Cable companies are increasing prices to maintain revenue growth, not to counter cord-cutting (the title is illogical), and they can do it because TV is mostly price inelastic. Consider the markets Cable companies are in:
TV - Mature, saturated, declining Landline Internet - Mature, saturated (as far as they are concerned), declining slightly (and possibly declining significantly if 5G can provide 20-100 Mbps fixed Internet for good prices) Landline Phone - Mature, saturated, declining Mobile Phone - Mature, mostly saturated No real competition; in some cases single companies have monopolies over local territory like counties; elsewhere there's a choice of just 2 companies, so an oligopoly situation where 2 choices have 100% of the market.
All those declining markets means one thing: cable companies have a hard time keeping revenue positive and keeping shareholders happy. Their solution? Increase prices on their services; in Canada in particular, they increase the price of TV and Internet every single year. They have wireless "sub brands" that charge $45 for a plan that the "premium brand" service charges $85/mo for. In short: the cable companies want to keep increasing revenue and 2% per quarter isn't good enough, so they are gouging people who won't abandon these services, and they have so little competition they can get away with it. If people want to solve this issue, I recommend making the jump to competitive services, such as online streaming, smaller Internet providers, and also writing to their elected representatives. Big Cable and Phone has a stranglehold on communication services and is doing everything to keep them priced at ridiculously high levels relative to many other markets (Europe being a perfect example). We get much less value from these companies than we should be. And without government intervention and active, vocal consumers the price of cable will continue to rise.
Magnetic disk performance resulted in companies investing in Flash and other technologies. The oil crisis resulted in companies investing in engine efficiency. Broken iPhones and expensive iPhones results in more people finding 3rd party repair options. Adversity and scarcity breeds innovation. We'll see a lot of money pour back into the pure science of understanding AI, and also we're seeing companies like Google and AMD invest in chip design that is tailored to AI. "AI-SICs", so to speak. I look forward to the solutions people invent to address the world's problems!
I was thinking about this yesterday. The phone has become so ubiquitous that almost nobody thinks of their phone's model name / number. It takes me a moment to recall the specific generation / variant I own because it is so constantly referred to as just "iPhone" or "my iPhone". For any phone. The real factor remains "Android" or "iPhone", most details after that are secondary to 99% of the conversations I have about smartphones.
Perhaps the names are getting so specific because the differentiation between phone generations is now so iterative that companies feel pressure to market those differences increasingly through the brand. Maybe now, if a company comes out with a truly different phone, they should break from brand category names like "Galaxy" or "iPhone" entirely. It's about time for a shakeup. Folding OLED display flip phone?
They reported that "full stack" development today is a term that is tied to the in-house server environment, and that in today's cloud environment, the extent to which the cloud manages itself means that programming for the "full stack" isn't nearly as difficult as it is for the on-premise computing and storage environment.
Yeah, and as a telecom employee I've thought this is the much better way forward. Spectrum sales create walled gardens. With one national network, each tower has access to full spectrum for maximum bandwidth, fewer towers are needed so the infrastructure spend is dramatically less, and the government can set a price and allow anybody in.
The alternative is good, too: Instead of spectrum sales, each carrier builds out a portion of the network, and has to contribute a minimum contribution like, say, $6 billion USD in infrastructure, and in return they get access to the whole network and customers everywhere. For that price they get access to the network and X number of customers. Then have a tiered pricing structure where, for each additional tower they add to the network, they get access to Y additional customers. If the figures are set carefully, this incentivizes both growing carriers, and large carriers spend more. The result? An even larger network, with more coverage in suburban and rural areas. And potentially new carriers and competition to drive prices lower.
Now... take this idea and apply it to a national fiber-Internet network, too. Private networks create uneven playing fields and require higher prices because each competitor has to over-build (where there's competition allowed of course). Incentivize carriers to be able to expand their customer base by reaching more and more people with their product, instead, and you'll see as close to 100% affordable broadband access as possible.
