I think you vastly underestimate the amount of art, music and literature that is being created in Europe. A lot of it is not targeted at English speaking audiences though.
The USA has certain advantages because it has a huge internal market, and adheres to a more cut-throat model of capitalism, allowing for more extremes both in good and bad products/companies/artists/etc. But overall I don't think quantity or quality is less than in the USA. I think the total European market is bigger than the USA, it's just fragmented mostly by language.
The only place where I think the USA does have a certain dominance is in making movies. In some fields I think there is European dominance, like for example architecture (look at the architects of the buildings for the Beijing Olympics for example).
I leave actual examples as an exercise to the reader. I've done a little searching, but outside of some lists for my own relative small country (the Netherlands), I don't have the time to wrestle though a lot of sites in other languages to make a better list. I'll leave you with a few names from the top of my head: J.K. Rowling, Stieg Larsson, Krezip, Anouk, Andre Rieu, Karel Appel, Jan Wolkers, Piet Mondriaan, Rem Koolhaas.
Steve jobs own words: "They (Microsoft) have absolutely no taste"
Well yeah, but how about Sony, Nokia, Samsung, RIM/Blackberry, Google and others? Have they all become trend-followers, just because Jobs got the idea of making a phone?
Did the US regulators have similar concerns? If not, why not? If they're genuine concerns - they sound like it - why is it just the EU that's following them up?
There generally seems to be a certain amount of frustration that the EU is holding up companies of US origin, although actually they have significant financial impact (and offices and presumably regional headquarters and subsidiary companies) in Europe too. Presumably Oracle and Sun *themselves* could have predicted these hurdles if they'd done their homework - is it really that outlandish to expect that merging two leading (albeit in different markets!) database companies would be a worry for the regulators?
I was wondering this too. What I've seen so far of Neelie Kroes in the last couple of years, she's been very fair, and quick to act if she could. It's only when companies are dragging their feet and fail to reply to the raised concerns that get raised. And she might have given some big fines to US companies, the biggest and most fines have still been applied against EU companies.
And given that Oracle is acquiring MySQL with this merger, I think the EU certainly has a point, the only other sizeable players remaining are PosGreSQL and Microsoft. Basically you end up with a market that looks similar to the OS market with Linux and OSX as competitors to Windows, and for the OS market I think Windows has been ruled a (near) monopoly on both sides of the Atlantic. I think the EU is well within its rights if it wants to prevent the situation that the current OS market is in.
If you just make up a million house rules there's a huge chance you won't get the balancing right. You know, the people writing those handbooks don't just sit at home, make up some spells and then send that straight to the printer, they do heavy playtesting and balancing.
This is only half true, but to be fair if you saw the other side of it you'd probably stop buying books.
They do start with a balanced game. They do, in fact, do heavy playtesting.
They also break the balance on purpose to 'force' you to keep the books up to date. Any but the smallest gaming circles will invariably have one player that springs for the new book for his class, and suddenly has advantages over the other characters. Next week other new books start showing up...
This is not an accident.
Depends, I'd say that most of what you see in new splat books just adds flavour and more options. The main problem is that each additional book increases the number of combinations by a big factor, and it's often that a few fringe combinations can use some rules loophole to do something insane.
If anything I think the problem is that WotC usually only did errata on the factual text, while in some cases they should also have done a bit more on the actual mechanics, if they were open to abuse. But I suppose it's a question of cost. I've been trying to get them to just make their database of Customer Service answers available, as a lot of those would have helped a lot in clarifying things.
I have well over a meter of 3/3.5 edition books alone, and very little material in there is really over the top, I'd say about 1-2%, sometimes just because of unclear wording. The problem is if your players are power hungry and want to "win" the game and go for that 1-2% unbalanced stuff, and the DM does not stop them.
What I find most telling about these stories, is that in just about 2 years since Apple has entered the smartphone market, they have become the product to beat, the benchmark against which all others are measured. How did it happen that sophisticated, tech savvy and powerful companies like Microsoft, Nokia, Sony and RIM have such a hard time coming up with an answer, and only Google seems to be going somewhere?
I don't have all the answers, but one thing that seems clear is that Apple totally focusses on the user experience. I once made the error in 2000 to buy a PocketPC instead of a Palm based on the hardware specs. I learned then that a 16Mhz machine can be a better choice then a 200 Mhz one, if the first has been properly designed.
