If the 90/10 market share is true, then those systems should have 10% of the virus market by that logic.
And they should have 10% of the game exclusives too. Obviously that's just a myth and people program games for Windows because it's a better place to develop them and is just a superior operating system.
You're right, I misread the figure in the summary. Since the digital downloads went from 15% to 20% (a 33% gain in proportion of their revenue) while only going up 25% over the previous year, their total revenues must have shrunk.
That said, it's entirely possible that all of the shrinking has been due to the economy causing people to cut down on their entertainment spending, and I can see music being the first thing cut.
And I agree with your assessment that they'll somehow be able to survive this time of songs being sold one by one instead of by the album. There will always be a market for music, it's built into our DNA.
The fact that the digital downloads grew from 25% and went from 20% of all sales to 25% of all sales says that overall sales remained the same (ie the digital downloads were direct cannibalization of physical purchases). The numbers themselves give that for a fact.
Couple that with the economy right now and you could say that, since the rest of the economy has gone to shit, avoiding a decline was as good as they could have hoped for. In addition, you could say that since digital downloads make a la carte purchasing possible where physical sales require you to buy a whole cd, the popular songs are getting even more popular with digital downloads. I think that 4x the number of people downloading certain songs would be good overall for the music industry since concert sales are a big draw and everything else (generally) would remain even.
That doesn't take into account the cost to produce a cd or the comparitive profit margins between the two. I don't know what those comparisons are and I'm not even going to guess at them since the rest of my post is based on things that are true and relatively simple extrapolations from that point, but I will say that I personally believe that the shift from physical to digital media isn't hurting their business, although it is definitely changing it. Let's call it a horizontal shift with opportunities to capitalize on the change.
Let's not forget that they pay their employees (my uncle, in this case) nearly $1000 per patent they get granted for IBM. That's a cost of $4 million just to the employee that does it.
I suspect that we don't know enough about how planets with atmospheres but no life behave to be able to determine if there were a chemical equilibrium or not. I also suspect that the people at NASA and most credible scientists believe that the chance of other life in our solar system is very small, but should be investigated anyway.
Exactly. That joke has everything that it needs to be funny and could easily be taken as such. Humor is all about context and subtleties, the sorts of things that experiments would have a hard time quantifying. How to you quantify if someone's in a bad mood? Did they tell it to people in a group or individually? How would that affect the outcome?
So I would go so far as to say that most experiments which analyze humor are worthless.
That kind of thinking comes from the flawed assumption that there's a class of "normal" people
There are people who are within one standard deviation of the mean, and there are those who are not.
anyone exhibiting behaviors not part of this class must have something wrong with them
That's not flawed so much as it's an admittance that society relies on the ability for people to make assumptions about other people. I assume that if I stick my hand up in the air after you've done something good, you'll slap it and we'll both acknowledge it as a "high 5". If I go out in public, I wear clothes and you don't beat me up. Things like that. When people can't make these assumptions about other people, or where these assumptions start to fall apart, you get problems. Nerds (like myself) tend to not be clued into these assumptions and unspoken rules, probably because we're just dumb when it comes to social interactions the same way that we're smart when it comes to math and science. Honestly, math and science come easy to me in ways that most other people never understand. The inverse is true with social skills: I don't get why it comes so easy to people.
So, while I find myself in that minority that doesn't interact very well socially, I've been able to make do enough that I can interact with people and can pass my quirks off as jokes most of the time. I'm eccentric as hell, but people tend to like me. I also understand why these judgments are made and the value they give to society.
Sounds like someone's been talking to their lawyer. I'm guessing you either became a drug dealer or started tapping some underage ass. Either way, good for you.
Siemens Penetration Testing is the best name in the industry. They always leave their clients satisfied through the depth of penetration and their overall thoroughness.
That problem exists for any VCS, distributed or not. With a centralized one, you'd need to check into a central source that's always at the same place anyway. With a DCVS, you can push your changes out to one of those anyway while keeping the copy on your local machine.
I know people who love to work those 80 work weeks in exchange for the freedom to do updates on the live server whenever they wanted without going through 20 different hoops and having manager approval. For some people, the job is its own reward when they're able to set the terms. I'm not one of those people, of course, but they are out there and they get happiness out of the situation.
I'm guessing that Chrome will never have AdBlock Plus and NoScript.
You can still use external things like a hosts file to make sure you don't get ads. Besides, there's a strong argument to be made that most people don't use adblock in the first place, and that its use is immoral.
It's all about control. Firefox allows you to control what you read.
