I lived with my grandparents who worked at the Czechoslovak embassy in Lisbon. Spent my vacations and occasionally Christmas back home with my parents.
You dont have to look that far into the past. Back in the 1980s, I was flying about once or twice per year between Prague and Lisbon and back. Always used Czechoslovak Airlines. The plane was largely empty, so I got to sit in the front, in facing seats with a table between them. Even when I had to sit in the "regular" class (I hesitate to call it economy, because it was nothing like today's cattle pens), we got a stewardess taking orders for drinks and snacks. And we got linen napkins with the main meal...
Ok, enough nostalgia. I'm now at the stage where speed is secondary to comfort. I want my zeppelins back!
This would be true, if Megaupload willfully stopped paying Carpathia. However, they expressed the willingness to continue paying them for the servers, if they had the funds available. These funds, however, were frozen by the US government, who is thus responsible for Carpathia not getting paid, and as such has taken over the duty to maintain the data integrity. It's actually nothing new - authorities in the US have been doing similar things with physical property for a while, via asset forfeiture; the only difference here is that it's digital property. And that can be much more easily routed outside the authorities' reach in the future.
1. Take people's data, hold it hostage
2. Tell people to pay if they want to see the data ever again
3. Profit!
All this, of course, is contingent of the hostage taker having access to the data storage. Solution is simple: don't store your data in a country with such practices, or with a company with ties to said country. The Internet should finally recognize the US as damaged area and route around it.
Same here. I was never willing to spend the money for Photoshop, so I "grew up" with GIMP. And with Inkscape, instead of Illustrator. So when my company, where I designed the marketing materials as a side job, decided to "professionalize" and get me Photoshop and Illustrator (I believe versions C2), I struggled for a while with the UI and then decided to go back to my old software. I'm sure Adobe products are amazing - otherwise they wouldn't sell so well - but after all the time, it's difficult for me to readjust.
As someone who grew up in a police state (communist Czechoslovakia), I find quite a lot of parallels between the Wall Street protests and the beginning of the anti-communist revolution in my country (I'm not implying these protests will spark a revolution).
On November 17, 1989, a massive student demonstration took place in Prague. This, by itself, was not all that unusual - another took place the day before in Bratislava, and others took place from time to time in all large cities. What was unusual, though, was the police brutality. They attacked the peaceful protesters to the extent that rumors started circulating that one of the students died. This sparked the "Velvet revolution" that overthrew the police state in Slovakia. What we see here is a similar scenario: instead of lack of basic freedoms we have an economic crisis that started a series of protests. Police is showing a comparable level of brutality. Fortunately, largely thanks to much more fragmented information system with mainstream media downplaying the protests (in Czechoslovakia, the only two TV stations sided with the protesters and informed the public about the police brutality), the brutality on Wall Street won't grow into a much larger movement.
I use my mp3 player only for audio books. If it could receive AM signal, I'd also listen to sports and talk radio shows. Believe it or not, but AM stations are still very popular.
Same at my company. Given that we use largely Web-based applications, there is no cost for porting apps to Win7 (if necessary at all); the only external cost would be to retire a few older printer that we tested as not working with Win7. However, with the few Win7 machines we have, we experienced two problems:
Retraining for Win7 is prohibitive, from a production perspective. We can't afford people to be idle for a day or two. (This also assumes converting from Office 2003 to Office 2007, which eats up most of the retraining costs
Anti-piracy controls on Win7 are far from perfect. We have only three machines with Win7, and yet we experienced a total of four times so far a black background and a screen that our product key was invalid. A call to Microsoft has always solved the issue, but it's still a hassle.
Electronic cigarettes: Not that bad. I personally don't smoke, but a coworker who is a heavy smoker got adjusted to the electronic version quite well. It also makes the air around the office better (even though he smokes outside, he used to reek of cigarette smoke before he switched).
Vibrating earbuds: I didn't try the insertable version, but I used to have a Panasonic walkman with large headphones that did just that. I quickly got addicted to them; without them even the same music sounded somewhat "flat". The in-ear version may itch a little, but I wouldn't dismiss it until I tried.
I think the grandparent post author and you simply have a different definition of gaming. For the grandparent, gaming is an activity, which should be made as enjoyable for the gamer as possible. Just like reading a book: read what you like, where you like and when you like. For you, gaming seems to be work. You use terms like "investing time" into a game or analogies like writing a term paper. Following my book analogy, for you gaming seems to be reading a boring book because everyone else is reading it.
I don't play MMOs, so I can't really say who's right or wrong (if it's even possible to say), but from what it's worth, I prefer the grandparent poster's view. In my single player experience, when I encounter a showstopper or a long, tedious task (the former in adventures, the latter in RPGs or RTSs), I go consult a walkthrough or employ a cheat. I prefer relaxing with games.
I use Win98SE at home, with older applications (don't need anything better right now). If I remember correctly, the OS came with MSIE 5. So upgrading to 6 would be about as easy as downloading and installing Opera. I did the latter and haven't had any problems. Not even Win98 is a good excuse to keep on using MSIE 6.
