I own a small company that sells tinfoil hats to angst-ridden European conspiracy "truthers". Thank you for your continued support... and remember: the CIA is watching you.
Instead of the Orwellian "two minutes of hate" this guy puts forth a daily radio show full of hate and anger 3-5 hours a day (I don't know, I don't listen to the show) and I have heard the show and he is often inaccurate but very capable at seeding his audience with misconceptions and anger.
"I don't listen to the show" && "this guy puts forth a daily radio show full of hate and anger 3-5 hours a day" begs the question... how would you know?
Now that's entertainment right there, boys and girls.:)
Sweden is quite different from the US when it comes to internet access. In Sweden there is real competition, and if somebody do not like what the city net of Lund is offering, there is at least two (probably 3-5, but I only know two because I do not live there) other ISPs that people can choose from in Lund.
...and you believe this is "different from the US" how, exactly? I live in a moderately sized city, and have a number of excellent choices for Internet access, from Cable to a number of DSL solutions to Metro Ethernet.
What the article misses is that if there was an actual android having camera eyes and being allowed to use its full processing power, it'd simply count the cards and beat every single damn time.
Can you elaborate on how you think that "counting cards" would help you in a game of No Limit Texas Hold Em?...because it won't help you.
This, of course, begs the question of how long it will take for the on-line casinos to start putting poker playing bots into the mix to skew the odds even further to the house.
Poker is one of the relatively few casino games that you don't play against the house. A casino could care less who wins or loses any particular hand; it makes no difference to them. They make their money via rake. There are many different ways that they can do this, but just consider it a "hand tax" and you'll get the idea.
Now sure, they could put poker "bots" in that would generate money for the house on top of the rake, but were it ever discovered, players would abandon the site immediately.
Don't listen to people who whine about this "already happening"... they are just donks who are bitter that they've lost their money.:)
In poker you have a finite number of cards, that are a lot smaller than the permutation of moves in chess or checkers. Just the ability to count cards and do statistical analysis makes poker, blackjack, etc easier to compute in my opinion.
I can only surmise that you've never really played Texas Hold Em.
In any event, in this test was limit Texas Hold Em game... which eliminates the skill of variable-sized betting from the game entirely. Wake me when they stage a No Limit compeition... that'll be the real test.
That's lying with numbers. Note that what the Wikipedia article states is household income. Median income per adult is a paltry $23,500. And this is before paying for what other countries have already paid for, like healthcare and schooling
Speaking of lying with numbers... did you actually read that Wikipedia article? You know, instead of taking median household income, and dividing it by 2, and claiming that's the accurate number? Sigh...
W41CA: 49 x 103 x 22mm, 126g iPhone: 61 x 115 x 11.6mm, 135g...and according to the respective product sheets, the Casio actually does far less, with worse battery life.
But the specs alone don't tell the story; the real story is in the implementation. It's arguable that the iPhone does nothing new, but the way it does it is really the key. Try using one, you'll see what I mean.
I've been to Japan on a number of occasions, and I'm actually returning there at the end of August. The Japanese certainly do love their gadgets, but the idea that they are any more than at best 6 months ahead of the US market is just not accurate.
The median income in the US is way lower than other Western countries.
um.... no. The median income in the US is actually higher than most other Western countries. And more of that income is actually kept by the wage earner, rather than being paid in taxes.
Back to the reasons why the US is such a technological backwater: I think it's mostly due to the demographics, with the median income being so low (meaning that most people don't have a lot of money)
Repeating a falsehood doesn't make it so. As for being a technological "backwater", what country do you think invented the LCD? Or the transistor? Or the microprocessor? Or for that matter, the cellphone?
Yes, that's right... good old backwater USA. Next!
Given that life at least requires food, and according to many, also clothing and shelter. having a right to life implies having a right to those things as well.
...and given that life inherently requires sex for its inception, any "non-thinker" would be foolish to exclude a right to sex. And given that women typically look at guys without the means to support themselves as losers, that also means a "right to wealth" is needed in order to propagate the "right to sex". That or send people to Thailand and pay for it via a government subsidy.
