You don't bitch about the 3210 and I don't bitch about your feature-overladen talking camcorder that can even crash. Seriously, the 3210 is a great mobile: It has a reasonable size, it's pretty robust even compared to other monoblock mobiles and it doesn't come with unnecessary bells and whistles like WAP. I like the 3210. It's a gret device for those people who need their phone for exactly two things: Call someone and be called. For everything else there's notebooks.
Okay, I currently do use a 6210 (a 3210 with WAP and less navigable menus), but that's because I got it for zero cost and my 3210 took a hit to the screen too many.
Note that the explorers in the past had to worry about material but not about the crew - skilled sailors were hardly rare. Now look at our astronauts: They need to be well-educated and in excellent physical as well as psychical condition and have to have the balls and discipline to go up there, spend months in a tiny space and do little but work every day. Also they require an extensive and costly training. When an unmanned rocket blows up that sucks and it's hideously expensive, but when a manned rocked blows up we lose astronauts, which are not only hideously expensive but also quite hard to acquire.
Back in the Seventies it was okay to blow up a few people trying to do something in or with space because back then nobody cared about things like profitability. Good for science, but nowadays inacceptable as profitability is quickly becoming the one value above all others.
Note that sticking to ASCII also ensures that they have no way to properly read documents fromm every country where English is not the main language as the countries have no way of saving their stuff properly. If you want compatibility and simplicity standardizing on UTF-32 would probably be the best way. UTF-8 wuld probably work as well - if they have the Unicode table they probably also have the UTF-8 specs.
They are ridiculously expensive. I have a Palm Vx, which is pretty much everything I need in a PDA. It cost me a whopping fifty bucks. If I should need a new PDA I can get a decent one with flash card and everything for a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty bucks. Now show me a tablet PC I can get for a similar price. Heck, show me one I can get for less than 1500 Euros.
Oh, I think Séparé might make sense for me. I use Tab Mix Plus with the mosewheel-scrolled tab bar. Unfortunately this is a bit problematic in conjunction with the Mighty Mouse, which has a very sensitive "wheel", which sometimes goes off while you middle-click, causing you to accidentally hit the wrong tab. Sure, you can undo he close but I'd prefer accidentally closing a separator than a real tab.
Additionally, most IRC clients have scripting capabilities, making IRC a valuable tool for roleplayers who just can't get a group going in their area. I have a weekly IRC roleplaying session and while it's not perfect it's far better than nothing.
Also, IRC is extremely easy to interface with. Open a socket, write some data to it and bang, you've got yourself an IRC client. This ease of use makes it great for when you need a simple method for network communication. Which is exactly why malware authors love it.
While what you say is generally true there is one problem: While software is unpatentable, the thing usually referred to as "software patents" tries to patent computers running the software, which works under a certain interpretation of the law. Until we have a law clearly stating that software cannot be patented (written in a form that closes as many loopholes as possible) people will keep playing the "computer running XYZ" card.
Support open document formats: The EU could declare that all official electronic documents have to use the OpenDocument format (where appropriate), effectively forcing Microsoft to provide OpenDocument support or face the fact that people will switch to OpenOffice because they can't use MS Office for stuff like tax declarations. This stuff is going to be done electronically in the future and if MS Office can't do that many people will consider it a showstopper. Note that support for OpenDocument will dilute the value of the MS Office document format because "it does the same but no one wants it so why not use.odt?".
Promote free software procurement policies: Just imagine what happens when the EU deicdes that all member states are to completely switch to Linux in the next ten years. That's a whole market that Microsoft uses. Note that this implies that MS is forced to support OpenDocument and other open formats.
Permanently block software patents: This would greatly reduce Microsoft's power to kill off competitors in the EU through litigation. It would also allow European software companies to use technology patented in the rest of the world, leading to much stronger competition. Those patents even come with public disclosure of how the stuff works. How handy.
Note that we have a very strong anti-patent lobby which has already stopped the last attempt at legitimizing software patents. They were not banned but the bill was rejected - because the European anti-patent lobby is strong, has good media presence (through things like website strikes) and directly gives them positive feedback for acting against patents - for example they presented the thanks of thirty thousand supporters to the Polish parliament when they stopped an attempt to pass the bill. Software patents are not banned in Europe, but we have people working at it and they're working well.
