Basically anyone who has anything to say about quality of University level education will say the US leads far and away in number and quality.
Isn't it mostly Boston that leads in number and quality?
My impression as a European is that the Ivy League universities are really amazingly good (but also amazingly expensive and amazingly hard to get into), whereas "average" universities tend to be sub-par.
You must not be too familiar with schools. Time and time again the schools around where I grew up, real educational funds were slashed in favor of building a new gymnasium, funding an entirely new sport, sending the teams to beach trips, and all other sorts of athletics pandering.
But are all these sports facilities (including breach trips apparantely) used by all students or by a select few top athletes?
Because that's what he says: the US idolizes a select few rather than encouraging everybody to paticipate.
Where would we be these days if it wasn't for Google? We'd probably be burning out synapses trying to recall the past relevance of members of Microsoft's upper echelons in this post desktop computer world...
Without Google we'd be looking them up in Encarta and discover they were famous philantropists.
As the guy who designed Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie has no credit with me about complaining about complexity. [...]
That is not the hallmark of simplicity.
Maybe he learned from that experience? Note that he says you need open source to solve complex issues well, and Lotus Notes wasn't open source. Basically he's saying that Lotes Notes would have been better if he'd open sourced it.
Not at all. Parallax48 is probably right: if you want to compare microsoft to linux, these are the terms you need to search for. Apparently a lot of people want that, and microsoft is very accommodating to those people. It may not be smart from a business perspective, but they are being honest here.
And it's not just that. Just try to look at the 1,180,000,000th result from Google. Chances are it doesn't exist. Google's number of results is an estimate, and it's quite often way higher than the real number of different results.
In any case, the total number of results doesn't matter. What matters is that the most relevant ones are in the top 10.
Exactly. Subversion is comparable to the Microsoft approach here: it works fine as long as not everybody changes everything at the same time. Git and mercurial are more like the Google approach. Do it distributed in a way that keeps everything easy to sync.
I'm not sure what people would expect Microsoft's Chief Software Architect to say - "Gosh, Google sure has cleaned our clock with this one!"? For that matter, If it were an interview with the lead of Google's Wave team, would you expect them to talk about how Microsoft's approach was superior?
What I'd expect them to do (and I still expect they're gonna do this) is to embrace Wave, add a wave server to Exchange, Mesh or whatever, but implement the standard in their own creative way, offering different functionality to discussions that stay within MS Wave Exchange servers, and fucking up everything when they need to talk to the outside world. But from MS users' point of view, that's going to be the fault of the outside world.
You're right! So a microsoft bigshot is saying that you basically need open source to accomplish anything non-trivial?
I wouldn't go so far as to say you need it, but the fact that it's open source and decentralised is certainly the main reason why I think Wave is going to be killer.
I think it's more like Ray Ozzie ridiculed on the altar of slashdot, since he obviously has no idea what he's talking about.
(By the way, am I supposed to know who Ray Ozzie is and care about his opinion? I'm pretty sure he's not the only person in the world who doesn't get the point about Google Wave. He might be the first to put his foot in his mouth about it, though.)
On my bike, I have a 3W LED flashlight with a handlebar mount. It is bright enough to see where I'm going at night, even with an oncoming car.
Even when it rains? When I was a teenager, the combination of darkness, glasses, rain and lots of oncoming cars often meant I couldn't see the bicycle path at all, and had no idea whether I strayed off the path on the left or the right side.
In dark, narrow town streets I've also encountered the problem that the area just ourside the car's headlights is pitch dark, and I can't see the side of the car. In a narrow street, it's important to see how wide the space is between the car and parked cars, but sometimes headlights make that impossible.
Didn't the (pre-firefox) Mozilla browser have that too? And Netscape? I don't really miss it now that most browsers have dropped it. Email is important enough to have a specialised application for it. I don't see the benefit of mixing it in a single monolithic app.
That was once ahead of the curve, but now it's standard.
What other browsers have a chat and BT client built in?
