Good grief... it's not a scientific paper, it's not a journalist's article, it isn't any meaningful content at all - it's a press release. Right off of BusinessWire. What's next, Ron Popeil's predictions for 2007?
>>...wherever I go I get along great with the locals. You know why? Because I don't have a bad attitude. >> I try to learn at least a few words of the local language. I take an interest in local culture. >> But mostly I interact with people as if we were all just, you know, people. People seem to like that.
BINGO. I've traveled to Europe, Asia (Japan and China), and even South America. In each case I try to learn at least a little bit of language, and use that, not minding that I might sound stupid. Nowhere have I been treated rudely, except by occasional individuals - and anyone can have an off day (or be a jerk) at times. Even in Paris, where Americans always joke about being treated snottily, I found that if I only tried to say a few words in struggling French, people smiled hugely and were more than happy to help and talk to me. Act humble, be genuine, be interested in others as much (or more) than in just yourself, and people will like you and be friendly. Act like a superior jerk, and they won't.
>>Probably because of the AT&T logo's resemblance to the Death Star
When I worked at Bell Atlantic (Verizon) several years ago, my favorite joke was that AT&T might have had the Death Star, but by God, our spokesman was Darth Vader!
Back in 1995, when I was at Carnegie Mellon, a researcher did a project in the planetarium at the Carnegie science museum. He had programmed a "joystick" to receive reflections from a set of reflective paddles held by the people in the audience. Each paddle had two different sides (red and green); depending on which side you held up, a different signal got sent back to the main processor (positive or negative, respectively). The overall "direction" taken by the game was determined by the sum of the responses - so if everyone held up "red", it as a 100% positive; but if everyone held up "green", it was 100% negative; and so on, with straight linear interpretation.
The first game was Pong. Up and down were controlled directly, if cumulatively, by the audience. You would think that control would be spotty, and that controls would overshoot. Instead, the audience was INCREDIBLY accurate in its overall response; even when the game got very fast, the audience played very, very well against the computer.
There were several games presented, but the last was a flight simulator, flying a plane through a set of rings. The left half of the audience controlled up and down; the right half controlled left and right. Again, you would think this would be nearly impossible to control - but the audience never missed a single ring, even when the game got fast.
Individually, it's doubtful that many members of the audience could have played any of the games as well as we saw the group play cumulatively. It was a clear and very effective demonstration that there was some sort of statistical model at play in the interplay of all those minds.
>>In the USA we have walmart for that... >>read the label on their own brank bottled water.
The differences being of course that a) at least Wal-Mart is honest about it; and more importantly, b) you can be reasonably sure that the water has at least run through a modern filtration system. Compare with a bottle of water that a) claims to be spring water, but is not; because b) it's actually from some random, unfiltered, unboiled, and more-than-likely contaminated water source. Imagine the fun that you and your bowels could have over the next 48 hours after drinking. Suddenly, Wal-Mart bottled water doesn't seem so bad at all...
>>In China, it is legal to copy someone else's blueprint if it is not clearly labeled. >>I guess there have been fake Honda CR-V's on the road, and tons of fake scooters and motorcyles bearing the Honda label.
Well, here's one I can't confirm, but I can believe it. Another Chinese friend has stated that a Chinese company copied the design of some modern small car (I want to say the Mini-Cooper) and then turned around and FILED FOR A PATENT on the design. Talk about cojones! (Or "dan dan", if you want the appropriate Chinese.)
I just got back from a month-long trip from the US to China with my wife, who is originally Chinese. One Chinese person we met described China as "king of the fake". It's scary - there is so much fake stuff everywhere. Some of the clothes are not very good quality, so it's obvious (plus you can see a girl over in the corner ripping the Chinese label out and sewing a Dolce & Gabbana label in with needle and thread). But the handbags, watches, that sort of thing? You're going to be hard-perssed to tell the difference between that and the "real" thing.
When we arrived, my wife's dad told us not to buy tea in small towns, because he had seen a report on CCTV (China Central Television) saying that people were taking other leaves, dying them with green dye and using formaldehyde to cover the smell, then cutting that with a small amount of real tea. We laughed - until it happened. We brought them back a small canister of "best quality" tea that we'd picked up on our Yangtze River cruise. When they steeped it, the water turned bright, neon green. We looked closely - it was *not* tea. We don't know what it was, but it went in the toilet. Mind you, most of the people on our cruise were Chinese nationals, not outsiders!
