Actually drinking three cups of green thee a day can increase one's basal methabolism up to 4% - i.e. the body will go through the stored calories slightly faster.
I wouldn't be very surprised if this drink does something similar. However, if it's effects are in the same scale of the ones from green thee alone, don't expect any real reduction in weight - it will be more in the area of: "drinking 5 cans a day is equivalent to jogging for 10 minutes".
I call it bastardized because Javascript is an error prone and hard to maintain language, code has to be developed on the server side to support the client side Javascript and all of the server-side code, the client side Javascript and the page's HTML and CSS are tightly coupled (meaning that changing one can break the others).
From the point of view of software architecture and/or the software development process, AJAX is not good - hence "bastardized".
It is, however, the best we have at the moment to make highly responsive web-based user interfaces.
The day the contracts between MS and the big PC manufacturers are such that PCs are priced without an OS and Windows is an extra option with it's own cost is the day MS will have done enough.
Until then they're just taking advantage of their monopoly position to screw us all up... continuously - so don't expect most of us around here to give any big kudos for whatever small moves they take here and there to make the whole "get screwed my MS" process slightly less painfull ("Pull your pants down and prepare to take it again. Don't worry, this time you get a cookie").
Which Web 2.0 definition are they using here, the share-trader's one or the technologist's one?
If it's the first, then it all goes around new business models that (in a not yet fully explained way) explore the networking and first mover advantage effects of online social networking sites to make money.
Now, beyond the fact that mobile phones already support two of the most popular tools for social networks (voice calls and SMS), exactly which new social network features can the online social network sites comunity bring to the mobile phone world that either have already been tried and failed miserable (think picture exchange - MMS) or would not work properly due to the current limitiations of the technology and/or the pricing models for mobile phone usage (think YouTube-mobile)?
From the top of my head, the few uses that i can think of which might be successful are things like allowing the user to navigate his online network of contacts also from his mobile (think a LinkedIn mobile user interface). That might help with the stickiness of the service but might be difficult to moneytise.
If we're going about the technology definition of Web 2.0 that all goes about providing in a browser a user intereface that feels and reacts as one done in a thick client application (basically fast responding and updating what's displayed only where it needs to be updated - thus without a full repaint). That's actually the whole point of AJAX (which is the bastardized mix of technologies people had to came up with in order to make the above mentioned happen under today's standard browser implementations).
This has no application to mobile phones whatsover since neither WML browsers (for WAP) nor miny web-browsers support the necessary standards to allow using of AJAX like techniques.
Actually, having studied and worked with a number of trully genial people in the past, i can definitelly tell you that being intelligent isn't the same as being smart.
There is quite a number of very inteligent people out there which are unhappy/unsucessfull because they are not smart enough (or brave enough) to navigate through the social minefield in academia/companies.
I myself, even though i have a high IQ (which i'm smart enough not to rub in everybody else's faces) consider myself a lot less smart than many people with (literally) less than 2/3s of my IQ.
PS: Note that what in my definition of smart, "street wise", for example, would be a form of smart.
How about this: - Poorer people are fatter because they eat more junk food and cheap, rich in carbo-hydrates food (like potatos or rice) instead of healthier (and usually more expensive) food such as vegetables, lean meat, olive oil, etc... - At the present, intellectual work is more highly regarded and beter payed than manual work. This means that the poor tend to be those with lesser abilities to do intelectual work (people with lower IQs or those who didn't had a opportunity to get a good education).
This could explain at least part of the stated relation between IQ and BMI - poor people are both more likelly to be those less able to do intelectual work (thus, this would include people with lower IQs) and to eat cheap food with too many carbo-hydrates and fat (ie food that makes you put on body weight).
Actually in a different article about "iPod killers" i actually described a portable player which would make use of blanket Wi-Fi coverage and an online "Library Of All The Music There Is" to allow people anywhere (or at least in the major cities) to listen to any music they wanted at any time.
Unfortunatly, the major obstacle to this are the big music publishers.
