Exactly, while Microsoft can't move to quickly because of all the "legacy" computers (I know people still running Pentium III computers and Windows 98 as their primary computer) that need to still have a bit of "support" left for them. On the other hand Apple has managed to switch their computers from 68k to PowerPC and now on to Intel CPUs, MS can't make huge moves like that. Apple is a much smaller company with a much more dedicated fanbase, very few users of MS products would really call themselves MS "fans" they just use what is A) Cheap B) Requires no new learning and C) Commonplace. If Apple dropped the price of Macs down to standard PC prices ($400 for a desktop, $500 for a laptop) and somehow magically found a way to perfect WINE on OS X and make it seamless, you can bet that MS marketshare would dwindle (now of course this might kill Apple's business, but a lot of people would buy and use Macs).
There are many reasons to upgrade to Snow Leopard, for example a major one for some people will be Exchange support, and another one will be a performance tweak. For example, even though very little is different from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04, 9.04 sped up the boot process a lot and as such starts about 45 seconds faster for me on a normal HDD. Snow Leopard is expected to clean up the code and make it be in general faster.
However the main reason will be the new APIs that will eventually require everyone to upgrade to Snow Leopard, but even before the new APIs get used much, its still a worthwhile upgrade.
Definition of: Net neutrality
(NETwork neutrality) A level playing field for Internet transport. It refers to the absence of restrictions or priorities placed on the type of content carried over the Internet by the carriers and ISPs that run the major backbones. It states that all traffic be treated equally; that packets are delivered on a first-come, first-served basis regardless from where they originated or to where they are destined.
From http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=Net+neutrality&i=55962,00.asp (yes, I know I probably could have found a better site, but didn't feel like Wikipedia would have enough credibility for this AC). This violates net neutrality because HTTP is being favored over FTP, P2P, and a whole host of other protocols.
However, if you read the title you will find that this is about Europe, Argentina is not in Europe. Argentina is in South America which isn't in even in the same hemisphere as Europe.
Re:and if these companies made profit?
on
NASA May Outsource
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· Score: 1, Insightful
No, NASA is basically a PR agency. Yes, some things are good for science, but look at all the risky human missions, the ISS which had a few good experiments but is basically a black hole for funds, the joint USSR/USA missions which were purely political, etc. Along with the usual political crap of keeping overpaid, useless people in order to tell congress that they created new jobs and they should get more money. Private businesses are more apt to do things that always -work- to get a profit, as in, not make the waste which was the Space Shuttle which aside from being a death trap, really couldn't do that much beyond taking satellites up and docking with space stations and spending more on that rather than with the cheaper and safer capsules.
I think the current status quo is best, only outsource if something better already exists.
If you look at private space industries, from having to learn just about -everything- from scratch, with a limited budget (back in the "space race" congress would give anything for space flight) with limited knowledge (NASA inherited all the missile documentation that the DoD had, something that even today a private company can't get) and having to make a profit. NASA doesn't really do that much anymore, its become a PR agency and nothing more. Private companies are much more apt to get things done reliably.
Lack of government healthcare != able to get help. It simply means that things are more expensive for those without healthcare in the short term if they need it. In general there are a lot of "reactionary" people here in the US who will go to the doctor for -anything-, heck, wasn't it just a few years ago where because of the prevalence of people going to the doctors for every little thing was going to create more drug resistant illnesses? In general, if it makes someone sick with obvious symptoms, they are going to get help here in the US. Its just the common reaction, not sure about in other countries (the US is the only country I've lived in for an extended period of time, though I have traveled to many different countries) but in the USA, a lot of people go to the doctor or even the emergency room for every thing.
Do you get paid per click or per impression? Due to ads screwing up in the '90s and early 2000s most people won't click on ads, no matter how nice you think they are, most people won't click on ads. Myself the only adblocking that I do is I block a few webservers in my/etc/hosts file, but I don't click on ads, I would imagine that there are a lot of other people with the same feelings. Plus there are a lot of others who have crappy connections or reading on a mobile device so ads are annoying because they take a long time to load.
But H.G. Wells died many, many, many, years ago. Few people remember when the Time Machine was released, and it wasn't a series. Not much is really elaborated in the Time Machine, it really only gives you a taste of the world, not the whole thing, on the other hand the Hitchhiker's Guide Book series is a series, elaborated and the author only recently died.