One of my own coworkers who is Chinese has told that you can't even trust bottled water - there have been reports of companies filling the bottles with tap water (unboiled, of course) and just sealing the lid, and selling it with fake Chinese "brand" labels. We found some bottles with suspicious lids, just buying from regular markets. I'm thinking my lucky stars that I didn't get sick.
It's a bit scary. There's a certain level of trust required for capitalism to thrive. China has the capitalism in spades; but not the trust. It's absolutely the Wild, Wild East over there.
If you go to the HTTP variant, it encrypts the logon but reverts to an unencrypted connection for the rest of your session. But if you specify HTTPS for the original connection, it stays that way throughout.
WRT your earlier comment about the "object" tag - as I said, I was talking about having standard browser support for SVG. There is no way I can build a commercial website using SVG and expect it to behave identically across browsers using the object tag, which defeats the purpose.
We're talking about major market recognition and uptake of SVG, which is practially nil. Which major commercial website uses SVG today? News outlets? E-commerce sites? Portals? Banking? Of course they can't - because those sites have to code to the lowest common denominator, which does *not* include SVG.
As tech lead for a major commercial website, I wish I could tell our folks that SVG would be a viable option for development any time in the near future. Without IE support, that's a fantasy.
My point is, it would have been nice if Firefox + SVG had made it to the market before IE7; maybe (and maybe I'm just dreaming) that would have put some fire behind the IE development managers to consider adding support themselves. As it is, if IE7 hits the market without SVG support, the likelihood is that it won't be useful in the real world for at least several more years, and that's a real shame.
And regarding this...
>>This means that all of the major browsers except >>IE will have some form of SVG support in the near-term.
There are *no* major browsers except IE. That's not a troll - that's a fact. IE is at 90% in the market. In my own company's stats, Firefox, even at 9%, is barely on the radar. It's all I can do to get our management to even recognize that it exists. Safari is at 0.8%. Opera users are at 0.1%. And I can't imagine why you think Konqueror is a major browser; we get about three hits a week, out of millions.
It's great that Opera includes SVG support, but for real website development, it's completely irrelevant. Wish that wasn't so, but it is. Firefox support, on the other hand, would *not* be irrelevant - which is why I'm disappointed it won't happen yet.
The timing of this seems very unfortunate. With 1.1, we were likely only a month or so away from having real, native SVG support in a major browser - and likely *before* IE7 was released. That might have given SVG a chance to be noticed for real by the public in a way that hasn't happened yet; maybe even enough to put pressure on the IE team to actually implement it themselves.
With the new delays, there's every chance that the IE7 betas will be out before SVG has a chance to become noticed by the general public. That just seems... unfortunate.
>>If it had be me who patched Safari to pass Acid2 >>but didn't release those patches for anyone to >>see, I doubt I'd have got the Slashdot coverage.
No doubt. If I had done the changes and not released them, I probably wouldn't get coverage either. In fact, I *did* fix them, but I won't let you see the fixes. Me and my wife, Morgan Fairchild.
Social or not, a contract represents an *agreement* among people or groups. To have a valid contract, first there must be a common agreement that the terms of that contract are actually valid. Our at-large social contract works because, on the whole, people agree that there are certain rules we must live by in order for society to work.
However, there has NEVER, implicitly or otherwise, been any sort of common agreement that society *must* endure advertising, regardless of degree of intrusion or method of delivery. When TV and radio were first brought on the air, the idea that commercial advertising would allow them to survive was not a given. The fact that it *did* allow them to survive happened to come to pass, but then again, there were no technological means for the public to manipulate the medium for their own benefit - for a while. However, there was no obligation for society to absorb content broadcast to them, and indeed when options became available, they were used.
When the first tape players became available, there *were* arguments and court cases regarding recording off the air, whether it was "legal" to listen while skipping recordings, etc. These arguments have all been had before. And consistently, it has been recognized that people hvae no inherent "obligation" to absorb content in any way other than however they see fit.
