Sure, it's HBO, and sure they have some stellar in-house programming; but it's one channel. People who are dumping their $60/month (and up!) cable TV plans aren't likely to pay $15 for one channel.
Two genuine questions here. First, if a disproportionate reason why a person has cable at all is for HBO, then $15/month is less than what they're paying for HBO + everything else, so it may well be worth it. How many users fit this particular category?
Second, how much of HBO's back catalog is included? The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Dead Like Me are all still highly regarded series that have a good amount of rewatch value. HBO has also produced a wide array of well produced documentaries. Yes, everyone says "zomg Game of Thrones and True Blood!!11" because they're trendy at the moment, but if HBO Go gives on-demand access to virtually every piece of HBO produced content, in 1080[i/p]...that may well be a worthwhile number.
Bonus round: Once all the major draws have been binge watched over the next year, the dropoff rate will likely be noticeable, for the very reason you specify.
Sure they could have screwed it up more. They could have mentioned that Alpha Centaurians have invaded Duluth, and are transforming Minnesotans into angry Communist half-snake half-jelly fish chimeras who chant "Serve the giant penis god!"
That's why Tesla is failing so badly. They treat customers like rational human beings and don't give "incentives" and "cash back" and "0% financing".
And I guess that means that before coupons were invented, every company simply failed.
You missed the key word: RETAIL. Tesla isn't a retail store. Tesla is a vertical market - they sell their own product in their own stores, and their product is relatively unique that they have additional liberties as a result. JC Penney doesn't make their own clothes, they sell other people's clothes for more money than they spent on acquiring them, and those same clothes are also being sold by other retailers. It's a completely different ballgame.
J.C. Penney tried this. It's become a textbook case study in retail management as to how not to run a retail store. Unfortunately, the "feeling of getting a bargain" is a powerful psychological motivator to purchase; treating customers like rational people is not.
Trying to force more people to live in the absence of resources? You're basically still killing people, you're simply distancing yourselves from the act and washing your hands of the responsibility. Maybe the person who dies will not be the one who can afford longevity treatments; more likely it will be some poor bastard with a different skin color and hat in some distant foreign land. This doesn't seem to worry the people who believe that bearded men live in the sky.
The people who actually believe in the bearded man in that lives in the sky are indeed concerned about living conditions in the third world. That's why they're building wells, providing medical assistance, and working to end child sex trafficking. Admittedly, I don't have a faith based charity off the top of my head that deals with food specifically, though I'm sure that some exist. Point is, the Christians on the receiving end of your condescension certainly exist...but the Christians who are actually working to combat poverty and poor living conditions in the third world are too busy addressing those problems to try and market themselves at a volume that can be heard above the Westboro Baptists.
On the whole, it would probably be more humane to just have everyone in the world play Russian Roulette once a year and thin the herd by 1/6th annually. Oh, wait, that would offend the people who believe that bearded men live in the sky.
Two things here. First, your condescension is misplaced. I don't see how believing that life is valuable is somehow an undesirable trait. Don't get me wrong, I understand that it's common for Christians to place more value on a fetus than a death row inmate, but the abstract concept of "life is sacred" does not seem like a terrible stance to have. That being said, let's roll with your idea for a minute, and have an annual "Russian Roulette Day", where everyone has a 1/6 chance of being shot, because resources. Is it not advantageous for society to keep alive a doctor who won the lottery and heals the poor for free? Is that person truly an equal loss to society than a convicted serial killer? Either we run the risk of losing 1/6 of our core human infrastructure, or we start issuing 'exemptions' for world leaders and decorated veterans...and everyone else with money and/or connections to get on that list. As an added bonus, we know that the drug lords and mobsters aren't going to show up for Roulette Day, so a decade of this plan, and chaos starts getting ever closer to actually happening.
Better yet, don't kill anyone, and incentivize population control. Oh, wait, that would offend the people who believe that bearded men live in the sky.
While sure, many of the people who have absurdly large families are also devoutly religious, that doesn't necessarily make it a direct comparison. I'm fully aligned with the concept of removing all government-based fiscal incentives for having more than three children - got a fourth? Great. No tax deduction after the third, and you pay for schooling out of pocket. If you can pay for 'em, you can have 'em, but if someone is going to get offended by the requirement that the money come from somewhere, that's not something that religion alone is responsible for.
Maybe the best strategy is not to play the game (i.e. let people die naturally)? Even now we can prolong life medically for people that are effectively invalids and/or in chronic pain, but to what advantage? Many of them would be happy to be allowed to pass away. When medical care rises to the level that these people actually want to continue living, then maybe we can talk about longevity.
Death is not a bad option, really.
Personally, I'm with you on that. Plenty of people disagree with me, but I do believe that people should be able to make their own decision to pull the
The App Permissions seem to be missing the crucial ability to deny internet access to an app. There are apps where network data connectivity is the problem. Similarly, I wonder if Google will have this permission setting capability on its internal applications. I know that I have a rather tightly worn tin foil hat when it comes to Google and the information they get, but the Xprivacy 'deny' list on my phone is a mile long, and that's with most of their apps frozen or forcibly pulled out, I find that Google's data access on the platform demands a tight leash, leading the 'privacy' and 'permissions' charge to ring of hypocrisy - "we'll make sure that only we have your location" doesn't mean much to me:/
so how about we knock off this feature creep shit already in favor of real battery life.
With that mentality, we'd all be using phones with low-rez, monochrome screens, non-touch (button) interfaces and GPRS data capability. Hell, yeah -- I want my Nokia 8290 back! Best phone ever!
No, with that mentality, we'd have things like
Phones that aren't anorexic, instead being willing to be a bit thicker and sport two days' worth of battery life.
Phones with physical keyboards. Nothing wrong with Swype or Swiftkey, but if there's a market for pseudo surround sound in a phone, you can't tell me that having a keyboard like the Blackberry Curve or HTC Rhodium doesn't have a maket.
Phones with intentionally lower DPI, for people with less-than-perfect eyesight that still want to use their phone.
Phones with a better ability to leverage integrated storage
Phones with screens designed to be user-replaceable
And that's just off the top of my head of hardware-based changes that end users would be much more likely to want, and would not negatively impact battery life.
Wedding and event videos fall squarely in this category. No bride will be okay with spending $1,500 for a Vimeo link.
And a bride can't use a USB drive (which hold much more than a DVD and can be copies far easier)? If the requirement is that they must have a DVD, a Pro can get a USB/Firewire/TB one.
I comprehensively covered this earlier in the thread, but it's not just the drive - it's that video format support isn't exactly a guarantee, and that USB flash drives are signficantly more expensive than a single DVD (and most 32GB flash drives are, at best, at cost parity with a single Blu-Ray disc). Yes, external burners are basically the answer here, but the problem here is that the newer Mac Pro units seem to have quite the laundry list of requirements of external hardware as opposed to even the previous design.
Just because we don't burn mix CDs anymore or use them for backup devices doesn't mean that the optical drive is dead. It's a niche, but it's not dead.
I never said that there was absolutely ZERO need to use discs. I said most people don't use them these days including pros. So why include it? I saw MBs with printer ports more than a decade after you could buy a printer than needed that port. Also lots of them have PS/2 connectors still.
For Pros that do need a burner tend to use more professional ones than you can get in a computer. Dedicated duplicators are more common with pros than a computer burner.