WoW survives for 2 reasons, one is the same reason as social networking, you have some friends on WoW who might only play WoW, so to move to a different game would mean losing them, and the other is time, there are people who have devoted nearly years of their life to WoW, even with a better MMO people will still play WoW because they are the top level, have good weapons, etc. they don't want to go back to level 1 and no items even if the game is more fun.
Why Eoin Colfer? All of his books have been, meh. And what is with the general trend of taking classic, decent works and making crappy sequels? Its most evident in Hollywood (Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, all the half-hearted Disney made-for-DVD sequels of major works, etc), but now even books are?
The problem is NASA has a ton of data that is of course funded by -our- tax dollars but is locked away, lost (remember the moon tapes?), forgotten, or otherwise not allowed for everyone to see. Because of this either A) All info NASA has researched should be released to all US citizens (unlikely due to the similarities between ICBMs and spacecraft, though philosophically ideal) B) NASA releases most of its information to US contractors (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Virgin US, etc) to get commercial spacecraft off the ground than fades in the background or C) NASA continues to do its thing and private companies continue to do their thing.
Commercial space travel has made great strides in recent year but ends up having to deal with all the problems that plagued even government spaceflight, only with a lot less funding and must be a lot more safe than government spaceflight because they have to make a profit and people are more apt to sue.
So how do you upgrade this? I would assume you would add more modules but that would increase the space of the computer and so tiny computers would be underpowered while you could get one the size of a large TV that would be lightning fast, but who wants a huge computer? Especially for a laptop or HTPC.
I only run an anti-virus once every six months or so... I still have never gotten a virus.
-you- might have not gotten a virus, but I'm sure I'm safe to say that you know a heck of a lot more about computers than the average employee using a computer. Most of them just need a "click here and run the program to see a cute kitten" and they will install a trojan willingly.
Also, it's bad practice to update 'just because'. Period. 80% of outages come from a Change and much of it is unnecessary. Not saying you shouldn't apply important updates, but you shouldn't apply EVERYTHING just for the sake of it. (As a side note, people who brag about high uptime is equally retarded for the opposite reason... they're usually the one missing the important updates)
Sure, but a lot of them I would say were missing the "important updates", I mean, seriously, who still has XP Service Pack 1 installed... in 2008? Apparently the tech guys in one of my jobs I was at for a while.
Yes, there are a lot of people still on MSN, and AIM, especially if they aren't that great with computers. A lot of them have Facebook, but Facebook chat is quite buggy and seems to fail on low-bandwith connections (and recently has forced me to spoof my user agents in order to use Facebook chat with alphas of Firefox....).
Pidgin is actually pretty good in the amount of things it supports, I have some friends on AIM, MSN, and others on various others. It helps centralize things.
Similarly, a powerful company could send private enforcers to handle their copyright matters, without the need to go through the government. It's more difficult than guarding a physical item in your possession, but by no means impossible.
How? Lets see here, I torrent a file, the most they can see is my IP address, unless the company owns your ISP, they have to rely on a third party to provide that information, and without government intervention the most they could do would be physical harm, if they kept doing that people would revolt and literally destroy the company.
Seriously? You think you're safer by having it off 16 hours a day? Moreover, your tech people think that it's acceptable to have an environment where the security precaution is to turn off your computer when you're not using it?
You would be surprised of how often tech "pros" do something stupid. I've had some people not update Windows because it might "mess something up" then others still have IE 6 because some outdated intranet program needs it, other times they have had non-updated anti-virus, run everything as admin, and a whole lot of other random bad ideas.
Physical property though has 2 things that make it sane, for one is natural scarcity, that is if I want a house it costs money and a lot of money even if you take no profit off of it. On the other hand, for just about nothing you can make 100 digital copies of a CD, each exactly the same as the original without the original being destroyed. And another thing is that physical property is able to be secured. If I have a gold coin I can hide it, I can put it in my pocket, I can put it in a vault. On the other hand, intellectual property is akin to showing someone a gold coin and then telling them not to remember it, it is illogical.
