I'm a UK student of Japanese Studies at Cambridge, but I'll let it slide:-)
The people I know in Japan are still waiting to see the effects of the new government. To be fair, most Japanese my age are very apathetic about politics, in spite of the regime shift, so I've not had much inside info!
Personally, I think the REM export restrictions from China will have a greater impact on Japanese foreign policy and economy than anything else (especially given their latest commitment to radical reductions in greenhouse emissions, which will require plenty of advanced tech). Whether that will actually see them hopping into the Asia camp or not... who knows?
You're quite correct, but as I said, it's important that the industry is seen as being civil. Just as you say, the administration would have looked at military applications, but quietly so. Honne and Tatemae are still deeply entrenched in Japanese culture, and nowhere more than in government and industry.
I would hope that any half-decent uni would support multiple platforms and open standards, as a matter of policy. The notion of sticking to expensive proprietary platforms as a policy seems remarkably anti-academic to me.
My (UK) uni supports most platforms. However, a friend told me how her daughter - attending a different uni - was told that, in order to be able to connect to the university network from her room, she would have to be using Vista. I'm not even kidding. I was gob-smacked. When I looked into it, their policy loosely alluded to the security benefits. Bitter, bitter irony...
Needless to say, her university is not considered to be one of high repute. Any UK resident over the age of 25 will understand what I mean when I say "ex-polytechnic".
You, sir, win a million points for insight. Minus one for saying it has nothing to do with culture though.
Publicly, it is very important to Japan that their innovations and applications are seen as being civil rather than military, for political and cultural reasons going back decades.
Holy shit - have you seen the discussion that follows the blog you've cited? If the discussions in/. were even half that articulate and intelligent, modding would be redundant.
the grammar of speech is now recognised as quite distinct from the grammar of writing
Hi,
Please could you point me at some research or articles regarding this? I'm not picking holes; I'm genuinely interested. This is something I've been noticing in my study of Japanese and I would like to learn more about the equivalent phenomenon in English.
Agreed. How many more stories about browser-speed do we need, given how insignificant the discrepancies are? For most end-users, browser lag is completely dwarfed by restricted bandwidth.
In my case, judicious application of AdBlock and NoScript make this a complete non-issue. I'm far more interested in standards compliancy and security.
Yeah, okay, but the boss who gives you a nap also seems to be the dickbag who fires you for trying to write clear and appropriately highlighted instructions for the sake of your brain-dead colleagues who will still get it wrong. $17,000? A law firm should know better.
Hmm. I'd say they started that way - Colour Of Magic and Light Fantastic were clearly just parodies of "high fantasy" - but the order changed over time. I think he started focussing on Humour after about the 4th book, which contained a healthy dose of misanthropically insightful philosophy (since this is the source of most of his humour.) Eventually he seemed to move on to using humour to tell us things about the world, with fantasy being just a backdrop.
Compare the focus of Colour Of Magic with something like Monstrous Regiment. They're all set in the same world, true, but the latter was primarily about people, society, attitudes, culture-shifts, and held up a big mirror to it all in order to say "look how daft we all are!" It speaks volumes that, as his books became more about satirising people than literary style, they became both funnier and deeper, which goes to show how much he developed as an artist of his medium.
We could go on for hours dissecting Pratchett though, which in itself probably says more about his work than we ever could. The truth is, he is a warmly humanistic, satirical genius whose works will be considered as classic as Mark Twain's in the years to come, and I'm deeply saddened by his onset of Alzheimer's.
Haskell is very powerful in its elegance, but it was created to be - and is mostly used for - academic and research purposes. True, the IO Monad allows you to interact with the physical world, but it's seen by many purists as a kludge (unfair, but that's how it is), and I wouldn't want to touch metal with it. Even if you could work around these hypothetical concerns, it's still a fairly niche language and would be very difficult to maintain on a larger scale - there just isn't a big enough interested and skilled community to do it yet.
It's a grand idea, to be sure, but I would think Haskell is the last language you'd pick for an OS. First we need some elegant & powerful, competitively capable Haskell apps. If you can get a suite together that demonstrates the language's potential versatility, then you might have a case for coding some of the higher-level OS stuff.