In context, MB = MacBook? I'm not sure, but I'd argue this point regardless. I worked at Staples in 2002, and that is when printers tended to be hybrid, having both parallel and USB ports. So, let's assume that 2002 was the last year that retail printers used parallel ports, and 2003 was the year of USB exclusivity on the printer. Your 'decade after' mark means that Macbooks should have had parallel ports in 2012, but my research indicates that no Macbook (i.e Intel-based Mac) has ever had a parallel port; even my HP dv9000 series laptop from 2006 was all USB. As for dedicated duplicators, they're great, but they still need an initial burn somewhere. While I know that there are models out there will allow one or more drives to be used directly from the PC, many pros I know did the initial burn from the computer, and then a one-to-many duplication on a standalone unit. I'm not saying that that's the only way to do it, but I am saying that there's still a good reason to have just the bay available.
...and Apple was rather widely panned for doing so at the time. This was in large part due to the dearth of an alternative storage medium being included - you were either getting files around with a 56K modem, a USB ZIP drive, a USB Floppy drive, or VERY expensive 16MB flash drives that, in many cases, had slower write speeds than actual floppy disks. Floppies were passe, no doubt, but Apple should have been putting CD-RW drives in the iMac long before they actually did.
I don't know when you were around computers but Apple removed the floppy with the first iMac. And it had a CD-ROM as most other computers. It was years before CD-RWs much less blank discs were affordable. USB sticks were then becoming the standard for replacing floppies. Maybe on PC they lagged behind for years as it took PC manufacturers a while to embrace USB.
I was most certainly around during that time, and like I said - many people who bought the early iMacs were unhappy with that design decision. CD-RW drives were expensive around the very-first-gen models, but PCs started shipping with them as standard fare around that time, making the price of external drives go down pretty quickly. Blank CDs were $2-$4 each, but 4MB flash drives and CompactFlash cards were $40-$60 each; it was a long time before cost-per-megabyte of USB flash drives were favorable to optical media at the 650MB mark.
Wedding and event videos fall squarely in this category. No bride will be okay with spending $1,500 for a Vimeo link.
And cheap USB2 keys that hold a couple hundred times as much data as a DVD don't exist. Nope, they do, and are far more convenient and resilient to damage than optical media.
You're right, they do. And let's even assume that I found somewhere on the internet that had some sort of packaging that resembled a DVD case, enabling this particular flash drive to be artfully labeled as the wedding video. What format do you suggest I provide the video in?.mp4? It's a fairly common format, generally well supported, but am I certain that the drive itself will be able to handle the throughput of a high bitrate video? Will the TV (or device connected thereto)? Or will there just be a whole lot of stuttering throughout? If she plugs it into her computer, will that play it back? Windows 8 might support.mp4 natively, but Windows 7/Vista/XP do not. Should I include a VLC installer for her? I don't know what OSX supports out of the box, but I think Quicktime plays it? Should she update Quicktime? What if she wants to bring it to her parent's house to see it - are her parents likely to have a Smart TV, or some other device with a USB input that reads.mp4?.MP4 may be the closest thing for compatibility, but no menus and awkward chapter authoring become a problem..MKV solves those problems, but now we're playing compatibility roulette all over again. With a 64GB flash drive, I certainly could provide multiple formats, one with menus, one high-bitrate.mp4, one for the iPod, a Quicktime version, and even an MPEG-1 to be absolutely certain it'll play on something. Well, now I've spent $20 on a single flash drive for this bride, and increased my render time by a factor of five.
Or, I can, y'know, give her a DVD. I've yet to know someone who doesn't have the means by which to play back a DVD. If I'm feeling adventurous, I can ask her if she has a Blu-Ray player, and give her one of those. Still cheaper, still simpler, and still more reliable than gambling on a particular video format.
You also need storage space. HD video, art assets, high resolution multitrack audio projects, and CAD drawings aren't exactly compact forms of data, y'know.
Use the local SSD as a buffer for high speed work. Copy from network to local, work, upload back. Clear space, move to next job. If you require high speed links to large disk, use thunderbolt to add dual 10GbE for iSCSI or dual 16Gb fiber channel.
And how is that a better workflow than having one's data locally available on an internal hard drive? It's sure as hell more expensive, and the copy in/copy out plan is what one would generally have to do in that case, but it shouldn't be necessary. It's easily a half-hour each way - a half hour spent working around a technological shortcoming that is only there for design reasons.
That's a rather broad brush to paint with, especially since disk I/O over the LAN starts hitting a ceiling pretty quick. This would be easier to swallow if there were a PCI Express slot to add a 10GigE/Fiber/Infiniband card, but they did away with that, too.
False. See links above. Thunderbolt IS PCI Express. It's on a cable instead of a slot. Whoop de do.
That's indeed a fair point. It's entirely possible to go down that road, but now we're talking a storage array that costs more than the Mac Pro itself. Even the Thunderbolt RAID bays I've seen have cost several hundred dollars, and that's without drives...but I will indeed concede that it's possible. That's a large part of my point though - the standard
Powerpoint isn't bad, people just don't know how to use it. Let's go back to 2007, when one of the most well-known Powerpoint* presentations was given: https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... Take a look at Steve as he's presenting. He's glancing back at the screen, from time to time, usually after his slides have advanced. The changing of the slides doesn't affect the flow of what he's saying; it underscores it at just the right time. It's mostly pictures; there are fewer than ten words on the screen at any given point, and not a bullet point in sight. The graphics are large, clear, and immediately relevant. There's no crowding on the screen, the text has a high contrast with the background, and there's nothing to distract the viewer from the presenter. Steve practiced what he was going to say, how it was going to be paced, the sequence in which points were going to be given, and designed his slides accordingly.
This was an excellent presentation for a reason - it's abundantly clear that countless hours went into every second of its exposition. This was no night-before job, with copy/pastes from Wikipedia, and low-res pictures from Google Images, being given by a presenter who was on a red eye flight three hours before he gave it, who is giving the talk having only practiced the first half just once, without an audience, much less a critical one. No, Steve knew that he had a presentation to give, so he was preparing it for quite some time.
The fact of the matter is that Powerpoint* wasn't relevant in this speech - it was the fact that it was a highly polished presentation, from a talented orator and presenter, with lots of practice, and a set of slides that were clearly designed by someone with a graphic design background. Every once in a while, you'll come across someone who is giving a presentation with a similar focus on design and implementation, who has taken their task seriously and practiced accordingly. Most of the time, they get all the time, focus, and attention to detail as a final paper in Freshman Comp, due the day after Memorial Day and read aloud half hungover - because that's how much priority the presentation itself is given by the presenter.
[NEWS_OUTLET] reports that an online service provided by [ORGANIZATION_WITH_PERSONAL_DATA] was used to gather the personal information of [CUSTOMERS_OR_USERS]. Criminals were able to scrape [INSECURE_SYSTEM] to acquire [SUPPOSEDLY_SECURED_INFORMATION]. The system has been shut down while [OVERPAID_AND_INCOMPETENT_ANALYSTS] investigate and [PROMISE], and they're notifying [CUSTOMERS_OR_USERS] whose information was accessed.
At this point, you can turn this story into a Mad Lib, and fill in the blanks with basically any set of nouns, and it'll mostly be true.
