The big problem I have with MicroSoft, is that they only innovate when they have real competition. Otherwise they just stall as they don't seem to be able to have an innovative idea on their own. But I don't count them out yet, even if WP7 was not their first try at a mobile OS. (hint: it's got a "7" as version number). If five years from now MS does indeed dominate the mobile market, which I fear they might, then it will be bad, because Apple and Google, the biggest innovators of the last decade, will have been defeated and probably gone down in flames.
This is a more likely scenario then people hold possible right now. I see them also dominating gaming though Xbox a couple years from now, it only needs one wrong move by Sony and Nintendo.
For temperature I don't care either way. I'm used to Celcius, but I would not mind Fahrenheit. Both are relatively arbitrary. I find the zero of Celsius somewhat useful as it means I have to watch out on de roads for icy conditions.
For other things, like length, surface and volume, electric fields and a couple more things, I find that metric is really a lot simpler, even though the meter itself is relatively arbitrary. I would have no problem with a system in centriyards, kiloyards, hectoyards, cubic yards etc. It's all the different units for the same thing that make things confusing.
Document Foundation does indeed sound a lot better.
I personally like what Apple and MS did, they gave the applications separate names: Pages, Word, Excel, Numbers, Keynote, Powerpoint.
Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress aren't too bad in that respect. Officially they could have a DF prefix, so it would be DF Writer, DF Calc, DF Draw, DF Impress, and the whole thing would be Document Foundation Office, or just OpenOffice, both sound better than LibreOffice (and I'm not a native English speaker).
As a frequent user of Facebook, I find the numbers of rogue and bogus applications to be the most annoying aspect of the site. They need to start seriously vetting the developers and apps NOW.
But I thought that this was exactly why everyone over here hated the Apple AppStore? Isn't everything supposed to be free so the users can make their own choices?
When I visit the US, I'm always amazed that there are many channels, but there's nothing on them except commercials. I usually zap through all the channels, find nothing and turn the TV off again.
Now there's plenty of mindless drivel on the TV where I live too, but a lot less commercials (even on the commercial TV (non-public) channels) and usually there is something worth watching on at least one or two of the 25 or so channels I get.
I really like Spotify. I have a reasonable mp3 collection, most of which I ripped from CDs. But the nice thing about Spotify is that it allows you to make temporary playlists on a whim. Like for example last summer I wanted to listen to some African music because I got inspired by the football world cup in South Africa. I only knew a few, and then I found many more by looking at what Spotify suggested were similar artists. Same thing with a colleague from India I carpooled with for a while. He taught me a lot about Indian classical music by playing around with Spotify on my iPhone and while I was driving. (yay for car stereo with an iPod connector). My playlist of French music was created in a similar way.
Guess I'll go back to pirating music again then
Well, if you're not planning to pay for it, then I suppose you're exactly the kind of "customer" Spotify wants to get rid of.
I know this attitude well. Being Canadian, it's even worse here.
I try to buy media, and would love to be able to legitimately buy various movies and TV shows online, but thanks to the CBC/CRTC, they can't be made available here thanks to some very backwards and broken laws.
Try living in the Netherlands. I got an iPod Video in 2004, when iTunes was supposed to start selling movies and TV shows. Still nothing: There is no way for me to legally buy or rent a movie or TV show online. Not Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, iTunes or any of the others. If I want to legally have access to most of the stuff I want to see, then I have to hope that at some point it gets released in Region 2 on DVD, usually years after it was originally released.
I really hope that Spotify succeeds as a business model. It really shows even more than iTunes what can be done with the internet. It's especially great over my unlimited data plan on my iPhone, because I can't carry my whole collection of music and/or movies with me. €9,95 a month is peanuts compared to how much I use it.
Occasionally you find that a song is not on Spotify, but I now have an account for almost a year and it's been great fun, especially to quickly find new kinds of music I didn't know yet if I have one song as an example and then build a playlist by finding similar artists.
