However they choose to price this service, I hope they only charge those who actually use the service (mostly dumb-founded Americans who constantly watch TV in the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and living room). I never watch TV.
I also wonder if they are going to broadcast the same old crap as they broadcast everywhere else. I guess there won't be any adult channels... with some fresh asian pornos to boot, a plane trip could actually be a joy!
Remember that a meteorologist is a TV starlet. He/she needs to show up, in addition to a pretty face/boobs/legs or for whatever reason them "huaping" now are hired, some spectacular results. Thus, they run several simulations on them Beowulf clusters and then pick something that may be presentable on the screen.
Weather prediction relies heavily on Navier-Stokes' equations, which are more sensitive than my girl friend's pussy; change a parameter one percent and that smooth sailing wind may turn into a storm. Meteorologists don't understand how to deal with these equations, but they know that they are a tricky son of a bitch.
Basically, the only way to make the predictions better is to further minimize the FEM elements used in the calculations, which means even bigger Beowulf clusters (or equivalent). It also means that we need to have the best and most accurate data available to these simulations. I can easily see the predictions go way down south if the water parameters are fucked up the slightest. So we need to reserve them frequencies, or come up with a technique to filter out disturbances (vertical/horizontal direction comes to mind when talking about satellites).
Weather predictions are generally speaking utterly unimportant, but sometimes they help save lives by warning for tornado build ups and similar. It is merely a matter of weighing the costs against the gains, as always.
fully patched, running Ad Aware and Spybot regularly with Javascript OFF
Man, I surf porn sites using Mac OS X, and just as I need no protection in real life, I need no protection in cyper space, save for blocking pop-ups. Safari usually gives the prettiest, fastest and most accurate rendering, but for porn surfing I usually turn to Firefox or Mozilla (I need them bookmarklets, particularly the "increment" one).
To date there is no known way mankind can annihilate an entire planet or its life. To be sure, poofing off all our nuclear devices would be the end of this mammal period and mark the start of the renewed rule of insects. Life would live on.
If we don't blast our nukes, but continue to pollute and increase the global temperature, mankind will still survive, although quality of life for the already suffering part of the human race will further decrease.
If we instead direct all available resources on picking up our own garbage, we will instead have the problem of third world nations continue the trend of polluting the planet. Believe me, this is happening right here in China right now.
Damned if we do, damned if we don't.
Taking the nihilist approach, we can coldly contemplate the fact that Mother Earth in itself can be regarded as an organism (coined Gaia), where all life on the planet are to the planet what the cells are to the human body. Gaia may lose some of its "cells", but it will continue living on. And on a larger time scale, humans just represent an infinitesimally small time period of Gaia's existence. Gaia has seen countless of species come and go, and she will see humans come and go as well.
Damned if we do, damned if we don't. It is just a matter of time. Resistance is futile. In the end we and all our descendants will disappear. We will fry. Or freeze. We WILL die.
You might as well try to have fun tonight. I know I will.
Is it only because it's so easy to do with electronic information that it feels OK to do so?
No, it is OK to do so because we, the government, are your benevolent servant. We know what is best for you, and you can trust us. After all, we are democratic institutions with a long history of serving our subjetcs. Since we are democratic, we can turn to measures previosuly abused in Communist countries, without any risk whatsoever that integrity will be compromised. This is social engineering at its best!
Furthermore, we, the democratic governments of the European union, naturally subscribe to the human rights declarations and all, just that we need to modify it a bit to make it work in a European framework. After all, we are not freedom of expression fundamentalists like the Americans, and we don't really need a constitution for anything than else but to use as parliament toilet paper, or to quote at fashionable political international gatherings (for instance to cram it up Hu Jintaos ass when we need to press China for better investment deals).
And for your information: Communism is DEAD! You have no alternatives any longer, so we don't really need to put up a good side to contrast with the evil, since there is no evil. We are all good, we all want your best, we all know what is best for you. You can trust us.
