I think that's the big difference. Both European and american providers didn't anticipate the popularity of SMS, but the american simply put a huge pricetag on it, while in Europe (and I take it japan too) they were a bit cheaper than calling. So people got used to them, the added bonus is that they're far less intrusive than calling someone. But then the general stereotype of americans is that they're arrogant and rude so maybe it is a cultural thing.:-P
Exactly, I see this here too. People who leave on time are suddenly lousy employees because they are not willing to live on the job. A smart company hires enough people to get the job done, so employees can balance their work and personal life. Overtime should be the exception, not the rule (as it so often is).
No that's not what it's for. You release a browser that's supposed to support DOCTYPE $foo, but it has bugs. Lazy people make web pages with DOCTYPE $foo that rely on bugs. Now you want to fix that bug without breaking pages(*). It's impossible to tell from DOCTYPE $foo whether it expects broken behavior or not. Releasing a new DOCTYPE doesn't have any meaning because the standard hasn't changed, the spec would be "just like the old DOCTYPE except you can't rely on bugs x, y and z". Pinning it at IE7 means "I know the IE7 implementation works, I don't know if the IE8+ implementation does." Sure, I can see your point. Problems though: - you're breaking all the sites that did code up to the standards and are expecting their new nifty thing to Just Work(TM) in IE, because IE thinks it should be rendering them in IE-6 mode. A minor issue. - more importantly, whenever you update your rendering engine you'll have to implement a new mode. Think about IE-10 getting released in 5 years time (okay so I'm being optimistic). By that time you'll have a rendering mode for IE-7, one for IE-8, one for IE-9 and one for IE-10. These might render some pages completely the same, or they might not. They will have slight differences between the rendering of the original IE-7 and the current IE-7 mode. They will be a big lump of code your engineers will have to update every single time not only a rendering bug is found for the latest engine, but also when a rendering "bug" is found in the older engine not incorrectly rendering something. The cost of supporting this piece of crap will quickly spiral out of control.
Basically it's the same reason windows XP ended up having so many holes (in its first few incarnations): when you are carrying the weight of 4 to 5 previous versions with you, it is very hard to move forward. Microsoft made the right choice in breaking stuff in Vista, but they did not follow through. The same is now apparently true for internet explorer. This endless pursuit of ill-conceived backwards compatibility is not immediately harmful for the web (which will muddle along), but it's just not a very good business decision by microsoft.
The people from ALA are really kidding themselves if they think other vendors will follow suit. Most likely firefox and opera will just start rendering stuff correctly and let web masters figure out what bugs they fixed by themselves. Backwards compatibility is great and all, but in this case it's unlikely the costs will justify the benefits. In either case, webmasters will be doing extra work trying to be compliant for everyone anyway.
Er, maybe I didn't make this clear. Day and a half playtime, which of course was spread out over the course of a week or three. If it were truly a day and a half that would mean a day and a half without eating, drinking or sleeping. I don't think I could (or would want to) manage that. Actually thinking about it it probably was more like 2 days total playtime. Must have gone through the earlier levels faster than I thought. (lvl 1 to 20 for instance would be doable in maybe 15 hours playtime?)
From what I have seen, the use of multiple accounts by single users is not all that uncommon. I would be interested in knowing where you've seen that. It's very common in other MMO's such as EVE (they actually restrict training so you need to have two accounts to train two characters) but in WoW there's usually no point. The only exception maybe being the gold farmers, but then they also pay for all those accounts. I think they might be skewing the numbers a fair bit, as there are a lot of these operations out there and each one of them must employ quite a few people to keep up with the grind. They also need accounts to advertise from, spare accounts for when they get banned etc.
You'll notice since you end up skipping most of the quests, you just level so fast that all of the content whooshes by. The main changes are in the 30-50 range (I did that recently in maybe a day and a half total playtime).
Doing your PhD is a doctoral degree AFAIK and thus not "school".
Worst. Nitpick. Evar. Er if you read it in context it's a valid nitpick, as the OP was suggesting "school" doesn't involve anything truly original, while my point is that a PhD does.
"Doing your PhD" is still school, which is an artificially protected environment for the student in some ways. In school, the problems you are asked to solve in your classes are almost always problems someone else has solved, and you can -research- the solution. Doing your PhD is a doctoral degree AFAIK and thus not "school". You are not trying to solve problems someone else has solved, it's supposed to involve original research. Actually, solving problems someone else has solved is usually what you do at work, which is why the new generation won't be causing a global recession through their lack of invention skills any time soon.