Thus i do agree that the next generation in portable music players might very well be a wireless device that plays music from an online store. Even if without a "Library Of All The Music There Is", people should be able to play the music from a personal online data store. Unfortunatly i believe RIAA and their ilk will fight this tooth and nail, quite possibly to the point of buying the necessary laws to make this illegal (if they don't exist already).
Still, don't just discard the idea that Mobile Phones which can play MP3s might take over the MP3 player market. Even though mobile phone manufacturers are just trying to add features to their phones to beat the competition on their own market and aren't really trying to take over the MP3 player market, this might very well happen. A big important factor at play here is that people are lazy - they'll get a mobile phone which plays MP3s like they got mobile phones with built-in digital cameras... because it costs more or less the same and has more features. After getting such a phone, they'll use it instead of a standalone player because "I always carry my phone with me anyways".
Also note that this is not at all like the situation of digital cameras in mobile phones - unlike in the digital camera world, where a standalone cameras can offer better resolution, room for more pictures and beter lens (esp. zoom) than ones in mobile phones, playing an MP3 on earphones doesn't sound any beter because it's done by a dedicated player. The only thing a dedicated MP3 player offers beter than ones in mobile phones is more storage space, and even that can be trumphed by the mobile phone if mobile networks start offering access to MP3 libraries at reasonable prices (which will probably happen in Europe and Asia due to the mature mobile phone market, but maybe not in the US - where using a mobile phone is much more expensive).
I strongly suspect that at this point, the iPod killer will not be an iPod-like device, but instead will be some device which will shift the paradigm.
At this point, the best contestant in the horizon seems to be the mobile phone which can play MP3s. My reasoning is as follows: - Nowadays most people already have mobile phones. - The cycle of replacement on mobile phones is about 3 years. Mobile phones that can play MP3s just came out. - Carrying around just a mobile phone is always lighter than carrying around a mobile phone plus a dedicated MP3 player. - Playing MP3s isn't such a special thing anymore. The technology is widespread and the processing power inside a mobile phone is more than enough for the task. - Mobile phone manufacturers have an enormous amount of experience with things like saving batery power. - The competition on making portable MP3 players with more storage has long reached the point of diminishing returns - unless you're going on vacations, carrying around weeks worth of music is of little use. One can already see the consumers changing tack by going for smaller devices which use flash memory and have less storage capacity (for example iPod Nano). This makes it easier to build MP3 playing functionality on a mobile phone with an amount of storage which is acceptable for consumers. - Ever since the number of new mobile phone users started falling (because in some countries everybody and their cat has a mobile phone), mobile phone manufacturers have been trying to differenciate their products by adding cool new features to them. The ability to play MP3s is just another of those.
My expectation is that, slowly, as people change their old phones for newer ones, more and more people will have mobile phones that play MP3s (if it takes off like cameras on phones, people will be hard pressed to find mobile phones that don't play MP3s) and leave their dedicated MP3 players at home since there's no point in carrying around 2 devices that do the same.
Eventualy dedicated MP3 players (including iPods) will be a niche market.
It seems to me that once again the patents system is not protecting real innovation, but instead protects "Being the first to write down a patent for an obvious approach to solve a problem".
Creating and using one standard format for various types of data is the kind of solution that has been used for loads of years in the area of software, more specifically EAI (Enterprise Application Integration).
So some guys got together and said - "Hey, lets do the same but over a transmission line!" - and this stuff is actually worthy of patent protection!!!
Kinda fits with the pattern of most business and software patents - grab a solution already used in one domain and write a patent for using the same solution on another domain.
Now, i don't dispute the fact that things like the actual standard format (including things like headers and such) is worthy of protection (the competition should go through the trouble of making up their own format themselfs), but then again copyright already protects it. What pisses me off is that having a solution based on the concept of encoding multiple types of data in a single format and transmiting it is now a state granted monopoly of this guys.