Not all that ironic; he was in the best position to see where Britain was heading. Since then, many other British writers described the future Britain as fascist. All these people simply observed certain trends and extended them to their logical conclusion.
I've worked with people who moved the mouse while carefully holding it with their thumb and index finger and pressed mouse buttons only while they were holding the mouse that way, with their other hand. You'd be surprised how common this is among people who didn't use a mouse for the first fifty years of their life...
I voted for Jay. Not the ideal choice, but still the closest to my beliefs. I'm past the "lesser evil" compromise stage; I now vote only for candidates I like the most.
No, I'm saying that with each new version we offer additional functionality; sort of like MS Office does. However, while our US customers make purchase decisions based on the functionality they are already familiar with, in Europe our customers base their decisions on the full package, including the functionality that we promise but they haven't tried yet.
Spot on. I work for a technology company that sells both hardware and software in the US and Europe, and our European prices are nearly 80% higher than our US prices, which means that even at absolute values our equipment costs more Euros than Dollars. Why do we price our products so high? Because we can. We found that Europeans are much less price sensitive and much more willing to be early adopters; in the US our customers know what features they need and are unwilling to pay for anything extra we throw into the mix. You could almost say that in Europe people purchase new technology for the sake of technology, while in the US people view technology as mere work tools.
The network setup is pretty basic - Win98SE box to my Comcast cable modem. I run AVG for antivirus protection, and that's about it; the Comcast box seems to be filtering all the nasty stuff out. You're absolutely right about MSIE. I don't use it; instead, I'm using Opera 7. Of course, that means that I don't have as much of an Internet surfing reach as I have at work, but the machine is primarily for e-mail, basic office stuff and gaming, not for heavy-duty browsing. In fact, I still occasionally use Lynx for text-heavy pages, but it doesn't seem to handle some of the newer extensions, such as.aspx, which I come across. As for reinstall, it ain't that bad. I keep my documents on zip disks (the computer has a built-in zip drive), so we're talking about 3 CDs - one for Win98, one for Office 97 and one for drivers/software. The install is faster than that for WinXP (I've recently reinstalled two machines at work), even though having to use drivers for everything from the chipset up is quite a pain. Still, since I'm not doing too much install/uninstall stuff, I can easily go for a year or more without needing to refresh the OS.
...when it ain't broken? I count myself as one of the schizophrenics who mix new and old. At work, I'm forced to use WinXP and Office 2003 (so far, I refused to switch to Vista and Office 2007, arguing the training time and costs it would take me to learn the new interfaces), but at home I still use Win98SE and Office 97. So far, the only upgrade I was forced to make was to switch from Eudora 3.0 to Thunderbird, as my Eudora didn't support outgoing mail authentication, which became required with my ISP. There are several reasons why I don't feel it's necessary for me to upgrade:
It works. My computer does all I need, so there's no reason to uprade
Interface. My main problem with any upgrade is new interface I need to get used to. Not only different button layout, but also the way the new technology behaves, reacts to my inputs.
New features. I still don't use all the features available in the software I'm using; why should I feel the need for more features I wouldn't be using?
All this doesn't mean I don't like new technology. However, all the years of work in IT and high-tech startups have taught me that the best innovation one can achieve is a more simplified interface. Technology with more features and thus more complex interface is thus not truly innovative in my book.
Won't help you much, because n front of you is an aggressive driver who cuts people off, creating another traffic slowdown that you're just gonna hit in the next minute or two;)
...that cut people off, forcing them to brake. What makes this even worse here in Atlanta is the fact that nobody uses blinkers to indicate they are about to cut you off. I propose a system where cars of people who cut others off are immediately stalled. That'll help the traffic flow...
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I lived with my grandparents who worked at the Czechoslovak embassy in Lisbon. Spent my vacations and occasionally Christmas back home with my parents.
Ok, enough nostalgia. I'm now at the stage where speed is secondary to comfort. I want my zeppelins back!
This would be true, if Megaupload willfully stopped paying Carpathia. However, they expressed the willingness to continue paying them for the servers, if they had the funds available. These funds, however, were frozen by the US government, who is thus responsible for Carpathia not getting paid, and as such has taken over the duty to maintain the data integrity. It's actually nothing new - authorities in the US have been doing similar things with physical property for a while, via asset forfeiture; the only difference here is that it's digital property. And that can be much more easily routed outside the authorities' reach in the future.
2. Tell people to pay if they want to see the data ever again
3. Profit!
All this, of course, is contingent of the hostage taker having access to the data storage. Solution is simple: don't store your data in a country with such practices, or with a company with ties to said country. The Internet should finally recognize the US as damaged area and route around it.
Same here. I was never willing to spend the money for Photoshop, so I "grew up" with GIMP. And with Inkscape, instead of Illustrator. So when my company, where I designed the marketing materials as a side job, decided to "professionalize" and get me Photoshop and Illustrator (I believe versions C2), I struggled for a while with the UI and then decided to go back to my old software. I'm sure Adobe products are amazing - otherwise they wouldn't sell so well - but after all the time, it's difficult for me to readjust.
