Google did pay for use of that photo. Your newspaper received valuable traffic to it's site from use of that photo. Nevermind that people actually pay Google money for users, as well as paying for users with valuable content.
It won't show up on your invoices. This was all authorised when your newspaper opted to publish this content to the web and allowed it be crawled by search engines including Google. People don't realise you agree to terms and conditions when you submit content to Google that allows them to copy your content for the purposes of providing search and directing traffic.
I don't think your post is flamebait, and others don't think so either, they modded it informative. It's important perspective and having copyrighted content copied and published massively without being asked first is bound to piss anyone off.
This is what was agreed to, however indirectly, when your content was put up on the web in view of the all seeing eye of Google:
11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.
11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.
11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this license shall permit Google to take these actions.
11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license.
I would completely agree that Google is highly invasive in hunting down content to index in it's search. But it's copying arguably ammounts to fair use depending on the interpretation, but otherwise but copyright is respected... vaguely... and paid for... indirectly.
"Nine out of the first ten websites which pop up on Googleâ(TM)s search engine are run by pirates who have downloaded Adeleâ(TM)s output and offer it online far more cheaply than official copyrighted sites and High Street retailers."
This isn't the only piece of fiction in this article but this is so damingly wrong I'm in disbelief that an editor of a newspaper could make such a error. Anyone can easily type in Adele into Google to reveal this piece of fiction. As evidence I offer: http://www.google.com/search?&q=adele
Non of the first top ten results I get are "pirated" even by the Dailymail's most loose definition of the term, most are official or 100% legit.
If they have the technology to cross interstellar space then one would assume staying hidden from us and not crashing would be trivial technological problems. Indeed we can already build aircraft invisible to radar, therefore any odd radar return cannot be a genuine UFO.
That said, it's unreasonable to assume an alien race doesn't have it's own problems with reckless individuals, criminals, stupidity and of course, adolesecents.
Bunch of adolescent ETs steal a beat up old jalopy without cloaking and go for a joy ride... one too many alien brews behind the flight controls and wham! Straight into a hillside in front of some frightened primates.
+1! Indeed the iPad is shackled to bloated iTunes installed on a laptop or desktop of some sort. Apple was clever to do this, and clever to dumb down it's gadget so it was itself a peripheral and not a replacement for the other computers it sells. They also were clever to make it big enough not to be a replacement for a iPod which one might find a 5-7" inch tablet capable of being - it could fit in a womans handbag and therefore become a portable music player or drive bluetooth headphones in another bag or backpack. iPad is big enough to make lugging it enough of a chore to not kill the iPod business. Apples decisions with it's tablet computer have been a factor.
Android tablets are actually a bad thing. Android does a much better job of being a standalone OS that can interface with everything and sync with the cloud. Android owners enjoy over the air syncing of apps they pick on market.android.com. It also doesn't ask you to hand over your credit card details before you can even download free app and you can even bypass the market and side-load any apps you want. Aside from it being a little tricky to get root access to your own device (ultimately Google doesn't stop you like Apple tries to) this is much more like old school OS freedom we enjoy with our Win/OSX/*nix machines. The result is it's more of a PC killer than a complimentary gadget. Then there's the Motorola Atrix which docks with a laptop like screen and keyboard to become a PC. Sony's Xperia Play is also going to take a swipe at portable gaming - I'd bet on Sony releasing their gaming focused tablet (the S1) this year. Ultimately it'll be Android taking a slice of the desktop market share, not Apple, which is going to lose it's glory in 3...2...1..
Linux has come along way, it's now stable mature reliable and available in a million flavours from some slick looking desktops through to supercomputers. It's a testament to the millions of people who've writen and re-writen it over and over and never run out of fun broken-by-design things to fix, through countless millions of labour hours over a couple of decades to produce an OS almost as good as what a proprietary outfit can do with merely a few orders of magnitude less labour in a few years.
(If Linux every worked properly I'd have nothing to do and would probably quit IT and take up mosaic tiling or producing hand-copied phone directories).
Now all it needs is some users.
Please ignore Kinect, because it would ruin Microsoft bashing. It's a rather inconvienient disruptive advancement and has gone on to break records for sales of any consumer electronics ever.