Hell, you might even win election with a platform like that, even if it is as ridiculous as the the "right to food" and the "right to shelter".
How about a novel idea -- equal opportunitynot equal outcome?
well, they're part of a "fairness doctrine" in the UK. I've not seen *any* of the distortions that posters seem to think it causes.
Perhaps because you agree with the viewpoint generally espoused on the BBC, you don't notice it, but many people consider the BBC to be rather... left leaning. Note the recent scandals involving the beeb?
I don't necessarily agree with that assessment, but the point is that objectivity is very clearly in the eye of the beholder.
Yes, I (and many europeans nowadays) have some very strong opinions about the contemporary US. "Fascist rouge state" is one of the more friendly ones. This is mainly based on the all to similar politics excercised by your political leadership. Lets elaborate on this some more, shall we?
As much as I disagree with you, I feel I must commend you. Few people are willing to wear their jingoistic ignorance as a badge of honor, and display it to the world. Huzzah, Herr Tomoe, huzzah!
Because Chirac/Schröder/Merkel think it's a bad idea to just rely on one foreign search engine in a nation that staggers fastly into becoming a fascist rouge state
Obviously, there are a lot of smart people doing good things at MS, but putting a computer into every home only reaches it's true potential when that computer is running free software on free hardware.
Nay, sir, you don't take it far enough! The house in which this free computer running free software resides should be free as well! And free electricity to operate it! Only then will it reach its true potential!
Oh, and there should be some free love goin' on in the house too, if you get my meanin'... mrrrrrow mrrrrow!
Actually, if you look at the web site mentioned (which is funded by Greenpeace), you'll find that Bob Carter does not get his funding from Exxon.
What you will find is that Bob Carter has written articles for an organization (TechCentralStation.com) that has in past received funding from Exxon. I think it's an important distinction to make, because Carter does appear to be a serious scientist with peer reviewed, published papers.
You may disagree with him, but I don't think it's fair to say that he receives funding from Exxon simply because he has written two articles for a web site that receives funding from Exxon.
So the American corporations (of doom) are sending jobs to foreign companies to save some cash. Considering Indian IT workers have a wage of $10,000 compared to the $60,000 of fresh out of college Americans, that adds up. The pay raises usually end up in the pockets of the business owners.
...and who exactly are these evil business owners who are pocketing the money? Your mom and dad. Your neighbors. The guy who drives the bus you take to work.
Anyone who invests in company stock directly or indirectly via 401K programs, 403Bs, etc.
Remember, these are by in large publicly owned companies you're talking about. They are own by their shareholders, and have a responsibility to turn a profit for them.
Profits a public company makes are typically reinvested in the business, to keep it growing and healthy, or they are distributed to shareholders via dividends, or indirectly via raised share prices.
China owns 1/3 of the US national debt and makes most of its products. Quite where the US is going to go when all the jobs except lawyering have moved offshore isnt clear, but a good candidate is "downhill"
This is untrue. Only 22% of the US national debt is foreign-owned and China doesn't even hold 1/3rd of that. Japan, Europe, and many, many other countries rank higher up on that list.
It is also untrue that China makes "most" of the products used in the US. This FUD is worse than the FUD in the original article.
What one has to understand is that the methods of parenting in many Asian countries are quite different from those employed here, as is the perceived role of law enforcement. Because parents feel that they cannot simply order their children to stay away from the arcades, they put their trust in the laws of the land to prevent their children from what is seen as an unproductive, unhealthy activity.
As someone with quite a bit of experience with Malaysia, I can tell you that parents by in large have no problem ordering their children to stay away. Indeed the families (Native Malay, Chinese, and Indian alike) are paid much more deference and are fair more overbearing in their children's lives than here in the West.
It is likely that relative smothering and rigid expectation that leads children in such countries to seek an unsupervised outlet such as gaming, in which they can do whatever they want.
