Can't wait 'til she discovers the wonders of forced casualisation and then gets super upset when employees choose not to come in for 3 hours at 20-minutes notice. "How dare they treat my business so flippantly?" I wonder.
At the very least they've definitely been run through a middle-man at some point. So what they've done is put a microphone in a library, grabbed whatever audio is on it, voice recognition'd it and then cleaned it up, and uploaded it to Twitter. And hidden it inside a lamp. shrug
It's pretty firmly established that Bush lied and had been gunning for Iraq long before WMD became his casus belli and you have a wonderful resource called the world wide web if you have any interest at all in confirming that.
A lot of people here seem to have absolutely no issue with saying "I have no problem with the ethical ramifications of a company's actions or choice of representatives or the beneficiaries of a company's wealth that my support helps grow". I can't tell if you're sociopathic or just utterly clueless. Not taking a 'moral stand' isn't business -- it's taking a moral stand of not caring. Culpability can stem from inaction as well.
I've never used it but I was under the impression that Microsoft had not killed off their Messenger platform, just MSN Messenger? They still run Lync which is the business-oriented platform and where they stand to make actual money.
The best part about the Mac client is that it stops me from shutting down my computer (have to mash op-com-esc each time I forget to try to kill lync before shutdown)
They were likely making good money off the Windows Live Messenger (It's final name by the time it was killed off) because it had so many users, and was serving advertisements to all desktop users.
It wasn't that much money, but it was a user base that was leveraged many times, and that they could keep on leveraging. By killing Messenger, they disconnected users' ombilical cord to the MS social network, whatever that is.
There's still some kind of enterprise messenger that Microsoft sells. I don't remember the name of it, but I've seen it very recently in several organizations.
Office Communicator/Microsoft Lync. I can't speak to Lync (the current iteration), but Communicator, while functional, leaves a lot to be desired. I use a Mac at home. Spell-check everywhere is awesome, MS can't figure out how to unify their UIs so that useful little features are accessible everywhere. In theory it's nice because it plays well with Exchange. However, different organizations in a large corporation with their own Exchange servers may or may not be able to communicate with each other over it. And it seemed to go back and forth daily. And a ton of small UI misfeatures that make it unpleasant to work with as a communications medium (IMO, again, beter than nothing, but worse than many other options).
That's a pretty interesting test, thanks for sharing it. The funny thing is I had to pass over a bunch of words I know from french/latin/italian that I haven't seen used in English so I don't know whether the meaning has shifted or not in the transfer. Stupid English.
I moved to Rome and got a job at a small Italian company with just a handful of other people. I'd never studied Italian before (but French and Latin, yes) and just simply turning up and having to struggle through reading and writing emails in Italian, talking to people in Italian, even terribly broken and incorrect Italian, has done for me in 6 months what would have taken about 8 years of non-intensive study. My grammar isn't great but that's for lack of actively studying it, I'm too busy. Even still, I self-correct all the time and my conversational and comprehension skills are comparatively through the roof. There really is no substitute for immersion and practice. The more familiar with something you become, the more you start to recognise patterns and where your own styles fall down -- you start to notice that others use certain prepositions in a context where you'd use a different one, and you check and self-correct. All the time you're getting better and more comfortable with the whole process; listening, speaking, pronunciation, stringing more and more complex sentences together. It's a holistic process and there is simply no substitute for jumping in the deep end, and the more organic and 'real' it can be, the better. A stale classroom a few times a week is almost doing you a disservice by making you think you're studying -- you might be better off saving your time until you can commit yourself to it properly (for e.g. reading a newspaper every day, speaking for an hour every day with a native speaker, reading and writing in forums/IRC in that language).
Personally I found watching films with subtitles (the original subtitles, I mean - same stuff they're saying on the screen, like a version for hearing-impaired people) very helpful in learning
I like that. "Prove you're not a drug dealer and we'll see if there's still money to return." It kind of gives the middle fingers to 3 somewhat-important US rights: the right to not self-incriminate (being coerced into providing new evidence that might be used against you), being considered innocent until proven guilty (assets seized without an active case against you), and that everyone is equal under the law (unless we say you're a drug dealer (or, going back 60 years, black)).
