Not to trivialize the censorship issues involved, but if someone really wants to know what surfing the Internet is like for Chinese people, they should learn Chinese and read their complaints in person. There are plenty of sites that offer language lessons basically for free these days. My favorite is Popup Chinese because their hosts speak standard mandarin and they have a great popup dictionary plugin.
I'd really like to speak with one of these people who learned Chinese from a Web site. In Chinese.
If you want to learn Chinese, take a really good Chinese class. For a couple years at least. And while you're doing that, use sites like popup chinese as practice, auxiliary learning and reinforcement.
Although that site and other similar sites can be accessed for free, if you are on one of the paid plans a lot more features are enabled. The problem is that they're not cheap--like $20/month for the first tier.
Re:Steve's rarely at the earnings calls
on
Apple After Jobs
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· Score: 1
To be fair to the article, it didn't speculate that Jobs' absence from the quarterly earnings call might have been due to an illness; it reported that when investors realized that Jobs wasn't attending the call, there was another stock drop.
On the other hand, it did neglect to mention, as you and others have, that it's unusual for him to be at these meetings.
Good points and it all relates to the relevance of Surface and similar devices as commercial products.
I'm sure these will be eye-catching in a casino and other locations; the photo downloading and manipulation would be _great_ at a Kodak kiosk in your local store.
But what about the home/consumer market? It's more than a matter of just being too expensive right now. Even when the price comes down, there are fundamental issues. One of the first may be the fact that screens get dirty when you touch them. There are ways to reduce the impact of fingerprints, but those ways impact screen clarity. The finger-painting was cute and all but fingers are fairly imprecise compared to a digital tablet and pen.
At first glance, it seems more "natural" to interact with screen objects using your hands and fingers. But that doesn't mean it is more efficient. One example--multi-touch input isn't much help when you only have one finger on one hand. Or if you can't keep your fingers steady enough to use it properly. Like the keyboard, it may very well be technology most efficiently used by people with two hands and 10 fingers.
I don't buy your thesis that's Apple's success is due to its ability to convince us that its products are the best.
You don't like OS X; lots of other people do. I've never had a problem with Mac hardware; I changed my own battery in my first-generation iPod--after four years of life--and thanks to the upgrade get 20 hours of battery life.
Can you name another corporation that has thrived because it convinced people its product was good and it really wasn't? If people didn't like iPods and Macs the company would be bankrupt or absorbed, like naysayers have been predicting for decades. And the company you name has to be something non-essential and non-physically addictive: big oil and tobacco don't count.
My point is that if Apple products weren't performing, they wouldn't be selling.
Let me be clearer. Jobs has a reputation for driving his employees hard and not accepting anything less than perfection. This puts him possibly in the realm of someone who is an "asshole" to work for. This is just rumored but since I don't work for Apple and Jobs, that's all I have to go on.
The question is if his way of managing people makes a better product or not. Can product excellence be achieved without inspiring terror in your employees?
Use Gordon Ramsey as a parallel, in the restaurant business--which has many, many assholes, by the way--and ask if the quality of his cuisine and employees is helped or hindered by his habit of terrorizing underperformers. There are definitely great restaurants that are not run by assholes, but is that the exception?
I guess there's a few questions in there. The article suggests that investors' confidence is based on Jobs. So if he goes, so will they.
For me the more interesting question is how much of Apple's success can be ascribed to Jobs' leadership style. Perhaps that should be in quotes because he is rumored to be an asshole to work for. Did his uncompromising behavior and standards create the iPod? Would it have been less of a hit if his vision didn't push it in the right direction? Or did it require a perfectionist?
Clearly he won't settle for less than best in him employees--but viewing from the outside, it's hard to say if that helped or hindered Apple's success.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying about dual CableCard--I just upgraded from Series2 to Series3 and it has dual Cablecard. Granted, it's pricey, but it works great. Zero problems and an incredible improvement over the Series2 in terms of hardware. The software is still behind Series2, though, and of course I've given up on TivoToGo--the Toast solution is only for Series2.
However, TiVo is such a seamless TV solution that it works for me. I don't care if it's not a total media solution.
