Unless you use OpenOffice. In OOo finger zooming means "move your finger one millimeter to zoom from 20% to 400%". It's the one program that makes me wish I could disable finger zooming on a per-application level.
True, even though this went horribly wrong at one point when Charles Manson misinterpreted a term for "playground slide" as "apocalyptic war". Granted, the man was quite insane to begin with but it still serves as an illustration that someone's interpretation of a song can radically differ from the one intended.
Another example would be the Deutschlandlied. The first stanza begins with "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles" ("Germany, Germany above all"). Ever since a psychopathic Austrian painter took over the country people tend to misinterpret it as "Germany should be above all other countries". That's actually wrong; when the song was written Germany was an area containing several dozen small countries all sharing one language and (mostly) culture. The song expresses the desire to get rid of the borders and just have one German country - or, in short, the desire for Germany to exist. Of course that didnt keep the brownshirts from coopting it.
Literary figures (and similar symbolism in other forms of art) are always a difficult thing - they heavily rely on the audience knowing certain things or having certain opinions. Thus, someone who has never been to the UK will have a harder time grasping the symbolism of Helter Skelter. Someone from today might interpret a particular still life as nothing but a depiction of a fruit basket even though back when it was made the numerous symbols for death would've been readily apparent to everyone. And few people outside Germany would see any special connotations in the remark "nobody intends to build a wall".
Symbolism is a clever way to convey a message. Unfortunately it's also a fairly noisy one and it's not always easy to detect which symbols are the most robust.
I'm not even partially female but I think that bathing (a period of downtime used mainly for relaxation) and reading (something best done during a period of downtime) go well together. Also, the point of the natural disaster thing was to point out that anything capable of destroying your whole library (yes, that was the whole premise) will also most likely destroy any electronic devices in the house so your library is toast either way, whether you have it in a room or backed up on your PC.
As for wanting all good characteristics from everything: The problem is that I think e-readers don't add significant value as they are as in this case I value the strengths of paper over those of an electronic device. If the electronic version became significantly cheaper than the paper version (say, a decent reader at 50-100 bucks and new DRM-free ebooks at 10-15 bucks) I'd switch but given the behavior of other parts of the content industry I doubt that's ever going to happen.
There is one context in which e-readers would mainly have advantages for me, that being role playing material (where the library-in-a-hand and searchability become invaluable). But for that I'd need a reader with an A4 sized screen and good color reproduction, which would not only cost an arm and a leg but also suck energy at a comparatively prodigious rate.
Which doesn't mean that the average university student will pay less. Any losses sustained by the publishers on the book market will just be converted into yet another price hike on the journal market. Fewer things can convert a professor to Open Access faster than direct contact with the publishers.
Unfortunately, nice as Open Access is, I don't see OA journals replacing Nature - or even smaller, domain-specific journals - just yet.
Very true. The ergonomics are different. With books I don't have to worry about batteries, I can easily tell how far through I am by looking at it (no, comparing page numbers does not give me that same immediately intuitive information) and I can annotate in whichever way I want. Plus, print media have a pretty high resolution compared to computer displays. The eye fatigue thing might be related to that.
Also, I can reasonably take a book with me into the bathtub. The humid environment isn't terribly healthy for the book but apart from the pages possibly getting wavy, it can cope. In fact, even if I accidentally drop the book into the water, a bit of drying will return it to usability. Try that with a running Kindle. I dare you.
Another issue is the whole concept: Your whole library fits onto one device. That sounds great until you realize that if something goes wrong with the device (and/or your account and/or the DRM server if the books are in a DRM'd format), your whole library just went down the drain. Even if after losing the reader you still can redownload everything without paying again, you still have to rebuy the reader. If damage on a similar scale (the thing you hold in your hand breaks) happens to your library, you have to replace one book. Plus, books can take a comparatively large abount of abuse (especially of the dropping variant) before becoming unusable.
Granted, ebooks can be backed up - but damage that takes out your entire library usually also takes out all electronic devices in the house. Floods, fires and massive structural damage to the house tend to do that. So unless you go to the trouble of setting up offsite backups your your ebooks you don't gain that much protection either. Theft protection maybe, but getting one's book stolen isn't that common an occurrence (and getting one's e-reader stolen is still more expensive).
Give me a waterproof, shock-proof e-reader with a 180+ DPI display that looks exactly like paper, capable of running for weeks on a single battery charge. Oh, and it can't cost more than, say, 100 bucks (as I don't expect e-books to be much cheaper than printed ones and I'm not paying 300 bucks for a device that allows me to do what I already can). Anything short of that just can't live up to ink on paper.
