For dead-silence you might be better off with getting a LED backlight. In my laptop I can't hear the hard drive over the whine of the backlight converter.
They introduced the iPod in an existing market and now pretty much dominate that market. Not because the iPod is very good, but because the competition sucked. And still sucks.
Now they have entered the smartphone market. And, once again, they immediately grabbed a sizable piece of the market. Is it because the iPhone is so wonderful? No, again, it is because the competition sucks. Windows Mobile is a steaming pile, Symbian has more problems than it solves and Android, well, let's wait and see, but initial reports doesn't look all that great.
Remember, succes in the consumer market is never decided on technical merit. It is about usability, interface and perception. Apple really stands out in those areas.
Single battle? Perhaps. But the opposition doesn't seem to be able to conjure up some heavy artillery, so the war might be as well declared "won".
Even better, after you're done optimizing your own job, start working with your boss on making him obsolete. He gets promoted, you get his old job. Which isn't all that much work anymore.
He then leverages you into a cushy advisor role, and you advice to make him a board member.
He makes you advisor to the board. You advice to make him VP.
Get the picture? Been there, done exactly that. We make a mean, lean, promoting machine!:-)
If you're not happy with Vista (and I can certainly understand that) and you feel you're being winked-and-nudged by the hoops you have to jump through to get XP, maybe you shouldn't still be giving MS the cash.
What if everyone that wanted XP didn't buy Vista to downgrade and instead wrote to MS that they wanted XP without hoops?
Sure, the first few hundred will be laughed at by customer support. The next thousand maybe not so much. And after a hunderd thousand customers called (and sales not made) you can bet XP is all over the shelves again.
Sometimes life can be so easy, but we choose to make it difficult.
There are plenty of film clips that show the blasts of these things. However, there is never any scale to them. Either the blast is so far away that you can't possibly compare it to scenery or it is footage from high flying planes.
So, out of curiosity, how big are these mushroom clouds anyway?
It hadn't occurred to the writers that even in the complete absence of ethics, it just makes no sense to use humans to do brute labor.
Perhaps they are doing it for the entertainment value? If you see how humans are treating animals, I can fully imagine an advanced race treating humans as slaves. Even if they aren't the pinnacle of efficiency, at least you can beat or shoot them.
All bad joking aside, it really is horrific when you see these working conditions. However, there seems to be a great demand for jobs like this, as the alternative is working yourself to death on a farm. The fact that all those uneducated, unskilled laborers come to the factories in new busloads every day drives the price way down.
It's not really that much different to how it used to be in Europe, it's just that we had about 150 years to further develop ourselves. Sucks for current-generation Chinese, but their grandchildren can bask in luxury we won't be seeing in that age.
I'm a carpenter. Among other things, I make decorated wooded doors. For each door I create, I get payed. If you make pictures of these doors and give them to anyone you know, I really don't care.
If I was a musician, I would get payed to perform. Each time I perform, I get payed, great! And if someone gives away recordings from this, I certainly wouldn't care. In fact, I would welcome it, because it would get more people into my concerts.
The key point here is that people don't just want a continuous supply of digital content; they want a continuous supply of new digital content.
True. To ensure this, it might be better to pay the creators, instead of the big media corporations? True talent isn't payed all that well. The money goes to line the coffers at RIAA/MPAA and to the few selected easily molded talentless 'artists' like Britney.
I'm pretty confident that getting rid of the big media cartels improves artist income, as a whole. Well, at least for those that actually have talent.
As long as the fileformat is somewhat sane, this isn't at all difficult. To replace hamburger with cheeseburger between "two lines down from pickles=yes" and "three lines above the next occurrence of relish=no":
For a lot of things I really am an early adopter. However, the item offered has to have an added value to my life (other than just 'oh shiny').
For e-book readers I can't see the business case, for me. I have the choice of buying a paper book, or, for maybe somewhat less, an e-book version. For that last one, I suffer a substantial upfront investment in the hardware.
So, what could I gain from this? Either I have to buy enough books to offset this upfront investment, or I have to get some non-financial gain. For me, that would be the possibility of having my whole book collection contained in one device. Think of it as an mp3-player: having one with 10 songs isn't useful, having all your music on you is very useful.
Converting all my old books isn't (currently) possible, so it has to have a monetary gain. But I don't see it in my case, when I factor in the lifespan of the device and the non-transferable books due to DRM. Perhaps next year another party comes out with an even better reader and then what? Keep with Kindle because of the vendor lock-in or sink the cost and go for the next platform?
Maybe I am a closet Luddite, and maybe I really should buy the Kindle so my money goes to further development with a possible future outcome that suits me better. Or maybe this device just isn't for me in its current form.
