In a country like Norway for example it would be possible for people to use their government tax website or banking login system to log in and people would trust if the government said "There is absolutely no identifying information between your vote and you. All we track is whether or not you voted at all". Sure there'd be people who didn't trust them, but the vast majority would.
Also Norwegians are generally not shy at all about who they're voting for. It's not like people here are worried that their votes would be help against them. If anything many people are pretty proud and open about who they vote for. So, it wouldn't matter to most people if it were tracked so long as the information wasn't then sent to a telemarketing firm.
In America, it's amazing since over 80% of the people there are more than happy to run around telling everyone who they voted for and yet, they don't want the government to know. Of course, the only two useful government databases in the U.S. is the social security database and the IRS database so any voter tracking can be used to say "Well, those old people or those poor people never vote for me, so screw them, if I need money for a war, I'll just take it from them". Besides, thanks to the well known "covert nature" of many government organizations like DHS, CIA, NSA etc... in the U.S. people wouldn't trust the government with their votes anyway. I've known people to wear latex gloves when voting to make sure their finger prints couldn't be lifted from different buttons in the voting booth.
Problems:
1) In a world where people who buy $40,000 cars, they buy smooth/professional looking Japanese or German cars. They made this thing look like some crap old man sports cars. Even if the thing came with a super model under the dashboard willing to make the driver happy however possible, no one who has any self respect and a credit limit able to handle $40,000 would be cost dead in this car. I don't have statistics on it, but I'd imagine that this car is being purchased mainly by companies who actually do received tax credits for carbon reduction. The technology of this car targets a middle cTheylass 28-35 year primarily stylish female demographic or a male in the similar age group who want something stylish and practical, and yet, the physical design is most similar to cars purchased by men from 40-50 years old trying to but something is a balance between a mustang and a practical car. In short... what the hell were they thinking? If they did nothing more to the 2013 model than to replace the nose of the car with something that didn't look like a poor mans muscle car, it would improve sales dramatically. Take a page from Toyota or Audi for a design idea on that.
2) They bragged about a great new revolutionary design, but the people most likely to purchase a car like this need to have a feel for reliability and dependability. That's the type of person that buys hybrids and electric cars. Toyota pulled it off because they have a long standing reputation for just being reliable as hell. GM/Chevy has a reputation of cars up on bricks that need an engine rebuild. When Toyota released a new hybrid design, it caught on quick because when Toyota says they made a fancy new type of car... you know that if anything goes wrong, they'll fix it. Yeh... there was that thing which got blown out of proportion in the press with the gas peddle, but I'm not joking when I say that as a used Prius owner, Toyota actually tracked me down to tell me to come in to get parts replaced because they found a possible problem. They proactively deal with problems... even on 6 year old out of warranty cars with nearly 100,000 miles on them. Chevy... umm... yeh right. So, if a company like Chevy claims they made a whole new design, people go "I think I'll wait until it's not so revolutionary and they have the kinks worked out".
3) Chevy bragged for years about how the brand new awesome design they're making would get insanely high gas mileage. Then as they got closer and closer to releasing it, the mileage dropped and dropped. Hell, just look at all the people claiming Microsoft/Intel will never make a Windows machine with better battery life. In the mean time, from Windows 7 to Windows 8 developer preview to Windows 8 consumer preview, my Series 7 Slate went from 3 hours on battery (Watching video) to 3.5 hours on battery to 4.8 hours on battery. Not sure how much better they'll do when it's released, but I'm expecting a comparable Ivy Bridge with LP-DDR3 on the same design otherwise will get 8 hours or more especially since the new graphics controller will offload even more processing and spend its time in sleep. But yet, people will say "Intel and Microsoft SUCK at battery life" and no matter what technology Intel and Microsoft add, people will always be like "ARM and Android or ARM and iOS will always be better" yet a comparable ARM and Android or iOS will consume just as much power. It won't matter. It's built into our minds that Intel processors with Windows are made to heat homes. Chevy should have never made the promises about efficiency they made. But of course they would never have been allowed to design the car if they didn't. So now, while the Volt sucks (though not as bad as people make it out to), GM has an initial design to build on. The Volt is their version 1 and probably not a bad attempt for a version 1, but it's years late and more than a few dollars short. If they get version 2 right, people might actually consider the value in buying one. But for now, $40,000 for what effectively i
First let me start by saying, lossy compression has absolutely no place in mastering. Capture you samples at the highest resolution possible 24-bit/96Hz is passable, 192Hz is better. If you're mastering music on a machine that can't handle this, then simply take when you're given and be off with you.
The author of this article makes claims about performing an analysis of the Apple Mastered for iTunes method. I didn't like his form of analysis. There are major issues with comparing lossy to lossless audio since we have to decide if we want to perform individual listening tests, which often yield nothing of any interest since most "Super Listeners" generally are pretenders to begin with. Frankly, at 24-bit/96Hz or better using high bit rates (as would be used for mastering) chances are, you don't have suitable speakers or headphones to perform the test reliably anyway. Even the best monitor speakers from Genelec can't reproduce the differences at these levels. Some headphones might be able to handle it in some ranges, but not in all. Therefore we're limited to what is possible with pure data analysis.
In data analysis, we can do things like invert the wave of the output and add the results together to produce a distortion wave. As the author claims to have done, but now comes the issue of deriving anything meaningful from this. Often times, better codecs will produce greater distortion because it's supposed to be "meaningful distortion". As such, think of it like dithering an image to improve results from image compression, this is extremely common when down-sampling before compressing. As a result, filters will produce more accurate AC characteristics of the waves being compressed. This comes at a cost of bit rate consumption, but the end result when the image is decompressed is higher.
Some numbers like SNR (signal to noise ratio) are calculated by deriving a meaningful number to calculate how much of the original signal still exist in the compressed signal. Higher distortion such as what this guy is observing can in fact produce better signal retention.
Next is the issue of attempting to produce the best audio output possible based on what the listener perceives as being superior sound. This is a very common issue in audio compression. AAC originally defined 7 possible branches for compression methods which would be selected per audio unit based on a vendor specific 'Psycho-acoustic model". This would attempt to choose the best balance between bit rate allocation and what should sound best to the user. Often these models just tried all 7 compressions and built a quality metric related to how the audio should sound in the end and chose the best output and moved on. Now, though I could be wrong, I believe I know of 21 possible branches for the compression. While each one has its benefits, for a computer to choose one branch over another requires the computer to have a concept of what sounds best. Rarely is it chosen based on pure wave distortion. Often it's chosen based on concepts like "we can improve the quality of this signal by increasing the high frequency distortion since in those ranges, it wouldn't be reproducible by anything other than piezoelectric elements far too small to be heard."
So, in the end, while he may be actually on to something, his reasoning is likely entirely incompatible with reality. Lossless compression chooses how best to lose based on perceived quality as opposed to pure signal quality. A perfect compression would lose nothing and still chop audio to 1/50th the original size. But in this universe, the best lossless compressions still struggle to perform 2:1 reliably and while it can often average or peak at 4:1 can often also end up increasing the size instead. Most of the old Ella Fitzgerald/Loius Armstrong recording are examples of worst case files.
So, while his analysis was very cute, it was possibly inaccurate.
Now, I'll reiterate the first point. Audio compression DOES NOT BELONG in a mastering environment. Lossless is ok if there's a
A stock suggests that you own a portion of the company, at best it gives you a vote in the future of the company. For the most part, it's more accurate to see the stock as an IOU. But the company has no responsibility to ever actually pay the IOU, but you can sell the IOU to other people willing to accept the risk in hopes of reward.
If the company has control over enough of its own shares, then the vote you have a right to as a "share holder" is meaningless as well. This is why, in order to go public, it is necessary for the primary share holders to hold less than a given percentage of the stocks. This makes it so that the people buying the shares could in theory have a real say in the future of the company. This process usually ends up moving control from a few major share holders to a large handful of shareholders that will vote pretty much always with the original major shareholders which again renders the stock market shareholder's vote meaningless again.
