Many (but definitely not all) big-name columnists' opinions are in fact "better" than almost everyone in the blogosphere, for a few key reasons:
They have access to decision-makers
They have more to lose if they fuck up
[...]
But that's exactly the point! They grew so dependent on this 'insider access' that they realistically cannot write anything that goes against the flow. If they do, they'll lose their insider access immediately.
If they ever write something negative then it is usually something that is so big that the respective company they are reporting on can't ignore it anyway; the columnists become a tool of their PR departments working towards defusing the problem by providing a 'balanced' opinion by the columnists.
Shame you did not really understand what the AC said and chose to nitpick instead. The AC was right and pretty precise in his description.
There is no real GPS in iPhone. There is a real GPS in this Nokia device. If you are still having a hard time understanding what the difference between them is, go check some navigation software for mobile phones. Take a close look at its accuracy (or lack thereof).
Even funnier: check some recent Ericsson phone (C905), they have Google Maps installed -- a special build that can use the internal GPS. If you download Google Maps from Google website, you get a different version that is unable to use the GPS.
BTW, "A-GPS" means exactly nothing. It's a marketing terms.
My girlfriend and me have both a Sony-Ericson phone, bought 3 years apart. Guess what ? Both chargers and connectors are proprietary, fragile, weird and different! Of course if you lose it you'll have to spend an arm to get a replacement.
While I am more than happy to have the proprietary chargers replaced by a common standard, the statement above contains at least misinformation, if not ill will.
I've been using Ericsson phones since nearly 15 years now. For the better part of it, they had one standard of charging port. Some three years ago they decided to change it to a new standard. Yes, both were proprietary, but neither of them was weird nor fragile (they are not as trivial as a simple jack is but you quickly come to appreciate their actual solution when you notice it is just the right balance between stiffness/ stability of the connection and the protection from doing damage to either the port or the connector).
And no, they are not expensive to get. New chargers on Ebay cost some 3 EUR, if you are afraid they are not "genuine" you can go to a phone dealer and get one for twice as much (my estimate, given the cost of other accessories from SE).
Most people in the military , especially men, go into jobs that involve killing people.
Well, yes, this is what I expect you can tell about a significant part of army employees (?) -- they like shooting, they don't mind killing (it's "patriotic", and plenty of other excuses). I mean, I imagine it works this way, given that guns, army, etc play a big role in the American culture. And, there are not that many jobs you can do with this kind of mindset after you leave army.
However, I suspect there's another group of people that simply don't have any better idea on what to do with their lives. They like that fact that army gives them a job, that they don' t need to think about minor daily problems most other people have. And as soon as they quit army, they are in trouble: they don't like what they see, and they are accustomed to being cared for (in every aspect of their lives) by the army. But that's just my suspicion.
This is something that strikes me in many stories about homeless people in the US:
Comment above:
I left home at 19 and an Ivy League University - joined the military to continue college.
Article:
Mr. Ross figures he has been homeless for about 15 years, surviving on his Army pension
What is it about this correlation between being in the military in the past and being homeless later? Forgive my ignorance, I am not from the US and I have not been in the army (any army). What does army do to people that they have problems living "normal" lives later? Or, were these people "different" from the very beginning and army was an interesting option for them (unlike "regular" jobs & lifestyle)?
[...] VMWare Player. Is that program also going to become free? (If not, I guess it should be replaced with VirtualBox, but VirtualBox doesn't seem quite as polished.)
Care to elaborate on that (VirtualBox being less polished in this scenario)?
I seem to have exactly the opposite impression; I used to work a lot with VMWare but I was forced to check other options when VMWare failed to run on one of my PCs and since that time I am using exclusively VirtualBox.
I'm (hopefully) going to be in a similar situation as you in a year.
[...]
Nothing in the english/spanish world has the same opportunities in CS as the US, with few exceptions.
So let me summarize:
you haven't actually been anywhere outside the US (assumption, yes, but most likely a valid one), in particular you did not *study* in Europe (for example),
yet you say that the "opportunities in US" are unparalleled.
given this last statement, I can safely say you also did not bother to compare (1) the curricula of some US/ other (English, let's say) universities, (2) career chances after finishing some specific non-US universities.
This is, yes... reasonable. And so non-surprising.
That's the reason for the pricing model. SMS has to be priced high enough to make sure its use doesn't grow faster than voice.
