But how many iPad customers are buying the top end model?
You can spend that much on an iPad, but I'd expect the average sale price is supposed to be below the price of the 3G model, which would put it under $630. It was in one of their recent SEC filings, I think.
It's much easier to say "I want a $500 iPad", and "but I should probably get a 3G just incase.... and my music collection is already 12GB so..." than to start with "I want an $800 thing" when you can quickly go to "I can buy a real laptop or desktop for that".
The point of the tower is that since it will have the strongest signal, any nearby phones would connect to it. You'd have to put up a radio for each network type, but it would work.
So when your buddy goes and buys a disposable phone and sneaks it in to you... it still uses the monitored tower. No secret calls for you.
I'd imagine having a locked up population of thousands of people in one place all with nothing to do but make calls would be a recipe for disaster. There is no way they could monitor that volume of calls, or cut off individuals from having access as a form of punishment (since they could just borrow Joe's phone).
I thought that was pretty cool too. But he said it took 45 seconds or so to figure out if a ticket was a winner, and that was the big issue. But that was back in '03. Today, you could easily program a smartphone to recognize the pattern on the ticker and figure out for you if the ticket is a winner in a second or two, easily increasing the rate you could do this.
It would still be hard work and I'd imagine it would be very boring and tedious to do every day, but you could do it faster today.
They don't have to play Man-In-The-Middle. They can just make sure that HTTPS doesn't work (return error codes, drop packets, etc) such that it becomes unusable and people's only choice (if they want to keep accessing FB) is to use standard HTTP.
I agree on the PS3 and 360, but surely the margins on the Wii must be pretty good. No Blu-Ray, no hard drive, small processor. Instead of a price drop they just bundled in a game made by Nintendo.
I would expect that Nintendo could drop $50 or more off the price of the Wii and still make money on each unit sold. They haven't dropped the price in years.
Turning off DIMMs can be done. Some high end servers will let you add/remove RAM on the fly, it's basically the same thing except the RAM isn't physically going anywhere.
There are two problems you'd run into. First you'd have to move everything to the DIMMs that you're keeping on. This means that all the pointers would change, so you'd have to have a way to keep track of that. If you moved things and then moved them back when the power came 'back on', that may suffice.
The second is how much stuff is in memory in the first place. Programs keep tons of junk in memory as caches because it's faster than disk (and when not under memory pressure, it's 'free'). You'd have to notify programs (like iOS does) that there is a memory pressure situation and to dump stuff they can recreate so you could turn off more DIMMs. Of course, this means performance would be worse when you came back up because you'd have to recreate that data or load it back off disk. So basically it would feel like suspending to disk, only slightly faster.
This seems most useful if you had a ton of free memory. Right now my Mac has iTunes open, mail, and an RSS reader. It's not doing much, but because of all the data in cache to keep programs opening fast only about 1/6 to 1/8th of my 4GB of memory is totally unused.
I see them as cable box replacements, for when you don't watch much or the shows you want are easily available on services like Hulu (which they would have to let you access). The problem with Netflix is that most TV shows are months late (although I think they just inked a deal with someone to improve that).
I don't think this category of devices is there quite yet, it's a little ahead of the market at the moment.
That was exactly what I thought of when I first read this too. Read the lady's letter. Facebook automatically downloads pictures and updates and she plays a lot of Bejeweled. If FB is caching pictures for her and she has a lot of friends, I could see hitting 30-50MB in a day.
I think you're right that this is a billing system issue. It shows no data use while you were using your phone, and it shows a ton when you're not. It's just coalescing things so you don't have 1200 data charges per day of 2-10kb each.
You're got good points, but there are so many ads about price comparison it seems like there's a great chance American is just shooting themselves in the foot with this one. I haven't flown in years, and it wouldn't occur to me to go to an airline's site unless I knew they were the only ones who served the route or I had just heard about how incredible they were from someone I trusted.