I woudn't call it hardcore SF, but on the SF vs. Fantasy it should come down on the side of SF.
Space opera like Star Wars doesn't focus on the science and technology. But hyperspace travel, planet size cities (Coruscant), space ships, makes it share a lot more with for example the Foundation stories of Asimov, then it does with the legends of King Arthur.
Science Fiction is often just used as a backdrop to explore "what if" scenarios. Stories like Avatar or Starship Troopers could also have been told in a non-Sf setting. Probably BSG, SW and most of SF could. But still, if the writer goes for spaceships, aliens, and advanced technology instead of dragons, vampires and magic, then it's SF instead of Fantasy.
The lines get even more blurry with stories like Superman, Heroes or Xmen. I think a lot of superhero stories are in the grey area between SF and Fantasy. Something like Green Lantern leans a bit towards SF, something like Thor is basically pure fantasy. I'd call radioactive spiders a mythological creature too.
You make a valid point. But I think that Software Engineering and Management still have a lot to develop. We still don't really know how to do big software projects, most of them fail in one way or another. It might not be the classical Computer Science from the 1970's and 80's, but it's the challenge faced today. Next to that new algorithms will always be needed, although that sometimes is almost more Mathematics than CS.
But even current compiler technology has it's limits. I'm no expert, but at least that's what I was told about the Itanium: Nobody could make a decent compiler for it.
But in any mature discipline a lot of the work is engineering. I'm working on a new telescope (lofar), and most of it is just high end engineering, but at the same time we're pushing the boundaries and also breaking new ground in computer science and several kinds of physics.
I don't understand why more and more, people mix up the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy. There might be a lot of overlap in the audiences, and sometimes the line gets a little blurred, but have we now really gone as low as calling Lord of the Rings a Science Fiction ?????!?!!?!?
It might not have a lot to do with the topic at hand, but I don't think Tolkien in his wildest dreams could have imagined that his master piece would ever be called a Science Fiction.
I'll allow The Matrix, Torchwood and Dr.Who into the SF category, but Buffy, LotR or Being Human. Who makes up this stuff??
Sorry for the rant, but I really don't understand why a lot of Fantasy is being misnamed as SF nowadays. Where does this come from, can anyone explain?
Maybe I'm getting old, I just turned 35. When I say Science Fiction, I mean Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars. Fantasy is Tolkien, Jordan and Feist, Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribean.
Sure the line gets blurred a bit with a writer like Tanith Lee or a series like Smallville. But sheeesh, calling Lord of the Rings an SF???
Yeah, but if you do need anything more, it's a half year long struggle to get it.
I really tried with Excel, but it only goes sofar.
And even then manipulating 2 GB Excel files on a machine with 512MB RAM was a pain, but I couldn't convince my boss I needed more RAM, even though my inability to perform certain calculations in a timely manner was costing the company millions. He needed to have an exact answer how much money we would save to do de € 50 investment. A ballpark figure of "at least several million" wasn't enough for him.
I think that it's a sign that engineers are very bad at organizing themselves. Unlike lawyers or surgeons or accountants.
I think it's because on average those attracted to engineering have less social skills then for example lawyers. And we're a bit of an anarchistic bunch.
No matter which side tries to take a step forward, the other side will tear it down.
Which I think is one of the big flaws of the two party system you guys have. Sure a multi-party system has the drawback that it sometimes is difficult to form a coalition if nobody has a majority.
But if the system becomes stagnant, then it's easy for a new party to get heard, gain votes and influence, and often become a crucial part of a coalition for it to secure a majority even if by itself it might only be 10% or so of the electorate.
I find that it keeps parties and their politicians much more honest if they know a new party can come along replace them quite easily.
I think you should watch the movie as a story of what could happen if the military-industrial complex gets even more power over society than it has now.
Replace the aliens with "terrorists" in Irak and you have essentially the same story.
