There were details that were certainly wrong, but in general it got the larger details right, or reasonably so. And anyone familiar with Facebook's history knows Ceglia was a lying nobody trying to extort money by being such a big pain in the ass that he would just be handed a big check to shut the fuck up. Now, it appears, he's about to find out what happens when you commit fraud.
I'm not so sure. That may certainly apply in some cases (it's one of the theories of Neandertal replacement, and was to some degree true in the Americas), but I think that a lot of the claims of invaders replacing pre-existing populations have been shown to be false. Generally speaking, invaders come in too small a numbers to outright wipe out a pre-existing population. The Anglo-Saxons didn't really wipe out or chase away every Celt in England, the Turks didn't wipe out and chase away every Eastern Mediterranean, and even where there is a legitimate claim of attempted genocide in the Americas, particularly Latin America and French North America, there was plenty of intermarriage, and many native peoples simply took up the language and the religion of the conqueror. My mother-in-law's family came from Quebec, and though she denied it, I heard from others that it would be hard to find a Quebecois family that did not have Amerindian ancestors somewhere in the last five centuries.
Competition that time and time again has proven completely incapable of producing search products that the large majority of users, consumers and businesses want.
I'm wagering downgrade right will be limited largely to enterprise customers, and probably even there they'll find some way to make downgrading less desirable (ie. make downgrade licenses expensive). Microsoft will not allow Windows 8 to be hamstrung like Windows Vista was by allowing the previous version to compete with it.
I suspect Microsoft does care, because some of anti-social freaks are directly or indirectly responsible for a considerable amount of purchasing, and Windows 8's success in no small part hinges on us buying into it being the best durned OS for the desktop, the tablet and the phone.
As much as Dawkins may get a little direct, considering the treatment he has been subjected to by some of the True Believers, it's little wonder he says things the way he does. Coreligionists of True Believers seem to be quick to attack Dawkins, but slow to admit that some among them are purely immoral vicious bastards.
Or as some holy guy who lived in Palestine once said: "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
Very true. Religion is only one of the tribal markers used to determine "us" vs. "them". It's what irritates me about the oft repeated claim "most wars are caused by religion." Religion is a useful tool for convincing people to kill their fellow man, but so is political ideology, nationalism, and more fundamentally, potable water, arable land, oil, gold, Lebensraum, and so on. If you analyze most wars, causation is almost always economic in nature.
That's not to say that religion in one way or another cannot be held responsible. When the Pope goes and tells a bunch of greedy Medieval lords and their armies to go "free" Jerusalem because it's what God wants, when in fact he's part mouthpiece for aristocracy who want a piece of the most valuable trade corridor in the world, and in part wants to make sure Constantinople is weakened and ultimately recognizes his authority because he's the guy sitting on Peter's throne, I think there's room for some condemnation.
The problem here is to some degree simply behavioral. It's how we have evolved. We are a social animal, with the same sort of tribal instincts you will find in most other social animals. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, seem to have the same sorts of behaviors, if not quite as complex as ours (smaller brains means more simplistic rationalizations for beating enemy tribe's baby chimp to a pulp). In fact, one of the chief arguments for global integration of economies is precisely to create the kind of economic interdependencies that make aggression less likely on a large scale.
I think even beyond that we need to define life. It's almost certain that the earliest self-replicators did not behave much like life as we know it. The first "life" may have been little more than a pool of self-replicating organic molecules splitting through mechanical fission.
This is some strange variant of "If we can send Men to the Moon, surely we must be able to..."
There are plenty of complicated problems that are not easily solved. That these problems take time to solve hardly seems to me to be justification for inserting "Goddidit" as an explanation.
This appears to be Microsoft's gamble. The problem is that a huge amount of their profit margin comes from the enterprise, where the PC still reigns supreme, and I wonder how thrilled many corporate and government customers will be to suddenly find that to keep using Windows, they're now facing a future with a single vendor.
I keep hearing this "XBox is profitable" line, but considering how much money Microsoft through at it, has it even paid for the R&D and the marketing (read: dumping) that went on to get it to this lofty position?
Microsoft bought game console market share with oodles of cash robbed from other divisions. To say "well, it's profitable now" is a pretty heavy distortion of the situation.
Considering the size of the device, it's hard to imagine the keyboard being somehow more spacious than my notebook's keyboard. It's a matter of size.
