I hear this argument again and again but I've never found it convincing. You're asserting that the price difference between indie and big-label music would work in the favor of indie labels if people weren't able to download the big-label music for free. Then you go on to assert that the quality of the big-label music is inferior, calling it "RIAA crap" and implying that they are somehow less "legitimate."
What you don't take into account is that it's just as easy to pirate indie music as riaa music. Furthermore, many indie labels offer free downloads. This means that not only can it all be found on the net for free, there's a larger, legal supply of indie music. If there's more of this music, it's easier to get, and it's free, it should win hands down. In a market with infinite supply and no cost, products should win based entirely on their merit.
The bottom line is that indie music is just like shareware software or any other kind of amateur work. There are gems but most of it sucks. A few geniuses always end up in the pile but by and large they have the level of popularity they merit.
Vague answers for overly-broad questions...
on
Why Do Games Sell?
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· Score: 1
Because they're either well-made or well-marketed.
I should probably start by saying that I'm a linux guy. I run linux (but dual boot for games that I can't wine). I work as a linux programmer, and I spend 50 hours a week at a linux machine working on linux servers.
That said though, I believe a lot of the hatred towards Microsoft independent of the actual products that Microsoft makes. In my opinion, Microsoft hardware kicks the stuffing out of every other manufacturer in the market today. I've been using Vista since beta, and although I personally don't care for the interface and layout, it mostly does what it says it does. Even the biggest Linux / OSS zealots have to agree that Excel is a damn nice piece of software.
If it's not the software, then what is it?
Well, first of all, a lot of us have bad, bad memories of old Microsoft software. I don't care how long vista stays up without crashing...after running windows 95, I am just too skittish to call any Microsoft OS stable. I still think some of their software is terrible (*cough* IIS *cough* *cough*) but that's not really relevant; every company has some duds.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, a lot of techies KNOW that microsoft is big enough that the entire computing industry pays the price for their mistakes. It has the power to force DRM onto us, and it can effectively lock us in to its own proprietary standards. For example, just because IE was the default browser on XP, and there are a bajillion IE installs out there, I spend a huge amount of time dealing with its endless bugs and quirks at work.
Really, what it comes down to is the "feel" we get from the company. As you may or may not remember, a lot of Linux people had GREAT disdain for Apple right up through OS9, mostly because they regarded their software as overly pedantic. However, Apple has always made a strong effort to tell the consumer that they are making their products FOR THEM. Their good personality as a company made sure that people always paid attention to them, and as soon as they started making better products, they started flying off the shelves.
The feeling that Microsoft is using its size to force me to deal with their software against my will is very hard to shake. Also, even though Microsoft will go to great lengths to tout the new features in Vista, the biggest ones I see are the Activation, the DRM, and the transparent look they ripped off of apple.
Of course, I'm sure there are a million people out there who could rebut all of this....but I mean...as I was kind of saying earlier, it's not about the facts anymore....it's about the feeling I get from the companies.
Apple seems like that kind of annoying artsy girl who's got a pretty good body but knows that less is more when it comes to getting your attention. Microsoft is a fat girl trying to get me alone in the elevator with her.
Honestly, unless Microsoft makes a concerted effort to make me feel like it's putting my *personal* needs above: - the desire to compete with EVERY SINGLE PRODUCT ON THE MARKET THAT MIGHT MAYBE EVER TURN A PROFIT (e.g. zune, msn live maps, msn search, msn, vista, tablet pc's, keyboards, mice, xbox, etc etc etc) - the needs of the media cartels (drm) - its desire for control (using xp to push ie) - it's need to stamp out piracy (activation) I'm not going to trust them. As it is I think they just get into as many markets as possible and use their size to push out competitors so they can do the minimum work possible.
Anyways, I've rambled on much longer than I should have. I suppose the reason I didn't cut this off a few pages ago is that you (claim) to actually work for microsoft, and I know that no matter what you think of your employer it's gotta suck to see a fucking army of people on here dumping on your employer like it's a full-time job. Sad to say, I think no matter how good you ever get at your job there, you won't ever change the perception out here that Microsoft makes "shitty" software and that it's "evil." There's just some unshakeable, fundamental feeling that Microsoft does not "care" about me as a consumer and no amount of good software will ever shake that.