If the contract between Spamhuis and Tucows was not done under US contract law (likelly, since Tucows is a Canadian company and Spamhuis is based in the UK), wouldn't Tucows be liable for breach of contract if the unilaterally terminated the contract since only Canadian courts can order a termination of the contract?
Even if IANAL, it seems logical that a court in a country cannot order the termination of a contract done under another country's law - otherwise it would be a widespread scam to engage in a contract to recieve services, recieve said services and then pay some judge in some currupt 3rd world country to order the termination of the contract (before payment).
Well, recently it came to the attention the authorities that a number of companies where granting stock options and (either immediatly or later) backdating them to a date when the stock price was low (ie, it was as if the options had been granted at a date when the stock price was lower, and thus the exercise price on the option was said low price from the chosen date).
This is illegal.
So the authorities started investigating and lo-and-behold, quite a number of tech companies had been backdating their options or commmiting other types of irregularities with their options.
<RANT> Surprise, surprise - guess that during the last market bust a lot of managers on technology companies where patting each other on their backs and saying to each other "Its not your fault that the share price is going down, it's an industry wide problem and you should still be rewarded for all your hard work". I'm sure they conveniently forgot the fat bonuses they got when the stock prices were going up, even though that was not due to the success of the company but instead due to the bull market.
Now they got caught. I'm sure the favorite excuses are: - Everybody else was doing it. - It would be impossible to retain our best people without doing it. </RANT>
As soon as i read "Web 2.0" on the article my mind immediately went into "white noise" mode with intermitent messages of "buzzword filled overhyped crap" and i couldn't read any further.
Could you people please stop feeding the traders trying to re-enact the Internet boom.
Advantages and disadvantages of a gagdet are only valid in the context in which the gadget is released.
Sure, now and by comparisson with other available gadgets, the Walkman is bulky and the media used to store the music is bulky and can only store a very limited amount of music - this is probably the reason why now nobody uses walkmans.
However, in the 80s the closest competition to the walkman was either a boombox (way much more bulky and using the same media to store the music) or the portable radio (smaller but offering no control about the music one could hear and prone to reception problems in some locations).
If you're really serious in trying to prove the iPod's "inherent superiority" i suggest you look at the present and future gadgets instead of doing an evaluation of 20 year-old technologies in a 21st century environment.
Personally i reckon the iPod killer will be..... the mobile phone that also plays MP3s. And here's 2 reason's why: - If you want to keep in touch nowadays you have to have a mobile phone. For a couple of extra bucks you can get one that plays MP3s and has enough storage for a week worth of music, and it's still cheaper than getting a standard phone plus an iPod. - The room occupide by a mobile phone will always be less than the room occupied by a mobile phone plus an iPod.
Then again i might be wrong - maybe the iPod killer will be a little gadget that you put in you ear which, using the cheapest communications transport media available at your location (Wi-Fi, GSM, Wi-Max, etc), plays music streamed from your personal music store hosted on the Internet.
Maybe cheap city-wide wireless Internet access will become a reality (blimps in the sky; municipal networks,...) and the music majors see the light and the Big Online Library of All The Music There Is will be a reality and any portable music player will just stream music from the Big Library over the wireless city networks.
Jokes about female avatars being all men aside, it's quite possible that this result is true. However this is only for online gaming, not gaming in general.
Given that on average women tend to be more adept of social activities than men (at least that's my experience), it isn't surprising at all that women go for games where they are in contact with other people.
In my long experience with online RPGs (from MUDs all the way to WoW and Guild Wars), women (as in confirmed women;)) would spend a lot more time chatting than men (which tended more often to go exploring and slaying monsters).
Online gaming is usually more appropriated to socializing (pretty much the only exception being FPSs and RTSs) than offline gaming (unless you invite your buddies over for a session of drinking and blasting each other out with RPGs;))
In this game you play the role of an electron. The game will feature ground breaking new features such as: - You never see your character, you just see an out of focus misty blob. This is to simulate Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty - Sometimes your character will be able to go through solid walls due to tunnel effect. - The scenario will look suspiciously like a madman's vision of atoms and crystaline structures - The caracter will spend most of it's time buzzing around the same place (atom) and will only be able to go somewhere else after being hit by photons with the right amount of energy.