But we'll leave that out because it kind of implies that while we've all been distracted by shiny multitouch gadgets and cloud computing Microsofts just taken a huge leap a ahead of everyone else.
This will create cognative dissonance in the/. groupthink.
No one dare suggest Microsoft is losing the smartphone/tablet/desktop wars to Apple and Linux because they were busy slaughtering Nintendo and Sony.
Linux has crushed both Microsoft and Apple with the explosive growth: Android phones now have the crown of market share. Once some actual android running tablet hardware becomes available it'll crush the iPad too.
Desktop linux is now pretty slick, fast and reliable, with enough apps to mean you can live in it and not be without ability to do some tasks taken for granted on OSX/Win. So what happend? Why aren't we all just grabbing a live CD and never going back? Because it's too litttle to late, we needed that back in 2006, back then Ubuntu would take a minute and a half to boot and it was pure luck if all your hardware was supported. Might as well have installed Vista. If you could send a copy linux now back in time to 2006, it would slaughter anything around at the time.
Android is Linux done right. It's pretty good at all levels. Good design under the hood and it's now pretty slick on top too. Asside from the prettiness lately, it's been ahead of iOS in technology and features for a while, and has a pace of development thats mind boggling. It's a OS done right, it's easy to use and it actually does more than it's competitors. (better notification system, cloud integration, more of a standalone handheld computer: it isn't shackled to syncing to desktop software like iTunes).
Microsoft is listening though. WP7 was pretty good attempt. It was slick in a way iOS/android wasn't at the time.
Lets ignore Kinect, because that's truely groundbreaking and would spoil Microsoft bashing.
What is Google but a command line interface? Your browser url bar? Your start menu search box with integrated desktop search? Then there's something called the Web.
It seems CLI and GUI has been hybridized after a brief fad of flashy GUI (now isolated to gimmicky tablets). If you actually IT at the momment, rather than post on a website blog about the IT industry you'll find yourself working more and more with web interfaces. No CLI, no native GUI. It's just how it's all going to be done. (please take away some of the CLI and crappy native interfaces I have to deal with PLEASE!).
Ultimately 80x50 inline text sucks for representing any information. Since re-flowable HTML and the hyperlink it's as obsolete as dinosaur DNA. Ultimately you can sit down to a very powerful web app or the occasional well designed GUI and start getting shit done. You don't have to read the man page or all but read the source code to use it, which I might add, man pages still don't have examples. GUI you don't learn, you just use it. Ironically, most CLI work is done from a GUI.
Have worked with CLI for years, I cut my teeth on it way back, it still helps me out but I don't delude myself that CLI is somehow magical or is in some way a superior interface it's not. It's often epic usablility and discoverabiltiy fail and completely ignores advancements in human interface over decades). I don't need that doublethink in order to cope. Admit it, it sucks. But we use it at times and we get awesome shit done.
Yes but we all know deep down that tablets are indeed a fad. Except nobody wants to hear that. If you do try tell someone they yell "Nooo!", take a swing at you then scamper off to a corner and clutch their shiny glowing smartphone.
Laptops never killed PCs which are still going strong, Tablets will never kill laptops which aren't in any danger with the current crop of tablets.
I'm waiting for a tablet that uses 1.8" HDDs (kind used in ipod classic etc) - ie ~250gb *cheap* storage. Throw in a actual USB host and memory card reader and you have a hope in hell of something that can substitute an actual laptop and be productive.
As soon as Microsoft puts Kinect-like functionality in a phone or tablet, Android, iOS and others will have nothing to counter it..
WP7 was a great attempt and was very slick and new which briefly made iOS and Android look old news at the time. But it was too little too late into a saturated smartphone market.
Kinect sold ten million in a few months - outselling all ipods iphones and ipads and being extremely impressive for any new technology release. But we're all still so obsessed over shiny smartphones that we're ignoring Microsoft's meteoric sucess with Kinect and failing to talk about the obvious next move from MS. Kinect is, quite frankly, is a real revolutionary change in interfaces. Something which it owns and it's competitors don't. Multi-touch was more an evolutionary gimmick wrapped in masterful marketting hyperbole. It's cute, but touch screens have been around a long time and are stupendously overrated: ultimate your hands are in the way of the display.