Last time I was in KL, I saw an Indian father beat the piss out of his daughter on the street in front of hotel guards, a bus full of tourists, and any number of other people. Apparently he was pissed off that she was going away for the weekend with an Indian guy on our trip to a jungle park.
The daughter didn't cry (she seemed used to it), and the mother muttered "family business" in English as she walked passed... everyone was nonplussed, and no one interfered.
Certainly it isn't all this way, but in general, authoritarian parents (compared to what we're used to here) are the rule, and thus an outlet that allows full freedom is likely quite appealing, thus the popularity of such games in many parts of Asia.
Eastern values brought Opium dens and drug abuse to America in the 1920's and hasn't stopped pumping the world with Heroin and other drugs (remember, Afghanistan is technically an EASTERN nation and has Opium as it's most profitable export).
You're wrong about "eastern values" bringing opium and drug abuse... what actually happened was that the British were the world's largest drug cartel at the time via their India Trading Company. They were exporting opium around the world, commercializing it.
Much of this opium was traded with China in return for silk, tea, and other such items, even after England made opium illegal, it was perfectly legal and encouraged for them to sell it to addicted Chinese.
Indeed, when the Chinese made opium illegal in 1839, the British went to war with them, defeating them badly and imposing humiliating conditions on the Chinese, and the opium started flowing again. Hong Kong became part of the British Empire as a direct result of this, the "Opium War" -- a very shameful part of British history.
Do a google search on "Opium War" or "history of China" and read about it for yourself.
Careful who you flame for morality reasons, the west has exploited the east for a very long time. Who do you think it is that goes to those sex cities in Bangkok, Pattaya, and Patong Beach? It isn't the locals, I'll tell you that, it's the farangs (westerners) on a sex vacation.
I've seen western men in their 60's walking hand in hand with Thai girls (and boys... and boy ladies) that could be their grandchildren, but I've never seen Thai's doing the same (there or here).
Yes, those evil, evil companies that employ your Uncle and bring jobs and revenue to the economy of their host country. Down with companies making money!
We've been making money selling shareware products (really, just electronically distributed/sold products these days) for the past 15 years, and making money at it. Yes, with a real office, real employees, and real paychecks.
Konfabulator is a new product for Mac OS X that has been recently released by one of the creators of the Kaleidoscope product for "classic" Mac OS X that allowed you to have custom interface themes. Konfabulator allows you to have nicely designed application widgets running in windows that either appear on your desktop, or float on top of all windows. Most of the widgets currently available for it do things like display clocks, pull in news from various sources, and so on -- and people can fairly easily create their own widgets. Here is an interesting review of Konfabulator:
Konfabulator looks like an interesting product, however I wonder how useful it will end up being after the dust settles. How useful it is may have little bearing on how successful it will be as a product -- Kaleidoscope was not a useful product, but it was extremely popular and successful. I think the attention that Konfabulator is experiencing right now is primarily because it empowers non-programmers with the ability to make little applications, similar to what HyperCard offered people years ago.
It is essentially, as some have pointed out, Active Desktop running on Mac OS X. The little widget windows can be likened to web browser windows running JavaScript in them, but presented in a nicer, easier to manage package. Sometimes packaging is everything, and the Konfabulator packaging is quite well done, but it should also be noted that Microsoft's Active Desktop technology didn't exactly set the world on fire a few years ago.
However, I do wonder why the interest in Konfabulator is so high, given that something much more powerful already exists for Mac OS X, and it uses native Mac OS X widgets. It is from Apple, and it is called AppleScript Studio:
http://www.apple.com/applescript/studio/
Using a combination of industrial-strength GUI tools that Interface Builder offers, and the ease of use of AppleScript, non-programmers can make some very impressive applications using AppleScript Studio. ASS (ah, what a terrible acronym) also doesn't require that end users of your applications have purchased and installed any third party software, as Konfabulator does.