For all the criticisms I've heard about the film - some of them justifiable, some just uninformed fan-boy ranting - there is one aspect in which the film excelled: The Book.
Perfectly quirky, simple-looking, clean animation, a "please remain calm" backing track, and the narration masterfully voiced by a calm, eloquent Stephen Fry. Just about the only person who could've done it better than the two radio-series narrators. I feel confident in saying it will never be done better.
Maybe not terror, but every single Vimes novel was a classic Noir thriller - often dipping or diving into the realms of pastiche, homage or parody, but a full-bodied detective thriller nonetheless.
Here's a link to the latest projection (wikipedia's out of date) which is updated daily. It explains how the estimate is made, so have a read if you're interested (I confess, I'm not)
Stolen from wikipedia:
"As of April 2008, predictions of exhaustion date of the unallocated IANA pool seem to converge to between February 2010 and May 2011"
I wonder what the implications will be for Wave? Real-time updates across multiple servers present very similar challenges to cloud-computing. If the relevant protocols have the same problems then it raises doubts over the scalability of the Wave protocol.
As an aside, a more useful addition would be a "-1 Factually Incorrect" mod. Many's the time I've seen something get to +4 Informative, only to discover the information was incorrect. The only way to offset it without being a dick and crying Troll is to mod it Overrated, which somehow doesn't cut the mustard. You end up with "Score:0, Insightful" comments.
The counter-argument is that it would invite a whole new level of Mod-trolling, where people express their disagreement to an opinion or interesting argument by modding it down as being "Incorrect". It's a tricky problem.
Why does "balanced" have to mean "equal"? It makes perfect sense to me (for example) that a Priest would have to run from a fight with a Warrior, but would kick a Death Knight's arse.
If all the classes have to be "equal", then why bother having classes at all?
Slashdot Mirror
"Basically, all the normal concept car goodies are here, which is a good thing because Jaguar has no plans to build this car."
Can't he at least finish the Dreamfall saga before he starts mucking about in another genre!?
Thanks for the info - much appreciated.
I'm a UK student of Japanese Studies at Cambridge, but I'll let it slide :-)
The people I know in Japan are still waiting to see the effects of the new government. To be fair, most Japanese my age are very apathetic about politics, in spite of the regime shift, so I've not had much inside info!
Personally, I think the REM export restrictions from China will have a greater impact on Japanese foreign policy and economy than anything else (especially given their latest commitment to radical reductions in greenhouse emissions, which will require plenty of advanced tech). Whether that will actually see them hopping into the Asia camp or not... who knows?
You're quite correct, but as I said, it's important that the industry is seen as being civil. Just as you say, the administration would have looked at military applications, but quietly so. Honne and Tatemae are still deeply entrenched in Japanese culture, and nowhere more than in government and industry.
I would hope that any half-decent uni would support multiple platforms and open standards, as a matter of policy. The notion of sticking to expensive proprietary platforms as a policy seems remarkably anti-academic to me.
My (UK) uni supports most platforms. However, a friend told me how her daughter - attending a different uni - was told that, in order to be able to connect to the university network from her room, she would have to be using Vista. I'm not even kidding. I was gob-smacked. When I looked into it, their policy loosely alluded to the security benefits. Bitter, bitter irony...
Needless to say, her university is not considered to be one of high repute. Any UK resident over the age of 25 will understand what I mean when I say "ex-polytechnic".
Personally, I would be astounded if it didn't exist already.
You, sir, win a million points for insight. Minus one for saying it has nothing to do with culture though.
Publicly, it is very important to Japan that their innovations and applications are seen as being civil rather than military, for political and cultural reasons going back decades.
Holy shit - have you seen the discussion that follows the blog you've cited? If the discussions in /. were even half that articulate and intelligent, modding would be redundant.
Hi,
Please could you point me at some research or articles regarding this? I'm not picking holes; I'm genuinely interested. This is something I've been noticing in my study of Japanese and I would like to learn more about the equivalent phenomenon in English.
Thanks.
Agreed. How many more stories about browser-speed do we need, given how insignificant the discrepancies are? For most end-users, browser lag is completely dwarfed by restricted bandwidth.
