2) If it's something you carry around, small, expensive and likley to break when dropped, consider the warranty: CD player, tape system, mini-disc, PDA, etc
Come on! They wouldn't sell extended warranties unless they made money from it. Buying a warranty is like gambling - the bank always wins in the end. On average that is.
The only situation where you should consider an extended warranty is if you absolutely need the object and you will not be able to afford a second one if it falls to pieces - like a car or a house for many people.
but that doesn't invalidate a single word or fact of what I said about the Soviet Union.
Correct. What you have or have not experienced does not invalidate what you say. However, the fact that it was possible to correctly guess it from how out of touch you were with Soviet daily life, may make your claims less trustworthy.
We're far off topic. Feel free to post a reply, if you want the last word, but I'll end my own off topical posts there for today.
This is getting far off the original topic, and this is the wrong forum for any detailed discussion on the Soviet Union, so let me be very brief.
You don't have to believe me, but for almost everything I wrote I have personal experience as a basis. I was there and I saw it. For a small part I just have secondary sources, but I could have taken the space to name them, if it had been on topic.
When it comes to Pasternak and Dostoyevsky, my statement wasn't that they never would be availble. I have a Soviet edition of Pasternak's poems myself. My point was that such books were very rare over the time, and there were periods, when Dostoyevsky was not to be found at all. To my knowledge Dr. Zhivago was never ever printed in the Soviet Union before Gorbachev.
My impression is that you never lived one single day of your adult life in the Soviet Union yourself. Feel free to correct me on that point, if I'm wrong.
You are right on a lot of things, of course. "And the health care was certainly better than it is in modern Russia." is unfortunately very likely to be true.
I guess articles containing words like "overconfident moron", "jack shit", "smartass" and "vultures" have a tendency not to be taken as very serious discussion objects.
Communism hasn't failed in Soviet Union, unless you use some very special definition of failure.
You have some good points in your post, but the sentence above is not one of them. The system did implode because it failed on most accounts, but most spectacularly when it comes to economic and environmental criteria.
They did not provided basic needs for their citizens. I cannot think of any single product you could be certain to find in the shops. Sure, some days you could find excellent meat, and some days you could find decent toilet paper. However, there was no way you could be sure what you would find that particular day in the particular shop you chose to go to, and most products were of apalling quality.
The health care was free but rubbish. People died from trivial diseases, that weren't considered deadly at all in the West.
Sure books were extremely cheap, but some of the most important litterature in the world was simply not available, as it wasn't judged politically correct. Pasternak? Dostoyevsky? Hardly ever available.
...creating for the first time ever a country with hundreds of nationalities that could coexist in peace and friendship.
Almost every country in the world before the 19th century has been multi-national, so that is nothing new. How far the "friendship" lasted in the Soviet Union you can tell from the speed with which the country broke up, once communism fell.
Racism was rampant but not published in media of course. For some reason many Russians disliked blacks and showed it much more openly, that would have been possible in the West. Likewise Africans used to dislike Soviet ex-patriated staff in Africa much more than any other nationality in my experience. And don't get me started on anti-semitism.
Don't get me wrong here. I loved travelling in the Soviet Union. I met lovely people and found a marvellous atmosphere. I loved a lot of their culture and I miss many aspects of the place. But on the whole, if you compare it to the West, it sucked.
In short: Communism has not failed, because it has never been tried.
Well, it actually has been tried a lot. However, the results of the attempts never were what Marx and Engels hoped for. All the evidence is against communism. Principles, which dozens of countries have tried with usually disastrous consequences, are very likely to be flawed.
When it comes to Public Domain in the internet world, we won't know for another couple of dozen years how it will work out, but we can of course theorize (that means "guess") about it, as Lessig does.
This article is really lame, uninformative and about as funny as colon cancer.
You forgot "and complete nonsense". There is no source for any of the "events", so it is most likely the result of someone making up 10 exceedingly pointless anecdotes and publishing them on the internet. It's a good candidate for slashdot's worst story of the year.
You seem to equate Japanese and American lives. But let's remember that the Japanese began this war with a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor while conducting peace talks with America. That has got to count for something, right?