In that case, why bother filtering at all? If you already include reviews that pan the product and/or yourself, you don't really gain much from filtering anymore. Unless you try to sell a product that really nobody would review favorably in the same price range as more decent products, which isn't a terribly good business plan anyway.
However, there are a few retailers who allow negative reviews. When I specced out my computer, the reviews on the retailers' site have been a great help. Most of the cases I considered got panned for being flimsy or having sharp-edged parts. Without the reviews I would've bought yet another badly-made case; the one I actually bought is pretty decent.
It appears that unfiltered reviews are a quality criterion for retailers. Thus it makes sense to include it when considerung which retailer to go with.
They're not only asking for biometric data, they've also managed to force the EU (by theatening to make all travelers from the EU get a visa before being allowed into the country) to require them in order to get a passport. Yes, thanks to the States' paranoia, my own government now treats me like a criminal if I want to travel abroad. Gee, thanks a lot.
Actually, the move away from the (in my eyes still weird) UMD format would be universally seen as a good thing - if it had been done with the PSP's successor. The gripe people are having is that the Go is essentially a more expensive PSP that doesn't work with all PSP games.
Yes, the UMD should go away but not at the price of breaking compatibility with current-generation games that used to work on previous releases of the same device. No matter how cumbersome your media format is, you don't break compatibility with it within the generation.
The Pandora hasn't yet been delivered (although the first units should be ready within the month) and there won't be a second batch before 2010. Plus, it's unlikely that the Pandora will ever be marketed like the bigger handhelds (sold to brick and mortar stores in bulk). Thus, no competition there.
Other "alternative" handhelds like the Wiz or the Dingoo suffer from similar problems-- stores aren't interested enough to import them in bulk and nobody's going to pay for a big media campaign. So they're going to be sold to people who hear about them on the internet.
By all means, enjoy your handheld that costs more than a brand new console.
The handheld I preordered also costs more than a brand new console but at least it comes with two SDHC slots and an officially supported homebrew scene. Plus, I can plug a USB GPS dongle into it and use it as a satnav. Yeah, the PSP Go is really worth its money.
Depends on when you order your ticket. In Germany you can get fairly cheap tickets if you book early (the cheap tickets are made available in low numbers, although the third-cheapest version is often still available), also the Deutsche Bahn sells various variants of the "BahnCard", a rebate card that automatically cuts your fare by 25/50/100 percent (only for normal tickets). While it's not cheap (a second class BahnCard 25 is ~60 EUR/year) it's fairly useful if you commute by train or expect to do a lot of traveling.
I'm just speccing out the price for a second class ICE (our bullet train) ticket from Bremen to Nuremberg, that's about 430 kilometers; roughly 265 miles. Travel time is four hours. If I want to go on monday at 9:00, I have to pay the full price (106 EUR, ca. 151 USD). If I go on the 2nd of November I can go for 59 EUR (ca. 85 USD); if I go in December I can get the second-cheapest ticket for 39 EUR (57 USD). In theory there is also a 29 EUR ticket but I've never see those in the wild.
In short: At least in Germany, 240 USD is a pretty steep price for 250 miles unless you want to go first class and don't have a rebate card. Just print yourself a ticket and take the train instead.
The AC said "1:25 minutes". 85 seconds from Sacramento to San Diego is pretty damn fast. That's an average speed of 5.94 mi/s or 21388 mph - about Mach 32. Given that the plane has to start and land, I'd put the actual airspeed somewhere closer to Mach 90.
However, the train still wins in the comfort department, especially as it doesn't subject you to body-liquefing g-forces.
Wrong notebook. TFS talks about two notebooks. The first has one Intel and one ARM processor and only uses one of them at a time. The other has two Atom processors, using both simultaneously.
The GP wondered why someone would go through the trouble of creating a dual-socket netbook when Intel offers a processor that already offers two cores, needs less energy and wouldn't have required them to hack dual-socket support into the chipset. That's a justified question.
As for your ARM-only netbook: Those should surface within the next few months. If they don't, a homebrew project involving an old laptop and a Beagle Board will.
Well, the sequel certainly fits the "reflection on society" part. For about ten seconds somewhere towards the end. The rest, however, makes you realize just how good the original movie actually is.
I am familiar with Otlet's work, and while he was visionary, you're now attempting to put DaVinci over the Wright brothers.
I am aware that there is a treadmill. However, I maintain that you got on it first - it's fairly pointless to declare some invention to really be from another country just because it's based on prior work from that country. If we did that we could reassign virtually everything as most inventions have been made possible by other inventions. Hypertext was used by people before Tim Berners-Lee, but they used it in a different context, making it just as tangential to the internet as Otlet's work.