This is all if Microsoft actually gets it's shit together of course, something it's competitors have been doing better the last 9-10 years. If it does, it suddenly makes Windows mobile getting more market share entirely plausible.
One things for sure, gaming on smartphones is underwhelming - Apple sure isn't doing it right. Microsoft has proven sucess with gaming.
Google is a honey pot for what was previously inaccessible to advertisers: Every detail and statistic about your personal online life. If your a gmail user, the content of your personal emails, if your a latitude user, exactly where you go and if you are a Google Voice user, all your private phone calls. All an awesome mine of data, thats now extending into the real world. So viewers aren't the product, it's the detail of your life that is highly desirable and invaluable to anyone who wants to get at your money and your attention.
While they can't exactly hand over the exact details of your life to whoever pays for it, they can pass on what they learn from it.
In this regard Facebook, Twitter, and Apple are castles also.
Prison is more apt than castle I would have thought. Then I corrected myself, Panopticon is more apt.
Is facebook really giving me new informational content (I'm not talking about the social networking aspect) that was not available before in another form on the internet? No. It's just walling off the information from me.
Actually it is new information that wasn't previously available on the internet. Facebook is like a reverse wikileaks, leaking private and personal information back to corporations and government. Not only do does it have a detailed map of your connections with friends and family but a total record of all your social interactions. Even better, you can spend even more time on facebook playing games etc. It's all recorded.
There are numerous alternative markets. If you want official then there's market.android.com, and it syncs over the air to your handset. With Android you are not restricted to any default apps, even the homescreen/launcher can be changed so can the market. Alternative markets have some nice innovative thinking on how to do an app store. To paraphrase the Apple spin: If you hit a wall in usability of Android then there's an app for for that
The internet doesn't heal itself. It's healed by on call engineers who get woken by a phone call at 3am. The automagical healing is human technical support performing heroic emergency fixes 24/7. I sure wish it could all just fix itself...
It's like all the black clothing in my house and white cat fur. I suspect no atmosphere would be necessary for the fur to find it's way over everything.
Don't under estimate the bandwidth of physically shipping something like a DVD-R, USB stick, or microSD card in or out of libya. You could traffic these items into and out of the war torn state of your choice. They could contain photos, video, messages etc. Gigabytes of content could sail past any borders. It may take a day or two to reach somewhere with unrestricted internet. But when your hauling dozens of gigabytes it still makes good bandwidth. It just doesn't leave a single point of failure like a large and obvious dish on top of a mountain.
We all know a mertic asston of pirated content moves in schools, offices and around the world this way, all anonymous and untraceable, it undoubtedly dwarfs p2p piracy.
In my mind this is far more practical that daisy chaining wok-fi to get bandwidth into the country which gives obvious targets with which to interfere. Something like a microSD card could be stiched into the clothing of a refugee.
So I'm partly serious when I say you could set up homing pigeon internet - strap microSD cards to their feet. Except of course, they would literally drop packets.
I reccently moved into a house with all incandescent bulbs after being a long time user of CFLs. I suddenly found I was replacing 1-2 bulbs per month, and had a suprisingly high power bill. I always used to complain about CFLs, but going back to being without them, I thought would be ok, was anything but.
I now have a number of LED bulbs in several places, which while 10x more expensive at first but these pay for themselves over CFLs in about one year, almost completely moisture restitant, no mercury and can be recycled as standard e-waste. We really really badly need good cheap LED/OLED lighting, one could imagine living in a home thats 10 or more years old where all the LED lights are the originals from when it was built.
SyFy doesn't even doFantasy very well. They failed to do a deal to rescue Legend Of The Seeker from ABC amongst other failings. TV has traditionally done a poor job of high fantasy despite being tremendous demand for a fantasy TV series (even one set in the Tolkien universe would be huge), with as precious few good examples of good fantasy as there is as proper Sci Fi.
A good fraction of problems on Windows servers can be solved by restarting a service, or 3rd party system app. Sometimes logging off/on the user account that a service runs under is as good as a reboot. I would say this is a universal rule not just for UNIX but for any contemporary OS server or otherwise. These days we actually have things to try before a reboot is necessary.
The iPad has the same screen real estate as a netbook and only weighs about 300 grams less. Battery life is similar. In pure practicality iPads are not worth the premium. While it's not too bad typing on a touchscreen, it's impossible to touch-type.