A. These people were not committing crimes. B. The cop most likely wouldn't have the foggiest idea what they were doing. C. Police on the street aren't the ones that track down cyber criminals, that's handled by other organizations.
Gotta love the flight from City A to far-away City B comparisons. Except you need to be going Mach 3+ before Scramjets get past minimal stall speed, and the only way to get to Mach 3 right now is with a rocket-assisted takeoff. The neighbors around airports are going to love that, I'm sure.
I wonder if Scramjets would increase or decrease condensation trails, which are known to have a dimming and cooling effect on everything below them. Decreasing would mean more sunlight hitting the ground, but also more heat, which would only heat up the Earth at ground level that much more. If it increases, it means more cooling, but also more dimming.
It's nice to see Eclipse for the Mac, but Eclipse could learn a LOT about the user interface and experience from Mac apps. For example, plain ordinary "File Open" and "File Close" and "Import" features, workspaces be damned. Eclipse's current way of handling the opening and importing of source code is excessively difficult, and needs to be changed. The "workspaces" concept is idiotic when the file / folder system works just fine. Hell, BlueJ, another coding program, kicks the crap out of Eclipse in this specific regard and it's used to teach 1st year comp sci students!
Yes, just like the Microsoft Mac team, Eclipse devs could learn a lot from the Mac, I think this will be a good step for them.
All smartphones have a laundry list of missing features, so you're only making a moot point. What I mean is one step, one iteration forward. That doesn't imply major changes, and it certainly does not imply "adding all the missing features". And the claim isn't subjective, you need only look at all the "design concepts" coming out from Nokia and Intel that are emulating the iPod. They aren't making lateral moves, they're adding to the smartphone. That's a step forward.
But, Apple's self-imposed product limitations are too annoying for me. It's just not going to be the device I really want. Apple's device definitely takes the Smartphone concept one step forward, and certainly Apple put no limits on certain features. So what are these sale-killing features that you want? Your post would have been much more useful if you had made it constructive, rather than leaving this "big gap" of issues you have that you don't mention.
As for what I'd like to see in the next iPhone:
- More storage capacity. Apple went with the "smartphone music" model for storage, where the marketing says "it plays music", but then the actual amount of storage is very low. Remember all those phones that claimed they could play music but you only had 50 MB of storage for that music? That's what I mean. 16GB isn't enough for one quarter of my iTunes library in ALAC lossless format.
- Longer battery life. An obvious issue, but I'm always unsatisfied with the talk time of most phones.
- I'm willing to bet that Apple is, once again, working with Google, but this time on a sweet GPS / Google Maps solution.
- At least two models. GPS is cool, but I have no need for it, so a regular iPhone would be great. Heck, in Canada, I'd even be content if the took out the EDGE radio. Data prices up here are so insanely high that I'd never even bother sending data by EDGE.
- I wonder if a black & white mode for the screen could save power?
- A standard file system and finder. The iPhone is a great smartphone and could also be a great mini-tablet or PDA in the next iteration, or two.
- A graphics chip and a triple axis motion sensor. The iPhone might have an early chance at being a portable gaming device, and the 3-axis sensor would allow developers to make the broad spectrum of games that appeal to all generations, just as the Wii does.
Nicely put. I also think it may have to do with the appearances of the two people. Linus is always a clean cut polo-T guy. Richard looks like a hippy. While appearances can be deceiving, generally they aren't. I think there are marked differences between the two persons involved, and yes the egos.
And dare I say that commercial software is driven by the quest for profits, and that quest gives commercial developers a very firm focus on competing publicly, and that is why, even to this day, proprietary software tends to be much more feature-complete, though more buggy. It's the reason why you could be more productive, overall, in 2000 on a Windows or Mac PC than you could on an open source PC. I think this point is accurate and valid, and highlights one of the problems that free and open software, by and large, have always had - not enough focus on the desktop to deliver a complete suite of software to compete with Windows and OS X, and an easy installer that encourages people to switch.