So, it's best to look at the IOU as a gambling voucher, like a casino chip that can't ever be cashed in but can be sold to other gamblers.
I seriously believe that Apple should use that stock pile to start buying back their own stock to get out from under the thumbs of people like this. Apple doesn't need shareholders anymore, at least for now. Of course, the iPad is about to face insanely hard competition from Microsoft because Microsoft finally "got it right" with Windows 8... I own 3 iPads, 4 iPhones, iPods, Mac Minis etc... but in reality, I also own a Windows 8 tablet and it's about a million times better than the iPad in every way but battery life. Find a hardware manufacturer for Windows 8 tablets that can "Do cool" and Apple will have a struggle ahead. Where Apple will spend years trying to get Office programs and many other tools in place for iOS, Microsoft is coming out with those things ready to role. Add to that that there really isn't anything that will be truly iOS specific (as most cool apps are Android too these days and Windows 8 runs that too) and Apple will need to start worrying. In fact, the biggest thing that will hurt Apple is iTunes for Windows since it allows users to take pretty much everything but their books and apps to the Windows tablets and you can always get more apps and if you bought a book using iBooks... well you can probably live without it anyway.
So, the best thing right now is that instead of pushing Apple to do all kinds of stupid things like changing there ways because Jobs is dead and can't stop it anymore, Apple will need to start investing insanely heavily over the next few years to make up for the fact that starting February 29th, they are no longer the only game in town. (Yes, I know Android is out there, I've used it, it's trying to catch up to iOS and iOS will soon need to try and catch up to Windows 8, so it's way behind).
So in my opinion, the best thing to do is to run the company and quick dicking around with all this stupid crap. Let Apple run Apple, they're pretty good at it. Screw the people who all want to change it for the sake of being special.
We decided not to try and get into the business because we can simply say "Fuck it, we have oil".
Of course, the absolute ultimate server park location is Longyearbyen since we have proper power there, we have some of the biggest Internet pipes in the world there (it's where the cross arctic fibers come down), we have passive data center cooling there 9 months of the year. Other than the 75% of the nations graduates who came from BI (in otherwords useless as shit but can still sell oil), the remaining 20% are dominated by top notch IT geeks, just check Finn.no and you'll see there are two type of jobs in abundance right now "useless bastards who wear ties" and "IT this and IKT that".
P.S. - Not all bastards who wear ties are useless, just the ones who spent 3 years in a business school isolated from anyone who knows anything about anything and graduated without taking a single math or science class and then went on to sell oil hehe.
It's not about the only browser without a tablet presence trying to get a tablet presence by latching onto the last major electronics company to not have a tablet strategy?
You're saying they have a product. I see it more as not having a product and slapping some shit together hoping what they poop out will become a product.
I have a Samsung Series 7 Slate and I can run IE, Opera, Chrome, Safari and that one from the guys who rewrote Netscape's old crap... can't remember their name since they died so long ago.
How about a device which runs them all and if you need one, run that one. If you need another, run the other instead.
Oh.... sorry. Forgot, these days we're support to have some sort of compatibility between browsers by using standards and stuff. But still.. my tablet run Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OS X or a pile of other operating systems. Choice is nice.
It's been a shit idea for the past 12 years. I was demoing products like this back at CeBit 2000 with Ericsson. It was a bad idea back then, it's a slightly less bad idea today.
LG is what you buy when you desperately need a phone while your real phone is in for repair.
I have heard of old people and REALLY poor people using LG phones because they're cheap. The old people don't want the gadget phones and LG makes some with big buttons. The poor people just want a phone and you couldn't just reach into the telephone recycling boxes in the past, so you bought an LG.
Don't get me wrong. Microsoft and Nokia advertise the hell out of it and are doing whatever they can to sell it. But, as an iPad to Windows 8 tablet convert for the past 3 months, I have to say that if Microsoft does get Windows 8 Phone up and running on an x86 platform with moderate battery life, I'll consider dumping iPhone as well. See, on my Windows 8 tablet, I run iTunes desktop which lets me keep all my music, movies and videos. I have apps like TomTom for U.S. and Western Europe which were big investments I'll need an iPhone for, but the rest of the apps were a buck or two and most of the ones I actually use are free. So, I really think I'd be happier with a Windows 8 Phone than a iPhone if the Windows 8 Phone is like the Windows 8 tablet which gives me the ability to plug it into a screen and keyboard and use it as a PC as well.
I'm looking forward to a time when I can have the power of a dual core Sandy Bridge Core i5 as a telephone running Windows 8 with the phone interface when I carry it and the desktop interface when it's docked. A single device to do everything. Then I can have some sort of laptoppish dock for when I need a desktop on the road. This way, I can find a dock with the perfect screen and perfect keyboard and then find a PC/Phone with the perfect specs and only upgrade one or the other when I find something much better.
I type this now from an AWESOME Asus N53SV notebook with a Core i7, 16 Gigs of RAM and dual 400GB 525/500 MB/sec SSDs... it has the worst keyboard and trackpad EVER!!!! though. I would love to buy the ultimate keyboard and screen dock... use it until I'm 150 years old and then just upgrade the computer part which would effectively be my phone as well.
So... bash Windows Phone all you want.... but the way things are going, Windows 8 Phone will almost certainly be the first truly converged device operating system. Able to run Windows Metro, Windows Desktop, Android, etc... apps. Able to run practically every program made since 1978. Able to work on phone, tablet, laptop, desktop and TV all equally well. Etc... Sure, it could end up being a niche, but I'm pretty sure that this is what people will demand in the years to come.
I don't know much about the market in Canada, I know that often it's much like the U.S., sometimes more limited since many foreign vendors are just thinking about coming to the U.S. and haven't even considered Canada yet. This creates obvious lack of choice issues. But based on the pathetic sales of the Playbook and the enormous sales of other devices, it still seems strange. I would say that they had to limit their demographic further somehow. Like sticking strictly to people who actually consider a tie appropriate to wear in public (I mean other than to weddings and funerals). Maybe by going to a church of some type, even then that sounds weird since most of the guys I know who actually go to church use iPhones anyway since it's easier to listen to sports games on them while the tiny bluetooth earbud is hidden under their fluffy hair (and you thought the fluffy hair on men at church was just a weird jesus crispy thing... no it really has a purpose). Or maybe they camped outside of a Blackberry store and found that 85% of the tablet owners who came out were just trying to connect their blackberry to their iPad.
It just seems to me that it would be very hard in general to find 150 playbook users out of a genuinely randomly picked 1000 tablet owners. Of course, maybe a better statistic would be to compare active users as opposed to simply owners. Maybe at the low price they offered it, tons of people who had owned a Blackberry figured WTF? and gave it a shot before realizing they should have just saved up for the Samsung or the iPad.
I currently have 3 iPads in my house. Got one as a gift from my boss. Wife got one as a gift from her boss. Daughter won one in a "click here to win an iPad" thing. Would have never spent money on them, especially after using one for a year. It's pretty bloody useless. I do also have a Kindle (I think it works) and I have a Samsung Series 7 Slate. The Slate I packed up tonight, brought it downtown and met my nephew there and was teaching him C++ development using Visual Studio 2010 on it. When I needed a scratch pad, I switched to the PaintPlay app and just scribbled using my stylus on it. That's a tablet that actually does something useful. It's a damn shame the Windows 8 ARM tablet is going to suck so bad. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's cute and stuff that it'll look like the x86 version, but it won't run anything other than the same shit you find on every other tablet. When I look at the Playbook (including the new version I looked at online) I still can't figure out what form of utility value it offers AT ALL.
I left the states 14 years ago, and though I go back to visit occasionally, I'm not even in an ACTA nation! You have to love countries like Norway. While we have endless laws prohibiting just about anything, the 32 policemen in the country just can bother with anything less important than murder. Oh... when annual budget arrives for them, they rush out and arrest everyone they can as fast as they can. So, figure like 30 arrests in one night. The rest of the time, they hang out in down town Oslo making sure that the hookers are confined to the first place anyone sees when they visit Norway, kinda like a welcome mat. I think they take turns with who gets to keep the national theater area safe which is where all the rich girls in expensive dresses that barely cover their privates go to get munchies after getting plastered at night.
