> I personally top-post because, during my days > as a bottom-poster, many people couldn't be > bothered to learn the interface and "scroll > down" to where my message was.
Actually, you'd be better off breaking the material into sensible bits, and then addressing each bit sequentially. Of course, this involves a bit more key tapping than some people are willing to indulge in. However, the extra work is definitely worth it when it comes to clarity of presentation.
Actually, it's merely annoying, and reads a lot like interruption, with every other point being something like "oh yeah?". Clarity is a result of composition, which is lost in such snippy styles. I'm just thankful that the "point for point" style really is dying off, at least in the communities I belong to... with the sad exception of wikis, which have brought it back in force, using an even more annoying style of alternating source and reply with font style changes on the same damn line. Ugh.
And yes, smiles must die. Or at least have a big die-off to reduce their population. My mother however, bless her heart, ends every paragraph in her letters to me with multiple exclamation points and smilies. But if you ever met her, you'd understand, it really does kind of reflect her personality.
> Talk to the geniuses at Microsoft who decided top posting would be the default behavior in Outlook
I know you like to blame Microsoft for everything from global warming to itchy shorts, but they didn't begin this trend, which is a good deal older than email itself. When you're dealing with paper memos, top posting makes sense. In fact, it makes sense in any circumstance where you're not dealing with an archive of long-running "threads" as you get on BBS's and Usenet.
In other words, your stylistic preferences don't make for some grand objective aesthetic truth.
Top-posting, bottom-posting, whatever. Being a reasonably intelligent human, I have the capacity to adapt to either. As long as it's not that asinine and snippy "point for point" alternating-quote-and-reply nonsense I had to grow up with, I don't get bent out of shape either way.
If you want to enjoy the game of Go, then don't get those dinky little boards from toy stores. Those are about as fun as playing chess on one of those plastic clamshell travel chess sets -- actually even worse, because there's so many pieces to jostle around. Get a set of regulation stones (about $25, google for "regulation go stones") and a vinyl mat. Ishi press is a good place for both of those. A set will cost you maybe $10 more than what you'd pay at toys-r-us. If you have the bucks, get a full size board, but I'm always fine with the mat -- it's a lot more portable.
But if Woodward and Bernstein were bloggers, they'd've been happy to publish the skimpy information that started their investigation -- smug that they put one over on the press -- and let the whole thing degenerate into a partisan "Nixon Sucks!" style-flamewar.
Furthermore, Deep Throat would also be a dead man, or at least would be keeping his mouth shut lest he become one.
I do think it's wierd that rather than calling the first i686 chips hexium, they called them P-II. Why? to prevent confusion? and why arent PIII's i786 and P4's i886? i mean, why rename more i686s? am I missing something?
Because Pentium was chosen as a brand name, and yes it was to play on the "five", since customers had previously gotten conditioned to want the 286, 386, then 486. None of those numbers had trademark protection, and AMD was producing some crappy knockoffs (wasn't really til the Duron that AMD pulled ahead). It's a brand, apropos of a line of processors, so you don't change the brand unless you're promoting a new line, such as "high end" (Xeon) and "budget" (Celeron). Intel has Xeon/Pentium/Celeron, and AMD looks like they've settled on Opteron/Athlon/Sempron.
As for why the model numbers don't change, the PPro, P2, and P3 are largely the same design. The P4 probably deserved a different model number, but Intel prefers to use the capability bits now (for querying for MMX, SSE, SSE2, etc) instead of the model number.
> In related news, global warming started to decline, as temperatures in Oregon returned to normal.
The Pentium II did not run as hot as the Alpha, and not nearly as hot as today's CPU's. If not for thermal diode protection, today's CPU's will burn up in one second if you remove the heatsink. This was demonstrated graphically on old Socket A Athlons, which didn't have thermal protection. Poof. Instantly. My PII had a passive heatsink about as small as the one on the motherboard chipset, no fan, and it never even got more than warm.
> Speculation on reasons for the difference in click rates range from Firefox's integrated pop-up blocking to seeing the average Firefox user as more tech-savvy the average Internet Explorer user.
Er, the glaring omission would be any mention of the effectiveness of any of these products. Am I not clicking on the right links? Because I'm seeing less than a page worth of review for each product, that seems to consist of installing it, clicking around the admin interface, then going on to the next product. It doesn't appear that they actually used the products they were reviewing!
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> A piece of trivia came up in my department meeting today. The company I work for has 60,000 software developers worldwide.
IBM, eh? Microsoft doesn't even have that many employees.
