Unless I misunderstand things, both HD-DVD and Bluray use the same blue laser diodes (the differences are elsewhere).
Sony suspending shipments of diodes to horde them for itself doesn't disadvantage Bluray, it hurts other makers regardless of format; Sony is still making both standalone players and the PS3, and all of those will be Bluray, and none HD-DVD.
While the overall shortages may drive up prices and slow overall adoption of next-gen DVD players, Sony doesn't seem to be hurting the chances of Bluray winning the format war; indeed, if anything, its maximizing Bluray's chances by guaranteeing that all the Sony diodes end up in Bluray players.
So, the comparison is between "Apple Unix" (Mac OS, presumably) that people pay for a license/support contract from the OS software vendor (Apple), and Linux that people pay for a support contract from the OS software vendor (Red Hat, etc.)?
Well, duh. A big part of the whole point of OSS is that it doesn't have to be "commercial software" to use it in production: you can support it yourself if you have the in-house expertise, you can have an application vendor do OS support if they have the expertise to support the environment for their application, or you can have third-party support. Or you can close your eyes and pray. All without violating the license agreement.
Whereas something like Windows or MacOS, you have no choice—you pay for a license from the vendor that covers the use you are making , or you aren't legally able to use the software. Comparing "commercial Linux" to "commercial foo" when "foo" is only available as commercial software is not really apples-to-apples.
Um, Sony's stopped shipping the lasers to other people because they are using them in the PS3.
Plus, the artificial shortage they are creating will likely increase the prices for whatever lasers they do decide to sell to others, while the shortage of lasers means less competition for Sony players.
This suggests that the ones you've seen are for games where a "walkthrough" is even a viable concept. That's not the kind of game I generally play, and very much not the kind of game I was talking about when I referred to games like The Sims.
Yes, manuals have become thinner than they used to be, but there has been a marked moved in recent years towards "training levels" within the game itself where you are guided through the main functions of the game and its UI while actually enjoying the game experience.
Yeah, and I've found that they are far less useful than the manuals used to be, in many cases. Though, of course, they require less literacy and therefore broaden the market that can be reached. I understand the marketing value, but its a loss for me.
The rest of your argument, however, is not. 'Singular they' is indeed a revision, motivated by gender politicists unsatisfied with the availability of 'he' as the natural gender neutral third person singular pronoun in English.
That's a nice story. Unfortunately, its rather clearly wrong.
(Earlier, 'she' was imported for similar reasons as well.)
The use of "she" in that role (or alternating he/she, or using "he" for certain classes of subjects and "she" for others where identity and sex of the referent is indefinite, or using neologism like "hir") is, in fact, a much newer (rather than "earlier") phenomenon, rather than "earlier".
The early uses sometimes claimed as 'singular they' in fact are invariably actually 'indefinate they' where the *number* is indefinite.
The cool thing about people using absolutes like "invariably" is that a single counterexample suffices to demonstrate that the claim is false. But one can more than a single example of singular they/them/their that is not indefinite in number, but only in identity and sex of the referent. Rather than list the counterexamples here, though, I will point you to this page which (among other things) lists the numerous examples cited in the Oxford English Dictionary that rather thoroughly debunk the claim that the use historically has been only for indefinite number.
The most common use, you will note, is with a singular universal antecedent of the form ("some-", "no-", "any-") + ("-one", "-body"), etc., like the use (supposedly) at issue here with "someone".
Sure, they may be neat-o, but don't successful products generally have some sort of purpose?
Insofar as they do, its not all too uncommon for the purpose to be thought of by some clever marketeer after the product exists. But the internet cafe phenomenon suggests that there is a large set of users for whom web-based applications and online storage make quite a bit of sense.
...though "useless" kinda works, when you consider how much better, e.g., TeX with the appropriate packages is at lots of the things that Word (or PowerPoint) are used for.
Wikipedia is largely complete now, and very little improvement is going to happen with most of the articles on important topics.
As long as you restrict "important topics" to matters of history about which relatively complete knowledge exists now that are far enough in the past that current articles don't have agenda-driven cruft polluting them, that's maybe true; for moving target topics, like those in science and technical fields, that's certainly not the case. Anyway, what's important isn't a fixed target, either.
And, frankly, I think you greatly overestimate the completeness of Wikipedia.