The Japanese did not start the conflict with the US, even though they did initiate this particular armed part of the conflict. The Americans under commodore Matthew Perry had initiated a completely unprovoked attack on Japan less than 100 years earlier, and Americans and Europeans swarmed around the area colonizing one country after the other. The Americans had led a war in the nearby Philippines a few decades earlier, and the French and the English had been involved in the opium wars against China in the 19th century, not to mention the events in Indochina and Indonesia. In China, the Western nations had until recently had large interest spheres which were basically controlled by the West. The only purpose of the West leading wars thousands of miles from home was self interest, and it built on a lack of respect of the local people.
It is hardly surprising that the Japanese felt threatened by Westerners in general, and that they wanted to do something about it.
This doesn't mean that the Japanese did the right thing of course. The Pearl Harbor incident was neither a clever move nor morally justified. However, the Western nations didn't behave in a clever or moral way either, and hadn't done so for several hundred years from an Asiatic perspective.
It's hardly the same technology, is it? Sony's ebook is far from paper thin. The screen is very sharp and pleasant, but it is about 5 mm thick, as far as I remember.
MS has no problem with profits. They get enough revenue on their Windows systems already. I would say that they spend about the right amount on development to get a nice trickle of money flowing in from the number of people who upgrade now.
However, if they one day will need more money, this is definitely an opportunity for them to exploit with more aggressive marketing to make people upgrade more often. Or perhaps even for MS to come up with better products. However, there is no need to do that yet. From an economic perspective.
Universities, American ones anyway, are largely a waste of time. They're commercial enterprises above all, and for that reason they inflate grades to keep students in place and corrupt research in order to attract grants.
That is often true, but far from always.
When my daughter grows up, I will propose to her that she read and travel (rigorously) instead of taking a formal degree
I would suggest that you postpone that advice until then. She may turn out to be a person who is much better off in college than outside.
I'm a drop out from university myself and oh, so happy I didn't waste more time there. It is about 20 years since I didn't graduate, and I'm reasonably well off.
However, the vast majority of the people I meet seem perfectly happy with their university studies, and if they like it, all the better for them. Dropping out can go horribly wrong.
If bringing your own computer isn't an option, your level of security goes down, obviously.
However, the main reason not to bring your own laptop today is probably a financial one. Can you afford it? I actually had two small ones while travelling around - one back up, in case the other one would break. If I had done it today, I would probably have taken just one laptop and an iPod as backup.
The richer you are, the smaller one you can buy.
Ok, I agree that you may have special priorities, which makes it difficult to bring laptops. If you are going to climb Mount Everest, and you cannot find any space to put any rope, because of all your laptops, that is probably a bad move.
However, a lot of things can be bought abroad when you need them. If you travel around for one year and intend to spend one single week fishing, there is no need to carry around your own fishing rod. Just buy one when you get there.
Ok, mod me down as troll, flamebait, off topic and worse, but before you do that, could you please help me.
I'm not into Starwars at all. I've seen one or two on the wide screen once and probably half of some of the other ones, when I still had a tele. I've forgotten most of it.
Does anyone know of a web site where they give a short but good description of the main characters only and the main story line for the six films? I really just want the basics, so I don't feel left out when my mother discusses the films with my grandma.
This is another country you are talking about. This is a sovereign conuntry. Your law need not apply here. You want to force them to cooperate? You can use diplomacy, or you can invade.
Let me guess that you are American? There are actually plenty of retaliation possibilities beyond diplomacy that do not use bombs: import and export quotas, trade tarifs, and so on.
Anyhow, in this case we are not talking primarily about American or Indonesian law but international law, and Indonesia is a signatory of several treaties regarding intellectual property. They signed them. They should follow them.
While their [ActiveX] security aspect is a bad thing, they're quite useful in their own way.
Well, that's the whole point, isn't it? If they had been useless and difficult to use, no one would have used them anywhere, and there wouldn't have been any problem. Of course they are convenient.
It is also convenient to have no password for your computer and to use "pass" as password on all web sites that require one. You can do that on the free sign up at www.nyt.com, but if you let it become a habit and you do it at your internet bank, you have a problem.
for me, and probably others, it's the other way around, PowerPC made Macs cool, granted, never cool enough to warant actually buying one, but still interesting. I've exactly zero interest in over priced designer intel x86 boxes.