No, that's not true. The sole reason for SMS prices is the economy, i.e. how much the carriers think they can charge the users. Since SMS usage is not falling (it's growing, actually), they see no reason for lowering the prices.
If Lego's products are better, they'll win on quality and be worth the price. Or perhaps the general public doesn't value the difference, in which case the public gets what it wants. This is capitalism working well: competition, with competitors competing on quality and price and consumers having options.
No.
First of all, you did not consider the fact that the general public is often unaware of the quality difference; what the general public sees is (1) the price, (2) the ads saying that (in this case) "our bricks are just like Lego, just cheaper"; any serious thoughts about quality usually come several years later (and it's usually way too late for the original company which is floating belly up by that time). In general, it's naive to think that competitors really compete on the quality plane. Lego is a perfect example of this; actually, given the current price of these toys, it's a low hanging fruit every toy producer in the world is or has been thinking of.
And, don't get me wrong: I think Lego (the company behind it) deserves a good ass-kicking, if not for the exorbitant prices (that I doubt is only high enough to make up for the high quality), then at least for the dumb marketing practices (who the fsck needs Star Wars sets with only a handful of bricks, most of them custom at that? where are the generic bricks?).
I am just pointing out that it has nothing to do with "beneficial" effects of capitalism. And, Lego is unlikely to survive it, at least as we know it today.
Exchange is great. No jokin'. If you have the right staff, who don't treat it like an SMTP engine and IMAP4 - then kick it when it doesn't behave that way.
DO. NOT. LIE.
So, I believe that Google is nothing but a life of frustration - and in five years, when you see you've helped to build a monster that will make you wish for the good 'ol days of MS Monopoly?
I guess this pretty much explains your bias towards MS...
MS is beginning to license Exchange as a service online. It's good today, and prolly great tomorrow. Look into that - I think the real advantages happen once the number of users approaches 15K. It's an elastic service, and they do SharePoint integrated portal, too.
So what is the problem? From what you described, the priority of your former boss was minimizing the RISK (very aggressively, nearly ignoring other variables). Did he still expect to make PROFIT?
Anyway, I don't really see how this is related to eBay/ PayPal problem apart from the fact that the story you told uses it as an example...
Probably more like Blizzard has decided [...] it can eke out a few more pennies selling these dongles for 6 euros a pop.
Are you serious? If Blizzard wanted to make money on it, they'd sell it for 60 EUR, not 6 EUR -- you know what the prices are in Europe, you know they could, if they wanted to.
I guess we will see.. as the FAQ page says, the prices is subject to change...
FYI, cmd.exe is not a scripting language; it is more of a "macro language". The result is there are funny (not always so) side effects where you have nested scopes (try nested loops for example).
In fact, cmd.exe is one of the most brain-dead "languages" I've ever seen, full of ugly hacks (see FOR syntax for example).
the US also has the best health care outcomes in the industrialized world and generally by a wide margin. If you have cancer, your survival rates in the US are much better than Europe on average and the best in the world in absolute terms
The European system produces mediocre results in terms of actual health care outcomes (what we are nominally paying for), but it is relatively inexpensive. Americans pay a lot but have the best health care outcomes in the world. Do you have any hard numbers to back these claims?
Because when I read stuff like this:
Americans pay far more than is strictly necessary by any reasonable metric, but I guess they can afford it. Americans are also bearing the cost of most medical technology innovation, amortized in the American medical market; when is the rest of the industrialized world going to carry their fair share of that burden? I just think you've never been outside USA (and that's a mild way of putting this).
Ubuntu would not give you Remote Desktop access to your windows machines without configuring Wine, I think. Mod him down, please. He's got no idea what he's talking about...
If a locksmith breaks into your home by picking your locks, he is still a burglar. If a locksmith picks your locks, he is not necessarily a burglar, nor is he breaking into your house.
I am not really sure whether the desktop preference has something to do with Europe vs. US - though, incidentally, I *am* in Europe, I *am* using SuSE and I *am* a strong KDE supporter - I detest Gnome, to put it straight (why? HUGE widgets, esp. buttons, swapped "OK" and "Cancel" - the list is long; OK, the rant is over, it is not the time nor the place to discuss personal preferences).