I'm going to take it that you don't actually use a workstation much less a recent computer.
I'm not the author of the GP post, but I *do* use a workstation.
Let's start with OOD which I assume you mean optical drive. When was the last time you used one?
Yesterday actually, when I burnt a DVD for a friend. See kids, I know that 'streaming' is all the rage and that all the cool kids are doing it, but there's still no substitute for handing someone a physical product. Wedding and event videos fall squarely in this category. No bride will be okay with spending $1,500 for a Vimeo link. Moreover, if you're using a copyrighted song in the video, and you've got the proper licensing to do it, an upload to Youtube will still be flagged, and you'll spend plenty of time sorting that out and providing paperwork. Even if we put that aside, Youtube quality varies based on any number of things, but they *do* compress video in order to stream it. Their HD streaming looks pretty good now, but it's still got much heavier compression than a Blu-Ray disc. Just because we don't burn mix CDs anymore or use them for backup devices doesn't mean that the optical drive is dead. It's a niche, but it's not dead.
So removing it is like when computer manufacturers removed the floppy drive. Apple was one the first; others took years to do so even when it was apparent no one used them anymore.
...and Apple was rather widely panned for doing so at the time. This was in large part due to the dearth of an alternative storage medium being included - you were either getting files around with a 56K modem, a USB ZIP drive, a USB Floppy drive, or VERY expensive 16MB flash drives that, in many cases, had slower write speeds than actual floppy disks. Floppies were passe, no doubt, but Apple should have been putting CD-RW drives in the iMac long before they actually did.
Now let's talk about the HDDs. Yes they removed them. If you are using a workstation, you need speed.
You also need storage space. HD video, art assets, high resolution multitrack audio projects, and CAD drawings aren't exactly compact forms of data, y'know.
With most professionals using networked drives for collaboration
That's a rather broad brush to paint with, especially since disk I/O over the LAN starts hitting a ceiling pretty quick. This would be easier to swallow if there were a PCI Express slot to add a 10GigE/Fiber/Infiniband card, but they did away with that, too.
the need to have personal drives only comes from a small percentage of pros.
That number is so small that there's an insignificant market for storage devices that can connect to them, right? And it makes more sense for Apple to make them an online-only product rather than waste shelf space on them in the store, right? This logic is better illustrated with your optical drive notions earlier - Apple actually doesn't sell them in the store (or, in some stores, only has one or two slimline ones on the shelf, frequently with a thin layer of dust).
Since the Mac Pro is for pros and not consumers, this was an understandable choice.
Yes...Pros let everything live on iSCSI volumes or in Teh Cloud (tm) and never have a reason to store things locally. (/sarcasm)
Now let's talk about eSATA. It isn't a standard that Apple has ever supported. Their standards has always been FireWire or Thunderbolt.
This is a fair point. I wish they would have better eSATA support, but I will certainly concede that eSATA has never been their thing.
As for "underpowerd PSU", you do understand that a workstation is not a gaming machine, right?
Quadro/Firepro cards aren't exactly miserly with their power usage, especially when tied with a high end Core i7. Now, what Apple did in the redesigned Mac Pro units w
New laptop, an SSD, and VMWare Workstation, all for less than $1,000. The key here is TinyXP, the custom-built flavor of XP circulating the internet that uses 50MB of RAM after installation. Boot time for all of them would certainly be measurable if not staggered, but 16VMs on a laptop that's got 16GB of RAM, running stripped down XP installations that have one job...I think it's doable.
I still think the Layer 3 Switch option is a better one. Where that might be a bit more of a problem would be with regards to whether the update software is capable of handling the possibility of seeing more than one device available to update at the same time. Even though it's possible with networking tricks to get all the pumps addressable at the same time, there's no guarantee that the software is built for that use case. For that matter, it's entirely possible that the software will throw up if multiple instances are attempted to run concurrently. Thus, the 16-VM route may be necessary for that reason, regardless of whether or not a layer 3 switch could solve the networking problem.
I was never an Apple Maps user, but I was always of the persuasion that the map data and the routing logic was the problem, not whether the GPS had a six-foot margin of error instead of a six inch margin of error. Without good routing logic and accurate street maps, all the accuracy in the world won't help with navigation.
Then again, I'm still waiting for Delorme to release Street Atlas for Android.
My initial reaction is to say that computing is simply cyclical; what was once mainframes and dumb terminals turned into locally installed applications on desktops and laptops, and now we're doing that again with Teh Cloud (tm). However, here's the difference:
1.) In the 80's and early 90's, overall technical competence of computer users was higher. Yes, the there was always the secretary who tried to use WordPerfect to make a database because she knew exactly one program, but overall, especially if you had a home computer, you had some concept of what you were buying, and what the things on the spec sheet meant - computers being sold today will have helpfully descriptive bullet points like "great for multitasking" instead of "8GB RAM", something that wouldn't have passed muster in the last cycle. 1b.) Malware was much less a problem, back in the earlier days of computing. E-mail viruses were a thing, certainly, but for the most part, one ran a virus scanner and moved on with life. Also, with less hardware to throw at resident software, any kind of malware that ran resident would use enough system resources to alert the user to its presence, which is less the case now. Google Docs doesn't care about macro viruses, and users of that platform don't have to, either. There's value in that proposition for many less-technically-inclined users. Similarly, backups/hard disk crashes are "someone else's problem". 2.) In the 80's and 90's, systems were generally designed for interoperability a bit better than they are today. It's possible to send an e-mail from a server running Exchange 2016 Preview to an SMTP server from 1989 and it'll be able to meaningfully use the message. This is not the case with Facebook or WhatsApp. 3.) Inherently connected applications are the norm now. The utility of Facebook is "the rest of the stuff on Facebook". Google Docs and Pixlr don't apply to this point since they still deal with.doc and.jpg files that are more standards compliant, but many of the web apps that are popular aren't necessarily tied to the "open/change/save/close" paradigm that is commonplace in the desktop world. 4.) "Bleed little, bleed often" is a more culturally acceptable proposition for most people, as it gives them the instant gratification of getting the product at a price they can afford, while not requiring a gargantuan up-front cost that happens regularly as people feel the need to keep up with the Joneses. $5/month = $180 over the course of three years, which has basically been the shelf life of every version of MS Office released. Makes it a lot easier to swallow for many people, whether or not it's actually a value proposition in the long run. 4b.) The fact that virtually every software developer who has implemented IAPs instead of a one-time, up-front cost has made more money on that business model. At this point, it's solely a matter of principle that a developer of a paid application would sell a perpetual license, since general acceptance of subscription and IAP licensing makes it a better idea for everyone to go down that road instead. This was not nearly as true in the days of mainframe computing.