They're as good as they're ever going to be, so if the article on gerbils gets 500 edits this year, that's 100% wasted effort, just running to stay in place.
I dunno. I just looked at the article on gerbils, and it looks like it could use a lot of work; it has subjective (and not even correctly spelled) commentary on one of its external links, for starters.
Are they really competing with Microsoft Office that much? I'm not sure they really are: while there is some overlap (especially with where Office is headed), they seem to be somewhat different target universes of usess.
I couldn't believe that it had come to that: People are so unwilling to play a game and enjoy the experience, that they buy the strategy guide WITH THE FREAKIN' GAME.
I've come to learn that, with certain kinds of games, what I used to expect in a manual will be found in the Strategy Guide.
So I tend to buy the Strategy Guide with those kinds of games when I buy them. Now, I'm not talking about "puzzle" games, but things like The Sims.
I guess the object is to blast through the game and do it as "perfectly" as possible as quickly as you can, so that you can go on to the next $50 game (+$16 strategy guide).
Certainly not with me; if its not still worth playing a game for at least a couple years after I bought it, I don't consider it to have been a good purchase in the first place.
...is the idea that you could learn much about the relationship between anything and today's popular culture from the Star Trek TV franchise, which had been struggling to remain viable on any basis but nostalgia for years before it finally died.
On the original Macintosh, all functions were accessable from menus. Now it's considered acceptable to have functions you can only reach from some wierd key combo, one not necessarily easy to find out about.
PC (and other) software frequently used to be like what you complain about as if it were "new" even before there was a Macintosh. And, even though—influenced by the Mac—most PC software that survived eventually grew pretty GUI menus and toolbars and gizmos and gadgets you could click with a mouse, weird key combinations just never died off. They weren't created by third-party documentation, they've always been there.
Perhaps you could make sure your pronoun agrees with your noun. "They" is a plural pronoun which should refer to a plural noun.
Wrong in two respects: the singular use of they in a generic sense in English is well attested and widely used, and has been for–essentially–ever (yes, it was never popular with the people who tried to impose Latin-inspired grammatical structure on English, but its not an area where they were ever all that successful in doing so.) So there's nothing really wrong with "someone...they". But, secondly, and (as others have pointed out), "comments", not "someone", is the antecedent of "they" and is, in any case, plural, so even if you were right that "someone...they" was an error, it wouldn't matter.
All the politically correct grammar revisionists can kiss my butt if they disagree.
Er, the "grammar revisionists" are the ones who tried (but, from the evidence of actual literary usage, failed) to impose that rule on English, contrary to the history revisionists who try to pretend otherwise.
...most games came with books the size, or at least information content, of most modern "strategy guides". They were called "manuals", and took up the space inside of the box instead of just having a disk and a cardboard insert.
For many games, the separation of what used to be expected in a robust manual into a separate "strategy guide" with the manual, if any, included with the game often little more than a basic introduction to the UI seems to be more of a way of restricting nominal price increases (as more of the work and cost is separated out into a different product) and narrowing the manufacturer's activities to their core competencies, than an excuse for making games more complex.
Sure, games are more complex, because newer computers can handle more complex games, and there is a market for them to fill. But its not strategy guides that have caused this,
Well, there is the study which found it comparable in terms of accuracy to the Encyclopedia Britannica, which strongly suggests that it works at least reasonably well as an encyclopedia.
What I have often wondered is how hard it would be for a small, quiet conspiracy to cause considerable damage to the factual accuracy of Wikipedia, especially in historical articles that don't get a lot of attention.
"Historical articles that don't get a lot of attention" might be easy to distort specifically because they don't get a lot of attention. OTOH, the same not getting a lot of attention that would make it easy would also make it of rather limited utility.
Of course, most encyclopedias in general aren't good for much more than casual verification when you already are generally familiar with the subject, getting an outline idea of a subject before you do more serious investigation, and, when you already know the subject material, pointing someone else too when you find a particular good explanation to save yourself the trouble of a lengthy explanation. In any of those uses, Wikipedia's weaknesses aren't really much of a problem.
for Google, the next step would be to create a javascript/css/html based presentation application to rival powerpoint.
Don't they already have Page Creator? How much difference in there between a "presentation" and a web site designed to viewed fullscreen and with a defined sequence of pages?
