But the languages that are dying are being replaced with more common languages.
If anything, the eradication of these "secret" languages and lesser-known ones should open up that wealth of information to more people.
It's not like the people who know the information are dying, only the language they speak. And since that language is being replaced with another one, the information is still there, it just sounds different, and can be understood by more people.
I thought the same thing. TFA says this:
To be clear, this paper deliberately concerns itself with the commodity computer market, where products are aimed at the mass market. We consider the Mac to be a premium, niche product, like a Bang and Olufsen television, which is difficult to justify in the business world outside of the publishing sector. We therefore do not think that the Mac, despite claims of its superiority, provides a meaningful competitive threat to Microsoft. So there ya go. I'm not sure how that will fly. What if Microsoft or other OEMs want to make a "niche product" too? Wait, does Dell's Alienware line qualify as niche for gamers? What about all of the Media Center devices -- aren't those niche for entertainment affionados?
I dont know about your math, but your reality is what is wrong. If I understand you correctly, it sounds like you expect your ISP to reserve 100% of your total capacity just in case you intend to use it. And not just yours, but every customer they have. You're essentially saying, "If they have 500 customers with 1MB connections, they should have a 500 MB connection."
The problem is that your proposed service would be so exceedingly expensive that you, nor anyone else, would want to buy it. Actually, that service does exist. Some businesses buy QoS lines with throughput guarantees and no bandwidth limitations. They also exist in fractions, too. For example, you might buy a 1.54 MB line for $300/mo with a 25% throughput guarantee. Meaning the line can go as fast as 1.54, it will never drop below 384k, and you're allowed to peg it at 384k for 24/7 without penalty.
Since Slashdot loves analogies, here's one based on your logic: A restaurant that offers "free refills" should stock enough soda to quench the thirst of all its customers, even if the customers decide to stay there from opening until closing, drink non-stop, with their mouth directly under the spout. And sell it for $0.99.
When you've had your GMail email address for as long as you've had your Hotmail address, please email me and tell me you're not getting any spam.
Spam is certainly not unique to Hotmail users. I pay Postini $2/mo to filter my email, and that only weed out about 95% of it. Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, their users all get spam too.
About the only "backroom deal" that Microsoft is likely to get is from Microsoft itself. And one could easily argue that they're entitled to send you their own spam if you're using their free email service.
The people in this anti-group claim that it exists only because the hate group "Fuck Islam" violates Facebook's own terms of service. They say that it has nothing to do with free speech or their opinions on the subject.
If that is true, then were are all of the other anti-groups protesting these hate groups, which I found on FaceBook in about three minutes of searching:
ALL CHILD MOLESTERS SHOULD HAVE THERE DICKS GET CUT OFF
Fuck The Fucking KKK
FUCK THE KKK FUCK THOSE RACIST BITCHES!!!!
All unite against the group(fuck uslimsand palestine)
FUCK ISRAEL!!! EVERONE HATES IT SO WHY IS IT STILL AROUND?!
Fuck Nazis
Fuck The Enemies of Israel
It seems to me that if they were really concerned, they would protest ALL of these hate groups, and not just the one they selected. After all, if they are truly okay with free speech but not hate groups, then shouldn't they take equal protest against the anti-KKK group, the anti-Nazi group, and the anti-Israel group?
Couldn't it also be that what's he's trying to do is simply impossible, because the manufacturer doesn't have Vista-compatible drivers? Or because he has incompatible components?
He admits that he "put together" his own machine. Could that be why it does not wake up from sleep mode? Or why he's having so many other troubles?
I've found that the more someone messes with settings, the more likely they are to cause serious problems down the line. I have no doubt that this self-proclaimed power user has been doing plenty of messing around.
On the other hand, I have a brand-new Dell system which did not ship with Vista. I loaded Vista on it, and everything works perfectly -- including sleep and hibernate. I also have a two-year old Dell laptop which I loaded Vista onto, and it too works perfectly. The wireless reconnects after a standby in 15-20 seconds. Not great, but not bad enough to drive me to Linux.
His issues might have more clout if they were experienced by more people. But it seems to me that the only people "suffering" from Vista are the ones who are using unsupported hardware, or are trying to mess with settings to the point they break things. Oh, there's also the group that spreads FUD about Vista without actually trying it, regurgitating the FUD that others have already tried to spread.