The fact is that both Gnome and KDE have huge userbases and the decision to favor Gnome is at least not understandable to me. There is no point in exploring the specific differences between Gnome and KDE but suffice to say that KDE is at least not worse than Gnome.
They ruin the distribution, as the parent poster said.
http://www.hamachi.cc/ looks like P2P VPN application.
I have yet to try it, but from the description:
Hamachi is a zero-configuration virtual networking application enabling secure direct communications between any two computers on the Internet regardless of the presence of firewalls or address translation devices on the route between them. In particular, it can create true peer-to-peer network between two computers each residing behind its own broadband router.
I am not really sure about the protocol they are using, looks kinda shady at the first glance.
Slashdot Mirror
Many (but definitely not all) big-name columnists' opinions are in fact "better" than almost everyone in the blogosphere, for a few key reasons:
[...]
But that's exactly the point! They grew so dependent on this 'insider access' that they realistically cannot write anything that goes against the flow. If they do, they'll lose their insider access immediately.
If they ever write something negative then it is usually something that is so big that the respective company they are reporting on can't ignore it anyway; the columnists become a tool of their PR departments working towards defusing the problem by providing a 'balanced' opinion by the columnists.
Your safety is the main reason why drugs are so expensive, not research or marketing.
Sure. Next time you better at least try to omit "your" from these kind of sentences. It reads like a cheap ad now (which it is).
Shame you did not really understand what the AC said and chose to nitpick instead. The AC was right and pretty precise in his description.
There is no real GPS in iPhone. There is a real GPS in this Nokia device. If you are still having a hard time understanding what the difference between them is, go check some navigation software for mobile phones. Take a close look at its accuracy (or lack thereof).
Even funnier: check some recent Ericsson phone (C905), they have Google Maps installed -- a special build that can use the internal GPS. If you download Google Maps from Google website, you get a different version that is unable to use the GPS.
BTW, "A-GPS" means exactly nothing. It's a marketing terms.
My girlfriend and me have both a Sony-Ericson phone, bought 3 years apart. Guess what ? Both chargers and connectors are proprietary, fragile, weird and different! Of course if you lose it you'll have to spend an arm to get a replacement.
While I am more than happy to have the proprietary chargers replaced by a common standard, the statement above contains at least misinformation, if not ill will.
I've been using Ericsson phones since nearly 15 years now. For the better part of it, they had one standard of charging port. Some three years ago they decided to change it to a new standard. Yes, both were proprietary, but neither of them was weird nor fragile (they are not as trivial as a simple jack is but you quickly come to appreciate their actual solution when you notice it is just the right balance between stiffness/ stability of the connection and the protection from doing damage to either the port or the connector).
And no, they are not expensive to get. New chargers on Ebay cost some 3 EUR, if you are afraid they are not "genuine" you can go to a phone dealer and get one for twice as much (my estimate, given the cost of other accessories from SE).
Most people in the military , especially men, go into jobs that involve killing people.
Well, yes, this is what I expect you can tell about a significant part of army employees (?) -- they like shooting, they don't mind killing (it's "patriotic", and plenty of other excuses). I mean, I imagine it works this way, given that guns, army, etc play a big role in the American culture. And, there are not that many jobs you can do with this kind of mindset after you leave army.
However, I suspect there's another group of people that simply don't have any better idea on what to do with their lives. They like that fact that army gives them a job, that they don' t need to think about minor daily problems most other people have. And as soon as they quit army, they are in trouble: they don't like what they see, and they are accustomed to being cared for (in every aspect of their lives) by the army. But that's just my suspicion.
Comment above:
I left home at 19 and an Ivy League University - joined the military to continue college.
Article:
Mr. Ross figures he has been homeless for about 15 years, surviving on his Army pension
What is it about this correlation between being in the military in the past and being homeless later? Forgive my ignorance, I am not from the US and I have not been in the army (any army). What does army do to people that they have problems living "normal" lives later? Or, were these people "different" from the very beginning and army was an interesting option for them (unlike "regular" jobs & lifestyle)?
[...] VMWare Player. Is that program also going to become free? (If not, I guess it should be replaced with VirtualBox, but VirtualBox doesn't seem quite as polished.)
Care to elaborate on that (VirtualBox being less polished in this scenario)?
I seem to have exactly the opposite impression; I used to work a lot with VMWare but I was forced to check other options when VMWare failed to run on one of my PCs and since that time I am using exclusively VirtualBox.