> I personally top-post because, during my days
> as a bottom-poster, many people couldn't be
> bothered to learn the interface and "scroll
> down" to where my message was.
Actually, you'd be better off breaking the material into sensible bits, and then addressing each bit sequentially. Of course, this involves a bit more key tapping than some people are willing to indulge in. However, the extra work is definitely worth it when it comes to clarity of presentation.
Actually, it's merely annoying, and reads a lot like interruption, with every other point being something like "oh yeah?". Clarity is a result of composition, which is lost in such snippy styles. I'm just thankful that the "point for point" style really is dying off, at least in the communities I belong to
And yes, smiles must die. Or at least have a big die-off to reduce their population. My mother however, bless her heart, ends every paragraph in her letters to me with multiple exclamation points and smilies. But if you ever met her, you'd understand, it really does kind of reflect her personality.
> Talk to the geniuses at Microsoft who decided top posting would be the default behavior in Outlook
I know you like to blame Microsoft for everything from global warming to itchy shorts, but they didn't begin this trend, which is a good deal older than email itself. When you're dealing with paper memos, top posting makes sense. In fact, it makes sense in any circumstance where you're not dealing with an archive of long-running "threads" as you get on BBS's and Usenet.
In other words, your stylistic preferences don't make for some grand objective aesthetic truth.
Top-posting, bottom-posting, whatever. Being a reasonably intelligent human, I have the capacity to adapt to either. As long as it's not that asinine and snippy "point for point" alternating-quote-and-reply nonsense I had to grow up with, I don't get bent out of shape either way.
If you want to enjoy the game of Go, then don't get those dinky little boards from toy stores. Those are about as fun as playing chess on one of those plastic clamshell travel chess sets -- actually even worse, because there's so many pieces to jostle around. Get a set of regulation stones (about $25, google for "regulation go stones") and a vinyl mat. Ishi press is a good place for both of those. A set will cost you maybe $10 more than what you'd pay at toys-r-us. If you have the bucks, get a full size board, but I'm always fine with the mat -- it's a lot more portable.
"...unleash terrible plague and death and destruction the world over..."
So. . . You're saying it's from Mars?
Worse. It's from Texas.
But if Woodward and Bernstein were bloggers, they'd've been happy to publish the skimpy information that started their investigation -- smug that they put one over on the press -- and let the whole thing degenerate into a partisan "Nixon Sucks!" style-flamewar.
Furthermore, Deep Throat would also be a dead man, or at least would be keeping his mouth shut lest he become one.
I do think it's wierd that rather than calling the first i686 chips hexium, they called them P-II. Why? to prevent confusion? and why arent PIII's i786 and P4's i886? i mean, why rename more i686s? am I missing something?
Because Pentium was chosen as a brand name, and yes it was to play on the "five", since customers had previously gotten conditioned to want the 286, 386, then 486. None of those numbers had trademark protection, and AMD was producing some crappy knockoffs (wasn't really til the Duron that AMD pulled ahead). It's a brand, apropos of a line of processors, so you don't change the brand unless you're promoting a new line, such as "high end" (Xeon) and "budget" (Celeron). Intel has Xeon/Pentium/Celeron, and AMD looks like they've settled on Opteron/Athlon/Sempron.
As for why the model numbers don't change, the PPro, P2, and P3 are largely the same design. The P4 probably deserved a different model number, but Intel prefers to use the capability bits now (for querying for MMX, SSE, SSE2, etc) instead of the model number.
> In related news, global warming started to decline, as temperatures in Oregon returned to normal.
The Pentium II did not run as hot as the Alpha, and not nearly as hot as today's CPU's. If not for thermal diode protection, today's CPU's will burn up in one second if you remove the heatsink. This was demonstrated graphically on old Socket A Athlons, which didn't have thermal protection. Poof. Instantly. My PII had a passive heatsink about as small as the one on the motherboard chipset, no fan, and it never even got more than warm.
> Speculation on reasons for the difference in click rates range from Firefox's integrated pop-up blocking to seeing the average Firefox user as more tech-savvy the average Internet Explorer user.
So quit whining and target the demographic. Duh.
Never mind, I read to the end, where it assumed all the technologies were more or less equal. Poppycock.
Er, the glaring omission would be any mention of the effectiveness of any of these products. Am I not clicking on the right links? Because I'm seeing less than a page worth of review for each product, that seems to consist of installing it, clicking around the admin interface, then going on to the next product. It doesn't appear that they actually used the products they were reviewing!
The PS2 has an i.Link port already. I fail to notice one single device or game that actually uses it.