and a product that is entrenched in the U.S. military has a good foothold in the climb to becoming a standard.
True, but a foothold is only a foothold. If the rest of the world doesn't like your standard because it has found something better, it won't help them much. And from what you're writing, Adobe Connect looks like a better Powerpoint while Google wave looks like a much better communications platform. If it gets off the ground, Adobe will probably make Adobe Connect compatible with it.
It's a communication protocol that integrates the best aspects from email, wiki, twitter, and instant messaging, in order to provide you with a communications platform that offers stability, versioning, rollback, multiple concurrent edits on "documents" (although the concept of document is getting a bit vague in Google wave) etc.
Or more philosophical: IM, twitter, wiki, editing documents and email are all forms of communication. Google Wave integrates all of these things in one communcations platform that supersedes all of the previous ones. The old apps you can still do on the new platform, except you can do it much better now and integrate them all together in big communication streams that also provide versioning, rollback, concurrent editing etc.
To see how it works though, you'll still have to watch the video.
The Dutch government is currently embroiled in basically the same fight, trying to get the internet providers to ban access to online gambling sites as well. They've *also* been found guilty of trying to protect their own monopoly and discriminating against other European organisations trying to provide gambling sites.
Of course guns are designed to kill. The problem is people want to keep law-abiding citizens from having them to protect themselves. Criminals, by definition, don't obey the law. If they want a gun, they're going to get one.
Yes, they're getting them. From the USA. Ask your neighbours down south what they think of the liberal handing out of guns to responsible US citizens.
There's a difference between being popular with unpopular constituencies on the one hand, and going out of your way to pose for photographs, shaking hands, and taking a detour to meet with a neo-nazi convicted for burglary on the other hand.
Actually, it's the other way round in the Netherlands. Private healthcare is mostly illegal, with the result that most hospitals are lightyears ahead of the USA or Australian hospitals - on average.
The reasoning behind this is that private healthcare would be used by the politicians and the rich, while everyone else would have to go to public institutions. Then the politicians could just keep cutting away at the hospitals' funding while avoiding the consequences by escaping into private healthcare. So the general public feeling is: we keep them honest by making sure they get the same treatment.
That's why people jumping the line etc. or getting better treatment when rich or famous make headlines in papers: join the queue mate, the doctor will decide your priority.
Ofcourse the system isnt perfect and just underwent huge changes. But by and by it's pretty good. Although German healthcare seems to be even better and Belgian healthcare has worse hospitals but better surgical results.
... since your epiphany is basically about a concept called alienation (not to be confused with Alien Nation) and has been known as a philosophical concept since early in the industrial revolution. Not that it's a bad epiphany, it's just about 150 years late and already discussed to death.
Then again, applying well-known philosophical concepts to new areas is nice in and of itself.
In my experience, really bad design decisions aren't always motivated by idiots trying to push their hobby horse, but often because better solutions have been patented to death.
Case in point: electronic television guides. Every format under the sun is patented. Philips refused to submit to extortion for years and implemented one miserable scheme after another, until they finally got an agreement with a patent holder. Even then, the patent holder refused to let Philips implement the whole thing themselves but instead insisted it had to be their own, horribly buggy, implementation. You can still hear the tv-guys at Philips gnashing their teeth.
I fear it's sort of similar with these controllers: the good ideas were being patented, so the designers had to avoid them and come up with something 'original'. That doesn't always work out for the best, as demonstrated in the article:)
In The Netherlands, you just do a bank transfer. You can even automate it. And the bankrecords are acceptable as proof in a court of law, and accessible to you - you can provide copies on request or ask the bank for a certified copy.
Ofcourse, if said person would rather not have the authorities look at it (being on welfare, for instance, and you cant receive ANY money then without a huge hassle, not even 5 euro's per month) there was the alternative option we took: pay them in cash and mail them (on the same day) a payment confirmation.
Money transfers are now limited to the cost of internal transfers, inside Europe (at least for consumers). That was made into law last year.
As for cheques, I believe the last time I saw someone use one was my father, about 30 years ago. Everyone uses bank transfers (in The Netherlands), which were mostly free until Europe started to limit the cost of international transfers to no more than the cost of national transfers. After that every bank raised the price of transfers to compensate.
The smoking gun called it rape. Then they continue and say he was accused of a sexual assault, which can include a lot of things that are *not* considered rape by most people. Apparently, considering the sentence, that was the case here.
Not that he isn't an asshole, but the website is exaggerating a bit more than seems to be justified. Perhaps it's their version of a prank.