In short, Konfabulator is cool. It isn't particularly useful at this stage, and even though that may change with additional widgets being created, I don't think it needs to be very useful to be successful. If anything, I hope that it will get people who have been empowered with the ability to create their own widgets to look into the power that AppleScript Studio offers.
You clearly have no clue what you're talking about. Many parts of Cocoa are built on top of Carbon -- there is no "emulation layer" for Carbon calls, nor are carbon applications inherently slower than Cocoa applications.
Carbon and Cocoa are merely two APIs that allow you to do the same thing. Carbon is procedural, Cocoa is object oriented.
Many things are easier to prototype and get your initial code up and running in Cocoa, but like an OO framework, you must design your object hierarchy well ahead of time.
There is also a rather serious learning curve for Cocoa, and if you decide to go with Cocoa over Carbon, you've essentially written off any xplat possibilities.
Most of the major applications for Mac OS X are written in Carbon, and will continue to be. Cocoa is a very cool OO framework, but it isn't right for every project, and the misinformation you're spreading is doing no one any good.
Slashdot Mirror
I own a small company that sells tinfoil hats to angst-ridden European conspiracy "truthers". Thank you for your continued support... and remember: the CIA is watching you.
Instead of the Orwellian "two minutes of hate" this guy puts forth a daily radio show full of hate and anger 3-5 hours a day (I don't know, I don't listen to the show) and I have heard the show and he is often inaccurate but very capable at seeding his audience with misconceptions and anger.
:)
"I don't listen to the show" && "this guy puts forth a daily radio show full of hate and anger 3-5 hours a day" begs the question... how would you know?
Now that's entertainment right there, boys and girls.
I always assumed it was because the phone was primarily designed for use in the US where 3G doesn't really exist.
Really? That's odd, I'm using Verizon's EVDO 3G service on my laptop right now to post this message... the coverage is quite good in the USA.
I'd call that real competition.
What the article misses is that if there was an actual android having camera eyes and being allowed to use its full processing power, it'd simply count the cards and beat every single damn time.
...because it won't help you.
Can you elaborate on how you think that "counting cards" would help you in a game of No Limit Texas Hold Em?
This, of course, begs the question of how long it will take for the on-line casinos to start putting poker playing bots into the mix to skew the odds even further to the house.
:)
Poker is one of the relatively few casino games that you don't play against the house. A casino could care less who wins or loses any particular hand; it makes no difference to them. They make their money via rake. There are many different ways that they can do this, but just consider it a "hand tax" and you'll get the idea.
Now sure, they could put poker "bots" in that would generate money for the house on top of the rake, but were it ever discovered, players would abandon the site immediately.
Don't listen to people who whine about this "already happening"... they are just donks who are bitter that they've lost their money.
In poker you have a finite number of cards, that are a lot smaller than the permutation of moves in chess or checkers. Just the ability to count cards and do statistical analysis makes poker, blackjack, etc easier to compute in my opinion.
I can only surmise that you've never really played Texas Hold Em.
In any event, in this test was limit Texas Hold Em game... which eliminates the skill of variable-sized betting from the game entirely. Wake me when they stage a No Limit compeition... that'll be the real test.
That's lying with numbers. Note that what the Wikipedia article states is household income. Median income per adult is a paltry $23,500. And this is before paying for what other countries have already paid for, like healthcare and schooling
Speaking of lying with numbers... did you actually read that Wikipedia article? You know, instead of taking median household income, and dividing it by 2, and claiming that's the accurate number? Sigh...
Let's see here.
...and according to the respective product sheets, the Casio actually does far less, with worse battery life.
W41CA: 400x240 screen
iPhone: 480x320 screen
W41CA: 70mb of memory
iPhone: 4 or 8gb of memory
W41CA: 49 x 103 x 22mm, 126g
iPhone: 61 x 115 x 11.6mm, 135g
But the specs alone don't tell the story; the real story is in the implementation. It's arguable that the iPhone does nothing new, but the way it does it is really the key. Try using one, you'll see what I mean.
