If the company is sound, this will be a short term drop follwed by a recovery. If you own shares, and think AAPL is sound without Jobs, then selling makes no sense. Instead, you should be buying the discounted shares in anticipation of a recovery, which is what strong companies do.
The problem with Apple, is that the stock price is sustained by hype. Hype for cool new products. Fortunately or unfortunately for Apple, the hype is mostly generated by Steve Jobs. If he goes, the price of the company is going to drop and it won't recover unless Apple can somehow reinstate the hype.
Aside from Jobs I suspect that the economic climate and the market oversaturation / stagnation of phones, computers, mp3 players isn't going to help the company any. Apple products have generally commanded a premium for their styling and their perceived quality over competitors, but the reality is that advantage has disappeared. Every market they compete in has many, many comparable alternatives and more often than not they are cheaper too. Even markets which are still opening up such as digital movies have many alternatives. Apple screwed up bigtime with the underpowered Apple TV and I doubt they will be able to recover sufficiently to dominate movies the way they enjoyed with music.
HTPCs are grotesquely over the top in terms of maintenance, usability, space, cost and power consumption for most people. I think if someone did produce a cheap, usable HTPC that they might have a hit on their hands.
Sounds like the judge is confused about cause and effect. Is it a game that cause the guy to become delusional, or was he susceptible to delusions in the first place?
Who knows what triggers a nut to commit a violent act but if someone is susceptible, it could be religion, a pop song, a glance from their neighbour, a movie star, a game, a character from a book. Are we to criticize all of those things on the offchance that some delusional person might hurt themselves or others?
That's not to say that games or whatever can get off without doing anything. I think all online games, at least on consoles should have controls that limit or at least advise how long someone should be able play them. For example it should be possible to restrict kids to a maximum amount of time of play per day. And adults should still be warned by popups how long they've played with occasional advice to take a break.
DivX isn't a codec. It is a brand which specifies audio, video codecs, container formats, resolutions, subtitles etc. for devices to implement. The component pieces of DivX are mostly international standards but most people think of it as just DivX. This does have one benefit to the consumer - a common specification that devices from different manufactures can implement and conform to. Anything with a DivX 7 logo should be able to play content encoded from any other compliant device or software. It's just too bad that it was left to a private company to do so that they can skim certification fees from devices, as well as inveigle their own DRM platform into the spec.
The industry should have sat down and hashed all this out and stuck a consumer friendly name on it. After all, H264, AAC and others are industry standards to start. It should not have required a huge amount of effort to say which profiles/levels of these codecs should be used to gain certification.
Just because MKV supports it doesn't mean DivX will. People assume that suddenly a DivX 7 device will play whatever crap they have lying around in MKV containers when that obviously won't be the case at all. The specification will have very specific requirements about what audio, video codecs it supports and what extra content such as subtitles it supports. Everything else will just be ignored. It may also put a cap on the maximum file size, or on the max bits per second - the sort of thing that hardware manufactures need to know to produce a compliant device. So if you threw some random file at it, it might work or then again it might not.
I think Obama mentioned that he wants to yank tax breaks away from companies that export jobs, and give breaks to companies that create jobs here in the U.S.
The thing is, that some countries such as Ireland provide more jobs in the US than the US provides to Ireland. It's all very well to draw jobs back, but its not so smart if end up in a negative situation, and risk pissing off the EU at the same time.
The 80GB unit without FULL backward compatibility still supports 80% of PS2 titles, and retains the memory card slots.
I own the EU PS3 which has software assisted BC and every game I own plays perfectly. To be sure in the 1.5/1.6x days there were a few glitchy titles (e.g. RE4 had some weird texture issues) but these days emulation is close to perfect as you would hope.
I say software assisted emulation because the EU PS3 emulates the Emotion Engine (CPU) but still contains the Graphics Synthesizer (GPU). Some people have suggested that this cannot be emulated in software but I do not agree. Of course it can even if emulation were slower than hardware. It would still enable a large number of games to run perfectly well, games that do not hit the physical limits of the hardware. And for the others, I am sure that the emulator could special case them based on how they hit the hardware.
Emulation on the 360 worked similarly, profiling games based on what APIs they hit and then optimizing the execution paths for those games.
So, what is the difference between this and silverlight? Both are a copy of flash that won't get any wide usage anytime soon and none of them run on linux...
I suppose the answer is JavaFX will eventually appear and be reasonably supported on Linux, whereas Silverlight never will. A half-assed Mono implementation doesn't count as supported either.
Still, Sun could help themselves here by stating specifically which platforms are supported. It's understandable if they go for the largest user base first, but other platforms are important too.