Re:Musta only stole the good bits
on
Facebook In Court
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I looked at the site and it looks quite professional, actually. It looks very good considering that it's a student effort. Now if they had $100,000 to hire a UI design consultant, a graphics expert, and some expert coders, I'm sure it could look and perform much better.
What EA needs to do is focus on quality, at least with one game - BF2142. I play the game daily and the client is so buggy and unstable that it is not commercial-grade software right now. It used to be stable; several updates ago it was great, but now it is so buggy that it's just ridiculous.
And yes, EA does make scads of boring games. The best thing for EA to do is split itself up into several companies, one the game development section, and another to be effectively an investment bank to fund games from companies that otherwise couldn't afford to see them through to release. You could probably make a third company out of EA's distribution group. You'd get three smaller, more agile companies, each highly specialized, each able to continue to cooperate, but with separate leadership and less upper management. The conglomerate format just isn't working.
The ISS won't last 50 years in space, let alone the hundreds of years that most of the old and new wonders have been around, and it has no culture or history, and it's life is subject to politics. That isn't a wonder, it's a taxpayer expense.
The new 7 wonders are about culture and history, not about technological accomplishment, though certainly there is also the labour element to a number of the new and old wonders.
All software anti-cheat systems are flawed because they include things other than cheating. I get kicked by Punkbuster for high ping on gaming servers.
The trouble with anti-cheat systems is that the developers have no ethical standard. They tolerate inconveniencing legitimate players to ensure that the cheaters are stopped as well. The law would see things differently. The law believes in letting some criminals go to ensure that it never punishes an innocent man. Flawed though it may be, it works far more often than it fails. Punkbuster is the complete opposite, and what's worse is that Punkbuster is full of bugs. I get kicked from servers several times a day and the only message I get is:
"Punkbuster
[Ok]"
All complaints to the company fall on deaf ears. And because EA chooses PB, I am stuck with a company granted an artifician monopoly by another company, and have no choice but to have a greatly diminished experience. Nothing is worse than screwing a gamer over in the heat of a competitive match, and that's what PB does too often.
I don't care whether they test the wings or not. I just don't ever want to have to get on a plane and see the wings bend any more than aluminium wings. If I look out the window and see the wings actually flapping and flexing under force any more than I'd usually expect, which is little flexing at all, I'm going to be violently sick from at least two orifices.
compared to the lightweight framework that it is on the mac, the windows version absolutely sucks. It's just an incredibly sluggish, and somewhat useless media player. This is because of how libraries are packaged in an OS, versus on another OS. OS X is Apple's baby, so it can load whatever libraries and include them under the "OS X" RAM side and make use of native APIs.
On Windows, Apple's APIs that make Quicktime so good are not native, they have to be installed along with everything else, so load times are longer because there is more to load, and there can be additional overhead as well.
But Quicktime is by far the best player, IMO. It's the best player to handle streaming, hands down. And I've never seen a Quicktime video with the audio and video out of sync, even very slightly, but I see it all the time on WMP, Real, and those Flash players. This is hugely annoying.
During the beta test of LOTRO, it was revealed that at least one, or more, Turbine employees were a part of the dominant guild, Extra Crispy (EC). They censored dissent and criticism towards the game, and demonstrated strong favouratism for some players.
Is Turbine going to enforce rules for Turbine employee participation to avoid issues like censorship and favouratism, and to avoid other potential scandals?
I would suggest, in addition to watching the Earth for climate change, that we also watch other planets. I've read recently that some research points to part of the climate change problem being the sun itself. Why don't we send weather monitoring stations to Mars as well, and see if the temperature is rising on other planets?