And if you look at places with little to no government intervention you will see capitalism. For example, Somalia has a strong free-market economy that surpasses many other economies in Africa ( http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=25433&Cr=Somalia&Cr1= ). Similarly, in most tribal lands you will see, once again, capitalism. Capitalism is the basic human economy, while some are mixed with religion and other things giving some people more wealth based on reverence for them, you will see capitalism in most economies, even ones with little to no recognizable government.
there is not any technical reason for limiting a game to a particular console
There are a lot of reasons. for one differences of controllers, there are a lot of games that work great for the Wii but doesn't work for most other consoles. The PS3 is going to be better at doing HD, and the 360 has Xbox Live.
Copyright is not capitalist. Intellectual property is not property in true capitalism. Government-free capitalism would make patents, copyright, and all forms of intellectual "property" obsolete.
You are a total fool if you think that true capitalism, especially true government-free capitalism would even have copyright.
...Except for the fact that usually the best games from a system comes from the first party because they designed the system and know how to program it. Just look at all the crap for the Wii most of it doesn't work, but most Nintendo games are the few gems (Brawl, Galaxy, etc). The same thing happened with the launch of the DS but that has settled down to where third parties make decent games. The Cell isn't exactly easy to program and optimize for, so I would imagine that Sony games would push the hardware to its limits. Just look at older consoles, the most impressive SNES games were made by Nintendo and some of the most impressive Genesis games came from Sega.
Its more instinctive. Its pretty easy to figure out how to move and shoot in a PC game, but how about ducking? Throwing grenades? Using items? All those things are much less instinctive and things are closer. For example, you can still move and move your gun around while selecting grenades or reloading and you don't have to take your fingers off the keys. Along with how its easier to figure out where buttons are on controllers than on a keyboard, even with a good knowledge of touch typing, there is nothing distinguishing about WASD, while you can fix that sometimes by mapping things to ESDF (most keyboards have a raised bump on F and J) so its easier to find.
I pay no more than $30 for any of my 360 games, and on average I pay about $15. Even if I pay twice as much of the value of the game on DLC, I end up with about $60 which is the price of an average PC game. So the games are just as cheap if not cheaper than the PC counterparts.
Its times like these where the landowners and cities that own ground where Comcast's wires are going through should have leased the land and forced them to pay more or upgrade the infrastructure to keep up with the times to keep using it. With the pathetic condition of Comcast's network, they should use the money to make their network halfway reliable.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, while Microsoft can't move to quickly because of all the "legacy" computers (I know people still running Pentium III computers and Windows 98 as their primary computer) that need to still have a bit of "support" left for them. On the other hand Apple has managed to switch their computers from 68k to PowerPC and now on to Intel CPUs, MS can't make huge moves like that. Apple is a much smaller company with a much more dedicated fanbase, very few users of MS products would really call themselves MS "fans" they just use what is A) Cheap B) Requires no new learning and C) Commonplace. If Apple dropped the price of Macs down to standard PC prices ($400 for a desktop, $500 for a laptop) and somehow magically found a way to perfect WINE on OS X and make it seamless, you can bet that MS marketshare would dwindle (now of course this might kill Apple's business, but a lot of people would buy and use Macs).
There are many reasons to upgrade to Snow Leopard, for example a major one for some people will be Exchange support, and another one will be a performance tweak. For example, even though very little is different from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04, 9.04 sped up the boot process a lot and as such starts about 45 seconds faster for me on a normal HDD. Snow Leopard is expected to clean up the code and make it be in general faster.
However the main reason will be the new APIs that will eventually require everyone to upgrade to Snow Leopard, but even before the new APIs get used much, its still a worthwhile upgrade.
Definition of: Net neutrality (NETwork neutrality) A level playing field for Internet transport. It refers to the absence of restrictions or priorities placed on the type of content carried over the Internet by the carriers and ISPs that run the major backbones. It states that all traffic be treated equally; that packets are delivered on a first-come, first-served basis regardless from where they originated or to where they are destined.
From http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=Net+neutrality&i=55962,00.asp (yes, I know I probably could have found a better site, but didn't feel like Wikipedia would have enough credibility for this AC). This violates net neutrality because HTTP is being favored over FTP, P2P, and a whole host of other protocols.
