The Wikipedia and a TV Wiki serve two different purposes. Wikipedia is for general purpose information with some degree of detail. The TV Wiki is for all the gory details as related specifically to television.
Using the first replier's example, in the Wikipedia, there is a lot of information about stuff like the cultural phenomenon of Star Trek, its history and background, etc.
In the TV Wiki, the entry is currently kind of skimpy and needs editing for now, but I would expect it to have detailed information about the series specifically as it relates to television, such as episode airdates, where and when it was on the schedule, the actors, production crew, writers, guest stars, set locations, and so on.
At least, that's what I would have in mind. I don't see the TV wiki as a "split" of Wikipedia; I see it as a separate special-purpose wiki. Some of the information will necessarily be the same, but it serves different purposes.
Maybe, but the thing I'm really interested in is not can the software be bug-free, but can it be more reliable than humans?
The article says:
One reason why people feel safer in their cars than on public transport is because they are in control of the vehicle.
The funny thing is that I feel a lot less safe because other people, people I have no control over, are in control of their vehicle. The sad fact is that so many people are so mind-numbingly stupid behind the wheel of a car that I would much rather trust software that's slightly buggy and causes a few fatal crashes a year than humans who are outright stupid that cause almost 40,000 fatal crashes a year. And yes, if that means giving up control of my car so that other people have to give up control of theirs, I'm okay with that.
The whole reason that Google is an important company is that it crawls through the publicly-accessible parts of the Internet in order to index its contents.
If Google is to retain its premier position in the search engine market, then it will very much so remain firmly connected to the existing Internet.
Yeah, but building a GoogleNet and retaining their position on the old Internet are not mutually exclusive options. The old Internet will presumably still be around for a long time, and if Google is planning on building another Internet, I can’t imagine them designing it so that users on it can’t access existing content on the old Internet. In other words, even if this speculation comes to pass, Google will still be needed and will still be around as it currently is.
Because neither the article nor the summary make it clear, Michal Zalewski is a Polish author and hacker who has a book named Silence on the Wire: A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks published by No Starch Press and sold at your favorite bookstores.
Michal Zalewski is a security researcher who has worked on topics ranging from hardware and OS design principles to networking. He has published research on many security topics and has worked for the past eight years in the InfoSec field for a number of reputable companies, including two major telecommunications firms.
Then perhaps "peaked" is the wrong word to toss around here.
The porn market, eh? Now THAT'S an industry in which Google has the potential to experience large growth, but the road ahead would be long and hard. Any thoughts at this point would be premature, don't you think?
But if they do manage to penetrate that market, they should give themselves a hand--job well done!
Try Cedega, I've heard it works fine with that particular game.
No, I'm not being facetious, I know about Cedega but really hadn't really considered it before. A quick browse of their database shows that City of Heros does indeed run on it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to try it out. Thanks, man, and I'm glad to see that someone modded you up, though I would have gone with Informative...:-)
You're right, too. Keep in mind that I've never actually used Photoshop, so I'm not qualified to compare the interfaces to each other. What I meant was that the interface for The GIMP is different from pretty much any other application that I've used, with at least three entirely separate windows being required by default to do any productive work. My layers and tools windows always seem to get buried under others and I have to hunt for them in my taskbar. I've gotten used to it by now, but I still don't find it very useful and wish that at the very least, the windows were logically "attached" to each other and bringing one up would bring the whole application up.
I'll probably skip the PS extension. Now that I've gotten used to The GIMP's interface, I don't want to mess with my head, and since I've never used Photoshop, it probably wouldn't be that useful to me. It's still really cool, though, and if it gets Photoshop users to switch, then I chalk it up as a good thing.
Dude, it's right here. That's the beauty of Google and why I like it so much. You only have to use the features you want to, no fuss and no muss.
And all of these weird features like e-mail and road maps that they're tossing out there all willy-nilly in obvious desperation are really, really cool. Really.
Yahoo also has e-mail, road maps, an IM service, and so on, and they're not exactly threatened as a company, at least not right now. And what about Microsoft? It's got all that, plus a highly complex operating system, a very high-level office productivity suite, development tools, etc. ad nauseum, but it's anything but struggling at the moment.
I dunno, the article sounds rather like pretty wild speculation to me. Not that speculation is wrong—the author admits it's speculation—but if any of this stuff comes to pass, I would chalk the author's correctness up more to luck than to keen insight.
Google has a lot of project in the works, including Gmail, Gtalk, Google Desktop, etc. These projects are anything but mainstream and have a LOT of room for growth. Hell, there's still even room for growth in their primary market, the search engine. Though they are huge, they are far from owning that market.
And Apple knocking off Microsoft? Maybe, but if they haven't done it yet, I don't have much reason to believe they'll do it anytime soon. I will admit that there was an interesting speculation in the article:
What if Apple introduces OS 10.5, its next super-duper operating system release, and at the same time starts loading FOR FREE the current operating system version—OS 10.4—on every new iPod [as a bootable drive] in a version that runs on generic Intel boxes? What if they also make 10.4 a free download through the iTunes Music Store?
Wild speculation, but man, it would be fun to watch the resulting scramble.
As for me, I'm convinced that if anyone will ever knock off Microsoft, it will be an OS that gets game developers behind them. I've said for years that as weird as it sounds, gamers drive the market. Not many people use computers at home or school for productive uses, most people use them for playing games. The most popular "applications" on my own computer are probably Firefox and City of Heros. Firefox already runs on a zillion platforms. If City of Heroes ran on Linux, I would probably go ahead to switch to a Linux-only system, if for no other reason than it's free and I don't have to buy a new version every few years.