Looking around an Asus EEE capacitive multi-touch netbook seems to be priced the same as a iPad. So I don't see a focus on cost - Apple could really be pricing the iPad a lot lower and really making sure that competitors could not move in to the market. The Samsung Galaxy Tab hit one million sales in December 2010 - thats awesome for any single product and couldn't in principal be done if Apple was actually properly saturating the tablet market.
Ultimately the iPad is a nice accessory to a Apple PC (Intentional: Macs ARE PCs) or laptop.
Interestingly this is the killer app of forthcoming Android tablet - it is very much a real versatile standalone computer that has no requirement of some bloatware host software on a PC or laptop. It really is a logical step down from a netbook which is a logical step from laptop. This makes much more sense than an iPad which is more an accessory to a existing computer than a computing device in it's own right.
I would throw away my aging macbook in a heartbeat and get a iPad if I could just plug in a USB drive, media card reader, or digital camera.
That said Apple would have quietly introduced either better cloud support or external device hosting in order to compete, after realising their error.
Frankly Apple cannot compete because it is blind, in every new market it has entered it's been marginalised to a niche, because it failed to gauge what the market wants, faithfully catering to the cult of Mac and depending on new recruits to buy it's products.
I reccently logged into a Samsung Galaxy Tab with my Google account, it suddenly started syncing all my contacts and downloaded all my applications from the Android market automatically. Even my paid ones, I didn't have to buy something I already owned, again!
Apple is the only company I can think of that makes it's consumers pay twice for something!
This is the worst open source code I've ever looked at, it's a mess of spahetti code, full of kludge after kludge. There's no commenting and most of the code doesn't seem to do anything, there are functions that haven't been used in literally millions of years. Talk about bloat!
How this stuff compiles and runs I don't know, it's clearly NOT intellegent design!
Slashdot Mirror
It won't show up on your invoices. This was all authorised when your newspaper opted to publish this content to the web and allowed it be crawled by search engines including Google. People don't realise you agree to terms and conditions when you submit content to Google that allows them to copy your content for the purposes of providing search and directing traffic.
I don't think your post is flamebait, and others don't think so either, they modded it informative. It's important perspective and having copyrighted content copied and published massively without being asked first is bound to piss anyone off.
This is what was agreed to, however indirectly, when your content was put up on the web in view of the all seeing eye of Google:
11. Content license from you 11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services. 11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services. 11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this license shall permit Google to take these actions. 11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license.
I would completely agree that Google is highly invasive in hunting down content to index in it's search. But it's copying arguably ammounts to fair use depending on the interpretation, but otherwise but copyright is respected... vaguely... and paid for... indirectly.
"Nine out of the first ten websites which pop up on Googleâ(TM)s search engine are run by pirates who have downloaded Adeleâ(TM)s output and offer it online far more cheaply than official copyrighted sites and High Street retailers."
This isn't the only piece of fiction in this article but this is so damingly wrong I'm in disbelief that an editor of a newspaper could make such a error. Anyone can easily type in Adele into Google to reveal this piece of fiction. As evidence I offer: http://www.google.com/search?&q=adele
Non of the first top ten results I get are "pirated" even by the Dailymail's most loose definition of the term, most are official or 100% legit.
So I stopped reading and got on with my life.
If they have the technology to cross interstellar space then one would assume staying hidden from us and not crashing would be trivial technological problems. Indeed we can already build aircraft invisible to radar, therefore any odd radar return cannot be a genuine UFO.
... one too many alien brews behind the flight controls and wham! Straight into a hillside in front of some frightened primates.
That said, it's unreasonable to assume an alien race doesn't have it's own problems with reckless individuals, criminals, stupidity and of course, adolesecents.
Bunch of adolescent ETs steal a beat up old jalopy without cloaking and go for a joy ride
Memo does state the creatures were 3 foot tall.
+1! Indeed the iPad is shackled to bloated iTunes installed on a laptop or desktop of some sort. Apple was clever to do this, and clever to dumb down it's gadget so it was itself a peripheral and not a replacement for the other computers it sells. They also were clever to make it big enough not to be a replacement for a iPod which one might find a 5-7" inch tablet capable of being - it could fit in a womans handbag and therefore become a portable music player or drive bluetooth headphones in another bag or backpack. iPad is big enough to make lugging it enough of a chore to not kill the iPod business. Apples decisions with it's tablet computer have been a factor.