Note: this is not a troll. I am trying to explain why people think Microsoft is evil, and I'm just not going to mince words about it.
In the opinion of many around here, Microsoft makes shitty software. Its marketshare is so large that, as a rather tech-savvy segment of the population, we are *forced* to deal with Microsoft or at least its effects on the industry.
Microsoft, like all other companies, tries to maintain and even increase its marketshare. To us, that is effectively an effort to spread the use of shitty software.
Microsoft is not evil or predatory or destructive in the way that the RIAA etc are...techies have just built up a lot of resentment towards the company over the years and 'evil' is the lowest-common-denominator slam.
Pull up the link in the parent post and Microsoft Live Maps side by side. Now scroll all the ways to the left of the Microsoft map and note where it ends on the Google Map. Now scroll all the way to the right and note where it ends on the google map. You'd think that the two sides of a two-dimensional world map would at least touch, or even overlap a bit, right? Not so. You'll notice that there's a slice of Eastern Russia that just *isn't on the map*. Even more interestingly, that part *precisely includes the area blurred on the goggle map.*
Why exactly is it less reprehensible / offensive to see soldiers die than schoolchildren?
Some of the people who died at columbine are old enough to go to war. Some soldiers, due to financial stresses / family traditions are just as compelled to be at war as students are to be at school. Soldiers routinely die horrible deaths because some asshole two-bit third-world dictator is feeling too big for his britches, or some enemy soldier has a bad day, or some army bureaucrat screws up...I don't see how that is any more 'ok' than some high school bully popping a gasket.
I think if you feel any difference between seeing highschoolers get mowed down and soliders get mowed down, you should ask yourself why exactly you feel that way. Your answers might surprise you.
It matters because no matter how much Joe Consumer likes his PS3, if the console isn't met with some measure of success in the market at large, it's not going to get developer support and games are not going to materialize.
Actually, a kernel does an OS make. Branding and userland utilities, such as in the case of Ubuntu and Debian, do not distinguish operating systems. That's why they're referred to different distributions of linux.
Quoth wikipedia: "An operating system (OS) is a computer program that manages the hardware and software resources of a computer. At the foundation of all system software, the OS performs basic tasks such as controlling and allocating memory, prioritizing system requests, controlling input and output devices, facilitating networking, and managing files. It also may provide a graphical user interface for higher level functions."
Note the fact that GUIs are optional.
Ubuntu and Debian are just different package preferences and userland utilities running on the same OS, Linux. Ubuntu forked the installer, layout, and some of the organizational structure, but their kernels and userland utilties are built from the same damn source.
Your initial comment was this:
"You can be certain that the OS X that runs on the iPhone is a distant relative of the OS X that runs on the desktop. The two OS probably have as much as common as say, Windows XP and Windows Mobile. Think fork."
XP and Windows mobile do not share a kernel, nor do they share userland utilities, because windows was not designed with scalability in mind. A GNU/Linux system, however, because it was designed with scalability in mind, can be run just as easily on an ipod as a desktop computer. Obviously some userland packages are too bloated, but the OS itself does not fork.
My point was that your assertion that the os x that runs on the iphone must not be related to desktop os x is wrong. I've looked at the darwin sources, and the kernel could certainly be built for an embedded environment. They might need to introduce compile-time options into their userland utilities to allow them to build memory-efficient versions, and such, but there is *no reason why they would need to fork os x*. In fact, there's no reason why the iphone and desktop versions of os x couldn't build off of the same set of sources. My original point was that if they were smart enough to make their OS and applications scalable there's no reason why they'd need two codebases.
Linux is a single unified source base. Pop open a console and go to/usr/src/linux. Architecture-specific code goes in the "arch" folder. On my system I've got code for 28 architectures in the arch folder, averaging about 2mb each. The other 217 megs of shit is platform-independent. That works out to about 1% arch-specific code.
Most distros offer their own patchsets against the main kernel tree, but you can run red hat's 2.6.19 kernel on suse, gentoo, etc etc as long as you build it to use whatever features the operating system requires (udev/devfs/etc) support.