Once everyone is using an alternative OS (not necessarily Linux, but something other than Windows) at home for games, then they will all want to use it at work and school for productivity and educational applications, and that familiarity will drive more and more companies and schools to switch desktops.
You're right. The interface for The GIMP is very different from any other application I've used. It's not really bad, it's just different and it takes a lot of getting used to.
I just started using The GIMP not too long ago. I don't want to spend the money to upgrade my old copy of Paint Shop Pro if there's software that's just as good for free. If it takes me a little longer to learn how to use it, that's fine. (Unlike most people, my time is worthless...) But if they could improve the interface, I can't imagine that people choosing a graphics software package wouldn't use the free one, especially for low- to intermediate-level graphics needs.
Who knows? If they improve it a great deal (and improve the text tool, my only complaint with the software right now), we could be seeing a huge GIMP / Photoshop rivalry on the horizon!
In my reply a little further down, I pointed out Google's rationale for wanting a mobile phone number.
Why use mobile phones? It's a way to help us verify that an account is being created by a real person, and that one person isn't creating thousands of accounts. We want to keep our system as spam-free as possible, and making sure accounts are used by real people is one way to do that.
If you still don't buy it, that's fine, but that's what's going through their head.
I can kinda sorta see their point. What they don't want is a machine mass registering for new accounts from their registration site, and this effectively keeps that from happening.
However, in defense of the other repliers, I think that asking for people's cell phone numbers is a bit over the line. I wish they had just used something like word verification instead.
That was my first thought: Sign up by phone, why? Since you can't get to it now, and in case anyone else doesn't read the article, here's what they have to say about it:
Why use mobile phones? It's a way to help us verify that an account is being created by a real person, and that one person isn't creating thousands of accounts. We want to keep our system as spam-free as possible, and making sure accounts are used by real people is one way to do that.
I think the tried and true method of getting a Gmail account is still the best: get someone to invite you. If you don't know anyone who has a free Gmail account, Google gmail invite and you'll find places where you can get them for free.
Not only does it not write 1TB to a DVD recorder, it doesn't even write it to a hard drive:
They are expected to retail from about 130,000 yen for the cheapest model to 230,000 yen for the one-terabyte recorder, which stores data on two 500 gigabyte hard disk drives.
So what are we talking about here, two hard drives plus a standard DVD recorder all integrated into one unit for a little over US$2,000!? Jesus, I think I'd rather just buy two hard drives and a DVD recorder (dual-layer, of course) for less than US$800.
Sure, I'd need a slightly bigger case, but to save an extra $1,200, I think I can live with that.
Count me among the hoardes that hate AOL. I have horror stories.
This article deals with one of them. I know a lot of people who have a hard time cancelling their service with AOL. My dad tried cancelling the service three or four times and ended up sending them a certified letter to get them to stop bugging him.
Another issue I have with AOL is that AOL digs roots very deeply into your computer. I don't know if this is still true since I haven't seen anyone using the service in a while, but it used to do stuff like replace your built-in dial-up networking functionality with its own, and even replacing various parts of the TCP/IP software and system files with its own. Uninstall? Useless. I've completely reinstalled many people's computers just to get AOL off of them. It's ironic that now their ads pitch the service as a way of protecting people from stuff that screws up their computer.
I've also dealt a lot with "This thing isn't working" complaints. People who can't get through, people who do get through but only very slowly, people whose other software starts experiencing mysterious problems, and so on ad nauseum.
There's a reason that AO "Hell" has such a bad reputation, and whenever anyone I know says, "America Online has a good deal on Internet service; I think I'll sign up," I always tell them, "I highly recommend against that, and no offense, but if you do, don't call me to come fix your computer."
The company I work for had a brief co-branding partnership with AOL, and as a result, all employees were offered a free year of AOL service. I work in the IT department, and almost everyone I know turned it down because the service, even free, just wasn't worth it. Actually, come to think of it, one guy I worked with gave his account to his parents and then spent the next year fixing their computer...
And speaking of AOL's declining membership and miserable service, I guess Time Warner has to be feeling a little bit better about their decision to drop AOL from its name. Ooh, cheap shot.
Meanwhile, if you're experiencing problems cancelling AOL, try one suggestion I found: call the phone number on your credit card statement.
Even $400, if the system is kick-ass, is doable. But as someone else pointed out, the point of TFA is that we won't be able to get an Xbox 360 for $300 or $400.
At $299 and $399, many gamers may not be seeing the holiday season's hottest toy under their Christmas trees this year.
For a while, the only way anyone will be able to get a system will be to either a) steal one, b) buy one off of eBay (good luck paying $299 or $399...), or c) buy a bundle priced at $600.
Why? Some people blame the stores (and make no mistake, I do too), but Microsoft shares some of the blame, too. As TFA said, "when hot new gaming systems come out, supply is short, and demand is often so high that retailers can elect to sell the units only as parts of bundles that include accessories and games of the retailer's choosing." Bundles that, according to TFA cost at a minimum $599.93 for a "Core Bundle," which includes an extra controller, a 64MB memory card, and four games.