I've been to Japan on a number of occasions, and I'm actually returning there at the end of August. The Japanese certainly do love their gadgets, but the idea that they are any more than at best 6 months ahead of the US market is just not accurate.
The median income in the US is way lower than other Western countries.
um.... no. The median income in the US is actually higher than most other Western countries. And more of that income is actually kept by the wage earner, rather than being paid in taxes.
Back to the reasons why the US is such a technological backwater: I think it's mostly due to the demographics, with the median income being so low (meaning that most people don't have a lot of money)
Repeating a falsehood doesn't make it so. As for being a technological "backwater", what country do you think invented the LCD? Or the transistor? Or the microprocessor? Or for that matter, the cellphone?
Yes, that's right... good old backwater USA. Next!
Hell, you might even win election with a platform like that, even if it is as ridiculous as the the "right to food" and the "right to shelter".
How about a novel idea -- equal opportunity not equal outcome?
Nah, it'd never fly.
Perhaps because you agree with the viewpoint generally espoused on the BBC, you don't notice it, but many people consider the BBC to be rather... left leaning. Note the recent scandals involving the beeb?
I don't necessarily agree with that assessment, but the point is that objectivity is very clearly in the eye of the beholder.
As much as I disagree with you, I feel I must commend you. Few people are willing to wear their jingoistic ignorance as a badge of honor, and display it to the world. Huzzah, Herr Tomoe, huzzah!
Oh, the irony, Herr Tomoe. Anyhoo, never let reality get in the way of business... or politics, for that matter.
Much easier to just rattle off paranoid "fascist rogue state" rabble.
Obviously, there are a lot of smart people doing good things at MS, but putting a computer into every home only reaches it's true potential when that computer is running free software on free hardware.
Nay, sir, you don't take it far enough! The house in which this free computer running free software resides should be free as well! And free electricity to operate it! Only then will it reach its true potential!
Oh, and there should be some free love goin' on in the house too, if you get my meanin'... mrrrrrow mrrrrow!
What you will find is that Bob Carter has written articles for an organization (TechCentralStation.com) that has in past received funding from Exxon. I think it's an important distinction to make, because Carter does appear to be a serious scientist with peer reviewed, published papers.
You may disagree with him, but I don't think it's fair to say that he receives funding from Exxon simply because he has written two articles for a web site that receives funding from Exxon.
Anyone who invests in company stock directly or indirectly via 401K programs, 403Bs, etc.
Remember, these are by in large publicly owned companies you're talking about. They are own by their shareholders, and have a responsibility to turn a profit for them.
Profits a public company makes are typically reinvested in the business, to keep it growing and healthy, or they are distributed to shareholders via dividends, or indirectly via raised share prices.
This is untrue. Only 22% of the US national debt is foreign-owned and China doesn't even hold 1/3rd of that. Japan, Europe, and many, many other countries rank higher up on that list.
It is also untrue that China makes "most" of the products used in the US. This FUD is worse than the FUD in the original article.
As someone with quite a bit of experience with Malaysia, I can tell you that parents by in large have no problem ordering their children to stay away. Indeed the families (Native Malay, Chinese, and Indian alike) are paid much more deference and are fair more overbearing in their children's lives than here in the West.
It is likely that relative smothering and rigid expectation that leads children in such countries to seek an unsupervised outlet such as gaming, in which they can do whatever they want.
Last time I was in KL, I saw an Indian father beat the piss out of his daughter on the street in front of hotel guards, a bus full of tourists, and any number of other people. Apparently he was pissed off that she was going away for the weekend with an Indian guy on our trip to a jungle park.
The daughter didn't cry (she seemed used to it), and the mother muttered "family business" in English as she walked passed... everyone was nonplussed, and no one interfered.
Certainly it isn't all this way, but in general, authoritarian parents (compared to what we're used to here) are the rule, and thus an outlet that allows full freedom is likely quite appealing, thus the popularity of such games in many parts of Asia.
You're wrong about "eastern values" bringing opium and drug abuse... what actually happened was that the British were the world's largest drug cartel at the time via their India Trading Company. They were exporting opium around the world, commercializing it.
