"This is, I believe, at least one reason Japan tends to excel in miniaturization -- doing more with less space."
There's probably some truth to that. Interesting theory. I'm still not convinced you'd see total strangers in Japan clumping together like that, but like you point out, there is Tokyo to explain... hmm, I'll have to think about this one.
As a sidenote, even here in NYC I'm astounded by how many people seem to care about automobiles, despite their being pretty much irrelevant to our lives. (I'm still confused by the presence of the annual car show in Manhattan.) I think it's got a lot to do with the fact that 3/4 of New Yorkers were actually raised in the suburbs. Cultural, yes. And it's also true that we do love our cell phones.
"Pretty big talk -- how ya gonna stop me?"
I always get bitter about the idiosyncrasies of Japanese culture, after I've been talking to my parents. Can't help, sorry.:)
I dunno, I guess I just see all these "forced social graces" as fake somehow, as if it's a fear of shaming the family/the nation that motivates these behaviors. I know it sounds ridiculous, and I could be wrong, but that's just the impression I always get from my parents and my extended family in Japan.
Sorry if I wasn't clear--I meant that Japanese culture frowns on being open with other people in general, whether Japanese or not. It's not just the attitude towards foreigners, though that's where it might be most noticeable. People raised the most traditionally are the most reticent and loath to speak their minds.
Not that such a culture doesn't have anything to recommend it, but I would hesitate to call it "gregarious" unless I'd been watching too much imported anime and scat porn.
Dude, that sounds more like a software problem than a hardware problem. What OS were you using that insisted on spanning everything between two screens?
I tried for a minute to answer this, but there's just no way can you compare a postindustrial economy like Japan's to China's pastiche of developing industry and agriculture. Any comparison is rendered all but meaningless--everything about the two nations, even their geographies, is just so different.
Gregarious? You've gotta be kidding. Westerners (of Japanese descent or otherwise) who spend any significant amount of time there invariably return with accounts of vague, passive-aggressive unfriendliness, if not outright hostility. Japanese culture is the shyest and most obsessed with shame and slavish duty I've ever encountered. Maybe it's just cultural, but I'm not going to let you get away with calling Japan a "gregarious" nation. I should know--I was raised Japanese.
Your tax structure sounds like it's designed to make it less attractive to live in the boonies (north Sweden)--which, possibly, is the intent after all, since city living tends to be more energy efficient than rural living.
John C. Dvorak getting himself a regular column in MacUser is a feat all trolls and muckrakers can only aspire to. I always used to wonder what sort of perverse mischievousness on the part of the editors at MacUser prompted his hiring.
Blue Man Group and the whole "Intel Inside" campaign are fucking tacky. IBM may not be the most stylish of companies either, but at least it's associated in the popular mind with respectability and dependability. If Apple really is switching to Intel, I assume they must have good reasons for doing so, but I'll still be sad to see Apple slumming with everything tasteless and ugly that Intel represents.
His secret? Keeping up to date with the various Mac-oriented sites, and a gullible Slashdot readership. That's all. I don't think he's a "troll" in the classical sense of the word, but I do think it's sad that there's someone out there with nothing better to do than collect admiration and karma on Slashdot by pretending to work at Apple.
Even assuming the authors of that C|NET article have some inside info, it's possible the paragraph in question is just speculation on their part. They could have just gotten a reliable tip saying "Intel's going to be manufacturing chips for Apple" and written the article assuming, like everyone else, that meant x86. </obvious>
But it does say a lot about the performance of the hardware under certain conditions: specifically, running software compiled with gcc. I imagine that's the most relevant aspect of "performance" for many people on Slashdot.
That said, I'd be interested to see Intel's optimized compiler pitted against IBM's PowerPC-optimized one.
In case you hadn't figured it out already: The moderators are even stupider than the posters. As a corollary, when posters moderate, their intelligence immediately dwindles down past zero. That's the only explanation I've come up with that makes any sense, anyway.