This may be part of what Apple is after. Having people being lukewarm and identifying all their interest in the Mac with a processor doesn't sell. That gone, people like you may feel like looking at other features in the Mac, which may turn out to be more compelling.
Apple has never been anti-MS. Since more or less day one (or actually day one?) of the Macintosh's life, MS has provided a widely used word processor and spread sheet for the Mac. Apple has always appreciated this, and so has a large number of their users.
AppleWorks was never supposed to replace MS Office. iWork is not supposed to replace MS Office. It is supposed to replace AppleWorks.
The origin of MacOS X, Next, used to run on Intel, and so can Darwin. It shouldn't be any surprise to anyone that MacOS X is able to do so too.
Your post is currently marked "Flamebait", and I think that is highly unfair, as your opinion is clear and obviously honest, but I do disagree with your comment.
Slashdot has plenty of news in different areas, and in many of them I have absolutly no interest, but other people obviously do. There is a visible interest for StarWars, StarTrek, Lord of the Rings, HitchHiker's guide and so on. Harry Potter isn't far from that category of films. If it had been "When Harry met Sally" I would have jumped, but Harry P is within limits I think.
Re:Its only the bad things we head about?
on
Safari vs. KHTML
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Being nice costs time and money. Only a minority of Apple's potential customers care if the company is nice to a specific group of open source developers. Apple's goal is to make money for their shareholders, not to spend it on things most of their customers don't care about.
From the information we see here, their behaviour is perfectly rational, even though it is less than convenient for the OSS people.
I don't know if the animosity is symptomatic of the OSS community, but usually when two commercial companies try to cooperate and fail, they simply look at the numbers.
Company A: We don't get enough out of this cooperation to continue. Can you change the conditions?
Company B: No, we're sorry. With other conditions we wouldn't get enough out of it.
Company A: OK. Let's end it then.
Company B: Yes. Have a nice day!
Company A: See you around!
In the case with KHTML, it seems the OSS developers simply cannot make it an attractive case for Apple to contribute bug fixes back in a usable format, and Apple responds in the commercial way by not doing it.
You are right in that they could have sold the product releasing the source code and giving credit.
However, from a marketing point of view it is probably not that clever to go out and say; "Buy our great product for a lot of money. By the way, it is almost identical to this other thing that you can download for absolutely free from another website."
Did his novels get a lot of coverage in India, Tibet, Japan, or "Arabia" ?
I cannot tell for all those countries, but I stumbled over them the other day in Kyoto - not hidden in a remote shelf but proudly displayed in front of most of the other children books.
Still, Christian influence wouldn't necessarily disturb the Japanese, as long as the story is good.
How could anyone rate the partent "Flamebait"? It is a polite well formulated question, with an apparently honest parallel to another issue, which has been discussed elsewhere.
It seems some moderators have not read the Moderator guidelines. You should not mod people down, because you disagree with their opinions.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on! They wouldn't sell extended warranties unless they made money from it. Buying a warranty is like gambling - the bank always wins in the end. On average that is.
The only situation where you should consider an extended warranty is if you absolutely need the object and you will not be able to afford a second one if it falls to pieces - like a car or a house for many people.
Or if you happen to be, as you admit, a klutz.
Correct. What you have or have not experienced does not invalidate what you say. However, the fact that it was possible to correctly guess it from how out of touch you were with Soviet daily life, may make your claims less trustworthy.
We're far off topic. Feel free to post a reply, if you want the last word, but I'll end my own off topical posts there for today.
Thanks for your opinions!
You don't have to believe me, but for almost everything I wrote I have personal experience as a basis. I was there and I saw it. For a small part I just have secondary sources, but I could have taken the space to name them, if it had been on topic.
When it comes to Pasternak and Dostoyevsky, my statement wasn't that they never would be availble. I have a Soviet edition of Pasternak's poems myself. My point was that such books were very rare over the time, and there were periods, when Dostoyevsky was not to be found at all. To my knowledge Dr. Zhivago was never ever printed in the Soviet Union before Gorbachev.
My impression is that you never lived one single day of your adult life in the Soviet Union yourself. Feel free to correct me on that point, if I'm wrong.