If we're going to monitor our own planet, we should have some objective evidence from other planets as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Cable companies are increasing prices to maintain revenue growth, not to counter cord-cutting (the title is illogical), and they can do it because TV is mostly price inelastic. Consider the markets Cable companies are in:
TV - Mature, saturated, declining
Landline Internet - Mature, saturated (as far as they are concerned), declining slightly (and possibly declining significantly if 5G can provide 20-100 Mbps fixed Internet for good prices)
Landline Phone - Mature, saturated, declining
Mobile Phone - Mature, mostly saturated
No real competition; in some cases single companies have monopolies over local territory like counties; elsewhere there's a choice of just 2 companies, so an oligopoly situation where 2 choices have 100% of the market.
All those declining markets means one thing: cable companies have a hard time keeping revenue positive and keeping shareholders happy. Their solution? Increase prices on their services; in Canada in particular, they increase the price of TV and Internet every single year. They have wireless "sub brands" that charge $45 for a plan that the "premium brand" service charges $85/mo for. In short: the cable companies want to keep increasing revenue and 2% per quarter isn't good enough, so they are gouging people who won't abandon these services, and they have so little competition they can get away with it. If people want to solve this issue, I recommend making the jump to competitive services, such as online streaming, smaller Internet providers, and also writing to their elected representatives. Big Cable and Phone has a stranglehold on communication services and is doing everything to keep them priced at ridiculously high levels relative to many other markets (Europe being a perfect example). We get much less value from these companies than we should be. And without government intervention and active, vocal consumers the price of cable will continue to rise.
Magnetic disk performance resulted in companies investing in Flash and other technologies. The oil crisis resulted in companies investing in engine efficiency. Broken iPhones and expensive iPhones results in more people finding 3rd party repair options. Adversity and scarcity breeds innovation. We'll see a lot of money pour back into the pure science of understanding AI, and also we're seeing companies like Google and AMD invest in chip design that is tailored to AI. "AI-SICs", so to speak. I look forward to the solutions people invent to address the world's problems!
I was thinking about this yesterday. The phone has become so ubiquitous that almost nobody thinks of their phone's model name / number. It takes me a moment to recall the specific generation / variant I own because it is so constantly referred to as just "iPhone" or "my iPhone". For any phone. The real factor remains "Android" or "iPhone", most details after that are secondary to 99% of the conversations I have about smartphones.
Perhaps the names are getting so specific because the differentiation between phone generations is now so iterative that companies feel pressure to market those differences increasingly through the brand. Maybe now, if a company comes out with a truly different phone, they should break from brand category names like "Galaxy" or "iPhone" entirely. It's about time for a shakeup. Folding OLED display flip phone?
They reported that "full stack" development today is a term that is tied to the in-house server environment, and that in today's cloud environment, the extent to which the cloud manages itself means that programming for the "full stack" isn't nearly as difficult as it is for the on-premise computing and storage environment.
I'm pretty sure I also saw the Tobacco industry release a self-generated research study indicating that people would get less cancer by smoking, too.
If the source is financially interested in the outcome... don't believe the hype.
Yeah, and as a telecom employee I've thought this is the much better way forward. Spectrum sales create walled gardens. With one national network, each tower has access to full spectrum for maximum bandwidth, fewer towers are needed so the infrastructure spend is dramatically less, and the government can set a price and allow anybody in.
The alternative is good, too: Instead of spectrum sales, each carrier builds out a portion of the network, and has to contribute a minimum contribution like, say, $6 billion USD in infrastructure, and in return they get access to the whole network and customers everywhere. For that price they get access to the network and X number of customers. Then have a tiered pricing structure where, for each additional tower they add to the network, they get access to Y additional customers. If the figures are set carefully, this incentivizes both growing carriers, and large carriers spend more. The result? An even larger network, with more coverage in suburban and rural areas. And potentially new carriers and competition to drive prices lower.
Now... take this idea and apply it to a national fiber-Internet network, too. Private networks create uneven playing fields and require higher prices because each competitor has to over-build (where there's competition allowed of course). Incentivize carriers to be able to expand their customer base by reaching more and more people with their product, instead, and you'll see as close to 100% affordable broadband access as possible.