Linux is not maintained as disjoint projects with a shared code base. One central repository (kernel.org) maintains the offical source, and specialists maintain the architecture-specific code.
Neither the arch-specific code nor the patchsets are forks. You probably consider them to be forks because you do not know what a fork is. A fork is when a group of developers copy the code from a project and develop it independently in another direction without any intention to merge back with the main trunk. Arch-specific code is not a fork because it exists as part of the main kernel trunk. Patchsets are not forks because they only exist to be applied against the main trunk. Good patchsets frequently get merged into the trunk anyways.
Linux runs on everything from phones and toasters to supercomputer clusters. You only need to fork your operating system if it wasn't designed with scalability in mind.
I've been programming C++ for 10 years, 3 of those professionally. These days I do a lot of Java, PHP, and Perl as well.
Unless your education was very different from the majority of CS programs out there, your education was not designed to help you develop software. To make an analogy, programmers are like writers; they rely on their ability to express their ideas to earn a living. Computer Scientists are like academic scholars; they rely on a broad knowledge of concepts to evaluate the effectiveness of certain ideas and approaches. A writer will write a book and a scholar will tell you objectively how it relates to various understandings of morality. A programmer will write a program, and a computer scientist will tell you mathematically how efficient it is.
The sad thing is that a lot of people out there who just want to write software end up getting these educations which prepare them to be computer scientists.
If you want to write software, the only way to get better is to write software. You are probably not going to be a professionally useful programmer until you have 10,000 lines of code under your belt. You will most likely not be capable of designing a 10,000 line software system until you have written 100,000 lines of code.
Pick something that interests you and start writing.
nehe.gamedev.net is a great site if you want to learn opengl. gtk+ is a very friendly api for cross-platform guis. the jabber protocol is fairly easy to implement if you're willing to do some research into writing c++ networking code.
If you have other interests reply here (or, hell, anywhere else in this discussion) and I'm sure people will point you in the right direction.
Hey, guys....I read through the developer's blog. There's a section in there which he tells non-programmers to skip, where he goes through the gritty details of why porting VBA is impossible. Here's a quick summary if you can't seem to sift through the tech-speak but still want to know what's going on.
First of all, a lot of the code that actually comprehends the VB programming language is actually tangled up in the GUI code. Second, the code has huge blocks of code that are written in processor-specific assembly. That means that they either have to fundamentally redesign the entire product or maintain separate versions for all of the different processors they support (32-bit PPC, 32-bit x86, 64-bit x86). Third, he rules out the possibility of porting the windows version of VBA over to the mac because the damn thing actually makes assumptions about how the actual.exe file is formatted. Finally, the author kinda passes blame along, saying he just inherited the whole program from his predecessors, who no longer work at Microsoft.
When I first read the article, I thought it stunk to high heaven of Microsoft trying to gimp Apple. I still believe this is going to be a huge headache for Apple users who rely on extensive cross-compatibility, but unless that blog is a large-scale, deliberate, malicious fabrication, VBA is really an ungodly mess of an application.
Who would have guessed?
summary of ted stevens' bill?
on
HR 5252 Bill Dies
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Can someone please link to or provide a quick summary of what Ted Stevens' bill would have enacted? I keep up with the network neutrality to some extent, but all of the corporate power grabs start to blur together after a while.
I don't mean this as a troll. I'm not a yahoo-hater by any means. I actually used them pretty frequently back in '97, when the web was young =).
My point is this: can anyone explain to me what precisely yahoo contributes to the internet nowadays? Microsoft (love them or hate them) just said hey, here's a new operating system. Google says hey, here's a new approach to email. Youtube says hey, here's a new way to share video. Even if you're a rabid fan or a hater of any of those companies, you have to admit that they have a clear product.
Yahoo, on the other hand, doesn't have any clear product. Sure, everyone knows them as a search company, but there are a billion search sites out there, and yahoo seems to be going in twenty different directions on its home page. Why should I use them instead of google, or craigslist, or cnn, or google news, or msnbc?
