I have participated in medical research as volunteer (mostly for trials on the uptake of drugs e.g. inhale vs. intravenous) and sample size was normally 6-12 patients. No more than that, I was told that such a sample size is large enough. Also costs are high of those experiments, which is an incentive to keep sizes small.
For such a first experiment, a group of ten patients sounds very reasonable to me. Now they can follow those patients for a while to see if there are any after effects, and if all looks good continue with larger trials, potentially making it a standard treatment for this cancer.
For whatever reason, people do fall for it. Big time.
Other than by pure greed, I don't know WHY people would really fall for it, especially if one gets many of those mails a day (easily a dozen or more a day for me - it's about half of the spam that makes it through greylisting). If you get just one such mail, then I can imagine: the first one I got, well over a decade ago, also made me wonder: is this legitimate, is this real, it certainly sounded quite real but the whole thing was just too unlikely to be trusted. Why trust a random strange contacting me by e-mail? At the time I had never heard about such scams.
But anyway, yes, people do fall for it. And there must be quite some people that fall for it. If not, it would die out quickly: that is pure economics. This are relative expensive scams to carry out, time and effort wise, and if they do not get any response on their mails (or no return on those responses) the activity would stop.
China is behind, I'm sure, but not by 50 years. Their achievements are maybe what the US did 50 years ago, but that doesn't mean that they are technologically that far behind.
NASA has learnt a lot from the moon landings and the shuttle program and everything else they did, a lot of that knowledge is published and the Chinese will definitely learn as much as they can from it. They can buy rocket technology from US companies if they want, too. They will be behind, the most state-of-the-art tech NASA has will be kept as state secrets, but that doesn't make them 50 years behind, more like 10 years. And they're learning still.
What China is mostly behind in is general organisation and management. They just don't have that kind of expertise, the experience as can be found in NASA. Again that is something they are catching up with fast, too, and the current mission is definitely a big experience, and if successful, a great success. A manual docking is really tough to achieve in space.
The Chinese are doing with their space program the exact same as what the US was doing 50 years ago, during the moon race. They want to show their people and the world that they are a country to recon with, that they are as advanced as the other major economies. And of course for the glory of their government and the communist party - which of course was exactly what the then-US government tried to do for themselves.
Maybe not to buy myself: it's an interesting device. It seems they have actually put some innovative touches in the hardware, but we'll have to see the final result to know how good it really is.
And innovation is always good, as it keeps the rest of the vendors on their toes, to innovate themselves and/or to copy features and ideas and to put those in their own devices. Hopefully with further improvements.
Besides I wonder why they would go to such lengths to lock down the OS. It's their own product, they sell it, they make their profit already. The OS license has been paid for, and even if it were resellable, there is no market to sell it to, as all other such devices have a license already. I wonder whether they really care that much about the hacker market, and whether they really see it as so big a threat. Beacuse I don't think it's a serious threat to them.
I wonder why they wouldn't use a Linux distribution for this project.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I recall from the Amiga back then (a friend had one), and what I have seen here so far, this "Amiga Experience" is all about the GUI, not so much about the underlying tech. Which is no matter what totally different than on the original Amiga for the simple fact that we have so different hardware nowadays. Hard drives, more memory, USB, optical drives, WiFi, you name it. It wasn't there back then, and is standard now.
Already there are themes to make Gnome or KDE look and behave exactly like OS-X, or Mac Classic, or Windows XP or whatever. They can be themed so thoroughly, using different window managers probably even more possibilities, that I'd say this is the way to go.
Take a Linux distro, e.g. Ubuntu, as base, and build your own customisation on it. There are plenty of derivative distros that do it just like that. Ubuntu being a derivative itself. And presto you have the Amiga Experience, with all it's quirks, with all the underlying goodness of modern hardware support etc.
Part of a typical Apple announcement is also a launch date. Tomorrow, next week, next month: they will always give a date. And a retial price for it. And full specs.