I totally understand the quality argument. Midwest Express is supposed to be quite nice in the areas they fly. On the other hand, I remember flying on some airlines in the 90s that aren't around anymore that were just horrible.
If American thinks its quality is so much better, let them show it. Why not partner with Expedia to add "Air Experience" rating next to each price, where the ratings are based on passenger and secret shopper testing. That way you could see that American is charging $200 (with a 4 star rating) and Discount-O-Jet is charging $175 (with a 1.5 star rating) and make your choice. It would also give Expedia something to promote over the competition.
Of course, that would be a 'put up or shut up' move, and if American isn't as good as they want everyone to think they are, it could really backfire.
Side note: Remember travel agents? There used to be people, in offices, that you went to to book airplane tickets. Only they could see the prices. They used to be everywhere. In the past 15 years, it's a job that has completely disappeared. I get the feeling AA wants to go back to that world, where they could schmooze the agents to get more customers.
Yeah, that's my big problem. If he auto-responded with a copy of the terms and "By continuing to send me email you agree to them" that would be much better.
I like the idea of suing the people who's products are being advertised, but since so much spam is a fake scam, suing Apple because someone is offering a free iPod (or Pfizer because of "cheep V1agR4") doesn't seem like it would accomplish much. Actual cases where the companyis the advertiser are much more rare.
Like I said, I hate spam. I get hundreds of pieces a day, and I wasn't for CAN-SPAM (since it legitimized it). I think all email should be opt-in. But Dan's little agreement seems like you suing me if I sent you a letter from my business because I didn't take the time to go read a note posted on his door I didn't know about. It seems like trap, and a somewhat unfair one.
I just worry is method is too heavy handed. What if I send him a question (about something else, totally not business related) and he decides that the "I work for Joe Bob Web Services, ask us about our XMas Special" in my signature makes my message count as commercial solicitation and decides to sue me? He's a lawyer, that's all he does. Just to go to court (in California) to get it dismissed would cost me a fortune.
When I first heard of Dan, I was like a lot of people here. "Good for him, he's doing something to stop spam." The more I learned, the less sure I am that his little "EULA" is a good way to go about it.
I know a company that has had the fun of dealing with Dan. While I hate spammers as much as the next guy, Dan's little crusade seems less than legal to me. Having a valid opt-out isn't good enough. Here is what you agree to by sending him email (not that you would know it at the time):
All persons, businesses, and other entities that send any unsolicited commercial email to any email address containing “danbalsam.com” voluntarily enter a contract with Dan Balsam and agree to be bound by the terms of the contract and “No Spam Policy” as described herein.
Unless Dan Balsam or someone else with an email address including “danbalsam.com” has specifically opted in to receive commercial email from you, you understand and agree that neither Dan Balsam nor anyone else with an email address including “danbalsam.com” has ever requested any commercial communication from you, and that any commercial email you send that includes “danbalsam.com” in the To, Cc, or Bcc fields that fits these criteria is against the express wishes of the recipient(s).
As consideration for reading your unsolicited commercial email, you agree that any email you send which advertises or promotes any product, service, or Internet destination shall be subject to a $25,000.00 fee for reading and responding appropriately. The fee may be paid in advance at PayPal, or Dan Balsam will remit an invoice.
You accept responsibility for any affiliates or marketing agents who promote any product, service, or Internet destination on your behalf.
Concealing your identity increases the fee by $10,000.00 to compensate for the effort to track down the sender.
You may not sell, barter, or give away to any other party any email addresses containing the domain name “danbalsam.com.” Violation of this clause subjects you to liquidated damages of $10,000.00 or ten (10) times the amount of money you made selling the address(es), whichever is greater.
You agree that California Business & Professions Code 17529.5 is not pre-empted by the Federal CAN-SPAM Act, 15 U.S.C. 7701 et seq.