Can I give you some advice? Learn the Lambda calculus first. It's pretty easy, and basically every functional language is a variation on the lambda calculus, so after that learning any functional language would just be a matter of syntax.
WoW beta was stable for everyone I know. Not a single person I know has reported crashes. Inside my guild we only had a few bugs with the patch-loader, but nothing much. It could be you are using a Mac though, I've heard the game crashes on that platform a lot more than on Windows.
But as for EVE versus WOW: there is a difference between going live with a few cosmetic bugs, or going live without a working market (the defining feature of your game), without a working tutorial for new players (on day 1 this is crucial) and ships disappearing into Oblivion all over the map.
But I guess we differ on what we define as "stable" and "bugfree":)
Since when have Blizzard releases been full of bugs? The *one* reason my friends and I buy everything they ship is because they release only decent, near bugfree games. Okay, you can dislike the content. But it is solid content, even if not your cup of tea.
Remember, releasing games that need several patches before you can play without crashing was common use before Blizzard demonstrated that releasing good games (even with internet patching available) is a sound business policy. The same with MMO's. Every beta I participated in before WoW, was a bugfest of biblical proportions. Enter WoW, with a nigh bugfree beta. *sold*.
I mean, upon its release EVE Online had a tutorial that left you floating in space, all lost and lonely, if you made a "wrong" move. The freaking *starting tutorial* just *killed* you when you made a mistake. Also, the day before they released the game they implemented a massive patch, that reactivated lots of already fixed bugs again - a clear hint about problems with their sourcecode control system. This was a few weeks before the WoW beta. It was such a relief to play a *stable* game for a change, I was sold on WoW right then and there.
While I applaud the use of the Ribbon, which I consider to be a major step forward in terms of usability in the user interface, I think OpenOffice is targetting the wrong demographic here.
Who loves the Ribbon? People that aren't expert Office users, but just need to get most of the simple things like fonts and tables, done. My wife needed extensive coaching on Office 2000. To the point I had to explain the same things over and over again, each time. I gave her Office 2007 and I started to explain things, and she said "but honey, it's right there! no need to tell me" - I haven't needed to explain any of the stuff **she uses** again.
Who hates the Ribbon? Expert users that use every advanced function the package offers. Some functions are just no longer there, others moved to very different spots.
Who's using OpenOffice? Not my wife. More the expert computer users who go and see what it has to offer. And get turned off by the new GUI.
That's why I think the ribbon is great in Office 2007 (and I love it, basically), but I think OpenOffice should make it an optional feature.
(...) were all motivated by "doing the best for (their own) people".
Ehm, no. Virtually every example of mass terror was started as a means of getting a seriously unruly mass of ordinary people under control again. They were sold externally as "doing the best for their own people". That's slightly different from "being motivated by". Be careful about lumping really different social environments together as well: it may look good to compare the spanish inquisition to the fascists, but there's a world of difference in social composition, background, ideology and so forth between them. Lumping them together oversimplifies things and it reduces your ability to understand each of them.
Case in point: the French revolution's terror probably took between 16000 and 40000 lives. While that is a considerable amount of bloodshed, it's a bit hard to equate it with the nazi deathcamps that, I've been told, killed a bit more people. Also, the dynamics were totally different and if you really must include the French, you could better compare it to the Paris Commune's decimation (30-50000 victims) which had a dynamic that was much more comparable (a revolution that failed, and fear of the revolutionaries driving the almost ousted rulers to extreme measures).
Orwell fought in the Spanish civil war with the republicans against the fascists. In his time there were dictators like Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, Hitler,... so it is easy to understand where the inspiration and fear came from.
But not so easy to understand his personal experience with both. You should read Homage to Catalonia if you want a better understanding of the writer.
Churning seems to mean (in general) "to agitate, to upset, to replace old with new". As far as I know the word "churn" has been used as a synonym for "turnover" in several areas, including banking, e-commerce and telecom.
By not getting a 2-year contract but a simple phone and a prepaid contract that can be left whenever you feel like it. It saves you enough to buy a new phone in a few years without getting tied down by the telco's.
Ofcourse, if you're one of those people who can't live without a *new* phone each year, by all means enjoy your slavery.
Slashdot Mirror
and a product that is entrenched in the U.S. military has a good foothold in the climb to becoming a standard.
True, but a foothold is only a foothold. If the rest of the world doesn't like your standard because it has found something better, it won't help them much. And from what you're writing, Adobe Connect looks like a better Powerpoint while Google wave looks like a much better communications platform. If it gets off the ground, Adobe will probably make Adobe Connect compatible with it.