And of course Apple only announces a product when it's done, and ready to go to the shops. Before what's released are only rumours, but that are always rumours of actual specs - and I suspect they release the rumours only when that function is actually there and ready. That makes it much easier to live up to the hype. What you see is what you get.
It's typical MS marketing: show off something, but not too much, and let fantasy (wishful thinking) fill in the gaps.
Then when the product is launched, many people will queue up for it.
But it's a risky strategy, especially nowadays, as those people will switch on their devices and one of the first things they do with it is send twitter or facebook comments on about how good/bad it is. If you don't meet expectations, the next day there won't be lines anymore. Other than for the returns counter, maybe.
Maybe you remember the laptops with swivel screen from about a decade ago? There was a name for the type of device, I forgot what it was. The screen could turn around and close backwards onto the keyboard, display side up. So you basically got a thick tablet in your hands. They came at a significant premium to normal laptops.
Technology has advanced, everything is smaller, we have multi-touch (those touch screens, if they were touch screens already, could do only a single touch at a time), and now everything is built into the screen instead of into the keyboard part.
They flopped at the time, too expensive, too few advantages. But obviously the idea wasn't that bad.
From the looks of it now, I'm interested in this. I never had that with their Zune or Xbox.
I may never use it, yet it's an interesting device as it is presented. I'm afraid it's currently still vapourware, but you never know. It gives some ideas to Apple and Samsung for their next offerings.
Why interesting? For one, it uses x86. That means you can install a normal OS on it, and office type software. I am interested in a tablet hybrid like the Transformer but the Android OS hold me back: it misses essentials like OpenOffice. It is really important to me to be able to read/write Office documents. Also my e-banking system uses a USB key, with Windows-only drivers. This may just work with the Surface Pro. It won't work on any exisiting tablet. And that's a showstopper to me: I would buy it to use on business trips, and being able to access my bank is important.
I also like the built-in keyboard. That's another issue I have with tablets, it's so darn hard to type on those things. Especially if you want to look at the screen at the same time. The built-in stand is just smart, and can be very useful.
All in all it the hardware side looks really attractive to me. The software side, no idea.
Finally something interesting coming out of MS. Whether it's giong to make it to the marketplace, and if so whether it can compete with existing offerings, time will tell. We don't know battery life, for example, and that's key for tablets. Does it have instant-on or need to boot? How's the touch screen feel? How's the keyboard type? Is the trackpad nice and sensitive? How does the UI cope with both mouse and touch inputs? Many questions, that won't be answered for now.
I agree. The summary doesn't make sense. Razor-thin hardware margins? That's not Samsung, but the people that put together those phones for Samsung. No-one ever says the same about Apple, for example, while Apple also designs their own hardware.
Samsung's margin should be better thanks to using Android. Must be far cheaper to maintain their own brand of Android than to maintain a complete mobile OS, plus they have access to the enormous existing app market. The profit is in the design and marketing of the device, and that's what Samsung is doing quite well. They're also designing and making their own chips, this is usually also a quite profitable business - simply because they own the design to those chips.
The edge of the puzzle: you can try what you want at the outside, but you won't (shouldn't) get a match there. On the other hand if the edge is a black line, the algorithm may go haywire as to outside edges form a perfect match against one another.
There may be more than one puzzle included.
One piece may match against several others, but only certain groups of four may match together.
Some pieces may have an imperfect match, the pattern continues (to our eyes) but one edge is blue and the other yellow, and still they go together because a border in the image happens to fall on the cut. Such a match you can only find by comparing complete tiles (very hard for a computer, easy for a human), or by having two groups of multiple tiles where only this edge doesn't match but everything else does, and then it's likely that they do belong together.
And there are probably other pitfalls that I haven't thought of. All in all, it's not easy!
Interesting, and inbelievably cheap - not just becasue of the Windows license fee; no idea how much they pay for that. It's Windows CE so linking to the normal Win7 retail prices doesn't make sense.