In the event that any suit or action is instituted to enforce any provision in this contract, Dan Balsam shall be entitled to all costs and expenses of maintaining such suit or action, including reasonable attorneys’ fees.
This contract shall inure to the benefit of and be binding upon the parties hereto and their respective heirs, successors, assigns, administrators, executors and other legal representatives.
Any action in respect of or concerning this contract shall be litigated solely in California and both parties consent to jurisdiction in California. This contract shall be governed by, construed and enforced in accordance with the laws of the State of California.
Sending email to or copying to or blind copying to any email address containing the domain name “danbalsam.com,” or similar actions by your affiliates/agents, constitutes voluntary acceptance of these terms.
I just actually read all of your post. You actually don't have the right to deny service to a minority based on race/creed. The civil rights act made that illegal. That's the reason some tea-party people argue that the act was unconstitutional or overreached.
Now, you may not be prosecuted for refusing to serve a white customer, but if the situation was reversed you could easily lose in court.
Or, you could design the product not to have connections to it's battery exposed like that. How about a simple physical switch (not unlike those in headphone jacks) that prevents power from going through the latch slots unless a little switch is pressed in.
That way, if the latches are full you could have the current on, and if they had a little cutout slot in them or a notch, the power could be off. Then you could use a piece of metal, even without paint, and it wouldn't cause this problem so long as it has the right notch.
Shouldn't there be something (like a current limiting resister) so that even if a mistake like this DID happen, it couldn't draw too much current and cause these kind of problems? Surely you could detect how much current is being drawn and shut it off if it's too much. Other devices do that.
Also, if the brownouts are the problem, why doesn't the Kindle notice the voltage getting low and complain? At this point, why would any electronic device be able to get to such a low voltage point where it can't continue to guarantee it's operation without warning the user.
They aren't guilty of the Espionage Act. They haven't even been officially charged with anything. It's questionable if they even can be charged under the act (since they do/may-fall-under the journalism exception). So far they are in exactly the same legal situation Intel is over spying on US intelligence: none.
There is lots of saber-rattling and threats; but no charges. Thus they can't be guilty. Arguably, there are no charges because then they could be proved innocent, where as right now they're basically stuck as "we assume they're guilty" unless for push for a court to say otherwise (directed verdict?).
It doesn't (just to spoil the joke). As you know, the TI-80 doesn't have a link port, so it can't be connected to other calculators. That's also why it took so long for someone to release games for it, because it wasn't easy to hit (unlike the 85, for example, which had things installed with a simple corrupt dump).
Note: Information current as of ~1999, not responsible for design changes TI made in the last decade
Oh, I was quite familiar with the plot of the movie and it's reviews before I saw it. I wasn't expecting much, just "basic and entertaining". But a few strategic cuts or changes could have made it so much better. Even without the fridge, just getting rid of any furry animal in the movie would have improved it quite a bit.
Yeah, I know about the suspension of disbelief thing. But there is a level that goes with it, just like watching science fiction stuff. The "it's a jeep chase from giant ants along a cliff" thing is not exactly believable, but in that world it's not that bad. But when, in the middle of that improbable series of events, they suddenly create Tarzan and a troupe of helper monkeys I go from "stretching it but I'll accept it" to "it snapped in my eye!"
It's like Spider Man 2 or 3. You know the events of the movie are fake, but you can get past it. But when, in the middle of a chase, Spiderman stops and breaks the fourth wall by posing in front a flag, the movie isn't even trying.
I've been modding in this thread, but forget it. I want to post on this.
This is my big problem. I recently saw Indiana Jones & The Crystal Skull. I knew it wasn't going to be very good, but I was still amazed at two parts of the movie.
The first is when he was first being lead into the warehouse where all the artifacts are being stored. They have a show showing him walking in through the big doors, and in the background is a 20-30ft piles of boxes, made in CGI. Did you not have the budget in your $100m movie to buy boxes? Wait! You did. You piles of them 5 minutes later. I get you don't want to recreate the whole warehouse, but a single pile of boxes? It was pathetic.