This is scheduled to ship right after Duke Nukem Forever.
Conservative viewpoints are discouraged on the Internet because:
Theory A:
... the Internet has no central governing authority, thereby giving it a liberal bias.
Theory B: Like minded people tend to group together (even on the Net) and you're not frequenting the right sites (ie, those with a conservative bias) and thus in your perception the Internet is a liberal place
I do agree that central governing authorities tend to promote the status quo - they obviously want things to remain as they are (since after all they have power and they would very much like to continue having it) - which by definition makes them conservative (as in, they don't want change).
However i don't think a lack of a central governing authority would switch the political gears on a whole information-exchange media all the way from conservative to liberal - to me, it seems more logical that the Net is more or less politically neutral and whichever slight political bias it might have comes from the demographics of it's users - if most of it's users are young people instead of old people, expect to find more opinions from apolitical, progressive and/or liberal people than from conservative people (in average young people tend to be in the "disapointed with politics"/"wanting change" field while old people tend to be in the "keep things as they are" field).
As more people join the discussions going on the Net (discussion groups, blogs, etc), expect that the range and intensity of the opinions being voiced on the Net more closelly match the "outside" world.
Note however that there are two factors which might skew what you see on Net vs what you see outside:
It's much more easy to express one's opinions on the Net than it is outside. The (semi-)anonymity of posting on the Net allows one to express opinions which are currently non-mainstream without the social risks of publicly going against the majority (like the risk of losing one's job for being a "radical").
In sites such as Slashdot you're in contact with a lot of non-Americans. This means that in here you're getting a much broader, world representative range of viewpoints which you won't get from mainstream American media (which in my good days i call the "navel gazers" and in my bad days i call the "circle jerk"). For example mainstream European political beliefs could easilly be percieved by Americans as having a strong "liberal" bias - allowing gay marriage, abortion, consumption of soft drugs and looking at the world as a complicated place in shades of grey - while in Europe we percieve American political beliefs as having a strong conservative-religious-moralistic bias - forbiding consenting adults to engage in non-mainstream behaviours, seing the world as "us the good ones"/"them the bad ones")
Quite possibly, the Net is much more representative of full range of opinions (political or otherwise) throughout the world than any local media would be (which tend to focus on the "accepted" mainstream opinions on a specific country). For an American the contrast might be even more glaring since American mainstream media seems to be even more guilty of navel gazing and always painting everything with the same two political colors ("Democrat" or "Republican") than most mainstream media i've been exposed to (the mainstream media of several countries, which mainstream media do have a tendency for navel gazing and for often using a restricted palette of political colors, though rarelly quite as extreme as the American one).
I'm not sure I agree with some of the conclusions here (you can buy iTunes cards at Walgreens), but it's an interesting discussion.
iTunes is selling MP3s? Since when? Last i heard they where only selling DRM encumbered stuff (which is the reason i personally haven't bought anything from iTunes... and i do own an iPod).
Nobody decides to become a junkie - they try stuff, usually in their teens, and get addicted to it.
Since the price of hard drugs is so high (thanks to the so called war on drugs), a person addicted to a hard drug turns into a junkie (since they can't afford the drugs while still leading a normal life).
Experiments in some countries where they provide the drug to those addicted to hard drugs (btw i live in Holland were one such experiment is going on) have shown they can be normal members of the society (with a steady job, a house, a family - not junkies anymore).
Be very happy that your parents have warned you about the dangers of hard-drugs and your peers have not pressured you into taking them - some people don't have such luxuries.
This is not to say that people should be forgiven their crimes because of how they became what they are (far from it - those that commit a crime should pay for it), it's just me pointing out that nobody chooses to live a miserable life, usually there's a story behind it envolving some stupid choice or other usually in one's teen years.