I understand your point, and can agree with you that the act of digitizing the book merits a compensation. And I could live with paying my share of the labor of that, but I won't pay for the content again, as I feel I already payed for that in the paper version.
Point is, they will never sell me a Kindle (and follow-up purchases) if there isn't an easy way to transfer my whole book collection to the device.
Having to scan a few thousand books myself isn't an option (and think of the duplicate work if everyone is to do this!).
Amazon charging a small fee or comping me the e-books that I've already bought with them in paper format would get me to buy a Kindle without delay.
Not having an easy way to get my collection on Kindle would bar me from buying it as doesn't fit well to my needs.
My plan is quite a bit more elaborate, but what I posted above isn't all that hard to make happen.
For one thing: Amazon knows what I've bought with them. They also have digital versions of those books. So, if I buy a Kindle, they could preload it with (or give credit towards) those books.
That doesn't solve the problem for books I bought elsewhere (and with the DRM they all employ it won't be solved anytime soon) but that's a bit unrealistic anyhow.
For novels, sure, you read one or maybe two in parallel. But now consider reference manuals and other techie books. I'm sure anyone reading/. has loads of them. I sure wouldn't mind taking them all with me if at all possible on this device.
Not going to happen, as I'm definitely not going to buy my books again, just in a different format.
Give me my current bookcollection for free with the device, I already payed for the content and the duplication cost of e-books is zero.
Ok, my best shot: you can only get new books on it, there is no way to get your current collection digitized for the Kindle.
That means you are going to get, maybe, ten books on it over the lifetime of the device. Is that worth the price? The paperbacks are way cheaper, that's for sure.
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For dead-silence you might be better off with getting a LED backlight. In my laptop I can't hear the hard drive over the whine of the backlight converter.
They introduced the iPod in an existing market and now pretty much dominate that market. Not because the iPod is very good, but because the competition sucked. And still sucks.
Now they have entered the smartphone market. And, once again, they immediately grabbed a sizable piece of the market. Is it because the iPhone is so wonderful? No, again, it is because the competition sucks. Windows Mobile is a steaming pile, Symbian has more problems than it solves and Android, well, let's wait and see, but initial reports doesn't look all that great.
Remember, succes in the consumer market is never decided on technical merit. It is about usability, interface and perception. Apple really stands out in those areas.
Single battle? Perhaps. But the opposition doesn't seem to be able to conjure up some heavy artillery, so the war might be as well declared "won".
To prevent draconian laws being passed, the Pirate Party should raise awareness of this.
While they got a lot of attention some time ago, nowadays they aren't heard of too often. So, Pirats, get off you behinds and lobby!
No, you're not.
Try a default blue Gnome theme, it really hurts the eyes. I can't stand to use it.
The latest Ubuntu's have a less orangy brown that is even better than it used to be.
So if Shuttleworth changes the colorscheme, fine, but I really hope someone keeps the brown one alive.
Even better, after you're done optimizing your own job, start working with your boss on making him obsolete. He gets promoted, you get his old job. Which isn't all that much work anymore.
:-)
He then leverages you into a cushy advisor role, and you advice to make him a board member.
He makes you advisor to the board. You advice to make him VP.
Get the picture? Been there, done exactly that. We make a mean, lean, promoting machine!
They still use the same stickers. They only upgraded the glue to "will-never-ever-come-off" strenght.
I hate those stickers.
If you're not happy with Vista (and I can certainly understand that) and you feel you're being winked-and-nudged by the hoops you have to jump through to get XP, maybe you shouldn't still be giving MS the cash.
What if everyone that wanted XP didn't buy Vista to downgrade and instead wrote to MS that they wanted XP without hoops?
Sure, the first few hundred will be laughed at by customer support. The next thousand maybe not so much. And after a hunderd thousand customers called (and sales not made) you can bet XP is all over the shelves again.
Sometimes life can be so easy, but we choose to make it difficult.
There are plenty of film clips that show the blasts of these things. However, there is never any scale to them. Either the blast is so far away that you can't possibly compare it to scenery or it is footage from high flying planes.
So, out of curiosity, how big are these mushroom clouds anyway?
It hadn't occurred to the writers that even in the complete absence of ethics, it just makes no sense to use humans to do brute labor.
Perhaps they are doing it for the entertainment value? If you see how humans are treating animals, I can fully imagine an advanced race treating humans as slaves. Even if they aren't the pinnacle of efficiency, at least you can beat or shoot them.
In support of above, I can recommend seeing the 2005 documentary China Blue.
It illustrates exactly these choices.
In most (consumer) product categories, you can't buy quality anymore. It's all crap.
Could be worse, they could be making Zunes!
All bad joking aside, it really is horrific when you see these working conditions. However, there seems to be a great demand for jobs like this, as the alternative is working yourself to death on a farm. The fact that all those uneducated, unskilled laborers come to the factories in new busloads every day drives the price way down.
