ATB
In all seriousness, the post was pretty typical stream-of-consciousness self-discovery stuff. It's wordy by definition.
That is incorrect - there are free Game Add-Ons (DLC) on Xbox LIVE for a number of games. There are also free Arcade (XBLA) games, by the way.
Here are some examples:
- Some Halo 3 maps/map packs
- Free tracks for Rock Band (several versions)
- Left 4 Dead Survival Pack
- Deadliest Warrior DLC
- Fable 3 free weapons/outfits
.. and a lot more. Disclaimer: I work there.
Compare it to the revolutions in the other Balkan states around 1988-1992. It was by far the most violent. How many died in Hungary? In Bulgaria? In Poland? In Czechoslovakia?
"there were great fears that the Yugoslavian debacle might repeat itself there"
There were? Interesting, given that the Yugoslavian Civil War happened several years AFTER those 1000+ Romanians died. How would that repetition have worked?
"You can bemoan the people that died"
Could there be a more callous response to thousands of casualties? As I've shown above, this didn't happen in ANY of the other countries making the same transition. It was only the multi-ethnic and barely-cohesive artificial country of Yugoslavia that did worse. Several years later.
"Even a dysfunctional country like Romania has been able to claw itself to levels of prosperity no one dreamed about in 1989."
Sure, and this is a great thing. However, as my reply quoted, it was in response to "lacked any sort of violence." 1000+ dead and many more injured is a poor definition of "any sort of violence."
The Romanian revolution was extremely violent: over 1,000 people died and over 3,000 were wounded, and the former dictator and his wife were found guilty in a hasty show trial and executed on the spot. Their former allies then former a post-Communist clique that looted the country for most of the 90s and stole several elections. Romania continues to have one of the highest corruption rates in Eastern Europe.
But yes, aside from that, it went "remarkably well."
This isn't random conspiratorial nonsense, it's well-documented and NPOVed five ways from Sunday: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Revolution_of_1989#Aft...
That is a very simplistic view of what it takes for some authors to be able to sell Kindle editions (I used to work in that exact field) --
* their contract with the publisher may give all digital rights to the pub. This is the case surprisingly often. Depending on the publisher's priority or digital strategy, a kindle edition may take forever.
* Royalties may be different fir digital editions, eg the publisher may want to take a much bigger cut since they don't have to pay for printing, distribution, etc. If the author doesn't like that, it can seriously delay or halt digital publication.
* Agreements with other dist. channels may prevent a Kindle edition. File under either 'digital strategy' as above or 'publisher greed/stupidity.'
According to the US census, the number of people living in the US at that point was in the low 200ish million, maybe ~230m.
As of right now, in early 2010, it's somewhere around 305-310 million. That number includes a lot of baby boomers (70+ million people, born between 1943 and 1960) who are getting very close to retirement age, especially those whose age and skill set make them unattractive to hire.
Taking into account the nearly 50% increase in US population and the rapid ageing of 70+ million people, many of whom possess skills that aren't necessarily well-suited to the information economy, the chart isn't all that shocking.
Yet it suffers from many not-so-obvious flaws, as analyzed in the popular linguistics blog "Language Log." The commentary is written in a calmly analytical style (interspersed with some judicious jibes) that I think many YC.HN readers will find rather agreeable ("a beautifully written language crime, though it pretends to lay down the law") ---
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992
The entire 'Prescriptivist Poppycock' category at Language Log is generally good reading: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5
The most likely way of losing the type is surely if a user accidentally (or maliciously) changes the filename extension. That is why Windows pops up an alarmist warning if a user tries to change their file extension. Whereas a largely invisible (but still changeable) attribute is much less likely to 'get lost' due to user intervention.
The author makes a number of unsourced assumptions about the business models involved, as well as his moral rights. You'll have to decide for yourself if those are correct:
"The US Kindle store caps book prices at $9.99 even for hardcovers that normally have a retail price of $23.95 and which would typically cost $16 in dead tree format via Amazon. Amazon gets the books at this price by taking the publishers for a huge [...] discount"
That is a fact, is it? Publishers happily sell their books for much less money so they become Kindle bestsellers, thereby undermining their traditional distribution models and pissing off every bookstore? REALLY?