Now all of that being said, I do think that video editing is one of the few tasks that will never lend itself to a subscription model, beyond what Digital Juice does. Editing-as-a-service makes very little sense, since even a moderately sized project will still take tens of gigabytes of upload time, which means "hours before you can edit". Meanwhile, 100GB of assets is not unheard of for even a two hour wedding video shot in HD, and with upload speeds still measured the single-digit mbit/sec unit, it can easily be days before editing can even be entertained. At the same time, costs are a lot higher for a company looking to get into that business, because you're going to get much less ability to thin provision even 500GB of space, as the nature of what's being done is going to make much more use of that space than the OneDrive accounts with a 1TB progres
The real product that Starbucks sells is its dining room - a place where, for $3-$10, you can sit for an hour in a relatively comfortable chair and either meet with someone, get some work done, or simply not-sit-at-home. Now, that's certainly not to say that there aren't a large number of people who like the "coffee flavored chocolate milk", but there's any number of places that sell actual-coffee that see plenty of business. I'm a 7-Eleven guy myself, but Dunkin' Donuts is also very popular. Many of the gas stations around me sell either Green Mountain or Chock Full O' Nuts, so it's entirely possible to purchase drinkable coffee along with gasoline. The law of large numbers says that there's going to be a good number of people who will just prefer Starbucks' product to the competition.
I'm not saying it's a good usenet service; there are rumors that it's been outsourced to Highwinds anyway. Even so, it's still under their name, and it's plenty for people like me who use Usenet for things other than alt.binaries.
Show me a product from 10 years ago that is still around, and popular, in essentially the same form.
Microsoft Office 2003. Now, to be fair, this does indeed depend on how you count. Office 2003 is still feature complete for most Office users. Office 2007/2010/2013 has a fresh coat of paint, and Sparklines are nice and all, but functionally speaking, it may fit your criteria. Alternatively, we can point to the fact that most Office clones (Open/LibreOffice, AbiWord, iWork) have a very similar layout and functionality.
But, let's assume that we're talking about current iterations. eBay and Paypal are still very recognizable from 2005. Amazon still sells books. The iTunes Music Store hasn't changed much. My ISP still offers Usenet access, and Yahoo mail is still quite popular; hell "e-mail" is quite possibly the longest lived digital communication protocol ever created. Google's search page hasn't changed significantly in ten years.
Now, to be fair to your point, this is certainly a list of exceptions that took a bit of time to come up with. However, I'll also point out that the reason why Office 2003 was my primary example is that it's still possible for users to install it on a computer purchased today as long as they have their installation discs. Google discontinues products when they're no longer viable for Google, and that's their prerogative. However, I submit that if Google is going to devise a means of facilitating the generation of data, to which they have the exclusive means by which to make that data useful, that the onus should be on them to ensure that the users receive copies of that data if the service is to go down. Now yes, I understand that the users are the product, not the customers, but that then lends credence to the grandparent's point. Office 2003 may long be discontinued, but Microsoft didn't take my data with them when Office 2007 was released. Google's "everything on Google's servers" philosophy has its merit, but its caveats are clear as well. I have AIM conversations from 1999 that are still stored as HTML files. I cannot say the same for discussions in Google Wave.
Had he rubber-stamped this merger, all manner of people would have been howling for blood. He'd be removed from his position, and the ensuing legal and political inquiries would have essentially ended his life and neutered any prospect of future employment.
So, with pretty much EVERYONE standing over his shoulder (with club in hand), he was FORCED to play it straight.
Counterpoint: Where do we see precedent for this as of late? Most of the high-profile cases that come to mind of late involve people getting off scot free. Enron, Martha Stewart, and Bernie Madoff are about the only names that stick in my head that had any sort of repercussions for their actions, and those are the better part of a decade ago. The level of corruption in this day and age leads me to believe that, had he intended to let the merger go through, he could have easily went to Comcast, asked for $50 million and a tenured job as a middle manager somewhere, gotten it, and had Comcast's legal department ensure that no one raised any questions.
Yes, everyone had him under an electron microscope with clubs in hand...but I sincerely doubt anyone would have actually threw the first punch, had this gone the other way.
Simple fact is that they are commonly used to find contraband and are successful in doing so regularly. They are successful in finding drugs WAY too often for it to be merely false positives to allow illegal searches.
From what I've read thus far in the thread, few are questioning whether or not a dog can reliably smell drugs/bombs/whatever. explosive/drug sniffing dogs at border checkpoints and airports make perfect sense for this very reason, and my understanding of the case is such that the use of dogs in these cases aren't being called into question.
The problem stems from a scenario like this: A cop pulls someone over for a traffic stop. During the traffic stop, the officer wants to search the car, for whatever reason - anything from what might be a genuine concern, to simply wanting to give someone a hard time because he's a jerk. So, the cop calls in a K-9 unit to smell for the "drugs", the dog smells them, and now "probable cause" has been established to search the vehicle.
The objection isn't with the dogs themselves, but with the fact that the cop explicitly calling a drug sniffing dog for what should be a routine traffic stop. The odds are highly unlikely that the dog won't be signaled to give a false positive, because at the very least it's a major embarrassment to the officer if the dog smells nothing, vs. the dog giving a false positive. Dog smells nothing, cop has egg on his face in the eyes of the citizen and the K-9 unit. Dog "smells something", cop does the search, finds nothing, "well...the dog gave the signal" is something for which there are witnesses, and for which the officer cannot be faulted.
The case here is that the cop cannot detain an individual to wait for a dog, as it applies to one-to-one scenarios such as a traffic stop. The efficacy of dogs at checkpoints and airports makes a lot more sense, because you're basically searching everyone in one shot, and are less likely to signal the dog to make a false positive in a targeted manner.
Google applications on virtually every stock (read:non-AOSP) ROM: not removable. Microsoft applications on an AOSP ROM that, almost by definition, requires root and an unlocked bootloader: Good question; the fine summary says "integration", which could mean anything.
Still, I'd say the ultimate outcome is better with Microsoft than with Google. Not because of who Microsoft is, but because of who Cyanogen is.
"Oh noes, google is teh big evil corp'ration, let's go with teh Microsoft". I mean, what the hell are they thinking?
They're probably thinking, "Rent is due this month, and I need to put gas in my car, and I'd like to eat something besides ramen noodles tonight", like the rest of us. Microsoft is willing to give them a pile of money to make it so that a build of their ROM prompts for an outlook.com address instead of a gmail address. Dropbox, Samsung, and HTC already do this, so as long as the MS additions don't dim the "uninstall" button, I see no reason why MS being the prompt at the beginning is any better or any worse.
This just sounds like the point at which the free software folks sell out and say fuck it, let's just follow the money.
Which is why the devil is in the details. If the pile of money means "It prompts to create a Microsoft account at the beginning and OneNote and OneDrive are installed by default, with a 'skip' button for the former and working 'uninstall' buttons for the two latter", then it's foolish to turn down that pile of money. If Cyanogen with Bing(r) is just as difficult to deal with as pulling the Google stuff from a stock ROM...then that *is* selling out.
I have a hard time people are going to buy an Android device, so they can wipe it, kick out Google, and bring in Microsoft. If you want that, buy a Microsoft device and get on with it.
Personally, I really like the new Outlook client for Android, especially since I have an Exchange account. Also, I don't always store stuff in The Cloud (tm), but when I do, I use OneDrive. However, I use Xprivacy, and I see no Windows Phone equivalent for the title. I use Root Explorer, and again, I see no WP equivalent. I use Swype, which doesn't exist on Windows Phone, nor does Titanium Backup or any number of other apps. "Buy a Microsoft device" is as shortsighted an answer as when zealots say "Get a Mac" to any and every problem that happens on a PC: it ignores any number of other variables.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, it's HBO, and sure they have some stellar in-house programming; but it's one channel. People who are dumping their $60/month (and up!) cable TV plans aren't likely to pay $15 for one channel.