I love this place. The best part is, even if the most dishonest man were to stand on a building here screaming at the top of his lungs speaking his mind, it wouldn't matter. People here are mature enough to listen to what interests them and intelligent enough to ignore the nonsense for the most part.
Of course your hidden reference to what most people refer to as the current Orwellian state is nicely placed. Of course, I'm not quite sure that we're at the point where the technology is ready for the thought police concept. Maybe the search result police is the next best thing.
Apple has spent years and millions on research and development into LLVM which while not currently ideal as a solution for producing VM code friendly with both ARM and x86 or ARM8 and x64, is in theory supposed to be able to handle this. Apple has worked very hard to develop the LLVM project in such a way that it will sooner than later take over the role GCC currently plays on Mac OS X. LLVM and CLang have certainly reached a level of maturity where GCC can soon be the optional compiler as opposed to the main compiler on the platform.
In reality, with the exception of a small amount of code to get the LLVM virtual machine functioning on start-up, it would be possible to get the majority of the system up and running without the need for fat binaries. In fact, even if Apple simply stays with x64, this is a better option than using GCC in the long run since it would allow improvements to LLVM make improvements to how the system performs otherwise. Also by improving the kernel link loader, it would be possible to perform tracing JIT optimization across library boundaries at run-time. This could in theory improve system performance between 10 and 50% depending on how many calls across library boundaries are made.
So, fat binaries, while entertaining are of little use today. Especially when you're talking about two little-endian processors with an instruction set which, while different fundamentally, mirrors one another's capabilities quite closely.
Oh.... and in the area of "compute' power where the GPU is being used for general purpose computing, a more advanced LLVM back-end could in theory recompile certain traces of code to produce GPU specific code. This isn't "that useful" in normal every day code, but it can be extremely useful if any of the languages supported by CLang were extended to support SIMD types like float4 of float8.
The reason Europe (not specifically the EU, hell Norway has tons of magazines, I joke sometimes they have one for each person in the country) has so many magazines has to do with the car vs. public transportation mentality. If you visit cities in the U.S. with excellent public transportation and a culture where news stands are at nearly every station, you'll find that magazine selection is much more substantial than elsewhere.
With the exception of bridal and teen magazines, people don't drag their asses to the store to actually buy magazines anymore. Magazines in Europe are also very much a impulse purchase. Like,"I need a ticket for a train... oooh a magazine that comes with some new makeup!". The more educated (and generally wealthier) people are using iPads or at least phones on the trains these days, but most people still pop into the news stand at the train station and find something to fill their time with. It's also very useful for people who don't like looking at the other people on the trains. I often find myself driving behind trolleys and there will be someone with their head aimed out the back window so they don't have to look at other people on the trolley. When I'm on the train, bus or trolley, many people (better than 15%) will be reading something on paper.
There's no really good reason to buy magazines in the states anymore... well except the picture ones where the images are much higher resolution like National Geographic. But in Europe, they serve a function. So, it's like this in all the cities, but in most countries out here, the companies who are located at the train station also have a presence elsewhere, and since they fill the stores all around the country with the same items, the magazine selection is pretty good everywhere.
When you're in the city centers though, if you are multi-lingual (I'm a New Yorker in Norway and I can read 9 languages... don't be impressed, I barely speak two) so you can go to the major magazine stands and have access to magazines in lots of different languages which increases your selection substantially.
I'm personally seeing them more as an ICQ type company. The difference is, they figured out a way to make money by becoming an advertising company and a bank. They effectively are issuing their own international currency now. In reality, I'm more than a little bit nervous about that aspect. Since they're not actually a regulated bank or casino, they could in theory treat their currency as having value within itself and start behaving like a nation that prints more of it when they need it. Also, people blindly convert their real money into FaceBook money without understanding that all it takes is a creative hacker to wipe them out. FaceBook accounts are hacked all the time.
I think FaceBook will be around for a while, but I also think that if Microsoft or Apple release their own proper social networking system (as opposed to the crap ones int he past) which initially builds onto FaceBook and simply "Value Adds" until it starts taking over the feed a well, then FaceBook has a relatively limited life ahead of it.
On the other hand, the IPO isn't about raising money. They already have real revenue streams in place they can build on. They're not going to run out of money anytime really soon, at least not while they're charging sucker companies to try and sell me slutty party dresses (seriously, you'd think they'd target better by checking my gender) and getting millions of people to spend money on coins to play games with. This is about providing a means to current shareholders to convert parts of their investments into cash.
My biggest problem with ACTA is less about the agreement itself as opposed to how it was passed. The governments of the world hid the content of ACTA the best the could for as long as they could in order to try and sneak it through under the eyes of the people which they represent. The kicker of it is, by doing it as an international trade agreement, it effectively puts laws in place in all the countries which signed it while bypassing the normal law making processes. In effect, by making ACTA a trade agreement instead of laws in each country, people are now required to obey what seems like laws in every way to them even though they were entirely without representation when the law was passed. On top of that, the people who negotiated/passed the laws were in most countries appointed officials, not elected. And therefore, they don't have to worry about things like losing their positions over misrepresenting the people.
The secrecy and intentional efforts to get it passed without public knowledge was a disgusting display of abuse of power. So, while people may disagree with ACTA itself, what they should really disagree with is that national leaders are treating the people who put them in power as school children in a classroom for naughty kids as opposed to their bosses. They demand you stay seated. They demand you don't speak without raising your hands. And if you break either of those rules, then you're a troublemaker.
When a company sells you a game, there has to be some sort of means of guaranteeing that you can continue to play it in the future. I buy PC games because of two main reasons. PCs never become obsolete, you can always get a new an better PC. It's not like a console where you find yourself screwed into buying a new obsolete console when your old one dies to play old games. I recently played Falcon 2.0 from Spectrum Holobyte for a retro feel... I admit, I didn't have a 5.25" floppy drive anymore, but I did have the 5.25" diskette itself. So I downloaded a pirated copy of the game to play it. But I could play it after all this time. So my second reason is, I want to know, even if the company who makes the game goes out of business, I can still play it.
So, this type of DRM is a great reason not to buy the game since I won't be able to play it later. It has a limited life span.
In fact, if you're a democrat and you would rather stick with the evil you know as opposed to the the evil that is likely to come, you should have registered republican and voted in one of the primaries for Gingrich. All three other candidates might be able to have a chance against Obama (which is SOOOO pathetic since Obama's approval rating is awful... if there was anyone decent, they'd be a sure winner) but Gingrich can't garner democrat votes since all Obama supporter have to do is play commercials with Gingrich bashing them. He's equally hard on the independents and well anyone who isn't republican. These days, he's even hard on other republicans.
His biggest accomplishment he brags about throughout the primaries is that he manages to establish a house of representatives with a big enough majority that he could leave over 50% of American unrepresented and laws could be passed through congress without debate or opposition. In addition, this lasted nearly 2 full years while a republican president was in office as well leaving the only road block being the senate and even though it was a democrat senate, it wasn't enough. That and the fact that most of the seats on the supreme court had been filled by republican presidents as well meant that he claims to be very nearly responsible for undermining the entire system of checks and balances which are in place to protect the American people from poor leadership.
Obama wouldn't even have to campaign against Gingrich. Just play back some commercials with Gingrich talking.
But there are a TON of people who would vote for him. He knows how to splurt populist buzzwords. He looks like a fat old church minister and will have no problem preaching to the Baptists, Methodists and Catholics. He'll play the Muslim card against Obama which no matter how many times people clear that up, people still are dumb enough to believe because you can show videos of Obama making jokes about the content of the Christian bible. Sure, Gingrich is a sinner and he "Feels terrible about it!" but that's not the issue! The issue is Obama does not love Jesus the way Gingrich does! Let the sinless man cast the first stone!