On the face of it, it's just a simple action movie. but as I know Paul Verhoeven's films, there is always an undertone with a deeper message.
But then I don't think Jurassic Park was a bad movie either. It's just that you have to cater to the unwashed masses first, or the studio bosses will not pay to have it made.
Ellison and Bixby I've heard off, but never read anything. I haven't seen them for sale here in Europe. Unlike Asimov, who can still be found in the larger bookstores.
If you're gay you are sexually attracted to people of the same sex. It has nothing to do with your taste.
Within our society there is a strong pressure to have a strict distinction between males and females. I have the feeling even more so in the US then in NW Europe where I live. While there are differences between males and females on average, the overlap is much bigger than society wants us to believe. But there is a lot of social pressure for boys not to give into their more feminine urges and girls to avoid more masculine things. Feminism has allowed women a little bit more wiggling room to cross the gender divide under the guise of emancipation. There are some signs that in return is has limited the options available to men.
Knowing who's of the opposite sex probably has some evolutionary advantages, so part of it might be ingrained quite deeply into us. but compared to a lot of other species, the differences are much less in humans, probably partially due to our long lifespan and relatively monogamous sexual relations. I think we seem to be evolving towards a smaller difference between the sexes.
But a large part is culture. And culture has a lot to do with creating stable societies and keeping those in power at the top. I think our culture is still very much geared towards keeping men in power, to the point where to become a successful woman, you often have to behave masculine. (how often do you see Hillary Clinton or Angela Merkel in a dress?) It's often gay people who not only break the boundary sexually, but also behaviourally cross the gender line in a lot of other ways. As gay people rarely reproduce themselves, there might be an evolutionary advantage to having them around that explains their existence. I think part of it is to shake up the culture so things don't become to stagnant.
I think that the fear of being seen as doing something associated with the opposite gender is a sign of lack of confidence in yourself. It's the same fear that prevents gays from coming out of the closet. Having self-confidence is not easy. It's hardest during puberty I think. But in the end I think you're happier if you dare to make your own choices. A lot of people cave to the peer pressure of the culture though, especially if it gives them security and stability.
Depending on how we were put together in the womb, there seem to be differences on averages between men and women and gays (of both sexes). These averages have helped define the differences between gender roles. But the standard deviation is so big, that there is a lot of overlap, and it's more of a sliding scale. I once read a piece of research which showed that if you index men from 100 for very masculine to 1 for very feminine, people in general (not just women), prefer men with a score around 50. I don't remember if the opposite was researched as well. The other conclusion seemed to be that very few people scored at the extreme of the scale, which would make sense, given that's what the ladies like. It also means that men (and probably women) are mostly about an equal mix between masculine and feminine traits. It's just that we're all a slightly different mix. Probably it's therefore best to try and have the confidence to trust your own choices, it probably makes you happier in the end.
I say: Enjoy your furniture!
P.S. From the gay men that I do know, I have the feeling that some of them spend more attention on grooming themselves than the average man, but not so much on having an austere interior design and designer furniture. In my view that's more of a masculine thing, even though you seem to think otherwise, women rarely appreciate it. but that's my personal experience.
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The big problem I have with MicroSoft, is that they only innovate when they have real competition. Otherwise they just stall as they don't seem to be able to have an innovative idea on their own. But I don't count them out yet, even if WP7 was not their first try at a mobile OS. (hint: it's got a "7" as version number).
If five years from now MS does indeed dominate the mobile market, which I fear they might, then it will be bad, because Apple and Google, the biggest innovators of the last decade, will have been defeated and probably gone down in flames.
This is a more likely scenario then people hold possible right now. I see them also dominating gaming though Xbox a couple years from now, it only needs one wrong move by Sony and Nintendo.
I wrote this comment, but apparently I wasn't logged in.
For temperature I don't care either way. I'm used to Celcius, but I would not mind Fahrenheit. Both are relatively arbitrary. I find the zero of Celsius somewhat useful as it means I have to watch out on de roads for icy conditions.