You're confusing this with some kind of bizarre accounting.
If they know they can win the challenge--and it's easy enough for them to test it out, isn't it?--then they win a MacBook (pstt...which they can sell and split the funds) and they are vindicated.
DF getting recognition is not a negative thing for them. WTF do they care? They defend themselves against those who have called their claims "anti-Apple" and bullshit, and they get $500 each.
Sometimes things are a lot simpler than people make them out to be.
Along the lines of what you've said, while PS might solve the problem of graphics appearing dated, it wouldn't keep gameplay current. Gameplay evolves, grows, develops and just because graphics look wonderful 5 years later, it doesn't mean people will still enjoy the style of gameplay. To take an extreme example, it doesn't matter how realistic the paddles look, Pong is still very limited in terms of gameplay.
Thanks, that's a great link that in fact I hadn't heard of.
I'm impressed with how well it works for Chinese-English, but I should note that it only works as an aid for someone who reads Chinese fairly well to begin with--it doesn't consistently recognize compound words (words consisting of more than one character). For example, it does recognize moshige as "Mexico" but doesn't recognize zongtong as "president." So it's spotty. One the other hand, it eliminates a lot of basic dictionary look-up. This is a valuable tool.
If people don't remember who cured polio, or how, or when, that doesn't mean it was not a major discovery.
It's the fact that it was cured that made the cure irrelevant...people no longer live in fear of their children contracting polio--it's completely out of most people's minds.
Similarly, the importance of contacting alien intelligence will likely diminish 50-100 years after they are contacted. People at that time will take communicating with aliens for granted.
But let's assume that we contact aliens and cancer is still plaguing humans--won't it be a big moment when it is cured? After all, you can't chat with aliens if you die prematurely from brain cancer.
I understand that; what I'm saying is that if this payment model becomes widely accepted and used, then there the city will eventually need fewer meter collectors. In that case, the city is saving money by reducing labor costs but not passing the savings on.
Dispensing parking tickets has nothing to do with collecting money from meters. It's a different labor pool. Paying tickets by cell phone will not reduce the labor cost of parking enforcement, unless it makes feeding the meter so convenient that people get less tickets.
My assumption is that collecting parking meter fees by cell phone is more efficient than sending someone out walking the streets with a box to collect quarters. So rather than letting the cell company charge the consumer 30 cents, part of the cell phone company's expense should be taken out of the parking revenues.
The price should be the same; presumably, this will allow the city to cut labor costs involved in collection of change from meters.
If a lot of people end up using the non-change system and the convenience fees are still charged, it will effectively mean that the parking meter charges--apart from fees--have been raised, since the city will be getting the same income with less expense.
In other words, these convenience fees are shifting collection costs from the city to the consumer.
I'm not a statistician but I think your analysis is based on a couple of assumptions that may not be true.
The inference in this argument is that one unique man has a date with one unique woman.
Also, you're suggesting that if there were 3625 women playing, still only 290 of them would date. In other words, you're suggesting that 8% is the "real" number of people who would find a date in WoW or another MMORPG.
I'm suggesting that if 3625 women were playing WoW, more than 290 of them would be looking to find a date in-game. It's just a theory, of course.
By the way, I'm ignoring your type in the last line LOL.
The statistical difference between the percentage of males vs. females who have dated based on an in-game connection is of some interest.
It's much higher for women. The question is, why? A reasonable conclusion could be that more females participate in MMORPGs for social reasons than for pure gameplay. One question worth investigating is the ages of male vs. female players. Might it be that female players are generally older?
As one leaves school, one also leaves behind social opportunities for dating--most people find that it is a lot easier finding dates in college than at work.
Good points. This number is not tied directly into total population but rather the rise of a middle class in China that has the time and money to play these games. Another factor of course is the availability of machines...as access to them rises, so will the number of game addicts.
Once the size of the middle class rises, this $ number will explode even more.
By providing specific times, you make it seem like a paradox. That's not what he is saying.
What he is saying is very simple: how much time you spend in traffic depends upon when you leave the house. He suggests that leaving earlier for work can actually make your commute last longer because the traffic (from school, for example) is much worse.