Android tablets are actually a bad thing. Android does a much better job of being a standalone OS that can interface with everything and sync with the cloud. Android owners enjoy over the air syncing of apps they pick on market.android.com. It also doesn't ask you to hand over your credit card details before you can even download free app and you can even bypass the market and side-load any apps you want. Aside from it being a little tricky to get root access to your own device (ultimately Google doesn't stop you like Apple tries to) this is much more like old school OS freedom we enjoy with our Win/OSX/*nix machines. The result is it's more of a PC killer than a complimentary gadget. Then there's the Motorola Atrix which docks with a laptop like screen and keyboard to become a PC. Sony's Xperia Play is also going to take a swipe at portable gaming - I'd bet on Sony releasing their gaming focused tablet (the S1) this year. Ultimately it'll be Android taking a slice of the desktop market share, not Apple, which is going to lose it's glory in 3...2...1..
Also reads as if your staff don't succeed with this they will be denied money. It's just not worded like that.
Is that mm/dd/yy or dd/mm/yy?
I wouldn't want to get my dates mixed up.
Huh? I thought 11/11/11 it was binary and I'd missed it by 1001 years and 11 months.
Linux has come along way, it's now stable mature reliable and available in a million flavours from some slick looking desktops through to supercomputers. It's a testament to the millions of people who've writen and re-writen it over and over and never run out of fun broken-by-design things to fix, through countless millions of labour hours over a couple of decades to produce an OS almost as good as what a proprietary outfit can do with merely a few orders of magnitude less labour in a few years.
(If Linux every worked properly I'd have nothing to do and would probably quit IT and take up mosaic tiling or producing hand-copied phone directories).
Now all it needs is some users.
Please ignore Kinect, because it would ruin Microsoft bashing. It's a rather inconvienient disruptive advancement and has gone on to break records for sales of any consumer electronics ever.
/. groupthink.
But we'll leave that out because it kind of implies that while we've all been distracted by shiny multitouch gadgets and cloud computing Microsofts just taken a huge leap a ahead of everyone else.
This will create cognative dissonance in the
No one dare suggest Microsoft is losing the smartphone/tablet/desktop wars to Apple and Linux because they were busy slaughtering Nintendo and Sony.
Linux has crushed both Microsoft and Apple with the explosive growth: Android phones now have the crown of market share. Once some actual android running tablet hardware becomes available it'll crush the iPad too.
Desktop linux is now pretty slick, fast and reliable, with enough apps to mean you can live in it and not be without ability to do some tasks taken for granted on OSX/Win. So what happend? Why aren't we all just grabbing a live CD and never going back? Because it's too litttle to late, we needed that back in 2006, back then Ubuntu would take a minute and a half to boot and it was pure luck if all your hardware was supported. Might as well have installed Vista. If you could send a copy linux now back in time to 2006, it would slaughter anything around at the time.
Android is Linux done right. It's pretty good at all levels. Good design under the hood and it's now pretty slick on top too. Asside from the prettiness lately, it's been ahead of iOS in technology and features for a while, and has a pace of development thats mind boggling. It's a OS done right, it's easy to use and it actually does more than it's competitors. (better notification system, cloud integration, more of a standalone handheld computer: it isn't shackled to syncing to desktop software like iTunes).
Microsoft is listening though. WP7 was pretty good attempt. It was slick in a way iOS/android wasn't at the time.
Lets ignore Kinect, because that's truely groundbreaking and would spoil Microsoft bashing.
What is Google but a command line interface? Your browser url bar? Your start menu search box with integrated desktop search? Then there's something called the Web.
It seems CLI and GUI has been hybridized after a brief fad of flashy GUI (now isolated to gimmicky tablets). If you actually IT at the momment, rather than post on a website blog about the IT industry you'll find yourself working more and more with web interfaces. No CLI, no native GUI. It's just how it's all going to be done. (please take away some of the CLI and crappy native interfaces I have to deal with PLEASE!).