I'm (hopefully) going to be in a similar situation as you in a year. [...] Nothing in the english/spanish world has the same opportunities in CS as the US, with few exceptions.
So let me summarize:
This is, yes... reasonable. And so non-surprising.
That's the reason for the pricing model. SMS has to be priced high enough to make sure its use doesn't grow faster than voice.
No, that's not true. The sole reason for SMS prices is the economy, i.e. how much the carriers think they can charge the users. Since SMS usage is not falling (it's growing, actually), they see no reason for lowering the prices.
If Lego's products are better, they'll win on quality and be worth the price. Or perhaps the general public doesn't value the difference, in which case the public gets what it wants. This is capitalism working well: competition, with competitors competing on quality and price and consumers having options.
No.
First of all, you did not consider the fact that the general public is often unaware of the quality difference; what the general public sees is (1) the price, (2) the ads saying that (in this case) "our bricks are just like Lego, just cheaper"; any serious thoughts about quality usually come several years later (and it's usually way too late for the original company which is floating belly up by that time). In general, it's naive to think that competitors really compete on the quality plane.
Lego is a perfect example of this; actually, given the current price of these toys, it's a low hanging fruit every toy producer in the world is or has been thinking of.
And, don't get me wrong: I think Lego (the company behind it) deserves a good ass-kicking, if not for the exorbitant prices (that I doubt is only high enough to make up for the high quality), then at least for the dumb marketing practices (who the fsck needs Star Wars sets with only a handful of bricks, most of them custom at that? where are the generic bricks?).
I am just pointing out that it has nothing to do with "beneficial" effects of capitalism.
And, Lego is unlikely to survive it, at least as we know it today.
Exchange is great. No jokin'. If you have the right staff, who don't treat it like an SMTP engine and IMAP4 - then kick it when it doesn't behave that way.
DO. NOT. LIE.
So, I believe that Google is nothing but a life of frustration - and in five years, when you see you've helped to build a monster that will make you wish for the good 'ol days of MS Monopoly?
I guess this pretty much explains your bias towards MS...
MS is beginning to license Exchange as a service online. It's good today, and prolly great tomorrow. Look into that - I think the real advantages happen once the number of users approaches 15K. It's an elastic service, and they do SharePoint integrated portal, too.
Now that has really made me laugh.
So what is the problem? From what you described, the priority of your former boss was minimizing the RISK (very aggressively, nearly ignoring other variables). Did he still expect to make PROFIT?
Anyway, I don't really see how this is related to eBay/ PayPal problem apart from the fact that the story you told uses it as an example...
Eclipse with PyDev work fine for me.
Probably more like Blizzard has decided [...] it can eke out a few more pennies selling these dongles for 6 euros a pop.
Are you serious? If Blizzard wanted to make money on it, they'd sell it for 60 EUR, not 6 EUR -- you know what the prices are in Europe, you know they could, if they wanted to.
I guess we will see.. as the FAQ page says, the prices is subject to change...
FYI, cmd.exe is not a scripting language; it is more of a "macro language". The result is there are funny (not always so) side effects where you have nested scopes (try nested loops for example). In fact, cmd.exe is one of the most brain-dead "languages" I've ever seen, full of ugly hacks (see FOR syntax for example).
Are you really that naïve? People handling the blog are PR professionals, professional spin doctors...
I can only second that.
I am not really sure whether the desktop preference has something to do with Europe vs. US - though, incidentally, I *am* in Europe, I *am* using SuSE and I *am* a strong KDE supporter - I detest Gnome, to put it straight (why? HUGE widgets, esp. buttons, swapped "OK" and "Cancel" - the list is long; OK, the rant is over, it is not the time nor the place to discuss personal preferences).
The fact is that both Gnome and KDE have huge userbases and the decision to favor Gnome is at least not understandable to me. There is no point in exploring the specific differences between Gnome and KDE but suffice to say that KDE is at least not worse than Gnome.
They ruin the distribution, as the parent poster said.
Shall we expect KOpenSuse anytime soon?
Probably the best software firewall for Windows: Agnitum Outpost Firewall Pro: http://agnitum.com/products/outpost/.
More configurable than its competitors, does well on security tests, too.
Check the Web for some independent tests.
You'd have to check whether it runs on 2003.