Like instant messaging?
Well, tell everyone who doesn't have it yet to get broadband. They're going to need it.
Time to invest in dark fiber :)
It's a communication protocol that integrates the best aspects from email, wiki, twitter, and instant messaging, in order to provide you with a communications platform that offers stability, versioning, rollback, multiple concurrent edits on "documents" (although the concept of document is getting a bit vague in Google wave) etc.
Or more philosophical: IM, twitter, wiki, editing documents and email are all forms of communication. Google Wave integrates all of these things in one communcations platform that supersedes all of the previous ones. The old apps you can still do on the new platform, except you can do it much better now and integrate them all together in big communication streams that also provide versioning, rollback, concurrent editing etc.
To see how it works though, you'll still have to watch the video.
True.
The Dutch government is currently embroiled in basically the same fight, trying to get the internet providers to ban access to online gambling sites as well. They've *also* been found guilty of trying to protect their own monopoly and discriminating against other European organisations trying to provide gambling sites.
Greed is not exclusive to the US Government.
Of course guns are designed to kill. The problem is people want to keep law-abiding citizens from having them to protect themselves. Criminals, by definition, don't obey the law. If they want a gun, they're going to get one.
Yes, they're getting them. From the USA. Ask your neighbours down south what they think of the liberal handing out of guns to responsible US citizens.
There's a difference between being popular with unpopular constituencies on the one hand, and going out of your way to pose for photographs, shaking hands, and taking a detour to meet with a neo-nazi convicted for burglary on the other hand.
Please tell me you work at a bank.
- John Smith. :)
Actually, it's the other way round in the Netherlands. Private healthcare is mostly illegal, with the result that most hospitals are lightyears ahead of the USA or Australian hospitals - on average.
The reasoning behind this is that private healthcare would be used by the politicians and the rich, while everyone else would have to go to public institutions. Then the politicians could just keep cutting away at the hospitals' funding while avoiding the consequences by escaping into private healthcare. So the general public feeling is: we keep them honest by making sure they get the same treatment.
That's why people jumping the line etc. or getting better treatment when rich or famous make headlines in papers: join the queue mate, the doctor will decide your priority.
Ofcourse the system isnt perfect and just underwent huge changes. But by and by it's pretty good. Although German healthcare seems to be even better and Belgian healthcare has worse hospitals but better surgical results.
... since your epiphany is basically about a concept called alienation (not to be confused with Alien Nation) and has been known as a philosophical concept since early in the industrial revolution. Not that it's a bad epiphany, it's just about 150 years late and already discussed to death.
Then again, applying well-known philosophical concepts to new areas is nice in and of itself.
In my experience, really bad design decisions aren't always motivated by idiots trying to push their hobby horse, but often because better solutions have been patented to death.
Case in point: electronic television guides. Every format under the sun is patented. Philips refused to submit to extortion for years and implemented one miserable scheme after another, until they finally got an agreement with a patent holder. Even then, the patent holder refused to let Philips implement the whole thing themselves but instead insisted it had to be their own, horribly buggy, implementation. You can still hear the tv-guys at Philips gnashing their teeth.
I fear it's sort of similar with these controllers: the good ideas were being patented, so the designers had to avoid them and come up with something 'original'. That doesn't always work out for the best, as demonstrated in the article :)
Must have been a Siamese cat. Those are both smart and vicious.
But this is slashdot. We could always use a bad car analogy:
"This is like saying you expected your car to not only go 100 mp/g, but also fly, and that means the car failed?" :)
In The Netherlands, you just do a bank transfer. You can even automate it. And the bankrecords are acceptable as proof in a court of law, and accessible to you - you can provide copies on request or ask the bank for a certified copy.
Ofcourse, if said person would rather not have the authorities look at it (being on welfare, for instance, and you cant receive ANY money then without a huge hassle, not even 5 euro's per month) there was the alternative option we took: pay them in cash and mail them (on the same day) a payment confirmation.
Money transfers are now limited to the cost of internal transfers, inside Europe (at least for consumers). That was made into law last year.
As for cheques, I believe the last time I saw someone use one was my father, about 30 years ago. Everyone uses bank transfers (in The Netherlands), which were mostly free until Europe started to limit the cost of international transfers to no more than the cost of national transfers. After that every bank raised the price of transfers to compensate.
The smoking gun called it rape. Then they continue and say he was accused of a sexual assault, which can include a lot of things that are *not* considered rape by most people. Apparently, considering the sentence, that was the case here.