Here's a conspiracy theory: Jim Louderback's new company is a geek-focused video-blog of sorts, professing the greatness of BitTorrent and other open-standard goodness. Could it be that this final editorial was an attempt to give him a little bit of geek street cred? Shame Vista and the geeks will come.
This thread started because someone suggested using PDF as a free way to markup text and pass it around. Kudos to you for trying to circumvent the argument by throwing in something completely different.
If we were teaching digital art, we'd expect them to use Photoshop and Illustrator, not GIMP. If we were teaching video production, we'd expect them to use Premier. If we were teaching them web design, we'd expect them to use DreamWeaver. Why is an office application any different?
You might have experienced one of the many free dump stations (or even a "Dump Day") where you're giving your electronics to a private business. They take your stuff and melt it down and sell it.
Had you have taken your stuff to a county dump, they'd have charged you their normal fees.
At least, that's how it is here in San Joaquin County. But if we give our stuff to Waste Management, it's free.
The last time I checked, MS Office 2007 for educational pricing (with its markup and PDF features) is cheaper than the license to Acrobat Professional.
The product is never advertsed to be a perfect, 100% fool-proof solution.
What it does, what ANY security system does, is makes it harder for people to get in. That's all. And for that, it works quite well.
Example: Bob is working for a company and has a spreadsheet which contains the company's top 1000 customers (or trade secrets, or next big marketing strategy, etc). He's about to leave and go to work for the competitor. He emails his GMail account the sensitive document so he can start using it when he gets to the new place.
The author of the document was smart enough to add DRM to the file. When Bob tries to open it at home, it won't. The next day when Bob returns to the office he tries to copy-and-paste it into a new file, it still can't be opened. When Bob tries to print it onto paper, he finds that he cannot. This is because the original author disabled everything through DRM.
Can Bob still take a screen capture? Sure. Can he commit to memory? Yes. Can he write it all down manually? Yes. But all of these require much more work and are prone to errors.
What tool (for free) allows you to mark up a PDF that someone gave you in such a way that the author can integrate those corrections/comments back into the original document for fast, easy changes?
In other words, if I took your PDF that said "except" and corrected it to say "accept", how would you integrate that correction back into your Word/WordPerfect/WordPad/NotePad file for your second draft?
1) No more freaking menus and dialog boxes 2) Better looking documents in less time 3) Royalty-free clip art 4) Enhanced copy-paste functions 5) Diagrams (see Smart Art) 6) Equation editor 7) PDF writing 8) Bulit-in APA/MLA styles 9) Track Changes 10) Mail Merge 11) XML format 12) Sharing with others (SharePoint, Groove, etc) 13) Live Grammar and Spell Check 14) AutoCorrect 15) Visual Basic 16) DRM (the kind that corporations need to keep their docs secret)
And that's just Word.
Please realize that there are many people out there that know the difference between Word and WordPad, and use those features quite often.
Because people outside of Slashdot use more than just plain-text features.
Uploading via PDF means that it's very difficult for a student and teacher to exchange comments, corrections, markup, etc. With Word's Track Changes feature, this is painless.
And it all goes back to teaching students what they will need to learn when they enter the workforce.
Part of the the school district's job is to prepare students to enter the work force, and use its tools. If 99% of the workforce is using PowerPoint and Excel and Word, then I'm glad that's what they're teaching them.
To that end, I'm glad they're recommending Office 2007 to parents. Many don't understand the difference between Works or WordPerfect or Word.
And for what it's worth, the 2007 for home use is only $130 and can be installed on 3 computers in the home. It contains Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Since Jan 2005, California has been charging an E-Waste Recovery Fee for some time now. Whenever you sell something to a California resident that has a display (CRT/LCD/etc), you have to charge this fee and give it to the state:
The fee is not a deposit either, like you have on soda cans. If you take your CRT to the dump later, even if you can prove you paid that E-Waste fee, you still have to pay the dump to take your trash.
Or for about $0.25/hr per desk, you could have just upgraded all of those slow pathetic machines into modern ones and given your users machines that would enable them to work faster.
1. Come up with a rediculous story about Vista which will generate lots of traffic from MS fanboys and the Linux croud. Mention Haliburton for extra hits.
Slashdot Mirror
But the languages that are dying are being replaced with more common languages.
If anything, the eradication of these "secret" languages and lesser-known ones should open up that wealth of information to more people.