"Look honey, it's a nano bouquet of flowers."
"What is this, a joke?!"
Let's also remember to mention that:
A. These people were not committing crimes.
B. The cop most likely wouldn't have the foggiest idea what they were doing.
C. Police on the street aren't the ones that track down cyber criminals, that's handled by other organizations.
The Goatse virus for bionic vision.
Gotta love the flight from City A to far-away City B comparisons. Except you need to be going Mach 3+ before Scramjets get past minimal stall speed, and the only way to get to Mach 3 right now is with a rocket-assisted takeoff. The neighbors around airports are going to love that, I'm sure.
I wonder if Scramjets would increase or decrease condensation trails, which are known to have a dimming and cooling effect on everything below them. Decreasing would mean more sunlight hitting the ground, but also more heat, which would only heat up the Earth at ground level that much more. If it increases, it means more cooling, but also more dimming.
Interesting times.
It's nice to see Eclipse for the Mac, but Eclipse could learn a LOT about the user interface and experience from Mac apps. For example, plain ordinary "File Open" and "File Close" and "Import" features, workspaces be damned. Eclipse's current way of handling the opening and importing of source code is excessively difficult, and needs to be changed. The "workspaces" concept is idiotic when the file / folder system works just fine. Hell, BlueJ, another coding program, kicks the crap out of Eclipse in this specific regard and it's used to teach 1st year comp sci students!
Yes, just like the Microsoft Mac team, Eclipse devs could learn a lot from the Mac, I think this will be a good step for them.
All smartphones have a laundry list of missing features, so you're only making a moot point. What I mean is one step, one iteration forward. That doesn't imply major changes, and it certainly does not imply "adding all the missing features". And the claim isn't subjective, you need only look at all the "design concepts" coming out from Nokia and Intel that are emulating the iPod. They aren't making lateral moves, they're adding to the smartphone. That's a step forward.
As for what I'd like to see in the next iPhone:
- More storage capacity. Apple went with the "smartphone music" model for storage, where the marketing says "it plays music", but then the actual amount of storage is very low. Remember all those phones that claimed they could play music but you only had 50 MB of storage for that music? That's what I mean. 16GB isn't enough for one quarter of my iTunes library in ALAC lossless format.
- Longer battery life. An obvious issue, but I'm always unsatisfied with the talk time of most phones.
- I'm willing to bet that Apple is, once again, working with Google, but this time on a sweet GPS / Google Maps solution.
- At least two models. GPS is cool, but I have no need for it, so a regular iPhone would be great. Heck, in Canada, I'd even be content if the took out the EDGE radio. Data prices up here are so insanely high that I'd never even bother sending data by EDGE.
- I wonder if a black & white mode for the screen could save power?
- A standard file system and finder. The iPhone is a great smartphone and could also be a great mini-tablet or PDA in the next iteration, or two.
- A graphics chip and a triple axis motion sensor. The iPhone might have an early chance at being a portable gaming device, and the 3-axis sensor would allow developers to make the broad spectrum of games that appeal to all generations, just as the Wii does.
Jobs recently admitted this at the Jobs & Gates interview at D All Things Digital
I'd like to connect Second Life to my low-sec system in EVE. And greet the new folks visiting EVE from Second Life with a couple Gjallahorns
jabuzz is right. Not only did some people stay for that reason, but for many other reasons as well. Off topic, but check out this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM7DhNzSTM
In one neighborhood, at least three people in this video decided to stay.
And on the topic - it filters out everything down to 15nm, but nothing below that, so it still won't filter out elements like lead, etc.
Nicely put. I also think it may have to do with the appearances of the two people. Linus is always a clean cut polo-T guy. Richard looks like a hippy. While appearances can be deceiving, generally they aren't. I think there are marked differences between the two persons involved, and yes the egos.