Using the consumer price index as a guide, $200 in 1977 * (188.9/60.6) = $623 in today's dollars
Well, you've got me there. I guess my defense is that the Atari 2600 was pretty revolutionary at the time; it offered a lot the no one had ever seen before. The Xbox 360 has fancier graphics, but is otherwise pretty much just the next in a line of products, ho hum. Is it really worth the extra moolah? I guess everyone will have to decide for themselves, and maybe it is for some people, but I personally don't think so.
Good idea, Other Reply Guy. Here's a Coral link to the Lego Serenity crew. Please use it instead. If the guy does get Slashdotted, this link should still (in theory) work, too.
Wouldn't it be great if they shot some of the scenes on full-size Lego sets? I know that's one extra feature that would be a sure way to get me to buy the DVD!
I hope that someone makes a Lego version of the movie at some point.
Oh, and you're right, the Lego version of the crew is awesome, though I have to reserve "adorable" to describe Lego Kaylee! Lego Jayne and Lego Book are too funny...
Not that Microsoft people read Slashdot, but in case one happens to...
That's just too much for a game system. I usually buy the new consoles when they come out (proud owner of a PS2, XBox, and Atari 2600), but these prices have pushed them out of the realm of game system and into the realm of major electronics investment. Even the so-called "core bundle" is as expensive than what I paid for my surround-sound system. More expensive bundles are pushing what I paid for my flat screen HDTV, which is the centerpiece of my whole entertainment system.
I know that Microsoft is trying to push the XBox 360 as a high-end electronics component, but the vast majority of people are going to just see it as a fancy game system. If you look at the official fact sheet, there is little to support anything more than that. A Windows Media Center extender? How many people do they think own Windows Media Center PCs anyway?
I guess what I'm saying is that while the XBox 360 looks like a really kick-ass game system, $600 to $700 is just too much money to pay to watch the Dead or Alive girls do their thing.
37 years? I can't wait that long! Where's the Fast Forward on these things?
That's in interesting point. How many times a week do we see revolutionary new technology that either never comes out at all or that doesn't seem so exciting by the time it finally does because of advances in conventional technologies during the time in between?
I've just got a feeling that by the time we start buying computers with Y nanotubes, Microsoft will have patented the letter Y, so we'll have to call them lamba nanotubes or itty-bitty-wishbone-shaped nanotubes instead...
I guess I'm just wishfully hoping that there is a fast forward on at least some of these technologies.
I'm glad you picked Purdue, that was one of my favorites:
...pronouns should:
1. AGREE in NUMBER
If the pronoun takes the place of a singular noun, you have to use a singular pronoun. ...
The words EVERYBODY, ANYBODY, ANYONE, EACH, NEITHER, NOBODY, SOMEONE, A PERSON, etc. are singular and take singular pronouns.
Everybody ought to do his or her best. (NOT: their best)
(Capital letters are theirs, emphasis is mine.)
I won't bother explaining yet again that the pronoun in your original sentence is not indefinite since it specifically refers to "a person" that you defined, you. Since you have the insane notion that just because you thought it meant something correct makes it correct, you would probably argue that 2 + 2 = 7 is mathematically correct because you "wrote seven while meaning four."
Instead, I'll point out that the document you cited wasn't written by Purdue, it was written by the National Council of Teachers of English. (Remember my comment about how with my luck, you'll get one of the stupid ones?) I checked their Web site to find a little more information about who they were and where this document you cited came from. The full version is posted here, and I do wish that Purdue hadn't shortened and/or paraphrased it. Regarding the section you quoted, it says:
Use of the singular they/their form. This construction is becoming increasingly acceptable. However, classroom teachers need to be aware that state and/or national assessments may not regard this construction as correct.
Also, the purpose of this document is for use as a guide to gender-neutral writing. It is not about correct grammar. In fact, the writers give the following as their stated purpose:
These guidelines offer suggestions for language use that will open rather than close possibilities and that speakers and writers should consider when engaged in communication activities.
Excuse me, but just because incorrect structures <airquotes> open possibilities </airquotes> doesn't make it any more correct than you are.
So given the choice between every reputable grammar resource and one organization that I've never heard of before in a document designed to make people feel good about themselves and that even admits that what they said isn't really considered correct, I'll stick with the former. I have no strong feelings against the NCTE, but if you look at their site, it's painfully obvious that they are not about education, they are about educators. They should stick to giving out Doublespeak Awards instead of grammar guidelines designed to encourage students to write anything, correct or not.
But hey, congratulations, you dug up one source designed to accommodate people like you who can't write. You go ahead and believe what you want to believe. Don't let being wrong stand in the way of boosting your misguided esteem, it's the American way! If you want to follow the fringe and look like an idiot to everyone else, I wouldn't even dream of stopping you.
See ya,
KS
P.S. My favorite quote from the site with the full version of the document: "[This document is] a guideline approved by the NCTE Executive Committee and found to be consistent with NCTE positions on education issues." Ha! That's what I want to learn grammar from—guidelines written to be consistent with positions on issues. You really are George W. Bush, aren't you? I knew it, because I see how you're pushing science in the same direction!
You said yourself that their qualifies person. Person is singluar, their is plural. Therefore, there is no pronoun agreement in number, and the sentence is incorrect. As I pointed out, the sentence could be correct if their refers to some unnamed third party group of people, in which case their doesn't qualify person.