It's not like the people who know the information are dying, only the language they speak. And since that language is being replaced with another one, the information is still there, it just sounds different, and can be understood by more people.
Oh yeah, way to make us non-color blind people feel inadequate.
You insensitive clod!!!
I think these guys have some more thinking to do.
.. where jokes write you!
I dont know about your math, but your reality is what is wrong. If I understand you correctly, it sounds like you expect your ISP to reserve 100% of your total capacity just in case you intend to use it. And not just yours, but every customer they have. You're essentially saying, "If they have 500 customers with 1MB connections, they should have a 500 MB connection."
The problem is that your proposed service would be so exceedingly expensive that you, nor anyone else, would want to buy it. Actually, that service does exist. Some businesses buy QoS lines with throughput guarantees and no bandwidth limitations. They also exist in fractions, too. For example, you might buy a 1.54 MB line for $300/mo with a 25% throughput guarantee. Meaning the line can go as fast as 1.54, it will never drop below 384k, and you're allowed to peg it at 384k for 24/7 without penalty.
Since Slashdot loves analogies, here's one based on your logic: A restaurant that offers "free refills" should stock enough soda to quench the thirst of all its customers, even if the customers decide to stay there from opening until closing, drink non-stop, with their mouth directly under the spout. And sell it for $0.99.
When you've had your GMail email address for as long as you've had your Hotmail address, please email me and tell me you're not getting any spam.
Spam is certainly not unique to Hotmail users. I pay Postini $2/mo to filter my email, and that only weed out about 95% of it. Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, their users all get spam too.
About the only "backroom deal" that Microsoft is likely to get is from Microsoft itself. And one could easily argue that they're entitled to send you their own spam if you're using their free email service.
The people in this anti-group claim that it exists only because the hate group "Fuck Islam" violates Facebook's own terms of service. They say that it has nothing to do with free speech or their opinions on the subject.
If that is true, then were are all of the other anti-groups protesting these hate groups, which I found on FaceBook in about three minutes of searching:
ALL CHILD MOLESTERS SHOULD HAVE THERE DICKS GET CUT OFF
Fuck The Fucking KKK
FUCK THE KKK FUCK THOSE RACIST BITCHES!!!!
All unite against the group(fuck uslimsand palestine)
FUCK ISRAEL!!! EVERONE HATES IT SO WHY IS IT STILL AROUND?!
Fuck Nazis
Fuck The Enemies of Israel
It seems to me that if they were really concerned, they would protest ALL of these hate groups, and not just the one they selected. After all, if they are truly okay with free speech but not hate groups, then shouldn't they take equal protest against the anti-KKK group, the anti-Nazi group, and the anti-Israel group?
Your post failed to mention Natalie Portman.
You insensitive, censoring clod!
Couldn't it also be that what's he's trying to do is simply impossible, because the manufacturer doesn't have Vista-compatible drivers? Or because he has incompatible components?
He admits that he "put together" his own machine. Could that be why it does not wake up from sleep mode? Or why he's having so many other troubles?
I've found that the more someone messes with settings, the more likely they are to cause serious problems down the line. I have no doubt that this self-proclaimed power user has been doing plenty of messing around.
On the other hand, I have a brand-new Dell system which did not ship with Vista. I loaded Vista on it, and everything works perfectly -- including sleep and hibernate. I also have a two-year old Dell laptop which I loaded Vista onto, and it too works perfectly. The wireless reconnects after a standby in 15-20 seconds. Not great, but not bad enough to drive me to Linux.
His issues might have more clout if they were experienced by more people. But it seems to me that the only people "suffering" from Vista are the ones who are using unsupported hardware, or are trying to mess with settings to the point they break things. Oh, there's also the group that spreads FUD about Vista without actually trying it, regurgitating the FUD that others have already tried to spread.
Here's a conspiracy theory: Jim Louderback's new company is a geek-focused video-blog of sorts, professing the greatness of BitTorrent and other open-standard goodness. Could it be that this final editorial was an attempt to give him a little bit of geek street cred? Shame Vista and the geeks will come.
The headline and article imply that they are switching to Linux (among other things).
What operating system were they previously using?
So if I follow your train of thought correctly, we should just not even bother with security at all?
Hmmm.... good info! I will have to check into this stuff next time I dump something.
It was an official county site, so I'm sure they'd have to participate. It's not like I could really argue with the person though.