Then again, I don't think most people take CNN seriously as a newschannel outside the US.
Not anymore: they were good when they began but for the last couple of years they've become very US-centric (you can almost hear the US anthem in the background) and biased by comparisson with BBC, Dutch news and TV5 (french).
Mostly you can figure out the bias on CNN news from the stuff they don't show and by the way that when reporting on a conflict where the US or Israel are present, they concentrate on showing the "suffering", "valour" and "good reasons" of that side and ignore the fact that the other side also has "suffering", "value" and "good reasons".
They paint the world black and white (it's grey people, GREY) and the US and it's main allies are always painted as white as pure snow.
I'm not trying to argue the severity of their crimes relative to others. I'm saying using jail for anything but violent criminals is an absolute waste of resources.
Waking up one day and finding out one's pension is gone sounds pretty violent to me. Now multiply this by 10000.
So, who's more deserving of jailtime: a) The guy that stole $50 at gunpoint? b) The guy that stole 10000 pensions via accounting tricks?
It's not the violence of the crime that counts, it's the damage it has caused.
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As for the point about usefullness to society and rehabilitation, consider the following: - Who's more ethically challenged - the well paid manager that knowingly steals the pensions of 10000 people or the junkie going through cold turkey that steals someone to pay for his next dose?
Could you really ever trust the manager which has stollen from thousands without need?
At least the junkie, if he can be freed from his adiction, can quite possibly turn into a productive member of society. The manager on the other hand has pretty much proven his lack the necessary ethics and morals the have any responsability whatesoever for anything belonging to other people.
People don't just learn the value of ethics when their punishment is being sent around giving lectures in universities - they (and all other potential white-collar thiefs watching) will just learn that crime pays.
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Sending the manager to prision is not a waste of resources because: a) Said manager has proven unsuited to take responsability on other people's things. One cannot manage anything if one cannot be trusted not to steal it. As such this person's main abilities (management) cannot be used and beyond that he's no more than an inexperience person with a high education. As such sending him to prison wastes little value. b) To satisfy society, a punishment must be given that matches the damage caused by the crime. c) To avoid that other ethically challanged managers commit crimes of this dimension, it must be clear that the risk*loss factor of commiting such a crime outweights the potential gains.
You hear it on the News and from the politicians every day: America is so much beter than the rest of the world - freer than North Korea, wealthier than Burkina Faso, more Democratic than China.
There's nowhere else in the world where people live so well - no need for rioting.
Now bend over and pull your pants down for another session of indoctrination....
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This post brought to you by the "Brainwashing Of The Masses Is Alive And Well In Modern Democracies Department".
With some subtle variation, the cube farm can be transformed from a soulless cell block into something that actually improves productivity. If you organize each functional team's cubes around their own central open areas, communication between team members will improve significantly.
Actually, most of the productivity problems with cubicles have to do with noise and visual distractions.
Working in a "team cubicle" does indeed (in my experience) provide easier communication within the team but it also increases noise and visual distractions since: A) A lot of work is done by sub-groups within the team - typically experts in related areas. These will engage in conversations/discussions related to their specific part of the work which break everybody else's concentration. B) There is a lot more "random" movements which can distract the eye (and the human eye is hardwired to detected movement and call attention to it) in a "team cubicle" than in a single person cubicle. This can be reduced a lot by having people work facing the cubicle walls.
This increase in noise and visual distraction actually decreases concentration and thus productivity. In the programming stage of a project this is actually a bad thing since a lot more time is spent coding than communicating (unless you have no design, in which case your whole development process is probably broken and communication is the least of your problems)
> Yes because obviously the US Constitution is the best constitution there is.
Considering that it's kept us democratic and free for 219 years, without a single military coup in history, I'd say it's a darned good one.
Well, there was the small issue of a civil war, so i reckon there's probably a couple of constitutions with a beter track record.
The part about democratic is also flawed: i suggest that investigate "gerrymandering" to see how politicians make sure they get reelected whether or not they do a good job and "proportional vote" to see how a real democracy (all votes are equal) really works.