Not that he isn't an asshole, but the website is exaggerating a bit more than seems to be justified. Perhaps it's their version of a prank.
Can I give you some advice? Learn the Lambda calculus first. It's pretty easy, and basically every functional language is a variation on the lambda calculus, so after that learning any functional language would just be a matter of syntax.
What would benefit the students more? Patriottism, or realism?
WoW beta was stable for everyone I know. Not a single person I know has reported crashes. Inside my guild we only had a few bugs with the patch-loader, but nothing much. It could be you are using a Mac though, I've heard the game crashes on that platform a lot more than on Windows.
But as for EVE versus WOW: there is a difference between going live with a few cosmetic bugs, or going live without a working market (the defining feature of your game), without a working tutorial for new players (on day 1 this is crucial) and ships disappearing into Oblivion all over the map.
But I guess we differ on what we define as "stable" and "bugfree" :)
That was even more weird than the time when fish came out of the water and attacked me on land.
That's a Murloc :P
The cousin to the dumbass that modded you up, instead of the parent :P
Since when have Blizzard releases been full of bugs? The *one* reason my friends and I buy everything they ship is because they release only decent, near bugfree games. Okay, you can dislike the content. But it is solid content, even if not your cup of tea.
Remember, releasing games that need several patches before you can play without crashing was common use before Blizzard demonstrated that releasing good games (even with internet patching available) is a sound business policy. The same with MMO's. Every beta I participated in before WoW, was a bugfest of biblical proportions. Enter WoW, with a nigh bugfree beta. *sold*.
I mean, upon its release EVE Online had a tutorial that left you floating in space, all lost and lonely, if you made a "wrong" move. The freaking *starting tutorial* just *killed* you when you made a mistake. Also, the day before they released the game they implemented a massive patch, that reactivated lots of already fixed bugs again - a clear hint about problems with their sourcecode control system. This was a few weeks before the WoW beta. It was such a relief to play a *stable* game for a change, I was sold on WoW right then and there.
While I applaud the use of the Ribbon, which I consider to be a major step forward in terms of usability in the user interface, I think OpenOffice is targetting the wrong demographic here.
Who loves the Ribbon? People that aren't expert Office users, but just need to get most of the simple things like fonts and tables, done. My wife needed extensive coaching on Office 2000. To the point I had to explain the same things over and over again, each time. I gave her Office 2007 and I started to explain things, and she said "but honey, it's right there! no need to tell me" - I haven't needed to explain any of the stuff **she uses** again.
Who hates the Ribbon? Expert users that use every advanced function the package offers. Some functions are just no longer there, others moved to very different spots.
Who's using OpenOffice? Not my wife. More the expert computer users who go and see what it has to offer. And get turned off by the new GUI.
That's why I think the ribbon is great in Office 2007 (and I love it, basically), but I think OpenOffice should make it an optional feature.
(...) were all motivated by "doing the best for (their own) people".
Ehm, no. Virtually every example of mass terror was started as a means of getting a seriously unruly mass of ordinary people under control again. They were sold externally as "doing the best for their own people". That's slightly different from "being motivated by". Be careful about lumping really different social environments together as well: it may look good to compare the spanish inquisition to the fascists, but there's a world of difference in social composition, background, ideology and so forth between them. Lumping them together oversimplifies things and it reduces your ability to understand each of them.
Case in point: the French revolution's terror probably took between 16000 and 40000 lives. While that is a considerable amount of bloodshed, it's a bit hard to equate it with the nazi deathcamps that, I've been told, killed a bit more people. Also, the dynamics were totally different and if you really must include the French, you could better compare it to the Paris Commune's decimation (30-50000 victims) which had a dynamic that was much more comparable (a revolution that failed, and fear of the revolutionaries driving the almost ousted rulers to extreme measures).
Orwell fought in the Spanish civil war with the republicans against the fascists. In his time there were dictators like Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, Hitler,... so it is easy to understand where the inspiration and fear came from.
But not so easy to understand his personal experience with both. You should read Homage to Catalonia if you want a better understanding of the writer.
Churning seems to mean (in general) "to agitate, to upset, to replace old with new". As far as I know the word "churn" has been used as a synonym for "turnover" in several areas, including banking, e-commerce and telecom.
By not getting a 2-year contract but a simple phone and a prepaid contract that can be left whenever you feel like it. It saves you enough to buy a new phone in a few years without getting tied down by the telco's.
Ofcourse, if you're one of those people who can't live without a *new* phone each year, by all means enjoy your slavery.