This is a valid argument for staggered work times--for not demanding that your employees commute at the same time that everyone else is on the road.
This is one of the problems with the age of the blog/web page/snippet, and it's one of the reasons that publications like the Times aren't irrelevant yet. And it's also one of the big reasons that the half-hour television news program is a farce.
For some stories/ideas/reports, you can't boil everything down to three nicely CSS-formatted ample white space-surrounding paragraphs.
Are you suggesting that despite the informative nature of the piece that slashdotters might not want to read it because the learning experience would take too long?
Most of the objections to farming are based on the damage it does to the economy and the hogging of resources that you mention.
So it's not the cheating aspect that is mainly at issue. This is why your lawn mowing analogy doesn't work. Your neighbor's kid mowing the lawn doesn't have negative ramifications, unless he sucks and destroys your roses or something.
When you try to make a claim and then place essential parts of the argument in a "disclaimer," you're making an ineffective argument. The problem IS with the gold farmers as well as the gold buyers. They're what make the problem persist. WOW has not done a very good job on their end, but neither have a bunch of other MMO corporations.
Look at it this way: gold farming makes money using WOW that does not go to Blizzard. We can probably agree that Blizzard does not like this situation, because profit from the operation of the game should go to THEM. Moreover, gold farming has an impact on the game that for many reduces the game's quality and may cause people to leave it. Therefore, Blizzard has a strong interest in stopping gold farming. And yet it continues. I suspect that means that stopping it is much more difficult than you're willing to admit and not necessarily an indication of a badly designed game, as you seem to suggest in Disclaimer #2.
In the past--the seventies and eighties--there was a lot of debate about porn, especially in the advent of increased attention on women's rights.
However, now we have a completely different context. The prevalence of porn is amazing and so is its accessibility.
It is becoming very clear that teenagers are conducting themselves (sexually) in a very different way from their parents or even probably older siblings. The recent case of the (Georgia?) teen who was convicted of a sex crime that was videotaped is a good example of this. I'm not debating about whether or not he committed a crime--I'm just discussing it in the context of the video.
In the seventies we had makeout parties, sure, but it was really rare to have people taking their clothes off and having sex in the open, orgy-style; it obviously was even more rare to take photos or film it, since the technology to view those photos or films without them being developed outside the home was absent.
I used to own several thousand books before personal computing was so prevalent and for the most part didn't have a problem remembering if I had a book or not.
For me the thing I needed to remember was my wishlist--books I had read about and was looking for. Keep in mind this was before the internets made book searching so boring.
For this purpose I had a small notebook with the titles noted, or in some cases particular editions I was looking for of books I already owned.
This system provides a clue to the whole problem. It was easy to remember books I had because I read them and if I kept them it was because they were memorable. If I read them and didn't like them, the crappy reading experience was equally memorable.
What couldn't be remembered, for me at least, were the wish list books I hadn't read yet--books for which I had no memories except a title.
As others have commented, it's not that many books. Several divisions by subject/fiction/non-fiction plus alpha by author and you're set.
Anything more, in terms of effort spent organizing (e.g., creating a database) is a complete waste of time that could be spent reading or acquiring new books.
Or, you could use that time even better by thinning out your book collection. If you have that many books with bar codes, your collection is relatively new (most of my books are pre-bar codes). If your collection is that new, a lot of it isn't going to stand the test of time. You should start being aggressive about eliminating books at this early stage because it gets way too easy to have books just for the sake of having them.
A couple other posters below have talked about going electronic etc. but they don't understand the concept of book collecting. Nonetheless, keeping your collection smaller is better. Create a set of rules for keeping a book. For example, a basic one is "Will I ever read it again?" Being collectible isn't enough--you need to provide additional criteria, like "It is collectible and it is an important work of British fantasy that I enjoy reading."
I believe it is better to have a small collection of treasured books than to treasure a large collection of small books.
The original post referred to "killing infant girls."
Infanticide does not happen "all the time" in China. Your MSN reference noted two phenomena: sex determination via selective abortion and infanticide. One is much more pervasive in China and I can assure you it's not infanticide, which was more common before the advent of Communism in China.