As for freedom, i suggest you check the latest couple of laws passed in the US - more specifically the ones about torture and indefinite detainment of foreign non-combatants and how a US citizen can easilly be declared a non-combatant and stripped of his/her citizenship and thus become subject to those laws.
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It's really entertaining to see how people can get brainwashed into ignoring the flaws of the political/social systems under which they live (and they all have flaws) and into spewing propaganda about how "my country is the greatest of them all".
I guess never having lived in another country (vacations don't count) and being surrounded by media which almost exclusivelly spews country-centered news probably makes one especially prone to believing nacionalistic bullshit.
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If you want to be a real patriot, then be proud of the good things of your country, do your best to improve those that are not-so-good and always suspect the sleazy politicians that go around patting people on the back and saying "we live in a perfect country, the best there is, nothing needs changing".
Slashdot Mirror
Actually drinking three cups of green thee a day can increase one's basal methabolism up to 4% - i.e. the body will go through the stored calories slightly faster.
I wouldn't be very surprised if this drink does something similar. However, if it's effects are in the same scale of the ones from green thee alone, don't expect any real reduction in weight - it will be more in the area of: "drinking 5 cans a day is equivalent to jogging for 10 minutes".
In other words, pretty much worthless.
I call it bastardized because Javascript is an error prone and hard to maintain language, code has to be developed on the server side to support the client side Javascript and all of the server-side code, the client side Javascript and the page's HTML and CSS are tightly coupled (meaning that changing one can break the others).
From the point of view of software architecture and/or the software development process, AJAX is not good - hence "bastardized".
It is, however, the best we have at the moment to make highly responsive web-based user interfaces.
The day the contracts between MS and the big PC manufacturers are such that PCs are priced without an OS and Windows is an extra option with it's own cost is the day MS will have done enough.
... continuously - so don't expect most of us around here to give any big kudos for whatever small moves they take here and there to make the whole "get screwed my MS" process slightly less painfull ("Pull your pants down and prepare to take it again. Don't worry, this time you get a cookie").
Until then they're just taking advantage of their monopoly position to screw us all up
Which Web 2.0 definition are they using here, the share-trader's one or the technologist's one?
If it's the first, then it all goes around new business models that (in a not yet fully explained way) explore the networking and first mover advantage effects of online social networking sites to make money.
Now, beyond the fact that mobile phones already support two of the most popular tools for social networks (voice calls and SMS), exactly which new social network features can the online social network sites comunity bring to the mobile phone world that either have already been tried and failed miserable (think picture exchange - MMS) or would not work properly due to the current limitiations of the technology and/or the pricing models for mobile phone usage (think YouTube-mobile)?
From the top of my head, the few uses that i can think of which might be successful are things like allowing the user to navigate his online network of contacts also from his mobile (think a LinkedIn mobile user interface). That might help with the stickiness of the service but might be difficult to moneytise.
If we're going about the technology definition of Web 2.0 that all goes about providing in a browser a user intereface that feels and reacts as one done in a thick client application (basically fast responding and updating what's displayed only where it needs to be updated - thus without a full repaint). That's actually the whole point of AJAX (which is the bastardized mix of technologies people had to came up with in order to make the above mentioned happen under today's standard browser implementations).
This has no application to mobile phones whatsover since neither WML browsers (for WAP) nor miny web-browsers support the necessary standards to allow using of AJAX like techniques.
Actually, having studied and worked with a number of trully genial people in the past, i can definitelly tell you that being intelligent isn't the same as being smart.
There is quite a number of very inteligent people out there which are unhappy/unsucessfull because they are not smart enough (or brave enough) to navigate through the social minefield in academia/companies.
I myself, even though i have a high IQ (which i'm smart enough not to rub in everybody else's faces) consider myself a lot less smart than many people with (literally) less than 2/3s of my IQ.
PS: Note that what in my definition of smart, "street wise", for example, would be a form of smart.