I've been using Nokia phones in the past, as they seem to understand the same lesson, I'm a little puzzled why they and the other established forces in the market have such a hard time formulating an answer to the iPhone. But then the seem thing seems to be happening in the MP3 player market.
What does Apple do that makes them so dominant in these markets so quickly, that the other players seem to fail to do? Even I've been converted recently, having bought a Macbook a year ago, and an iPhone last week, after having had a good experience with my iPod for years. Somehow other products in the same price range just don't measure up. (I did quite an extensive comparison with my alternative OS being Linux).
How does Apple become the measuring stick and the product to beat so quicky, even Microsoft usually needs half a decade and Billions and often they don't really succeed if it's outside the direct Windows sphere of control. (WinCE/Mobile/Phone, Xbox?)
What you propose is actually hard to do. A law that forbids "distracted driving" would be open to wildly different interpretation and randomness by judge and jury. - What if you adjust the volume on your radio while driving? - What if you have a wailing kid on the back seat? - etc.
Vague laws either lead to jurisprudence (which will basically then cover the same ground, with a list of what is bad and what is good behaviour), or to a lot of arbitrary convictions depending on the personal view of the judge or jury.
The only laws that are usually vague, are those in a Constitution, bill of rights, or similar piece of work.
I think that most under the age of 35-40 will have grown up in a world where copying was cheap, if not free, and the lines around copyright got blurred. If the industry really plugs all the loopholes at some point, in a few years time the people who have come to expect not to always pay for copyrighted material will be a very large electoral force, and will end up forcing legislative change. It will take a few more years, but then the dinosaurs will find that it's the politicians themselves who "get it" and no longer support their outdated business model.
We will need to move from a system where the rules revolve around the rights to copy, to a system where authoring a new creative piece gives rights in a whole new manner. From copyright to authorright if you will. I don't think we should completely get rid of the notion of rewarding authors of original works, but we need something entirely new.
I've read the article (yeah sue me), and I really liked this link: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO.html If anything just read the bit "1.2. What problem? Sexism is dead!" If you don't see what the problem is, and just think the two guys are making a funny comment, then you're probably oblivious to a lot of sexism going on in the world.
Once you open your eyes, you'll see that there is a lot of sexism (and racism) in the world still. Some of it so ingrained that even some women don't notice it, especially if they grew up with it.
It's a really hard thing to see part your own culture and put things in perspective.
I think the article makes a good point that often people don't have bad intentions, and get defensive when accused. I do think that there still is a lot of unintentional sexism in our society.
It's as simple as assuming the male is the person in charge when meeting a man and a woman in a business environment, like for example a job interview. It's assuming the girl wants to be a nurse and the boy a doctor when you see some children playing with some toy hospital equipment. It's simple comments like: "You silly girl", or "I wouldn't have expected that of a woman". It's also that men are more expected to work late then women.
Exactly. It's about how society and humans change in scenario's founded in current science and technology extrapolated in some way. It's about the "What if"s.
Time Machine - what if we had time travel Journey to the moon - what if we could send people to the moon War of the Worlds - what if aliens existed and invaded us Caves of Steel - what if robots were as intelligent and able as humans Foundation - what if we could predict the future Neuromancer - what if technology would, ehm, yeah what exactly, go crazy?
A good SF book makes you think about the what if's, that's why 1984 is one of the best. Big Brother is watching!
I agree with this. It certainly will change people's ideas about what is part of these genre's and I think it's a better idea then for example Discworld, as the HHGTTG can be said to have inspired things like Wikipedia.
I think you should try to pick books with big new concepts and that have defined or expanded the genre.
I think one of the Asminov books should be in there were the Laws of Robotics are used and the first Foundation book, for having the concept of Psychohistory. Of course the already mentioned Verne, Clarke (2001) and Tolkien easily make the list. I think Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game would also make my list, it's I think the same topic as Starship Troopers, I haven't read that book, only seen the movie. The topic of genocide in both worthy of dicussion. Animal Farm should be on a general English list, not such a specific one, 1984 might be included in both though. Put some Cyberpunk in there, Neuromancer or something like that. HG Wells Time Machine and/or War of the Worlds are classics too.