Speaking of Communism, you're also way off base blaming "Communism" for this phenomenon. China has a one-child policy which most experts feel is a necessary thing. It's because of their population size, not ideology. The preference for sons has its origins in China's agrarian/Confucian roots. It's an unfortunate thing that when you combine the "good" one-child policy with the "bad" preference for sons, you end up with trouble on a large scale.
In fact, if it hadn't been for China's best-known "Communist" leader, i.e., Mao Zedong, the population problem might not be so extreme, but unfortunately Mao held that China's greatest exploitable resource was manpower and thus more babies was more power, so he ignored calls for population control and urged baby-making instead. So in a sense the situation is opposite of how you portray it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the parrot really was dead. The seller tried to cover it up by saying he was pining for the fjords. The joke doesn't make sense.
Not to trivialize the censorship issues involved, but if someone really wants to know what surfing the Internet is like for Chinese people, they should learn Chinese and read their complaints in person. There are plenty of sites that offer language lessons basically for free these days. My favorite is Popup Chinese because their hosts speak standard mandarin and they have a great popup dictionary plugin.
I'd really like to speak with one of these people who learned Chinese from a Web site. In Chinese.
If you want to learn Chinese, take a really good Chinese class. For a couple years at least. And while you're doing that, use sites like popup chinese as practice, auxiliary learning and reinforcement.
Although that site and other similar sites can be accessed for free, if you are on one of the paid plans a lot more features are enabled. The problem is that they're not cheap--like $20/month for the first tier.
To be fair to the article, it didn't speculate that Jobs' absence from the quarterly earnings call might have been due to an illness; it reported that when investors realized that Jobs wasn't attending the call, there was another stock drop. On the other hand, it did neglect to mention, as you and others have, that it's unusual for him to be at these meetings.
Good points and it all relates to the relevance of Surface and similar devices as commercial products.
I'm sure these will be eye-catching in a casino and other locations; the photo downloading and manipulation would be _great_ at a Kodak kiosk in your local store.
But what about the home/consumer market? It's more than a matter of just being too expensive right now. Even when the price comes down, there are fundamental issues. One of the first may be the fact that screens get dirty when you touch them. There are ways to reduce the impact of fingerprints, but those ways impact screen clarity. The finger-painting was cute and all but fingers are fairly imprecise compared to a digital tablet and pen.
At first glance, it seems more "natural" to interact with screen objects using your hands and fingers. But that doesn't mean it is more efficient. One example--multi-touch input isn't much help when you only have one finger on one hand. Or if you can't keep your fingers steady enough to use it properly. Like the keyboard, it may very well be technology most efficiently used by people with two hands and 10 fingers.
You're purposefully twisting what I said. I'm commenting on his personality, not on the product.
You don't like OS X; lots of other people do. I've never had a problem with Mac hardware; I changed my own battery in my first-generation iPod--after four years of life--and thanks to the upgrade get 20 hours of battery life.
Can you name another corporation that has thrived because it convinced people its product was good and it really wasn't? If people didn't like iPods and Macs the company would be bankrupt or absorbed, like naysayers have been predicting for decades. And the company you name has to be something non-essential and non-physically addictive: big oil and tobacco don't count.
My point is that if Apple products weren't performing, they wouldn't be selling.
The question is if his way of managing people makes a better product or not. Can product excellence be achieved without inspiring terror in your employees?
Use Gordon Ramsey as a parallel, in the restaurant business--which has many, many assholes, by the way--and ask if the quality of his cuisine and employees is helped or hindered by his habit of terrorizing underperformers. There are definitely great restaurants that are not run by assholes, but is that the exception?
For me the more interesting question is how much of Apple's success can be ascribed to Jobs' leadership style. Perhaps that should be in quotes because he is rumored to be an asshole to work for. Did his uncompromising behavior and standards create the iPod? Would it have been less of a hit if his vision didn't push it in the right direction? Or did it require a perfectionist?