Communication, as social networking has recently demonstrated, IS content.
Yes, but the early users created their own content; they didn't come to the internet looking for it, especially as social networking-style content generation didn't take place until much later.
In case you haven't been paying attention, national laws effecting actions taken by organizations and individuals exist everywhere. While the US may disapprove of China's internet laws/regulations/policies and may voice that disapproval, it has not tried by some technical means to overthrow them.
Yes, that would be an excellent argument as to why a single country is unfit to run an organization governing an international resource.
Your example of ccTLDs shows your ignorance of the issue. Guess who decides who gets a ccTLD? The Swiss entity ISO. LOL. That's because when IANA was still part of ISI at USC the division's director didn't want the ISI/IANA to have the responsibility of deciding what was a valid country and what wasn't.
So it's the ISO and not the ICANN that keeps.su around? While they shouldn't have the power to mess with ccTLDs, they certainly can.
German car manufacturers DO dictate how manufacturers build THEIR cars. THEIR cars. Or perhaps you've never heard of 'manufacturing under license'? But that of course isn't what you meant to say. Too bad the idea you were trying to form doesn't make any sense in terms of the reality of patents and manufacturing and is a terrible analogy.
I apologize for the imprecise use of the word "their". I do think, however, that my analogy makes as much sense as your position, which has to face the harsh reality of international politics. Yeah, it's great you guys invented this. Pat yourselves on the shoulder. But don't expect everyone to happily assume you'll never abuse your control over it.
Of course HTML exists, and while it may have been developed in Europe by a British-born engineer, it was itself a second generation of work whose foundation began with the work of American engineers, Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart. Oh, snap!
You mean Paul Otlet. Who borrowed from established practice in encyclopedias, who in turn borrowed from older sources. Just because something was first done electronically by someone doesn't mean they came up with the idea.
Plus, I don't think that the content found in the early internet was the important reason to connect to it. English content is primarily useful to English-speaking users. The important thing was being able to cost-effectively communicate with companies (or with branches of oneself) and the internet facilitated that.
As for your last paragraph... The question still remains why everyone else should bow to America when things America isn't even involved in are concerned? Yes you're involved with the internet. You're also involved with the planet and we still don't ask you for permission if we want to build a highway in Europe. You can police your part of the network, true, but why anything else?
If "it was developed there so they get to control it" was valid, Germany could dictate how car manufacturers would build their cars. That notion is obviously absurd. So why should the US DoC have control over things like, say, whether the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic gets a ccTLD?
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you use OpenOffice. In OOo finger zooming means "move your finger one millimeter to zoom from 20% to 400%". It's the one program that makes me wish I could disable finger zooming on a per-application level.
True, even though this went horribly wrong at one point when Charles Manson misinterpreted a term for "playground slide" as "apocalyptic war". Granted, the man was quite insane to begin with but it still serves as an illustration that someone's interpretation of a song can radically differ from the one intended.
Another example would be the Deutschlandlied. The first stanza begins with "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles" ("Germany, Germany above all"). Ever since a psychopathic Austrian painter took over the country people tend to misinterpret it as "Germany should be above all other countries". That's actually wrong; when the song was written Germany was an area containing several dozen small countries all sharing one language and (mostly) culture. The song expresses the desire to get rid of the borders and just have one German country - or, in short, the desire for Germany to exist. Of course that didnt keep the brownshirts from coopting it.
Literary figures (and similar symbolism in other forms of art) are always a difficult thing - they heavily rely on the audience knowing certain things or having certain opinions. Thus, someone who has never been to the UK will have a harder time grasping the symbolism of Helter Skelter. Someone from today might interpret a particular still life as nothing but a depiction of a fruit basket even though back when it was made the numerous symbols for death would've been readily apparent to everyone. And few people outside Germany would see any special connotations in the remark "nobody intends to build a wall".
Symbolism is a clever way to convey a message. Unfortunately it's also a fairly noisy one and it's not always easy to detect which symbols are the most robust.
No, but I do think that Slashdot is the JVC of hypertext.
I'm not even partially female but I think that bathing (a period of downtime used mainly for relaxation) and reading (something best done during a period of downtime) go well together. Also, the point of the natural disaster thing was to point out that anything capable of destroying your whole library (yes, that was the whole premise) will also most likely destroy any electronic devices in the house so your library is toast either way, whether you have it in a room or backed up on your PC.