Obama tries to talk to the people in a way which treats them as bright intelligent people. (of course, he stabs them in the back by approving things like ACTA and letting everything he does get earmarked to death by the first republican to see it), but, crazily enough, though he hasn't stopped the national debt from growing, he has managed to make it grow less which in itself is just short of a miracle with what he was given to work with. His state of the union suggests doing things like taking unemployment money and paying it to companies to move jobs from China to the U.S. effectively just using that money to subsidize the American jobs, but it doesn't take into consideration that logistics and raw materials are the real problems, not the cost of employment. Those U.S. companies still need to ship their products elsewhere and the U.S. lacks the infrastructure to do so cost effectively. The U.S. also has laws and regulations about poisonous gasses that make it impossible to recover metals from old things cost effectively (and this is a GOOD thing). So, moving manufacturing jobs to America through tax breaks sounds wonderful, but his plan is useless and unsustainable and fixes nothing. On the other hand, the other guys plans such more.
Gingrich talks to people as if they're members of his church. In America, THIS WORKS. But, Obama's campaign should have no problem dealing with that. If any of the other three make it past the primaries, Obama will have to struggle because they're all about as shitty a he is.
Effectively, if a person buys a portion of a company and receives a voucher for it, it should not be able to be resold unless it the company itself chooses to purchase it back and then resell it to someone else?
I used to work for Tandberg implementing SRTP and other things for SIP based communication. Let me make a few things clear.
1) I left because I hated the idea of making a $1,000-$100,000 alternative to Skype which is generally better across the board. 2) We had a big ass interop lab and we did do lots of interop testing with other vendors. It was a quiet agreement we had to try and make it easier for us to steal customers from each other. 3) Most of those REALLY expensive video conferencing are purchased because :
a) just owning it lets you claim a reduced carbon foot-print and get tax cuts bigger than the cost of the phone from the government.
b) Having a dual 56" or 65" video conferencing system in your conference room makes your company look really important. Sales people (meaning everyone who sits in conference rooms for a living) love how fancy they look. I know people at McKinsey that have purchased these and not even hooked them up as furniture. It gives the appearance that you have a direct line into the white house.
c) Companies like tandberg and polycom intentionally cut deals with people they know are on their way out of the company. You know people with purchasing/decision making power who are planning to go to another company in 6 months. Then they say "Let me leave this in your conference room for a year, if you don't use it, we'll come pick it up. If you do, then we'll invoice you. Oh and by the way (in a joking tone), putting this in will look great on your Resume/CV when you mention how much of a carbon foot print reduction you accomplished at your company.". Then the guy leaves and no one is left that has any idea what the real agreement was and the invoice comes in and gets paid.
The best comment I have ever heard from a room full of McKinsey types was "It is incredibly cool looking, we love it.", "How much do you use it?", "We don't touch that, we just use Skype, we're scared to break it".
The fact is, Tandberg and Polycom equipment are insanely hard to use for most people. No one wants to use a telephone which actually requires training to figure out. Remember that these phones are used primarily by people who every time they go somewhere to present something end up needing 10 minutes to get their laptop connected to the projector. That usually requires pressing power on the projector, selecting VGA input and then plugging the laptop in. Imagine a system where simply dialing another user can take 20 or more button presses?
These days, the best option for everyone is just to buy a 40" or bigger TV, a high end web cam, a PC with a proper sound card (this is important), and some speakers and a microphone, then use Skype. Skype performs MUCH MUCH better when the audio input and output are connected to the same crystal. This allows for high quality echo cancellation with far less CPU time. There are some special microphones out there where you can plug the audio output of the computer into the microphone and the microphone will subtract the audio output from the audio input which is even better... but if you use analog circuits, you get low latency but lower audio quality. If you use digital circuits, you get higher quality but also higher latency.
As for compatibility with other systems, well... the nice part about a rig like this is, you can have a desktop full of icons and you can call one person with Skype and another with something else. The programs are typically free, so why bother paying big bucks for them.
Projects like this tend to attract mainly programmers who would work on something obscure anyway. People who will make themselves seem special like the guys who were still using Acorn computers 10 years after the company died and while unable to accomplish anything useful on them, would insist on using them for all their daily tasks. Sure, when Acorn was in production it was quite advanced and really fancy... but so was Motif and CDE... which looked like dinosaurs a year after KDE and Gnome came around, yet people kept using it.
Point being, the people who insist on being the Open WebOS people will spend a bunch of time on it, but they wouldn't have really furthered any other projects that much. The OpenSource community is driven by a handful of major projects of which most have corporate backing. WebOS, well I don't see any companies investing heavily in its future.
Doubling the number of cells within the same spectrum range is a waste of time unless you also decrease the area which the cell covers. I'm sure some nifty engineer somewhere can easily write a program which would calculate ideal power levels and staggering of spectrum usage to make it work better, but in densely populated areas, increasing the number of cells that much. The Empire State Building for instance has to be a nightmare to plan for, though running pico cells on each floor might be a good idea. But otherwise, spectrum allocation has to be a huge challenge.
When I'm in the states, the speed of the 3G/4G networks don't bother me nearly as bad as the shit quality of the networks. I have been in most European countries and several Asian ones. I have never seen anyplace else in the world, not even in the mountains of Norway with such insanely shitty telephone and mobile broadband coverage as I've seen in the U.S.. I would feel sympathy for AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile if their service wasn't a disaster on a biblical scale. You'd imagine that every single U.S. Interstate, U.S. route and major state road would have awesome coverage. Oddly, when you look at the coverage maps from those companies, what they mark in dark green to symbolize "Amazing!!!" would barely sit in the white in European countries which would signify "You most likely will get a signal and maybe EDGE".
Frankly, I don't feel comfortable categorizing that as fanboist.
If the plan he is referring to at Sprint is in fact better than the one at AT&T, then it's informative with a derogatory anti-AT&T tone. If the plan isn't better and he is purely misinformed and quoting jibberish in favor of a brand he is fond of, then I'd agree with the fanboy bit. From the other comments I've read, I can only imagine that it can go either way depending on your needs.
Funny thing is, as an owner of 4 iPhones, 3 iPads, 2 Mac Minis, an Apple TV and who knows what else... that's just the stuff we use... I actually prefer my Windows 8 Samsung Slate and bought it because I didn't like the iPad. I wonder if I'm an Apple fanboy or someone who simply buys a lot of Apple shit until something better comes along.
Ignoring the fact the the original article is old and bs anyway....
Nokia and RIM have nothing to offer each other at the moment. Nokia will probably build up slow and steady based on enterprise services that are part of Windows Phone 7 and also because of tight integration with Windows 8. But Nokia's greatest struggle at the moment is not tech... the tech is good. It is the fact that Nokia is "The Granny Phone". The biggest problem with that are people like my mother who bought and iPod Touch and can't use it because she has nasty dragon lady nails and she can't grasp the concept of using a touch screen with her fingers. She's the only person I know who would be better off with a resistive touch screen. The point being that the granny phone company is moving to technology too complex for granny.
RIM is the "We used to be the messaging phone company and now everyone else does that better than us and we just got left behind" company. It's truly amazing how a company who had such a "cool status" turned into a "wow... you still use Blackberry?... you must really be nostalgic huh?" kind of company. Having lived in Europe all thee years, I have to say I have never seen a BlackBerry phone up close. There is one store downtown who sells them, but they also sell everything else. So I pretty much have only heard of them. Same goes for Nokia Smart Phones in recent years.
If you go to a restaurant downtown in Oslo here, you should be cautious to have an identifying case on it. When you walk through the restaurant, people tend to have their phones on the tables and 3 out of 5 phones are iPhone 4s. Then you have the "don't care who makes it" feature phones. And then you have an occasional android phone. The fact that Nokia can't even sell their phones in a country where it used to be 100% Nokia dominated with an oddball Ericsson phone here and there, is pretty sad.
I think I might stop by one of the last Nokia shops in town and see what the new phones look like. I love Windows 8 and MetroUI. I am running it on two of the machines on my desk as I type this. My laptop and my tablet. But I think it would annoy me on my phone.