Clearly he won't settle for less than best in him employees--but viewing from the outside, it's hard to say if that helped or hindered Apple's success.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying about dual CableCard--I just upgraded from Series2 to Series3 and it has dual Cablecard. Granted, it's pricey, but it works great. Zero problems and an incredible improvement over the Series2 in terms of hardware. The software is still behind Series2, though, and of course I've given up on TivoToGo--the Toast solution is only for Series2. However, TiVo is such a seamless TV solution that it works for me. I don't care if it's not a total media solution.
You're confusing this with some kind of bizarre accounting.
If they know they can win the challenge--and it's easy enough for them to test it out, isn't it?--then they win a MacBook (pstt...which they can sell and split the funds) and they are vindicated.
DF getting recognition is not a negative thing for them. WTF do they care? They defend themselves against those who have called their claims "anti-Apple" and bullshit, and they get $500 each.
Sometimes things are a lot simpler than people make them out to be.
Along the lines of what you've said, while PS might solve the problem of graphics appearing dated, it wouldn't keep gameplay current. Gameplay evolves, grows, develops and just because graphics look wonderful 5 years later, it doesn't mean people will still enjoy the style of gameplay. To take an extreme example, it doesn't matter how realistic the paddles look, Pong is still very limited in terms of gameplay.
I'm impressed with how well it works for Chinese-English, but I should note that it only works as an aid for someone who reads Chinese fairly well to begin with--it doesn't consistently recognize compound words (words consisting of more than one character). For example, it does recognize moshige as "Mexico" but doesn't recognize zongtong as "president." So it's spotty. One the other hand, it eliminates a lot of basic dictionary look-up. This is a valuable tool.
It's the fact that it was cured that made the cure irrelevant...people no longer live in fear of their children contracting polio--it's completely out of most people's minds.
Similarly, the importance of contacting alien intelligence will likely diminish 50-100 years after they are contacted. People at that time will take communicating with aliens for granted.
But let's assume that we contact aliens and cancer is still plaguing humans--won't it be a big moment when it is cured? After all, you can't chat with aliens if you die prematurely from brain cancer.
Dispensing parking tickets has nothing to do with collecting money from meters. It's a different labor pool. Paying tickets by cell phone will not reduce the labor cost of parking enforcement, unless it makes feeding the meter so convenient that people get less tickets.
My assumption is that collecting parking meter fees by cell phone is more efficient than sending someone out walking the streets with a box to collect quarters. So rather than letting the cell company charge the consumer 30 cents, part of the cell phone company's expense should be taken out of the parking revenues.
If a lot of people end up using the non-change system and the convenience fees are still charged, it will effectively mean that the parking meter charges--apart from fees--have been raised, since the city will be getting the same income with less expense.
In other words, these convenience fees are shifting collection costs from the city to the consumer.
I'm not a statistician but I think your analysis is based on a couple of assumptions that may not be true.
The inference in this argument is that one unique man has a date with one unique woman.
Also, you're suggesting that if there were 3625 women playing, still only 290 of them would date. In other words, you're suggesting that 8% is the "real" number of people who would find a date in WoW or another MMORPG.
I'm suggesting that if 3625 women were playing WoW, more than 290 of them would be looking to find a date in-game. It's just a theory, of course.
By the way, I'm ignoring your type in the last line LOL.
The statistical difference between the percentage of males vs. females who have dated based on an in-game connection is of some interest.
It's much higher for women. The question is, why? A reasonable conclusion could be that more females participate in MMORPGs for social reasons than for pure gameplay. One question worth investigating is the ages of male vs. female players. Might it be that female players are generally older?
As one leaves school, one also leaves behind social opportunities for dating--most people find that it is a lot easier finding dates in college than at work.
Once the size of the middle class rises, this $ number will explode even more.
What he is saying is very simple: how much time you spend in traffic depends upon when you leave the house. He suggests that leaving earlier for work can actually make your commute last longer because the traffic (from school, for example) is much worse.
This is a valid argument for staggered work times--for not demanding that your employees commute at the same time that everyone else is on the road.
This is one of the problems with the age of the blog/web page/snippet, and it's one of the reasons that publications like the Times aren't irrelevant yet. And it's also one of the big reasons that the half-hour television news program is a farce.