Implement more stringent anti-monopoly measures: This would mean more legal trouble for Microsoft, whose business model is built on "own a market and then take advantage of that". More stringent anti-monopoly laws would make the European market much less profitable for Micosoft - but they can't pull out because that would hurt their OS monopoly in the rest of the world, which they need to make money.
None of these practices are mutually exclusive and combined they could make Europe a very unpleasant place to be for an IT corporation (but paradisiac for small-to-middle sized businesses). The EU is currently in the process of partially implementing some of them (some governments are moving more and more of their stuff to Linux, which will make open standards a necessity sooner or later), some might happen if we don't stop fighting (the banning of software patents, even more government OSS, open standards) and some will probably happen if certain companies don't stop blatantly ignoring rules they don't like (more stringent anti-monopoly laws, more government OSS).
Microsoft might have won over the US DoJ, but the European Union might prove to be a much worse enemy. Unlike the US we're not one nation. If an American government agency screws up and gives a company a far too mild punishment the government sucks and there's not much that happens (this applies to all government agencies worldwide). If the same happens in an EU agency you might end up having nations cry foul because their interests were not properly represented. And nations are not as easily distracted as their citizens.
Also, Microsoft is the epitome of the Evil American Monopoly - and it suffers the fact that we don't like the USA and everything American nearly as much as we did ten years ago. Plus, they've got our tech market by the balls and we don't like being dependant on a corporation from another country (especially when both the corporation and the country have a reputation of being completely ruthless), that's why governments are switching to Linux and that's why they want interoperability. Interoperability opens up the market, allowing other OSes to compete.
Linux is gaining popularity among our politicians and as it does so does the interest in breaking free from Microsoft. The stalling tactics reinforce this interest, too - Microsoft is giving us the message that if we want anything from them (other than product licenses) we have to spend years suing them for it. Someone in Redmond seems to believe in the saying that bad publicity is good publicity...
Meh. Record a hidden dialogue where the characters complain about the lack of quiche lines and/or other things that might cause fanboys to exhibit irrational behavior. Maybe even put a reference to said fanboys as the closing line. Convince the developers to actually put it into the game, only accessible through some incredibly contrived method. Bing, you get one quality easteregg.
Okay, so it's a zdnet blog post by RP but at least it's not his personal blog. It's a step in the right direction. Also, there's still one link that goes somewhere else. Yeah.
I also saw a movie where Earth's core stopped and the resulting hole in the magnetic field caused a space laser to melt the Golden Gate Bridge. Call me disillusioned, but I think that sometimes movies might not depict reality. On the other hand we should probably try not to develop an earthquake weapon, just in case.
The summary contains only one link to primidi.com and that is Roland's name. I'm perfectly fine with an RP story where all relevant links point to sites that aren't RP's blog
No, European blood cells are about 3cm x 1.5cm. That's also why if you're an American in Europe and you need a blood transfusion you need to use an adapter.
You fail it. The successor of Web 2.0 will be Web 3D. There's nothing after that, but everyone will be talking about how cool it will be wenn Web Forever comes out.
Note that outside of the USA, the UK and Japan Google Maps and especially Google Local serve pretty much no use whatsoever. The European mainland? No maps, no high-res sat shots. Mainland Asia? You won't even find the capitals. 85% of the world? Nada. Niente. Zilch.
So, if you are actually living outside of the USA, the UK or Japan all you get are toy sites with usually clunky interfaces. Go Web 2.0. Rah rah rah.
Then again, considering how amazingly fast the internet (especially the most popular browser) has traditionally been at properly adopting technologies like CSS, PNG or the application/xhtml+xml MIME type it's no wonder that years-old technology is going to be the Next Big Thing. The next Next Big Thing is probably going to be CSS3. Somewhere around 2010.
Slashdot Mirror
They green-flagged a major malware site. ;)
You don't bitch about the 3210 and I don't bitch about your feature-overladen talking camcorder that can even crash. Seriously, the 3210 is a great mobile: It has a reasonable size, it's pretty robust even compared to other monoblock mobiles and it doesn't come with unnecessary bells and whistles like WAP. I like the 3210. It's a gret device for those people who need their phone for exactly two things: Call someone and be called. For everything else there's notebooks.