I have no obligation to read the ads in a magazine. I have no obligation not to turn down the dial on the radio when commercials come on. I have no obligation to sit by idly while pop-up windows dance across my desktop. THERE IS NO SUCH CONTRACT OR AGREEMENT, social or otherwise. If my actions, and the actions of millions of others, somehow cause those broadcasting content discomfort or loss, that's their problem, not mine.
I have no obligation to support *any* business model for anyone else. Indeed, if there were such an obligation, then society could never evolve or adapt to change, could it?
>>As a simple example, take 'if (!ptr)' instead of 'if (ptr==NULL)'. >>... >>IMHO the latter code snippet is clearer than the former, and I would use it
Please, PLEASE tell me you wouldn't use "ptr==NULL". For Pete's sake, tell me you would use "NULL==ptr" instead. Forget optimizations - the first "intermediate" thing you learn in C++ is to ALWAYS put the constant first in equality comparisons so that in case you accidentally use only one "=" some day when you haven't had enough caffeine, the compiler will catch it for you.
It doesn't matter how fast your code runs if it isn't correct. One should almost always prefer a correctness tradeoff over a performance tradeoff.
Talk about a glaring oversight... what's missing from that list? Not on the top 10, not the top 10 tech, not the top 5 brands, not anywhere, not mentioned once...
Does anyone other than me find it unlikely that Google themselves would be *nowhere* on those lists? That seems very strange... and unlikely.
Sorry, I just really couldn't stand the first season. After hearing the characters blathering on (poorly) about all this techno-jargon and pseudo-magical things happening left and right, my brothers and I started calling it "Babblin' Jive". I couldn't look at the thing without laughing.
In Northern Virginia, they're using WINVote machines. I used one this morning in North Arlington - and waited TWO HOURS PLUS to vote.
The wait was not due to the machines, though; they only had one set of voter rolls, and one person flipping through them to verify voters. They had us divided up into A-K and L-Z lines. The L-Z line was maybe 30-45 minutes; the A-K line was the aforementioned 2+ hours. I worry about how many people turned away from the lines, just because they didn't man the polls appropriately...
>>All the CEOs and CFOs and other people with >>impressive titles read the New York Times. >>Said people have the "final word" on workplace >>policy or some such.
I hope that's not what they're thinking - because if they are, they're fooling themselves. You think one, solitary ad in the NYT is going to change some $500K salaried CIO somewhere to switch their company to Firefox? "Oh, look, they bought advertising - I guess I better switch my whole company right away!" Microsoft advertises EVERY SINGLE DAY. I wouldn't be surprised if they bought the page RIGHT NEXT to the Firefox ad, just for the hell of it.
You are NOT going to win this battle from the top down. You're going to win it FROM THE BOTTOM UP. Hopefully, that's how SpreadFirefox will help. Hell, just spending that $250K on banner ads on CNN and Yahoo!, and, yes, even MSNBC would be a better use, don't you think? At least then potential switchers would actually *see* what the money was spent to buy...
I knew someone would say this - but frankly, having been on the streets of plenty of European cities, I have *never* seen the NYT at a newsstand. Since we're talking about a one-shot ad, it better be somewhere where the most people will actually see it.
I still say they should've bought the ad in USA Today instead. NYT has limited average-Joe distribution. USA Today is sold in all the cheesy work cafeterias where America's IT workers take their morning coffee. It's in every 7-11 (well, those in the States anyway) where the non-IT workers take *their* morning coffee. What the blazes is a NYT ad going to do, other than waste precious money?
Actually, if they're really treating this as *marketing*, rather than just self-congratulations, then they shouldn't target the NYT at all. Target USA Today, instead.
I can't buy NYT in my work cafeteria, or on my local street corner, or at the gas station I stop by on my way to work. But I can buy USA Today at all three.
If you're trying to actual MARKET the darned thing, then try getting advertising that is going to reach the maximum number of people.
Slashdot Mirror
Good grief... it's not a scientific paper, it's not a journalist's article, it isn't any meaningful content at all - it's a press release. Right off of BusinessWire. What's next, Ron Popeil's predictions for 2007?
That was *exactly* my first thought, except in my mind I spelled it:
E-bonics.
>> ...wherever I go I get along great with the locals. You know why? Because I don't have a bad attitude.