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In a country like Norway for example it would be possible for people to use their government tax website or banking login system to log in and people would trust if the government said "There is absolutely no identifying information between your vote and you. All we track is whether or not you voted at all". Sure there'd be people who didn't trust them, but the vast majority would.
:)
Also Norwegians are generally not shy at all about who they're voting for. It's not like people here are worried that their votes would be help against them. If anything many people are pretty proud and open about who they vote for. So, it wouldn't matter to most people if it were tracked so long as the information wasn't then sent to a telemarketing firm.
In America, it's amazing since over 80% of the people there are more than happy to run around telling everyone who they voted for and yet, they don't want the government to know. Of course, the only two useful government databases in the U.S. is the social security database and the IRS database so any voter tracking can be used to say "Well, those old people or those poor people never vote for me, so screw them, if I need money for a war, I'll just take it from them". Besides, thanks to the well known "covert nature" of many government organizations like DHS, CIA, NSA etc... in the U.S. people wouldn't trust the government with their votes anyway. I've known people to wear latex gloves when voting to make sure their finger prints couldn't be lifted from different buttons in the voting booth.
I'm glad I left
Problems :
1) In a world where people who buy $40,000 cars, they buy smooth/professional looking Japanese or German cars. They made this thing look like some crap old man sports cars. Even if the thing came with a super model under the dashboard willing to make the driver happy however possible, no one who has any self respect and a credit limit able to handle $40,000 would be cost dead in this car. I don't have statistics on it, but I'd imagine that this car is being purchased mainly by companies who actually do received tax credits for carbon reduction. The technology of this car targets a middle cTheylass 28-35 year primarily stylish female demographic or a male in the similar age group who want something stylish and practical, and yet, the physical design is most similar to cars purchased by men from 40-50 years old trying to but something is a balance between a mustang and a practical car. In short... what the hell were they thinking? If they did nothing more to the 2013 model than to replace the nose of the car with something that didn't look like a poor mans muscle car, it would improve sales dramatically. Take a page from Toyota or Audi for a design idea on that.
2) They bragged about a great new revolutionary design, but the people most likely to purchase a car like this need to have a feel for reliability and dependability. That's the type of person that buys hybrids and electric cars. Toyota pulled it off because they have a long standing reputation for just being reliable as hell. GM/Chevy has a reputation of cars up on bricks that need an engine rebuild. When Toyota released a new hybrid design, it caught on quick because when Toyota says they made a fancy new type of car... you know that if anything goes wrong, they'll fix it. Yeh... there was that thing which got blown out of proportion in the press with the gas peddle, but I'm not joking when I say that as a used Prius owner, Toyota actually tracked me down to tell me to come in to get parts replaced because they found a possible problem. They proactively deal with problems... even on 6 year old out of warranty cars with nearly 100,000 miles on them. Chevy... umm... yeh right. So, if a company like Chevy claims they made a whole new design, people go "I think I'll wait until it's not so revolutionary and they have the kinks worked out".
3) Chevy bragged for years about how the brand new awesome design they're making would get insanely high gas mileage. Then as they got closer and closer to releasing it, the mileage dropped and dropped. Hell, just look at all the people claiming Microsoft/Intel will never make a Windows machine with better battery life. In the mean time, from Windows 7 to Windows 8 developer preview to Windows 8 consumer preview, my Series 7 Slate went from 3 hours on battery (Watching video) to 3.5 hours on battery to 4.8 hours on battery. Not sure how much better they'll do when it's released, but I'm expecting a comparable Ivy Bridge with LP-DDR3 on the same design otherwise will get 8 hours or more especially since the new graphics controller will offload even more processing and spend its time in sleep. But yet, people will say "Intel and Microsoft SUCK at battery life" and no matter what technology Intel and Microsoft add, people will always be like "ARM and Android or ARM and iOS will always be better" yet a comparable ARM and Android or iOS will consume just as much power. It won't matter. It's built into our minds that Intel processors with Windows are made to heat homes.
Chevy should have never made the promises about efficiency they made. But of course they would never have been allowed to design the car if they didn't. So now, while the Volt sucks (though not as bad as people make it out to), GM has an initial design to build on. The Volt is their version 1 and probably not a bad attempt for a version 1, but it's years late and more than a few dollars short. If they get version 2 right, people might actually consider the value in buying one. But for now, $40,000 for what effectively i
First let me start by saying, lossy compression has absolutely no place in mastering. Capture you samples at the highest resolution possible 24-bit/96Hz is passable, 192Hz is better. If you're mastering music on a machine that can't handle this, then simply take when you're given and be off with you.
The author of this article makes claims about performing an analysis of the Apple Mastered for iTunes method. I didn't like his form of analysis. There are major issues with comparing lossy to lossless audio since we have to decide if we want to perform individual listening tests, which often yield nothing of any interest since most "Super Listeners" generally are pretenders to begin with. Frankly, at 24-bit/96Hz or better using high bit rates (as would be used for mastering) chances are, you don't have suitable speakers or headphones to perform the test reliably anyway. Even the best monitor speakers from Genelec can't reproduce the differences at these levels. Some headphones might be able to handle it in some ranges, but not in all. Therefore we're limited to what is possible with pure data analysis.
In data analysis, we can do things like invert the wave of the output and add the results together to produce a distortion wave. As the author claims to have done, but now comes the issue of deriving anything meaningful from this. Often times, better codecs will produce greater distortion because it's supposed to be "meaningful distortion". As such, think of it like dithering an image to improve results from image compression, this is extremely common when down-sampling before compressing. As a result, filters will produce more accurate AC characteristics of the waves being compressed. This comes at a cost of bit rate consumption, but the end result when the image is decompressed is higher.
Some numbers like SNR (signal to noise ratio) are calculated by deriving a meaningful number to calculate how much of the original signal still exist in the compressed signal. Higher distortion such as what this guy is observing can in fact produce better signal retention.
Next is the issue of attempting to produce the best audio output possible based on what the listener perceives as being superior sound. This is a very common issue in audio compression. AAC originally defined 7 possible branches for compression methods which would be selected per audio unit based on a vendor specific 'Psycho-acoustic model". This would attempt to choose the best balance between bit rate allocation and what should sound best to the user. Often these models just tried all 7 compressions and built a quality metric related to how the audio should sound in the end and chose the best output and moved on. Now, though I could be wrong, I believe I know of 21 possible branches for the compression. While each one has its benefits, for a computer to choose one branch over another requires the computer to have a concept of what sounds best. Rarely is it chosen based on pure wave distortion. Often it's chosen based on concepts like "we can improve the quality of this signal by increasing the high frequency distortion since in those ranges, it wouldn't be reproducible by anything other than piezoelectric elements far too small to be heard."
So, in the end, while he may be actually on to something, his reasoning is likely entirely incompatible with reality. Lossless compression chooses how best to lose based on perceived quality as opposed to pure signal quality. A perfect compression would lose nothing and still chop audio to 1/50th the original size. But in this universe, the best lossless compressions still struggle to perform 2:1 reliably and while it can often average or peak at 4:1 can often also end up increasing the size instead. Most of the old Ella Fitzgerald/Loius Armstrong recording are examples of worst case files.
So, while his analysis was very cute, it was possibly inaccurate.
Now, I'll reiterate the first point.
Audio compression DOES NOT BELONG in a mastering environment. Lossless is ok if there's a
A stock suggests that you own a portion of the company, at best it gives you a vote in the future of the company. For the most part, it's more accurate to see the stock as an IOU. But the company has no responsibility to ever actually pay the IOU, but you can sell the IOU to other people willing to accept the risk in hopes of reward.
If the company has control over enough of its own shares, then the vote you have a right to as a "share holder" is meaningless as well. This is why, in order to go public, it is necessary for the primary share holders to hold less than a given percentage of the stocks. This makes it so that the people buying the shares could in theory have a real say in the future of the company. This process usually ends up moving control from a few major share holders to a large handful of shareholders that will vote pretty much always with the original major shareholders which again renders the stock market shareholder's vote meaningless again.