At the same time the 'crystal skull' in the movie not only does not look like the real crystal skull but in fact looks like someone balled up palstic wrap and then poured resin around it. You couldn't have a few pieces of high quality glass blown? You couldn't have used the CGI for the skulls?
The CGI is applied in so many of the wrong places. The final scenes are very well done, as were the ants, but why keep spending the budget on making groundhogs look at Indy or troupes of monkeys playing Tarzan in a scene that TOTALLY breaks any suspension of disbelief.
I'm used to CGI. It takes a ton to impress me. But a good motorcycle chase that isn't all CGI and blue-screen will go a lot farther because I can tell they actually did it.
Heck, I suppose I'm lucky the quicksand in KotCS wasn't pure CGI. Stupid Lucas.
Slashdot Mirror
But how many iPad customers are buying the top end model?
You can spend that much on an iPad, but I'd expect the average sale price is supposed to be below the price of the 3G model, which would put it under $630. It was in one of their recent SEC filings, I think.
It's much easier to say "I want a $500 iPad", and "but I should probably get a 3G just incase.... and my music collection is already 12GB so..." than to start with "I want an $800 thing" when you can quickly go to "I can buy a real laptop or desktop for that".
iBooks is free and reads them just fine. I'm sure there are non-apple apps too.
The point of the tower is that since it will have the strongest signal, any nearby phones would connect to it. You'd have to put up a radio for each network type, but it would work.
So when your buddy goes and buys a disposable phone and sneaks it in to you... it still uses the monitored tower. No secret calls for you.
I'd imagine having a locked up population of thousands of people in one place all with nothing to do but make calls would be a recipe for disaster. There is no way they could monitor that volume of calls, or cut off individuals from having access as a form of punishment (since they could just borrow Joe's phone).
I thought that was pretty cool too. But he said it took 45 seconds or so to figure out if a ticket was a winner, and that was the big issue. But that was back in '03. Today, you could easily program a smartphone to recognize the pattern on the ticker and figure out for you if the ticket is a winner in a second or two, easily increasing the rate you could do this.
It would still be hard work and I'd imagine it would be very boring and tedious to do every day, but you could do it faster today.
They don't have to play Man-In-The-Middle. They can just make sure that HTTPS doesn't work (return error codes, drop packets, etc) such that it becomes unusable and people's only choice (if they want to keep accessing FB) is to use standard HTTP.
It's too bad much of the article is wrong.
How about just closing down the centers for the molesters full of children? Wouldn't that be easier than GPS tracking?
Who thought facilities to supply sex offenders with victims was a good idea in the first place?
I agree on the PS3 and 360, but surely the margins on the Wii must be pretty good. No Blu-Ray, no hard drive, small processor. Instead of a price drop they just bundled in a game made by Nintendo.
I would expect that Nintendo could drop $50 or more off the price of the Wii and still make money on each unit sold. They haven't dropped the price in years.
Turning off DIMMs can be done. Some high end servers will let you add/remove RAM on the fly, it's basically the same thing except the RAM isn't physically going anywhere.
There are two problems you'd run into. First you'd have to move everything to the DIMMs that you're keeping on. This means that all the pointers would change, so you'd have to have a way to keep track of that. If you moved things and then moved them back when the power came 'back on', that may suffice.
The second is how much stuff is in memory in the first place. Programs keep tons of junk in memory as caches because it's faster than disk (and when not under memory pressure, it's 'free'). You'd have to notify programs (like iOS does) that there is a memory pressure situation and to dump stuff they can recreate so you could turn off more DIMMs. Of course, this means performance would be worse when you came back up because you'd have to recreate that data or load it back off disk. So basically it would feel like suspending to disk, only slightly faster.
This seems most useful if you had a ton of free memory. Right now my Mac has iTunes open, mail, and an RSS reader. It's not doing much, but because of all the data in cache to keep programs opening fast only about 1/6 to 1/8th of my 4GB of memory is totally unused.