It seems like yahoo met with a lot of success with its search back in the day, and they're still puttering along like it's '97. Sure, back then, they were working hard to categorize a lot of the internet and make it easy to find things, but now, I honestly can't tell you what all of the people who work at yahoo are trying to do.
I agree with your point that it looked like Putin to begin with. I dont think anyone was expecting the polonium to have come from anywhere but Russia. This just confirms our fears and opens the door to a lot of finger-pointing.
And yeah, as sad as it sounds, that's the way it works. We send Israel billions of dollars of WMDs a year, because we like them. Somebody says that his third cousin's college roommate works with a guy who heard in a bar that Saddam still has WMDs, his country gets invaded and he's sentenced to death.
Russia whacking guys in western countries ignites cold war tensions. The UK/US whacking guys in western countries is business as usual. Such is the way of the world.
Because now it looks like Putin had one of his critics offed.
> Would it have made any different if it had been somewhere else?
Yes. If the polonium came from Russia it's likely that the government did it, because it's difficult for people outside of the government to get access to the reactor.
> If it had been in the UK, would a cold chill have fallen on relations between the UK and the West?
Well, UK *is* part of the West. That aside, no, the US and UK have really good relations (and fairly similar stances on these kind of assassinations (for the most part, actions in south america and the middle east aside)). They're likely to accuse Russia of this, and Russia will most likely take great offense. Russo-american relations are already strained over the cold war.
Honestly, I don't see the need for a WOW social networking site, since the players are already incredibly well-connected (vent, aim, wow forums, in-game chat). I think the only appeal is figuring out which players on the server are hot chicks and helping them finish quests. =)
I'm a bit skeptical of the definition of similar here. All of the convictions I know of came from leeching wireless in conjunction with doing something else...anyone remember that story about the guy who was parked outside of someone's house in a black suv for like three days, leeching their wireless?
Slashdot Mirror
I hear this argument again and again but I've never found it convincing. You're asserting that the price difference between indie and big-label music would work in the favor of indie labels if people weren't able to download the big-label music for free. Then you go on to assert that the quality of the big-label music is inferior, calling it "RIAA crap" and implying that they are somehow less "legitimate."
What you don't take into account is that it's just as easy to pirate indie music as riaa music. Furthermore, many indie labels offer free downloads. This means that not only can it all be found on the net for free, there's a larger, legal supply of indie music. If there's more of this music, it's easier to get, and it's free, it should win hands down. In a market with infinite supply and no cost, products should win based entirely on their merit.
The bottom line is that indie music is just like shareware software or any other kind of amateur work. There are gems but most of it sucks. A few geniuses always end up in the pile but by and large they have the level of popularity they merit.
Because they're either well-made or well-marketed.
Wow, this is incredible! For the price of a high-end gaming PC I can get a machine capable of high-end gaming PC visuals!
I should probably start by saying that I'm a linux guy. I run linux (but dual boot for games that I can't wine). I work as a linux programmer, and I spend 50 hours a week at a linux machine working on linux servers.
That said though, I believe a lot of the hatred towards Microsoft independent of the actual products that Microsoft makes. In my opinion, Microsoft hardware kicks the stuffing out of every other manufacturer in the market today. I've been using Vista since beta, and although I personally don't care for the interface and layout, it mostly does what it says it does. Even the biggest Linux / OSS zealots have to agree that Excel is a damn nice piece of software.
If it's not the software, then what is it?
Well, first of all, a lot of us have bad, bad memories of old Microsoft software. I don't care how long vista stays up without crashing...after running windows 95, I am just too skittish to call any Microsoft OS stable. I still think some of their software is terrible (*cough* IIS *cough* *cough*) but that's not really relevant; every company has some duds.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, a lot of techies KNOW that microsoft is big enough that the entire computing industry pays the price for their mistakes. It has the power to force DRM onto us, and it can effectively lock us in to its own proprietary standards. For example, just because IE was the default browser on XP, and there are a bajillion IE installs out there, I spend a huge amount of time dealing with its endless bugs and quirks at work.