I assume, and I am right (it doesn't take a mind-reader, and no matter how much you insist otherwise, you're not fooling anyone), that you meant that the original poster has too much time on the original poster's hands. In this case, the only wiggle room you could have gotten is if you had argued that the correct sentence is You are a person with too much time on his hands, or to be more gender-neutral, You are a person with too much time on his or her hands. This would agree in number, gender, and person with person in a generic sense of the word. "You are a person with too much time on your hands" is correct because person as an antecedent isn't generic; it refers to a specific person, you, which justifies usage of the second-person possessive pronoun your.
If you had said, "Pedants are people who have too much time on their hands," you would have been right, because their (plural) qualifies people (plural), and indirectly, pedants (plural). Of course, that sentence is semantically different and, as I said, not interchangeable with the corrected original sentence.
you have proven that a tortured rewriting of the sentence can cause the possessive pronoun to change
This is just, for lack of a better term, crazy talk. What are you smoking, anyway? I don't care how tortuously you rewrite a sentence, the possessive pronoun doesn't change unless its antecedent changes. Your hands are your hands, not his hands, not her hands, not their hands, not our hands.
Seriously, call your local high school English teacher. Then again, make it a college English professor, because too many high school teachers are incompetent, and knowing my luck, you'd get one of the stupid ones. True story: I once had a high school teacher who, when I got into an argument with an idiot of a classmate over whether there were 50 or 52 states in the United States, said, "Well, I don't know, really..." To add insult to injury, I was in a history classroom full of textbooks, none of which contained a simple list of the 50 states. The next class, I brought in detailed documentation that I was right, and it was all I could do to keep from commenting on how sad I think it is that someone who educates our children doesn't even know that there are 50—and only 50—states in the Union. Hey, just out of curiousity, how many states do you think are in the Union? That wasn't you by any chance, was it? (Guess number two...)
Anyway, if you don't believe me, then maybe you'll trust the literati at Emory , Purdue, or the writers of the American Heritage Book of English Use. Now please, stop making yourself look so foolish. I wish there were some way to agree on a disinterested third party to hold a large wager in escrow and settle this matter once and for all, because I am 100% certain that you are 100% wrong. Again, on the offhand chance that anyone else is reading this silliness, your grammatic illiteracy doesn't make you an idiot, because we all make stupid mistakes sometimes. Your relentless efforts to justify yourself in the face of obvious wrongness is what makes you an idiot. Hey, wait a minute, you're not George W. Bush, are you? (Guess number three...)
The overlap between offline and online currencies will increase, and will again extend beyond the current MMORPGs.
Great... I can see the ads now. "Own a Super Widget 2010 today for the low price of just US$19.95, EQ2 133g, or WoW 200g!" How long until someone opens a reality/virtual border duty-free shop?
On a slightly more serious note, how long do you think it will be before virtual assets are legally treated as real assets for financial purposes? For example, do these companies that sell virtual gold and items have to pay taxes on their sales? If so, is their product considered a good or a service? If I review games for a living and I buy a virtual item to review, can I claim it as a business expense? If I resell it, do I have to claim the profit as business income? If I play an MMORPG in my free time, am I building wealth that I can later use for retirement?
Basically I believe that the Internet is going to become a fully fledged mechanical facsimile of astral space, but with some vestigial physical world elements.
You know what I think may become a somewhat major problem? Virtual identity theft. Right now, id theft is a problem because you could lose your physical world stuff. But as virtual marketplaces become more common and prevalent, I could see a big black market in stolen game account information. Or think about what havoc would be wreaked if somehow CmdrTaco's Slashdot account were compromised and someone started posting stuff as him. (Free gift subscriptions for everybody!!!)
Crap, this post is going to be buried, and I actually think it's one of my more insightful ones of the night.:-)
Well, the problem as I see it is that nobody has come up with a technology yet that allows people to enjoy their fair use rights and prevents them from doing something illegal. So far, it seems to be an all-or-nothing prospect to production companies and/or the **AA. They figure, either we allow people fair use and risk people violating copyright, or we deny people fair use and keep people from violating copyright.
The media industries have unsuccessfuly chosen to try to keep people from violating copyright time after time, but they keep messing up. Because of their stupidity, we've ended up with a bastard hybrid of denying people fair use and still allowing people to violate copyright. The pirates are still pirating, the sharers are still sharing, and the honest consumers are getting screwed.
What if the big industries had gone the other way instead? What if they had embraced new technologies instead of trying to sue them out of existence? People would still be doing illegal things, but the massive majority of people would pay for legitimate services (a la iPods). We'd be a decade ahead of where we are in entertainment, consumers would have unprecedented choice and flexibility in what they watch, and the big industries would be a hell of a lot richer than they are now. Everyone would have won.
But the big industries don't want that. They're so bent on revenge that they would rather everyone lose, as long as it hurts the pirates and sharers.
You know, if you just hadn't bothered to reply, I wouldn't have thought badly about you. After all, we're all victims of periodic mistakes once in a while. Hell, if you look closely, it's entirely possible that I've misspelled a word or two in this reply. But you're just so wrong and so indignant about it that you've managed to make a pedantic person like me giddy with delight. I knew a guy like you in college that I still love making fun of to this day. Your name isn't Randy by any chance, is it?
You are a person with too much time on their hands is grammatically correct, but is semantically incorrect unless the time that the "you" to whom you are talking has is on some third party's hands.
As a point of illustration, consider both of the following sentences about my neighbor:
He is a person with yellow paint on his house.
He is a person with yellow paint on their house.