>> I try to learn at least a few words of the local language. I take an interest in local culture.
>> But mostly I interact with people as if we were all just, you know, people. People seem to like that.
BINGO. I've traveled to Europe, Asia (Japan and China), and even South America. In each case I try to learn at least a little bit of language, and use that, not minding that I might sound stupid. Nowhere have I been treated rudely, except by occasional individuals - and anyone can have an off day (or be a jerk) at times. Even in Paris, where Americans always joke about being treated snottily, I found that if I only tried to say a few words in struggling French, people smiled hugely and were more than happy to help and talk to me. Act humble, be genuine, be interested in others as much (or more) than in just yourself, and people will like you and be friendly. Act like a superior jerk, and they won't.
Close... Elves and Orcs.
>>Probably because of the AT&T logo's resemblance to the Death Star
When I worked at Bell Atlantic (Verizon) several years ago, my favorite joke was that AT&T might have had the Death Star, but by God, our spokesman was Darth Vader!
Back in 1995, when I was at Carnegie Mellon, a researcher did a project in the planetarium at the Carnegie science museum. He had programmed a "joystick" to receive reflections from a set of reflective paddles held by the people in the audience. Each paddle had two different sides (red and green); depending on which side you held up, a different signal got sent back to the main processor (positive or negative, respectively). The overall "direction" taken by the game was determined by the sum of the responses - so if everyone held up "red", it as a 100% positive; but if everyone held up "green", it was 100% negative; and so on, with straight linear interpretation.
The first game was Pong. Up and down were controlled directly, if cumulatively, by the audience. You would think that control would be spotty, and that controls would overshoot. Instead, the audience was INCREDIBLY accurate in its overall response; even when the game got very fast, the audience played very, very well against the computer.
There were several games presented, but the last was a flight simulator, flying a plane through a set of rings. The left half of the audience controlled up and down; the right half controlled left and right. Again, you would think this would be nearly impossible to control - but the audience never missed a single ring, even when the game got fast.
Individually, it's doubtful that many members of the audience could have played any of the games as well as we saw the group play cumulatively. It was a clear and very effective demonstration that there was some sort of statistical model at play in the interplay of all those minds.
>>In the USA we have walmart for that ...
>>read the label on their own brank bottled water.
The differences being of course that a) at least Wal-Mart is honest about it; and more importantly, b) you can be reasonably sure that the water has at least run through a modern filtration system. Compare with a bottle of water that a) claims to be spring water, but is not; because b) it's actually from some random, unfiltered, unboiled, and more-than-likely contaminated water source. Imagine the fun that you and your bowels could have over the next 48 hours after drinking. Suddenly, Wal-Mart bottled water doesn't seem so bad at all...
>>In China, it is legal to copy someone else's blueprint if it is not clearly labeled.
>>I guess there have been fake Honda CR-V's on the road, and tons of fake scooters and motorcyles bearing the Honda label.
Well, here's one I can't confirm, but I can believe it. Another Chinese friend has stated that a Chinese company copied the design of some modern small car (I want to say the Mini-Cooper) and then turned around and FILED FOR A PATENT on the design. Talk about cojones! (Or "dan dan", if you want the appropriate Chinese.)
I just got back from a month-long trip from the US to China with my wife, who is originally Chinese. One Chinese person we met described China as "king of the fake". It's scary - there is so much fake stuff everywhere. Some of the clothes are not very good quality, so it's obvious (plus you can see a girl over in the corner ripping the Chinese label out and sewing a Dolce & Gabbana label in with needle and thread). But the handbags, watches, that sort of thing? You're going to be hard-perssed to tell the difference between that and the "real" thing.
When we arrived, my wife's dad told us not to buy tea in small towns, because he had seen a report on CCTV (China Central Television) saying that people were taking other leaves, dying them with green dye and using formaldehyde to cover the smell, then cutting that with a small amount of real tea. We laughed - until it happened. We brought them back a small canister of "best quality" tea that we'd picked up on our Yangtze River cruise. When they steeped it, the water turned bright, neon green. We looked closely - it was *not* tea. We don't know what it was, but it went in the toilet. Mind you, most of the people on our cruise were Chinese nationals, not outsiders!