Thanks!
This thread started because someone suggested using PDF as a free way to markup text and pass it around. Kudos to you for trying to circumvent the argument by throwing in something completely different.
If we were teaching digital art, we'd expect them to use Photoshop and Illustrator, not GIMP. If we were teaching video production, we'd expect them to use Premier. If we were teaching them web design, we'd expect them to use DreamWeaver. Why is an office application any different?
You might have experienced one of the many free dump stations (or even a "Dump Day") where you're giving your electronics to a private business. They take your stuff and melt it down and sell it.
Had you have taken your stuff to a county dump, they'd have charged you their normal fees.
At least, that's how it is here in San Joaquin County. But if we give our stuff to Waste Management, it's free.
The last time I checked, MS Office 2007 for educational pricing (with its markup and PDF features) is cheaper than the license to Acrobat Professional.
Next?
The product is never advertsed to be a perfect, 100% fool-proof solution.
What it does, what ANY security system does, is makes it harder for people to get in. That's all. And for that, it works quite well.
Example: Bob is working for a company and has a spreadsheet which contains the company's top 1000 customers (or trade secrets, or next big marketing strategy, etc). He's about to leave and go to work for the competitor. He emails his GMail account the sensitive document so he can start using it when he gets to the new place.
The author of the document was smart enough to add DRM to the file. When Bob tries to open it at home, it won't. The next day when Bob returns to the office he tries to copy-and-paste it into a new file, it still can't be opened. When Bob tries to print it onto paper, he finds that he cannot. This is because the original author disabled everything through DRM.
Can Bob still take a screen capture? Sure. Can he commit to memory? Yes. Can he write it all down manually? Yes. But all of these require much more work and are prone to errors.
What tool (for free) allows you to mark up a PDF that someone gave you in such a way that the author can integrate those corrections/comments back into the original document for fast, easy changes?
In other words, if I took your PDF that said "except" and corrected it to say "accept", how would you integrate that correction back into your Word/WordPerfect/WordPad/NotePad file for your second draft?
Are you honestly asking this?
1) No more freaking menus and dialog boxes
2) Better looking documents in less time
3) Royalty-free clip art
4) Enhanced copy-paste functions
5) Diagrams (see Smart Art)
6) Equation editor
7) PDF writing
8) Bulit-in APA/MLA styles
9) Track Changes
10) Mail Merge
11) XML format
12) Sharing with others (SharePoint, Groove, etc)
13) Live Grammar and Spell Check
14) AutoCorrect
15) Visual Basic
16) DRM (the kind that corporations need to keep their docs secret)
And that's just Word.
Please realize that there are many people out there that know the difference between Word and WordPad, and use those features quite often.
Because people outside of Slashdot use more than just plain-text features.
Uploading via PDF means that it's very difficult for a student and teacher to exchange comments, corrections, markup, etc. With Word's Track Changes feature, this is painless.
And it all goes back to teaching students what they will need to learn when they enter the workforce.
Part of the the school district's job is to prepare students to enter the work force, and use its tools. If 99% of the workforce is using PowerPoint and Excel and Word, then I'm glad that's what they're teaching them.
To that end, I'm glad they're recommending Office 2007 to parents. Many don't understand the difference between Works or WordPerfect or Word.
And for what it's worth, the 2007 for home use is only $130 and can be installed on 3 computers in the home. It contains Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Since Jan 2005, California has been charging an E-Waste Recovery Fee for some time now. Whenever you sell something to a California resident that has a display (CRT/LCD/etc), you have to charge this fee and give it to the state:
4-15 inches : $6
15-35 inches: $8
35+ inches : $10
The fee is not a deposit either, like you have on soda cans. If you take your CRT to the dump later, even if you can prove you paid that E-Waste fee, you still have to pay the dump to take your trash.
More Info: http://www.erecycle.org/
Or for about $0.25/hr per desk, you could have just upgraded all of those slow pathetic machines into modern ones and given your users machines that would enable them to work faster.
1. Come up with a rediculous story about Vista which will generate lots of traffic from MS fanboys and the Linux croud. Mention Haliburton for extra hits.
2. Post story on "blog" with Google ads.
3. Profit!!
How about a study on the effects of reading a white-on-black website has on the mind, including the homicidal tendendices that follow?
Seriously, that trend started back in like 1997. Can we put it to rest?