And Chrome is open source, allowing anyone to use and control it that wants to as long as they play by the same rules that Google does. If they hadn't open sourced Chrome, I would agree with you. As it is, I believe Google when they say that they want to push the browser market in the direction of supporting better web apps. Google Docs, GMail, and Google Maps all have deficiencies arising from the shortcomings of browsers in general. Google's struggling to find revenue sources outside of advertising and they've chosen to stick to the web to do it (a good choice IMHO). Your diatribe against advertising is all well and good, but their behavior with Chrome just doesn't support it.
They have that functionality built into the core. They have a javascript console and element inspector that's as good as firebug, possibly better. I don't know if they have a straight up debugger, but I'd be surprised if they don't.
I'll second that motion. I get really sick of seeing his stories that consist almost entirely of "I try to fight spam, and I'm totally awesome, but judges are so out of it! Also, here's a nearly-incoherent rant on what I think could possibly be a solution but will never work in real life."
Did you mean to say 7 is just Vista with a nose job? Also, it runs a lot faster than Vista does. It runs as fast on a netbook as Vista does on my (pretty good) laptop. I intend to install it on my play system this weekend and test it out, but it sounds like 7 is a significant refinement, basically what they should have released Vista as in the first place.
I completely agree. I've used Vista and actually like it better than XP for my laptop, and that's something I never would have said about ME after 98 SE. I think Windows 7 will clear up the PR problems, fix a lot of the things that have bugged people the most, and overall just provide a better experience. From the screenshots I've seen, they sat down and decided on what all the low hanging fruit would be, bundled it into a new OS and are shipping it. These aren't insubstantial changes, but they're things that seem obvious once I've seen them and that seem fairly easy.
I think that Windows 7 will be a lot like Windows 98 SE was. It'll clear up a lot of the perception issues and also resolve some of the more substantial problems with the OS. I know I sound like a corporate shill for saying this, but I'm actually really excited for this release.
They will be a big part of pushing what we can do in space, but private companies can't/won't do it unless the government paves the way. The government's not just going to stop progressing in space because the baton's been passed, neither should it. Instead, it should be a situation where companies exploit where the government's always been and the government pushes the frontier.
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If the 90/10 market share is true, then those systems should have 10% of the virus market by that logic.
And they should have 10% of the game exclusives too. Obviously that's just a myth and people program games for Windows because it's a better place to develop them and is just a superior operating system.
We like to keep a modicum of decency in these forums
You must be new here...
You're right, I misread the figure in the summary. Since the digital downloads went from 15% to 20% (a 33% gain in proportion of their revenue) while only going up 25% over the previous year, their total revenues must have shrunk.
That said, it's entirely possible that all of the shrinking has been due to the economy causing people to cut down on their entertainment spending, and I can see music being the first thing cut.
And I agree with your assessment that they'll somehow be able to survive this time of songs being sold one by one instead of by the album. There will always be a market for music, it's built into our DNA.
The fact that the digital downloads grew from 25% and went from 20% of all sales to 25% of all sales says that overall sales remained the same (ie the digital downloads were direct cannibalization of physical purchases). The numbers themselves give that for a fact.
Couple that with the economy right now and you could say that, since the rest of the economy has gone to shit, avoiding a decline was as good as they could have hoped for. In addition, you could say that since digital downloads make a la carte purchasing possible where physical sales require you to buy a whole cd, the popular songs are getting even more popular with digital downloads. I think that 4x the number of people downloading certain songs would be good overall for the music industry since concert sales are a big draw and everything else (generally) would remain even.
That doesn't take into account the cost to produce a cd or the comparitive profit margins between the two. I don't know what those comparisons are and I'm not even going to guess at them since the rest of my post is based on things that are true and relatively simple extrapolations from that point, but I will say that I personally believe that the shift from physical to digital media isn't hurting their business, although it is definitely changing it. Let's call it a horizontal shift with opportunities to capitalize on the change.
Police have boundaries and borders. The internet, alas, does not.
Let's not forget that they pay their employees (my uncle, in this case) nearly $1000 per patent they get granted for IBM. That's a cost of $4 million just to the employee that does it.
I suspect that we don't know enough about how planets with atmospheres but no life behave to be able to determine if there were a chemical equilibrium or not. I also suspect that the people at NASA and most credible scientists believe that the chance of other life in our solar system is very small, but should be investigated anyway.
Geological, but they would be remiss not to mention all the possibilities they know about.
you're effectively making less money this year, even if your paycheck has a larger number on it.
I think that's what you meant to say, since technically they're making more money.
Exactly. That joke has everything that it needs to be funny and could easily be taken as such. Humor is all about context and subtleties, the sorts of things that experiments would have a hard time quantifying. How to you quantify if someone's in a bad mood? Did they tell it to people in a group or individually? How would that affect the outcome?
So I would go so far as to say that most experiments which analyze humor are worthless.
As with windowless, white vans, sometimes experience isn't the best teacher when you're on the internet.