File extensions have been used on the Mac since the first Macs were rolled out. It is just that they haven't been mandatory, and furthermore not limited to three characters. Currently, a file's content can be determined by a) extension, b) magic number, and c) resource fork information. Needless to say, there's no evil_knivel.exe.doc problems on the Mac. Furthermore, file extensions is not a Microsoft invention (Microsoft doesn't invent). IIRC CP/M and predecessors used file extensions, and Billy Boy just copied this method of recognizing file content.
zip files in Finder
I didn't know this. What's the point? ZIP has limited use on a Mac, since it needs special attention to preserve forks. It is used primarily for raw data, and has so many alternate compression schemes (b2zip, gzip and so on). The Finder is not supposed to do everything.
Video conferencing
It is an old feature on the Mac, as is speech recognition, text-to-speech and other technologies.
Fast user switching
Right, just that it didn't make sense before Mac OS X, since Mac OS 9 wasn't a multi-user OS.
I believe the US-onian dollar is already a de facto universal currency. I am all for standards and such, but an independent universal currency will never be.
isn't it great to live in China!... Plus you get all the Asian girls!
OT: If I had some karma points, I'd mod you up +5 for being so insightful:) Yes, cheap living and the world's prettiest
girls are reasons enough moving to China, at least for me.
Can overseas buyers buy from iTunes USA @ USD 99 cents?
Nope. Here in China I usually buy a whole CD for slightly more than 99 cents (10 yuan) and rip it meself (no DRM). I am sure it is all legal copies, since China is about to enter the WTO and has said it is taking measures against piracy and all... wtf do I care.
I conclude there will never be a market for iTunes Store in China. Unless they charge a ridiculously small fee, say 0.1 to 0.5 yuan per song or so. And that is precisely why you need to use a "regionalized" service, because just like the DVD market, companies are going to squeeze you for as much money as they can.
Right, I also use Safari, which is a Gecko browser. It has some features that other Geckos lack, for instance fast rendering ATSUI (for me the most single important issue) and a completely native interface. It also has some bugs that other Geckos have done away with. There are times I will have to go to Firefox or Mozilla to deal with pages.
You didn't dispute my main argument about IE vs Gecko, did you? Didn't think so.
1) ignorant about the existence of "alternative" browsers
2) habitually addicted to their fave browser
I dont know how many times I have tried to make people realize the advantages of using another browser, to no avail. And this is mostly on Mac OS X boxes, where the advantages are even more apparent. People desperately try to cling on to what is familiar. It's psychological, it doesn't signify these people are stupid.
So, I conclude that I and da slashdot fellas do have a natural ability for these things (curiosity, knowledge, no fear), whereas most people don't and never will, and so the populace will always follow the meager main path of doing things. Does this really surprise anyone?
IE will stick around for a long time, and will only slowly die away. Before it does, MS will have it replaced with a Gecko browser that has everything the regular Geckos have but with an additional feature set and seamless integration with the DOS. Unless they come into the game too late.
"The simplicity and richness of a Flash interface makes devices more user-friendly and enhances the customer's experience with rich content."
Theoretically, it could, although in actuality it will only add to the already prevalent information noise, since most "rich content" will be ads (or just meaningless graphics) disturbing the user process. When withdrawing money, you will have a number of presentations and offers from the bank, and perhaps from third parties (porn ads, contact ads, whore-o-scopes, dick/boob enlargement ads,...).
Also, current installations of very simple text- and/or video based devices intermittently display the typical Screen o' Death, since these devices typically rely on Windoze systems. This kind of failure will only increase with the more complex Flash, unless implementers start deploying Linux, OS X or other more robust systems (and this will probably not happen, since most implementers are clueless). Flash itself, being rather complicated, also has a large array of bugs.
That said, Firefox isn't shit, but the most reasonably standards compliant, light weight, cross platform web browser ever made. I wish them all the luck in the world, and sincerely hope they become the new standard to which -all- web developers adhere. I hope it means the end to any regard what so ever to that other worthless browser.
Because Apple is the good guy, just trying to protect what is theirs. iTunes is a little jewel with a remarkably crisp and unique brand name.
Beatles, on the other hand, is the ugly guy who wanted to squeeze some extra money from Apple, although there never was any conflict of brands with this very generic name.
Microsoft, finally, wants to dominate the universe and own everything, and is therefore automatically the bad guy. If they occasionally are right, people still oppose them, on principle grounds.
Try http://www.lenovogrp.com/ (or http://www.lenovo.cn/ if you know Chinese). I think Thinkpad and other IBM gadgets will decrease as much in quality under Lenovo as Volvo has decreased in quality under Ford's oppressive measures (or Saab has under GM's). It's just a transaction of money, estate and control, the quality will depend on wise management, regardless where the production is.