According to your logic, since "with yellow paint on (whoever's) house" modifies "person," both of these sentences must be correct. However, if the meaning of the sentence is that my neighbor has yellow paint on his own house, the second sentence is clearly incorrect and the sentences are not interchangeable. (Like yours...)
And thank god we've got people like you to let us know when we're being pedants and jerks. For what it's worth, I'm only a jerk to people being jerks. (Check my posts if you don't believe me.) As for that guy, I'll bet if you hadn't pointed it out, he would have never had the epiphany and made the life change that he undoubtedly made upon reading your scathing review. Oh, and he is a guy, not a girl, and for the record, he seems to be a pretty cool one from what little I know about him. I may not be the smartest guy in the world, but I was smart enough to figure what the writer's sex is. (Makes it kind of easy when he posts his name and picture on his blog.)
Now suck it.
Ah, now I see your point. I hope that sentence isn't supposed to be accompanied by any sort of gesture, because then it would really hurt my feelings. I'm sorry, if you had made that compelling argument to begin with, everyone would have seen how futile being right can be to someone like you. Oh well, I'd love to continue, but I think I'm going to go make a few truly insightful posts before the night is done. Or, maybe I'll just go defend some more pedantry against jerks. You posting in any other threads?
Slashdot Mirror
The Wikipedia and a TV Wiki serve two different purposes. Wikipedia is for general purpose information with some degree of detail. The TV Wiki is for all the gory details as related specifically to television.
Using the first replier's example, in the Wikipedia, there is a lot of information about stuff like the cultural phenomenon of Star Trek, its history and background, etc.
In the TV Wiki, the entry is currently kind of skimpy and needs editing for now, but I would expect it to have detailed information about the series specifically as it relates to television, such as episode airdates, where and when it was on the schedule, the actors, production crew, writers, guest stars, set locations, and so on.
At least, that's what I would have in mind. I don't see the TV wiki as a "split" of Wikipedia; I see it as a separate special-purpose wiki. Some of the information will necessarily be the same, but it serves different purposes.
Has anyone considered that maybe Earth is just the most Titan-like place in the Solar System other than Titan?
Maybe, but the thing I'm really interested in is not can the software be bug-free, but can it be more reliable than humans?
The article says:
The funny thing is that I feel a lot less safe because other people, people I have no control over, are in control of their vehicle. The sad fact is that so many people are so mind-numbingly stupid behind the wheel of a car that I would much rather trust software that's slightly buggy and causes a few fatal crashes a year than humans who are outright stupid that cause almost 40,000 fatal crashes a year. And yes, if that means giving up control of my car so that other people have to give up control of theirs, I'm okay with that.
Yeah, but building a GoogleNet and retaining their position on the old Internet are not mutually exclusive options. The old Internet will presumably still be around for a long time, and if Google is planning on building another Internet, I can’t imagine them designing it so that users on it can’t access existing content on the old Internet. In other words, even if this speculation comes to pass, Google will still be needed and will still be around as it currently is.
Because neither the article nor the summary make it clear, Michal Zalewski is a Polish author and hacker who has a book named Silence on the Wire: A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks published by No Starch Press and sold at your favorite bookstores.
O'Reilly has an online profile of Michal:
Then perhaps "peaked" is the wrong word to toss around here.
The porn market, eh? Now THAT'S an industry in which Google has the potential to experience large growth, but the road ahead would be long and hard. Any thoughts at this point would be premature, don't you think?
But if they do manage to penetrate that market, they should give themselves a hand--job well done!
No, I'm not being facetious, I know about Cedega but really hadn't really considered it before. A quick browse of their database shows that City of Heros does indeed run on it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to try it out. Thanks, man, and I'm glad to see that someone modded you up, though I would have gone with Informative... :-)
You're right, too. Keep in mind that I've never actually used Photoshop, so I'm not qualified to compare the interfaces to each other. What I meant was that the interface for The GIMP is different from pretty much any other application that I've used, with at least three entirely separate windows being required by default to do any productive work. My layers and tools windows always seem to get buried under others and I have to hunt for them in my taskbar. I've gotten used to it by now, but I still don't find it very useful and wish that at the very least, the windows were logically "attached" to each other and bringing one up would bring the whole application up.
I'll probably skip the PS extension. Now that I've gotten used to The GIMP's interface, I don't want to mess with my head, and since I've never used Photoshop, it probably wouldn't be that useful to me. It's still really cool, though, and if it gets Photoshop users to switch, then I chalk it up as a good thing.
Dude, it's right here. That's the beauty of Google and why I like it so much. You only have to use the features you want to, no fuss and no muss.
And all of these weird features like e-mail and road maps that they're tossing out there all willy-nilly in obvious desperation are really, really cool. Really.
Yahoo also has e-mail, road maps, an IM service, and so on, and they're not exactly threatened as a company, at least not right now. And what about Microsoft? It's got all that, plus a highly complex operating system, a very high-level office productivity suite, development tools, etc. ad nauseum, but it's anything but struggling at the moment.
I dunno, the article sounds rather like pretty wild speculation to me. Not that speculation is wrong—the author admits it's speculation—but if any of this stuff comes to pass, I would chalk the author's correctness up more to luck than to keen insight.
Google has a lot of project in the works, including Gmail, Gtalk, Google Desktop, etc. These projects are anything but mainstream and have a LOT of room for growth. Hell, there's still even room for growth in their primary market, the search engine. Though they are huge, they are far from owning that market.