Many of us in the working world deal with people who -can't- do anything other than "look it up on Google". Junior programmers, especially, who can't solve a problem unless they can swipe a code snippet from the web. Some of these eventually learn to poke randomly at the code till they find something that "sorta works". Either you live in the wrong area of the world (i.e. India) or your company is hiring the wrong programmers. All programmers I know have a good grasp of the analytical concepts involved in writing code. Remember that these young guys is what the industry is turning on at the moment. Trying to work of snippets looked up on the internet is more common for the trade school type programmer, which may be a problem with this type of education. This also means you need to manage your junior programmers better. If they weren't taught the necessary skills you'll have to spoonfeed them. Yeah it sucks, but your company hired them in the first place didn't they?
I've spoken to nurses and doctors who say the same things about some younger medical professionals; many of them lack the mential disciplines to diagnose problems. They're reduced to trying to look things up on Google and Wikipedia, and eventually give drugs randomly to trusting human patients. That's ridiculous. If they did that they shouldn't be a doctor at all. Considering the threat of lawsuits in this particular profession I wouldn't think any doctor that did that would last long. My experience with younger doctors is that they might not be as good at recognizing a certain problem (since they don't have the experience yet) but that they are far better up to speed (and stay up to speed) with the general state of the medical profession.
Fine; but what do you do when the information -needs- to be found; not by searching musty stacks of books, but by dissection of the problem and analysis of the elements that compose it? So what? Then we'll dissect the problem and carry on. This post reeks of "you damn kids get off my lawn".
The only problem with biofuels is that you need to grow them somewhere, and we're rapidly running out of space where we can do that. While they're more or less carbon-neutral, you don't want to have to cut down the rain forest to be able to grow enough of them.
I'll have a look at your "arguments" why don't I.
- An important point is for security, there is no way you can verify the validity of a binary except if you disassemble and inspect it manually. you can't compare it easily because it's platform/cpu/compiler specific output. Sources on the other hand can be directly compared against the trusted source. So for a lot of security-oriented companies, Gentoo, or other sources distributions, are just a lot more secure than pulling binaries from who knows where. Name one company that does this. You do realise every single package they install will have gentoo specific changes which they need to vet. It'll take a while I'm sure. Also, if you were crazy/rich enough to do this, you must as well just download the source packages for any other distro.
- USE flags, though ridiculed a lot, are a convenient way to achieve efficiency, if for example I don't need OSS support I just disable that flag. Disabling functinality in this way for a system does make sense since it can avoid you having to install things you don't really need. Most certainly you can win on one "efficiency" metric and that is installed package size. It's also the one most people don't find very important and everyone else (in the embedded space) is already using custom distros for. Really, USE flags aren't very useful unless in corner cases.
- as we get more cores compile time will not matter anymore, so that argument against source distributions is also lame It'll still take longer than just unpacking the binary. Not to mention all the stuff you'll need to configure. So that argument still stands.
- It's just fun to use because you can tweak a lot and the community is very helpful and tries to help users of all knowledge levels. The only valid argument you've given so far. Yes, gentoo is fun to play around with (for some people). It's like people who tune their car engines, it's a fun hobby. But I still don't see a convincing reason to use gentoo in any other capacity, which is why it has been ridiculed in the past.
One last point,
- the use of python makes everything slow since reading this database and emerging a package is a very I/O bound task AFAIK python makes CPU bound tasks slower, I/O shouldn't suffer much. Just to clear that up.
You are right of course but a beta is not the version of the browser most people should be running, and can not generally be referred to as "the current version" unless you're either google or a developer.
Most Americans (this is anecdotal) seem to live in a 50's world where "Europe" means the western portion of Europe that was never part of the communist block. Basically, England, France, Germany, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and Scandinavia. We generally don't consider Poland, Ukraine, or other Slavic/Eastern Block countries part of "Europe" even though I'm sure most Europeans do. And probably most Europeans who talk about "America" are talking about the contiguous U.S, forgetting Alaska, etc. Well as a (western) european, I think most americans are probably right when the discussion is cultural/economical. While the "new EU" definitely is making inroads it's quite different from the old EU (the one from before the recent expansion). People in the newer additions are poorer, have different problems and different cultural and political views from people in the old EU. Not to say this is a bad thing, "Europe" is all about diversity, but it can be handy to distinguish between the two.
And to the second point, I'd like to point out that when I was still a lad geographical data about the world was to be learned and a chapter on the US made a great deal about the fact the US includes canada and some islands. Just saying.
Jup same here. I just keep it patched, have been running the same win xp install for 5 (almost 6) years now and not one spyware or virus infection. I don't use IE or outlook though, but still. I don't get the post a couple of levels up about using virus scanners. Virus scanners are for corporate stooges and regular joe's, the rest of us should be smart enough not to open those pesky virus mails, or install spyware laden software.