However, if you read the title you will find that this is about Europe, Argentina is not in Europe. Argentina is in South America which isn't in even in the same hemisphere as Europe.
I think the current status quo is best, only outsource if something better already exists.
If you look at private space industries, from having to learn just about -everything- from scratch, with a limited budget (back in the "space race" congress would give anything for space flight) with limited knowledge (NASA inherited all the missile documentation that the DoD had, something that even today a private company can't get) and having to make a profit. NASA doesn't really do that much anymore, its become a PR agency and nothing more. Private companies are much more apt to get things done reliably.
Lack of government healthcare != able to get help. It simply means that things are more expensive for those without healthcare in the short term if they need it. In general there are a lot of "reactionary" people here in the US who will go to the doctor for -anything-, heck, wasn't it just a few years ago where because of the prevalence of people going to the doctors for every little thing was going to create more drug resistant illnesses? In general, if it makes someone sick with obvious symptoms, they are going to get help here in the US. Its just the common reaction, not sure about in other countries (the US is the only country I've lived in for an extended period of time, though I have traveled to many different countries) but in the USA, a lot of people go to the doctor or even the emergency room for every thing.
Do you get paid per click or per impression? Due to ads screwing up in the '90s and early 2000s most people won't click on ads, no matter how nice you think they are, most people won't click on ads. Myself the only adblocking that I do is I block a few webservers in my /etc/hosts file, but I don't click on ads, I would imagine that there are a lot of other people with the same feelings. Plus there are a lot of others who have crappy connections or reading on a mobile device so ads are annoying because they take a long time to load.
But H.G. Wells died many, many, many, years ago. Few people remember when the Time Machine was released, and it wasn't a series. Not much is really elaborated in the Time Machine, it really only gives you a taste of the world, not the whole thing, on the other hand the Hitchhiker's Guide Book series is a series, elaborated and the author only recently died.
WoW survives for 2 reasons, one is the same reason as social networking, you have some friends on WoW who might only play WoW, so to move to a different game would mean losing them, and the other is time, there are people who have devoted nearly years of their life to WoW, even with a better MMO people will still play WoW because they are the top level, have good weapons, etc. they don't want to go back to level 1 and no items even if the game is more fun.
Why Eoin Colfer? All of his books have been, meh. And what is with the general trend of taking classic, decent works and making crappy sequels? Its most evident in Hollywood (Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, all the half-hearted Disney made-for-DVD sequels of major works, etc), but now even books are?
The problem is NASA has a ton of data that is of course funded by -our- tax dollars but is locked away, lost (remember the moon tapes?), forgotten, or otherwise not allowed for everyone to see. Because of this either A) All info NASA has researched should be released to all US citizens (unlikely due to the similarities between ICBMs and spacecraft, though philosophically ideal) B) NASA releases most of its information to US contractors (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Virgin US, etc) to get commercial spacecraft off the ground than fades in the background or C) NASA continues to do its thing and private companies continue to do their thing.
Commercial space travel has made great strides in recent year but ends up having to deal with all the problems that plagued even government spaceflight, only with a lot less funding and must be a lot more safe than government spaceflight because they have to make a profit and people are more apt to sue.
So how do you upgrade this? I would assume you would add more modules but that would increase the space of the computer and so tiny computers would be underpowered while you could get one the size of a large TV that would be lightning fast, but who wants a huge computer? Especially for a laptop or HTPC.
I only run an anti-virus once every six months or so... I still have never gotten a virus.
-you- might have not gotten a virus, but I'm sure I'm safe to say that you know a heck of a lot more about computers than the average employee using a computer. Most of them just need a "click here and run the program to see a cute kitten" and they will install a trojan willingly.
Also, it's bad practice to update 'just because'. Period. 80% of outages come from a Change and much of it is unnecessary. Not saying you shouldn't apply important updates, but you shouldn't apply EVERYTHING just for the sake of it. (As a side note, people who brag about high uptime is equally retarded for the opposite reason... they're usually the one missing the important updates)
Sure, but a lot of them I would say were missing the "important updates", I mean, seriously, who still has XP Service Pack 1 installed... in 2008? Apparently the tech guys in one of my jobs I was at for a while.