I see them as cable box replacements, for when you don't watch much or the shows you want are easily available on services like Hulu (which they would have to let you access). The problem with Netflix is that most TV shows are months late (although I think they just inked a deal with someone to improve that).
I don't think this category of devices is there quite yet, it's a little ahead of the market at the moment.
That was exactly what I thought of when I first read this too. Read the lady's letter. Facebook automatically downloads pictures and updates and she plays a lot of Bejeweled. If FB is caching pictures for her and she has a lot of friends, I could see hitting 30-50MB in a day.
I think you're right that this is a billing system issue. It shows no data use while you were using your phone, and it shows a ton when you're not. It's just coalescing things so you don't have 1200 data charges per day of 2-10kb each.
I don't remember that episode. Seems more like something that would have been on Eerie, Indiana.
You're got good points, but there are so many ads about price comparison it seems like there's a great chance American is just shooting themselves in the foot with this one. I haven't flown in years, and it wouldn't occur to me to go to an airline's site unless I knew they were the only ones who served the route or I had just heard about how incredible they were from someone I trusted.
I totally understand the quality argument. Midwest Express is supposed to be quite nice in the areas they fly. On the other hand, I remember flying on some airlines in the 90s that aren't around anymore that were just horrible.
If American thinks its quality is so much better, let them show it. Why not partner with Expedia to add "Air Experience" rating next to each price, where the ratings are based on passenger and secret shopper testing. That way you could see that American is charging $200 (with a 4 star rating) and Discount-O-Jet is charging $175 (with a 1.5 star rating) and make your choice. It would also give Expedia something to promote over the competition.
Of course, that would be a 'put up or shut up' move, and if American isn't as good as they want everyone to think they are, it could really backfire.
Side note: Remember travel agents? There used to be people, in offices, that you went to to book airplane tickets. Only they could see the prices. They used to be everywhere. In the past 15 years, it's a job that has completely disappeared. I get the feeling AA wants to go back to that world, where they could schmooze the agents to get more customers.
Yeah, that's my big problem. If he auto-responded with a copy of the terms and "By continuing to send me email you agree to them" that would be much better.
I like the idea of suing the people who's products are being advertised, but since so much spam is a fake scam, suing Apple because someone is offering a free iPod (or Pfizer because of "cheep V1agR4") doesn't seem like it would accomplish much. Actual cases where the companyis the advertiser are much more rare.
Like I said, I hate spam. I get hundreds of pieces a day, and I wasn't for CAN-SPAM (since it legitimized it). I think all email should be opt-in. But Dan's little agreement seems like you suing me if I sent you a letter from my business because I didn't take the time to go read a note posted on his door I didn't know about. It seems like trap, and a somewhat unfair one.
I just worry is method is too heavy handed. What if I send him a question (about something else, totally not business related) and he decides that the "I work for Joe Bob Web Services, ask us about our XMas Special" in my signature makes my message count as commercial solicitation and decides to sue me? He's a lawyer, that's all he does. Just to go to court (in California) to get it dismissed would cost me a fortune.
When I first heard of Dan, I was like a lot of people here. "Good for him, he's doing something to stop spam." The more I learned, the less sure I am that his little "EULA" is a good way to go about it.
I know a company that has had the fun of dealing with Dan. While I hate spammers as much as the next guy, Dan's little crusade seems less than legal to me. Having a valid opt-out isn't good enough. Here is what you agree to by sending him email (not that you would know it at the time):
I just actually read all of your post. You actually don't have the right to deny service to a minority based on race/creed. The civil rights act made that illegal. That's the reason some tea-party people argue that the act was unconstitutional or overreached.
Now, you may not be prosecuted for refusing to serve a white customer, but if the situation was reversed you could easily lose in court.