One of my own coworkers who is Chinese has told that you can't even trust bottled water - there have been reports of companies filling the bottles with tap water (unboiled, of course) and just sealing the lid, and selling it with fake Chinese "brand" labels. We found some bottles with suspicious lids, just buying from regular markets. I'm thinking my lucky stars that I didn't get sick.
It's a bit scary. There's a certain level of trust required for capitalism to thrive. China has the capitalism in spades; but not the trust. It's absolutely the Wild, Wild East over there.
Maybe I'm not following you, but it's easy to use GMail encrypted:
https://mail.google.com/
If you go to the HTTP variant, it encrypts the logon but reverts to an unencrypted connection for the rest of your session. But if you specify HTTPS for the original connection, it stays that way throughout.
WRT your earlier comment about the "object" tag - as I said, I was talking about having standard browser support for SVG. There is no way I can build a commercial website using SVG and expect it to behave identically across browsers using the object tag, which defeats the purpose.
We're talking about major market recognition and uptake of SVG, which is practially nil. Which major commercial website uses SVG today? News outlets? E-commerce sites? Portals? Banking? Of course they can't - because those sites have to code to the lowest common denominator, which does *not* include SVG.
As tech lead for a major commercial website, I wish I could tell our folks that SVG would be a viable option for development any time in the near future. Without IE support, that's a fantasy.
My point is, it would have been nice if Firefox + SVG had made it to the market before IE7; maybe (and maybe I'm just dreaming) that would have put some fire behind the IE development managers to consider adding support themselves. As it is, if IE7 hits the market without SVG support, the likelihood is that it won't be useful in the real world for at least several more years, and that's a real shame.
And regarding this...
>>This means that all of the major browsers except
>>IE will have some form of SVG support in the near-term.
There are *no* major browsers except IE. That's not a troll - that's a fact. IE is at 90% in the market. In my own company's stats, Firefox, even at 9%, is barely on the radar. It's all I can do to get our management to even recognize that it exists. Safari is at 0.8%. Opera users are at 0.1%. And I can't imagine why you think Konqueror is a major browser; we get about three hits a week, out of millions.
It's great that Opera includes SVG support, but for real website development, it's completely irrelevant. Wish that wasn't so, but it is. Firefox support, on the other hand, would *not* be irrelevant - which is why I'm disappointed it won't happen yet.
The timing of this seems very unfortunate. With 1.1, we were likely only a month or so away from having real, native SVG support in a major browser - and likely *before* IE7 was released. That might have given SVG a chance to be noticed for real by the public in a way that hasn't happened yet; maybe even enough to put pressure on the IE team to actually implement it themselves.
With the new delays, there's every chance that the IE7 betas will be out before SVG has a chance to become noticed by the general public. That just seems... unfortunate.
>>If it had be me who patched Safari to pass Acid2
>>but didn't release those patches for anyone to
>>see, I doubt I'd have got the Slashdot coverage.
No doubt. If I had done the changes and not released them, I probably wouldn't get coverage either. In fact, I *did* fix them, but I won't let you see the fixes. Me and my wife, Morgan Fairchild.
>>while leaving out some of the "fluff" from the book.
Hopefully they'll leave out the pocket fluff. Otherwise, we'll never figure out how to finish watchine the damn movie.
Social or not, a contract represents an *agreement* among people or groups. To have a valid contract, first there must be a common agreement that the terms of that contract are actually valid. Our at-large social contract works because, on the whole, people agree that there are certain rules we must live by in order for society to work.
However, there has NEVER, implicitly or otherwise, been any sort of common agreement that society *must* endure advertising, regardless of degree of intrusion or method of delivery. When TV and radio were first brought on the air, the idea that commercial advertising would allow them to survive was not a given. The fact that it *did* allow them to survive happened to come to pass, but then again, there were no technological means for the public to manipulate the medium for their own benefit - for a while. However, there was no obligation for society to absorb content broadcast to them, and indeed when options became available, they were used.
When the first tape players became available, there *were* arguments and court cases regarding recording off the air, whether it was "legal" to listen while skipping recordings, etc. These arguments have all been had before. And consistently, it has been recognized that people hvae no inherent "obligation" to absorb content in any way other than however they see fit.