You must have spelled wrong. I get the following page titles:
Flaws of Capitalism. Flaws of Communism Socialism and Communism: Flaws of Communism SchoolSucks Termpapers Communism A Capitalism-Communism Synthesis Communism's Poor Rewards THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM
Etcetera. All are relevant to the search query and list the search terms in title or summary.
And btw, China is a nominal communist country. In actuality, it is an ultra capitalist nation. You can decry communism all you want in China, people will just look at you with a mesmerized expression, wondering what planet you come from.
Why on earth should a search on Tibet yield "free Tibet" pages first-hand? The fine article clearly states that Accona uses a different, AI-based technology, whereas Google primarily ranks by popularity (linked pages) and precise search terms.
An Accona search on "tibet human rights" gives four sponsored "human rights" links, and therafter the whole enchilada of Tibetan movement pages, for instance http://www.savetibet.org/ (which btw turns up just fine here in Shanghai, another oppressed Chinese city).
From my humble perspective, the obligatory anti-China bashing that is intermittently going on here on./ and elsewhere is getting tiresome. Tibet has been Chinese for over a thousand years, and the cultural intertwining goes back even further in time. There are plenty of reasons to press the Chinese government on many issues, but it would be wise to do so in an informed and intelligent way.
Furthermore, Google is far from prefect. Searching my Chinese name (I'm European, residing in China) on Accona yields results, whereas it doesn't on Google, even if Google has indexed my homepage. Google has a lot more pages indexed, however, which is both good and bad. Google's link popularity "algorithm" is widely abused, and so is the "precise search term" criterion; a gazillion pR0n sites regularly fill pages with nonsensical sentences made up of key words just to get a good search engine ranking. This doesn't happen as easily with AI algorithms.
I for one welcome another search engine. Google's monpoly must be broken. And of course you can't beat the king using the king's methods, right?
Slashdot Mirror
However they choose to price this service, I hope they only charge those who actually use the service (mostly dumb-founded Americans who constantly watch TV in the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and living room). I never watch TV.
I also wonder if they are going to broadcast the same old crap as they broadcast everywhere else. I guess there won't be any adult channels... with some fresh asian pornos to boot, a plane trip could actually be a joy!
... that the CRT is dead. So, most "image editors" don't use CRT:s. They use Apple Cinema Displays.
Remember that a meteorologist is a TV starlet. He/she needs to show up, in addition to a pretty face/boobs/legs or for whatever reason them "huaping" now are hired, some spectacular results. Thus, they run several simulations on them Beowulf clusters and then pick something that may be presentable on the screen.
Weather prediction relies heavily on Navier-Stokes' equations, which are more sensitive than my girl friend's pussy; change a parameter one percent and that smooth sailing wind may turn into a storm. Meteorologists don't understand how to deal with these equations, but they know that they are a tricky son of a bitch.
Basically, the only way to make the predictions better is to further minimize the FEM elements used in the calculations, which means even bigger Beowulf clusters (or equivalent). It also means that we need to have the best and most accurate data available to these simulations. I can easily see the predictions go way down south if the water parameters are fucked up the slightest. So we need to reserve them frequencies, or come up with a technique to filter out disturbances (vertical/horizontal direction comes to mind when talking about satellites).
Weather predictions are generally speaking utterly unimportant, but sometimes they help save lives by warning for tornado build ups and similar. It is merely a matter of weighing the costs against the gains, as always.
Man, I surf porn sites using Mac OS X, and just as I need no protection in real life, I need no protection in cyper space, save for blocking pop-ups. Safari usually gives the prettiest, fastest and most accurate rendering, but for porn surfing I usually turn to Firefox or Mozilla (I need them bookmarklets, particularly the "increment" one).
To date there is no known way mankind can annihilate an entire planet or its life. To be sure, poofing off all our nuclear devices would be the end of this mammal period and mark the start of the renewed rule of insects. Life would live on.
If we don't blast our nukes, but continue to pollute and increase the global temperature, mankind will still survive, although quality of life for the already suffering part of the human race will further decrease.