Dune would not make my list, even though it's a great book, it's not really breaking much new ground, and it's not something you read in an afternoon. I think I would recommend it to those students that liked the course material though.
You might want to consider Tanith Lee's White Witch, it's on the border of SF and Fantasy, but I found it very original, and it might be a tantalizing read at the Highschool age. Another might be the Peace War by Vernor Vinge, or The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, both have interesting post-apocalyptic topics, and might work well with a high school audience.
There are of course many more, some I haven't read (yet), and a lot of other nice suggestions in this thread, but that would be my shortlist.
The EU treats it's own industry exactly like those from abroad (including the USA). Sure MS and Intel have gotten some big fines, but the biggest penalties have still been to EU companies like E.ON, Gaz de France, and a group of car manufacturers.
It's just that unlike in the USA, offenders of anti-trust laws don't get off with a slap on the wrist.
Same thing holds for mergers and such. The process might be a bit slow though, I don't think the EU has the most efficient bureaucracy in the world, if only because it has like 27 languages.
I've used various Linux distributions as my main and only OS at work for the past 10 years, mainly SuSE, Fedora and Kubuntu. I've gotten a Macbook Pro two years ago, because it was the same price as a similarly specced Dell or Lenovo, with the idea of giving OS X a try and otherwise just putting Linux on it.
I've since found that using OS X means using a much more consistent and well designed product. It saves time and frustration, because everything just works and is designed to minimize the amount of annoyance. Next to that the hardware has a very high quality and attention to detail that I haven't seen in the HP, Dell and IBM/Lenovo products I used before.
I never got around to installing Linux on this machine. It might not be free, but OS X is a much better user experience especially when coupled with their hardware.
If you need a computer to work on, not to tinker with, then the Macs are just be the best out there.
When I shopped for a new laptop two years ago, I did a comparison between a Macbook Pro, and Dell and HP and Lenovo offerings with the same hardware specs. I found that once you select the same specs, the Mac was actually the cheapest offering (differences were only a few euros though). Of the choices the Mac was by far the lightest. For my job I use a lot of Unix and Linux, so the PC offerings would have had Linux installed, not Windows, so I was mostly comparing the hardware and didn't select something like Windows Ultimate which would have increased the price even further.
I've now been using the Mac for two years and I'm really impressed with the quality and amount of attention to detail that has gone into it's design. Compared to the IBM/Lenovo and Dell systems I had before, it's just more of a joy to work with as you spend less time being annoyed or struggling to accomplish something.
So my point is, that at least when I did my reseach, Apple actually has very attractive pricing if you compare it to similar specced offerings it's just that they don't service the lower end of the market.
I have mainly used illegal channels to obtain content for two reasons: - It had DRM that made it not work on my system or a pain to use. - I could not buy it because it wasn't available where I live*
*) It takes years before series from the USA make it to television and/or DVD over here, by that time I've already obtained DivX versions. Next to that a lot of sites and stores only sell certain content to the USA/UK, that includes sites like iTunes and Amazon.
If downloading stuff from some illegal site is 100x easier that obtaining it legally, then it's no wonder people choose to do that. I have no problem paying for stuff I want, I only have a problem if I want stuff but nobody is willing to sell it to me.
The Trackman Marble FX was indeed a very nice trackball. Mine also broke, I'd buy one again if they still sold them (especially a left-handed version).
I can't provide you a link to this as I'm not sure what the parent alludes to, but there are many statistics that show that homicides in the USA are easily 10x those in countries with stricter gun control laws.
As you can see there are twice as many murders by firearms in the USA as there are murders in the UK, and the amount of people getting killed by firearms in the UK is less then 4% of what it is in the USA.
It might not be the only factor, but I do think that the widespread availability of firearms in the USA is a large part in it's very high murder numbers.
Ms Office is king mostly because of Outlook and Excel. They have no real competition there, neither OpenOffice's offerings, nor things like Groupwise, Evolution or Lotus Notes come even close. It's what I understood after I worked in Dilbert land for a year.
Have you ever even tried a recent version of something like WordPerfect, or in a higher price category things like Indesign, Acroread or QuarkExpress? Using Word for professional publishing would be a pain, it's by no means the most sophisticated tool for the job, the others are lightyears ahead.
If you claim the above you have no clue what is needed for a really professional publication.