You are right on a lot of things, of course. "And the health care was certainly better than it is in modern Russia." is unfortunately very likely to be true.
I guess articles containing words like "overconfident moron", "jack shit", "smartass" and "vultures" have a tendency not to be taken as very serious discussion objects.
You have some good points in your post, but the sentence above is not one of them. The system did implode because it failed on most accounts, but most spectacularly when it comes to economic and environmental criteria.
They did not provided basic needs for their citizens. I cannot think of any single product you could be certain to find in the shops. Sure, some days you could find excellent meat, and some days you could find decent toilet paper. However, there was no way you could be sure what you would find that particular day in the particular shop you chose to go to, and most products were of apalling quality.
The health care was free but rubbish. People died from trivial diseases, that weren't considered deadly at all in the West.
Sure books were extremely cheap, but some of the most important litterature in the world was simply not available, as it wasn't judged politically correct. Pasternak? Dostoyevsky? Hardly ever available.
Almost every country in the world before the 19th century has been multi-national, so that is nothing new. How far the "friendship" lasted in the Soviet Union you can tell from the speed with which the country broke up, once communism fell.
Racism was rampant but not published in media of course. For some reason many Russians disliked blacks and showed it much more openly, that would have been possible in the West. Likewise Africans used to dislike Soviet ex-patriated staff in Africa much more than any other nationality in my experience. And don't get me started on anti-semitism.
Don't get me wrong here. I loved travelling in the Soviet Union. I met lovely people and found a marvellous atmosphere. I loved a lot of their culture and I miss many aspects of the place. But on the whole, if you compare it to the West, it sucked.
Well, it actually has been tried a lot. However, the results of the attempts never were what Marx and Engels hoped for. All the evidence is against communism. Principles, which dozens of countries have tried with usually disastrous consequences, are very likely to be flawed.
When it comes to Public Domain in the internet world, we won't know for another couple of dozen years how it will work out, but we can of course theorize (that means "guess") about it, as Lessig does.
# Ability to restrict content which may be illegal in some countries (e.g. Nazi material in Europe, or pornography in the Middle East)
# When distribution contracts for each area are awarded to different companies, it allows a company to avoid "stepping on someone else's toes"
You forgot "and complete nonsense". There is no source for any of the "events", so it is most likely the result of someone making up 10 exceedingly pointless anecdotes and publishing them on the internet. It's a good candidate for slashdot's worst story of the year.
The Japanese did not start the conflict with the US, even though they did initiate this particular armed part of the conflict. The Americans under commodore Matthew Perry had initiated a completely unprovoked attack on Japan less than 100 years earlier, and Americans and Europeans swarmed around the area colonizing one country after the other. The Americans had led a war in the nearby Philippines a few decades earlier, and the French and the English had been involved in the opium wars against China in the 19th century, not to mention the events in Indochina and Indonesia. In China, the Western nations had until recently had large interest spheres which were basically controlled by the West. The only purpose of the West leading wars thousands of miles from home was self interest, and it built on a lack of respect of the local people.
It is hardly surprising that the Japanese felt threatened by Westerners in general, and that they wanted to do something about it.
This doesn't mean that the Japanese did the right thing of course. The Pearl Harbor incident was neither a clever move nor morally justified. However, the Western nations didn't behave in a clever or moral way either, and hadn't done so for several hundred years from an Asiatic perspective.
It's hardly the same technology, is it? Sony's ebook is far from paper thin. The screen is very sharp and pleasant, but it is about 5 mm thick, as far as I remember.
However, if they one day will need more money, this is definitely an opportunity for them to exploit with more aggressive marketing to make people upgrade more often. Or perhaps even for MS to come up with better products. However, there is no need to do that yet. From an economic perspective.
That is often true, but far from always.
When my daughter grows up, I will propose to her that she read and travel (rigorously) instead of taking a formal degree
I would suggest that you postpone that advice until then. She may turn out to be a person who is much better off in college than outside.
I'm a drop out from university myself and oh, so happy I didn't waste more time there. It is about 20 years since I didn't graduate, and I'm reasonably well off.