For other things, like length, surface and volume, electric fields and a couple more things, I find that metric is really a lot simpler, even though the meter itself is relatively arbitrary. I would have no problem with a system in centriyards, kiloyards, hectoyards, cubic yards etc. It's all the different units for the same thing that make things confusing.
Even in Europe CRTs and LCDs are measured in inches. I don't know why.
On this site, it would end up being called CowboyNealOffice.
Document Foundation does indeed sound a lot better.
I personally like what Apple and MS did, they gave the applications separate names: Pages, Word, Excel, Numbers, Keynote, Powerpoint.
Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress aren't too bad in that respect. Officially they could have a DF prefix, so it would be DF Writer, DF Calc, DF Draw, DF Impress, and the whole thing would be Document Foundation Office, or just OpenOffice, both sound better than LibreOffice (and I'm not a native English speaker).
FOSS projects don't have marketing departments.
That's why they come up with ugly interfaces and all these crazy names.
People sneer at marketing in this community, but it does play a vital role, just like telephone sanitizers.
You missed two:
- BD is more expensive
- Region encoding is hard to bypass.
There are many examples:
Enterprise, Green Lantern, Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, every Hulk, all 10 seasons of SmallVille.
It seems that especially in the SF and Comicbook genre the studios feel the need to make these genesis movies.
If they do another FF movie, let it be them fighting the Hulk or something like that. Wolverine vs. Hulk would be nice too.
Superman should fight Brainiac or Doomsday or Darkseid. Preferably with Batman, Wonder Woman and the rest of the Justice League.
Or get me an "X-men: Phoenix Ressurection", something like that.
There are plenty good stories to tell.
As a frequent user of Facebook, I find the numbers of rogue and bogus applications to be the most annoying aspect of the site. They need to start seriously vetting the developers and apps NOW.
But I thought that this was exactly why everyone over here hated the Apple AppStore? Isn't everything supposed to be free so the users can make their own choices?
When I visit the US, I'm always amazed that there are many channels, but there's nothing on them except commercials.
I usually zap through all the channels, find nothing and turn the TV off again.
Now there's plenty of mindless drivel on the TV where I live too, but a lot less commercials (even on the commercial TV (non-public) channels) and usually there is something worth watching on at least one or two of the 25 or so channels I get.
The big question to me always is: Who is earning the money to pay for the advertisement?
I really like Spotify. I have a reasonable mp3 collection, most of which I ripped from CDs. But the nice thing about Spotify is that it allows you to make temporary playlists on a whim. Like for example last summer I wanted to listen to some African music because I got inspired by the football world cup in South Africa. I only knew a few, and then I found many more by looking at what Spotify suggested were similar artists.
Same thing with a colleague from India I carpooled with for a while. He taught me a lot about Indian classical music by playing around with Spotify on my iPhone and while I was driving. (yay for car stereo with an iPod connector). My playlist of French music was created in a similar way.
Guess I'll go back to pirating music again then
Well, if you're not planning to pay for it, then I suppose you're exactly the kind of "customer" Spotify wants to get rid of.
I know this attitude well. Being Canadian, it's even worse here.
I try to buy media, and would love to be able to legitimately buy various movies and TV shows online, but thanks to the CBC/CRTC, they can't be made available here thanks to some very backwards and broken laws.
Try living in the Netherlands. I got an iPod Video in 2004, when iTunes was supposed to start selling movies and TV shows. Still nothing: There is no way for me to legally buy or rent a movie or TV show online. Not Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, iTunes or any of the others. If I want to legally have access to most of the stuff I want to see, then I have to hope that at some point it gets released in Region 2 on DVD, usually years after it was originally released.
I really hope that Spotify succeeds as a business model. It really shows even more than iTunes what can be done with the internet. It's especially great over my unlimited data plan on my iPhone, because I can't carry my whole collection of music and/or movies with me. €9,95 a month is peanuts compared to how much I use it.