Chat is usually done by websites rather than browsers. There's too many different chat programs to support them all in a single browser, if you ask me. BT support is a really good idea, though (and I've used a lot in the past with Opera).
No one else has Opera's tight integration of multiple useful features without the bloat. And it's still faster on real sites, and the UI more responsive than other browsers, at least with 20-30+ tabs open.
Now that you mention it, lately I've been rather annoyed by Opera's responsiveness. Sometimes it simply refuses to load a page when I click a link, and I have to select "Open" from the right-click menu to get it to work.
But I suspect it's because I've got closer to 50 windows open and I'm on a Mac (which is crap with memory). Even so, Opera 5/6 worked fine when I had a 128MB Pentium II.
With the latest advances in lighting technology, particularly low power LED lighting, I think we should stop illuminating streets at night. It is entirely feasible to carry your own light if you need it. Cars and bikes have their own lights anyway.
Actually, car headlights are very much not fun when you're riding a bicycle. They're dangerously blinding. As a bicyclist, I'd prefer better street lights and banning lights on cars (or at least seriously dimming them). Somehow I don't think that's going to happen, though.
Building illuminations should be off for at least 3 hours per night and not shine any direct light at the sky.
What's particularly stupid is those big floodlights illuminating the outside of large buildings at night. And the floodlights are pointing upwards to ensure maximum light pollution.
Even in places like Daklha or Laayoune, surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of nothingness, there are some many powerful street lights you can't make out anything in the sky.
Street lights in the Sahara? Seriously? We were happy if there was anything resembling a road.
I admit this vacation was of the adventurous kind: camping on the banks of the Niger, traveling by camel into the desert, walking for 4 days through Dogon country, that sort of thing.
Although now that I think about it, I don't remember the starry sky being excessively spectacular when I was in the Western Desert in Egypt. They probably had a lot more lighting there.
The light polution is so bad, you can see Flanders from space at night. Think about it, seeing half a country as a bright white spot from space.
That goes for every urban area, in fact. All cities light up brightly when seen from space at night. Most of western Europe is brightly lit, but the coast of Netherland + Belgium is definitely the worst (or best, if you like pretty lights).
"Fraud is the crime or offense of deliberately deceiving another in order to damage them â" usually, to obtain property or services unjustly."
Sending large amounts of irregular wire transfers purely for the purpose of causing monetary damage would most certainly be a criminal act.
If there's a law against, it, sure. But it doesn't fit your definition of fraud. They're not deceiving anyone by sending them money, and they're also not obtaining property or services unjustly. Could be it's a legal form of harrassment. Similar (thought much, much smaller) to suing someone and dropping the case after they're racked up a good amount of legal fees.
What's morally wrong isn't always illegal, and what's morally right isn't always legal.
As for myself, I have never bought a cellphone costing more than 2X the absolute cheapest phone on the local market. But, that's just because I am not rich.
I got my previous phone for free with a free subscription. (I still don't know how they planned to make money from me. When they got annoying, I switched to a $5/month sim only subscription.)
I live in Amsterdam, and I'm happy if I can see more than just Venus and Jupiter.
The first time I went on vacation to Africa (south-western Sahara) was a revelation! I didn't just see stars, I saw a gigantic haze across the sky. Cityboy had never seen anything like that.
Cool detail about that vaction (to Timbuctoo, by the way): our group had a retired British nerd who'd worked for Brittish intelligence and could explain how to find various interesting stars when starting from Orion's belt. It was amazing is so many different ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that Eurpean American Football league called "World League"? Of course it's nowhere near the level of the National Football League.
Basically anyone who has anything to say about quality of University level education will say the US leads far and away in number and quality.
Isn't it mostly Boston that leads in number and quality?
My impression as a European is that the Ivy League universities are really amazingly good (but also amazingly expensive and amazingly hard to get into), whereas "average" universities tend to be sub-par.