As for wanting all good characteristics from everything: The problem is that I think e-readers don't add significant value as they are as in this case I value the strengths of paper over those of an electronic device. If the electronic version became significantly cheaper than the paper version (say, a decent reader at 50-100 bucks and new DRM-free ebooks at 10-15 bucks) I'd switch but given the behavior of other parts of the content industry I doubt that's ever going to happen.
There is one context in which e-readers would mainly have advantages for me, that being role playing material (where the library-in-a-hand and searchability become invaluable). But for that I'd need a reader with an A4 sized screen and good color reproduction, which would not only cost an arm and a leg but also suck energy at a comparatively prodigious rate.
Which doesn't mean that the average university student will pay less. Any losses sustained by the publishers on the book market will just be converted into yet another price hike on the journal market. Fewer things can convert a professor to Open Access faster than direct contact with the publishers.
Unfortunately, nice as Open Access is, I don't see OA journals replacing Nature - or even smaller, domain-specific journals - just yet.
Very true. The ergonomics are different. With books I don't have to worry about batteries, I can easily tell how far through I am by looking at it (no, comparing page numbers does not give me that same immediately intuitive information) and I can annotate in whichever way I want. Plus, print media have a pretty high resolution compared to computer displays. The eye fatigue thing might be related to that.
Also, I can reasonably take a book with me into the bathtub. The humid environment isn't terribly healthy for the book but apart from the pages possibly getting wavy, it can cope. In fact, even if I accidentally drop the book into the water, a bit of drying will return it to usability. Try that with a running Kindle. I dare you.
Another issue is the whole concept: Your whole library fits onto one device. That sounds great until you realize that if something goes wrong with the device (and/or your account and/or the DRM server if the books are in a DRM'd format), your whole library just went down the drain. Even if after losing the reader you still can redownload everything without paying again, you still have to rebuy the reader. If damage on a similar scale (the thing you hold in your hand breaks) happens to your library, you have to replace one book. Plus, books can take a comparatively large abount of abuse (especially of the dropping variant) before becoming unusable.
Granted, ebooks can be backed up - but damage that takes out your entire library usually also takes out all electronic devices in the house. Floods, fires and massive structural damage to the house tend to do that. So unless you go to the trouble of setting up offsite backups your your ebooks you don't gain that much protection either. Theft protection maybe, but getting one's book stolen isn't that common an occurrence (and getting one's e-reader stolen is still more expensive).
Give me a waterproof, shock-proof e-reader with a 180+ DPI display that looks exactly like paper, capable of running for weeks on a single battery charge. Oh, and it can't cost more than, say, 100 bucks (as I don't expect e-books to be much cheaper than printed ones and I'm not paying 300 bucks for a device that allows me to do what I already can). Anything short of that just can't live up to ink on paper.
In that case, why bother filtering at all? If you already include reviews that pan the product and/or yourself, you don't really gain much from filtering anymore. Unless you try to sell a product that really nobody would review favorably in the same price range as more decent products, which isn't a terribly good business plan anyway.
Now, that would be a nightmare. Who protects the poor, defenseless corporations from those vile consumers?
However, there are a few retailers who allow negative reviews. When I specced out my computer, the reviews on the retailers' site have been a great help. Most of the cases I considered got panned for being flimsy or having sharp-edged parts. Without the reviews I would've bought yet another badly-made case; the one I actually bought is pretty decent.
It appears that unfiltered reviews are a quality criterion for retailers. Thus it makes sense to include it when considerung which retailer to go with.
They're not only asking for biometric data, they've also managed to force the EU (by theatening to make all travelers from the EU get a visa before being allowed into the country) to require them in order to get a passport. Yes, thanks to the States' paranoia, my own government now treats me like a criminal if I want to travel abroad. Gee, thanks a lot.
Actually, the move away from the (in my eyes still weird) UMD format would be universally seen as a good thing - if it had been done with the PSP's successor. The gripe people are having is that the Go is essentially a more expensive PSP that doesn't work with all PSP games.
Yes, the UMD should go away but not at the price of breaking compatibility with current-generation games that used to work on previous releases of the same device. No matter how cumbersome your media format is, you don't break compatibility with it within the generation.
The Pandora hasn't yet been delivered (although the first units should be ready within the month) and there won't be a second batch before 2010. Plus, it's unlikely that the Pandora will ever be marketed like the bigger handhelds (sold to brick and mortar stores in bulk). Thus, no competition there.
Other "alternative" handhelds like the Wiz or the Dingoo suffer from similar problems-- stores aren't interested enough to import them in bulk and nobody's going to pay for a big media campaign. So they're going to be sold to people who hear about them on the internet.