One of the biggest problems I have with OpenOffice (that I use on my Mac and on Linux), is that it tries to emulate Ms Office, with all it's flaws.
I still use WordPerfect on Windows (version 12 currently so I'm a bit behind, but I don't buy each new version).
When I compare Word:Mac 2004 with any version of WordPerfect past 6.0, these are the major things that are much easier/better in WP: - Large documents with multiple sub-documents, but a central Index and page numbering, figure/equation/graph/table numbering. - Equation Editor. (LateX or WP are lightyears better than MS). - Handling of figures, caption formatting, and location, the placing in the text/on the page (I hate the whole anchor thing, I sometimes just want to put it on Page 30, 2 inches fro the top or something like that) - The same document format for each version. (WP has used the same format for 15 years or something, and can import/export to any version of Word, why does Word need a new document every other version? I can create a document in version 12, and it will open in version 6.0 for DOS. (my father is a dinosaur as it comes to computers). - No changes in layout if you change the printer is gets printed from. - Automatically updating of indexes and similar lists. - Proper handling of styles. - Easy automatic timed backups.
In my view Word is still a glorified scratchblock, while WP, LateX, PageMaker/Indesign, Acrobat and QuarkExpress allow you to actually create documents. Word is a plague, it's a terrible program.
The reason why Ms Office wins are in a large part because of the other programs bundled with it, and of course it's tie win with the OS. PowerPoint is pretty decent though, and Excel is the best spreadsheet I know. When I moved to Dilbert land I found out what the real killer app of Office is though: Outlook. Neither Evolution, Groupwise nor Lotus Notes can compete with that.
I don't know abot 15 year olds, but in the group of 20-30 year olds around me, it's MSN, Skype, Ventrillo, TeamSpeak and forums that are used for communication. Everyone has a headset nowadays and talks to friends while doing something else on the computer. They don't want to type and then read what others wrote. I think I spend 10+ hours a week behind a computer talking to friends while doing other things.
FORTRAN has it's uses, mostly in legacy applications, but I don't think it's a good language to learn programming in. I'd go with either (object)pascal or Python there. Certainly not Java.
Compare ------- print "Hello World" -----or------ begin
writeln("Hello World"); end. ------ with ------ class myHelloWorld {
public static void main(String args[])
{
System.out.println("Hello World!");
} }
----------
A language to teach people to program should not have to bother students with class definitions, "public static void" or any of that. I'm no expert on FORTRAN, but what I've seen it isn't stellar either in it's ability to minimize syntactic sugar.
You can design forms and controls in the same way as Visual Basic, but it is C++.
Wow! So it's exactly like Microsoft's Visual C++, except less-supported!
Seriously, how out-of-date is your knowledge that you didn't know about Visual C++? It's been around for ages-- hell it's probably the reason most companies dumped Borland Builder.
Until Visual Studio.Net, the Borland C++ Builder was light years ahead of VS. I had to use both VS6 and BC++4 during 2000-2004, and VS6 was a pain compared to BC++4.
Then MS noticed BC++ gaining traction and copied all it's features into VS.Net.
The one problem BC++ always had, is that if MS came with a new OS, it would take them a couple of months to a year to catch up.
But it's really.Net and C# that made BC++ fall by the roadside.
But still, it's amazing how many different and hugely successful careers this guy has had in one lifetime. Whatever you think about Arnold, and I'm not a fan, he has a knack for excelling at what he does. Each of the feats below alone is more then most people accomplish in a lifetime: - Mr. Universe. - One of the most successful actors of our time. - The highest office an immigrant in the USA can achieve. - Married into the Kennedy clan. - A successful business career, making him a millionaire even before he got into acting.
If anything, he's a very determined overachiever, and I think that's why a lot of people don't like him. I think it's much to simple to put the label Politician on him.
I have to disagree, I think that would be immensely stupid of them. I think they'll just use it to try to funnel users butting up against its limits towards full Oracle. If they kill it they lose that potential sales channel.
But that would give them an incentive to stop improving MySQL, as closing the gap with Oracle would make no business sense.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you vastly underestimate the amount of art, music and literature that is being created in Europe. A lot of it is not targeted at English speaking audiences though.