XSL wouldn't work on HTML because generally speaking it isn't well-formed. Not even a XHTML DTD ensures well-formedness because browsers are far too forgiving.
Anyway this patent is bullshit. If the iPhone were transforming the site in some meaningful way, it would be guaranteed to break any JavaScript in the page. That code calling document.getElementById("foo") would break when "foo" wasn't there or was rearranged. Safari might scale images or reflow the content, or ignore certain style rules but nothing that hasn't been done numerous times in space-confined browsers - Pocket IE, Opera, Netfront, Minimo, Lynx etc.
It really pisses me off that even supposedly "quality" newspapers like the Guardian just reprint some PR's press releases with marginal editing rather than doing even the most basic of reasarch or even, god forbid, any thinking.
The Grauniad should know better since Ben Goldacre is one of their columnists and constantly berating the press for swallowing some bullshit PR without the slightest background research or consideration of its points.
Netflix customers are customers of Netflix, not Sony. Netflix pays money to Sony for streaming its movies. The terms under which that arrangement is handled is defined in a contract. It is absolutely in Sony's own interest to include a clause that stops a major competitor (e.g. Microsoft) buying up exclusivity and getting to stream Sony's movies to a competing device and prohbits streaming to their own. Therefore it was smart and prescient for Sony to include the clause because Netflix has indeed accepted a large money hat from Microsoft. The situation would have been intolerable otherwise. Take solace from the fact that at some point contracts will be renegotiated and movies will probably turn up on the 360 at some point.
You say its not in their interests, but clearly it is or they wouldn't have added such conditions.
I'm sure it sucks a lot if you want to stream movies without any of this BS, but this should not be unexpected. Netflix knew full well what they were signing to and must have been aware of the repercussions if they later signed an exclusivity deal with Microsoft. I'm sure their deal MS has all kinds of clauses and restrictions if Netflix decided to allow Netflix on the PS3.
This kind of contractual bullshit and DRM is always going to affect streaming platforms, especially when one of the players tries to moneyhat exclusivity. It's more proof if any more were required that digital downloads have a long way to grow up, including adopting a common platform for DRM and format, before they're going to get more widespread adoption.
DRM is really bad, but I don't accept that Apple has only just embraced it. Apple championed DRM. They were the flag bearer for DRM. Everyone who has an iPod or bought content from iTMS is subject to DRM. The DRM in their video content is even more hideous. Maybe only now they've gotten their HDCP house in order, but DRM has always been there.
Say what you will of physical media and its attempts at copy protection, nothing even borders on the kind of shit that Apple, Microsoft, Amazon et al are flinging at their paying customers.
Realistically DRM is probably here to stay. But what would be nice is if the industry adopted a single common DRM and movie format that all services and all playback devices could support. At least then a movie bought on iTMS would play on a 360, or a movie bought on Amazon would play on a Zune etc. The current situation of countless providers with proprietary DRMs and formats and partnerships with studios is running the whole digital download industry into the ground. It's like a repeat of digital music and ebooks all over again. These companies are their own worst enemy.
If Sony movies are not being streamed to the 360, it's probably because there was a clause in the original contract agreed to and signed by both parties that prohibits it. I can't blame Sony if they added a clause saying forbidding streaming content to a competing device covered by some kind of exclusivity deal. If true, it's smart and prescient of Sony to have done it considering Netflix then went and signed such a deal with Microsoft.
The logo isn't source code, it's just a picture. A picture which happens to be a trademark. Mozilla's beef is with Debian or anybody else messing around with code or the settings and still trying to palm it off as Mozilla Firefox. People are still free to branch the code and call it anything they like, which is just what Debian has done. I really don't see what the issue is here. There are lots of registered trademarks in the open source movement - Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, FSF, Firefox, Java, Apache, Red Hat, Novell, Sun etc. etc. etc.
It's sad enough when anyone queues more than a few minutes for *any* consumer kit. But an expansion pack? Jesus Christ how sad is that?
I just hope the next time an expansion pack appears, that they make people queue at noon, not midnight. These people need as much sunshine as they can get.
They can't raise their own islands because they are atolls in the middle of the Pacific ocean. They're literally living on coral and sandstone. There are no shallow seas to dredge and short of cannibalizing some of their unihabited atolls they have *nothing* to raise their land with. And even if they could dredge (such as sending a flotilla of ships to pick up material from elsewhere), the fact is these islands are in deep waters so it would be extremely difficult to extend their land, or even raise it.
Which is why I suggested building another island. Negotiate with another government and buy a stretch of sea off and build an island. Or buy one. At least it would mean semi-autonomy. I expect most countries would much prefer that solution than integrating 300,000 extra people even if the Maldives government did buy up land.