IANAL, YMMV, blah blah blah
Or, you could design the product not to have connections to it's battery exposed like that. How about a simple physical switch (not unlike those in headphone jacks) that prevents power from going through the latch slots unless a little switch is pressed in.
That way, if the latches are full you could have the current on, and if they had a little cutout slot in them or a notch, the power could be off. Then you could use a piece of metal, even without paint, and it wouldn't cause this problem so long as it has the right notch.
Shouldn't there be something (like a current limiting resister) so that even if a mistake like this DID happen, it couldn't draw too much current and cause these kind of problems? Surely you could detect how much current is being drawn and shut it off if it's too much. Other devices do that.
Also, if the brownouts are the problem, why doesn't the Kindle notice the voltage getting low and complain? At this point, why would any electronic device be able to get to such a low voltage point where it can't continue to guarantee it's operation without warning the user.
They aren't guilty of the Espionage Act. They haven't even been officially charged with anything. It's questionable if they even can be charged under the act (since they do/may-fall-under the journalism exception). So far they are in exactly the same legal situation Intel is over spying on US intelligence: none.
There is lots of saber-rattling and threats; but no charges. Thus they can't be guilty. Arguably, there are no charges because then they could be proved innocent, where as right now they're basically stuck as "we assume they're guilty" unless for push for a court to say otherwise (directed verdict?).
99% advanced. On the other hand, Wikipedia is quite evenly distributed.
It doesn't (just to spoil the joke). As you know, the TI-80 doesn't have a link port, so it can't be connected to other calculators. That's also why it took so long for someone to release games for it, because it wasn't easy to hit (unlike the 85, for example, which had things installed with a simple corrupt dump).
Note: Information current as of ~1999, not responsible for design changes TI made in the last decade
Oh, I was quite familiar with the plot of the movie and it's reviews before I saw it. I wasn't expecting much, just "basic and entertaining". But a few strategic cuts or changes could have made it so much better. Even without the fridge, just getting rid of any furry animal in the movie would have improved it quite a bit.
Yeah, I know about the suspension of disbelief thing. But there is a level that goes with it, just like watching science fiction stuff. The "it's a jeep chase from giant ants along a cliff" thing is not exactly believable, but in that world it's not that bad. But when, in the middle of that improbable series of events, they suddenly create Tarzan and a troupe of helper monkeys I go from "stretching it but I'll accept it" to "it snapped in my eye!"
It's like Spider Man 2 or 3. You know the events of the movie are fake, but you can get past it. But when, in the middle of a chase, Spiderman stops and breaks the fourth wall by posing in front a flag, the movie isn't even trying.
I've been modding in this thread, but forget it. I want to post on this.
This is my big problem. I recently saw Indiana Jones & The Crystal Skull. I knew it wasn't going to be very good, but I was still amazed at two parts of the movie.
The first is when he was first being lead into the warehouse where all the artifacts are being stored. They have a show showing him walking in through the big doors, and in the background is a 20-30ft piles of boxes, made in CGI. Did you not have the budget in your $100m movie to buy boxes? Wait! You did. You piles of them 5 minutes later. I get you don't want to recreate the whole warehouse, but a single pile of boxes? It was pathetic.
At the same time the 'crystal skull' in the movie not only does not look like the real crystal skull but in fact looks like someone balled up palstic wrap and then poured resin around it. You couldn't have a few pieces of high quality glass blown? You couldn't have used the CGI for the skulls?
The CGI is applied in so many of the wrong places. The final scenes are very well done, as were the ants, but why keep spending the budget on making groundhogs look at Indy or troupes of monkeys playing Tarzan in a scene that TOTALLY breaks any suspension of disbelief.
I'm used to CGI. It takes a ton to impress me. But a good motorcycle chase that isn't all CGI and blue-screen will go a lot farther because I can tell they actually did it.
Heck, I suppose I'm lucky the quicksand in KotCS wasn't pure CGI. Stupid Lucas.