What is "real" money, my friend? Money is an abstraction, a convenience. Money works only because we have agreed to use it.
If you only consider money real if Walmart accepts it (I'm exaggerating, but I think you understand my point), please reconsider: there are literally hundreds of different currencies in the world, all printed by recognized governments and some even fully backed by national gold reserves, that you will not be able to purchase anything somewhere other than the country of that money's origin. If governments can do it, why can't companies (provided they have enough customers for it to make any sense)?
Disclaimer: I do not play FarmVille or similar games. Actually, I do not use Facebook at all, although I do have an account there.
Or with any of their other acquisitions. Hell, they even rolled out Dodgeball [now Google Latitude] despite both of the original authors quitting Google, and that was the most screwed-up acquisition of theirs that I know of. Just take a look at the Wikipedia list: virtually all of the startups they bought are full of life and have become well-known products (except those that have been acquired quite recently or deal with things like security or server technology).
Add to the equation the fact that Google sometimes open-sources the codebase for the original product they got with the startup (like Jaiku and Etherpad), and I'm left wonder what else do you want with them:)
After all the years of delays and cost overruns, I'm extremely glad to see LHC entering normal operation mode. Congratulations to everybody who contributed and thank you very much for your commitment and hard work!
P.S. The labs down the hall that participate in the collaboration will be partying tonight:)
The problem is that electricity produced by more expensive solar panels or wind turbines will be just that - more expensive. So whatever goods are produced at a factory using these power sources will be ultimately more expensive than the competition's (provided that the competitors use Chinese panels). Rinse, repeat several times to account for multiple manufacturing steps, and either you use Chinese power sources, or you get out of business.
And no, taxing usage of Chinese power sources in America is not an option either, because then all the remaining manufacturing capacity left will move to countries with access to cheap power
Even better: Google has two classes of shares: A and B, one having 10 votes per share and the other only one vote per share. Selling the 10-vote share automatically makes it 1-vote share. Larry and Sergey, unsurprisingly, have all the 10-vote shares.
So, in order to have ultimate control over Google, the two only need to have 5% of all the shares, not 50%, as long as all the shares they own are B-class.
Why does everybody keep forgetting about Google Checkout? They even have a special donations program! And I find Google one of the most trustworthy companies on the Internet nowadays, despite the paranoid anti-Google sentiment common here on Slashdot.
I think that centralized media will survive in any case, even if the government has to fund them to keep them afloat. Besides being a pretty good advertisement platform, newspapers and TV are also very useful as tools of propaganda. We'll just have to see if they are useful enough in that role to justify upkeep, or our overlords (the old ones) will invent a find of tricks to do the same job without TV/newspapers.
Provided it has a sufficiently isolated userbase (millions of kids that rarely talk to older people other than their parents or teachers, and even more rarely text or email them), it might as well develop into a distinct dialect, if not more.
The difference between leet and Morse Code is that there is no standard defining leet, nor there are any leet exams or formal education, so it can freely transform to the needs of its audience.
If most members of that group assign similar grades to their peers, that could mean in the light of this study that some of that "c u l8r" stuff can more or less informative to them, and that - shock! - people can be worse or better at using this newspeak, if I may say so. This is the valuable result of this study, not the actual ratings. In other words, we have just discovered that this newspeak is an actual language, which also has more and less skilled users, and that the quality of their newspeak skills doesn't necessarily correlate with their English skills.
They're hiding something. Since the Japanese ministry of agriculture is not responsible for Gundam, it must be some other ministry of agriculture responsible for it. And this is but one sinister sign of which one exactly it might be...
Such as bug 452518 (saving MS Word format documents using Open Office KDE shipped with Kubuntu 9.10 can result in corrupted files). However, the list of great features planned for this release is amazing! Ubuntu is no longer "Debian with a graphical installer and brown theme", it has become a pretty interesting distro on its own merit.
Not only that, but it will give Android a bad reputation
Why? The masses aren't likely to even hear about this netbook should it be a commercial failure (which is most likely), and the techies know better than to expect a smartphone OS to work for netbooks. So if anything, this will give Acer bad reputation.