Sounds like you might be interested in this article from last week's Economist about how businesses would do well to embrace social issues as essential to the bottom line, regardless of both the CSR fanatics on the one side and the bean counters on the other. The article is wordy as fuck-all, but you'll probably get the gist from skimming it. Hope you find it enjoyable.
It would still be illegal for you to actually use OO.o (or presumably TextEdit.app, Keynote, or anything else that depends on patented algorithms to decipher these formats), unless you were willing to move to "some region that is not covered by their patent." Which probably aren't areas of the world where you'd be particularly interested in living.
Well, yeah, but by the same token it's not hard for someone to falsely claim you assaulted them, or even for a detective to put someone's hair sample in an evidence bag at an unrelated crime scene. But why would they do that? Why would the MPAA fake evidence against you? One fileswapper's as good as another.
If you were being framed by the MPAA, of course, it'd be up to you to explain the MPAA's motives to the court--just like it's up to you to show that a detective framing you has a vendetta against you. Remember how OJ got off.
"DeLay's misbehavior is mild compared to more established political patronage systems worldwide."
But why would we care about Haiti or Zimbabwe? We live in is America, and DeLay's behavior is disgusting compared to American politicians. That's ultimately what affects us. New Yorkers don't excuse corruption in City Hall by saying "well, it's worse in Chicago."
Well, if I want to see spaceflight in our time, then I shouldn't necessarily care about his motives as long as he's genuinely supportive of the program. That said, I hope the motherfucker burns.
If global commerce, the free exchange of culture, and everything other long-term trend tying different nations to one another continues apace, the day may yet come when we don't have to invest in such defensive measures. But I agree with you--that day is not yet.
Slashdot Mirror
"This is, I believe, at least one reason Japan tends to excel in miniaturization -- doing more with less space."
:)
There's probably some truth to that. Interesting theory. I'm still not convinced you'd see total strangers in Japan clumping together like that, but like you point out, there is Tokyo to explain... hmm, I'll have to think about this one.
As a sidenote, even here in NYC I'm astounded by how many people seem to care about automobiles, despite their being pretty much irrelevant to our lives. (I'm still confused by the presence of the annual car show in Manhattan.) I think it's got a lot to do with the fact that 3/4 of New Yorkers were actually raised in the suburbs. Cultural, yes. And it's also true that we do love our cell phones.
"Pretty big talk -- how ya gonna stop me?"
I always get bitter about the idiosyncrasies of Japanese culture, after I've been talking to my parents. Can't help, sorry.
Apple's FairPlay?
"Intel products support or will support several copy protection schemes such as Macrovision, DTCP-IP, COPP, HDCP, CGMS-A, and others."
I dunno, I guess I just see all these "forced social graces" as fake somehow, as if it's a fear of shaming the family/the nation that motivates these behaviors. I know it sounds ridiculous, and I could be wrong, but that's just the impression I always get from my parents and my extended family in Japan.
Sorry if I wasn't clear--I meant that Japanese culture frowns on being open with other people in general, whether Japanese or not. It's not just the attitude towards foreigners, though that's where it might be most noticeable. People raised the most traditionally are the most reticent and loath to speak their minds.
Not that such a culture doesn't have anything to recommend it, but I would hesitate to call it "gregarious" unless I'd been watching too much imported anime and scat porn.
Dude, that sounds more like a software problem than a hardware problem. What OS were you using that insisted on spanning everything between two screens?
Can't you just adjust your systemwide DPI setting or use larger fonts?
I tried for a minute to answer this, but there's just no way can you compare a postindustrial economy like Japan's to China's pastiche of developing industry and agriculture. Any comparison is rendered all but meaningless--everything about the two nations, even their geographies, is just so different.
Gregarious? You've gotta be kidding. Westerners (of Japanese descent or otherwise) who spend any significant amount of time there invariably return with accounts of vague, passive-aggressive unfriendliness, if not outright hostility. Japanese culture is the shyest and most obsessed with shame and slavish duty I've ever encountered. Maybe it's just cultural, but I'm not going to let you get away with calling Japan a "gregarious" nation. I should know--I was raised Japanese.