The USA has certain advantages because it has a huge internal market, and adheres to a more cut-throat model of capitalism, allowing for more extremes both in good and bad products/companies/artists/etc. But overall I don't think quantity or quality is less than in the USA. I think the total European market is bigger than the USA, it's just fragmented mostly by language.
The only place where I think the USA does have a certain dominance is in making movies. In some fields I think there is European dominance, like for example architecture (look at the architects of the buildings for the Beijing Olympics for example).
I leave actual examples as an exercise to the reader. I've done a little searching, but outside of some lists for my own relative small country (the Netherlands), I don't have the time to wrestle though a lot of sites in other languages to make a better list. I'll leave you with a few names from the top of my head:
J.K. Rowling, Stieg Larsson, Krezip, Anouk, Andre Rieu, Karel Appel, Jan Wolkers, Piet Mondriaan, Rem Koolhaas.
Steve jobs own words: "They (Microsoft) have absolutely no taste"
Well yeah, but how about Sony, Nokia, Samsung, RIM/Blackberry, Google and others? Have they all become trend-followers, just because Jobs got the idea of making a phone?
Did the US regulators have similar concerns? If not, why not? If they're genuine concerns - they sound like it - why is it just the EU that's following them up?
There generally seems to be a certain amount of frustration that the EU is holding up companies of US origin, although actually they have significant financial impact (and offices and presumably regional headquarters and subsidiary companies) in Europe too. Presumably Oracle and Sun *themselves* could have predicted these hurdles if they'd done their homework - is it really that outlandish to expect that merging two leading (albeit in different markets!) database companies would be a worry for the regulators?
I was wondering this too. What I've seen so far of Neelie Kroes in the last couple of years, she's been very fair, and quick to act if she could. It's only when companies are dragging their feet and fail to reply to the raised concerns that get raised. And she might have given some big fines to US companies, the biggest and most fines have still been applied against EU companies.
And given that Oracle is acquiring MySQL with this merger, I think the EU certainly has a point, the only other sizeable players remaining are PosGreSQL and Microsoft. Basically you end up with a market that looks similar to the OS market with Linux and OSX as competitors to Windows, and for the OS market I think Windows has been ruled a (near) monopoly on both sides of the Atlantic. I think the EU is well within its rights if it wants to prevent the situation that the current OS market is in.
If you just make up a million house rules there's a huge chance you won't get the balancing right. You know, the people writing those handbooks don't just sit at home, make up some spells and then send that straight to the printer, they do heavy playtesting and balancing.
This is only half true, but to be fair if you saw the other side of it you'd probably stop buying books.
They do start with a balanced game. They do, in fact, do heavy playtesting.
They also break the balance on purpose to 'force' you to keep the books up to date. Any but the smallest gaming circles will invariably have one player that springs for the new book for his class, and suddenly has advantages over the other characters. Next week other new books start showing up...
This is not an accident.
Depends, I'd say that most of what you see in new splat books just adds flavour and more options. The main problem is that each additional book increases the number of combinations by a big factor, and it's often that a few fringe combinations can use some rules loophole to do something insane.
If anything I think the problem is that WotC usually only did errata on the factual text, while in some cases they should also have done a bit more on the actual mechanics, if they were open to abuse. But I suppose it's a question of cost. I've been trying to get them to just make their database of Customer Service answers available, as a lot of those would have helped a lot in clarifying things.
I have well over a meter of 3/3.5 edition books alone, and very little material in there is really over the top, I'd say about 1-2%, sometimes just because of unclear wording. The problem is if your players are power hungry and want to "win" the game and go for that 1-2% unbalanced stuff, and the DM does not stop them.
What I find most telling about these stories, is that in just about 2 years since Apple has entered the smartphone market, they have become the product to beat, the benchmark against which all others are measured. How did it happen that sophisticated, tech savvy and powerful companies like Microsoft, Nokia, Sony and RIM have such a hard time coming up with an answer, and only Google seems to be going somewhere?
I don't have all the answers, but one thing that seems clear is that Apple totally focusses on the user experience. I once made the error in 2000 to buy a PocketPC instead of a Palm based on the hardware specs. I learned then that a 16Mhz machine can be a better choice then a 200 Mhz one, if the first has been properly designed.
I've been using Nokia phones in the past, as they seem to understand the same lesson, I'm a little puzzled why they and the other established forces in the market have such a hard time formulating an answer to the iPhone. But then the seem thing seems to be happening in the MP3 player market.