Two genuine questions here. First, if a disproportionate reason why a person has cable at all is for HBO, then $15/month is less than what they're paying for HBO + everything else, so it may well be worth it. How many users fit this particular category?
Second, how much of HBO's back catalog is included? The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Dead Like Me are all still highly regarded series that have a good amount of rewatch value. HBO has also produced a wide array of well produced documentaries. Yes, everyone says "zomg Game of Thrones and True Blood!!11" because they're trendy at the moment, but if HBO Go gives on-demand access to virtually every piece of HBO produced content, in 1080[i/p]...that may well be a worthwhile number.
Bonus round: Once all the major draws have been binge watched over the next year, the dropoff rate will likely be noticeable, for the very reason you specify.
Sure they could have screwed it up more. They could have mentioned that Alpha Centaurians have invaded Duluth, and are transforming Minnesotans into angry Communist half-snake half-jelly fish chimeras who chant "Serve the giant penis god!"
Now THAT would be a screwed up writeup!
And equally as newsworthy.
>
That's why Tesla is failing so badly. They treat customers like rational human beings and don't give "incentives" and "cash back" and "0% financing".
And I guess that means that before coupons were invented, every company simply failed.
You missed the key word: RETAIL. Tesla isn't a retail store. Tesla is a vertical market - they sell their own product in their own stores, and their product is relatively unique that they have additional liberties as a result. JC Penney doesn't make their own clothes, they sell other people's clothes for more money than they spent on acquiring them, and those same clothes are also being sold by other retailers. It's a completely different ballgame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
J.C. Penney tried this. It's become a textbook case study in retail management as to how not to run a retail store. Unfortunately, the "feeling of getting a bargain" is a powerful psychological motivator to purchase; treating customers like rational people is not.
A satellite running Linux is contingent upon a spontaneous reboot to function again? Great, now we'll never hear from that satellite again.
Clearly, the plan should have been to run the device on Windows 98. That way, it would only be out of commission for 49.7 days.
Trying to force more people to live in the absence of resources? You're basically still killing people, you're simply distancing yourselves from the act and washing your hands of the responsibility. Maybe the person who dies will not be the one who can afford longevity treatments; more likely it will be some poor bastard with a different skin color and hat in some distant foreign land. This doesn't seem to worry the people who believe that bearded men live in the sky.
The people who actually believe in the bearded man in that lives in the sky are indeed concerned about living conditions in the third world. That's why they're building wells, providing medical assistance, and working to end child sex trafficking. Admittedly, I don't have a faith based charity off the top of my head that deals with food specifically, though I'm sure that some exist. Point is, the Christians on the receiving end of your condescension certainly exist...but the Christians who are actually working to combat poverty and poor living conditions in the third world are too busy addressing those problems to try and market themselves at a volume that can be heard above the Westboro Baptists.
On the whole, it would probably be more humane to just have everyone in the world play Russian Roulette once a year and thin the herd by 1/6th annually. Oh, wait, that would offend the people who believe that bearded men live in the sky.
Two things here. First, your condescension is misplaced. I don't see how believing that life is valuable is somehow an undesirable trait. Don't get me wrong, I understand that it's common for Christians to place more value on a fetus than a death row inmate, but the abstract concept of "life is sacred" does not seem like a terrible stance to have. That being said, let's roll with your idea for a minute, and have an annual "Russian Roulette Day", where everyone has a 1/6 chance of being shot, because resources. Is it not advantageous for society to keep alive a doctor who won the lottery and heals the poor for free? Is that person truly an equal loss to society than a convicted serial killer? Either we run the risk of losing 1/6 of our core human infrastructure, or we start issuing 'exemptions' for world leaders and decorated veterans...and everyone else with money and/or connections to get on that list. As an added bonus, we know that the drug lords and mobsters aren't going to show up for Roulette Day, so a decade of this plan, and chaos starts getting ever closer to actually happening.
Better yet, don't kill anyone, and incentivize population control. Oh, wait, that would offend the people who believe that bearded men live in the sky.
While sure, many of the people who have absurdly large families are also devoutly religious, that doesn't necessarily make it a direct comparison. I'm fully aligned with the concept of removing all government-based fiscal incentives for having more than three children - got a fourth? Great. No tax deduction after the third, and you pay for schooling out of pocket. If you can pay for 'em, you can have 'em, but if someone is going to get offended by the requirement that the money come from somewhere, that's not something that religion alone is responsible for.
Maybe the best strategy is not to play the game (i.e. let people die naturally)? Even now we can prolong life medically for people that are effectively invalids and/or in chronic pain, but to what advantage? Many of them would be happy to be allowed to pass away. When medical care rises to the level that these people actually want to continue living, then maybe we can talk about longevity.
Death is not a bad option, really.
Personally, I'm with you on that. Plenty of people disagree with me, but I do believe that people should be able to make their own decision to pull the
The App Permissions seem to be missing the crucial ability to deny internet access to an app. There are apps where network data connectivity is the problem. Similarly, I wonder if Google will have this permission setting capability on its internal applications. I know that I have a rather tightly worn tin foil hat when it comes to Google and the information they get, but the Xprivacy 'deny' list on my phone is a mile long, and that's with most of their apps frozen or forcibly pulled out, I find that Google's data access on the platform demands a tight leash, leading the 'privacy' and 'permissions' charge to ring of hypocrisy - "we'll make sure that only we have your location" doesn't mean much to me :/
so how about we knock off this feature creep shit already in favor of real battery life.
With that mentality, we'd all be using phones with low-rez, monochrome screens, non-touch (button) interfaces and GPRS data capability. Hell, yeah -- I want my Nokia 8290 back! Best phone ever!
No, with that mentality, we'd have things like
And that's just off the top of my head of hardware-based changes that end users would be much more likely to want, and would not negatively impact battery life.
Wedding and event videos fall squarely in this category. No bride will be okay with spending $1,500 for a Vimeo link.
And a bride can't use a USB drive (which hold much more than a DVD and can be copies far easier)? If the requirement is that they must have a DVD, a Pro can get a USB/Firewire/TB one.
I comprehensively covered this earlier in the thread, but it's not just the drive - it's that video format support isn't exactly a guarantee, and that USB flash drives are signficantly more expensive than a single DVD (and most 32GB flash drives are, at best, at cost parity with a single Blu-Ray disc). Yes, external burners are basically the answer here, but the problem here is that the newer Mac Pro units seem to have quite the laundry list of requirements of external hardware as opposed to even the previous design.
Just because we don't burn mix CDs anymore or use them for backup devices doesn't mean that the optical drive is dead. It's a niche, but it's not dead.
I never said that there was absolutely ZERO need to use discs. I said most people don't use them these days including pros. So why include it? I saw MBs with printer ports more than a decade after you could buy a printer than needed that port. Also lots of them have PS/2 connectors still.
For Pros that do need a burner tend to use more professional ones than you can get in a computer. Dedicated duplicators are more common with pros than a computer burner.