OS: Windows CE. Never worked with that, no idea on the interface. Should include a browser, assume IE. But what version for WinCE?
Storage: not mentioned. Is this a "true" netbook as in can only do web browsing and web apps? Price could imply no local storage indeed, other than for the embedded OS. The ebay listing has no details at all. They are selling, shipping US only.
Install other OS? Well if no external storage, good luck with that.
Install applications? No mention about this. No external storage could be an issue there.
Form factor looks like the EEEPC 701 series, that's not too bad. It has a higher screen resolution. I like the overall idea. I'm still regularly using that EEEPC, almost exclusively for web browsing. It's sitting on the dining table, quick to grab, small enough to not be in the way too much, light enough to move around with one hand.
Safari is too integrated then, pity. But not surprising.
Anyway this Junior is a prototype browser, an experimental interface. It must be seen like that: an experiment with new interfaces. This is also the interesting part of it, and that they do it on the iPad may be just a marketing ploy. "New browser for iPad" sounds much better than "new browser for Android tablet". The the average consumer the iPad is hot hot hot, the Android tables are the cheap second choice.
It is great that these experiments are done, it shows people that there are more ways to do the same task. Not all experiments will work though, others may refinement, or will inspire a third party into making something that does work well.
If this browser is released, and if it gains significant popularity, then people will call on Apple to allow them to change the default. Maybe Apple will listen, maybe people will defect to Android systems where they can use Junior, let the market decide.
While it's sad that Safari is so tightly integrated, we're still talking about a single product line of a single vendor. There is a lot of competition: on the hardware side there are dozens of other hardware vendors producing tablet computers, on the software side there is Android, plus some secondary choices like Windows 8 (RT for tablets, iirc). Linux vendors are also creating typical tablet interfaces (like Ubuntu's unity). Neither has any traction near what Android has, but they are there nonetheless.
MySpace: never seen that as an integrated social network like Facebook, more as a place to build your homepage (a souped-up Geocities so to say). I can't browse now it as I'm in Hong Kong, so the page is served in Chinese which I can't read, and there is no link to change that to English (or any other language)! And my browser's preferences for language are 1) Dutch, 2) English. Go figure. Not only do they ignore my browser preference, they don't allow me to override the setting.
Facebook: originally from academia-only, making it very wanted and people were eager to get on, so when they opened up the world flocked to them. OK that's definitely simplified but part of the explanation.
Sure there may (and likely will) be a replacement for Facebook. At the moment though Facebook is going strong, and I can't really think of any existing company that may be able to market a direct competitor. Google would be one of those, they tried and failed. Apple may be, they have the brand and the user base (through their iPhones). Microsoft? Brand is strong, but very decent and business, not cool as Google or Apple.
For the upcoming years I see Facebook to go strong. For the upcoming decade maybe, depending on how they innovate their services and manage to not upset their users. Both are tricky points.
The company most comparable to Facebook is Google. Both have privacy issues; both live and fall by the amount of information they collect from their users. Google so far manages to keep their users on their side, I think more so than Facebook, at least they have a much better image when it comes to privacy, yet they did not manage to leverage that image to create a viable Facebook competitor.
How Facebook is going to do on the stock market I don't know. What would Facebook care? They have the cash already, they don't lose out there. They will survive even if their stock drops hard - I mean it won't be the thing that causes them to go bankrupt. Indeed they have to find additional revenues, no idea how they're going to do that, I never see any ads on Facebook courtesy to AdBlockPlus.
Privacy advocates beware, as the problem is almost certainly worse than ever anticipated.
Good thing we have alternatives, right?
Well, yes and no.
There are alternatives, but no useful alternatives. The problem of the Internet is that it is very conductive to the creation of monopolies, especially when it comes to sites that rely on user input. Facebook is big because in the early days it managed to gain critical mass. This made it grow to the juggernaut it is now. Slashdot is also a site that gained critical mass, and as a result is one of the biggest IT/tech related discussion sites.