I doubt that Google had netbooks in mind when they released Android. Keep in mind that they have announced ChromeOS to be their operating system for netbooks (and possibly over time more powerful machines as well), and it should be pretty clear that Acer's experiment had very low chances to succeed anyway. However, if ChromeOS and Android somehow use compatible app markets, that might be interesting...
Well well well. Mods, if you're not curious about a subject, just spend your mod points elsewhere. It's not like Slashdot has a shortage of real trolls or whatever.
Please get some coffee, you're being inattentive. Look, company 1 (Microsoft) has an OS product (Windows), promotes its own web browser to be bundled with it using all the dirty tricks invented by mankind, rightfully gets a hit by a shitstorm. Now, company 2 (Google) announces an OS product (ChromeOS), which appears to be bundled to its own browser (Chrome), as one can conclude from its name, and likely there will be no option to install another browser. That appears to be okay while there is no or little market adoption of ChromeOS, but wouldn't it put Google in a position very much resembling Microsoft's current one if ChromeOS becomes the dominant desktop OS one day?
Disclaimer: I don't use Microsoft products, I'm a Linux guy, I'm very fond of a lot of things that Google does. That's part of the reason I made my first post: I wouldn't enjoy seeing Google being steamrolled by an EU antitrust action N years later, and was expressing interest if such an antitrust action would be applicable to its offerings at all.
1) My post begins with "if we wake up tomorrow...". Ever heard of conditional sentences?
2) You missed all the fun. Google has announced the Chrome OS project back in July, please crawl out of your cave/bunker already.
3) That is not required; being unable to install a different browser just because the user wants to install it is enough.
Please see this post for clarification. In short: if we wake up tomorrow and ChromeOS is already the dominant operating system, would it be required of it to support installation of third party browsers, even if such a feature was never intended?
Slashdot Mirror
What is "real" money, my friend? Money is an abstraction, a convenience. Money works only because we have agreed to use it.
If you only consider money real if Walmart accepts it (I'm exaggerating, but I think you understand my point), please reconsider: there are literally hundreds of different currencies in the world, all printed by recognized governments and some even fully backed by national gold reserves, that you will not be able to purchase anything somewhere other than the country of that money's origin. If governments can do it, why can't companies (provided they have enough customers for it to make any sense)?
Disclaimer: I do not play FarmVille or similar games. Actually, I do not use Facebook at all, although I do have an account there.
Or with any of their other acquisitions. Hell, they even rolled out Dodgeball [now Google Latitude] despite both of the original authors quitting Google, and that was the most screwed-up acquisition of theirs that I know of. Just take a look at the Wikipedia list: virtually all of the startups they bought are full of life and have become well-known products (except those that have been acquired quite recently or deal with things like security or server technology). :)
Add to the equation the fact that Google sometimes open-sources the codebase for the original product they got with the startup (like Jaiku and Etherpad), and I'm left wonder what else do you want with them
After all the years of delays and cost overruns, I'm extremely glad to see LHC entering normal operation mode. Congratulations to everybody who contributed and thank you very much for your commitment and hard work! :)
P.S. The labs down the hall that participate in the collaboration will be partying tonight
And no, taxing usage of Chinese power sources in America is not an option either, because then all the remaining manufacturing capacity left will move to countries with access to cheap power
Even better: Google has two classes of shares: A and B, one having 10 votes per share and the other only one vote per share. Selling the 10-vote share automatically makes it 1-vote share. Larry and Sergey, unsurprisingly, have all the 10-vote shares.
So, in order to have ultimate control over Google, the two only need to have 5% of all the shares, not 50%, as long as all the shares they own are B-class.
There is an alternative: try Google Checkout.
Why does everybody keep forgetting about Google Checkout? They even have a special donations program! And I find Google one of the most trustworthy companies on the Internet nowadays, despite the paranoid anti-Google sentiment common here on Slashdot.
Here
If that's the case, how do you define "free"?