And Apple knocking off Microsoft? Maybe, but if they haven't done it yet, I don't have much reason to believe they'll do it anytime soon. I will admit that there was an interesting speculation in the article:
Wild speculation, but man, it would be fun to watch the resulting scramble.
As for me, I'm convinced that if anyone will ever knock off Microsoft, it will be an OS that gets game developers behind them. I've said for years that as weird as it sounds, gamers drive the market. Not many people use computers at home or school for productive uses, most people use them for playing games. The most popular "applications" on my own computer are probably Firefox and City of Heros. Firefox already runs on a zillion platforms. If City of Heroes ran on Linux, I would probably go ahead to switch to a Linux-only system, if for no other reason than it's free and I don't have to buy a new version every few years.
Once everyone is using an alternative OS (not necessarily Linux, but something other than Windows) at home for games, then they will all want to use it at work and school for productivity and educational applications, and that familiarity will drive more and more companies and schools to switch desktops.
But that's just my wild speculation...
You're right. The interface for The GIMP is very different from any other application I've used. It's not really bad, it's just different and it takes a lot of getting used to.
I just started using The GIMP not too long ago. I don't want to spend the money to upgrade my old copy of Paint Shop Pro if there's software that's just as good for free. If it takes me a little longer to learn how to use it, that's fine. (Unlike most people, my time is worthless...) But if they could improve the interface, I can't imagine that people choosing a graphics software package wouldn't use the free one, especially for low- to intermediate-level graphics needs.
Who knows? If they improve it a great deal (and improve the text tool, my only complaint with the software right now), we could be seeing a huge GIMP / Photoshop rivalry on the horizon!
In my reply a little further down, I pointed out Google's rationale for wanting a mobile phone number.
If you still don't buy it, that's fine, but that's what's going through their head.
I can kinda sorta see their point. What they don't want is a machine mass registering for new accounts from their registration site, and this effectively keeps that from happening.
However, in defense of the other repliers, I think that asking for people's cell phone numbers is a bit over the line. I wish they had just used something like word verification instead.
That was my first thought: Sign up by phone, why? Since you can't get to it now, and in case anyone else doesn't read the article, here's what they have to say about it:
I think the tried and true method of getting a Gmail account is still the best: get someone to invite you. If you don't know anyone who has a free Gmail account, Google gmail invite and you'll find places where you can get them for free.
Not only does it not write 1TB to a DVD recorder, it doesn't even write it to a hard drive:
So what are we talking about here, two hard drives plus a standard DVD recorder all integrated into one unit for a little over US$2,000!? Jesus, I think I'd rather just buy two hard drives and a DVD recorder (dual-layer, of course) for less than US$800.
Sure, I'd need a slightly bigger case, but to save an extra $1,200, I think I can live with that.
Count me among the hoardes that hate AOL. I have horror stories.
This article deals with one of them. I know a lot of people who have a hard time cancelling their service with AOL. My dad tried cancelling the service three or four times and ended up sending them a certified letter to get them to stop bugging him.
Another issue I have with AOL is that AOL digs roots very deeply into your computer. I don't know if this is still true since I haven't seen anyone using the service in a while, but it used to do stuff like replace your built-in dial-up networking functionality with its own, and even replacing various parts of the TCP/IP software and system files with its own. Uninstall? Useless. I've completely reinstalled many people's computers just to get AOL off of them. It's ironic that now their ads pitch the service as a way of protecting people from stuff that screws up their computer.
I've also dealt a lot with "This thing isn't working" complaints. People who can't get through, people who do get through but only very slowly, people whose other software starts experiencing mysterious problems, and so on ad nauseum.
There's a reason that AO "Hell" has such a bad reputation, and whenever anyone I know says, "America Online has a good deal on Internet service; I think I'll sign up," I always tell them, "I highly recommend against that, and no offense, but if you do, don't call me to come fix your computer."
The company I work for had a brief co-branding partnership with AOL, and as a result, all employees were offered a free year of AOL service. I work in the IT department, and almost everyone I know turned it down because the service, even free, just wasn't worth it. Actually, come to think of it, one guy I worked with gave his account to his parents and then spent the next year fixing their computer...
And speaking of AOL's declining membership and miserable service, I guess Time Warner has to be feeling a little bit better about their decision to drop AOL from its name. Ooh, cheap shot.
Meanwhile, if you're experiencing problems cancelling AOL, try one suggestion I found: call the phone number on your credit card statement.
Even $400, if the system is kick-ass, is doable. But as someone else pointed out, the point of TFA is that we won't be able to get an Xbox 360 for $300 or $400.
For a while, the only way anyone will be able to get a system will be to either a) steal one, b) buy one off of eBay (good luck paying $299 or $399...), or c) buy a bundle priced at $600.
Why? Some people blame the stores (and make no mistake, I do too), but Microsoft shares some of the blame, too. As TFA said, "when hot new gaming systems come out, supply is short, and demand is often so high that retailers can elect to sell the units only as parts of bundles that include accessories and games of the retailer's choosing." Bundles that, according to TFA cost at a minimum $599.93 for a "Core Bundle," which includes an extra controller, a 64MB memory card, and four games.
Well, you've got me there. I guess my defense is that the Atari 2600 was pretty revolutionary at the time; it offered a lot the no one had ever seen before. The Xbox 360 has fancier graphics, but is otherwise pretty much just the next in a line of products, ho hum. Is it really worth the extra moolah? I guess everyone will have to decide for themselves, and maybe it is for some people, but I personally don't think so.
