already have a fair computer (which I painstakingly bought with months of savings).
Although I already have a PC, I'd like to sink my teeth in one of these. If I could install Linux in it, it would be the ideal test bed for all sorts of crazy stuff I have in mind; since I can only afford one computer, I can't do most of this stuff in my main computer (and things like VMWare are off-limits to me, because they aren't the fastest thing around and require a lot of memory and storage I can't spare).
But then, I'm just a relatively poor geek. This product wasn't made for me. I can only dream if it were... =)
Thank you! =) It was really nice of you. I hope it didn't cause you any trouble.
I always open everything in background. I think it's a bit annoying, but so far I can live with it. =) It can be reproduced this way: try to open simultaneously a lot of websites (in background, foreground, it doesn't matter). Some of these will probably load before the others, right? Select an already loaded website while others are still loading. Sometimes, a form or password box in other website will steal the keyboard focus. It is more likely to happen with the rightmost tabs, but I have no idea why.
Since we're at it, why don't we go back using square wheels? =)
Although they list Mozilla*.* vulnerabilities as not very serious, they must be acknowledged anyway. One is fairly trivial, I've seen it many times: typing in a text box in a tab may send keypresses to a text box in another tab. It happens when I open many tabs at once; the last tab to load usually steals the focus. It's a minor annoyance, though, and can be easily noticed looking at the screen, since typing doesn't appear where it should. However, spoofing dialog boxes can be more serious. Although suspending script execution in inactive tabs could solve this problem, it can break other things.
At any rate, I'm fairly confident this will be solved in a sensible way by Mozilla*.* developers.
I'm amazed no one remembered this. Or so it seems. I don't mean to make fun of this; although the movie probably looks campy today, the idea of a car with a mind of his own is scary. I'm sure the original news article doesn't do justice to how much scared the driver was. He was lucky to keep his life, 200km/h is just too much.
Timing couldn't be better. Until the end of the year, we'll have Firefox 1.0 ready. A Brazilian Portuguese version should be ready not long after. I'm happy with this, because I work as a network admin in a public school in Brazil, and this situation will enable me to mandate a no-IE policy in our LAN. We only have licenses for Windows 2000, therefore we aren't eligible for IE updates. IE6, by itself, is already dangerous, despite the fact SP2 is a step in the right direction. But an unmaintained IE6 is nothing but trouble, and I think it will be easy to convince the school's principal of this. I foresee this happening in many other places, now.
Thunderbird is my next target, I'm eagerly waiting for a full-feature, almost-no-bugs release. I had some trouble this week with some recalcitrant Outlook Express users and viruses, and I already managed to convince them to change the e-mail client. You can use good arguments to convince them, but downtime can usually be even stronger than your arguments. ^^
I second the parent. Around 50 SP4 installs in non-homogeneous machines and everything came out fine. A few installations under VMWare as well. I don't claim every machine was completely different from the other, but they were pretty mixed: Pentium MMX, Pentium II, Pentium III, Celeron slot 1, K6-2, Pentium 4, Duron, Athlon and Athlon XP endured it just fine. They used chipsets from a lot of vendors, like Intel, VIA and SiS. Memory chips were usually "generic" ones, varied capacity and memory sticks positioning. There was Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate, Western Digital and Fujitsu HDs, and videocards with nVidia, S3, SiS and Trident chipsets (including onboards). And an even wider sound chip selection. Never, never seen a hiccup in SP4 installation. Then, good-bye to uninstallation files... ^^
Just as a side comment, not every country is like this. I've never been in Japan, but some friends of mine told me some stories. It seems some Japanese people can be very scared if a foreigner approaches them speaking Japanese. This happened at a McDonald's.
...
Clerk: Hello, welcome! (with Japanese accent)
Friend: Konnichiwa!
Clerk:
The clerk was completely shocked, and couldn't speak for a while, eyes wide open. Luckily, the manager was around and took her station, while she recovered. I would assume she'd had a heart attack if my friend tried some advanced sentences (he's majoring in Japanese language). I can imagine a lot of reasons for that, but I don't know what's the truth. ^^
Of course, Brazilians can be equally arrogant. I've seen (and felt ashamed by) loud and noisy Brazilians who thought everybody else should see how "fun", "friendly" and "entertaining" people they were. This happened to me in a ferry-boat, and I was glad I were not with them. =)
Most Portuguese-speaking people can understand basic Spanish, although most Spanish-speaking people can't understand basic Portuguese. This has something to do with both langages' evolution... Portuguese has more vowel sounds, but vowel to consonant ration is lower than in Spanish. This means Spanish has more redundant information (by Portuguese standards), and Portuguese has more variations (which makes it harder to decode). Their grammars are very similar, although Portuguese is a bit easier.
That said, there's a transition language, called Portuñol, spoken in Brazilian borders, which can usually be understood by both Spanish and Portuguese speakers. And because of recent Mercosur expansion (and related economic opportunities), Spanish is being seriously considered as a second language by a lot of people in Brazil.
You mean if you're traveling randomly in the western world, because most of the Panamerican people really don't speak English. =) Just to be nitpicky. ;)