Ultimately 80x50 inline text sucks for representing any information. Since re-flowable HTML and the hyperlink it's as obsolete as dinosaur DNA. Ultimately you can sit down to a very powerful web app or the occasional well designed GUI and start getting shit done. You don't have to read the man page or all but read the source code to use it, which I might add, man pages still don't have examples. GUI you don't learn, you just use it. Ironically, most CLI work is done from a GUI.
Have worked with CLI for years, I cut my teeth on it way back, it still helps me out but I don't delude myself that CLI is somehow magical or is in some way a superior interface it's not. It's often epic usablility and discoverabiltiy fail and completely ignores advancements in human interface over decades). I don't need that doublethink in order to cope. Admit it, it sucks. But we use it at times and we get awesome shit done.
Thats what matters.
Yes but we all know deep down that tablets are indeed a fad. Except nobody wants to hear that. If you do try tell someone they yell "Nooo!", take a swing at you then scamper off to a corner and clutch their shiny glowing smartphone.
Laptops never killed PCs which are still going strong, Tablets will never kill laptops which aren't in any danger with the current crop of tablets.
I'm waiting for a tablet that uses 1.8" HDDs (kind used in ipod classic etc) - ie ~250gb *cheap* storage. Throw in a actual USB host and memory card reader and you have a hope in hell of something that can substitute an actual laptop and be productive.
As soon as Microsoft puts Kinect-like functionality in a phone or tablet, Android, iOS and others will have nothing to counter it. .
WP7 was a great attempt and was very slick and new which briefly made iOS and Android look old news at the time. But it was too little too late into a saturated smartphone market.
Kinect sold ten million in a few months - outselling all ipods iphones and ipads and being extremely impressive for any new technology release. But we're all still so obsessed over shiny smartphones that we're ignoring Microsoft's meteoric sucess with Kinect and failing to talk about the obvious next move from MS. Kinect is, quite frankly, is a real revolutionary change in interfaces. Something which it owns and it's competitors don't. Multi-touch was more an evolutionary gimmick wrapped in masterful marketting hyperbole. It's cute, but touch screens have been around a long time and are stupendously overrated: ultimate your hands are in the way of the display.
This is all if Microsoft actually gets it's shit together of course, something it's competitors have been doing better the last 9-10 years. If it does, it suddenly makes Windows mobile getting more market share entirely plausible.
One things for sure, gaming on smartphones is underwhelming - Apple sure isn't doing it right. Microsoft has proven sucess with gaming.
(Grips his android phone a little tighter)
Google is a honey pot for what was previously inaccessible to advertisers: Every detail and statistic about your personal online life. If your a gmail user, the content of your personal emails, if your a latitude user, exactly where you go and if you are a Google Voice user, all your private phone calls. All an awesome mine of data, thats now extending into the real world. So viewers aren't the product, it's the detail of your life that is highly desirable and invaluable to anyone who wants to get at your money and your attention.
While they can't exactly hand over the exact details of your life to whoever pays for it, they can pass on what they learn from it.
In this regard Facebook, Twitter, and Apple are castles also.
Prison is more apt than castle I would have thought. Then I corrected myself, Panopticon is more apt.
'creating a really bad user experience.'
So far the android modding community (which is fucking awesome i might add) has done alot to improve that over stock.
Is facebook really giving me new informational content (I'm not talking about the social networking aspect) that was not available before in another form on the internet? No. It's just walling off the information from me.
Actually it is new information that wasn't previously available on the internet. Facebook is like a reverse wikileaks, leaking private and personal information back to corporations and government. Not only do does it have a detailed map of your connections with friends and family but a total record of all your social interactions. Even better, you can spend even more time on facebook playing games etc. It's all recorded.
There are numerous alternative markets. If you want official then there's market.android.com, and it syncs over the air to your handset. With Android you are not restricted to any default apps, even the homescreen/launcher can be changed so can the market. Alternative markets have some nice innovative thinking on how to do an app store. To paraphrase the Apple spin: If you hit a wall in usability of Android then there's an app for for that
Yes people don't understand nuclear power generation != nuclear weapons
The internet doesn't heal itself. It's healed by on call engineers who get woken by a phone call at 3am. The automagical healing is human technical support performing heroic emergency fixes 24/7. I sure wish it could all just fix itself ...