"and by saying "screw you" to the small fry like me, who are looking for our points on the referral scheme"
Because Amazon has given you a few % off sales coming from your links, you have the moral right to extend this scheme to all future ways in which Amazon will ever sell anything? How is that a "screw you" in any way?
"One nasty suspicion of mine is that Amazon were demanding discounts so ludicrous that publishers would be making a net loss on each book sold after expenses and royalties"
Publishers are just lining up to make heavy losses so they can sell electronic content, i.e. they are just desperate to subsidize Amazon's ebook reader? Think this through for a minute.
"what have I got against Amazon's Kindle?
1) DRM. (It's unethical, immoral, fattening, and a royal pain in the ass"
That's strange, since most of the complains seem to be about the cut from referral fees he's not making anymore. A point that, coincidentally, doesn't appear anywhere in the conclusion anymore.
"4) They're using their monopsony position to fuck over their suppliers (i.e. the publishers) "
You'd think someone from a publisher (horribly leak-happy companies, the lot of them) would've let something on by now. Strange how nobody's done so.
Some car manufacturers clearly have been working on this. Better lights (showing dangers ahead), improved handling and braking (to avoid hitting stuff), and more innovative things like radar-based warning sounds if the car things you're about to change lanes and hit someone (the one in the BMW 5 series still has some issues, but it's not bad), or automated braking systems like the ones Mercedes-Benz and Volvo are promoting.
Those systems are still in their infancy. But safety innovation is definitely going in the direction of accident prevention. We have done a lot to protect the fragile human body inside the metal cage by cleverly absorbing impacts through deformation zones, airbags, etc. The next big step will be figuring out how to avoid needing to rely on them. One suggestion has been that the regulatory battle will be the hardest challenge: once you take some level of control out of a driver's hands, litigation issues and complicated fault assignment rear their ugly head. And of course, many drivers will dislike the idea of being babied by a 'nanny car' and refuse to give up any level of control over their vehicles, not unlike (tortured analogy ahead) low-level programmers who insist in coding to the bare metal.
For about a decade, Germany has been trying to sell the 'Transrapid' mag-lev trains and tech to China. Transrapid was sponsored by various German governments (both federal and state) for well over two decades, with the occasional state PM or federal minister turning it into their pet project (e.g. to link an airport to a city, or to link two big cities), etc. The Transrapid patent is from 1934 and the first test track was completed in Germany in 1987, almost twenty years after planning first started.
Unfortunately (for the Transrapid guys), 'normal' train technology started catching up, and the technological hurdles to implementing long-distance mag-lev trains remain prohibitively expensive, despite vast sums being sunk into it by the German government (not only is the actual technology quite sensitive, but the tranches that need to be built tend to be elevated and very straight - which doesn't work well in densely populated areas like Europe).
In the late 90s and early 00s, the only way forward seemed to be selling it to a place needing fast trains and having no scruples about building the tranches wherever they damn well please. Enter China. A few years ago, a German-Chinese joint venture built a single 19-mile track to connect Shanghai to its airport.
The real kicker? The German companies behind Transrapid continue to allege that the Chinese are stealing the technology and implementation details from the German side of the joint-venture so they can build their own -- much cheaper. Or as China Daily reported, the State Council is 'encouraging engineers to "learn and absorb foreign advanced technologies while making further innovations."'
The cost for the aforementioned 19-mile Transrapid track was $1.4 billion dollars. The cost of 80 high-speed Bombardier trains (running on presumably standard rail lines)? $4 billion.
That term simply doesn't come across well in a discussion held - ostensibly - by adults. It has the same effect as someone writing 'MAD LULZ G00G PWNED MS' and ultimately conveys nothing aside from prejudice.