Haskell I've never used and seems to be stuck in the university wasteland. Ruby and Rails seem more practical, but no more than Python. To be honest, I dislike python because it uses indent significance, the one thing I despised most about Make. I seem to recall the thing that sucks about make is it requires a \t somewhere. Python can use tabs or spaces. I prefer tabs but apparently most people prefer spaces, go figure. In any case, you're unlikely to ever encounter the same type of problems you had in make.
I live in Switzerland and it has a direct democracy system, and I do not think it is the worst system. The reality is that you actually get a middle of the road system. A direct democracy system would allow every citizen to vote on ever single law. (that's the common definition anyway) You're obviously using another definition since Switzerland is a representative democracy like any other. It's also arguably one of the most conservative countries in Europe, thus kind of reinforcing the GP's point.
GPSs foster insecurity and the inability to think analytically. I don't think so. I think some people are just better at navigating at others. And that is a fact. I don't own a GPS but when I have to drive somewhere I'm not familiar with, even with a map and directions I can still get lost. I just suck at navigating. I'm quite good at reading maps btw, which requires mostly analytical skill which I seem to have enough of. But when it comes right down to it I can't seem to map it well onto 3D space. I guess that's a part of reading maps too. So I would have sucked as a hunter/gatherer, it's not the stone age anymore is it?
Now as a counterpoint, my brother sometimes does have GPS which he uses when he doesn't know exactly where the place he's going to is. And when the GPS tells him to turn a left somewhere he'll routinely go "oh no that'll lead me through country roads, I'll just keep going round this way and take a left a couple of miles further". He doesn't seem to have any inability to think analytically.
Of course there will always be people who overrely on their electronic gadgets. It's common especially among somewhat older people who are not as comfortable with them as younger people yet. But to state that GPS is useless or somehow damaging as a whole is ridiculous to me. It's just another tool you need to use wisely, and that can greatly cut down on people asking me how to get to some street in the city. ("So yeah, a left here, then you keep going for 2 intersections where you take a right, then go 2 km's, then take a right... er, no, one way street there. You know what? Ask someone else")
Exactly, tools like Nessus and Nmap are invaluable. I routinely use them to inspect my own network to make sure it is as difficult as possible to break in....
When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. The analogy doesn't hold up very well. You don't use a gun on yourself. (well, not in normal operation anyway)
Not sure why the parent is modded down but he's right. Compared to the US the UK has "socialized healthcare". The name is of course meant to stigmatize the healthcare reform plans in the US, and has little to do with the actual implementation (which is more "socialized" in some nations than others).
The GP post was not made by a frothing asshole so there goes your theory out of the window. I read one article on roughly drafted (about iPods a while back) and it was badly researched, plain wrong, full of proof of assertion and generally insulting to everyone who didn't agree with the author. A bit like your comment really.
This isn't a big deal on a modern computer... sharing code was important when you were trying to accomodate 50 people in under a megabyte of memory, but now that everyone has their own individual gigabyte or more, it really doesn't make much difference if ten programs each load their own copy of a 100 kb library into memory, does it? Er, not that I know how it works but what happens when version X.a till Y.n of that library have a security bug. How do you fix it across all applications?
The annoying thing is they insist on showing (localized) copyright notices even in locales where ignorance of the law is not a valid defense. Besides that, skipping it means you have seen it at least once, as otherwise you wouldn't be wanting to skip it.
Slashdot Mirror
... and then get tried as adults.
Yeah, I see the logic.
I think that's the big difference. Both European and american providers didn't anticipate the popularity of SMS, but the american simply put a huge pricetag on it, while in Europe (and I take it japan too) they were a bit cheaper than calling. So people got used to them, the added bonus is that they're far less intrusive than calling someone. But then the general stereotype of americans is that they're arrogant and rude so maybe it is a cultural thing. :-P
Exactly, I see this here too. People who leave on time are suddenly lousy employees because they are not willing to live on the job. A smart company hires enough people to get the job done, so employees can balance their work and personal life. Overtime should be the exception, not the rule (as it so often is).
- you're breaking all the sites that did code up to the standards and are expecting their new nifty thing to Just Work(TM) in IE, because IE thinks it should be rendering them in IE-6 mode. A minor issue.
- more importantly, whenever you update your rendering engine you'll have to implement a new mode. Think about IE-10 getting released in 5 years time (okay so I'm being optimistic). By that time you'll have a rendering mode for IE-7, one for IE-8, one for IE-9 and one for IE-10. These might render some pages completely the same, or they might not. They will have slight differences between the rendering of the original IE-7 and the current IE-7 mode. They will be a big lump of code your engineers will have to update every single time not only a rendering bug is found for the latest engine, but also when a rendering "bug" is found in the older engine not incorrectly rendering something. The cost of supporting this piece of crap will quickly spiral out of control.