It's like all the black clothing in my house and white cat fur. I suspect no atmosphere would be necessary for the fur to find it's way over everything.
Don't under estimate the bandwidth of physically shipping something like a DVD-R, USB stick, or microSD card in or out of libya. You could traffic these items into and out of the war torn state of your choice. They could contain photos, video, messages etc. Gigabytes of content could sail past any borders. It may take a day or two to reach somewhere with unrestricted internet. But when your hauling dozens of gigabytes it still makes good bandwidth. It just doesn't leave a single point of failure like a large and obvious dish on top of a mountain.
We all know a mertic asston of pirated content moves in schools, offices and around the world this way, all anonymous and untraceable, it undoubtedly dwarfs p2p piracy.
In my mind this is far more practical that daisy chaining wok-fi to get bandwidth into the country which gives obvious targets with which to interfere. Something like a microSD card could be stiched into the clothing of a refugee.
So I'm partly serious when I say you could set up homing pigeon internet - strap microSD cards to their feet. Except of course, they would literally drop packets.
I reccently moved into a house with all incandescent bulbs after being a long time user of CFLs. I suddenly found I was replacing 1-2 bulbs per month, and had a suprisingly high power bill. I always used to complain about CFLs, but going back to being without them, I thought would be ok, was anything but.
I now have a number of LED bulbs in several places, which while 10x more expensive at first but these pay for themselves over CFLs in about one year, almost completely moisture restitant, no mercury and can be recycled as standard e-waste. We really really badly need good cheap LED/OLED lighting, one could imagine living in a home thats 10 or more years old where all the LED lights are the originals from when it was built.
SyFy doesn't even doFantasy very well. They failed to do a deal to rescue Legend Of The Seeker from ABC amongst other failings. TV has traditionally done a poor job of high fantasy despite being tremendous demand for a fantasy TV series (even one set in the Tolkien universe would be huge), with as precious few good examples of good fantasy as there is as proper Sci Fi.
A good fraction of problems on Windows servers can be solved by restarting a service, or 3rd party system app. Sometimes logging off/on the user account that a service runs under is as good as a reboot. I would say this is a universal rule not just for UNIX but for any contemporary OS server or otherwise. These days we actually have things to try before a reboot is necessary.
The iPad has the same screen real estate as a netbook and only weighs about 300 grams less. Battery life is similar. In pure practicality iPads are not worth the premium. While it's not too bad typing on a touchscreen, it's impossible to touch-type.
Looking around an Asus EEE capacitive multi-touch netbook seems to be priced the same as a iPad. So I don't see a focus on cost - Apple could really be pricing the iPad a lot lower and really making sure that competitors could not move in to the market. The Samsung Galaxy Tab hit one million sales in December 2010 - thats awesome for any single product and couldn't in principal be done if Apple was actually properly saturating the tablet market.
Ultimately the iPad is a nice accessory to a Apple PC (Intentional: Macs ARE PCs) or laptop.
Interestingly this is the killer app of forthcoming Android tablet - it is very much a real versatile standalone computer that has no requirement of some bloatware host software on a PC or laptop. It really is a logical step down from a netbook which is a logical step from laptop. This makes much more sense than an iPad which is more an accessory to a existing computer than a computing device in it's own right.
I would throw away my aging macbook in a heartbeat and get a iPad if I could just plug in a USB drive, media card reader, or digital camera.
That said Apple would have quietly introduced either better cloud support or external device hosting in order to compete, after realising their error.
Frankly Apple cannot compete because it is blind, in every new market it has entered it's been marginalised to a niche, because it failed to gauge what the market wants, faithfully catering to the cult of Mac and depending on new recruits to buy it's products.
I reccently logged into a Samsung Galaxy Tab with my Google account, it suddenly started syncing all my contacts and downloaded all my applications from the Android market automatically. Even my paid ones, I didn't have to buy something I already owned, again!
Apple is the only company I can think of that makes it's consumers pay twice for something!
This is the worst open source code I've ever looked at, it's a mess of spahetti code, full of kludge after kludge. There's no commenting and most of the code doesn't seem to do anything, there are functions that haven't been used in literally millions of years. Talk about bloat!
How this stuff compiles and runs I don't know, it's clearly NOT intellegent design!