Both my cats respond to their names. They also understand other sentences like (in spanish) "food!" (obvious), "time to nap with me!" (she runs like lighting to the bed), "want to go outside?" (goes to the door), "GTFO!" (she goes out of the room), "stop it!" (used usually when they're harassing birds or the neighbor dogs), "not today" (when I don't want to have cats in the bed at nighttime), etc.
One of my cats brings me his playing ball when she wants me to throw it (like a dog). I youtubed it once (with crappy phone quality), tough it doesn't show when she initially brings me the ball:
I also doesn't find this particular API hard or convoluted. But there is some boilerplate (new_key(), get_key(), etc) here that could be simplified with higher level functions.
I've been finding real uses for Google Wave and I'm liking it a lot. I'm also a programmer. I've used it with great success to do some "agile" style development for some projects I work on as freelance (read: all weekend bugfixing at home to finish a project for monday) and coordinate the tasks to be done with other programmers and designers.
Because usually the list of tasks isn't fixed but the programmer/designer finds new things to fix or implement as they're working on fixing the previous ones (for example: you notice you'll need to install a third party module => "install module X in Y", the module has a bug => "fix bug in module X", etc...), the wiki-style editting capabilities of Wave are great, everyone updates his tasks, everyone can add comments on them (and delete them later) and everyone knows what the others are working on.
I've also used it for informal chitchat with friends, like the "LOST" example above. The threads are a lot easier to follow than emails with several people on the CC, but is also "asynchronous" unlike Jabber/MSN.
I've a wave with some friends were we attach every ebook we buy so we all share them with just one of us paying for every title (which is legal in my country BTW).
Mmmm... more uses... oh yes, I've used it to write drafts for articles before publishing them on my site (again, the RTE is much better than emailing and remailing you for that.)
Using is too as personal notes manager (using tags.)
Things that MUST improve the make wave perfect:
- Performance on threads with hundreds of messages (blips).
- Drop the pseudo-MDI GUI, which I hate, and use something more like Gmail.
- Allow you to receive your email inside Google Wave and reply from there so I could stop using Gmail entirely.
- A good Android/iPhone native app (the web sucks on mobile devices currently.)
When - not if, when - they go Dark Side and release a client that injects ads or collates data, who's going to switch to a fork clients and a different metaserver and protocol version? That's right: you, and me, and him over there. Not Real People.
It's open source; you switch to another client just like there isn't a single Jabber client.
Read a little about the project. It's a network of distributed servers, much like email is. If everything works as designed and Facebook NOMNOM them, there will be 0 consequences for the network.
...but it was stored on Google Docs.
You mean 15 eur/hour on staff or as freelancers? Because I know of some romanian programmers earning less than 31.000€ here in Spain. A freelancer usually takes 30-60 eur/hour, and a consulting company a lot more.
On my country, Spain, that's pretty much the average salary for a userspace developer with 2-3 years experience. But not a kernel developer. A kernel developer could not find work here.
2.4 million people tuned in for the finale.
And probably five times that figure downloaded the torrent outside the USA. I wish a system to pay for the chapters outside USA, at a reasonable price and with good subtitules were in place; I would use it.
Two can Live as Cheaply as One for Half as Long. -- Howard Kandel