And dare I say that commercial software is driven by the quest for profits, and that quest gives commercial developers a very firm focus on competing publicly, and that is why, even to this day, proprietary software tends to be much more feature-complete, though more buggy. It's the reason why you could be more productive, overall, in 2000 on a Windows or Mac PC than you could on an open source PC. I think this point is accurate and valid, and highlights one of the problems that free and open software, by and large, have always had - not enough focus on the desktop to deliver a complete suite of software to compete with Windows and OS X, and an easy installer that encourages people to switch.
I looked at the site and it looks quite professional, actually. It looks very good considering that it's a student effort. Now if they had $100,000 to hire a UI design consultant, a graphics expert, and some expert coders, I'm sure it could look and perform much better.
What EA needs to do is focus on quality, at least with one game - BF2142. I play the game daily and the client is so buggy and unstable that it is not commercial-grade software right now. It used to be stable; several updates ago it was great, but now it is so buggy that it's just ridiculous.
And yes, EA does make scads of boring games. The best thing for EA to do is split itself up into several companies, one the game development section, and another to be effectively an investment bank to fund games from companies that otherwise couldn't afford to see them through to release. You could probably make a third company out of EA's distribution group. You'd get three smaller, more agile companies, each highly specialized, each able to continue to cooperate, but with separate leadership and less upper management. The conglomerate format just isn't working.
The ISS won't last 50 years in space, let alone the hundreds of years that most of the old and new wonders have been around, and it has no culture or history, and it's life is subject to politics. That isn't a wonder, it's a taxpayer expense.
The new 7 wonders are about culture and history, not about technological accomplishment, though certainly there is also the labour element to a number of the new and old wonders.
All software anti-cheat systems are flawed because they include things other than cheating. I get kicked by Punkbuster for high ping on gaming servers.
The trouble with anti-cheat systems is that the developers have no ethical standard. They tolerate inconveniencing legitimate players to ensure that the cheaters are stopped as well. The law would see things differently. The law believes in letting some criminals go to ensure that it never punishes an innocent man. Flawed though it may be, it works far more often than it fails. Punkbuster is the complete opposite, and what's worse is that Punkbuster is full of bugs. I get kicked from servers several times a day and the only message I get is:
"Punkbuster
[Ok]"
All complaints to the company fall on deaf ears. And because EA chooses PB, I am stuck with a company granted an artifician monopoly by another company, and have no choice but to have a greatly diminished experience. Nothing is worse than screwing a gamer over in the heat of a competitive match, and that's what PB does too often.
I don't care whether they test the wings or not. I just don't ever want to have to get on a plane and see the wings bend any more than aluminium wings. If I look out the window and see the wings actually flapping and flexing under force any more than I'd usually expect, which is little flexing at all, I'm going to be violently sick from at least two orifices.
On Windows, Apple's APIs that make Quicktime so good are not native, they have to be installed along with everything else, so load times are longer because there is more to load, and there can be additional overhead as well.
But Quicktime is by far the best player, IMO. It's the best player to handle streaming, hands down. And I've never seen a Quicktime video with the audio and video out of sync, even very slightly, but I see it all the time on WMP, Real, and those Flash players. This is hugely annoying.
During the beta test of LOTRO, it was revealed that at least one, or more, Turbine employees were a part of the dominant guild, Extra Crispy (EC). They censored dissent and criticism towards the game, and demonstrated strong favouratism for some players.
Is Turbine going to enforce rules for Turbine employee participation to avoid issues like censorship and favouratism, and to avoid other potential scandals?
I would suggest, in addition to watching the Earth for climate change, that we also watch other planets. I've read recently that some research points to part of the climate change problem being the sun itself. Why don't we send weather monitoring stations to Mars as well, and see if the temperature is rising on other planets?
If we're going to monitor our own planet, we should have some objective evidence from other planets as well.