I lived in China...it was great there. You buy whatever phone you want. Then you go buy a SIM card and put it in your phone. There, you have service. You can either do a subscription, or pay as you go. And the pay as you go plans are actually reasonable plans...your time that you bought wouldn't expire for a year, and the price of minutes were very reasonable.
You want to switch providers? Take out the sim card and put another in. You go across the border to Hong Kong for the weekend? Buy a $10 pre-paid sim card in hong kong for each friend, and you all suddenly have local hong kong numbers.
It was wonderful. Then I came back to the US and cried myself to sleep.
Some others love to plunder specialist terms from other people's domains. IT is a classic case in point: think of all the words and phrases, from "interface" to "ping", "access", and "download", that have crept into everyday discourse.
While I'm not arguing with your actual point, the word access has been around since Old French and Old English (and came from latin). It's not a new word in IT.
Interface, while popularized by IT usage, was coined in the 1880's to refer to a common boundary, but was plundered by the IT industry.
The word ping was used to refer to submarine sonar, and was plundered by the IT industry as well.
And downloading originally referred to unloading equipment from an aircraft.
So your overall point is reinforced, but the jargon wasn't ours to begin with.
Young professionals have the means to leave China, even if they don't have the means to change the government. I'd suggest they get out while the getting's good.
It's harder than you think for people to leave. I worked in the IT industry in Chian for a few years, so I was around these young professionals. China makes it a HUGE hassle to get a passport, and most countries aren't very quick to give out visas to Chinese without them already having a job in that country. Which is rather hard to get.
Add to that the fact that unless they want to go to a LESS developed country, their well-paying Chinese jobs don't give them enough money to easily travel/move to an expensive country like those in Europe or North America.
Believe me, most of my coworkers would have LOVED to immigrate to the "west" (or Australia), but very few had the means to do it.
There was an article awhile back about using a 3d scene as the picture, then for each different user, a random camera angle was chosen, and the scene was rendered. So it's a different picture, generated dynamically for each user, but showing the same thing.
You don't ever have to use the command-line if all you want to do is run office apps, send emails and surf the web.
I only wish that was true. Realistically, you'll be using it to configure your wireless card, fiddle with config files, install printer drivers, and all sorts of other things.
Don't get me wrong, I love the command-line as much as the next guy, but I have yet to have a linux install that I can realistically use without typing a few nasty bits of command line stuff that cause my wife's eyes to glaze over.
The fact that Ubuntu EVER recognized your wireless network card puts you a step ahead of me. Say what you want about how wonderful Ubuntu is, a user-friendly desktop OS should NOT have to go to a command line and mess with ndiswrapper to get a wireless card working.
Until I can get all my hardware working without dropping to a command-line, (which I tried again a few months ago, and still can't do), I will continue to roll my eyes at all the people saying that Linux is for the masses.
Did you read the apps he was talking about? My P2P file-sharing software and music player don't require any screen real-estate once I've started them...or are you one of those people that maximizes the visualizations on windows media player?
The file system layout is far more intuitive than the baroque drive lettering system.
Ok, you've suddenly become ridiculous. etc, opt, bin, dev? Not intuitive AT ALL. Sure, it makes sense one you understand it, but I can explain in about 45 seconds to my parents that C is the hard drive, D or E is the cd-rom, F is a USB stick.
Try explaining to your parents what/etc is, and why their cd drive shows up in/mnt/cdrom but their hard drive isn't/mnt/harddrive.
What I want to know is: why do you care? and is the 0.001uS you'll save every time you click an email really that critical to your use of the program? Because other versions of Thunderbird have this annoying issue where it will hang for a second or two after you receive new mail. It drives me crazy.
If they can get rid of that, and improve their filtering system (let me launch a script or executable on mail that matches a certain filter), I'd become a total Thunderbird fanboy.
They are low in terms of total sales, but i know that they do sell "genuine" DVDs. You go to Wal-Mart in Shenzhen, and there's a DVD section, with legal DVDs. They are priced at about $3 to $4 US, and are region coded. They have a few movies there that are hard to find in the local bootleg markets, (and are maybe 5-10 times as expensive as the bootlegs), so they manage to sell a few.
....and getting it to run under ubuntu was as easy as "sudo apt-get install hplip". I think that quote is pretty telling. Of course, the actual TYPING of that archaic set of commands is pretty easy, but figuring out that when you want to install your printer means you type that "nonsense" is a pretty big leap for non-techies.
Now I don't want to get flamed by people thinking I'm stupid. I know exactly what all that "nonsense" means, but there's no way my parents, or rather up-to-date friends, would have ANY idea to do that.
And people say Linux is ready for the masses.....sigh.
If you are a salaried employee, getting your work done more efficiently helps both you and your company.