In context, MB = MacBook? I'm not sure, but I'd argue this point regardless. I worked at Staples in 2002, and that is when printers tended to be hybrid, having both parallel and USB ports. So, let's assume that 2002 was the last year that retail printers used parallel ports, and 2003 was the year of USB exclusivity on the printer. Your 'decade after' mark means that Macbooks should have had parallel ports in 2012, but my research indicates that no Macbook (i.e Intel-based Mac) has ever had a parallel port; even my HP dv9000 series laptop from 2006 was all USB. As for dedicated duplicators, they're great, but they still need an initial burn somewhere. While I know that there are models out there will allow one or more drives to be used directly from the PC, many pros I know did the initial burn from the computer, and then a one-to-many duplication on a standalone unit. I'm not saying that that's the only way to do it, but I am saying that there's still a good reason to have just the bay available.
...and Apple was rather widely panned for doing so at the time. This was in large part due to the dearth of an alternative storage medium being included - you were either getting files around with a 56K modem, a USB ZIP drive, a USB Floppy drive, or VERY expensive 16MB flash drives that, in many cases, had slower write speeds than actual floppy disks. Floppies were passe, no doubt, but Apple should have been putting CD-RW drives in the iMac long before they actually did.
I don't know when you were around computers but Apple removed the floppy with the first iMac. And it had a CD-ROM as most other computers. It was years before CD-RWs much less blank discs were affordable. USB sticks were then becoming the standard for replacing floppies. Maybe on PC they lagged behind for years as it took PC manufacturers a while to embrace USB.
I was most certainly around during that time, and like I said - many people who bought the early iMacs were unhappy with that design decision. CD-RW drives were expensive around the very-first-gen models, but PCs started shipping with them as standard fare around that time, making the price of external drives go down pretty quickly. Blank CDs were $2-$4 each, but 4MB flash drives and CompactFlash cards were $40-$60 each; it was a long time before cost-per-megabyte of USB flash drives were favorable to optical media at the 650MB mark.
Wedding and event videos fall squarely in this category. No bride will be okay with spending $1,500 for a Vimeo link.
And cheap USB2 keys that hold a couple hundred times as much data as a DVD don't exist. Nope, they do, and are far more convenient and resilient to damage than optical media.
You're right, they do. And let's even assume that I found somewhere on the internet that had some sort of packaging that resembled a DVD case, enabling this particular flash drive to be artfully labeled as the wedding video. What format do you suggest I provide the video in? .mp4? It's a fairly common format, generally well supported, but am I certain that the drive itself will be able to handle the throughput of a high bitrate video? Will the TV (or device connected thereto)? Or will there just be a whole lot of stuttering throughout? If she plugs it into her computer, will that play it back? Windows 8 might support .mp4 natively, but Windows 7/Vista/XP do not. Should I include a VLC installer for her? I don't know what OSX supports out of the box, but I think Quicktime plays it? Should she update Quicktime? What if she wants to bring it to her parent's house to see it - are her parents likely to have a Smart TV, or some other device with a USB input that reads .mp4? .MP4 may be the closest thing for compatibility, but no menus and awkward chapter authoring become a problem. .MKV solves those problems, but now we're playing compatibility roulette all over again. With a 64GB flash drive, I certainly could provide multiple formats, one with menus, one high-bitrate .mp4, one for the iPod, a Quicktime version, and even an MPEG-1 to be absolutely certain it'll play on something. Well, now I've spent $20 on a single flash drive for this bride, and increased my render time by a factor of five.
Or, I can, y'know, give her a DVD. I've yet to know someone who doesn't have the means by which to play back a DVD. If I'm feeling adventurous, I can ask her if she has a Blu-Ray player, and give her one of those. Still cheaper, still simpler, and still more reliable than gambling on a particular video format.
You also need storage space. HD video, art assets, high resolution multitrack audio projects, and CAD drawings aren't exactly compact forms of data, y'know.
Use the local SSD as a buffer for high speed work. Copy from network to local, work, upload back. Clear space, move to next job. If you require high speed links to large disk, use thunderbolt to add dual 10GbE for iSCSI or dual 16Gb fiber channel.
And how is that a better workflow than having one's data locally available on an internal hard drive? It's sure as hell more expensive, and the copy in/copy out plan is what one would generally have to do in that case, but it shouldn't be necessary. It's easily a half-hour each way - a half hour spent working around a technological shortcoming that is only there for design reasons.
That's a rather broad brush to paint with, especially since disk I/O over the LAN starts hitting a ceiling pretty quick. This would be easier to swallow if there were a PCI Express slot to add a 10GigE/Fiber/Infiniband card, but they did away with that, too.
False. See links above. Thunderbolt IS PCI Express. It's on a cable instead of a slot. Whoop de do.
That's indeed a fair point. It's entirely possible to go down that road, but now we're talking a storage array that costs more than the Mac Pro itself. Even the Thunderbolt RAID bays I've seen have cost several hundred dollars, and that's without drives...but I will indeed concede that it's possible. That's a large part of my point though - the standard
Powerpoint isn't bad, people just don't know how to use it. Let's go back to 2007, when one of the most well-known Powerpoint* presentations was given: https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... Take a look at Steve as he's presenting. He's glancing back at the screen, from time to time, usually after his slides have advanced. The changing of the slides doesn't affect the flow of what he's saying; it underscores it at just the right time. It's mostly pictures; there are fewer than ten words on the screen at any given point, and not a bullet point in sight. The graphics are large, clear, and immediately relevant. There's no crowding on the screen, the text has a high contrast with the background, and there's nothing to distract the viewer from the presenter. Steve practiced what he was going to say, how it was going to be paced, the sequence in which points were going to be given, and designed his slides accordingly.
This was an excellent presentation for a reason - it's abundantly clear that countless hours went into every second of its exposition. This was no night-before job, with copy/pastes from Wikipedia, and low-res pictures from Google Images, being given by a presenter who was on a red eye flight three hours before he gave it, who is giving the talk having only practiced the first half just once, without an audience, much less a critical one. No, Steve knew that he had a presentation to give, so he was preparing it for quite some time.
The fact of the matter is that Powerpoint* wasn't relevant in this speech - it was the fact that it was a highly polished presentation, from a talented orator and presenter, with lots of practice, and a set of slides that were clearly designed by someone with a graphic design background. Every once in a while, you'll come across someone who is giving a presentation with a similar focus on design and implementation, who has taken their task seriously and practiced accordingly. Most of the time, they get all the time, focus, and attention to detail as a final paper in Freshman Comp, due the day after Memorial Day and read aloud half hungover - because that's how much priority the presentation itself is given by the presenter.
*Yes, it was probably Keynote.
[NEWS_OUTLET] reports that an online service provided by [ORGANIZATION_WITH_PERSONAL_DATA] was used to gather the personal information of [CUSTOMERS_OR_USERS]. Criminals were able to scrape [INSECURE_SYSTEM] to acquire [SUPPOSEDLY_SECURED_INFORMATION]. The system has been shut down while [OVERPAID_AND_INCOMPETENT_ANALYSTS] investigate and [PROMISE], and they're notifying [CUSTOMERS_OR_USERS] whose information was accessed.
At this point, you can turn this story into a Mad Lib, and fill in the blanks with basically any set of nouns, and it'll mostly be true.
I'm going to take it that you don't actually use a workstation much less a recent computer.
I'm not the author of the GP post, but I *do* use a workstation.
Let's start with OOD which I assume you mean optical drive. When was the last time you used one?