Really, what it comes down to is the "feel" we get from the company. As you may or may not remember, a lot of Linux people had GREAT disdain for Apple right up through OS9, mostly because they regarded their software as overly pedantic. However, Apple has always made a strong effort to tell the consumer that they are making their products FOR THEM. Their good personality as a company made sure that people always paid attention to them, and as soon as they started making better products, they started flying off the shelves.
The feeling that Microsoft is using its size to force me to deal with their software against my will is very hard to shake. Also, even though Microsoft will go to great lengths to tout the new features in Vista, the biggest ones I see are the Activation, the DRM, and the transparent look they ripped off of apple.
Of course, I'm sure there are a million people out there who could rebut all of this....but I mean...as I was kind of saying earlier, it's not about the facts anymore....it's about the feeling I get from the companies.
Apple seems like that kind of annoying artsy girl who's got a pretty good body but knows that less is more when it comes to getting your attention. Microsoft is a fat girl trying to get me alone in the elevator with her.
Honestly, unless Microsoft makes a concerted effort to make me feel like it's putting my *personal* needs above:
- the desire to compete with EVERY SINGLE PRODUCT ON THE MARKET THAT MIGHT MAYBE EVER TURN A PROFIT (e.g. zune, msn live maps, msn search, msn, vista, tablet pc's, keyboards, mice, xbox, etc etc etc)
- the needs of the media cartels (drm)
- its desire for control (using xp to push ie)
- it's need to stamp out piracy (activation)
I'm not going to trust them. As it is I think they just get into as many markets as possible and use their size to push out competitors so they can do the minimum work possible.
Anyways, I've rambled on much longer than I should have. I suppose the reason I didn't cut this off a few pages ago is that you (claim) to actually work for microsoft, and I know that no matter what you think of your employer it's gotta suck to see a fucking army of people on here dumping on your employer like it's a full-time job. Sad to say, I think no matter how good you ever get at your job there, you won't ever change the perception out here that Microsoft makes "shitty" software and that it's "evil." There's just some unshakeable, fundamental feeling that Microsoft does not "care" about me as a consumer and no amount of good software will ever shake that.
Note: this is not a troll. I am trying to explain why people think Microsoft is evil, and I'm just not going to mince words about it.
In the opinion of many around here, Microsoft makes shitty software. Its marketshare is so large that, as a rather tech-savvy segment of the population, we are *forced* to deal with Microsoft or at least its effects on the industry.
Microsoft, like all other companies, tries to maintain and even increase its marketshare. To us, that is effectively an effort to spread the use of shitty software.
Microsoft is not evil or predatory or destructive in the way that the RIAA etc are...techies have just built up a lot of resentment towards the company over the years and 'evil' is the lowest-common-denominator slam.
Pull up the link in the parent post and Microsoft Live Maps side by side. Now scroll all the ways to the left of the Microsoft map and note where it ends on the Google Map. Now scroll all the way to the right and note where it ends on the google map. You'd think that the two sides of a two-dimensional world map would at least touch, or even overlap a bit, right? Not so. You'll notice that there's a slice of Eastern Russia that just *isn't on the map*. Even more interestingly, that part *precisely includes the area blurred on the goggle map.*
Now isn't that interesting?
Why exactly is it less reprehensible / offensive to see soldiers die than schoolchildren?
Some of the people who died at columbine are old enough to go to war. Some soldiers, due to financial stresses / family traditions are just as compelled to be at war as students are to be at school. Soldiers routinely die horrible deaths because some asshole two-bit third-world dictator is feeling too big for his britches, or some enemy soldier has a bad day, or some army bureaucrat screws up...I don't see how that is any more 'ok' than some high school bully popping a gasket.
I think if you feel any difference between seeing highschoolers get mowed down and soliders get mowed down, you should ask yourself why exactly you feel that way. Your answers might surprise you.
It matters because no matter how much Joe Consumer likes his PS3, if the console isn't met with some measure of success in the market at large, it's not going to get developer support and games are not going to materialize.
Actually, a kernel does an OS make. Branding and userland utilities, such as in the case of Ubuntu and Debian, do not distinguish operating systems. That's why they're referred to different distributions of linux.