What does Apple do that makes them so dominant in these markets so quickly, that the other players seem to fail to do? Even I've been converted recently, having bought a Macbook a year ago, and an iPhone last week, after having had a good experience with my iPod for years. Somehow other products in the same price range just don't measure up. (I did quite an extensive comparison with my alternative OS being Linux).
How does Apple become the measuring stick and the product to beat so quicky, even Microsoft usually needs half a decade and Billions and often they don't really succeed if it's outside the direct Windows sphere of control. (WinCE/Mobile/Phone, Xbox?)
What you propose is actually hard to do. A law that forbids "distracted driving" would be open to wildly different interpretation and randomness by judge and jury.
- What if you adjust the volume on your radio while driving?
- What if you have a wailing kid on the back seat?
- etc.
Vague laws either lead to jurisprudence (which will basically then cover the same ground, with a list of what is bad and what is good behaviour), or to a lot of arbitrary convictions depending on the personal view of the judge or jury.
The only laws that are usually vague, are those in a Constitution, bill of rights, or similar piece of work.
Very well put.
I think that most under the age of 35-40 will have grown up in a world where copying was cheap, if not free, and the lines around copyright got blurred. If the industry really plugs all the loopholes at some point, in a few years time the people who have come to expect not to always pay for copyrighted material will be a very large electoral force, and will end up forcing legislative change.
It will take a few more years, but then the dinosaurs will find that it's the politicians themselves who "get it" and no longer support their outdated business model.
We will need to move from a system where the rules revolve around the rights to copy, to a system where authoring a new creative piece gives rights in a whole new manner. From copyright to authorright if you will. I don't think we should completely get rid of the notion of rewarding authors of original works, but we need something entirely new.
I've read the article (yeah sue me), and I really liked this link: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO.html
If anything just read the bit "1.2. What problem? Sexism is dead!"
If you don't see what the problem is, and just think the two guys are making a funny comment, then you're probably oblivious to a lot of sexism going on in the world.
Once you open your eyes, you'll see that there is a lot of sexism (and racism) in the world still. Some of it so ingrained that even some women don't notice it, especially if they grew up with it.
It's a really hard thing to see part your own culture and put things in perspective.
I think the article makes a good point that often people don't have bad intentions, and get defensive when accused. I do think that there still is a lot of unintentional sexism in our society.
It's as simple as assuming the male is the person in charge when meeting a man and a woman in a business environment, like for example a job interview.
It's assuming the girl wants to be a nurse and the boy a doctor when you see some children playing with some toy hospital equipment.
It's simple comments like: "You silly girl", or "I wouldn't have expected that of a woman".
It's also that men are more expected to work late then women.
Exactly. It's about how society and humans change in scenario's founded in current science and technology extrapolated in some way.
It's about the "What if"s.
Time Machine - what if we had time travel
Journey to the moon - what if we could send people to the moon
War of the Worlds - what if aliens existed and invaded us
Caves of Steel - what if robots were as intelligent and able as humans
Foundation - what if we could predict the future
Neuromancer - what if technology would, ehm, yeah what exactly, go crazy?
A good SF book makes you think about the what if's, that's why 1984 is one of the best. Big Brother is watching!
I agree with this. It certainly will change people's ideas about what is part of these genre's and I think it's a better idea then for example Discworld, as the HHGTTG can be said to have inspired things like Wikipedia.
I think you should try to pick books with big new concepts and that have defined or expanded the genre.
I think one of the Asminov books should be in there were the Laws of Robotics are used and the first Foundation book, for having the concept of Psychohistory.
Of course the already mentioned Verne, Clarke (2001) and Tolkien easily make the list.
I think Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game would also make my list, it's I think the same topic as Starship Troopers, I haven't read that book, only seen the movie. The topic of genocide in both worthy of dicussion.
Animal Farm should be on a general English list, not such a specific one, 1984 might be included in both though.
Put some Cyberpunk in there, Neuromancer or something like that.
HG Wells Time Machine and/or War of the Worlds are classics too.
Dune would not make my list, even though it's a great book, it's not really breaking much new ground, and it's not something you read in an afternoon. I think I would recommend it to those students that liked the course material though.