Occasionally you find that a song is not on Spotify, but I now have an account for almost a year and it's been great fun, especially to quickly find new kinds of music I didn't know yet if I have one song as an example and then build a playlist by finding similar artists.
I woudn't call it hardcore SF, but on the SF vs. Fantasy it should come down on the side of SF.
Space opera like Star Wars doesn't focus on the science and technology. But hyperspace travel, planet size cities (Coruscant), space ships, makes it share a lot more with for example the Foundation stories of Asimov, then it does with the legends of King Arthur.
Science Fiction is often just used as a backdrop to explore "what if" scenarios. Stories like Avatar or Starship Troopers could also have been told in a non-Sf setting. Probably BSG, SW and most of SF could. But still, if the writer goes for spaceships, aliens, and advanced technology instead of dragons, vampires and magic, then it's SF instead of Fantasy.
The lines get even more blurry with stories like Superman, Heroes or Xmen. I think a lot of superhero stories are in the grey area between SF and Fantasy. Something like Green Lantern leans a bit towards SF, something like Thor is basically pure fantasy. I'd call radioactive spiders a mythological creature too.
Economics isn't necessarily the same however, more like studying Theology, i.e. you might've really learned something, but..
An interesting way to describe Economics, I'll remember that one.
You make a valid point. But I think that Software Engineering and Management still have a lot to develop. We still don't really know how to do big software projects, most of them fail in one way or another. It might not be the classical Computer Science from the 1970's and 80's, but it's the challenge faced today.
Next to that new algorithms will always be needed, although that sometimes is almost more Mathematics than CS.
But even current compiler technology has it's limits. I'm no expert, but at least that's what I was told about the Itanium: Nobody could make a decent compiler for it.
But in any mature discipline a lot of the work is engineering. I'm working on a new telescope (lofar), and most of it is just high end engineering, but at the same time we're pushing the boundaries and also breaking new ground in computer science and several kinds of physics.
Warning: Rant coming:
I don't understand why more and more, people mix up the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy. There might be a lot of overlap in the audiences, and sometimes the line gets a little blurred, but have we now really gone as low as calling Lord of the Rings a Science Fiction ?????!?!!?!?
It might not have a lot to do with the topic at hand, but I don't think Tolkien in his wildest dreams could have imagined that his master piece would ever be called a Science Fiction.
I'll allow The Matrix, Torchwood and Dr.Who into the SF category, but Buffy, LotR or Being Human. Who makes up this stuff??
Sorry for the rant, but I really don't understand why a lot of Fantasy is being misnamed as SF nowadays. Where does this come from, can anyone explain?
Maybe I'm getting old, I just turned 35. When I say Science Fiction, I mean Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars. Fantasy is Tolkien, Jordan and Feist, Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribean.
Sure the line gets blurred a bit with a writer like Tanith Lee or a series like Smallville. But sheeesh, calling Lord of the Rings an SF???
Because to most people computers are like magic. Especially the older generation in upper management.
Yeah, but if you do need anything more, it's a half year long struggle to get it.
I really tried with Excel, but it only goes sofar.
And even then manipulating 2 GB Excel files on a machine with 512MB RAM was a pain, but I couldn't convince my boss I needed more RAM, even though my inability to perform certain calculations in a timely manner was costing the company millions. He needed to have an exact answer how much money we would save to do de € 50 investment. A ballpark figure of "at least several million" wasn't enough for him.
I was so happy to leave there.
I think that it's a sign that engineers are very bad at organizing themselves. Unlike lawyers or surgeons or accountants.
I think it's because on average those attracted to engineering have less social skills then for example lawyers. And we're a bit of an anarchistic bunch.
No matter which side tries to take a step forward, the other side will tear it down.