Good idea, Other Reply Guy. Here's a Coral link to the Lego Serenity crew. Please use it instead. If the guy does get Slashdotted, this link should still (in theory) work, too.
Wouldn't it be great if they shot some of the scenes on full-size Lego sets? I know that's one extra feature that would be a sure way to get me to buy the DVD!
I hope that someone makes a Lego version of the movie at some point.
Oh, and you're right, the Lego version of the crew is awesome, though I have to reserve "adorable" to describe Lego Kaylee! Lego Jayne and Lego Book are too funny...
Not that Microsoft people read Slashdot, but in case one happens to...
That's just too much for a game system. I usually buy the new consoles when they come out (proud owner of a PS2, XBox, and Atari 2600), but these prices have pushed them out of the realm of game system and into the realm of major electronics investment. Even the so-called "core bundle" is as expensive than what I paid for my surround-sound system. More expensive bundles are pushing what I paid for my flat screen HDTV, which is the centerpiece of my whole entertainment system.
I know that Microsoft is trying to push the XBox 360 as a high-end electronics component, but the vast majority of people are going to just see it as a fancy game system. If you look at the official fact sheet, there is little to support anything more than that. A Windows Media Center extender? How many people do they think own Windows Media Center PCs anyway?
I guess what I'm saying is that while the XBox 360 looks like a really kick-ass game system, $600 to $700 is just too much money to pay to watch the Dead or Alive girls do their thing.
That's in interesting point. How many times a week do we see revolutionary new technology that either never comes out at all or that doesn't seem so exciting by the time it finally does because of advances in conventional technologies during the time in between?
I've just got a feeling that by the time we start buying computers with Y nanotubes, Microsoft will have patented the letter Y, so we'll have to call them lamba nanotubes or itty-bitty-wishbone-shaped nanotubes instead...
I guess I'm just wishfully hoping that there is a fast forward on at least some of these technologies.
I'm glad you picked Purdue, that was one of my favorites:
(Capital letters are theirs, emphasis is mine.)
I won't bother explaining yet again that the pronoun in your original sentence is not indefinite since it specifically refers to "a person" that you defined, you. Since you have the insane notion that just because you thought it meant something correct makes it correct, you would probably argue that 2 + 2 = 7 is mathematically correct because you "wrote seven while meaning four."
Instead, I'll point out that the document you cited wasn't written by Purdue, it was written by the National Council of Teachers of English. (Remember my comment about how with my luck, you'll get one of the stupid ones?) I checked their Web site to find a little more information about who they were and where this document you cited came from. The full version is posted here, and I do wish that Purdue hadn't shortened and/or paraphrased it. Regarding the section you quoted, it says:
Also, the purpose of this document is for use as a guide to gender-neutral writing. It is not about correct grammar. In fact, the writers give the following as their stated purpose:
Excuse me, but just because incorrect structures <airquotes> open possibilities </airquotes> doesn't make it any more correct than you are.
So given the choice between every reputable grammar resource and one organization that I've never heard of before in a document designed to make people feel good about themselves and that even admits that what they said isn't really considered correct, I'll stick with the former. I have no strong feelings against the NCTE, but if you look at their site, it's painfully obvious that they are not about education, they are about educators. They should stick to giving out Doublespeak Awards instead of grammar guidelines designed to encourage students to write anything, correct or not.
But hey, congratulations, you dug up one source designed to accommodate people like you who can't write. You go ahead and believe what you want to believe. Don't let being wrong stand in the way of boosting your misguided esteem, it's the American way! If you want to follow the fringe and look like an idiot to everyone else, I wouldn't even dream of stopping you.
See ya,
KS
P.S. My favorite quote from the site with the full version of the document: "[This document is] a guideline approved by the NCTE Executive Committee and found to be consistent with NCTE positions on education issues." Ha! That's what I want to learn grammar from—guidelines written to be consistent with positions on issues. You really are George W. Bush, aren't you? I knew it, because I see how you're pushing science in the same direction!
Is this really that hard?
You said yourself that their qualifies person. Person is singluar, their is plural. Therefore, there is no pronoun agreement in number, and the sentence is incorrect. As I pointed out, the sentence could be correct if their refers to some unnamed third party group of people, in which case their doesn't qualify person.
I assume, and I am right (it doesn't take a mind-reader, and no matter how much you insist otherwise, you're not fooling anyone), that you meant that the original poster has too much time on the original poster's hands. In this case, the only wiggle room you could have gotten is if you had argued that the correct sentence is You are a person with too much time on his hands, or to be more gender-neutral, You are a person with too much time on his or her hands. This would agree in number, gender, and person with person in a generic sense of the word. "You are a person with too much time on your hands" is correct because person as an antecedent isn't generic; it refers to a specific person, you, which justifies usage of the second-person possessive pronoun your.
If you had said, "Pedants are people who have too much time on their hands," you would have been right, because their (plural) qualifies people (plural), and indirectly, pedants (plural). Of course, that sentence is semantically different and, as I said, not interchangeable with the corrected original sentence.
This is just, for lack of a better term, crazy talk. What are you smoking, anyway? I don't care how tortuously you rewrite a sentence, the possessive pronoun doesn't change unless its antecedent changes. Your hands are your hands, not his hands, not her hands, not their hands, not our hands.