Basically it's the same reason windows XP ended up having so many holes (in its first few incarnations): when you are carrying the weight of 4 to 5 previous versions with you, it is very hard to move forward. Microsoft made the right choice in breaking stuff in Vista, but they did not follow through. The same is now apparently true for internet explorer. This endless pursuit of ill-conceived backwards compatibility is not immediately harmful for the web (which will muddle along), but it's just not a very good business decision by microsoft.
The people from ALA are really kidding themselves if they think other vendors will follow suit. Most likely firefox and opera will just start rendering stuff correctly and let web masters figure out what bugs they fixed by themselves. Backwards compatibility is great and all, but in this case it's unlikely the costs will justify the benefits. In either case, webmasters will be doing extra work trying to be compliant for everyone anyway.
Er, maybe I didn't make this clear. Day and a half playtime, which of course was spread out over the course of a week or three. If it were truly a day and a half that would mean a day and a half without eating, drinking or sleeping. I don't think I could (or would want to) manage that. Actually thinking about it it probably was more like 2 days total playtime. Must have gone through the earlier levels faster than I thought. (lvl 1 to 20 for instance would be doable in maybe 15 hours playtime?)
You'll notice since you end up skipping most of the quests, you just level so fast that all of the content whooshes by. The main changes are in the 30-50 range (I did that recently in maybe a day and a half total playtime).
Worst. Nitpick. Evar. Er if you read it in context it's a valid nitpick, as the OP was suggesting "school" doesn't involve anything truly original, while my point is that a PhD does.
The only problem with biofuels is that you need to grow them somewhere, and we're rapidly running out of space where we can do that. While they're more or less carbon-neutral, you don't want to have to cut down the rain forest to be able to grow enough of them.
One last point, - the use of python makes everything slow since reading this database and emerging a package is a very I/O bound task AFAIK python makes CPU bound tasks slower, I/O shouldn't suffer much. Just to clear that up.
You are right of course but a beta is not the version of the browser most people should be running, and can not generally be referred to as "the current version" unless you're either google or a developer.
And to the second point, I'd like to point out that when I was still a lad geographical data about the world was to be learned and a chapter on the US made a great deal about the fact the US includes canada and some islands. Just saying.
Jup same here. I just keep it patched, have been running the same win xp install for 5 (almost 6) years now and not one spyware or virus infection. I don't use IE or outlook though, but still. I don't get the post a couple of levels up about using virus scanners. Virus scanners are for corporate stooges and regular joe's, the rest of us should be smart enough not to open those pesky virus mails, or install spyware laden software.
Now as a counterpoint, my brother sometimes does have GPS which he uses when he doesn't know exactly where the place he's going to is. And when the GPS tells him to turn a left somewhere he'll routinely go "oh no that'll lead me through country roads, I'll just keep going round this way and take a left a couple of miles further". He doesn't seem to have any inability to think analytically.
Of course there will always be people who overrely on their electronic gadgets. It's common especially among somewhat older people who are not as comfortable with them as younger people yet. But to state that GPS is useless or somehow damaging as a whole is ridiculous to me. It's just another tool you need to use wisely, and that can greatly cut down on people asking me how to get to some street in the city. ("So yeah, a left here, then you keep going for 2 intersections where you take a right, then go 2 km's, then take a right... er, no, one way street there. You know what? Ask someone else")
When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. The analogy doesn't hold up very well. You don't use a gun on yourself. (well, not in normal operation anyway)
Microsoft is complaining to the EU though. European rules actually forbid monopolies in some cases.
Wrong. If you have the money you pay for it yourself.
At least, in any reasonable implementation of universal healthcare.
Not sure why the parent is modded down but he's right. Compared to the US the UK has "socialized healthcare". The name is of course meant to stigmatize the healthcare reform plans in the US, and has little to do with the actual implementation (which is more "socialized" in some nations than others).
I'm sorry, I missed the part where you proved the WHO is wrong. Perhaps you need to flesh that post out a bit.
The GP post was not made by a frothing asshole so there goes your theory out of the window. I read one article on roughly drafted (about iPods a while back) and it was badly researched, plain wrong, full of proof of assertion and generally insulting to everyone who didn't agree with the author. A bit like your comment really.
The annoying thing is they insist on showing (localized) copyright notices even in locales where ignorance of the law is not a valid defense. Besides that, skipping it means you have seen it at least once, as otherwise you wouldn't be wanting to skip it.