Benefits to you: less overtime, enjoying your job more, more likely to get a promotion and a pay increase
And I'd say, if you are so antagonistic toward your company that you'd refuse to invest a little bit of your own time/money into doing something that helps the company along with yourself, then you should quit and find a job with a company that you can really get behind.
I agree entirely. WAY to slow. I was bored out of my mind waiting for the "other team" to finish their moves. We eventually gave up waiting for each other, since the two teams rarely, if ever, actually INTERACTED with each other. So my team played our own cooperative game, and the other played theirs.
Use what skills you do have (as an intelligent and logically minded person) to "fake" your way to social skills. What I mean is pay attention to other people. See what they do and say. Watch what works and doesn't work. You (and half of us engineers) may never really understand why certain social actions work and don't, but we should be smart enough to learn to predict statistically what does and doesn't.
Pretend like you have good social skills, try to act like you do. Make note of what you do that doesn't work, and actively change it. Practice restraining your natural personality at times, with the goal of making a new stranger like you.
I'm not convinced that would be a huge loss for California. If MS were to properly support open formats, then would they still be considered "evil"? I think it's worth the money to go to a open and compatible system, even if the vendor with the best implementation happens to be microsoft.
Note that the key word here is "properly support". I'm not sure that will happen.
His point was not that you had to have the exact same mechanism that Goldeneye used, but that there are ways to prevent it. Goldeneye was just one example.
Which wouldn't necessarily make anyone happy. Look at the hot cofee thing...they had the normal, fully clothed skins on. It was the position of those wireframe models that had everyone up in arms....
The sheep that march to Walmart's "Low Prices -- Whatever the Cost" beat will not be affected. They are good consumers. Not hippie freaks, using products that cannot be found on the acres of shelving at Walmart. Walmart understands the threat of free software. Although I dislike Wal-Mart as much as the next guy on slashdot, this attitude annoys me. A lot of people shop at Wal-Mart because they are poor. They can't afford to be more conscientious about where they shop. They may even understand that in the long run, it hurts things, but they aren't in a position to go buy stuff that costs 50% more.
Most of the people here on slashdot are well-educated city-dwelling folk with good incomes (or college students with parents in that position). Learn what it's like to live in a small town where, before Wal-Mart opened, you had to drive an hour to buy shoes for less than $80. And no, you COULDN'T afford to pay $80 for shoes.
I know, I sound like that old crotchety guy that talks about walking to school uphill both ways, but the arrogance without understanding where many of the consumers come from bothers me.
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I lived in China...it was great there. You buy whatever phone you want. Then you go buy a SIM card and put it in your phone. There, you have service. You can either do a subscription, or pay as you go. And the pay as you go plans are actually reasonable plans...your time that you bought wouldn't expire for a year, and the price of minutes were very reasonable.
You want to switch providers? Take out the sim card and put another in. You go across the border to Hong Kong for the weekend? Buy a $10 pre-paid sim card in hong kong for each friend, and you all suddenly have local hong kong numbers.
It was wonderful. Then I came back to the US and cried myself to sleep.
Some others love to plunder specialist terms from other people's domains. IT is a classic case in point: think of all the words and phrases, from "interface" to "ping", "access", and "download", that have crept into everyday discourse.
While I'm not arguing with your actual point, the word access has been around since Old French and Old English (and came from latin). It's not a new word in IT.
Interface, while popularized by IT usage, was coined in the 1880's to refer to a common boundary, but was plundered by the IT industry.
The word ping was used to refer to submarine sonar, and was plundered by the IT industry as well.
And downloading originally referred to unloading equipment from an aircraft.
So your overall point is reinforced, but the jargon wasn't ours to begin with.
Young professionals have the means to leave China, even if they don't have the means to change the government. I'd suggest they get out while the getting's good.
It's harder than you think for people to leave. I worked in the IT industry in Chian for a few years, so I was around these young professionals. China makes it a HUGE hassle to get a passport, and most countries aren't very quick to give out visas to Chinese without them already having a job in that country. Which is rather hard to get.
Add to that the fact that unless they want to go to a LESS developed country, their well-paying Chinese jobs don't give them enough money to easily travel/move to an expensive country like those in Europe or North America.
Believe me, most of my coworkers would have LOVED to immigrate to the "west" (or Australia), but very few had the means to do it.
There was an article awhile back about using a 3d scene as the picture, then for each different user, a random camera angle was chosen, and the scene was rendered. So it's a different picture, generated dynamically for each user, but showing the same thing.
You don't ever have to use the command-line if all you want to do is run office apps, send emails and surf the web.
I only wish that was true. Realistically, you'll be using it to configure your wireless card, fiddle with config files, install printer drivers, and all sorts of other things.
Don't get me wrong, I love the command-line as much as the next guy, but I have yet to have a linux install that I can realistically use without typing a few nasty bits of command line stuff that cause my wife's eyes to glaze over.