Quoth wikipedia: "An operating system (OS) is a computer program that manages the hardware and software resources of a computer. At the foundation of all system software, the OS performs basic tasks such as controlling and allocating memory, prioritizing system requests, controlling input and output devices, facilitating networking, and managing files. It also may provide a graphical user interface for higher level functions."
Note the fact that GUIs are optional.
Ubuntu and Debian are just different package preferences and userland utilities running on the same OS, Linux. Ubuntu forked the installer, layout, and some of the organizational structure, but their kernels and userland utilties are built from the same damn source.
Your initial comment was this:
"You can be certain that the OS X that runs on the iPhone is a distant relative of the OS X that runs on the desktop. The two OS probably have as much as common as say, Windows XP and Windows Mobile. Think fork."
XP and Windows mobile do not share a kernel, nor do they share userland utilities, because windows was not designed with scalability in mind. A GNU/Linux system, however, because it was designed with scalability in mind, can be run just as easily on an ipod as a desktop computer. Obviously some userland packages are too bloated, but the OS itself does not fork.
My point was that your assertion that the os x that runs on the iphone must not be related to desktop os x is wrong. I've looked at the darwin sources, and the kernel could certainly be built for an embedded environment. They might need to introduce compile-time options into their userland utilities to allow them to build memory-efficient versions, and such, but there is *no reason why they would need to fork os x*. In fact, there's no reason why the iphone and desktop versions of os x couldn't build off of the same set of sources. My original point was that if they were smart enough to make their OS and applications scalable there's no reason why they'd need two codebases.
Linux is a single unified source base. Pop open a console and go to /usr/src/linux. Architecture-specific code goes in the "arch" folder. On my system I've got code for 28 architectures in the arch folder, averaging about 2mb each. The other 217 megs of shit is platform-independent. That works out to about 1% arch-specific code.
Most distros offer their own patchsets against the main kernel tree, but you can run red hat's 2.6.19 kernel on suse, gentoo, etc etc as long as you build it to use whatever features the operating system requires (udev/devfs/etc) support.
Linux is not maintained as disjoint projects with a shared code base. One central repository (kernel.org) maintains the offical source, and specialists maintain the architecture-specific code.
Neither the arch-specific code nor the patchsets are forks. You probably consider them to be forks because you do not know what a fork is. A fork is when a group of developers copy the code from a project and develop it independently in another direction without any intention to merge back with the main trunk. Arch-specific code is not a fork because it exists as part of the main kernel trunk. Patchsets are not forks because they only exist to be applied against the main trunk. Good patchsets frequently get merged into the trunk anyways.
Linux runs on everything from phones and toasters to supercomputer clusters. You only need to fork your operating system if it wasn't designed with scalability in mind.
Funny, where I come from, we call that the "don't use insecure products" solution.
Dear AC parent:
WHOOOOOOSH!
I've been programming C++ for 10 years, 3 of those professionally. These days I do a lot of Java, PHP, and Perl as well.
Unless your education was very different from the majority of CS programs out there, your education was not designed to help you develop software. To make an analogy, programmers are like writers; they rely on their ability to express their ideas to earn a living. Computer Scientists are like academic scholars; they rely on a broad knowledge of concepts to evaluate the effectiveness of certain ideas and approaches. A writer will write a book and a scholar will tell you objectively how it relates to various understandings of morality. A programmer will write a program, and a computer scientist will tell you mathematically how efficient it is.
The sad thing is that a lot of people out there who just want to write software end up getting these educations which prepare them to be computer scientists.
If you want to write software, the only way to get better is to write software. You are probably not going to be a professionally useful programmer until you have 10,000 lines of code under your belt. You will most likely not be capable of designing a 10,000 line software system until you have written 100,000 lines of code.
Pick something that interests you and start writing.
nehe.gamedev.net is a great site if you want to learn opengl.
gtk+ is a very friendly api for cross-platform guis.
the jabber protocol is fairly easy to implement if you're willing to do some research into writing c++ networking code.
If you have other interests reply here (or, hell, anywhere else in this discussion) and I'm sure people will point you in the right direction.
I have no idea. If anyone at my company even suggested such a hack I would have him fired on the spot. No, I'm not joking.