This is fine and dandy, unless you already have an Exchange account configured, e.g. for your work email. When I went to add another Exchange account, my iPhone told me that "Only one Exchange ActiveSync account can be configured."
Maybe there's a way around this, but Google's dire warnings suggest there isn't ("Important! Google Sync uses the Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync® protocol. When setting up a new Exchange ActiveSync account on your iPhone, existing data may be removed from your phone.")
I'll be Googling for a while, but helpful suggestions are appreciated.. (and no, 'suck it iPhone n00b' is not helpful... :))
The focus of the linked article is not his (lack) of academic degrees, but rather a pattern of lying about his degrees and achievements, later redacted. The article also tries to track his real-world experience, which appears similarly underwhelming based on the data dug up by the author.
If you've used a Kindle before to get content, it's readily apparent that the killer app is the large library of content you can one-click buy online and instantly appear on your device over its always-on wireless cell connection. Virtually all Kindle books have roughly the first chapter free for download, so you can easily sample everything available pretty much anywhere your Kindle can get a cell connection (you can buy books from the Kindle, no need to use a PC). You can also use the (free) internet access from your Kindle to read webmail, browse, etc.
Given the lack of proper connectivity and presumably no support for Amazon's DRMed books on this clone, it's not really a competitor, per se. At best, it's an e-ink reader, which has an overlapping target market, but lacks pretty much everything that makes Kindle so compelling. And $200 for a 'dumb' reader seems pretty damn steep.
"Amazon — where workers famously had desks made of wooden doors nailed to two-by-fours in the company’s earlier, money-losing days — remans in some ways as cheap as ever"
Everywhere I went, Amazon still used 'door desks' which are basically doors with legs. They are sturdy, come in various sizes, and are assembled and disassembled easily. There's an award named after them (the "Door Desk Award") that Amazon hands out fairly often, and there's a competition to see how quickly Amazon people can assemble one of them from parts (Jeff Bezos is pretty quick, IIRC).
"Amazon’s frugal ways reflect “more their culture than the immediate economic conditions.”"
Wherever you go, people will casually mention that Amazon "tries to be frugal." The last time I heard this, it was during an office move where I did a lot of the moving myself (instead of relying on the facility staff to do it) after an executive assistant casually mentioned that "we value frugality" so I figured that staff may be put to better use elsewhere. I've been around VPs and never got the impression that they felt comfortable splashing out a lot of cash unless there was a clear need to do so. This culture extends to the very top.
"the company’s relatively modest record of charitable giving has drawn some unfavorable reviews"
Amazon became profitable after many unprofitable years not that long ago (2002). It's probably easier to give a lot to charity if you've been making billions in profits year after year.
* Going to PvP-specific areas only (i.e. areas where 'hero' player characters are meant to fight 'villain' player characters)
* Using 'in-character' communication to indicate he wanted to fight villains, like heroes in that area supposedly do. His character was a hero.
* Using a teleport power to move some nearby villain player characters near non-player-characters, who would then kill the villains.
* Subsequently using 'in-character' communication to cheer about having killed villains.
* This was a major issue because many, many players in those player-vs-player (hero vs villain) areas instead would use the areas for 'farming,' i.e. trying to get experience points (or in-character currency) by killing non-player-characters instead.
* The 'written vs. unwritten rules' that he broke were specifically the customs of what players were actually doing in those areas (farming) vs what the game designers had intended them to do (kill each other).
That conflict between the intended purpose of a game's aspects and how others reacted to it being used that way is the main focus of that professor's article. He seemed to expect for people to suspend their disbelief and remain fully in-character, i.e. following the game's ostensible in-character limitations.
The current WhatWG proposals called "HTML 5" have been stirring up a lot of polarizing speech lately
Positive attention to new technologies is only beneficial if Adobe has a clear monetization strategy for them. So we will introduce a controversy and try our best to make it "polarizing."