So, it's best to look at the IOU as a gambling voucher, like a casino chip that can't ever be cashed in but can be sold to other gamblers.
I seriously believe that Apple should use that stock pile to start buying back their own stock to get out from under the thumbs of people like this. Apple doesn't need shareholders anymore, at least for now. Of course, the iPad is about to face insanely hard competition from Microsoft because Microsoft finally "got it right" with Windows 8... I own 3 iPads, 4 iPhones, iPods, Mac Minis etc... but in reality, I also own a Windows 8 tablet and it's about a million times better than the iPad in every way but battery life. Find a hardware manufacturer for Windows 8 tablets that can "Do cool" and Apple will have a struggle ahead. Where Apple will spend years trying to get Office programs and many other tools in place for iOS, Microsoft is coming out with those things ready to role. Add to that that there really isn't anything that will be truly iOS specific (as most cool apps are Android too these days and Windows 8 runs that too) and Apple will need to start worrying. In fact, the biggest thing that will hurt Apple is iTunes for Windows since it allows users to take pretty much everything but their books and apps to the Windows tablets and you can always get more apps and if you bought a book using iBooks... well you can probably live without it anyway.
So, the best thing right now is that instead of pushing Apple to do all kinds of stupid things like changing there ways because Jobs is dead and can't stop it anymore, Apple will need to start investing insanely heavily over the next few years to make up for the fact that starting February 29th, they are no longer the only game in town. (Yes, I know Android is out there, I've used it, it's trying to catch up to iOS and iOS will soon need to try and catch up to Windows 8, so it's way behind).
So in my opinion, the best thing to do is to run the company and quick dicking around with all this stupid crap. Let Apple run Apple, they're pretty good at it. Screw the people who all want to change it for the sake of being special.
We decided not to try and get into the business because we can simply say "Fuck it, we have oil".
Of course, the absolute ultimate server park location is Longyearbyen since we have proper power there, we have some of the biggest Internet pipes in the world there (it's where the cross arctic fibers come down), we have passive data center cooling there 9 months of the year. Other than the 75% of the nations graduates who came from BI (in otherwords useless as shit but can still sell oil), the remaining 20% are dominated by top notch IT geeks, just check Finn.no and you'll see there are two type of jobs in abundance right now "useless bastards who wear ties" and "IT this and IKT that".
P.S. - Not all bastards who wear ties are useless, just the ones who spent 3 years in a business school isolated from anyone who knows anything about anything and graduated without taking a single math or science class and then went on to sell oil hehe.
It's not about the only browser without a tablet presence trying to get a tablet presence by latching onto the last major electronics company to not have a tablet strategy?
You're saying they have a product. I see it more as not having a product and slapping some shit together hoping what they poop out will become a product.
I have a Samsung Series 7 Slate and I can run IE, Opera, Chrome, Safari and that one from the guys who rewrote Netscape's old crap... can't remember their name since they died so long ago.
How about a device which runs them all and if you need one, run that one. If you need another, run the other instead.
Oh.... sorry. Forgot, these days we're support to have some sort of compatibility between browsers by using standards and stuff. But still.. my tablet run Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OS X or a pile of other operating systems. Choice is nice.
It's been a shit idea for the past 12 years. I was demoing products like this back at CeBit 2000 with Ericsson. It was a bad idea back then, it's a slightly less bad idea today.
LG is what you buy when you desperately need a phone while your real phone is in for repair.
I have heard of old people and REALLY poor people using LG phones because they're cheap. The old people don't want the gadget phones and LG makes some with big buttons. The poor people just want a phone and you couldn't just reach into the telephone recycling boxes in the past, so you bought an LG.
Don't get me wrong. Microsoft and Nokia advertise the hell out of it and are doing whatever they can to sell it. But, as an iPad to Windows 8 tablet convert for the past 3 months, I have to say that if Microsoft does get Windows 8 Phone up and running on an x86 platform with moderate battery life, I'll consider dumping iPhone as well. See, on my Windows 8 tablet, I run iTunes desktop which lets me keep all my music, movies and videos. I have apps like TomTom for U.S. and Western Europe which were big investments I'll need an iPhone for, but the rest of the apps were a buck or two and most of the ones I actually use are free. So, I really think I'd be happier with a Windows 8 Phone than a iPhone if the Windows 8 Phone is like the Windows 8 tablet which gives me the ability to plug it into a screen and keyboard and use it as a PC as well.
I'm looking forward to a time when I can have the power of a dual core Sandy Bridge Core i5 as a telephone running Windows 8 with the phone interface when I carry it and the desktop interface when it's docked. A single device to do everything. Then I can have some sort of laptoppish dock for when I need a desktop on the road. This way, I can find a dock with the perfect screen and perfect keyboard and then find a PC/Phone with the perfect specs and only upgrade one or the other when I find something much better.
I type this now from an AWESOME Asus N53SV notebook with a Core i7, 16 Gigs of RAM and dual 400GB 525/500 MB/sec SSDs... it has the worst keyboard and trackpad EVER!!!! though. I would love to buy the ultimate keyboard and screen dock... use it until I'm 150 years old and then just upgrade the computer part which would effectively be my phone as well.
So... bash Windows Phone all you want.... but the way things are going, Windows 8 Phone will almost certainly be the first truly converged device operating system. Able to run Windows Metro, Windows Desktop, Android, etc... apps. Able to run practically every program made since 1978. Able to work on phone, tablet, laptop, desktop and TV all equally well. Etc... Sure, it could end up being a niche, but I'm pretty sure that this is what people will demand in the years to come.
I don't know much about the market in Canada, I know that often it's much like the U.S., sometimes more limited since many foreign vendors are just thinking about coming to the U.S. and haven't even considered Canada yet. This creates obvious lack of choice issues. But based on the pathetic sales of the Playbook and the enormous sales of other devices, it still seems strange. I would say that they had to limit their demographic further somehow. Like sticking strictly to people who actually consider a tie appropriate to wear in public (I mean other than to weddings and funerals). Maybe by going to a church of some type, even then that sounds weird since most of the guys I know who actually go to church use iPhones anyway since it's easier to listen to sports games on them while the tiny bluetooth earbud is hidden under their fluffy hair (and you thought the fluffy hair on men at church was just a weird jesus crispy thing... no it really has a purpose). Or maybe they camped outside of a Blackberry store and found that 85% of the tablet owners who came out were just trying to connect their blackberry to their iPad.
It just seems to me that it would be very hard in general to find 150 playbook users out of a genuinely randomly picked 1000 tablet owners. Of course, maybe a better statistic would be to compare active users as opposed to simply owners. Maybe at the low price they offered it, tons of people who had owned a Blackberry figured WTF? and gave it a shot before realizing they should have just saved up for the Samsung or the iPad.
I currently have 3 iPads in my house. Got one as a gift from my boss. Wife got one as a gift from her boss. Daughter won one in a "click here to win an iPad" thing. Would have never spent money on them, especially after using one for a year. It's pretty bloody useless. I do also have a Kindle (I think it works) and I have a Samsung Series 7 Slate. The Slate I packed up tonight, brought it downtown and met my nephew there and was teaching him C++ development using Visual Studio 2010 on it. When I needed a scratch pad, I switched to the PaintPlay app and just scribbled using my stylus on it. That's a tablet that actually does something useful. It's a damn shame the Windows 8 ARM tablet is going to suck so bad. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's cute and stuff that it'll look like the x86 version, but it won't run anything other than the same shit you find on every other tablet. When I look at the Playbook (including the new version I looked at online) I still can't figure out what form of utility value it offers AT ALL.
I left the states 14 years ago, and though I go back to visit occasionally, I'm not even in an ACTA nation! You have to love countries like Norway. While we have endless laws prohibiting just about anything, the 32 policemen in the country just can bother with anything less important than murder. Oh... when annual budget arrives for them, they rush out and arrest everyone they can as fast as they can. So, figure like 30 arrests in one night. The rest of the time, they hang out in down town Oslo making sure that the hookers are confined to the first place anyone sees when they visit Norway, kinda like a welcome mat. I think they take turns with who gets to keep the national theater area safe which is where all the rich girls in expensive dresses that barely cover their privates go to get munchies after getting plastered at night.