Like I said, I wouldn't use a tablet for anything but jotting quick notes and emailing. Displaying documents, sure, but working on them, that's what notebooks and PCs are for (like I said, even my Netbook is bloody awful, I know, I had to do some changes to some code I was working on last night on it, what a fun experience that was).
Hah, Mark "Fucking" Zuckerberg here. I've already patented ass wiping thresholds, as well as asses and assholes. In fact, since Steve "Rotting Corpse" Jobs finally bit the big one, I'm even closer to cornering the asshole patent market.
But my netbook is still far more functional than a tablet or a phone. For what I use those devices for, I don't actually need to do much in the way of actual office app work. In fact, even a netbook is too cramped for that, which is why I still have my PC and my notebook, because they have full sized keyboards and bigger displays (the latter is absolutely key to spreadsheets, many of the ones I have I normally work with on dual monitors).
I'll be honest. If my tablet or phone can just display the powerpoint presentation or Word document, that's good enough for me. I cannot imagine anyone seriously want to use a tablet as some sort of out-of-office workhorse. For a touch typist like myself, I doubt I can get much beyond 20-30WPM with considerable errors on a touch screen. A real keyboard, even a crappy neo-chiclet keyboard, is infinitely superior.
Outlook-Exchange is pervasive in the enterprise. If all MS is delivering is their ActiveSync-capable app, how exactly is that an improvement on what I can get out of an out-of-the-box Android or iOS device?
As to the rest of Office, I'm dubious. On a pure tablet, heavy duty word processing, desktop publishing and spreadsheet work is going to be abysmal, and if the device has a keyboard, well I can pick up a pretty cheap netbook that's likely to have as much, if not more horsepower and a helluva lot more storage.
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There were details that were certainly wrong, but in general it got the larger details right, or reasonably so. And anyone familiar with Facebook's history knows Ceglia was a lying nobody trying to extort money by being such a big pain in the ass that he would just be handed a big check to shut the fuck up. Now, it appears, he's about to find out what happens when you commit fraud.
I'm not so sure. That may certainly apply in some cases (it's one of the theories of Neandertal replacement, and was to some degree true in the Americas), but I think that a lot of the claims of invaders replacing pre-existing populations have been shown to be false. Generally speaking, invaders come in too small a numbers to outright wipe out a pre-existing population. The Anglo-Saxons didn't really wipe out or chase away every Celt in England, the Turks didn't wipe out and chase away every Eastern Mediterranean, and even where there is a legitimate claim of attempted genocide in the Americas, particularly Latin America and French North America, there was plenty of intermarriage, and many native peoples simply took up the language and the religion of the conqueror. My mother-in-law's family came from Quebec, and though she denied it, I heard from others that it would be hard to find a Quebecois family that did not have Amerindian ancestors somewhere in the last five centuries.
Competition that time and time again has proven completely incapable of producing search products that the large majority of users, consumers and businesses want.
I'm wagering downgrade right will be limited largely to enterprise customers, and probably even there they'll find some way to make downgrading less desirable (ie. make downgrade licenses expensive). Microsoft will not allow Windows 8 to be hamstrung like Windows Vista was by allowing the previous version to compete with it.
I suspect Microsoft does care, because some of anti-social freaks are directly or indirectly responsible for a considerable amount of purchasing, and Windows 8's success in no small part hinges on us buying into it being the best durned OS for the desktop, the tablet and the phone.
To simplify, no, the XBox division is not yet profitable, and having a few solid quarters does not mean a solid investment.
As much as Dawkins may get a little direct, considering the treatment he has been subjected to by some of the True Believers, it's little wonder he says things the way he does. Coreligionists of True Believers seem to be quick to attack Dawkins, but slow to admit that some among them are purely immoral vicious bastards.
Or as some holy guy who lived in Palestine once said: "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
Never underestimate the human capacity to compartmentalize.
Very true. Religion is only one of the tribal markers used to determine "us" vs. "them". It's what irritates me about the oft repeated claim "most wars are caused by religion." Religion is a useful tool for convincing people to kill their fellow man, but so is political ideology, nationalism, and more fundamentally, potable water, arable land, oil, gold, Lebensraum, and so on. If you analyze most wars, causation is almost always economic in nature.