Which I think is one of the big flaws of the two party system you guys have. Sure a multi-party system has the drawback that it sometimes is difficult to form a coalition if nobody has a majority.
But if the system becomes stagnant, then it's easy for a new party to get heard, gain votes and influence, and often become a crucial part of a coalition for it to secure a majority even if by itself it might only be 10% or so of the electorate.
I find that it keeps parties and their politicians much more honest if they know a new party can come along replace them quite easily.
I think you should watch the movie as a story of what could happen if the military-industrial complex gets even more power over society than it has now.
Replace the aliens with "terrorists" in Irak and you have essentially the same story.
On the face of it, it's just a simple action movie. but as I know Paul Verhoeven's films, there is always an undertone with a deeper message.
But then I don't think Jurassic Park was a bad movie either. It's just that you have to cater to the unwashed masses first, or the studio bosses will not pay to have it made.
Although I liked both: Asimov >> Firefly
Ellison and Bixby I've heard off, but never read anything. I haven't seen them for sale here in Europe. Unlike Asimov, who can still be found in the larger bookstores.
This is a fallacy perpetrated in today's media. That to have balance, you need to put an equal amount of effort in to both sides of an argument.
This isn't limited to just religion though.
Does that make me gay ... I hope not?
If you're gay you are sexually attracted to people of the same sex. It has nothing to do with your taste.
Within our society there is a strong pressure to have a strict distinction between males and females. I have the feeling even more so in the US then in NW Europe where I live.
While there are differences between males and females on average, the overlap is much bigger than society wants us to believe. But there is a lot of social pressure for boys not to give into their more feminine urges and girls to avoid more masculine things. Feminism has allowed women a little bit more wiggling room to cross the gender divide under the guise of emancipation. There are some signs that in return is has limited the options available to men.
Knowing who's of the opposite sex probably has some evolutionary advantages, so part of it might be ingrained quite deeply into us. but compared to a lot of other species, the differences are much less in humans, probably partially due to our long lifespan and relatively monogamous sexual relations. I think we seem to be evolving towards a smaller difference between the sexes.
But a large part is culture. And culture has a lot to do with creating stable societies and keeping those in power at the top. I think our culture is still very much geared towards keeping men in power, to the point where to become a successful woman, you often have to behave masculine. (how often do you see Hillary Clinton or Angela Merkel in a dress?) It's often gay people who not only break the boundary sexually, but also behaviourally cross the gender line in a lot of other ways. As gay people rarely reproduce themselves, there might be an evolutionary advantage to having them around that explains their existence. I think part of it is to shake up the culture so things don't become to stagnant.
I think that the fear of being seen as doing something associated with the opposite gender is a sign of lack of confidence in yourself. It's the same fear that prevents gays from coming out of the closet. Having self-confidence is not easy. It's hardest during puberty I think. But in the end I think you're happier if you dare to make your own choices. A lot of people cave to the peer pressure of the culture though, especially if it gives them security and stability.
Depending on how we were put together in the womb, there seem to be differences on averages between men and women and gays (of both sexes). These averages have helped define the differences between gender roles. But the standard deviation is so big, that there is a lot of overlap, and it's more of a sliding scale. I once read a piece of research which showed that if you index men from 100 for very masculine to 1 for very feminine, people in general (not just women), prefer men with a score around 50. I don't remember if the opposite was researched as well. The other conclusion seemed to be that very few people scored at the extreme of the scale, which would make sense, given that's what the ladies like. It also means that men (and probably women) are mostly about an equal mix between masculine and feminine traits. It's just that we're all a slightly different mix. Probably it's therefore best to try and have the confidence to trust your own choices, it probably makes you happier in the end.
I say: Enjoy your furniture!
P.S. From the gay men that I do know, I have the feeling that some of them spend more attention on grooming themselves than the average man, but not so much on having an austere interior design and designer furniture. In my view that's more of a masculine thing, even though you seem to think otherwise, women rarely appreciate it. but that's my personal experience.