Yesterday actually, when I burnt a DVD for a friend. See kids, I know that 'streaming' is all the rage and that all the cool kids are doing it, but there's still no substitute for handing someone a physical product. Wedding and event videos fall squarely in this category. No bride will be okay with spending $1,500 for a Vimeo link. Moreover, if you're using a copyrighted song in the video, and you've got the proper licensing to do it, an upload to Youtube will still be flagged, and you'll spend plenty of time sorting that out and providing paperwork. Even if we put that aside, Youtube quality varies based on any number of things, but they *do* compress video in order to stream it. Their HD streaming looks pretty good now, but it's still got much heavier compression than a Blu-Ray disc. Just because we don't burn mix CDs anymore or use them for backup devices doesn't mean that the optical drive is dead. It's a niche, but it's not dead.
So removing it is like when computer manufacturers removed the floppy drive. Apple was one the first; others took years to do so even when it was apparent no one used them anymore.
...and Apple was rather widely panned for doing so at the time. This was in large part due to the dearth of an alternative storage medium being included - you were either getting files around with a 56K modem, a USB ZIP drive, a USB Floppy drive, or VERY expensive 16MB flash drives that, in many cases, had slower write speeds than actual floppy disks. Floppies were passe, no doubt, but Apple should have been putting CD-RW drives in the iMac long before they actually did.
Now let's talk about the HDDs. Yes they removed them. If you are using a workstation, you need speed.
You also need storage space. HD video, art assets, high resolution multitrack audio projects, and CAD drawings aren't exactly compact forms of data, y'know.
With most professionals using networked drives for collaboration
That's a rather broad brush to paint with, especially since disk I/O over the LAN starts hitting a ceiling pretty quick. This would be easier to swallow if there were a PCI Express slot to add a 10GigE/Fiber/Infiniband card, but they did away with that, too.
the need to have personal drives only comes from a small percentage of pros.
That number is so small that there's an insignificant market for storage devices that can connect to them, right? And it makes more sense for Apple to make them an online-only product rather than waste shelf space on them in the store, right? This logic is better illustrated with your optical drive notions earlier - Apple actually doesn't sell them in the store (or, in some stores, only has one or two slimline ones on the shelf, frequently with a thin layer of dust).
Since the Mac Pro is for pros and not consumers, this was an understandable choice.
Yes...Pros let everything live on iSCSI volumes or in Teh Cloud (tm) and never have a reason to store things locally. (/sarcasm)
Now let's talk about eSATA. It isn't a standard that Apple has ever supported. Their standards has always been FireWire or Thunderbolt.
This is a fair point. I wish they would have better eSATA support, but I will certainly concede that eSATA has never been their thing.
As for "underpowerd PSU", you do understand that a workstation is not a gaming machine, right?
Quadro/Firepro cards aren't exactly miserly with their power usage, especially when tied with a high end Core i7. Now, what Apple did in the redesigned Mac Pro units w
http://apcmag.com/pirated_wind...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
http://store.vmware.com/store/...
New laptop, an SSD, and VMWare Workstation, all for less than $1,000. The key here is TinyXP, the custom-built flavor of XP circulating the internet that uses 50MB of RAM after installation. Boot time for all of them would certainly be measurable if not staggered, but 16VMs on a laptop that's got 16GB of RAM, running stripped down XP installations that have one job...I think it's doable.
I still think the Layer 3 Switch option is a better one. Where that might be a bit more of a problem would be with regards to whether the update software is capable of handling the possibility of seeing more than one device available to update at the same time. Even though it's possible with networking tricks to get all the pumps addressable at the same time, there's no guarantee that the software is built for that use case. For that matter, it's entirely possible that the software will throw up if multiple instances are attempted to run concurrently. Thus, the 16-VM route may be necessary for that reason, regardless of whether or not a layer 3 switch could solve the networking problem.
I was never an Apple Maps user, but I was always of the persuasion that the map data and the routing logic was the problem, not whether the GPS had a six-foot margin of error instead of a six inch margin of error. Without good routing logic and accurate street maps, all the accuracy in the world won't help with navigation.
Then again, I'm still waiting for Delorme to release Street Atlas for Android.
What will the programming languages be like
Perl. It was simply ahead of its time.
Very. It's why they're including internet explorer as a separate application. Edge isn't intended to run IE specific applications.
My initial reaction is to say that computing is simply cyclical; what was once mainframes and dumb terminals turned into locally installed applications on desktops and laptops, and now we're doing that again with Teh Cloud (tm). However, here's the difference:
1.) In the 80's and early 90's, overall technical competence of computer users was higher. Yes, the there was always the secretary who tried to use WordPerfect to make a database because she knew exactly one program, but overall, especially if you had a home computer, you had some concept of what you were buying, and what the things on the spec sheet meant - computers being sold today will have helpfully descriptive bullet points like "great for multitasking" instead of "8GB RAM", something that wouldn't have passed muster in the last cycle. .doc and .jpg files that are more standards compliant, but many of the web apps that are popular aren't necessarily tied to the "open/change/save/close" paradigm that is commonplace in the desktop world.
1b.) Malware was much less a problem, back in the earlier days of computing. E-mail viruses were a thing, certainly, but for the most part, one ran a virus scanner and moved on with life. Also, with less hardware to throw at resident software, any kind of malware that ran resident would use enough system resources to alert the user to its presence, which is less the case now. Google Docs doesn't care about macro viruses, and users of that platform don't have to, either. There's value in that proposition for many less-technically-inclined users. Similarly, backups/hard disk crashes are "someone else's problem".
2.) In the 80's and 90's, systems were generally designed for interoperability a bit better than they are today. It's possible to send an e-mail from a server running Exchange 2016 Preview to an SMTP server from 1989 and it'll be able to meaningfully use the message. This is not the case with Facebook or WhatsApp.
3.) Inherently connected applications are the norm now. The utility of Facebook is "the rest of the stuff on Facebook". Google Docs and Pixlr don't apply to this point since they still deal with
4.) "Bleed little, bleed often" is a more culturally acceptable proposition for most people, as it gives them the instant gratification of getting the product at a price they can afford, while not requiring a gargantuan up-front cost that happens regularly as people feel the need to keep up with the Joneses. $5/month = $180 over the course of three years, which has basically been the shelf life of every version of MS Office released. Makes it a lot easier to swallow for many people, whether or not it's actually a value proposition in the long run.
4b.) The fact that virtually every software developer who has implemented IAPs instead of a one-time, up-front cost has made more money on that business model. At this point, it's solely a matter of principle that a developer of a paid application would sell a perpetual license, since general acceptance of subscription and IAP licensing makes it a better idea for everyone to go down that road instead. This was not nearly as true in the days of mainframe computing.
Now all of that being said, I do think that video editing is one of the few tasks that will never lend itself to a subscription model, beyond what Digital Juice does. Editing-as-a-service makes very little sense, since even a moderately sized project will still take tens of gigabytes of upload time, which means "hours before you can edit". Meanwhile, 100GB of assets is not unheard of for even a two hour wedding video shot in HD, and with upload speeds still measured the single-digit mbit/sec unit, it can easily be days before editing can even be entertained. At the same time, costs are a lot higher for a company looking to get into that business, because you're going to get much less ability to thin provision even 500GB of space, as the nature of what's being done is going to make much more use of that space than the OneDrive accounts with a 1TB progres
The real product that Starbucks sells is its dining room - a place where, for $3-$10, you can sit for an hour in a relatively comfortable chair and either meet with someone, get some work done, or simply not-sit-at-home. Now, that's certainly not to say that there aren't a large number of people who like the "coffee flavored chocolate milk", but there's any number of places that sell actual-coffee that see plenty of business. I'm a 7-Eleven guy myself, but Dunkin' Donuts is also very popular. Many of the gas stations around me sell either Green Mountain or Chock Full O' Nuts, so it's entirely possible to purchase drinkable coffee along with gasoline. The law of large numbers says that there's going to be a good number of people who will just prefer Starbucks' product to the competition.