That's not to say that religion in one way or another cannot be held responsible. When the Pope goes and tells a bunch of greedy Medieval lords and their armies to go "free" Jerusalem because it's what God wants, when in fact he's part mouthpiece for aristocracy who want a piece of the most valuable trade corridor in the world, and in part wants to make sure Constantinople is weakened and ultimately recognizes his authority because he's the guy sitting on Peter's throne, I think there's room for some condemnation.
The problem here is to some degree simply behavioral. It's how we have evolved. We are a social animal, with the same sort of tribal instincts you will find in most other social animals. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, seem to have the same sorts of behaviors, if not quite as complex as ours (smaller brains means more simplistic rationalizations for beating enemy tribe's baby chimp to a pulp). In fact, one of the chief arguments for global integration of economies is precisely to create the kind of economic interdependencies that make aggression less likely on a large scale.
I think even beyond that we need to define life. It's almost certain that the earliest self-replicators did not behave much like life as we know it. The first "life" may have been little more than a pool of self-replicating organic molecules splitting through mechanical fission.
This is some strange variant of "If we can send Men to the Moon, surely we must be able to..."
There are plenty of complicated problems that are not easily solved. That these problems take time to solve hardly seems to me to be justification for inserting "Goddidit" as an explanation.
And how is this brand new UI going to work out for MS. The average user will find KDE more familiar than what's about to be dumped on them.
This appears to be Microsoft's gamble. The problem is that a huge amount of their profit margin comes from the enterprise, where the PC still reigns supreme, and I wonder how thrilled many corporate and government customers will be to suddenly find that to keep using Windows, they're now facing a future with a single vendor.
I keep hearing this "XBox is profitable" line, but considering how much money Microsoft through at it, has it even paid for the R&D and the marketing (read: dumping) that went on to get it to this lofty position?
Microsoft bought game console market share with oodles of cash robbed from other divisions. To say "well, it's profitable now" is a pretty heavy distortion of the situation.
My netbook is an Asus, bought it off of eBay for $150. Dual core Atom processor, 1gb of RAM. Not fantastic, but certainly usable enough.
Considering the size of the device, it's hard to imagine the keyboard being somehow more spacious than my notebook's keyboard. It's a matter of size.
Like I said, I wouldn't use a tablet for anything but jotting quick notes and emailing. Displaying documents, sure, but working on them, that's what notebooks and PCs are for (like I said, even my Netbook is bloody awful, I know, I had to do some changes to some code I was working on last night on it, what a fun experience that was).
ActiveX was a CORBA implementation, so it was hardly Microsoft alone that was responsible for it.
This is definitely satire.
And I'm sure by notebook keyboard will still be superior.
Hah, Mark "Fucking" Zuckerberg here. I've already patented ass wiping thresholds, as well as asses and assholes. In fact, since Steve "Rotting Corpse" Jobs finally bit the big one, I'm even closer to cornering the asshole patent market.
Look and be in awe of my might patented asshole!
But my netbook is still far more functional than a tablet or a phone. For what I use those devices for, I don't actually need to do much in the way of actual office app work. In fact, even a netbook is too cramped for that, which is why I still have my PC and my notebook, because they have full sized keyboards and bigger displays (the latter is absolutely key to spreadsheets, many of the ones I have I normally work with on dual monitors).
I'll be honest. If my tablet or phone can just display the powerpoint presentation or Word document, that's good enough for me. I cannot imagine anyone seriously want to use a tablet as some sort of out-of-office workhorse. For a touch typist like myself, I doubt I can get much beyond 20-30WPM with considerable errors on a touch screen. A real keyboard, even a crappy neo-chiclet keyboard, is infinitely superior.
Outlook-Exchange is pervasive in the enterprise. If all MS is delivering is their ActiveSync-capable app, how exactly is that an improvement on what I can get out of an out-of-the-box Android or iOS device?
As to the rest of Office, I'm dubious. On a pure tablet, heavy duty word processing, desktop publishing and spreadsheet work is going to be abysmal, and if the device has a keyboard, well I can pick up a pretty cheap netbook that's likely to have as much, if not more horsepower and a helluva lot more storage.
The hockey stick has been confirmed several times since initial publication. So tell me, are you just an ignoramus, or a professional shill?
At least nine other times it has.
If I want to work on spreadsheets and documents I have a net book, a notebook and a desktop. Why would I need Office on a tablet or a phone?