Seriously, call your local high school English teacher. Then again, make it a college English professor, because too many high school teachers are incompetent, and knowing my luck, you'd get one of the stupid ones. True story: I once had a high school teacher who, when I got into an argument with an idiot of a classmate over whether there were 50 or 52 states in the United States, said, "Well, I don't know, really..." To add insult to injury, I was in a history classroom full of textbooks, none of which contained a simple list of the 50 states. The next class, I brought in detailed documentation that I was right, and it was all I could do to keep from commenting on how sad I think it is that someone who educates our children doesn't even know that there are 50—and only 50—states in the Union. Hey, just out of curiousity, how many states do you think are in the Union? That wasn't you by any chance, was it? (Guess number two...)
Anyway, if you don't believe me, then maybe you'll trust the literati at Emory , Purdue, or the writers of the American Heritage Book of English Use . Now please, stop making yourself look so foolish. I wish there were some way to agree on a disinterested third party to hold a large wager in escrow and settle this matter once and for all, because I am 100% certain that you are 100% wrong. Again, on the offhand chance that anyone else is reading this silliness, your grammatic illiteracy doesn't make you an idiot, because we all make stupid mistakes sometimes. Your relentless efforts to justify yourself in the face of obvious wrongness is what makes you an idiot. Hey, wait a minute, you're not George W. Bush, are you? (Guess number three...)
If by "moron" you mean
Great... I can see the ads now. "Own a Super Widget 2010 today for the low price of just US$19.95, EQ2 133g, or WoW 200g!" How long until someone opens a reality/virtual border duty-free shop?
On a slightly more serious note, how long do you think it will be before virtual assets are legally treated as real assets for financial purposes? For example, do these companies that sell virtual gold and items have to pay taxes on their sales? If so, is their product considered a good or a service? If I review games for a living and I buy a virtual item to review, can I claim it as a business expense? If I resell it, do I have to claim the profit as business income? If I play an MMORPG in my free time, am I building wealth that I can later use for retirement?
You know what I think may become a somewhat major problem? Virtual identity theft. Right now, id theft is a problem because you could lose your physical world stuff. But as virtual marketplaces become more common and prevalent, I could see a big black market in stolen game account information. Or think about what havoc would be wreaked if somehow CmdrTaco's Slashdot account were compromised and someone started posting stuff as him. (Free gift subscriptions for everybody!!!)
Crap, this post is going to be buried, and I actually think it's one of my more insightful ones of the night. :-)
Well, the problem as I see it is that nobody has come up with a technology yet that allows people to enjoy their fair use rights and prevents them from doing something illegal. So far, it seems to be an all-or-nothing prospect to production companies and/or the **AA. They figure, either we allow people fair use and risk people violating copyright, or we deny people fair use and keep people from violating copyright.
The media industries have unsuccessfuly chosen to try to keep people from violating copyright time after time, but they keep messing up. Because of their stupidity, we've ended up with a bastard hybrid of denying people fair use and still allowing people to violate copyright. The pirates are still pirating, the sharers are still sharing, and the honest consumers are getting screwed.
What if the big industries had gone the other way instead? What if they had embraced new technologies instead of trying to sue them out of existence? People would still be doing illegal things, but the massive majority of people would pay for legitimate services (a la iPods). We'd be a decade ahead of where we are in entertainment, consumers would have unprecedented choice and flexibility in what they watch, and the big industries would be a hell of a lot richer than they are now. Everyone would have won.
But the big industries don't want that. They're so bent on revenge that they would rather everyone lose, as long as it hurts the pirates and sharers.
So, so stupid.
You know, if you just hadn't bothered to reply, I wouldn't have thought badly about you. After all, we're all victims of periodic mistakes once in a while. Hell, if you look closely, it's entirely possible that I've misspelled a word or two in this reply. But you're just so wrong and so indignant about it that you've managed to make a pedantic person like me giddy with delight. I knew a guy like you in college that I still love making fun of to this day. Your name isn't Randy by any chance, is it?
You are a person with too much time on their hands is grammatically correct, but is semantically incorrect unless the time that the "you" to whom you are talking has is on some third party's hands.
As a point of illustration, consider both of the following sentences about my neighbor:
According to your logic, since "with yellow paint on (whoever's) house" modifies "person," both of these sentences must be correct. However, if the meaning of the sentence is that my neighbor has yellow paint on his own house, the second sentence is clearly incorrect and the sentences are not interchangeable. (Like yours...)
And thank god we've got people like you to let us know when we're being pedants and jerks. For what it's worth, I'm only a jerk to people being jerks. (Check my posts if you don't believe me.) As for that guy, I'll bet if you hadn't pointed it out, he would have never had the epiphany and made the life change that he undoubtedly made upon reading your scathing review. Oh, and he is a guy, not a girl, and for the record, he seems to be a pretty cool one from what little I know about him. I may not be the smartest guy in the world, but I was smart enough to figure what the writer's sex is. (Makes it kind of easy when he posts his name and picture on his blog.)
Ah, now I see your point. I hope that sentence isn't supposed to be accompanied by any sort of gesture, because then it would really hurt my feelings. I'm sorry, if you had made that compelling argument to begin with, everyone would have seen how futile being right can be to someone like you. Oh well, I'd love to continue, but I think I'm going to go make a few truly insightful posts before the night is done. Or, maybe I'll just go defend some more pedantry against jerks. You posting in any other threads?