Yes, there are a lot of people still on MSN, and AIM, especially if they aren't that great with computers. A lot of them have Facebook, but Facebook chat is quite buggy and seems to fail on low-bandwith connections (and recently has forced me to spoof my user agents in order to use Facebook chat with alphas of Firefox....).
Skype?
Pidgin is actually pretty good in the amount of things it supports, I have some friends on AIM, MSN, and others on various others. It helps centralize things.
Similarly, a powerful company could send private enforcers to handle their copyright matters, without the need to go through the government. It's more difficult than guarding a physical item in your possession, but by no means impossible.
How? Lets see here, I torrent a file, the most they can see is my IP address, unless the company owns your ISP, they have to rely on a third party to provide that information, and without government intervention the most they could do would be physical harm, if they kept doing that people would revolt and literally destroy the company.
Seriously? You think you're safer by having it off 16 hours a day? Moreover, your tech people think that it's acceptable to have an environment where the security precaution is to turn off your computer when you're not using it?
You would be surprised of how often tech "pros" do something stupid. I've had some people not update Windows because it might "mess something up" then others still have IE 6 because some outdated intranet program needs it, other times they have had non-updated anti-virus, run everything as admin, and a whole lot of other random bad ideas.
Physical property though has 2 things that make it sane, for one is natural scarcity, that is if I want a house it costs money and a lot of money even if you take no profit off of it. On the other hand, for just about nothing you can make 100 digital copies of a CD, each exactly the same as the original without the original being destroyed. And another thing is that physical property is able to be secured. If I have a gold coin I can hide it, I can put it in my pocket, I can put it in a vault. On the other hand, intellectual property is akin to showing someone a gold coin and then telling them not to remember it, it is illogical.
And if you look at places with little to no government intervention you will see capitalism. For example, Somalia has a strong free-market economy that surpasses many other economies in Africa ( http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=25433&Cr=Somalia&Cr1= ). Similarly, in most tribal lands you will see, once again, capitalism. Capitalism is the basic human economy, while some are mixed with religion and other things giving some people more wealth based on reverence for them, you will see capitalism in most economies, even ones with little to no recognizable government.
So in other words you still have a computer running, just not your main computer.
there is not any technical reason for limiting a game to a particular console
There are a lot of reasons. for one differences of controllers, there are a lot of games that work great for the Wii but doesn't work for most other consoles. The PS3 is going to be better at doing HD, and the 360 has Xbox Live.
Big brother won, and he is a capitalist.
Copyright is not capitalist. Intellectual property is not property in true capitalism. Government-free capitalism would make patents, copyright, and all forms of intellectual "property" obsolete.
You are a total fool if you think that true capitalism, especially true government-free capitalism would even have copyright.
...Except for the fact that usually the best games from a system comes from the first party because they designed the system and know how to program it. Just look at all the crap for the Wii most of it doesn't work, but most Nintendo games are the few gems (Brawl, Galaxy, etc). The same thing happened with the launch of the DS but that has settled down to where third parties make decent games. The Cell isn't exactly easy to program and optimize for, so I would imagine that Sony games would push the hardware to its limits. Just look at older consoles, the most impressive SNES games were made by Nintendo and some of the most impressive Genesis games came from Sega.
Its more instinctive. Its pretty easy to figure out how to move and shoot in a PC game, but how about ducking? Throwing grenades? Using items? All those things are much less instinctive and things are closer. For example, you can still move and move your gun around while selecting grenades or reloading and you don't have to take your fingers off the keys. Along with how its easier to figure out where buttons are on controllers than on a keyboard, even with a good knowledge of touch typing, there is nothing distinguishing about WASD, while you can fix that sometimes by mapping things to ESDF (most keyboards have a raised bump on F and J) so its easier to find.
I pay no more than $30 for any of my 360 games, and on average I pay about $15. Even if I pay twice as much of the value of the game on DLC, I end up with about $60 which is the price of an average PC game. So the games are just as cheap if not cheaper than the PC counterparts.
Its times like these where the landowners and cities that own ground where Comcast's wires are going through should have leased the land and forced them to pay more or upgrade the infrastructure to keep up with the times to keep using it. With the pathetic condition of Comcast's network, they should use the money to make their network halfway reliable.