It's hard for Adobe to have an official opinion
But unofficially, Adobe will do everything possible to undermine the excitement over HTML5 and torpedo it at all cost.
whatever this consortium of minority browser vendors chooses to do
MINORITY. Get it? Unsupported! Unofficial! What happens if the minority goes away? Don't buy Tucker. Buy GM.
seeing what the final agreement turns out to be, and how it is eventually manifested in the world, both are prerequisites for practical tool-making
Given that we are a tool vendor, this is the only interesting part. And since we largely control the tool market for our tech, this is a major threat to us.
Still, I'm glad that an analyst asked a question about it at the quarterly financial call. Here's what Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen had to say
What a threatened tool vendor CEO has to say is what you should use to form your opinion about a technology and its future viability.
I think the challenge for HTLM 5 will continue to be how do you get a consistent display of HTML 5 across browsers
The biggest challenge for HTML5 will be the constant undermining from companies that see their current tool strategy and quasi-monopoly threatened, such as us.
And when you think about when the rollout plans that are currently being talked about, they feel like it might be a decade before HTML 5 sees standardization across the number of browsers that are going to be out there.
If we keep repeating the fear of how long it might take to implement again and again, it will take even longer. Your hesitation equals cold hard cash for us.
we still think that actually the fragmentation of browsers makes Flash even more important rather than less important
When asked about a potential competitor, I always mention how its rise will make our product more important. Because that's what the board pays me to do.
Adobe's about communicating your ideas -- publishing to various channels -- not just about Flash. Dreamweaver, ColdFusion and the imaging tools all benefit from an increase in HTML.
Hey guys, remember ColdFusion? ... Guys?
Adobe profits from easing communication in general
Positive communication about Adobe products. And sowing FUD about competitors. But since Slashdot posters ran the term 'FUD' into the ground ten years ago, you can't use it anymore without being derided. SCORE!
Flash is a strong bet for emerging platforms
I'm high as a kite.
I'm increasingly uncomfortable with calling the WhatWG proposals "HTML 5" though
Giving something that might become a standard the appearance of legitimacy is dangerous to our business model. Open standards are the enemy of our proprietary tools.
What counts is not a press release, but a realworld deliverable
What is not deliverable, for instance, is Flash on iPhone and possibly many other portable devices, which appear to be the biggest growth market/land rush of the next decade. Allowing an open competitor like HTML5 to dominate that market would be fatal for us.
Shantanu's last point in there really resonates with me
Please give me a raise.
this whole "HTML5" campaign will likely benefit Flash, because few remain who oppose the idea that "experience matters"
Our experience in making cold hard cash from selling Flash tools matters the most. Using "scare quotes" will help de-legitimize HTML5.
Things are quite a bit different than five years ago.
We now have a virtual monopoly on serving casual video on the web. We will fight anything that threatens us.
iPhone helped to radically increase the number of phones with Flash support
The new QuickTime X plays Flash videos natively. We might be screwed.
the "HTML5" publicity helps marginalize those few who still argue that images, animation, audio/video and rich interactivity have no place on the web
HTML5 uses open standards to play those file formats natively, which severely undercuts our tool/server profits.
Flash will be able to deliver on those heightened expectations, regardless of what each separate browser engine does.
Fuck you, WHATWG, Chrome, Mozilla, Safari.
* If some of the top companies are implicitly not competing for you (as an employee), it means your value as an asset is lowered. There is simply less desire for another company to lure you away with more money, better benefits, a more attractive project to work on, etc. Once you work at one of the companies "on the list," none of the others will come knocking. Your value is also lowered in terms of being able to negotiate a better salary, for instance: HR (and perhaps your manager) knows that you do not have an offer from Yahoo or Google just waiting to whisk you away.
* The basic effect on general engineers' salaries is thus: the less it costs Google/MS to hire a Silicon Valley A-lister, the less incentive they will feel to look for bargains by hiring outside the circle of "made men". Thus they will hire fewer such relative-newcomers, at lower salaries. Thus there will be less upward pressure on non-Silicon-Valley-A-list salaries: fewer engineers will leave the broader pool for Silicon Valley and those that do will be receiving less money to do so, so the competitive pressures on the non-SV-A-list employers are weakened too. So less salary for SDEs broadly. This knock-on effect is likely minimal for junior ASP.NET bank programmers etc. but likely significant for hotter engineers at more high-powered dev/research/etc. workplaces throughout the US.