I thought Microsoft removed desktop Windows from Dreamspark? It's not quite what MSDNAA used to be.
I never remember seeing desktop Windows in Dreamspark. It's why I still have a laptop running Windows Server 2008R2.
http://www.newsgroupreviews.co...
I'm not saying it's a good usenet service; there are rumors that it's been outsourced to Highwinds anyway. Even so, it's still under their name, and it's plenty for people like me who use Usenet for things other than alt.binaries.
Show me a product from 10 years ago that is still around, and popular, in essentially the same form.
Microsoft Office 2003. Now, to be fair, this does indeed depend on how you count. Office 2003 is still feature complete for most Office users. Office 2007/2010/2013 has a fresh coat of paint, and Sparklines are nice and all, but functionally speaking, it may fit your criteria. Alternatively, we can point to the fact that most Office clones (Open/LibreOffice, AbiWord, iWork) have a very similar layout and functionality.
But, let's assume that we're talking about current iterations. eBay and Paypal are still very recognizable from 2005. Amazon still sells books. The iTunes Music Store hasn't changed much. My ISP still offers Usenet access, and Yahoo mail is still quite popular; hell "e-mail" is quite possibly the longest lived digital communication protocol ever created. Google's search page hasn't changed significantly in ten years.
Now, to be fair to your point, this is certainly a list of exceptions that took a bit of time to come up with. However, I'll also point out that the reason why Office 2003 was my primary example is that it's still possible for users to install it on a computer purchased today as long as they have their installation discs. Google discontinues products when they're no longer viable for Google, and that's their prerogative. However, I submit that if Google is going to devise a means of facilitating the generation of data, to which they have the exclusive means by which to make that data useful, that the onus should be on them to ensure that the users receive copies of that data if the service is to go down. Now yes, I understand that the users are the product, not the customers, but that then lends credence to the grandparent's point. Office 2003 may long be discontinued, but Microsoft didn't take my data with them when Office 2007 was released. Google's "everything on Google's servers" philosophy has its merit, but its caveats are clear as well. I have AIM conversations from 1999 that are still stored as HTML files. I cannot say the same for discussions in Google Wave.
Had he rubber-stamped this merger, all manner of people would have been howling for blood. He'd be removed from his position, and the ensuing legal and political inquiries would have essentially ended his life and neutered any prospect of future employment.
So, with pretty much EVERYONE standing over his shoulder (with club in hand), he was FORCED to play it straight.
Counterpoint: Where do we see precedent for this as of late? Most of the high-profile cases that come to mind of late involve people getting off scot free. Enron, Martha Stewart, and Bernie Madoff are about the only names that stick in my head that had any sort of repercussions for their actions, and those are the better part of a decade ago. The level of corruption in this day and age leads me to believe that, had he intended to let the merger go through, he could have easily went to Comcast, asked for $50 million and a tenured job as a middle manager somewhere, gotten it, and had Comcast's legal department ensure that no one raised any questions.
Yes, everyone had him under an electron microscope with clubs in hand...but I sincerely doubt anyone would have actually threw the first punch, had this gone the other way.
Simple fact is that they are commonly used to find contraband and are successful in doing so regularly. They are successful in finding drugs WAY too often for it to be merely false positives to allow illegal searches.
From what I've read thus far in the thread, few are questioning whether or not a dog can reliably smell drugs/bombs/whatever. explosive/drug sniffing dogs at border checkpoints and airports make perfect sense for this very reason, and my understanding of the case is such that the use of dogs in these cases aren't being called into question.
The problem stems from a scenario like this: A cop pulls someone over for a traffic stop. During the traffic stop, the officer wants to search the car, for whatever reason - anything from what might be a genuine concern, to simply wanting to give someone a hard time because he's a jerk. So, the cop calls in a K-9 unit to smell for the "drugs", the dog smells them, and now "probable cause" has been established to search the vehicle.
The objection isn't with the dogs themselves, but with the fact that the cop explicitly calling a drug sniffing dog for what should be a routine traffic stop. The odds are highly unlikely that the dog won't be signaled to give a false positive, because at the very least it's a major embarrassment to the officer if the dog smells nothing, vs. the dog giving a false positive. Dog smells nothing, cop has egg on his face in the eyes of the citizen and the K-9 unit. Dog "smells something", cop does the search, finds nothing, "well...the dog gave the signal" is something for which there are witnesses, and for which the officer cannot be faulted.
The case here is that the cop cannot detain an individual to wait for a dog, as it applies to one-to-one scenarios such as a traffic stop. The efficacy of dogs at checkpoints and airports makes a lot more sense, because you're basically searching everyone in one shot, and are less likely to signal the dog to make a false positive in a targeted manner.
But now you're stuck with Microsoft.
Is this supposed to be some kind of improvement?
Google applications on virtually every stock (read:non-AOSP) ROM: not removable.
Microsoft applications on an AOSP ROM that, almost by definition, requires root and an unlocked bootloader: Good question; the fine summary says "integration", which could mean anything.
Still, I'd say the ultimate outcome is better with Microsoft than with Google. Not because of who Microsoft is, but because of who Cyanogen is.
"Oh noes, google is teh big evil corp'ration, let's go with teh Microsoft". I mean, what the hell are they thinking?
They're probably thinking, "Rent is due this month, and I need to put gas in my car, and I'd like to eat something besides ramen noodles tonight", like the rest of us. Microsoft is willing to give them a pile of money to make it so that a build of their ROM prompts for an outlook.com address instead of a gmail address. Dropbox, Samsung, and HTC already do this, so as long as the MS additions don't dim the "uninstall" button, I see no reason why MS being the prompt at the beginning is any better or any worse.
This just sounds like the point at which the free software folks sell out and say fuck it, let's just follow the money.
Which is why the devil is in the details. If the pile of money means "It prompts to create a Microsoft account at the beginning and OneNote and OneDrive are installed by default, with a 'skip' button for the former and working 'uninstall' buttons for the two latter", then it's foolish to turn down that pile of money. If Cyanogen with Bing(r) is just as difficult to deal with as pulling the Google stuff from a stock ROM...then that *is* selling out.
I have a hard time people are going to buy an Android device, so they can wipe it, kick out Google, and bring in Microsoft. If you want that, buy a Microsoft device and get on with it.
Personally, I really like the new Outlook client for Android, especially since I have an Exchange account. Also, I don't always store stuff in The Cloud (tm), but when I do, I use OneDrive. However, I use Xprivacy, and I see no Windows Phone equivalent for the title. I use Root Explorer, and again, I see no WP equivalent. I use Swype, which doesn't exist on Windows Phone, nor does Titanium Backup or any number of other apps. "Buy a Microsoft device" is as shortsighted an answer as when zealots say "Get a Mac" to any and every problem that happens on a PC: it ignores any number of other variables.