As a result, if you want to connect with friends and use an online social network, you go to Facebook, because everyone else is there already. You don't go to Google+ or any other such network, as your friends aren't there. The sheer size of Facebook is its main attraction, and this makes it also very difficult for other networks to start to compete. After all you first have to get critical mass, and that's really difficult.
Even a company like Google, with its very positive image, its huge resources, gaining enormous publicity with their start-up network (they made it to the TV news, front page of news papers worldwide, all over the tech sites) didn't manage to do this. They didn't even gain enough traction to survive as social network in a niche, like e.g. LinkedIn still survives. This just goes to show how hard it is to come with a viable alternative. The only way to come with an alternative is to link your network to Facebook, which Facebook won't allow, and still doesn't give users much of an incentive to use your network and not Facebook's.
I do not second-guess any women on the Shuttle missions.
I do second-guess this case because the news about this rocket launch is literally >50% "we got a woman in space" and There is no reason to me this woman would not be as good as their male counterparts. She used to be a fighter pilot, so has a proven track record in another high-demand job. It's just how the news overly focusses on having a woman in space that makes me suspect that the selection criteria for this mission included "must include a female".
It is almost like if you would report on the first Apollo moon missions as "we got a man in space, and outside of orbit! Oh yeah they also touched down on the moon. This man is fantastic, his family is great, he worked so hard to get in space and put evreything aside. His wife and kid followed the launch at home."
Now what is the important part: a man/woman in space, or the exploratory and scientific reach and objectives of the space mission?
The incredible focus on having a female on board makes me wonder why she was chosen.
The US regularly had/has females their crew, and the gender of an astronaut is pretty much a non-issue. These are obviously chosen for being good astronauts.
This Liu Yang is surely a good astronaut, but as the news about this launch is more than half about having a woman on boars, makes me wonder what the real reason is to chose her over one of the other candidates they have.
Gender shouldn't matter. I don't think there are jobs in space that require men over women or the other way around, nor that it is something men naturally can do better.
One of the core reasons I think there are more male than female space travellers is that men are generally more willing to take risks and to be at the forefront of exploration and in the limelight, while many women prefer to stay safely at home. And if there is any high-profile, high-risk job than it's being astronaut.
I don't have the feeling that the tablet market is exactly saturated. Sure there are many players, but it's a fast growing market, and there is definitely place for more players.
Whether MS has what it takes to compete in that market, that's a totally different matter.
And by the way, Apple launched their first-ever mobile phone offering in a mature, and far more saturated market than the tablet market is now. I can't say they didn't do well. So launching a new product in a saturated market is not a recipe for failure - you just have to offer something good that can compete with the rest.
That the Zune was a flop was not because the digital music player market was saturated, it was more because it was a lesser offering than the iPod.
I think I can outline how many consumers choose their new phone.
What processor is in it, is not an issue. Now many nm it uses, whatever that may mean, no-one cares about. Battery life may be an issue, as is internal storage. Screen size/resolution is important, as you see that. Case design is make or break. Brand is important, best brand is that what their friends use too, best model is at least one newer.
They walk to some shops, play a bit with the phones, and then say "I like that shiny one". The choice has been made.
All what's left to do is to pull out a credit card, pay, have the shop keeper help copy their contacts to the new phone, stick the SIM from last year's phone which is by now far too outdated to be seen with in the office into their new toy, and done.
A phone is a fashion statement, and is chosen that way. Intel is not fashionable.
In case of Apple, the whole Wintel ecosystem is their lower-end competitor. And for some reason those Wintels don't manage to move up to the higher end, and really threaten Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
A sample of ten is normal in medical terms.
I have participated in medical research as volunteer (mostly for trials on the uptake of drugs e.g. inhale vs. intravenous) and sample size was normally 6-12 patients. No more than that, I was told that such a sample size is large enough. Also costs are high of those experiments, which is an incentive to keep sizes small.