How precisely do they indicate the study was flawed?
It obliterates the conclusion drawn from the study.
The central finding of the study was that E-rated games without violence-related descriptors contained "unlabelled" "intentional violence", and that the rating was therefore untrustworthy, finding that 64% of a sample of 55 games contained between 30% and 90% "violent game play". When you recognize, however, that the same methodology rates Pac-Man as 62% "violent", Dig Dug 67% violent, and Centipede 97% violent, it makes it a lot harder to take seriously that the 30%-90% ratings found for 64% of the games in the study in any way shows that the absence of an ESRB violence descriptor in an E-rated game is substantially misleading, as the kind of arguable "violence" in Pac-Man, Dig Dug, or Centipede is not what most people are looking to ratings to protect children from.
Thompson's "research" on media ratings (consistently coming to the conclusion that every type of rating system in existence underrates every kind of media and is getting worse all the time) has all the hallmarks of a political crusade masquerading as science, and highly selective presentation of data an expunging data that would call into question the conclusion rather than presenting the facts found fairly is a central hallmark of such pseudo-science.
But that's not all (by far) of Thompson's research, and its certainly not unheard for an otherwise top-flight researcher to have a hobbyhorse issue where they go off the deep end (its particularly noticeable to the public with researchers in the social sciences since those issues tend to be politically salient; the same thing in physical scientists gets seen more as eccentricity since when they got goofy about an issue, its usually not political salient, and often is completely incomprehensible to laymen.)
IIRC, diesel engines generally produce less power output per pound of engine weight, which hurts them in speed contests against gasoline negines. Their advantage in many applications is that they are more cost effective in terms of the kind and quantity of fuel consumed to do their work.
The FTC is largely anti-neutrality. The "there's no problem yet" attitude will, once the problem exists, likely be replaced with a "the problem doesn't justify the disruption that forcing companies to change established practices" stance once problems emerge (unless FTC members are replaced, first.)
Of course, taking action before there was a problem would avoid the disruption, but the FTC is on the side of the people who stand to benefit from the "problems" that would be prevented.
Its also been used by rental car companies to track speeding (pretty much the exact application described in the summary, with "parents" replaced by "owners" and "teens" replaced by "renters"), although I seem to remember at least one legal decision striking down the use as illegal.
At any rate, you are correct, this is a decidely non-novel "invention" that is already in use; I wouldn't be surprised if something either like this or transponder-based wasn't in the next couple decades required for all cars by the government just as license plates are, and used not only to monitor speeding, but also to assess road tolls, and for more intrusive law enforcement purposes.
Who will use this? Sure, I can see Microsoft doing this, as the article says, in order to take a pre-emptive strike against Open Office. But who will use Office for Linux? The current Linux users defintely won't for several reasons: 1.) They hate Micrsoft 2.) They don't want to have to pay for anything, especially something that runs on Linux 3.) They don't want to introduce new vulnerabilities to their system 4.) They already have a solid alternative in Open Office
If desktop Linux is ever going to be significant, then it is going to have attracted lots (compared to its current userbase) of the people now using MS Windows and/or MacOS who don't have nearly as strong a feeling for (1), (2), or (3), but simply want works best and think as a desktop environment whatever version of Linux they choose meets that. But they may still see value in interoperability with outside organizations that are still standardized on Office, and OOo interoperability with Office is always going to lag a bit, so having MS Office available would be a plus for many of them, likely.
I disagree that MS is likely to do it, though, unless its already certain its failed in its bid to maintain Windows platform dominance. Microsoft has too much to lose by weakening the disincentives to switch from Windows, and too little to gain even if Linux had 5-10 times its current desktop market share.
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Unless I misunderstand things, both HD-DVD and Bluray use the same blue laser diodes (the differences are elsewhere).
Sony suspending shipments of diodes to horde them for itself doesn't disadvantage Bluray, it hurts other makers regardless of format; Sony is still making both standalone players and the PS3, and all of those will be Bluray, and none HD-DVD.
While the overall shortages may drive up prices and slow overall adoption of next-gen DVD players, Sony doesn't seem to be hurting the chances of Bluray winning the format war; indeed, if anything, its maximizing Bluray's chances by guaranteeing that all the Sony diodes end up in Bluray players.