If we instead direct all available resources on picking up our own garbage, we will instead have the problem of third world nations continue the trend of polluting the planet. Believe me, this is happening right here in China right now.
Damned if we do, damned if we don't.
Taking the nihilist approach, we can coldly contemplate the fact that Mother Earth in itself can be regarded as an organism (coined Gaia), where all life on the planet are to the planet what the cells are to the human body. Gaia may lose some of its "cells", but it will continue living on. And on a larger time scale, humans just represent an infinitesimally small time period of Gaia's existence. Gaia has seen countless of species come and go, and she will see humans come and go as well.
Damned if we do, damned if we don't. It is just a matter of time. Resistance is futile. In the end we and all our descendants will disappear. We will fry. Or freeze. We WILL die.
You might as well try to have fun tonight. I know I will.
No, it is OK to do so because we, the government, are your benevolent servant. We know what is best for you, and you can trust us. After all, we are democratic institutions with a long history of serving our subjetcs. Since we are democratic, we can turn to measures previosuly abused in Communist countries, without any risk whatsoever that integrity will be compromised. This is social engineering at its best!
Furthermore, we, the democratic governments of the European union, naturally subscribe to the human rights declarations and all, just that we need to modify it a bit to make it work in a European framework. After all, we are not freedom of expression fundamentalists like the Americans, and we don't really need a constitution for anything than else but to use as parliament toilet paper, or to quote at fashionable political international gatherings (for instance to cram it up Hu Jintaos ass when we need to press China for better investment deals).
And for your information: Communism is DEAD! You have no alternatives any longer, so we don't really need to put up a good side to contrast with the evil, since there is no evil. We are all good, we all want your best, we all know what is best for you. You can trust us.
File extensions have been used on the Mac since the first Macs were rolled out. It is just that they haven't been mandatory, and furthermore not limited to three characters. Currently, a file's content can be determined by a) extension, b) magic number, and c) resource fork information. Needless to say, there's no evil_knivel.exe.doc problems on the Mac. Furthermore, file extensions is not a Microsoft invention (Microsoft doesn't invent). IIRC CP/M and predecessors used file extensions, and Billy Boy just copied this method of recognizing file content.
I didn't know this. What's the point? ZIP has limited use on a Mac, since it needs special attention to preserve forks. It is used primarily for raw data, and has so many alternate compression schemes (b2zip, gzip and so on). The Finder is not supposed to do everything.
It is an old feature on the Mac, as is speech recognition, text-to-speech and other technologies.
Right, just that it didn't make sense before Mac OS X, since Mac OS 9 wasn't a multi-user OS.
Further predictions:
Native PDF on-screen rendering
Entirely out-sourcing graphics to the GPU
Legible type
Unix kernel (Windux?)
64-bit processing
Built-in rudimentary security
Gecko IE
Gonna be a truly fantastic OS!
I believe the US-onian dollar is already a de facto universal currency. I am all for standards and such, but an independent universal currency will never be.
OT: If I had some karma points, I'd mod you up +5 for being so insightful :) Yes, cheap living and the world's prettiest
girls are reasons enough moving to China, at least for me.
Nope. Here in China I usually buy a whole CD for slightly more than 99 cents (10 yuan) and rip it meself (no DRM). I am sure it is all legal copies, since China is about to enter the WTO and has said it is taking measures against piracy and all... wtf do I care.
I conclude there will never be a market for iTunes Store in China. Unless they charge a ridiculously small fee, say 0.1 to 0.5 yuan per song or so. And that is precisely why you need to use a "regionalized" service, because just like the DVD market, companies are going to squeeze you for as much money as they can.
but how many do we really need?
Ein Land, ein Volk, ein Führer, eine GPS Systeme.
And KTHML is of course an independent piece of work by the great folks at KDE. I guess that is why the Safari user agent string is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/XX (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/YY
Right, I also use Safari, which is a Gecko browser. It has some features that other Geckos lack, for instance fast rendering ATSUI (for me the most single important issue) and a completely native interface. It also has some bugs that other Geckos have done away with. There are times I will have to go to Firefox or Mozilla to deal with pages.
You didn't dispute my main argument about IE vs Gecko, did you? Didn't think so.