Now if NVidia cards would work on those architectures, too :-)
I suggest we ban all games with guns and nudity... What do you mean by "nothing left to play except Tetris"?
I think that centralized media will survive in any case, even if the government has to fund them to keep them afloat. Besides being a pretty good advertisement platform, newspapers and TV are also very useful as tools of propaganda. We'll just have to see if they are useful enough in that role to justify upkeep, or our overlords (the old ones) will invent a find of tricks to do the same job without TV/newspapers.
Provided it has a sufficiently isolated userbase (millions of kids that rarely talk to older people other than their parents or teachers, and even more rarely text or email them), it might as well develop into a distinct dialect, if not more.
The difference between leet and Morse Code is that there is no standard defining leet, nor there are any leet exams or formal education, so it can freely transform to the needs of its audience.
Yes I do. I agree, perhaps l337speak or leetspeak would be a much better term in this case.
If most members of that group assign similar grades to their peers, that could mean in the light of this study that some of that "c u l8r" stuff can more or less informative to them, and that - shock! - people can be worse or better at using this newspeak, if I may say so. This is the valuable result of this study, not the actual ratings. In other words, we have just discovered that this newspeak is an actual language, which also has more and less skilled users, and that the quality of their newspeak skills doesn't necessarily correlate with their English skills.
They're hiding something. Since the Japanese ministry of agriculture is not responsible for Gundam, it must be some other ministry of agriculture responsible for it. And this is but one sinister sign of which one exactly it might be...
Or, if a new release candidate turns out to be a disaster, Linux runs her, so to say ;-) [no offense meant]
- Help! Call the police! A huge Koala has trashed my hall with a load of dirty socks, and is now fucking my girlfriend!
Such as bug 452518 (saving MS Word format documents using Open Office KDE shipped with Kubuntu 9.10 can result in corrupted files).
However, the list of great features planned for this release is amazing! Ubuntu is no longer "Debian with a graphical installer and brown theme", it has become a pretty interesting distro on its own merit.
Not only that, but it will give Android a bad reputation
Why? The masses aren't likely to even hear about this netbook should it be a commercial failure (which is most likely), and the techies know better than to expect a smartphone OS to work for netbooks. So if anything, this will give Acer bad reputation.
I doubt that Google had netbooks in mind when they released Android. Keep in mind that they have announced ChromeOS to be their operating system for netbooks (and possibly over time more powerful machines as well), and it should be pretty clear that Acer's experiment had very low chances to succeed anyway. However, if ChromeOS and Android somehow use compatible app markets, that might be interesting...
Well well well. Mods, if you're not curious about a subject, just spend your mod points elsewhere. It's not like Slashdot has a shortage of real trolls or whatever.
Please get some coffee, you're being inattentive.
Look, company 1 (Microsoft) has an OS product (Windows), promotes its own web browser to be bundled with it using all the dirty tricks invented by mankind, rightfully gets a hit by a shitstorm.
Now, company 2 (Google) announces an OS product (ChromeOS), which appears to be bundled to its own browser (Chrome), as one can conclude from its name, and likely there will be no option to install another browser. That appears to be okay while there is no or little market adoption of ChromeOS, but wouldn't it put Google in a position very much resembling Microsoft's current one if ChromeOS becomes the dominant desktop OS one day?
Disclaimer: I don't use Microsoft products, I'm a Linux guy, I'm very fond of a lot of things that Google does. That's part of the reason I made my first post: I wouldn't enjoy seeing Google being steamrolled by an EU antitrust action N years later, and was expressing interest if such an antitrust action would be applicable to its offerings at all.
1) My post begins with "if we wake up tomorrow...". Ever heard of conditional sentences?
2) You missed all the fun. Google has announced the Chrome OS project back in July, please crawl out of your cave/bunker already.
3) That is not required; being unable to install a different browser just because the user wants to install it is enough.
Please see this post for clarification. In short: if we wake up tomorrow and ChromeOS is already the dominant operating system, would it be required of it to support installation of third party browsers, even if such a feature was never intended?