For such a first experiment, a group of ten patients sounds very reasonable to me. Now they can follow those patients for a while to see if there are any after effects, and if all looks good continue with larger trials, potentially making it a standard treatment for this cancer.
Makes me wonder how someone like that could ever become a top-ranked manager to begin with.
For whatever reason, people do fall for it. Big time.
Other than by pure greed, I don't know WHY people would really fall for it, especially if one gets many of those mails a day (easily a dozen or more a day for me - it's about half of the spam that makes it through greylisting). If you get just one such mail, then I can imagine: the first one I got, well over a decade ago, also made me wonder: is this legitimate, is this real, it certainly sounded quite real but the whole thing was just too unlikely to be trusted. Why trust a random strange contacting me by e-mail? At the time I had never heard about such scams.
But anyway, yes, people do fall for it. And there must be quite some people that fall for it. If not, it would die out quickly: that is pure economics. This are relative expensive scams to carry out, time and effort wise, and if they do not get any response on their mails (or no return on those responses) the activity would stop.
China is behind, I'm sure, but not by 50 years. Their achievements are maybe what the US did 50 years ago, but that doesn't mean that they are technologically that far behind.
NASA has learnt a lot from the moon landings and the shuttle program and everything else they did, a lot of that knowledge is published and the Chinese will definitely learn as much as they can from it. They can buy rocket technology from US companies if they want, too. They will be behind, the most state-of-the-art tech NASA has will be kept as state secrets, but that doesn't make them 50 years behind, more like 10 years. And they're learning still.
What China is mostly behind in is general organisation and management. They just don't have that kind of expertise, the experience as can be found in NASA. Again that is something they are catching up with fast, too, and the current mission is definitely a big experience, and if successful, a great success. A manual docking is really tough to achieve in space.
The Chinese are doing with their space program the exact same as what the US was doing 50 years ago, during the moon race. They want to show their people and the world that they are a country to recon with, that they are as advanced as the other major economies. And of course for the glory of their government and the communist party - which of course was exactly what the then-US government tried to do for themselves.
Still I'm interested.
Maybe not to buy myself: it's an interesting device. It seems they have actually put some innovative touches in the hardware, but we'll have to see the final result to know how good it really is.
And innovation is always good, as it keeps the rest of the vendors on their toes, to innovate themselves and/or to copy features and ideas and to put those in their own devices. Hopefully with further improvements.
Besides I wonder why they would go to such lengths to lock down the OS. It's their own product, they sell it, they make their profit already. The OS license has been paid for, and even if it were resellable, there is no market to sell it to, as all other such devices have a license already. I wonder whether they really care that much about the hacker market, and whether they really see it as so big a threat. Beacuse I don't think it's a serious threat to them.
They release some rumours, yes. But the product presentations they do is always the real thing, and the thing is ready then.
Microsoft releases those rumours in the form of a formal product presentation. There is no finished product yet. Key differnece.
I wonder why they wouldn't use a Linux distribution for this project.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I recall from the Amiga back then (a friend had one), and what I have seen here so far, this "Amiga Experience" is all about the GUI, not so much about the underlying tech. Which is no matter what totally different than on the original Amiga for the simple fact that we have so different hardware nowadays. Hard drives, more memory, USB, optical drives, WiFi, you name it. It wasn't there back then, and is standard now.
Already there are themes to make Gnome or KDE look and behave exactly like OS-X, or Mac Classic, or Windows XP or whatever. They can be themed so thoroughly, using different window managers probably even more possibilities, that I'd say this is the way to go.
Take a Linux distro, e.g. Ubuntu, as base, and build your own customisation on it. There are plenty of derivative distros that do it just like that. Ubuntu being a derivative itself. And presto you have the Amiga Experience, with all it's quirks, with all the underlying goodness of modern hardware support etc.
Or am I really missing something here?
Part of a typical Apple announcement is also a launch date. Tomorrow, next week, next month: they will always give a date. And a retial price for it. And full specs.