So, the comparison is between "Apple Unix" (Mac OS, presumably) that people pay for a license/support contract from the OS software vendor (Apple), and Linux that people pay for a support contract from the OS software vendor (Red Hat, etc.)?
Well, duh. A big part of the whole point of OSS is that it doesn't have to be "commercial software" to use it in production: you can support it yourself if you have the in-house expertise, you can have an application vendor do OS support if they have the expertise to support the environment for their application, or you can have third-party support. Or you can close your eyes and pray. All without violating the license agreement.
Whereas something like Windows or MacOS, you have no choice—you pay for a license from the vendor that covers the use you are making , or you aren't legally able to use the software. Comparing "commercial Linux" to "commercial foo" when "foo" is only available as commercial software is not really apples-to-apples.
I've got really nice full-spectrum-ish flourescent desk lamps at home, but I haven't seen comparable bulbs for standard fixtures, unfortunately.
Um, Sony's stopped shipping the lasers to other people because they are using them in the PS3.
Plus, the artificial shortage they are creating will likely increase the prices for whatever lasers they do decide to sell to others, while the shortage of lasers means less competition for Sony players.
How is Sony losing, here?
This suggests that the ones you've seen are for games where a "walkthrough" is even a viable concept. That's not the kind of game I generally play, and very much not the kind of game I was talking about when I referred to games like The Sims.
Yeah, and I've found that they are far less useful than the manuals used to be, in many cases. Though, of course, they require less literacy and therefore broaden the market that can be reached. I understand the marketing value, but its a loss for me.
That's a nice story. Unfortunately, its rather clearly wrong.
The use of "she" in that role (or alternating he/she, or using "he" for certain classes of subjects and "she" for others where identity and sex of the referent is indefinite, or using neologism like "hir") is, in fact, a much newer (rather than "earlier") phenomenon, rather than "earlier".
The cool thing about people using absolutes like "invariably" is that a single counterexample suffices to demonstrate that the claim is false. But one can more than a single example of singular they/them/their that is not indefinite in number, but only in identity and sex of the referent. Rather than list the counterexamples here, though, I will point you to this page which (among other things) lists the numerous examples cited in the Oxford English Dictionary that rather thoroughly debunk the claim that the use historically has been only for indefinite number.
The most common use, you will note, is with a singular universal antecedent of the form ("some-", "no-", "any-") + ("-one", "-body"), etc., like the use (supposedly) at issue here with "someone".
...though "useless" kinda works, when you consider how much better, e.g., TeX with the appropriate packages is at lots of the things that Word (or PowerPoint) are used for.
Are they really competing with Microsoft Office that much? I'm not sure they really are: while there is some overlap (especially with where Office is headed), they seem to be somewhat different target universes of usess.
I've come to learn that, with certain kinds of games, what I used to expect in a manual will be found in the Strategy Guide.
So I tend to buy the Strategy Guide with those kinds of games when I buy them. Now, I'm not talking about "puzzle" games, but things like The Sims.
Certainly not with me; if its not still worth playing a game for at least a couple years after I bought it, I don't consider it to have been a good purchase in the first place.
...is the idea that you could learn much about the relationship between anything and today's popular culture from the Star Trek TV franchise, which had been struggling to remain viable on any basis but nostalgia for years before it finally died.
PC (and other) software frequently used to be like what you complain about as if it were "new" even before there was a Macintosh. And, even though—influenced by the Mac—most PC software that survived eventually grew pretty GUI menus and toolbars and gizmos and gadgets you could click with a mouse, weird key combinations just never died off. They weren't created by third-party documentation, they've always been there.
Wrong in two respects: the singular use of they in a generic sense in English is well attested and widely used, and has been for–essentially–ever (yes, it was never popular with the people who tried to impose Latin-inspired grammatical structure on English, but its not an area where they were ever all that successful in doing so.) So there's nothing really wrong with "someone...they". But, secondly, and (as others have pointed out), "comments", not "someone", is the antecedent of "they" and is, in any case, plural, so even if you were right that "someone...they" was an error, it wouldn't matter.
Er, the "grammar revisionists" are the ones who tried (but, from the evidence of actual literary usage, failed) to impose that rule on English, contrary to the history revisionists who try to pretend otherwise.