You might want to consider Tanith Lee's White Witch, it's on the border of SF and Fantasy, but I found it very original, and it might be a tantalizing read at the Highschool age. Another might be the Peace War by Vernor Vinge, or The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, both have interesting post-apocalyptic topics, and might work well with a high school audience.
There are of course many more, some I haven't read (yet), and a lot of other nice suggestions in this thread, but that would be my shortlist.
The EU treats it's own industry exactly like those from abroad (including the USA). Sure MS and Intel have gotten some big fines, but the biggest penalties have still been to EU companies like E.ON, Gaz de France, and a group of car manufacturers.
It's just that unlike in the USA, offenders of anti-trust laws don't get off with a slap on the wrist.
Same thing holds for mergers and such. The process might be a bit slow though, I don't think the EU has the most efficient bureaucracy in the world, if only because it has like 27 languages.
I've used various Linux distributions as my main and only OS at work for the past 10 years, mainly SuSE, Fedora and Kubuntu. I've gotten a Macbook Pro two years ago, because it was the same price as a similarly specced Dell or Lenovo, with the idea of giving OS X a try and otherwise just putting Linux on it.
I've since found that using OS X means using a much more consistent and well designed product. It saves time and frustration, because everything just works and is designed to minimize the amount of annoyance. Next to that the hardware has a very high quality and attention to detail that I haven't seen in the HP, Dell and IBM/Lenovo products I used before.
I never got around to installing Linux on this machine. It might not be free, but OS X is a much better user experience especially when coupled with their hardware.
If you need a computer to work on, not to tinker with, then the Macs are just be the best out there.
When I shopped for a new laptop two years ago, I did a comparison between a Macbook Pro, and Dell and HP and Lenovo offerings with the same hardware specs.
I found that once you select the same specs, the Mac was actually the cheapest offering (differences were only a few euros though).
Of the choices the Mac was by far the lightest. For my job I use a lot of Unix and Linux, so the PC offerings would have had Linux installed, not Windows, so I was mostly comparing the hardware and didn't select something like Windows Ultimate which would have increased the price even further.
I've now been using the Mac for two years and I'm really impressed with the quality and amount of attention to detail that has gone into it's design. Compared to the IBM/Lenovo and Dell systems I had before, it's just more of a joy to work with as you spend less time being annoyed or struggling to accomplish something.
So my point is, that at least when I did my reseach, Apple actually has very attractive pricing if you compare it to similar specced offerings it's just that they don't service the lower end of the market.
I have mainly used illegal channels to obtain content for two reasons:
- It had DRM that made it not work on my system or a pain to use.
- I could not buy it because it wasn't available where I live*
*) It takes years before series from the USA make it to television and/or DVD over here, by that time I've already obtained DivX versions. Next to that a lot of sites and stores only sell certain content to the USA/UK, that includes sites like iTunes and Amazon.
If downloading stuff from some illegal site is 100x easier that obtaining it legally, then it's no wonder people choose to do that.
I have no problem paying for stuff I want, I only have a problem if I want stuff but nobody is willing to sell it to me.
If you make it a multitouch touchpad then I'm sold.
The Trackman Marble FX was indeed a very nice trackball. Mine also broke, I'd buy one again if they still sold them (especially a left-handed version).
I can't provide you a link to this as I'm not sure what the parent alludes to, but there are many statistics that show that homicides in the USA are easily 10x those in countries with stricter gun control laws.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita
United States: 0.042802 per 1,000 people
United Kingdom: 0.0140633 per 1,000 people
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir_percap-crime-murders-firearms-per-capita
United States: 0.0279271 per 1,000 people
United Kingdom: 0.00102579 per 1,000 people
As you can see there are twice as many murders by firearms in the USA as there are murders in the UK, and the amount of people getting killed by firearms in the UK is less then 4% of what it is in the USA.
It might not be the only factor, but I do think that the widespread availability of firearms in the USA is a large part in it's very high murder numbers.
Ms Office is king mostly because of Outlook and Excel. They have no real competition there, neither OpenOffice's offerings, nor things like Groupwise, Evolution or Lotus Notes come even close.
It's what I understood after I worked in Dilbert land for a year.
Have you ever even tried a recent version of something like WordPerfect, or in a higher price category things like Indesign, Acroread or QuarkExpress? Using Word for professional publishing would be a pain, it's by no means the most sophisticated tool for the job, the others are lightyears ahead.