I love this place. The best part is, even if the most dishonest man were to stand on a building here screaming at the top of his lungs speaking his mind, it wouldn't matter. People here are mature enough to listen to what interests them and intelligent enough to ignore the nonsense for the most part.
Of course your hidden reference to what most people refer to as the current Orwellian state is nicely placed. Of course, I'm not quite sure that we're at the point where the technology is ready for the thought police concept. Maybe the search result police is the next best thing.
Apple has spent years and millions on research and development into LLVM which while not currently ideal as a solution for producing VM code friendly with both ARM and x86 or ARM8 and x64, is in theory supposed to be able to handle this. Apple has worked very hard to develop the LLVM project in such a way that it will sooner than later take over the role GCC currently plays on Mac OS X. LLVM and CLang have certainly reached a level of maturity where GCC can soon be the optional compiler as opposed to the main compiler on the platform.
In reality, with the exception of a small amount of code to get the LLVM virtual machine functioning on start-up, it would be possible to get the majority of the system up and running without the need for fat binaries. In fact, even if Apple simply stays with x64, this is a better option than using GCC in the long run since it would allow improvements to LLVM make improvements to how the system performs otherwise. Also by improving the kernel link loader, it would be possible to perform tracing JIT optimization across library boundaries at run-time. This could in theory improve system performance between 10 and 50% depending on how many calls across library boundaries are made.
So, fat binaries, while entertaining are of little use today. Especially when you're talking about two little-endian processors with an instruction set which, while different fundamentally, mirrors one another's capabilities quite closely.
Oh.... and in the area of "compute' power where the GPU is being used for general purpose computing, a more advanced LLVM back-end could in theory recompile certain traces of code to produce GPU specific code. This isn't "that useful" in normal every day code, but it can be extremely useful if any of the languages supported by CLang were extended to support SIMD types like float4 of float8.
The reason Europe (not specifically the EU, hell Norway has tons of magazines, I joke sometimes they have one for each person in the country) has so many magazines has to do with the car vs. public transportation mentality. If you visit cities in the U.S. with excellent public transportation and a culture where news stands are at nearly every station, you'll find that magazine selection is much more substantial than elsewhere.
With the exception of bridal and teen magazines, people don't drag their asses to the store to actually buy magazines anymore. Magazines in Europe are also very much a impulse purchase. Like,"I need a ticket for a train... oooh a magazine that comes with some new makeup!". The more educated (and generally wealthier) people are using iPads or at least phones on the trains these days, but most people still pop into the news stand at the train station and find something to fill their time with. It's also very useful for people who don't like looking at the other people on the trains. I often find myself driving behind trolleys and there will be someone with their head aimed out the back window so they don't have to look at other people on the trolley. When I'm on the train, bus or trolley, many people (better than 15%) will be reading something on paper.
There's no really good reason to buy magazines in the states anymore... well except the picture ones where the images are much higher resolution like National Geographic. But in Europe, they serve a function. So, it's like this in all the cities, but in most countries out here, the companies who are located at the train station also have a presence elsewhere, and since they fill the stores all around the country with the same items, the magazine selection is pretty good everywhere.
When you're in the city centers though, if you are multi-lingual (I'm a New Yorker in Norway and I can read 9 languages... don't be impressed, I barely speak two) so you can go to the major magazine stands and have access to magazines in lots of different languages which increases your selection substantially.
I'm personally seeing them more as an ICQ type company. The difference is, they figured out a way to make money by becoming an advertising company and a bank. They effectively are issuing their own international currency now. In reality, I'm more than a little bit nervous about that aspect. Since they're not actually a regulated bank or casino, they could in theory treat their currency as having value within itself and start behaving like a nation that prints more of it when they need it. Also, people blindly convert their real money into FaceBook money without understanding that all it takes is a creative hacker to wipe them out. FaceBook accounts are hacked all the time.
I think FaceBook will be around for a while, but I also think that if Microsoft or Apple release their own proper social networking system (as opposed to the crap ones int he past) which initially builds onto FaceBook and simply "Value Adds" until it starts taking over the feed a well, then FaceBook has a relatively limited life ahead of it.
On the other hand, the IPO isn't about raising money. They already have real revenue streams in place they can build on. They're not going to run out of money anytime really soon, at least not while they're charging sucker companies to try and sell me slutty party dresses (seriously, you'd think they'd target better by checking my gender) and getting millions of people to spend money on coins to play games with. This is about providing a means to current shareholders to convert parts of their investments into cash.
My biggest problem with ACTA is less about the agreement itself as opposed to how it was passed. The governments of the world hid the content of ACTA the best the could for as long as they could in order to try and sneak it through under the eyes of the people which they represent. The kicker of it is, by doing it as an international trade agreement, it effectively puts laws in place in all the countries which signed it while bypassing the normal law making processes. In effect, by making ACTA a trade agreement instead of laws in each country, people are now required to obey what seems like laws in every way to them even though they were entirely without representation when the law was passed. On top of that, the people who negotiated/passed the laws were in most countries appointed officials, not elected. And therefore, they don't have to worry about things like losing their positions over misrepresenting the people.
The secrecy and intentional efforts to get it passed without public knowledge was a disgusting display of abuse of power. So, while people may disagree with ACTA itself, what they should really disagree with is that national leaders are treating the people who put them in power as school children in a classroom for naughty kids as opposed to their bosses. They demand you stay seated. They demand you don't speak without raising your hands. And if you break either of those rules, then you're a troublemaker.
When a company sells you a game, there has to be some sort of means of guaranteeing that you can continue to play it in the future. I buy PC games because of two main reasons. PCs never become obsolete, you can always get a new an better PC. It's not like a console where you find yourself screwed into buying a new obsolete console when your old one dies to play old games. I recently played Falcon 2.0 from Spectrum Holobyte for a retro feel... I admit, I didn't have a 5.25" floppy drive anymore, but I did have the 5.25" diskette itself. So I downloaded a pirated copy of the game to play it. But I could play it after all this time. So my second reason is, I want to know, even if the company who makes the game goes out of business, I can still play it.
So, this type of DRM is a great reason not to buy the game since I won't be able to play it later. It has a limited life span.
In fact, if you're a democrat and you would rather stick with the evil you know as opposed to the the evil that is likely to come, you should have registered republican and voted in one of the primaries for Gingrich. All three other candidates might be able to have a chance against Obama (which is SOOOO pathetic since Obama's approval rating is awful... if there was anyone decent, they'd be a sure winner) but Gingrich can't garner democrat votes since all Obama supporter have to do is play commercials with Gingrich bashing them. He's equally hard on the independents and well anyone who isn't republican. These days, he's even hard on other republicans.
His biggest accomplishment he brags about throughout the primaries is that he manages to establish a house of representatives with a big enough majority that he could leave over 50% of American unrepresented and laws could be passed through congress without debate or opposition. In addition, this lasted nearly 2 full years while a republican president was in office as well leaving the only road block being the senate and even though it was a democrat senate, it wasn't enough. That and the fact that most of the seats on the supreme court had been filled by republican presidents as well meant that he claims to be very nearly responsible for undermining the entire system of checks and balances which are in place to protect the American people from poor leadership.
Obama wouldn't even have to campaign against Gingrich. Just play back some commercials with Gingrich talking.
But there are a TON of people who would vote for him. He knows how to splurt populist buzzwords. He looks like a fat old church minister and will have no problem preaching to the Baptists, Methodists and Catholics. He'll play the Muslim card against Obama which no matter how many times people clear that up, people still are dumb enough to believe because you can show videos of Obama making jokes about the content of the Christian bible. Sure, Gingrich is a sinner and he "Feels terrible about it!" but that's not the issue! The issue is Obama does not love Jesus the way Gingrich does! Let the sinless man cast the first stone!