I'm not saying build it by the Maldives. You would have to locate a relatively shallow sea which probably means an existing landmass nearby and some pretty intense negotiation with another country. Then you would build it the same way the UAE Palm islands were built - with enormous computer controlled dredgers which suck up the sea bottom from one place and then deposit it somewhere else and surround the whole thing with rock to act as a sea wall.
I think the difference is that the Netherlands has dry land on one size and the sea isn't especially deep either in reclaimed areas. It's feasible to ring fence off sea / river channels because you can dredge up sand from one place and deposit it in another to form a barrier. Once done you can flush the sea water out and you have land. I doubt this is the case in the Maldives. I don't know the sea around the islands but it would not surprise me if the depth becomes precipitous very rapidly. There would be nothing to dredge and no way to deposit it either before it washed away.
Short of a volcano erupting nearby or having 100 large ships sailing back and forth from India with gravel I doubt there is any way to extend or raise the island. Who knows - perhaps they could turn themselves into a modern Venice, living on stilts or pioneer a technique to construct super massive floating land extensions or similar, but I'm not sure I would be very comfortable to living there.
Sounds preposterous, but the UAE has already built several artificial islands of a size that could easily house the population of the Maldives. If the UAE can then surely the Maldives can too. The major issue of course is that any new island would have to be raised to anticipate sea level changes otherwise it would be as flat and vulnerable as the old one. I don't know the details of any plan to purchase land but it seems doubtful to me that it would ensure a place to live if the Maldives sunk under the waves. I doubt any country would want 300,000 additional people dumped on their doorstep short of a major humanitarian relief effort. And the Maldives isn't in that situation yet.
And they're both capitalist, its only a matter of degrees. I certainly see no reason to think McCain was the lesser of two evils after 8 years of one of the most disastrous presidencies on record. And apparently the US electorate don't think so either.
It makes me laugh when I hear terms like "socialist" bandied around in US politics. Even the most right wing government in Europe would be socialist by the criteria applied by members of the McCain camp. Every progressive modern government has elements of socialism just as they have elements of capitalism. One would expect nothing less. If the USA taxes rich people more than poor people than they are doing nothing out of the ordinary.
It certainly seems like a tad hypocritical for McCain to accuse Obama of being a socialist when that McCain recently signed up to one of the biggest financial bailouts ever. You can't blow hot and cold about government intervention when you feel like it if you're going start slinging mud at others.
TV remotes have been around for a long time, as have programmable remotes, as have remotes that cycle through different settings automatically, as have keychain remotes. In fact I own a keychain remote that cost me a massive one pound. I take it on holidays just in case the hotel remote is busted.
Maybe TV-B_Gone is not patented for its TV remote abilities, but as a fight provocation device. I can see some novelty in a device which increases the chances of the user being punched in the face.
Stouts contain roasted / heated malt barley which is what lends it its colour and flavour. Some stouts contain all sorts of peculiar ingredients including chocolate and oysters. A light beer is going to have less malt barley and possibly use other ingredients such as rice. The way the beer is pressurized may also differ. Since stout is slightly more viscous, the bubbles of a pressurized pint tend to be smaller and the drink is less gassy. So the only difference is not the colour. The entire flavour and texture is different.
That said... I live in Ireland and my preference would Murphys or even Beamish to Guinness. Good luck finding them though because Diageo (which makes Guinness) also has an unhealthy monopoly on Irish pubs. You probably won't find a competing brand outside of County Cork where Heineken (owner of Murphys and Beamish) has a toehold and mixes up the variety a bit.
Better yet, see if there is a local micro brewery (a few exist here and there) and sink back a few of theirs instead. Three decent bars that come to mind are the Porthouse and Messrs Macguires in Dublin and the Franciscan Well in Cork.
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The problem with Apple, is that the stock price is sustained by hype. Hype for cool new products. Fortunately or unfortunately for Apple, the hype is mostly generated by Steve Jobs. If he goes, the price of the company is going to drop and it won't recover unless Apple can somehow reinstate the hype.
Aside from Jobs I suspect that the economic climate and the market oversaturation / stagnation of phones, computers, mp3 players isn't going to help the company any. Apple products have generally commanded a premium for their styling and their perceived quality over competitors, but the reality is that advantage has disappeared. Every market they compete in has many, many comparable alternatives and more often than not they are cheaper too. Even markets which are still opening up such as digital movies have many alternatives. Apple screwed up bigtime with the underpowered Apple TV and I doubt they will be able to recover sufficiently to dominate movies the way they enjoyed with music.