Okay, I currently do use a 6210 (a 3210 with WAP and less navigable menus), but that's because I got it for zero cost and my 3210 took a hit to the screen too many.
That jacket looks suspiciously like something from an old science fiction movie...
Note that the explorers in the past had to worry about material but not about the crew - skilled sailors were hardly rare. Now look at our astronauts: They need to be well-educated and in excellent physical as well as psychical condition and have to have the balls and discipline to go up there, spend months in a tiny space and do little but work every day. Also they require an extensive and costly training. When an unmanned rocket blows up that sucks and it's hideously expensive, but when a manned rocked blows up we lose astronauts, which are not only hideously expensive but also quite hard to acquire.
Back in the Seventies it was okay to blow up a few people trying to do something in or with space because back then nobody cared about things like profitability. Good for science, but nowadays inacceptable as profitability is quickly becoming the one value above all others.
Note that sticking to ASCII also ensures that they have no way to properly read documents fromm every country where English is not the main language as the countries have no way of saving their stuff properly. If you want compatibility and simplicity standardizing on UTF-32 would probably be the best way. UTF-8 wuld probably work as well - if they have the Unicode table they probably also have the UTF-8 specs.
They are ridiculously expensive. I have a Palm Vx, which is pretty much everything I need in a PDA. It cost me a whopping fifty bucks. If I should need a new PDA I can get a decent one with flash card and everything for a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty bucks. Now show me a tablet PC I can get for a similar price. Heck, show me one I can get for less than 1500 Euros.
If Microsoft can be innovative by copying someone else's features so can we.
Oh, I think Séparé might make sense for me. I use Tab Mix Plus with the mosewheel-scrolled tab bar. Unfortunately this is a bit problematic in conjunction with the Mighty Mouse, which has a very sensitive "wheel", which sometimes goes off while you middle-click, causing you to accidentally hit the wrong tab. Sure, you can undo he close but I'd prefer accidentally closing a separator than a real tab.
Additionally, most IRC clients have scripting capabilities, making IRC a valuable tool for roleplayers who just can't get a group going in their area. I have a weekly IRC roleplaying session and while it's not perfect it's far better than nothing.
Also, IRC is extremely easy to interface with. Open a socket, write some data to it and bang, you've got yourself an IRC client. This ease of use makes it great for when you need a simple method for network communication. Which is exactly why malware authors love it.
While what you say is generally true there is one problem: While software is unpatentable, the thing usually referred to as "software patents" tries to patent computers running the software, which works under a certain interpretation of the law. Until we have a law clearly stating that software cannot be patented (written in a form that closes as many loopholes as possible) people will keep playing the "computer running XYZ" card.
All of these things would hurt Microsoft:
.odt?".
Support open document formats: The EU could declare that all official electronic documents have to use the OpenDocument format (where appropriate), effectively forcing Microsoft to provide OpenDocument support or face the fact that people will switch to OpenOffice because they can't use MS Office for stuff like tax declarations. This stuff is going to be done electronically in the future and if MS Office can't do that many people will consider it a showstopper. Note that support for OpenDocument will dilute the value of the MS Office document format because "it does the same but no one wants it so why not use
Promote free software procurement policies: Just imagine what happens when the EU deicdes that all member states are to completely switch to Linux in the next ten years. That's a whole market that Microsoft uses. Note that this implies that MS is forced to support OpenDocument and other open formats.
Permanently block software patents: This would greatly reduce Microsoft's power to kill off competitors in the EU through litigation. It would also allow European software companies to use technology patented in the rest of the world, leading to much stronger competition. Those patents even come with public disclosure of how the stuff works. How handy.
Note that we have a very strong anti-patent lobby which has already stopped the last attempt at legitimizing software patents. They were not banned but the bill was rejected - because the European anti-patent lobby is strong, has good media presence (through things like website strikes) and directly gives them positive feedback for acting against patents - for example they presented the thanks of thirty thousand supporters to the Polish parliament when they stopped an attempt to pass the bill. Software patents are not banned in Europe, but we have people working at it and they're working well.