Much of this opium was traded with China in return for silk, tea, and other such items, even after England made opium illegal, it was perfectly legal and encouraged for them to sell it to addicted Chinese.
Indeed, when the Chinese made opium illegal in 1839, the British went to war with them, defeating them badly and imposing humiliating conditions on the Chinese, and the opium started flowing again. Hong Kong became part of the British Empire as a direct result of this, the "Opium War" -- a very shameful part of British history.
Do a google search on "Opium War" or "history of China" and read about it for yourself.
Careful who you flame for morality reasons, the west has exploited the east for a very long time. Who do you think it is that goes to those sex cities in Bangkok, Pattaya, and Patong Beach? It isn't the locals, I'll tell you that, it's the farangs (westerners) on a sex vacation.
I've seen western men in their 60's walking hand in hand with Thai girls (and boys... and boy ladies) that could be their grandchildren, but I've never seen Thai's doing the same (there or here).
Yes, those evil, evil companies that employ your Uncle and bring jobs and revenue to the economy of their host country. Down with companies making money!
We've been making money selling shareware products (really, just electronically distributed/sold products these days) for the past 15 years, and making money at it. Yes, with a real office, real employees, and real paychecks.
Konfabulator is a new product for Mac OS X that has been recently released by one of the creators of the Kaleidoscope product for "classic" Mac OS X that allowed you to have custom interface themes. Konfabulator allows you to have nicely designed application widgets running in windows that either appear on your desktop, or float on top of all windows. Most of the widgets currently available for it do things like display clocks, pull in news from various sources, and so on -- and people can fairly easily create their own widgets. Here is an interesting review of Konfabulator:
l
http://daringfireball.net/2003/02/konfabulous.htm
Konfabulator looks like an interesting product, however I wonder how useful it will end up being after the dust settles. How useful it is may have little bearing on how successful it will be as a product -- Kaleidoscope was not a useful product, but it was extremely popular and successful. I think the attention that Konfabulator is experiencing right now is primarily because it empowers non-programmers with the ability to make little applications, similar to what HyperCard offered people years ago.
It is essentially, as some have pointed out, Active Desktop running on Mac OS X. The little widget windows can be likened to web browser windows running JavaScript in them, but presented in a nicer, easier to manage package. Sometimes packaging is everything, and the Konfabulator packaging is quite well done, but it should also be noted that Microsoft's Active Desktop technology didn't exactly set the world on fire a few years ago.
However, I do wonder why the interest in Konfabulator is so high, given that something much more powerful already exists for Mac OS X, and it uses native Mac OS X widgets. It is from Apple, and it is called AppleScript Studio:
http://www.apple.com/applescript/studio/
Using a combination of industrial-strength GUI tools that Interface Builder offers, and the ease of use of AppleScript, non-programmers can make some very impressive applications using AppleScript Studio. ASS (ah, what a terrible acronym) also doesn't require that end users of your applications have purchased and installed any third party software, as Konfabulator does.
In short, Konfabulator is cool. It isn't particularly useful at this stage, and even though that may change with additional widgets being created, I don't think it needs to be very useful to be successful. If anything, I hope that it will get people who have been empowered with the ability to create their own widgets to look into the power that AppleScript Studio offers.
Port 80 and 443 are used for http and https by default for TCP, not UDP -- different animal entirely.
Carbon and Cocoa are merely two APIs that allow you to do the same thing. Carbon is procedural, Cocoa is object oriented.
Many things are easier to prototype and get your initial code up and running in Cocoa, but like an OO framework, you must design your object hierarchy well ahead of time.
There is also a rather serious learning curve for Cocoa, and if you decide to go with Cocoa over Carbon, you've essentially written off any xplat possibilities.
Most of the major applications for Mac OS X are written in Carbon, and will continue to be. Cocoa is a very cool OO framework, but it isn't right for every project, and the misinformation you're spreading is doing no one any good.