Was the drone dressed like a pigeon?
On November 17, 1989, a massive student demonstration took place in Prague. This, by itself, was not all that unusual - another took place the day before in Bratislava, and others took place from time to time in all large cities. What was unusual, though, was the police brutality. They attacked the peaceful protesters to the extent that rumors started circulating that one of the students died. This sparked the "Velvet revolution" that overthrew the police state in Slovakia. What we see here is a similar scenario: instead of lack of basic freedoms we have an economic crisis that started a series of protests. Police is showing a comparable level of brutality. Fortunately, largely thanks to much more fragmented information system with mainstream media downplaying the protests (in Czechoslovakia, the only two TV stations sided with the protesters and informed the public about the police brutality), the brutality on Wall Street won't grow into a much larger movement.
Nope - escort services are just a middle step. A currency will become viable when the Feds will try to shut it down.
I use my mp3 player only for audio books. If it could receive AM signal, I'd also listen to sports and talk radio shows. Believe it or not, but AM stations are still very popular.
Vibrating earbuds: I didn't try the insertable version, but I used to have a Panasonic walkman with large headphones that did just that. I quickly got addicted to them; without them even the same music sounded somewhat "flat". The in-ear version may itch a little, but I wouldn't dismiss it until I tried.
I don't play MMOs, so I can't really say who's right or wrong (if it's even possible to say), but from what it's worth, I prefer the grandparent poster's view. In my single player experience, when I encounter a showstopper or a long, tedious task (the former in adventures, the latter in RPGs or RTSs), I go consult a walkthrough or employ a cheat. I prefer relaxing with games.
I use Win98SE at home, with older applications (don't need anything better right now). If I remember correctly, the OS came with MSIE 5. So upgrading to 6 would be about as easy as downloading and installing Opera. I did the latter and haven't had any problems. Not even Win98 is a good excuse to keep on using MSIE 6.
Not all that ironic; he was in the best position to see where Britain was heading. Since then, many other British writers described the future Britain as fascist. All these people simply observed certain trends and extended them to their logical conclusion.
It does. And don't call me Shirley.
I've worked with people who moved the mouse while carefully holding it with their thumb and index finger and pressed mouse buttons only while they were holding the mouse that way, with their other hand. You'd be surprised how common this is among people who didn't use a mouse for the first fifty years of their life...
I voted for Jay. Not the ideal choice, but still the closest to my beliefs. I'm past the "lesser evil" compromise stage; I now vote only for candidates I like the most.
No, I'm saying that with each new version we offer additional functionality; sort of like MS Office does. However, while our US customers make purchase decisions based on the functionality they are already familiar with, in Europe our customers base their decisions on the full package, including the functionality that we promise but they haven't tried yet.
Spot on. I work for a technology company that sells both hardware and software in the US and Europe, and our European prices are nearly 80% higher than our US prices, which means that even at absolute values our equipment costs more Euros than Dollars. Why do we price our products so high? Because we can. We found that Europeans are much less price sensitive and much more willing to be early adopters; in the US our customers know what features they need and are unwilling to pay for anything extra we throw into the mix. You could almost say that in Europe people purchase new technology for the sake of technology, while in the US people view technology as mere work tools.
That's why we always vote for Lesser Evil, not the Greater Good.
True; I may finally retire my Win98 box, which I keep up and running for the Windows 95/98 games that don't run on WinXP.
The network setup is pretty basic - Win98SE box to my Comcast cable modem. I run AVG for antivirus protection, and that's about it; the Comcast box seems to be filtering all the nasty stuff out. You're absolutely right about MSIE. I don't use it; instead, I'm using Opera 7. Of course, that means that I don't have as much of an Internet surfing reach as I have at work, but the machine is primarily for e-mail, basic office stuff and gaming, not for heavy-duty browsing. In fact, I still occasionally use Lynx for text-heavy pages, but it doesn't seem to handle some of the newer extensions, such as .aspx, which I come across. As for reinstall, it ain't that bad. I keep my documents on zip disks (the computer has a built-in zip drive), so we're talking about 3 CDs - one for Win98, one for Office 97 and one for drivers/software. The install is faster than that for WinXP (I've recently reinstalled two machines at work), even though having to use drivers for everything from the chipset up is quite a pain. Still, since I'm not doing too much install/uninstall stuff, I can easily go for a year or more without needing to refresh the OS.
All this doesn't mean I don't like new technology. However, all the years of work in IT and high-tech startups have taught me that the best innovation one can achieve is a more simplified interface. Technology with more features and thus more complex interface is thus not truly innovative in my book.
Won't help you much, because n front of you is an aggressive driver who cuts people off, creating another traffic slowdown that you're just gonna hit in the next minute or two ;)
...that cut people off, forcing them to brake. What makes this even worse here in Atlanta is the fact that nobody uses blinkers to indicate they are about to cut you off. I propose a system where cars of people who cut others off are immediately stalled. That'll help the traffic flow...