Implement more stringent anti-monopoly measures: This would mean more legal trouble for Microsoft, whose business model is built on "own a market and then take advantage of that". More stringent anti-monopoly laws would make the European market much less profitable for Micosoft - but they can't pull out because that would hurt their OS monopoly in the rest of the world, which they need to make money.
None of these practices are mutually exclusive and combined they could make Europe a very unpleasant place to be for an IT corporation (but paradisiac for small-to-middle sized businesses). The EU is currently in the process of partially implementing some of them (some governments are moving more and more of their stuff to Linux, which will make open standards a necessity sooner or later), some might happen if we don't stop fighting (the banning of software patents, even more government OSS, open standards) and some will probably happen if certain companies don't stop blatantly ignoring rules they don't like (more stringent anti-monopoly laws, more government OSS).
Microsoft might have won over the US DoJ, but the European Union might prove to be a much worse enemy. Unlike the US we're not one nation. If an American government agency screws up and gives a company a far too mild punishment the government sucks and there's not much that happens (this applies to all government agencies worldwide). If the same happens in an EU agency you might end up having nations cry foul because their interests were not properly represented. And nations are not as easily distracted as their citizens.
Also, Microsoft is the epitome of the Evil American Monopoly - and it suffers the fact that we don't like the USA and everything American nearly as much as we did ten years ago. Plus, they've got our tech market by the balls and we don't like being dependant on a corporation from another country (especially when both the corporation and the country have a reputation of being completely ruthless), that's why governments are switching to Linux and that's why they want interoperability. Interoperability opens up the market, allowing other OSes to compete.
Linux is gaining popularity among our politicians and as it does so does the interest in breaking free from Microsoft. The stalling tactics reinforce this interest, too - Microsoft is giving us the message that if we want anything from them (other than product licenses) we have to spend years suing them for it. Someone in Redmond seems to believe in the saying that bad publicity is good publicity...
Great minds think alike... ;)
I dream of a day when Microsoft and its "partners" come up with a POSITIVE reason to use their products.
They could give you a free iPod with every copy of Windows.
In fact they are. The press conference has been going for over a month now but all the Real PR guys say is "Buffering..." over and over.
Meh. Record a hidden dialogue where the characters complain about the lack of quiche lines and/or other things that might cause fanboys to exhibit irrational behavior. Maybe even put a reference to said fanboys as the closing line. Convince the developers to actually put it into the game, only accessible through some incredibly contrived method. Bing, you get one quality easteregg.
Okay, so it's a zdnet blog post by RP but at least it's not his personal blog. It's a step in the right direction. Also, there's still one link that goes somewhere else. Yeah.
I also saw a movie where Earth's core stopped and the resulting hole in the magnetic field caused a space laser to melt the Golden Gate Bridge. Call me disillusioned, but I think that sometimes movies might not depict reality. On the other hand we should probably try not to develop an earthquake weapon, just in case.
The summary contains only one link to primidi.com and that is Roland's name. I'm perfectly fine with an RP story where all relevant links point to sites that aren't RP's blog
No, European blood cells are about 3cm x 1.5cm. That's also why if you're an American in Europe and you need a blood transfusion you need to use an adapter.
I think the first question the device will ask you after setup is "A/S/L?".
You fail it. The successor of Web 2.0 will be Web 3D. There's nothing after that, but everyone will be talking about how cool it will be wenn Web Forever comes out.
Note that outside of the USA, the UK and Japan Google Maps and especially Google Local serve pretty much no use whatsoever. The European mainland? No maps, no high-res sat shots. Mainland Asia? You won't even find the capitals. 85% of the world? Nada. Niente. Zilch.
So, if you are actually living outside of the USA, the UK or Japan all you get are toy sites with usually clunky interfaces. Go Web 2.0. Rah rah rah.
Then again, considering how amazingly fast the internet (especially the most popular browser) has traditionally been at properly adopting technologies like CSS, PNG or the application/xhtml+xml MIME type it's no wonder that years-old technology is going to be the Next Big Thing. The next Next Big Thing is probably going to be CSS3. Somewhere around 2010.
Probably Ruby# on Rails.NET.