It's not really that much different to how it used to be in Europe, it's just that we had about 150 years to further develop ourselves. Sucks for current-generation Chinese, but their grandchildren can bask in luxury we won't be seeing in that age.
Nonsense.
I'm a carpenter. Among other things, I make decorated wooded doors. For each door I create, I get payed. If you make pictures of these doors and give them to anyone you know, I really don't care.
If I was a musician, I would get payed to perform. Each time I perform, I get payed, great! And if someone gives away recordings from this, I certainly wouldn't care. In fact, I would welcome it, because it would get more people into my concerts.
The key point here is that people don't just want a continuous supply of digital content; they want a continuous supply of new digital content.
True. To ensure this, it might be better to pay the creators, instead of the big media corporations? True talent isn't payed all that well. The money goes to line the coffers at RIAA/MPAA and to the few selected easily molded talentless 'artists' like Britney.
I'm pretty confident that getting rid of the big media cartels improves artist income, as a whole. Well, at least for those that actually have talent.
As long as the fileformat is somewhat sane, this isn't at all difficult. To replace hamburger with cheeseburger between "two lines down from pickles=yes" and "three lines above the next occurrence of relish=no":
You can get quite funky as those two range markers are fully regexp-aware, of course!
Thanks for the discussion, I enjoyed it. It's rare these days on /. to find this... :-)
For a lot of things I really am an early adopter. However, the item offered has to have an added value to my life (other than just 'oh shiny').
For e-book readers I can't see the business case, for me. I have the choice of buying a paper book, or, for maybe somewhat less, an e-book version. For that last one, I suffer a substantial upfront investment in the hardware.
So, what could I gain from this? Either I have to buy enough books to offset this upfront investment, or I have to get some non-financial gain. For me, that would be the possibility of having my whole book collection contained in one device. Think of it as an mp3-player: having one with 10 songs isn't useful, having all your music on you is very useful.
Converting all my old books isn't (currently) possible, so it has to have a monetary gain. But I don't see it in my case, when I factor in the lifespan of the device and the non-transferable books due to DRM. Perhaps next year another party comes out with an even better reader and then what? Keep with Kindle because of the vendor lock-in or sink the cost and go for the next platform?
Maybe I am a closet Luddite, and maybe I really should buy the Kindle so my money goes to further development with a possible future outcome that suits me better. Or maybe this device just isn't for me in its current form.
I understand your point, and can agree with you that the act of digitizing the book merits a compensation. And I could live with paying my share of the labor of that, but I won't pay for the content again, as I feel I already payed for that in the paper version.
Point is, they will never sell me a Kindle (and follow-up purchases) if there isn't an easy way to transfer my whole book collection to the device. Having to scan a few thousand books myself isn't an option (and think of the duplicate work if everyone is to do this!).
Amazon charging a small fee or comping me the e-books that I've already bought with them in paper format would get me to buy a Kindle without delay.
Not having an easy way to get my collection on Kindle would bar me from buying it as doesn't fit well to my needs.
My plan is quite a bit more elaborate, but what I posted above isn't all that hard to make happen.
For one thing: Amazon knows what I've bought with them. They also have digital versions of those books. So, if I buy a Kindle, they could preload it with (or give credit towards) those books.
That doesn't solve the problem for books I bought elsewhere (and with the DRM they all employ it won't be solved anytime soon) but that's a bit unrealistic anyhow.
No, by Amazon sending me the Kindle version of all paper books I've bought with them.
For novels, sure, you read one or maybe two in parallel. But now consider reference manuals and other techie books. I'm sure anyone reading /. has loads of them. I sure wouldn't mind taking them all with me if at all possible on this device.
Not going to happen, as I'm definitely not going to buy my books again, just in a different format.
Give me my current bookcollection for free with the device, I already payed for the content and the duplication cost of e-books is zero.
The only way I'm ever going to buy an e-book reader is when my current book collections can be transfered to the machine.
Until that time, no thanks.
Convince me not to.
Ok, my best shot: you can only get new books on it, there is no way to get your current collection digitized for the Kindle.
That means you are going to get, maybe, ten books on it over the lifetime of the device. Is that worth the price? The paperbacks are way cheaper, that's for sure.
Trees that are prone to explode in cold weather don't grow up to be large trees, they get killed of rather soon.
So, it is no miracle you don't see exploding trees in your cold locale.
Now get the Amazon rainforest to -15C and I promise you a whole lot of snap, crackle and pop!
Can't blame the climate for the arsonists.
Forest fires are a natural forest rejuvenation mechanism. Temperature isn't so much the cause as is drought (although they often go hand in hand).
However, if the news is trustworthy, the current fires are most all set by insane criminals.