The handheld I preordered also costs more than a brand new console but at least it comes with two SDHC slots and an officially supported homebrew scene. Plus, I can plug a USB GPS dongle into it and use it as a satnav. Yeah, the PSP Go is really worth its money.
Depends on when you order your ticket. In Germany you can get fairly cheap tickets if you book early (the cheap tickets are made available in low numbers, although the third-cheapest version is often still available), also the Deutsche Bahn sells various variants of the "BahnCard", a rebate card that automatically cuts your fare by 25/50/100 percent (only for normal tickets). While it's not cheap (a second class BahnCard 25 is ~60 EUR/year) it's fairly useful if you commute by train or expect to do a lot of traveling.
I'm just speccing out the price for a second class ICE (our bullet train) ticket from Bremen to Nuremberg, that's about 430 kilometers; roughly 265 miles. Travel time is four hours. If I want to go on monday at 9:00, I have to pay the full price (106 EUR, ca. 151 USD). If I go on the 2nd of November I can go for 59 EUR (ca. 85 USD); if I go in December I can get the second-cheapest ticket for 39 EUR (57 USD). In theory there is also a 29 EUR ticket but I've never see those in the wild.
In short: At least in Germany, 240 USD is a pretty steep price for 250 miles unless you want to go first class and don't have a rebate card. Just print yourself a ticket and take the train instead.
The AC said "1:25 minutes". 85 seconds from Sacramento to San Diego is pretty damn fast. That's an average speed of 5.94 mi/s or 21388 mph - about Mach 32. Given that the plane has to start and land, I'd put the actual airspeed somewhere closer to Mach 90.
However, the train still wins in the comfort department, especially as it doesn't subject you to body-liquefing g-forces.
You forgot "Less space than a Nomad".
Wrong notebook. TFS talks about two notebooks. The first has one Intel and one ARM processor and only uses one of them at a time. The other has two Atom processors, using both simultaneously.
The GP wondered why someone would go through the trouble of creating a dual-socket netbook when Intel offers a processor that already offers two cores, needs less energy and wouldn't have required them to hack dual-socket support into the chipset. That's a justified question.
As for your ARM-only netbook: Those should surface within the next few months. If they don't, a homebrew project involving an old laptop and a Beagle Board will.
This time Han won't shoot at all, he'll just point at Greedo with his walkie-talkie.
Disney would never do that. They'd just ship the Cinderella 5 disk with thirty hours of unskippable ads.
Well, the sequel certainly fits the "reflection on society" part. For about ten seconds somewhere towards the end. The rest, however, makes you realize just how good the original movie actually is.
Are the guns you're allowed to have any good against the army? That's what you have to face if you seriously want to revolt.
You mean a Wii from the bottom, of course.
I am aware that there is a treadmill. However, I maintain that you got on it first - it's fairly pointless to declare some invention to really be from another country just because it's based on prior work from that country. If we did that we could reassign virtually everything as most inventions have been made possible by other inventions. Hypertext was used by people before Tim Berners-Lee, but they used it in a different context, making it just as tangential to the internet as Otlet's work.
Yes, but the early users created their own content; they didn't come to the internet looking for it, especially as social networking-style content generation didn't take place until much later.
Yes, that would be an excellent argument as to why a single country is unfit to run an organization governing an international resource.
So it's the ISO and not the ICANN that keeps .su around? While they shouldn't have the power to mess with ccTLDs, they certainly can.
I apologize for the imprecise use of the word "their". I do think, however, that my analogy makes as much sense as your position, which has to face the harsh reality of international politics. Yeah, it's great you guys invented this. Pat yourselves on the shoulder. But don't expect everyone to happily assume you'll never abuse your control over it.
Er, no. Since I don't live on Bizarro Earth I wouldn't do that. It should be fairly obvious who the IGP and GPU vendors would actually be.
And no, they're not going to be S3 and PowerVR.
You mean Paul Otlet. Who borrowed from established practice in encyclopedias, who in turn borrowed from older sources. Just because something was first done electronically by someone doesn't mean they came up with the idea.
Plus, I don't think that the content found in the early internet was the important reason to connect to it. English content is primarily useful to English-speaking users. The important thing was being able to cost-effectively communicate with companies (or with branches of oneself) and the internet facilitated that.
As for your last paragraph... The question still remains why everyone else should bow to America when things America isn't even involved in are concerned? Yes you're involved with the internet. You're also involved with the planet and we still don't ask you for permission if we want to build a highway in Europe. You can police your part of the network, true, but why anything else?
If "it was developed there so they get to control it" was valid, Germany could dictate how car manufacturers would build their cars. That notion is obviously absurd. So why should the US DoC have control over things like, say, whether the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic gets a ccTLD?