HTPCs are grotesquely over the top in terms of maintenance, usability, space, cost and power consumption for most people. I think if someone did produce a cheap, usable HTPC that they might have a hit on their hands.
Who knows what triggers a nut to commit a violent act but if someone is susceptible, it could be religion, a pop song, a glance from their neighbour, a movie star, a game, a character from a book. Are we to criticize all of those things on the offchance that some delusional person might hurt themselves or others?
That's not to say that games or whatever can get off without doing anything. I think all online games, at least on consoles should have controls that limit or at least advise how long someone should be able play them. For example it should be possible to restrict kids to a maximum amount of time of play per day. And adults should still be warned by popups how long they've played with occasional advice to take a break.
DivX isn't a codec. It is a brand which specifies audio, video codecs, container formats, resolutions, subtitles etc. for devices to implement. The component pieces of DivX are mostly international standards but most people think of it as just DivX. This does have one benefit to the consumer - a common specification that devices from different manufactures can implement and conform to. Anything with a DivX 7 logo should be able to play content encoded from any other compliant device or software. It's just too bad that it was left to a private company to do so that they can skim certification fees from devices, as well as inveigle their own DRM platform into the spec. The industry should have sat down and hashed all this out and stuck a consumer friendly name on it. After all, H264, AAC and others are industry standards to start. It should not have required a huge amount of effort to say which profiles/levels of these codecs should be used to gain certification.
Just because MKV supports it doesn't mean DivX will. People assume that suddenly a DivX 7 device will play whatever crap they have lying around in MKV containers when that obviously won't be the case at all. The specification will have very specific requirements about what audio, video codecs it supports and what extra content such as subtitles it supports. Everything else will just be ignored. It may also put a cap on the maximum file size, or on the max bits per second - the sort of thing that hardware manufactures need to know to produce a compliant device. So if you threw some random file at it, it might work or then again it might not.
The thing is, that some countries such as Ireland provide more jobs in the US than the US provides to Ireland. It's all very well to draw jobs back, but its not so smart if end up in a negative situation, and risk pissing off the EU at the same time.
I own the EU PS3 which has software assisted BC and every game I own plays perfectly. To be sure in the 1.5/1.6x days there were a few glitchy titles (e.g. RE4 had some weird texture issues) but these days emulation is close to perfect as you would hope.
I say software assisted emulation because the EU PS3 emulates the Emotion Engine (CPU) but still contains the Graphics Synthesizer (GPU). Some people have suggested that this cannot be emulated in software but I do not agree. Of course it can even if emulation were slower than hardware. It would still enable a large number of games to run perfectly well, games that do not hit the physical limits of the hardware. And for the others, I am sure that the emulator could special case them based on how they hit the hardware.
Emulation on the 360 worked similarly, profiling games based on what APIs they hit and then optimizing the execution paths for those games.
I suppose the answer is JavaFX will eventually appear and be reasonably supported on Linux, whereas Silverlight never will. A half-assed Mono implementation doesn't count as supported either.
Still, Sun could help themselves here by stating specifically which platforms are supported. It's understandable if they go for the largest user base first, but other platforms are important too.
Anyway this patent is bullshit. If the iPhone were transforming the site in some meaningful way, it would be guaranteed to break any JavaScript in the page. That code calling document.getElementById("foo") would break when "foo" wasn't there or was rearranged. Safari might scale images or reflow the content, or ignore certain style rules but nothing that hasn't been done numerous times in space-confined browsers - Pocket IE, Opera, Netfront, Minimo, Lynx etc.
The Grauniad should know better since Ben Goldacre is one of their columnists and constantly berating the press for swallowing some bullshit PR without the slightest background research or consideration of its points.
Netflix customers are customers of Netflix, not Sony. Netflix pays money to Sony for streaming its movies. The terms under which that arrangement is handled is defined in a contract. It is absolutely in Sony's own interest to include a clause that stops a major competitor (e.g. Microsoft) buying up exclusivity and getting to stream Sony's movies to a competing device and prohbits streaming to their own. Therefore it was smart and prescient for Sony to include the clause because Netflix has indeed accepted a large money hat from Microsoft. The situation would have been intolerable otherwise. Take solace from the fact that at some point contracts will be renegotiated and movies will probably turn up on the 360 at some point.
I'm sure it sucks a lot if you want to stream movies without any of this BS, but this should not be unexpected. Netflix knew full well what they were signing to and must have been aware of the repercussions if they later signed an exclusivity deal with Microsoft. I'm sure their deal MS has all kinds of clauses and restrictions if Netflix decided to allow Netflix on the PS3.