I wish I had mod points for you. That's the story of my experience with Linux.
The fact that Ubuntu EVER recognized your wireless network card puts you a step ahead of me. Say what you want about how wonderful Ubuntu is, a user-friendly desktop OS should NOT have to go to a command line and mess with ndiswrapper to get a wireless card working.
Until I can get all my hardware working without dropping to a command-line, (which I tried again a few months ago, and still can't do), I will continue to roll my eyes at all the people saying that Linux is for the masses.
Can I get a copy of your ahk script for alt-tabbing? That sounds really cool....
I've never had any luck trying to get that. I wanted to get ADSL without paying for POTS, but nobody would let me.
Did you read the apps he was talking about? My P2P file-sharing software and music player don't require any screen real-estate once I've started them...or are you one of those people that maximizes the visualizations on windows media player?
The file system layout is far more intuitive than the baroque drive lettering system.
/etc is, and why their cd drive shows up in /mnt/cdrom but their hard drive isn't /mnt/harddrive.
Ok, you've suddenly become ridiculous. etc, opt, bin, dev? Not intuitive AT ALL. Sure, it makes sense one you understand it, but I can explain in about 45 seconds to my parents that C is the hard drive, D or E is the cd-rom, F is a USB stick.
Try explaining to your parents what
Is there also a way to make threads collapse properly? My threads only collapse enough to hide one or two emails, but leave the rest open....
If they can get rid of that, and improve their filtering system (let me launch a script or executable on mail that matches a certain filter), I'd become a total Thunderbird fanboy.
They are low in terms of total sales, but i know that they do sell "genuine" DVDs. You go to Wal-Mart in Shenzhen, and there's a DVD section, with legal DVDs. They are priced at about $3 to $4 US, and are region coded. They have a few movies there that are hard to find in the local bootleg markets, (and are maybe 5-10 times as expensive as the bootlegs), so they manage to sell a few.
You mean they've never bought a LEGAL DVD in their life. At 5 yuan, everyone buys DVDs.
....and getting it to run under ubuntu was as easy as "sudo apt-get install hplip". I think that quote is pretty telling. Of course, the actual TYPING of that archaic set of commands is pretty easy, but figuring out that when you want to install your printer means you type that "nonsense" is a pretty big leap for non-techies.Now I don't want to get flamed by people thinking I'm stupid. I know exactly what all that "nonsense" means, but there's no way my parents, or rather up-to-date friends, would have ANY idea to do that.
And people say Linux is ready for the masses.....sigh.
If you are a salaried employee, getting your work done more efficiently helps both you and your company.
Benefits to you: less overtime, enjoying your job more, more likely to get a promotion and a pay increase
And I'd say, if you are so antagonistic toward your company that you'd refuse to invest a little bit of your own time/money into doing something that helps the company along with yourself, then you should quit and find a job with a company that you can really get behind.
I agree entirely. WAY to slow. I was bored out of my mind waiting for the "other team" to finish their moves. We eventually gave up waiting for each other, since the two teams rarely, if ever, actually INTERACTED with each other. So my team played our own cooperative game, and the other played theirs.
LAME
Five dollars? That's crazy expensive. They only charge about 75 cents for them in China.
Practice.
Use what skills you do have (as an intelligent and logically minded person) to "fake" your way to social skills. What I mean is pay attention to other people. See what they do and say. Watch what works and doesn't work. You (and half of us engineers) may never really understand why certain social actions work and don't, but we should be smart enough to learn to predict statistically what does and doesn't.
Pretend like you have good social skills, try to act like you do. Make note of what you do that doesn't work, and actively change it. Practice restraining your natural personality at times, with the goal of making a new stranger like you.
I'm not convinced that would be a huge loss for California. If MS were to properly support open formats, then would they still be considered "evil"? I think it's worth the money to go to a open and compatible system, even if the vendor with the best implementation happens to be microsoft.
Note that the key word here is "properly support". I'm not sure that will happen.
If I had mod points, I'd give them to you...that's hilarious.
His point was not that you had to have the exact same mechanism that Goldeneye used, but that there are ways to prevent it. Goldeneye was just one example.
Which wouldn't necessarily make anyone happy. Look at the hot cofee thing...they had the normal, fully clothed skins on. It was the position of those wireframe models that had everyone up in arms....
Most of the people here on slashdot are well-educated city-dwelling folk with good incomes (or college students with parents in that position). Learn what it's like to live in a small town where, before Wal-Mart opened, you had to drive an hour to buy shoes for less than $80. And no, you COULDN'T afford to pay $80 for shoes.
I know, I sound like that old crotchety guy that talks about walking to school uphill both ways, but the arrogance without understanding where many of the consumers come from bothers me.