And of course Apple only announces a product when it's done, and ready to go to the shops. Before what's released are only rumours, but that are always rumours of actual specs - and I suspect they release the rumours only when that function is actually there and ready. That makes it much easier to live up to the hype. What you see is what you get.
It's typical MS marketing: show off something, but not too much, and let fantasy (wishful thinking) fill in the gaps.
Then when the product is launched, many people will queue up for it.
But it's a risky strategy, especially nowadays, as those people will switch on their devices and one of the first things they do with it is send twitter or facebook comments on about how good/bad it is. If you don't meet expectations, the next day there won't be lines anymore. Other than for the returns counter, maybe.
Maybe you remember the laptops with swivel screen from about a decade ago? There was a name for the type of device, I forgot what it was. The screen could turn around and close backwards onto the keyboard, display side up. So you basically got a thick tablet in your hands. They came at a significant premium to normal laptops.
Technology has advanced, everything is smaller, we have multi-touch (those touch screens, if they were touch screens already, could do only a single touch at a time), and now everything is built into the screen instead of into the keyboard part.
They flopped at the time, too expensive, too few advantages. But obviously the idea wasn't that bad.
From the looks of it now, I'm interested in this. I never had that with their Zune or Xbox.
I may never use it, yet it's an interesting device as it is presented. I'm afraid it's currently still vapourware, but you never know. It gives some ideas to Apple and Samsung for their next offerings.
Why interesting? For one, it uses x86. That means you can install a normal OS on it, and office type software. I am interested in a tablet hybrid like the Transformer but the Android OS hold me back: it misses essentials like OpenOffice. It is really important to me to be able to read/write Office documents. Also my e-banking system uses a USB key, with Windows-only drivers. This may just work with the Surface Pro. It won't work on any exisiting tablet. And that's a showstopper to me: I would buy it to use on business trips, and being able to access my bank is important.
I also like the built-in keyboard. That's another issue I have with tablets, it's so darn hard to type on those things. Especially if you want to look at the screen at the same time. The built-in stand is just smart, and can be very useful.
All in all it the hardware side looks really attractive to me. The software side, no idea.
Finally something interesting coming out of MS. Whether it's giong to make it to the marketplace, and if so whether it can compete with existing offerings, time will tell. We don't know battery life, for example, and that's key for tablets. Does it have instant-on or need to boot? How's the touch screen feel? How's the keyboard type? Is the trackpad nice and sensitive? How does the UI cope with both mouse and touch inputs? Many questions, that won't be answered for now.
I agree. The summary doesn't make sense. Razor-thin hardware margins? That's not Samsung, but the people that put together those phones for Samsung. No-one ever says the same about Apple, for example, while Apple also designs their own hardware.
Samsung's margin should be better thanks to using Android. Must be far cheaper to maintain their own brand of Android than to maintain a complete mobile OS, plus they have access to the enormous existing app market. The profit is in the design and marketing of the device, and that's what Samsung is doing quite well. They're also designing and making their own chips, this is usually also a quite profitable business - simply because they own the design to those chips.
Few problems with your assumptions.
The edge of the puzzle: you can try what you want at the outside, but you won't (shouldn't) get a match there. On the other hand if the edge is a black line, the algorithm may go haywire as to outside edges form a perfect match against one another.
There may be more than one puzzle included.
One piece may match against several others, but only certain groups of four may match together.
Some pieces may have an imperfect match, the pattern continues (to our eyes) but one edge is blue and the other yellow, and still they go together because a border in the image happens to fall on the cut. Such a match you can only find by comparing complete tiles (very hard for a computer, easy for a human), or by having two groups of multiple tiles where only this edge doesn't match but everything else does, and then it's likely that they do belong together.
And there are probably other pitfalls that I haven't thought of. All in all, it's not easy!
Interesting, and inbelievably cheap - not just becasue of the Windows license fee; no idea how much they pay for that. It's Windows CE so linking to the normal Win7 retail prices doesn't make sense.