In my case, judicious application of AdBlock and NoScript make this a complete non-issue. I'm far more interested in standards compliancy and security.
Yeah, okay, but the boss who gives you a nap also seems to be the dickbag who fires you for trying to write clear and appropriately highlighted instructions for the sake of your brain-dead colleagues who will still get it wrong. $17,000? A law firm should know better.
+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++
Have they tried turning it off & back on again?
Hmm. I'd say they started that way - Colour Of Magic and Light Fantastic were clearly just parodies of "high fantasy" - but the order changed over time. I think he started focussing on Humour after about the 4th book, which contained a healthy dose of misanthropically insightful philosophy (since this is the source of most of his humour.) Eventually he seemed to move on to using humour to tell us things about the world, with fantasy being just a backdrop.
Compare the focus of Colour Of Magic with something like Monstrous Regiment. They're all set in the same world, true, but the latter was primarily about people, society, attitudes, culture-shifts, and held up a big mirror to it all in order to say "look how daft we all are!" It speaks volumes that, as his books became more about satirising people than literary style, they became both funnier and deeper, which goes to show how much he developed as an artist of his medium.
We could go on for hours dissecting Pratchett though, which in itself probably says more about his work than we ever could. The truth is, he is a warmly humanistic, satirical genius whose works will be considered as classic as Mark Twain's in the years to come, and I'm deeply saddened by his onset of Alzheimer's.
Haskell is very powerful in its elegance, but it was created to be - and is mostly used for - academic and research purposes. True, the IO Monad allows you to interact with the physical world, but it's seen by many purists as a kludge (unfair, but that's how it is), and I wouldn't want to touch metal with it. Even if you could work around these hypothetical concerns, it's still a fairly niche language and would be very difficult to maintain on a larger scale - there just isn't a big enough interested and skilled community to do it yet.
It's a grand idea, to be sure, but I would think Haskell is the last language you'd pick for an OS. First we need some elegant & powerful, competitively capable Haskell apps. If you can get a suite together that demonstrates the language's potential versatility, then you might have a case for coding some of the higher-level OS stuff.
For all the criticisms I've heard about the film - some of them justifiable, some just uninformed fan-boy ranting - there is one aspect in which the film excelled: The Book.
Perfectly quirky, simple-looking, clean animation, a "please remain calm" backing track, and the narration masterfully voiced by a calm, eloquent Stephen Fry. Just about the only person who could've done it better than the two radio-series narrators. I feel confident in saying it will never be done better.
Maybe not terror, but every single Vimes novel was a classic Noir thriller - often dipping or diving into the realms of pastiche, homage or parody, but a full-bodied detective thriller nonetheless.
Here's a link to the latest projection (wikipedia's out of date) which is updated daily. It explains how the estimate is made, so have a read if you're interested (I confess, I'm not)
Anyway, current guess is July 2011.
Stolen from wikipedia:
"As of April 2008, predictions of exhaustion date of the unallocated IANA pool seem to converge to between February 2010 and May 2011"
I wonder what the implications will be for Wave? Real-time updates across multiple servers present very similar challenges to cloud-computing. If the relevant protocols have the same problems then it raises doubts over the scalability of the Wave protocol.
As an aside, a more useful addition would be a "-1 Factually Incorrect" mod. Many's the time I've seen something get to +4 Informative, only to discover the information was incorrect. The only way to offset it without being a dick and crying Troll is to mod it Overrated, which somehow doesn't cut the mustard. You end up with "Score:0, Insightful" comments.
The counter-argument is that it would invite a whole new level of Mod-trolling, where people express their disagreement to an opinion or interesting argument by modding it down as being "Incorrect". It's a tricky problem.
Truer than you'd believe. See my essay on the problem.
/self-promotion
Why does "balanced" have to mean "equal"? It makes perfect sense to me (for example) that a Priest would have to run from a fight with a Warrior, but would kick a Death Knight's arse.
If all the classes have to be "equal", then why bother having classes at all?
Maybe not where you come from. Here in the UK, sniffer-dogs are trained to recognise detergent powder cut with talc...