No, people will continue to be
1) ignorant about the existence of "alternative" browsers
2) habitually addicted to their fave browser
I dont know how many times I have tried to make people realize the advantages of using another browser, to no avail. And this is mostly on Mac OS X boxes, where the advantages are even more apparent. People desperately try to cling on to what is familiar. It's psychological, it doesn't signify these people are stupid.
So, I conclude that I and da slashdot fellas do have a natural ability for these things (curiosity, knowledge, no fear), whereas most people don't and never will, and so the populace will always follow the meager main path of doing things. Does this really surprise anyone?
IE will stick around for a long time, and will only slowly die away. Before it does, MS will have it replaced with a Gecko browser that has everything the regular Geckos have but with an additional feature set and seamless integration with the DOS. Unless they come into the game too late.
Theoretically, it could, although in actuality it will only add to the already prevalent information noise, since most "rich content" will be ads (or just meaningless graphics) disturbing the user process. When withdrawing money, you will have a number of presentations and offers from the bank, and perhaps from third parties (porn ads, contact ads, whore-o-scopes, dick/boob enlargement ads, ...).
Also, current installations of very simple text- and/or video based devices intermittently display the typical Screen o' Death, since these devices typically rely on Windoze systems. This kind of failure will only increase with the more complex Flash, unless implementers start deploying Linux, OS X or other more robust systems (and this will probably not happen, since most implementers are clueless). Flash itself, being rather complicated, also has a large array of bugs.
10,000 flies can't be wrong -- eat shit.
That said, Firefox isn't shit, but the most reasonably standards compliant, light weight, cross platform web browser ever made. I wish them all the luck in the world, and sincerely hope they become the new standard to which -all- web developers adhere. I hope it means the end to any regard what so ever to that other worthless browser.
Because Apple is the good guy, just trying to protect what is theirs. iTunes is a little jewel with a remarkably crisp and unique brand name.
Beatles, on the other hand, is the ugly guy who wanted to squeeze some extra money from Apple, although there never was any conflict of brands with this very generic name.
Microsoft, finally, wants to dominate the universe and own everything, and is therefore automatically the bad guy. If they occasionally are right, people still oppose them, on principle grounds.
Try http://www.lenovogrp.com/ (or http://www.lenovo.cn/ if you know Chinese). I think Thinkpad and other IBM gadgets will decrease as much in quality under Lenovo as Volvo has decreased in quality under Ford's oppressive measures (or Saab has under GM's). It's just a transaction of money, estate and control, the quality will depend on wise management, regardless where the production is.
You must have spelled wrong. I get the following page titles:
Flaws of Capitalism. Flaws of Communism
Socialism and Communism: Flaws of Communism
SchoolSucks Termpapers
Communism
A Capitalism-Communism Synthesis
Communism's Poor Rewards
THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM
Etcetera. All are relevant to the search query and list the search terms in title or summary.
And btw, China is a nominal communist country. In actuality, it is an ultra capitalist nation. You can decry communism all you want in China, people will just look at you with a mesmerized expression, wondering what planet you come from.
Why on earth should a search on Tibet yield "free Tibet" pages first-hand? The fine article clearly states that Accona uses a different, AI-based technology, whereas Google primarily ranks by popularity (linked pages) and precise search terms.
./ and elsewhere is getting tiresome. Tibet has been Chinese for over a thousand years, and the cultural intertwining goes back even further in time. There are plenty of reasons to press the Chinese government on many issues, but it would be wise to do so in an informed and intelligent way.
An Accona search on "tibet human rights" gives four sponsored "human rights" links, and therafter the whole enchilada of Tibetan movement pages, for instance http://www.savetibet.org/ (which btw turns up just fine here in Shanghai, another oppressed Chinese city).
From my humble perspective, the obligatory anti-China bashing that is intermittently going on here on
Furthermore, Google is far from prefect. Searching my Chinese name (I'm European, residing in China) on Accona yields results, whereas it doesn't on Google, even if Google has indexed my homepage. Google has a lot more pages indexed, however, which is both good and bad. Google's link popularity "algorithm" is widely abused, and so is the "precise search term" criterion; a gazillion pR0n sites regularly fill pages with nonsensical sentences made up of key words just to get a good search engine ranking. This doesn't happen as easily with AI algorithms.
I for one welcome another search engine. Google's monpoly must be broken. And of course you can't beat the king using the king's methods, right?