You must not be too familiar with schools. Time and time again the schools around where I grew up, real educational funds were slashed in favor of building a new gymnasium, funding an entirely new sport, sending the teams to beach trips, and all other sorts of athletics pandering.
But are all these sports facilities (including breach trips apparantely) used by all students or by a select few top athletes?
Because that's what he says: the US idolizes a select few rather than encouraging everybody to paticipate.
Where would we be these days if it wasn't for Google? We'd probably be burning out synapses trying to recall the past relevance of members of Microsoft's upper echelons in this post desktop computer world...
Without Google we'd be looking them up in Encarta and discover they were famous philantropists.
If you can understand it, maybe it's not BS. So he managed to write a very buzzword-compliant sentence with actual meaning. Pretty impressive.
As the guy who designed Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie has no credit with me about complaining about complexity. [...]
That is not the hallmark of simplicity.
Maybe he learned from that experience? Note that he says you need open source to solve complex issues well, and Lotus Notes wasn't open source. Basically he's saying that Lotes Notes would have been better if he'd open sourced it.
Not at all. Parallax48 is probably right: if you want to compare microsoft to linux, these are the terms you need to search for. Apparently a lot of people want that, and microsoft is very accommodating to those people. It may not be smart from a business perspective, but they are being honest here.
And it's not just that. Just try to look at the 1,180,000,000th result from Google. Chances are it doesn't exist. Google's number of results is an estimate, and it's quite often way higher than the real number of different results.
In any case, the total number of results doesn't matter. What matters is that the most relevant ones are in the top 10.
Exactly. Subversion is comparable to the Microsoft approach here: it works fine as long as not everybody changes everything at the same time. Git and mercurial are more like the Google approach. Do it distributed in a way that keeps everything easy to sync.
I'm not sure what people would expect Microsoft's Chief Software Architect to say - "Gosh, Google sure has cleaned our clock with this one!"? For that matter, If it were an interview with the lead of Google's Wave team, would you expect them to talk about how Microsoft's approach was superior?
What I'd expect them to do (and I still expect they're gonna do this) is to embrace Wave, add a wave server to Exchange, Mesh or whatever, but implement the standard in their own creative way, offering different functionality to discussions that stay within MS Wave Exchange servers, and fucking up everything when they need to talk to the outside world. But from MS users' point of view, that's going to be the fault of the outside world.
Wave allows multiple people to edit the same document at the same time, across company lines... AFIK, this is not anywhere on the radar at Microsoft.
I think it is on their radar, and they're now warming up their air defense.
Should Apple start comparing the iPhone 3GS to Google waves?
I think they just need to make sure they've got a good wave client for it. Then they're set to ride this new, er, wave.
You're right! So a microsoft bigshot is saying that you basically need open source to accomplish anything non-trivial?
I wouldn't go so far as to say you need it, but the fact that it's open source and decentralised is certainly the main reason why I think Wave is going to be killer.
I think it's more like Ray Ozzie ridiculed on the altar of slashdot, since he obviously has no idea what he's talking about.
(By the way, am I supposed to know who Ray Ozzie is and care about his opinion? I'm pretty sure he's not the only person in the world who doesn't get the point about Google Wave. He might be the first to put his foot in his mouth about it, though.)
Before quitting and leaving, you might want to tell your boss about the jerks first. Might help to make the message sink in once you do leave.
On my bike, I have a 3W LED flashlight with a handlebar mount. It is bright enough to see where I'm going at night, even with an oncoming car.
Even when it rains? When I was a teenager, the combination of darkness, glasses, rain and lots of oncoming cars often meant I couldn't see the bicycle path at all, and had no idea whether I strayed off the path on the left or the right side.
In dark, narrow town streets I've also encountered the problem that the area just ourside the car's headlights is pitch dark, and I can't see the side of the car. In a narrow street, it's important to see how wide the space is between the car and parked cars, but sometimes headlights make that impossible.
Many do, though, and only Opera has that.