OS: Windows CE. Never worked with that, no idea on the interface. Should include a browser, assume IE. But what version for WinCE?
Storage: not mentioned. Is this a "true" netbook as in can only do web browsing and web apps? Price could imply no local storage indeed, other than for the embedded OS. The ebay listing has no details at all. They are selling, shipping US only.
Install other OS? Well if no external storage, good luck with that.
Install applications? No mention about this. No external storage could be an issue there.
Form factor looks like the EEEPC 701 series, that's not too bad. It has a higher screen resolution. I like the overall idea. I'm still regularly using that EEEPC, almost exclusively for web browsing. It's sitting on the dining table, quick to grab, small enough to not be in the way too much, light enough to move around with one hand.
Safari is too integrated then, pity. But not surprising.
Anyway this Junior is a prototype browser, an experimental interface. It must be seen like that: an experiment with new interfaces. This is also the interesting part of it, and that they do it on the iPad may be just a marketing ploy. "New browser for iPad" sounds much better than "new browser for Android tablet". The the average consumer the iPad is hot hot hot, the Android tables are the cheap second choice.
It is great that these experiments are done, it shows people that there are more ways to do the same task. Not all experiments will work though, others may refinement, or will inspire a third party into making something that does work well.
If this browser is released, and if it gains significant popularity, then people will call on Apple to allow them to change the default. Maybe Apple will listen, maybe people will defect to Android systems where they can use Junior, let the market decide.
While it's sad that Safari is so tightly integrated, we're still talking about a single product line of a single vendor. There is a lot of competition: on the hardware side there are dozens of other hardware vendors producing tablet computers, on the software side there is Android, plus some secondary choices like Windows 8 (RT for tablets, iirc). Linux vendors are also creating typical tablet interfaces (like Ubuntu's unity). Neither has any traction near what Android has, but they are there nonetheless.
Friendster: never used.
MySpace: never seen that as an integrated social network like Facebook, more as a place to build your homepage (a souped-up Geocities so to say). I can't browse now it as I'm in Hong Kong, so the page is served in Chinese which I can't read, and there is no link to change that to English (or any other language)! And my browser's preferences for language are 1) Dutch, 2) English. Go figure. Not only do they ignore my browser preference, they don't allow me to override the setting.
Facebook: originally from academia-only, making it very wanted and people were eager to get on, so when they opened up the world flocked to them. OK that's definitely simplified but part of the explanation.
Sure there may (and likely will) be a replacement for Facebook. At the moment though Facebook is going strong, and I can't really think of any existing company that may be able to market a direct competitor. Google would be one of those, they tried and failed. Apple may be, they have the brand and the user base (through their iPhones). Microsoft? Brand is strong, but very decent and business, not cool as Google or Apple.
For the upcoming years I see Facebook to go strong. For the upcoming decade maybe, depending on how they innovate their services and manage to not upset their users. Both are tricky points.
The company most comparable to Facebook is Google. Both have privacy issues; both live and fall by the amount of information they collect from their users. Google so far manages to keep their users on their side, I think more so than Facebook, at least they have a much better image when it comes to privacy, yet they did not manage to leverage that image to create a viable Facebook competitor.
How Facebook is going to do on the stock market I don't know. What would Facebook care? They have the cash already, they don't lose out there. They will survive even if their stock drops hard - I mean it won't be the thing that causes them to go bankrupt. Indeed they have to find additional revenues, no idea how they're going to do that, I never see any ads on Facebook courtesy to AdBlockPlus.
Possibly that's where he gets his inspiration and visions.
Privacy advocates beware, as the problem is almost certainly worse than ever anticipated.
Good thing we have alternatives, right?
Well, yes and no.
There are alternatives, but no useful alternatives. The problem of the Internet is that it is very conductive to the creation of monopolies, especially when it comes to sites that rely on user input. Facebook is big because in the early days it managed to gain critical mass. This made it grow to the juggernaut it is now. Slashdot is also a site that gained critical mass, and as a result is one of the biggest IT/tech related discussion sites.