* Because certain kinds of employees' labour mobility is lowered, it means that access to engineers is somewhat more limited. Your company may not be able to get the rockstar/ninja/hip term of the week who already knows the valley, doesn't need to relocate, and just wants to pay off his SF condo more quickly. Inversely, you may not want to compete for top graduates from places like Stanford with the 90k/100k first year salaries that Facebook and some others have been throwing around. This means you can either get second-tier native talent that may need relocating or that hasn't proven itself yet ... or you can play the H1 visa game and get a much cheaper foreign programmer who is contractually tied to your company, often fears for his immigrant status, and is thereby much less likely to leave your company for another one. This is a bad thing for US graduates or relatively inexperienced programmers, as it depresses their salaries, as well. In terms of the free market, I guess it's only a natural expression of international labour mobility.
* The lack of commentary on the above may be due to the current economic conditions and the "thank $DEITY I still have a job" attitude I've seen quite a bit. On the other hand, we got plenty of people on here with the kind of inside knowledge who would be able to tell us more on this subject.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992
The entire 'Prescriptivist Poppycock' category at Language Log is generally good reading:
"Johannes Gutenberg," in spite of not appearing in _Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow_ or kissing Sharon Stone in _Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol_ (the true highlight of the series, as many aficionados will readily attest), probably deserves our thanks instead.
The problem is that consumer preferences lead to lots of small (and fuel efficient) cars being bought every year; most of them just happen to be made by non-US companies. The profit margin on smaller cars is smaller, as well (luxury cars have the largest profit margin), but I don't believe that Toyota or Honda are losing money on every Corolla or Civic sold. They also seem to be doing OK in meeting fuel economy laws.
The real question is why US automakers don't make competitive small cars. One answer is the cost of labor in the US, but the other answer is that US automakers don't have a compelling process in place that continuously refines a small car until it does what the market wants. Look at the aforementioned Civic, for instance. Its original form came on the market in 1973, and its current larger form in 1996. Even the 70s version had a high build quality and was renowned for its reliability, but every subsequent iteration has, arguably, been refined and worked on to make it more and more palatable to the American market (the European Civics are different, FWIW).
Now look at US car makers. Which small US car has been marketed under the same name since the early 70s and refined every few years, meeting market demand and giving consumers what they want? US auto makers seem obsessed with re-badging and re-marketing their cars every few years, often to cover up memories of unsuccessful or embarrassing prior launches. The worst example is perhaps the Ford Taurus, which sold bucketloads in the full-size sedan segment in the 80s and 90s. So of course Ford took the Taurus out of their segment in '04 and replaced it with a smaller AND a larger sedan (the Fusion and the 500). Imagine Honda discontinuing the Accord next year and replacing it with a larger AND a smaller sedan (rather than making the Accord a bit larger, which they did last year... and five years ago). To nobody's surprise, the 500 flopped and was hastily renamed back to 'Taurus' for the '09/'10 year (there were some technical reasons, too).
Similarly, there are car production plants on US soil that make perfectly good cars, using non-unionized American workers. If you've ever been to, say, Louisville, KY, everybody seems to be driving a Camry.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992
The entire 'Prescriptivist Poppycock' category at Language Log is generally good reading:
on HN, you wrote --
"I hate how being harsh has become fashionable. Whatever happened to manners?"
on your blog, you follow up by saying --
"I stand behind those words. Acting bitter on the Internet seems to be increasingly gathering the popularity amongst an audience that’s used to being amused and entertained by cheap attacks."
Two points: the first is that you use the word "bitter" to back up an anecdote of someone using "fucking" as an adjective to describe a poor User Interface experience. I disagree with that assessment, as there's nothing that suggests bitterness by using "fucking." It's merely a more extreme descriptor of the user's anger or exasperation, but it doesn't suggest bitterness, which has a distinctly different flavour (if you will excuse the pun).
