PrimeVideo.com is the website (in addition to apps on mobile and living room devices like TVs and consoles) where customers outside of the US, UK, Germany, and Japan can watch Prime Video. In the aforementioned four countries, customers can watch Prime Video directly on their amazon.* retail website instead.
> "In general Microsoft doesn't allow free DLC. You can ship bug fixes and there's a tiny amount of title update space you can shove content into, but large amounts of content are meant to be deployed through paid DLC"
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.
That is surprising to me, because I've personally heard developers complain that they weren't allowed to release free DLC. I apologize for the misinformation... I guess policies have changed?
"Those three countries - along with Romania (and sometimes Slovenia) are the case studies for Eastern Europe. They're where the transition from communism went remarkably well and lacked 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."
Point. Its late for me and I got slightly jumbled up. You're absolutely right that Romania was the most violent of the revolutions and that I shouldn't have included them in the lacking violence part. I've edited the original post to mention this.
Even still, it could have been much worse; the revolution could have failed. And it lead to a stable government that successfully transitioned between parties afterwards. And the Romanian economy is doing fairly well. I'd call that a pretty remarkable success, given how spectacular the failures in Eastern Europe are on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Their former allies then former a post-Communist clique that looted the country for most of the 90s and stole several elections.
I haven't really read much about this, Romanian elections being fraudulent. Don't suppose you could recommend a few good news articles or other data (books or papers, perhaps) on the subject (Romania after 1989, not just elections specifically)? The Wikipedia article doesn't have any citation for it either.
And something more recent to show that the trend has continued? Romania has elections every 4 years, I believe. That paper was published after one round of elections. There's been a few rounds since.
"Extremely violent?" Even the Romanian revolution was practically bloodless compared to what could have been. Recall that there is a large Hungarian minority in Romania, with strong claims to territory, and there were great fears that the Yugoslavian debacle might repeat itself there.
The fact that Romania made it out of the hellish Ceausescu regime with comparatively little violence, and is now a full-on EU member, is one of the great success stories of that time.
You can bemoan the people that died and the slowness of the eventual transition towards more open government, but you must keep a sense of perspective. Even a dysfunctional country like Romania has been able to claw itself to levels of prosperity no one dreamed about in 1989.
"the Romanian revolution was practically bloodless compared to what could have been"
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."
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."
And I admitted that I was wrong, right away. You're beating a dead horse to death if this is your main reason behind your statements.
Not lacking any violence at all doesn't mean that Romania had an incredibly violent revolution. Its not that black and white.
1,000 people dying is incredibly sad, yes. But, the death toll could have been much, much worse. The military could have sided with the government, not the people. There could have been an ethnic division within the country. The Soviet Union could have reversed the Sinatra Doctrine and stepped in.
This article blames the author for not having a Kindle version of her book.
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 that graphic, the previous highest peak of long-term unemployed in the US was in the early 1980s, with around 3m unemployed. The current high peak in 2010, which looks like it may be decreasing now, is just over 6m.
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.
This is a very popular essay which tends to get posted around the web quite often.
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") ---
Despite outward appearances, Orwell is not making one of those prescriptivist rants that you sometimes see from people who don't know how language evolves. What Orwell is talking about is deeper. His essay more about style rather than grammar, which means it's not really taking part in the (de- vs pre-)scriptivist debates in the first place. However, it goes the extra mile in using examples to show how pointlessly fluffy prose is simply worse at communication, because it either obscures the point, or (he implies) causes a point never to exist in the first place because it promotes wooly thinking.
Yeah, his essay makes some rookie mistakes, like complaining about recent decline and using the passive voice. He's still correct, in general. He's not stating rules of grammar or trying to lay down any sort of law, he's posting a couple of helpful pointers for getting your point across, which emphasis precision and clarity over appearing educated.
I think the biggest indication that that critique is ill-founded is that it doesn't start with "well, it's kinda long," because that's the biggest hypocrisy I detect. What is really comes down to, is that an essay that's really about prose and composition shouldn't be analyzed as if it's about linguistics, even when it happens to have "language" in the title by stroke of ill fortune.
There was an interesting, non-fawning (and less sputtering than the LL post) piece on Orwell and some of his work by Julian Barnes in the NY Review of Books earlier this year.
I don't agree with this linguist. All he does is torture the meaning of the rules and torture logic in order to squeeze out some kind of inconsistency from Orwell's essay.
I'm not sure whether this essay gets posted because of its advice on the use of language or merely for the following, continuously relevant, observation:
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
The implication is that when you use language in the way we often see politicians, the PR department, etc. do, then they are not only guilty of using inaccurate language: they are probably also guilty of having inaccurate thoughts. You should worry about using inaccurate language, because it may mean you are having inaccurate thoughts; a vicious circle.
I must say, calling Orwell’s essay a “language crime” is more than a bit overblown. This blog post’s “jibes” miss the essay’s spirit, and Orwell’s playful (often ironic) tone, and thereby misread its substance, I think. The Language Log author completely ignores the terrible examples that Orwell calls out, and the entire premise of the article, in his rush to nitpick Orwell’s prose and “prove” him a hypocrite. I’ll quote Orwell’s essay here, because this is the essential bit:
> Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart
> from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them.
> The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision.
> The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he
> inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as
> to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness
> and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern
> English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As
> soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the
> abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are
> not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the
> sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together
> like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.
Orwell quite skillfully analyzes several of the most common problems with political prose, describes how they operate, and their pernicious effect. His rules are not designed to be rock solid prescriptions, but something more like guidelines or heuristics. The goal, with political speech and writing, as with most expository prose, should be to make imagery concrete, and language precise, because the goal should be to make the author’s plain meaning understood, rather than obscuring it in a vague and meaningless haze.
The blog author’s “logical” analysis of his final rule is the most particularly stupid. Orwell’s plain meaning is clear: “do not take these rules as dogma, and break them where necessary to write clear and stylish prose.” Instead, the author tries to apply an odd mathematical rigor to show that the caveat is somehow vacuous. But consider: if that final rule was removed, would the essay actually be saying the same thing? No. Is this final warning actually self-contradictory? Not really. It’s Orwell’s apparently too subtle way of contradicting the seeming strictness of the previous rules, pointing out that the device was meant for rhetorical effect rather than to demonstrate firm conviction. (Think about it, if Orwell had said “sometimes passive sentences are less clear than active ones,” the reader could equally call him out for indecisiveness.)
In conclusion: meh, a pretty weak language-lawyer analysis, especially for its premise that Orwell is being too language lawyerly. Orwell’s prose where he “breaks” his rules remains clear, concise, and stylish – obviously said rules can be broken without yielding awful language. So what? Using said “rules” to examine prose makes a decent start at identifying some of its problematic passages. An author consciously considering all of those “rules” while writing may decide to break some of them sometimes, but will also (at least in my personal experience) catch sloppy phrases and sloppy reasoning, and write tighter, clearer prose.
I can never keep up with Language Log, and 3 grafs into this I have to say that this post is fantastic, and absolutely justifies the re-re-re-re-post of this essay on HN. Thank you!
encoding the type in the filename isn't a bad way of ensuring the type never gets lost
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.
Why can't one strive for better?
Given the reality of prevalent general ignorance why not embrace it and eradicate writing in schools, replacing it with touch-tying lessons?
DISCLAIMER: I haven't worked at Amazon for some time now.
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.