This kind of contractual bullshit and DRM is always going to affect streaming platforms, especially when one of the players tries to moneyhat exclusivity. It's more proof if any more were required that digital downloads have a long way to grow up, including adopting a common platform for DRM and format, before they're going to get more widespread adoption.
Say what you will of physical media and its attempts at copy protection, nothing even borders on the kind of shit that Apple, Microsoft, Amazon et al are flinging at their paying customers.
Realistically DRM is probably here to stay. But what would be nice is if the industry adopted a single common DRM and movie format that all services and all playback devices could support. At least then a movie bought on iTMS would play on a 360, or a movie bought on Amazon would play on a Zune etc. The current situation of countless providers with proprietary DRMs and formats and partnerships with studios is running the whole digital download industry into the ground. It's like a repeat of digital music and ebooks all over again. These companies are their own worst enemy.
If Sony movies are not being streamed to the 360, it's probably because there was a clause in the original contract agreed to and signed by both parties that prohibits it. I can't blame Sony if they added a clause saying forbidding streaming content to a competing device covered by some kind of exclusivity deal. If true, it's smart and prescient of Sony to have done it considering Netflix then went and signed such a deal with Microsoft.
The logo isn't source code, it's just a picture. A picture which happens to be a trademark. Mozilla's beef is with Debian or anybody else messing around with code or the settings and still trying to palm it off as Mozilla Firefox. People are still free to branch the code and call it anything they like, which is just what Debian has done. I really don't see what the issue is here. There are lots of registered trademarks in the open source movement - Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, FSF, Firefox, Java, Apache, Red Hat, Novell, Sun etc. etc. etc.
All of the code is open source and tri-licenced. Do with it what you want.
I just hope the next time an expansion pack appears, that they make people queue at noon, not midnight. These people need as much sunshine as they can get.
They can't raise their own islands because they are atolls in the middle of the Pacific ocean. They're literally living on coral and sandstone. There are no shallow seas to dredge and short of cannibalizing some of their unihabited atolls they have *nothing* to raise their land with. And even if they could dredge (such as sending a flotilla of ships to pick up material from elsewhere), the fact is these islands are in deep waters so it would be extremely difficult to extend their land, or even raise it. Which is why I suggested building another island. Negotiate with another government and buy a stretch of sea off and build an island. Or buy one. At least it would mean semi-autonomy. I expect most countries would much prefer that solution than integrating 300,000 extra people even if the Maldives government did buy up land.
I'm not saying build it by the Maldives. You would have to locate a relatively shallow sea which probably means an existing landmass nearby and some pretty intense negotiation with another country. Then you would build it the same way the UAE Palm islands were built - with enormous computer controlled dredgers which suck up the sea bottom from one place and then deposit it somewhere else and surround the whole thing with rock to act as a sea wall.
Short of a volcano erupting nearby or having 100 large ships sailing back and forth from India with gravel I doubt there is any way to extend or raise the island. Who knows - perhaps they could turn themselves into a modern Venice, living on stilts or pioneer a technique to construct super massive floating land extensions or similar, but I'm not sure I would be very comfortable to living there.
Sounds preposterous, but the UAE has already built several artificial islands of a size that could easily house the population of the Maldives. If the UAE can then surely the Maldives can too. The major issue of course is that any new island would have to be raised to anticipate sea level changes otherwise it would be as flat and vulnerable as the old one. I don't know the details of any plan to purchase land but it seems doubtful to me that it would ensure a place to live if the Maldives sunk under the waves. I doubt any country would want 300,000 additional people dumped on their doorstep short of a major humanitarian relief effort. And the Maldives isn't in that situation yet.
And they're both capitalist, its only a matter of degrees. I certainly see no reason to think McCain was the lesser of two evils after 8 years of one of the most disastrous presidencies on record. And apparently the US electorate don't think so either.
It certainly seems like a tad hypocritical for McCain to accuse Obama of being a socialist when that McCain recently signed up to one of the biggest financial bailouts ever. You can't blow hot and cold about government intervention when you feel like it if you're going start slinging mud at others.
Maybe TV-B_Gone is not patented for its TV remote abilities, but as a fight provocation device. I can see some novelty in a device which increases the chances of the user being punched in the face.
That said... I live in Ireland and my preference would Murphys or even Beamish to Guinness. Good luck finding them though because Diageo (which makes Guinness) also has an unhealthy monopoly on Irish pubs. You probably won't find a competing brand outside of County Cork where Heineken (owner of Murphys and Beamish) has a toehold and mixes up the variety a bit.
Better yet, see if there is a local micro brewery (a few exist here and there) and sink back a few of theirs instead. Three decent bars that come to mind are the Porthouse and Messrs Macguires in Dublin and the Franciscan Well in Cork.