However, the vast majority of the people I meet seem perfectly happy with their university studies, and if they like it, all the better for them. Dropping out can go horribly wrong.
However, the main reason not to bring your own laptop today is probably a financial one. Can you afford it? I actually had two small ones while travelling around - one back up, in case the other one would break. If I had done it today, I would probably have taken just one laptop and an iPod as backup.
The richer you are, the smaller one you can buy.
Ok, I agree that you may have special priorities, which makes it difficult to bring laptops. If you are going to climb Mount Everest, and you cannot find any space to put any rope, because of all your laptops, that is probably a bad move.
However, a lot of things can be bought abroad when you need them. If you travel around for one year and intend to spend one single week fishing, there is no need to carry around your own fishing rod. Just buy one when you get there.
Good old wikipedia. Thanks for the reminder!
Ok, mod me down as troll, flamebait, off topic and worse, but before you do that, could you please help me. I'm not into Starwars at all. I've seen one or two on the wide screen once and probably half of some of the other ones, when I still had a tele. I've forgotten most of it. Does anyone know of a web site where they give a short but good description of the main characters only and the main story line for the six films? I really just want the basics, so I don't feel left out when my mother discusses the films with my grandma.
Let me guess that you are American? There are actually plenty of retaliation possibilities beyond diplomacy that do not use bombs: import and export quotas, trade tarifs, and so on.
Anyhow, in this case we are not talking primarily about American or Indonesian law but international law, and Indonesia is a signatory of several treaties regarding intellectual property. They signed them. They should follow them.
Well, that's the whole point, isn't it? If they had been useless and difficult to use, no one would have used them anywhere, and there wouldn't have been any problem. Of course they are convenient.
It is also convenient to have no password for your computer and to use "pass" as password on all web sites that require one. You can do that on the free sign up at www.nyt.com, but if you let it become a habit and you do it at your internet bank, you have a problem.
This may be part of what Apple is after. Having people being lukewarm and identifying all their interest in the Mac with a processor doesn't sell. That gone, people like you may feel like looking at other features in the Mac, which may turn out to be more compelling.
Apple has never been anti-MS. Since more or less day one (or actually day one?) of the Macintosh's life, MS has provided a widely used word processor and spread sheet for the Mac. Apple has always appreciated this, and so has a large number of their users.
AppleWorks was never supposed to replace MS Office. iWork is not supposed to replace MS Office. It is supposed to replace AppleWorks.
The origin of MacOS X, Next, used to run on Intel, and so can Darwin. It shouldn't be any surprise to anyone that MacOS X is able to do so too.
http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/VGN-U50/
Of course it is not a fully fledged PC of 2005 but it beats a lot of the things you could buy, let's say, five years ago.
Slashdot has plenty of news in different areas, and in many of them I have absolutly no interest, but other people obviously do. There is a visible interest for StarWars, StarTrek, Lord of the Rings, HitchHiker's guide and so on. Harry Potter isn't far from that category of films. If it had been "When Harry met Sally" I would have jumped, but Harry P is within limits I think.
From the information we see here, their behaviour is perfectly rational, even though it is less than convenient for the OSS people.
I don't know if the animosity is symptomatic of the OSS community, but usually when two commercial companies try to cooperate and fail, they simply look at the numbers.
Company A: We don't get enough out of this cooperation to continue. Can you change the conditions?
Company B: No, we're sorry. With other conditions we wouldn't get enough out of it.
Company A: OK. Let's end it then.
Company B: Yes. Have a nice day!
Company A: See you around!
In the case with KHTML, it seems the OSS developers simply cannot make it an attractive case for Apple to contribute bug fixes back in a usable format, and Apple responds in the commercial way by not doing it.
It is sad but rational.
However, from a marketing point of view it is probably not that clever to go out and say; "Buy our great product for a lot of money. By the way, it is almost identical to this other thing that you can download for absolutely free from another website."
I cannot tell for all those countries, but I stumbled over them the other day in Kyoto - not hidden in a remote shelf but proudly displayed in front of most of the other children books.
Still, Christian influence wouldn't necessarily disturb the Japanese, as long as the story is good.
It seems some moderators have not read the Moderator guidelines. You should not mod people down, because you disagree with their opinions.