For some stories/ideas/reports, you can't boil everything down to three nicely CSS-formatted ample white space-surrounding paragraphs.
Are you suggesting that despite the informative nature of the piece that slashdotters might not want to read it because the learning experience would take too long?
So it's not the cheating aspect that is mainly at issue. This is why your lawn mowing analogy doesn't work. Your neighbor's kid mowing the lawn doesn't have negative ramifications, unless he sucks and destroys your roses or something.
When you try to make a claim and then place essential parts of the argument in a "disclaimer," you're making an ineffective argument. The problem IS with the gold farmers as well as the gold buyers. They're what make the problem persist. WOW has not done a very good job on their end, but neither have a bunch of other MMO corporations.
Look at it this way: gold farming makes money using WOW that does not go to Blizzard. We can probably agree that Blizzard does not like this situation, because profit from the operation of the game should go to THEM. Moreover, gold farming has an impact on the game that for many reduces the game's quality and may cause people to leave it. Therefore, Blizzard has a strong interest in stopping gold farming. And yet it continues. I suspect that means that stopping it is much more difficult than you're willing to admit and not necessarily an indication of a badly designed game, as you seem to suggest in Disclaimer #2.
However, now we have a completely different context. The prevalence of porn is amazing and so is its accessibility.
It is becoming very clear that teenagers are conducting themselves (sexually) in a very different way from their parents or even probably older siblings. The recent case of the (Georgia?) teen who was convicted of a sex crime that was videotaped is a good example of this. I'm not debating about whether or not he committed a crime--I'm just discussing it in the context of the video.
In the seventies we had makeout parties, sure, but it was really rare to have people taking their clothes off and having sex in the open, orgy-style; it obviously was even more rare to take photos or film it, since the technology to view those photos or films without them being developed outside the home was absent.
For me the thing I needed to remember was my wishlist--books I had read about and was looking for. Keep in mind this was before the internets made book searching so boring.
For this purpose I had a small notebook with the titles noted, or in some cases particular editions I was looking for of books I already owned.
This system provides a clue to the whole problem. It was easy to remember books I had because I read them and if I kept them it was because they were memorable. If I read them and didn't like them, the crappy reading experience was equally memorable.
What couldn't be remembered, for me at least, were the wish list books I hadn't read yet--books for which I had no memories except a title.
Anything more, in terms of effort spent organizing (e.g., creating a database) is a complete waste of time that could be spent reading or acquiring new books.
Or, you could use that time even better by thinning out your book collection. If you have that many books with bar codes, your collection is relatively new (most of my books are pre-bar codes). If your collection is that new, a lot of it isn't going to stand the test of time. You should start being aggressive about eliminating books at this early stage because it gets way too easy to have books just for the sake of having them.
A couple other posters below have talked about going electronic etc. but they don't understand the concept of book collecting. Nonetheless, keeping your collection smaller is better. Create a set of rules for keeping a book. For example, a basic one is "Will I ever read it again?" Being collectible isn't enough--you need to provide additional criteria, like "It is collectible and it is an important work of British fantasy that I enjoy reading."
I believe it is better to have a small collection of treasured books than to treasure a large collection of small books.
Infanticide does not happen "all the time" in China. Your MSN reference noted two phenomena: sex determination via selective abortion and infanticide. One is much more pervasive in China and I can assure you it's not infanticide, which was more common before the advent of Communism in China.
Speaking of Communism, you're also way off base blaming "Communism" for this phenomenon. China has a one-child policy which most experts feel is a necessary thing. It's because of their population size, not ideology. The preference for sons has its origins in China's agrarian/Confucian roots. It's an unfortunate thing that when you combine the "good" one-child policy with the "bad" preference for sons, you end up with trouble on a large scale.
In fact, if it hadn't been for China's best-known "Communist" leader, i.e., Mao Zedong, the population problem might not be so extreme, but unfortunately Mao held that China's greatest exploitable resource was manpower and thus more babies was more power, so he ignored calls for population control and urged baby-making instead. So in a sense the situation is opposite of how you portray it.