Secondly, I don't believe anything "happened" to manners. There have always been people, often a vast majority of a given population, who used much coarser language to describe their everyday life and experience. Often this was a class distinction, thus the reference to "swearing like a sailor" etc. I expect that many people posting here were exposed -- in the context of software engineering or computer science -- to colleagues who were either used to communicating in an academic or professional context. Although coarse language is to be expected to some extent, written communication about features, bugs, etc. in a corporate US context tends to avoid direct expletives for various reasons ("lack of professionalism" etc). This isn't the case in parts of the OSS community or parts of Europe. You may have seen this before -- http://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/ -- the number of fuck/shit/crap uses in the Linux source code. Do you similarly think that the Linux contributors who provided the patches (or indeed Linus himself) need to "grow up?"
Different contexts, different modes of communication.
But the truth why that dude used "fuck" all over the place? It's a very quick and easy expression of dismay or outrage, and it gets cheap laughs. Whether or not that's an adolescent desire I can't say. Yet some of the most serious commentators on, say, international politics heavily use 'fuck' throughout their own communication. Read some interviews with Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, for instance -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh
The chest area overall not only moves more slowly, but also presents the "center shot" target for a sniper that he'd try to hit.
As for the head being left 'exposed' by the glass enclosure, consider that for a sniper to hit a target in the head, he would have to be on higher ground (e.g. a building) and have a clear line of sight. Sniper rifle ranges being what they are (the longest confirmed kill was at 1.42 miles for 35 years until 2002, and is now only about 450 feet more), you can be pretty sure that all relevant buildings within that range have probably been checked. If you consider the shooting angle involved, his chest area is at a much greater risk from somebody standing a reasonable distance away, maybe with slight elevation.
This is baffling. 'Consumer preferences' lead to lots of small cars being bought every year, most of them just happen to be made by non-US companies. The profit margin on smaller cars is smaller, as well (luxury cars have the largest profit margin), but I don't believe that Toyota or Honda are losing money on every Corolla or Civic sold. They also seem to be doing OK in meeting fuel economy laws.
The real question is why US automakers don't make competitive small cars. One answer is the cost of labor in the US, but the other answer is that US automakers don't have a compelling process in place that continuously refines a small car until it does what the market wants. Look at the aforementioned Civic, for instance. Its original form came on the market in 1973, and its current larger form in 1996. Even the 70s version had a high build quality and was renowned for its reliability, but every subsequent iteration has, arguably, been refined and worked on to make it more and more palatable to the American market (the European Civics are different, FWIW).
Now look at US car makers. Which small US car has been marketed under the same name since the early 70s and refined every few years, meeting market demand and giving consumers what they want? US auto makers seem obsessed with re-badging and re-marketing their cars every few years, often to cover up memories of unsuccessful or embarrassing prior launches. The worst example is perhaps the Ford Taurus, which sold bucketloads in the full-size sedan segment in the 80s and 90s. So of course Ford took the Taurus out of their segment in '04 and replaced it with a smaller AND a larger sedan (the Fusion and the 500). Imagine Honda discontinuing the Accord next year and replacing it with a larger AND a smaller sedan (rather than making the Accord a bit larger, which they did last year... and five years ago). To nobody's surprise, the 500 flopped and was hastily renamed back to 'Taurus' for the '09/'10 year (there were some technical reasons, too).
The auto industry must also be liberated from the Wagner Act
There are car production plants on US soil that make perfectly good cars, using non-unionized American workers. The auto industry is already liberated from the Wagner Act.
If you have any suspicion about it, get a friend to buy a random MP3 from Amazon using her account and buy the same file yourself using your account. Compare the two MP3s using whatever tool you want; I did, and they seemed to be absolutely identical.
FWIW, there is a field in the Amazon MP3 ID3 - under 'Comments' - which says Amazon.com Song ID: 20XXXXXXX (I Xed the last seven digits). That's a unique song identifier, not a user identifier.