...most games came with books the size, or at least information content, of most modern "strategy guides". They were called "manuals", and took up the space inside of the box instead of just having a disk and a cardboard insert.
For many games, the separation of what used to be expected in a robust manual into a separate "strategy guide" with the manual, if any, included with the game often little more than a basic introduction to the UI seems to be more of a way of restricting nominal price increases (as more of the work and cost is separated out into a different product) and narrowing the manufacturer's activities to their core competencies, than an excuse for making games more complex.
Sure, games are more complex, because newer computers can handle more complex games, and there is a market for them to fill. But its not strategy guides that have caused this,
"Historical articles that don't get a lot of attention" might be easy to distort specifically because they don't get a lot of attention. OTOH, the same not getting a lot of attention that would make it easy would also make it of rather limited utility.
Of course, most encyclopedias in general aren't good for much more than casual verification when you already are generally familiar with the subject, getting an outline idea of a subject before you do more serious investigation, and, when you already know the subject material, pointing someone else too when you find a particular good explanation to save yourself the trouble of a lengthy explanation. In any of those uses, Wikipedia's weaknesses aren't really much of a problem.
It obliterates the conclusion drawn from the study.
The central finding of the study was that E-rated games without violence-related descriptors contained "unlabelled" "intentional violence", and that the rating was therefore untrustworthy, finding that 64% of a sample of 55 games contained between 30% and 90% "violent game play". When you recognize, however, that the same methodology rates Pac-Man as 62% "violent", Dig Dug 67% violent, and Centipede 97% violent, it makes it a lot harder to take seriously that the 30%-90% ratings found for 64% of the games in the study in any way shows that the absence of an ESRB violence descriptor in an E-rated game is substantially misleading, as the kind of arguable "violence" in Pac-Man, Dig Dug, or Centipede is not what most people are looking to ratings to protect children from.
Thompson's "research" on media ratings (consistently coming to the conclusion that every type of rating system in existence underrates every kind of media and is getting worse all the time) has all the hallmarks of a political crusade masquerading as science, and highly selective presentation of data an expunging data that would call into question the conclusion rather than presenting the facts found fairly is a central hallmark of such pseudo-science.
But that's not all (by far) of Thompson's research, and its certainly not unheard for an otherwise top-flight researcher to have a hobbyhorse issue where they go off the deep end (its particularly noticeable to the public with researchers in the social sciences since those issues tend to be politically salient; the same thing in physical scientists gets seen more as eccentricity since when they got goofy about an issue, its usually not political salient, and often is completely incomprehensible to laymen.)
IIRC, diesel engines generally produce less power output per pound of engine weight, which hurts them in speed contests against gasoline negines. Their advantage in many applications is that they are more cost effective in terms of the kind and quantity of fuel consumed to do their work.
The FTC is largely anti-neutrality. The "there's no problem yet" attitude will, once the problem exists, likely be replaced with a "the problem doesn't justify the disruption that forcing companies to change established practices" stance once problems emerge (unless FTC members are replaced, first.)
Of course, taking action before there was a problem would avoid the disruption, but the FTC is on the side of the people who stand to benefit from the "problems" that would be prevented.
Its also been used by rental car companies to track speeding (pretty much the exact application described in the summary, with "parents" replaced by "owners" and "teens" replaced by "renters"), although I seem to remember at least one legal decision striking down the use as illegal.
At any rate, you are correct, this is a decidely non-novel "invention" that is already in use; I wouldn't be surprised if something either like this or transponder-based wasn't in the next couple decades required for all cars by the government just as license plates are, and used not only to monitor speeding, but also to assess road tolls, and for more intrusive law enforcement purposes.
If desktop Linux is ever going to be significant, then it is going to have attracted lots (compared to its current userbase) of the people now using MS Windows and/or MacOS who don't have nearly as strong a feeling for (1), (2), or (3), but simply want works best and think as a desktop environment whatever version of Linux they choose meets that. But they may still see value in interoperability with outside organizations that are still standardized on Office, and OOo interoperability with Office is always going to lag a bit, so having MS Office available would be a plus for many of them, likely.
I disagree that MS is likely to do it, though, unless its already certain its failed in its bid to maintain Windows platform dominance. Microsoft has too much to lose by weakening the disincentives to switch from Windows, and too little to gain even if Linux had 5-10 times its current desktop market share.