Didn't the (pre-firefox) Mozilla browser have that too? And Netscape? I don't really miss it now that most browsers have dropped it. Email is important enough to have a specialised application for it. I don't see the benefit of mixing it in a single monolithic app.
What other browsers have a chat and BT client built in?
Chat is usually done by websites rather than browsers. There's too many different chat programs to support them all in a single browser, if you ask me. BT support is a really good idea, though (and I've used a lot in the past with Opera).
No one else has Opera's tight integration of multiple useful features without the bloat. And it's still faster on real sites, and the UI more responsive than other browsers, at least with 20-30+ tabs open.
Now that you mention it, lately I've been rather annoyed by Opera's responsiveness. Sometimes it simply refuses to load a page when I click a link, and I have to select "Open" from the right-click menu to get it to work.
But I suspect it's because I've got closer to 50 windows open and I'm on a Mac (which is crap with memory). Even so, Opera 5/6 worked fine when I had a 128MB Pentium II.
With the latest advances in lighting technology, particularly low power LED lighting, I think we should stop illuminating streets at night. It is entirely feasible to carry your own light if you need it. Cars and bikes have their own lights anyway.
Actually, car headlights are very much not fun when you're riding a bicycle. They're dangerously blinding. As a bicyclist, I'd prefer better street lights and banning lights on cars (or at least seriously dimming them). Somehow I don't think that's going to happen, though.
Building illuminations should be off for at least 3 hours per night and not shine any direct light at the sky.
What's particularly stupid is those big floodlights illuminating the outside of large buildings at night. And the floodlights are pointing upwards to ensure maximum light pollution.
Even in places like Daklha or Laayoune, surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of nothingness, there are some many powerful street lights you can't make out anything in the sky.
Street lights in the Sahara? Seriously? We were happy if there was anything resembling a road.
I admit this vacation was of the adventurous kind: camping on the banks of the Niger, traveling by camel into the desert, walking for 4 days through Dogon country, that sort of thing.
Although now that I think about it, I don't remember the starry sky being excessively spectacular when I was in the Western Desert in Egypt. They probably had a lot more lighting there.
The light polution is so bad, you can see Flanders from space at night.
Think about it, seeing half a country as a bright white spot from space.
That goes for every urban area, in fact. All cities light up brightly when seen from space at night. Most of western Europe is brightly lit, but the coast of Netherland + Belgium is definitely the worst (or best, if you like pretty lights).
would a straight-up act of identity theft be as funny if it were aimed at an anti-copyright lobbyist?
No, but this wasn't identity theft. It's more like an identity gift.
In any case, it's most likely fraud, but still funny.
"Fraud is the crime or offense of deliberately deceiving another in order to damage them â" usually, to obtain property or services unjustly."
Sending large amounts of irregular wire transfers purely for the purpose of causing monetary damage would most certainly be a criminal act.
If there's a law against, it, sure. But it doesn't fit your definition of fraud. They're not deceiving anyone by sending them money, and they're also not obtaining property or services unjustly. Could be it's a legal form of harrassment. Similar (thought much, much smaller) to suing someone and dropping the case after they're racked up a good amount of legal fees.
What's morally wrong isn't always illegal, and what's morally right isn't always legal.
As for myself, I have never bought a cellphone costing more than 2X the absolute cheapest phone on the local market. But, that's just because I am not rich.
I got my previous phone for free with a free subscription. (I still don't know how they planned to make money from me. When they got annoying, I switched to a $5/month sim only subscription.)
My current phone is an iPhone.
I live in Amsterdam, and I'm happy if I can see more than just Venus and Jupiter.
The first time I went on vacation to Africa (south-western Sahara) was a revelation! I didn't just see stars, I saw a gigantic haze across the sky. Cityboy had never seen anything like that.
Cool detail about that vaction (to Timbuctoo, by the way): our group had a retired British nerd who'd worked for Brittish intelligence and could explain how to find various interesting stars when starting from Orion's belt. It was amazing is so many different ways.
That's very pragmatic thinking. I like it!