I have no obligation to read the ads in a magazine. I have no obligation not to turn down the dial on the radio when commercials come on. I have no obligation to sit by idly while pop-up windows dance across my desktop. THERE IS NO SUCH CONTRACT OR AGREEMENT, social or otherwise. If my actions, and the actions of millions of others, somehow cause those broadcasting content discomfort or loss, that's their problem, not mine.
I have no obligation to support *any* business model for anyone else. Indeed, if there were such an obligation, then society could never evolve or adapt to change, could it?
In short - that's just plain old horse manure.
That ain't Satan, it's Bowser from the Super Mario Brothers series. Which kinda makes sense, cause that's no turtle, it's actually a koopa.
Which makes me wonder if this movie is somehow coming to life. If so, I want to know where to get my spring-loaded shoes.
>>As a simple example, take 'if (!ptr)' instead of 'if (ptr==NULL)'.
>>...
>>IMHO the latter code snippet is clearer than the former, and I would use it
Please, PLEASE tell me you wouldn't use "ptr==NULL". For Pete's sake, tell me you would use "NULL==ptr" instead. Forget optimizations - the first "intermediate" thing you learn in C++ is to ALWAYS put the constant first in equality comparisons so that in case you accidentally use only one "=" some day when you haven't had enough caffeine, the compiler will catch it for you.
It doesn't matter how fast your code runs if it isn't correct. One should almost always prefer a correctness tradeoff over a performance tradeoff.
Talk about a glaring oversight... what's missing from that list? Not on the top 10, not the top 10 tech, not the top 5 brands, not anywhere, not mentioned once...
Does anyone other than me find it unlikely that Google themselves would be *nowhere* on those lists? That seems very strange... and unlikely.
Sorry, I just really couldn't stand the first season. After hearing the characters blathering on (poorly) about all this techno-jargon and pseudo-magical things happening left and right, my brothers and I started calling it "Babblin' Jive". I couldn't look at the thing without laughing.
:-)
In the words of Monty Python: "Got better..."
In Northern Virginia, they're using WINVote machines. I used one this morning in North Arlington - and waited TWO HOURS PLUS to vote.
The wait was not due to the machines, though; they only had one set of voter rolls, and one person flipping through them to verify voters. They had us divided up into A-K and L-Z lines. The L-Z line was maybe 30-45 minutes; the A-K line was the aforementioned 2+ hours. I worry about how many people turned away from the lines, just because they didn't man the polls appropriately...
>>All the CEOs and CFOs and other people with
>>impressive titles read the New York Times.
>>Said people have the "final word" on workplace
>>policy or some such.
I hope that's not what they're thinking - because if they are, they're fooling themselves. You think one, solitary ad in the NYT is going to change some $500K salaried CIO somewhere to switch their company to Firefox? "Oh, look, they bought advertising - I guess I better switch my whole company right away!" Microsoft advertises EVERY SINGLE DAY. I wouldn't be surprised if they bought the page RIGHT NEXT to the Firefox ad, just for the hell of it.
You are NOT going to win this battle from the top down. You're going to win it FROM THE BOTTOM UP. Hopefully, that's how SpreadFirefox will help. Hell, just spending that $250K on banner ads on CNN and Yahoo!, and, yes, even MSNBC would be a better use, don't you think? At least then potential switchers would actually *see* what the money was spent to buy...
I knew someone would say this - but frankly, having been on the streets of plenty of European cities, I have *never* seen the NYT at a newsstand. Since we're talking about a one-shot ad, it better be somewhere where the most people will actually see it.
I still say they should've bought the ad in USA Today instead. NYT has limited average-Joe distribution. USA Today is sold in all the cheesy work cafeterias where America's IT workers take their morning coffee. It's in every 7-11 (well, those in the States anyway) where the non-IT workers take *their* morning coffee. What the blazes is a NYT ad going to do, other than waste precious money?
Actually, if they're really treating this as *marketing*, rather than just self-congratulations, then they shouldn't target the NYT at all. Target USA Today, instead.
I can't buy NYT in my work cafeteria, or on my local street corner, or at the gas station I stop by on my way to work. But I can buy USA Today at all three.
If you're trying to actual MARKET the darned thing, then try getting advertising that is going to reach the maximum number of people.
Just look at them mysteriously, and say,
"Some men call me... Tim?"