Your tax structure sounds like it's designed to make it less attractive to live in the boonies (north Sweden)--which, possibly, is the intent after all, since city living tends to be more energy efficient than rural living.
That site is shitbucket-ugly. Of course it has more visitors on Linux than Mac.
Itanium isn't x86, and it doesn't suffer as severely from register starvation. I think.
John C. Dvorak getting himself a regular column in MacUser is a feat all trolls and muckrakers can only aspire to. I always used to wonder what sort of perverse mischievousness on the part of the editors at MacUser prompted his hiring.
Blue Man Group and the whole "Intel Inside" campaign are fucking tacky. IBM may not be the most stylish of companies either, but at least it's associated in the popular mind with respectability and dependability. If Apple really is switching to Intel, I assume they must have good reasons for doing so, but I'll still be sad to see Apple slumming with everything tasteless and ugly that Intel represents.
His secret? Keeping up to date with the various Mac-oriented sites, and a gullible Slashdot readership. That's all. I don't think he's a "troll" in the classical sense of the word, but I do think it's sad that there's someone out there with nothing better to do than collect admiration and karma on Slashdot by pretending to work at Apple.
Even assuming the authors of that C|NET article have some inside info, it's possible the paragraph in question is just speculation on their part. They could have just gotten a reliable tip saying "Intel's going to be manufacturing chips for Apple" and written the article assuming, like everyone else, that meant x86.
</obvious>
But it does say a lot about the performance of the hardware under certain conditions: specifically, running software compiled with gcc. I imagine that's the most relevant aspect of "performance" for many people on Slashdot.
That said, I'd be interested to see Intel's optimized compiler pitted against IBM's PowerPC-optimized one.
In case you hadn't figured it out already: The moderators are even stupider than the posters. As a corollary, when posters moderate, their intelligence immediately dwindles down past zero. That's the only explanation I've come up with that makes any sense, anyway.
Sounds like you might be interested in this article from last week's Economist about how businesses would do well to embrace social issues as essential to the bottom line, regardless of both the CSR fanatics on the one side and the bean counters on the other. The article is wordy as fuck-all, but you'll probably get the gist from skimming it. Hope you find it enjoyable.
It would still be illegal for you to actually use OO.o (or presumably TextEdit.app, Keynote, or anything else that depends on patented algorithms to decipher these formats), unless you were willing to move to "some region that is not covered by their patent." Which probably aren't areas of the world where you'd be particularly interested in living.
Well, yeah, but by the same token it's not hard for someone to falsely claim you assaulted them, or even for a detective to put someone's hair sample in an evidence bag at an unrelated crime scene. But why would they do that? Why would the MPAA fake evidence against you? One fileswapper's as good as another.
If you were being framed by the MPAA, of course, it'd be up to you to explain the MPAA's motives to the court--just like it's up to you to show that a detective framing you has a vendetta against you. Remember how OJ got off.
"DeLay's misbehavior is mild compared to more established political patronage systems worldwide."
But why would we care about Haiti or Zimbabwe? We live in is America, and DeLay's behavior is disgusting compared to American politicians. That's ultimately what affects us. New Yorkers don't excuse corruption in City Hall by saying "well, it's worse in Chicago."
Well, if I want to see spaceflight in our time, then I shouldn't necessarily care about his motives as long as he's genuinely supportive of the program. That said, I hope the motherfucker burns.
I dunno about you, but I prefer the term "pro-choice" to "pro-abortion." Not to feed this happy flamefest or anything.
If global commerce, the free exchange of culture, and everything other long-term trend tying different nations to one another continues apace, the day may yet come when we don't have to invest in such defensive measures. But I agree with you--that day is not yet.
Just wait for NZ to descend into lawlessness and tribal warfare like central Africa. There's copper in them thar hills.