Obama tries to talk to the people in a way which treats them as bright intelligent people. (of course, he stabs them in the back by approving things like ACTA and letting everything he does get earmarked to death by the first republican to see it), but, crazily enough, though he hasn't stopped the national debt from growing, he has managed to make it grow less which in itself is just short of a miracle with what he was given to work with. His state of the union suggests doing things like taking unemployment money and paying it to companies to move jobs from China to the U.S. effectively just using that money to subsidize the American jobs, but it doesn't take into consideration that logistics and raw materials are the real problems, not the cost of employment. Those U.S. companies still need to ship their products elsewhere and the U.S. lacks the infrastructure to do so cost effectively. The U.S. also has laws and regulations about poisonous gasses that make it impossible to recover metals from old things cost effectively (and this is a GOOD thing). So, moving manufacturing jobs to America through tax breaks sounds wonderful, but his plan is useless and unsustainable and fixes nothing. On the other hand, the other guys plans such more.
Gingrich talks to people as if they're members of his church. In America, THIS WORKS. But, Obama's campaign should have no problem dealing with that. If any of the other three make it past the primaries, Obama will have to struggle because they're all about as shitty a he is.
Effectively, if a person buys a portion of a company and receives a voucher for it, it should not be able to be resold unless it the company itself chooses to purchase it back and then resell it to someone else?
I used to work for Tandberg implementing SRTP and other things for SIP based communication. Let me make a few things clear.
1) I left because I hated the idea of making a $1,000-$100,000 alternative to Skype which is generally better across the board.
2) We had a big ass interop lab and we did do lots of interop testing with other vendors. It was a quiet agreement we had to try and make it easier for us to steal customers from each other.
3) Most of those REALLY expensive video conferencing are purchased because :
a) just owning it lets you claim a reduced carbon foot-print and get tax cuts bigger than the cost of the phone from the government.
b) Having a dual 56" or 65" video conferencing system in your conference room makes your company look really important. Sales people (meaning everyone who sits in conference rooms for a living) love how fancy they look. I know people at McKinsey that have purchased these and not even hooked them up as furniture. It gives the appearance that you have a direct line into the white house.
c) Companies like tandberg and polycom intentionally cut deals with people they know are on their way out of the company. You know people with purchasing/decision making power who are planning to go to another company in 6 months. Then they say "Let me leave this in your conference room for a year, if you don't use it, we'll come pick it up. If you do, then we'll invoice you. Oh and by the way (in a joking tone), putting this in will look great on your Resume/CV when you mention how much of a carbon foot print reduction you accomplished at your company.". Then the guy leaves and no one is left that has any idea what the real agreement was and the invoice comes in and gets paid.
The best comment I have ever heard from a room full of McKinsey types was "It is incredibly cool looking, we love it.", "How much do you use it?", "We don't touch that, we just use Skype, we're scared to break it".
The fact is, Tandberg and Polycom equipment are insanely hard to use for most people. No one wants to use a telephone which actually requires training to figure out. Remember that these phones are used primarily by people who every time they go somewhere to present something end up needing 10 minutes to get their laptop connected to the projector. That usually requires pressing power on the projector, selecting VGA input and then plugging the laptop in. Imagine a system where simply dialing another user can take 20 or more button presses?
These days, the best option for everyone is just to buy a 40" or bigger TV, a high end web cam, a PC with a proper sound card (this is important), and some speakers and a microphone, then use Skype. Skype performs MUCH MUCH better when the audio input and output are connected to the same crystal. This allows for high quality echo cancellation with far less CPU time. There are some special microphones out there where you can plug the audio output of the computer into the microphone and the microphone will subtract the audio output from the audio input which is even better... but if you use analog circuits, you get low latency but lower audio quality. If you use digital circuits, you get higher quality but also higher latency.
As for compatibility with other systems, well... the nice part about a rig like this is, you can have a desktop full of icons and you can call one person with Skype and another with something else. The programs are typically free, so why bother paying big bucks for them.
Projects like this tend to attract mainly programmers who would work on something obscure anyway. People who will make themselves seem special like the guys who were still using Acorn computers 10 years after the company died and while unable to accomplish anything useful on them, would insist on using them for all their daily tasks. Sure, when Acorn was in production it was quite advanced and really fancy... but so was Motif and CDE... which looked like dinosaurs a year after KDE and Gnome came around, yet people kept using it.
Point being, the people who insist on being the Open WebOS people will spend a bunch of time on it, but they wouldn't have really furthered any other projects that much. The OpenSource community is driven by a handful of major projects of which most have corporate backing. WebOS, well I don't see any companies investing heavily in its future.
Doubling the number of cells within the same spectrum range is a waste of time unless you also decrease the area which the cell covers. I'm sure some nifty engineer somewhere can easily write a program which would calculate ideal power levels and staggering of spectrum usage to make it work better, but in densely populated areas, increasing the number of cells that much. The Empire State Building for instance has to be a nightmare to plan for, though running pico cells on each floor might be a good idea. But otherwise, spectrum allocation has to be a huge challenge.
When I'm in the states, the speed of the 3G/4G networks don't bother me nearly as bad as the shit quality of the networks. I have been in most European countries and several Asian ones. I have never seen anyplace else in the world, not even in the mountains of Norway with such insanely shitty telephone and mobile broadband coverage as I've seen in the U.S.. I would feel sympathy for AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile if their service wasn't a disaster on a biblical scale. You'd imagine that every single U.S. Interstate, U.S. route and major state road would have awesome coverage. Oddly, when you look at the coverage maps from those companies, what they mark in dark green to symbolize "Amazing!!!" would barely sit in the white in European countries which would signify "You most likely will get a signal and maybe EDGE".
Frankly, I don't feel comfortable categorizing that as fanboist.
... that's just the stuff we use... I actually prefer my Windows 8 Samsung Slate and bought it because I didn't like the iPad. I wonder if I'm an Apple fanboy or someone who simply buys a lot of Apple shit until something better comes along.
If the plan he is referring to at Sprint is in fact better than the one at AT&T, then it's informative with a derogatory anti-AT&T tone. If the plan isn't better and he is purely misinformed and quoting jibberish in favor of a brand he is fond of, then I'd agree with the fanboy bit. From the other comments I've read, I can only imagine that it can go either way depending on your needs.
Funny thing is, as an owner of 4 iPhones, 3 iPads, 2 Mac Minis, an Apple TV and who knows what else
Ignoring the fact the the original article is old and bs anyway....
Nokia and RIM have nothing to offer each other at the moment. Nokia will probably build up slow and steady based on enterprise services that are part of Windows Phone 7 and also because of tight integration with Windows 8. But Nokia's greatest struggle at the moment is not tech... the tech is good. It is the fact that Nokia is "The Granny Phone". The biggest problem with that are people like my mother who bought and iPod Touch and can't use it because she has nasty dragon lady nails and she can't grasp the concept of using a touch screen with her fingers. She's the only person I know who would be better off with a resistive touch screen. The point being that the granny phone company is moving to technology too complex for granny.
RIM is the "We used to be the messaging phone company and now everyone else does that better than us and we just got left behind" company. It's truly amazing how a company who had such a "cool status" turned into a "wow... you still use Blackberry?... you must really be nostalgic huh?" kind of company. Having lived in Europe all thee years, I have to say I have never seen a BlackBerry phone up close. There is one store downtown who sells them, but they also sell everything else. So I pretty much have only heard of them. Same goes for Nokia Smart Phones in recent years.
If you go to a restaurant downtown in Oslo here, you should be cautious to have an identifying case on it. When you walk through the restaurant, people tend to have their phones on the tables and 3 out of 5 phones are iPhone 4s. Then you have the "don't care who makes it" feature phones. And then you have an occasional android phone. The fact that Nokia can't even sell their phones in a country where it used to be 100% Nokia dominated with an oddball Ericsson phone here and there, is pretty sad.
I think I might stop by one of the last Nokia shops in town and see what the new phones look like. I love Windows 8 and MetroUI. I am running it on two of the machines on my desk as I type this. My laptop and my tablet. But I think it would annoy me on my phone.