As a result, if you want to connect with friends and use an online social network, you go to Facebook, because everyone else is there already. You don't go to Google+ or any other such network, as your friends aren't there. The sheer size of Facebook is its main attraction, and this makes it also very difficult for other networks to start to compete. After all you first have to get critical mass, and that's really difficult.
Even a company like Google, with its very positive image, its huge resources, gaining enormous publicity with their start-up network (they made it to the TV news, front page of news papers worldwide, all over the tech sites) didn't manage to do this. They didn't even gain enough traction to survive as social network in a niche, like e.g. LinkedIn still survives. This just goes to show how hard it is to come with a viable alternative. The only way to come with an alternative is to link your network to Facebook, which Facebook won't allow, and still doesn't give users much of an incentive to use your network and not Facebook's.
I do not second-guess any women on the Shuttle missions.
I do second-guess this case because the news about this rocket launch is literally >50% "we got a woman in space" and There is no reason to me this woman would not be as good as their male counterparts. She used to be a fighter pilot, so has a proven track record in another high-demand job. It's just how the news overly focusses on having a woman in space that makes me suspect that the selection criteria for this mission included "must include a female".
It is almost like if you would report on the first Apollo moon missions as "we got a man in space, and outside of orbit! Oh yeah they also touched down on the moon. This man is fantastic, his family is great, he worked so hard to get in space and put evreything aside. His wife and kid followed the launch at home."
Now what is the important part: a man/woman in space, or the exploratory and scientific reach and objectives of the space mission?
The incredible focus on having a female on board makes me wonder why she was chosen.
The US regularly had/has females their crew, and the gender of an astronaut is pretty much a non-issue. These are obviously chosen for being good astronauts.
This Liu Yang is surely a good astronaut, but as the news about this launch is more than half about having a woman on boars, makes me wonder what the real reason is to chose her over one of the other candidates they have.
Gender shouldn't matter. I don't think there are jobs in space that require men over women or the other way around, nor that it is something men naturally can do better.
One of the core reasons I think there are more male than female space travellers is that men are generally more willing to take risks and to be at the forefront of exploration and in the limelight, while many women prefer to stay safely at home. And if there is any high-profile, high-risk job than it's being astronaut.
I don't have the feeling that the tablet market is exactly saturated. Sure there are many players, but it's a fast growing market, and there is definitely place for more players.
Whether MS has what it takes to compete in that market, that's a totally different matter.
And by the way, Apple launched their first-ever mobile phone offering in a mature, and far more saturated market than the tablet market is now. I can't say they didn't do well. So launching a new product in a saturated market is not a recipe for failure - you just have to offer something good that can compete with the rest.
That the Zune was a flop was not because the digital music player market was saturated, it was more because it was a lesser offering than the iPod.
Remember that Google is a huge company with many many mouths to feed as well.
Yet, last time I checked, Android is available for free, and it's open sourced under the permissive Apache license to boot.
Can you imagine how horrible the Zune would have been if it had not been an iPod competitor?
"Bringing the better out of them" doesn't mean the end result is necessarily good.
I think I can outline how many consumers choose their new phone.
What processor is in it, is not an issue. Now many nm it uses, whatever that may mean, no-one cares about. Battery life may be an issue, as is internal storage. Screen size/resolution is important, as you see that. Case design is make or break. Brand is important, best brand is that what their friends use too, best model is at least one newer.
They walk to some shops, play a bit with the phones, and then say "I like that shiny one". The choice has been made.
All what's left to do is to pull out a credit card, pay, have the shop keeper help copy their contacts to the new phone, stick the SIM from last year's phone which is by now far too outdated to be seen with in the office into their new toy, and done.
A phone is a fashion statement, and is chosen that way. Intel is not fashionable.
In case of Apple, the whole Wintel ecosystem is their lower-end competitor. And for some reason those Wintels don't manage to move up to the higher end, and really threaten Apple.