That kind of thinking comes from the flawed assumption that there's a class of "normal" people
There are people who are within one standard deviation of the mean, and there are those who are not.
anyone exhibiting behaviors not part of this class must have something wrong with them
That's not flawed so much as it's an admittance that society relies on the ability for people to make assumptions about other people. I assume that if I stick my hand up in the air after you've done something good, you'll slap it and we'll both acknowledge it as a "high 5". If I go out in public, I wear clothes and you don't beat me up. Things like that. When people can't make these assumptions about other people, or where these assumptions start to fall apart, you get problems. Nerds (like myself) tend to not be clued into these assumptions and unspoken rules, probably because we're just dumb when it comes to social interactions the same way that we're smart when it comes to math and science. Honestly, math and science come easy to me in ways that most other people never understand. The inverse is true with social skills: I don't get why it comes so easy to people.
So, while I find myself in that minority that doesn't interact very well socially, I've been able to make do enough that I can interact with people and can pass my quirks off as jokes most of the time. I'm eccentric as hell, but people tend to like me. I also understand why these judgments are made and the value they give to society.
Without going into too much detail, it paid off
Sounds like someone's been talking to their lawyer. I'm guessing you either became a drug dealer or started tapping some underage ass. Either way, good for you.
Siemens Penetration Testing is the best name in the industry. They always leave their clients satisfied through the depth of penetration and their overall thoroughness.
The country would even choose an ethnically neutral name (for example, "Harmonia").
Your ethnocentrism is showing. "Harmonia" has roots in Latin and Greek which gave rise to the Western world. How is that ethnically neutral?
That problem exists for any VCS, distributed or not. With a centralized one, you'd need to check into a central source that's always at the same place anyway. With a DCVS, you can push your changes out to one of those anyway while keeping the copy on your local machine.
I know people who love to work those 80 work weeks in exchange for the freedom to do updates on the live server whenever they wanted without going through 20 different hoops and having manager approval. For some people, the job is its own reward when they're able to set the terms. I'm not one of those people, of course, but they are out there and they get happiness out of the situation.
I'm guessing that Chrome will never have AdBlock Plus and NoScript.
You can still use external things like a hosts file to make sure you don't get ads. Besides, there's a strong argument to be made that most people don't use adblock in the first place, and that its use is immoral.
It's all about control. Firefox allows you to control what you read.
And Chrome is open source, allowing anyone to use and control it that wants to as long as they play by the same rules that Google does. If they hadn't open sourced Chrome, I would agree with you. As it is, I believe Google when they say that they want to push the browser market in the direction of supporting better web apps. Google Docs, GMail, and Google Maps all have deficiencies arising from the shortcomings of browsers in general. Google's struggling to find revenue sources outside of advertising and they've chosen to stick to the web to do it (a good choice IMHO). Your diatribe against advertising is all well and good, but their behavior with Chrome just doesn't support it.
They have that functionality built into the core. They have a javascript console and element inspector that's as good as firebug, possibly better. I don't know if they have a straight up debugger, but I'd be surprised if they don't.
I'll second that motion. I get really sick of seeing his stories that consist almost entirely of "I try to fight spam, and I'm totally awesome, but judges are so out of it! Also, here's a nearly-incoherent rant on what I think could possibly be a solution but will never work in real life."
Windows 7 is just Windows XP with a nose job.
Did you mean to say 7 is just Vista with a nose job? Also, it runs a lot faster than Vista does. It runs as fast on a netbook as Vista does on my (pretty good) laptop. I intend to install it on my play system this weekend and test it out, but it sounds like 7 is a significant refinement, basically what they should have released Vista as in the first place.
all of which were shamelessly taken from Windows 2000
I fail to see how taking features from one of their operating systems to another should evoke any shame in the first place.
I completely agree. I've used Vista and actually like it better than XP for my laptop, and that's something I never would have said about ME after 98 SE. I think Windows 7 will clear up the PR problems, fix a lot of the things that have bugged people the most, and overall just provide a better experience. From the screenshots I've seen, they sat down and decided on what all the low hanging fruit would be, bundled it into a new OS and are shipping it. These aren't insubstantial changes, but they're things that seem obvious once I've seen them and that seem fairly easy.
I think that Windows 7 will be a lot like Windows 98 SE was. It'll clear up a lot of the perception issues and also resolve some of the more substantial problems with the OS. I know I sound like a corporate shill for saying this, but I'm actually really excited for this release.
That sounds like a fantastic idea for a book.
They will be a big part of pushing what we can do in space, but private companies can't/won't do it unless the government paves the way. The government's not just going to stop progressing in space because the baton's been passed, neither should it. Instead, it should be a situation where companies exploit where the government's always been and the government pushes the frontier.