Hey, guys....I read through the developer's blog. There's a section in there which he tells non-programmers to skip, where he goes through the gritty details of why porting VBA is impossible. Here's a quick summary if you can't seem to sift through the tech-speak but still want to know what's going on.
.exe file is formatted. Finally, the author kinda passes blame along, saying he just inherited the whole program from his predecessors, who no longer work at Microsoft.
First of all, a lot of the code that actually comprehends the VB programming language is actually tangled up in the GUI code. Second, the code has huge blocks of code that are written in processor-specific assembly. That means that they either have to fundamentally redesign the entire product or maintain separate versions for all of the different processors they support (32-bit PPC, 32-bit x86, 64-bit x86). Third, he rules out the possibility of porting the windows version of VBA over to the mac because the damn thing actually makes assumptions about how the actual
When I first read the article, I thought it stunk to high heaven of Microsoft trying to gimp Apple. I still believe this is going to be a huge headache for Apple users who rely on extensive cross-compatibility, but unless that blog is a large-scale, deliberate, malicious fabrication, VBA is really an ungodly mess of an application.
Who would have guessed?
Can someone please link to or provide a quick summary of what Ted Stevens' bill would have enacted? I keep up with the network neutrality to some extent, but all of the corporate power grabs start to blur together after a while.
Thanks.
I don't mean this as a troll. I'm not a yahoo-hater by any means. I actually used them pretty frequently back in '97, when the web was young =).
My point is this: can anyone explain to me what precisely yahoo contributes to the internet nowadays? Microsoft (love them or hate them) just said hey, here's a new operating system. Google says hey, here's a new approach to email. Youtube says hey, here's a new way to share video. Even if you're a rabid fan or a hater of any of those companies, you have to admit that they have a clear product.
Yahoo, on the other hand, doesn't have any clear product. Sure, everyone knows them as a search company, but there are a billion search sites out there, and yahoo seems to be going in twenty different directions on its home page. Why should I use them instead of google, or craigslist, or cnn, or google news, or msnbc?
It seems like yahoo met with a lot of success with its search back in the day, and they're still puttering along like it's '97. Sure, back then, they were working hard to categorize a lot of the internet and make it easy to find things, but now, I honestly can't tell you what all of the people who work at yahoo are trying to do.
I agree with your point that it looked like Putin to begin with. I dont think anyone was expecting the polonium to have come from anywhere but Russia. This just confirms our fears and opens the door to a lot of finger-pointing.
And yeah, as sad as it sounds, that's the way it works. We send Israel billions of dollars of WMDs a year, because we like them. Somebody says that his third cousin's college roommate works with a guy who heard in a bar that Saddam still has WMDs, his country gets invaded and he's sentenced to death.
Russia whacking guys in western countries ignites cold war tensions. The UK/US whacking guys in western countries is business as usual. Such is the way of the world.
> Why is it so bad the reactor was in Russia?
Because now it looks like Putin had one of his critics offed.
> Would it have made any different if it had been somewhere else?
Yes. If the polonium came from Russia it's likely that the government did it, because it's difficult for people outside of the government to get access to the reactor.
> If it had been in the UK, would a cold chill have fallen on relations between the UK and the West?
Well, UK *is* part of the West. That aside, no, the US and UK have really good relations (and fairly similar stances on these kind of assassinations (for the most part, actions in south america and the middle east aside)). They're likely to accuse Russia of this, and Russia will most likely take great offense. Russo-american relations are already strained over the cold war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War
This has already been done to an extent.
http://www.facesofwow.com/gallery/index.php
Honestly, I don't see the need for a WOW social networking site, since the players are already incredibly well-connected (vent, aim, wow forums, in-game chat). I think the only appeal is figuring out which players on the server are hot chicks and helping them finish quests. =)
Where am I? Why am I wearing this chicken suit? The exuberance is insubstantial!
"vituperative"
I must congratulate you on your diction, sir!
*hug*
I'm a bit skeptical of the definition of similar here. All of the convictions I know of came from leeching wireless in conjunction with doing something else...anyone remember that story about the guy who was parked outside of someone's house in a black suv for like three days, leeching their wireless?