If you claim the above you have no clue what is needed for a really professional publication.
One of the biggest problems I have with OpenOffice (that I use on my Mac and on Linux), is that it tries to emulate Ms Office, with all it's flaws.
I still use WordPerfect on Windows (version 12 currently so I'm a bit behind, but I don't buy each new version).
When I compare Word:Mac 2004 with any version of WordPerfect past 6.0, these are the major things that are much easier/better in WP:
- Large documents with multiple sub-documents, but a central Index and page numbering, figure/equation/graph/table numbering.
- Equation Editor. (LateX or WP are lightyears better than MS).
- Handling of figures, caption formatting, and location, the placing in the text/on the page (I hate the whole anchor thing, I sometimes just want to put it on Page 30, 2 inches fro the top or something like that)
- The same document format for each version. (WP has used the same format for 15 years or something, and can import/export to any version of Word, why does Word need a new document every other version? I can create a document in version 12, and it will open in version 6.0 for DOS. (my father is a dinosaur as it comes to computers).
- No changes in layout if you change the printer is gets printed from.
- Automatically updating of indexes and similar lists.
- Proper handling of styles.
- Easy automatic timed backups.
In my view Word is still a glorified scratchblock, while WP, LateX, PageMaker/Indesign, Acrobat and QuarkExpress allow you to actually create documents. Word is a plague, it's a terrible program.
The reason why Ms Office wins are in a large part because of the other programs bundled with it, and of course it's tie win with the OS.
PowerPoint is pretty decent though, and Excel is the best spreadsheet I know. When I moved to Dilbert land I found out what the real killer app of Office is though: Outlook.
Neither Evolution, Groupwise nor Lotus Notes can compete with that.
I don't know abot 15 year olds, but in the group of 20-30 year olds around me, it's MSN, Skype, Ventrillo, TeamSpeak and forums that are used for communication. Everyone has a headset nowadays and talks to friends while doing something else on the computer. They don't want to type and then read what others wrote. I think I spend 10+ hours a week behind a computer talking to friends while doing other things.
FORTRAN has it's uses, mostly in legacy applications, but I don't think it's a good language to learn programming in. I'd go with either (object)pascal or Python there. Certainly not Java.
Compare
-------
print "Hello World"
-----or------
begin
writeln("Hello World");
end.
------
with
------
class myHelloWorld
{
public static void main(String args[])
{
System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
}
----------
A language to teach people to program should not have to bother students with class definitions, "public static void" or any of that. I'm no expert on FORTRAN, but what I've seen it isn't stellar either in it's ability to minimize syntactic sugar.
You can design forms and controls in the same way as Visual Basic, but it is C++.
Wow! So it's exactly like Microsoft's Visual C++, except less-supported!
Seriously, how out-of-date is your knowledge that you didn't know about Visual C++? It's been around for ages-- hell it's probably the reason most companies dumped Borland Builder.
Until Visual Studio.Net, the Borland C++ Builder was light years ahead of VS. I had to use both VS6 and BC++4 during 2000-2004, and VS6 was a pain compared to BC++4.
Then MS noticed BC++ gaining traction and copied all it's features into VS.Net.
The one problem BC++ always had, is that if MS came with a new OS, it would take them a couple of months to a year to catch up.
But it's really .Net and C# that made BC++ fall by the roadside.
Why is Arnold calling [what] he does acting?
Because he's a politician.
But still, it's amazing how many different and hugely successful careers this guy has had in one lifetime. Whatever you think about Arnold, and I'm not a fan, he has a knack for excelling at what he does.
Each of the feats below alone is more then most people accomplish in a lifetime:
- Mr. Universe.
- One of the most successful actors of our time.
- The highest office an immigrant in the USA can achieve.
- Married into the Kennedy clan.
- A successful business career, making him a millionaire even before he got into acting.
If anything, he's a very determined overachiever, and I think that's why a lot of people don't like him. I think it's much to simple to put the label Politician on him.
I have to disagree, I think that would be immensely stupid of them. I think they'll just use it to try to funnel users butting up against its limits towards full Oracle. If they kill it they lose that potential sales channel.
But that would give them an incentive to stop improving MySQL, as closing the gap with Oracle would make no business sense.