How about this:
- Poorer people are fatter because they eat more junk food and cheap, rich in carbo-hydrates food (like potatos or rice) instead of healthier (and usually more expensive) food such as vegetables, lean meat, olive oil, etc...
- At the present, intellectual work is more highly regarded and beter payed than manual work. This means that the poor tend to be those with lesser abilities to do intelectual work (people with lower IQs or those who didn't had a opportunity to get a good education).
This could explain at least part of the stated relation between IQ and BMI - poor people are both more likelly to be those less able to do intelectual work (thus, this would include people with lower IQs) and to eat cheap food with too many carbo-hydrates and fat (ie food that makes you put on body weight).
Actually in a different article about "iPod killers" i actually described a portable player which would make use of blanket Wi-Fi coverage and an online "Library Of All The Music There Is" to allow people anywhere (or at least in the major cities) to listen to any music they wanted at any time.
... because it costs more or less the same and has more features. After getting such a phone, they'll use it instead of a standalone player because "I always carry my phone with me anyways".
Unfortunatly, the major obstacle to this are the big music publishers.
Thus i do agree that the next generation in portable music players might very well be a wireless device that plays music from an online store. Even if without a "Library Of All The Music There Is", people should be able to play the music from a personal online data store.
Unfortunatly i believe RIAA and their ilk will fight this tooth and nail, quite possibly to the point of buying the necessary laws to make this illegal (if they don't exist already).
Still, don't just discard the idea that Mobile Phones which can play MP3s might take over the MP3 player market. Even though mobile phone manufacturers are just trying to add features to their phones to beat the competition on their own market and aren't really trying to take over the MP3 player market, this might very well happen.
A big important factor at play here is that people are lazy - they'll get a mobile phone which plays MP3s like they got mobile phones with built-in digital cameras
Also note that this is not at all like the situation of digital cameras in mobile phones - unlike in the digital camera world, where a standalone cameras can offer better resolution, room for more pictures and beter lens (esp. zoom) than ones in mobile phones, playing an MP3 on earphones doesn't sound any beter because it's done by a dedicated player. The only thing a dedicated MP3 player offers beter than ones in mobile phones is more storage space, and even that can be trumphed by the mobile phone if mobile networks start offering access to MP3 libraries at reasonable prices (which will probably happen in Europe and Asia due to the mature mobile phone market, but maybe not in the US - where using a mobile phone is much more expensive).
I strongly suspect that at this point, the iPod killer will not be an iPod-like device, but instead will be some device which will shift the paradigm.
At this point, the best contestant in the horizon seems to be the mobile phone which can play MP3s. My reasoning is as follows:
- Nowadays most people already have mobile phones.
- The cycle of replacement on mobile phones is about 3 years. Mobile phones that can play MP3s just came out.
- Carrying around just a mobile phone is always lighter than carrying around a mobile phone plus a dedicated MP3 player.
- Playing MP3s isn't such a special thing anymore. The technology is widespread and the processing power inside a mobile phone is more than enough for the task.
- Mobile phone manufacturers have an enormous amount of experience with things like saving batery power.
- The competition on making portable MP3 players with more storage has long reached the point of diminishing returns - unless you're going on vacations, carrying around weeks worth of music is of little use. One can already see the consumers changing tack by going for smaller devices which use flash memory and have less storage capacity (for example iPod Nano). This makes it easier to build MP3 playing functionality on a mobile phone with an amount of storage which is acceptable for consumers.
- Ever since the number of new mobile phone users started falling (because in some countries everybody and their cat has a mobile phone), mobile phone manufacturers have been trying to differenciate their products by adding cool new features to them. The ability to play MP3s is just another of those.
My expectation is that, slowly, as people change their old phones for newer ones, more and more people will have mobile phones that play MP3s (if it takes off like cameras on phones, people will be hard pressed to find mobile phones that don't play MP3s) and leave their dedicated MP3 players at home since there's no point in carrying around 2 devices that do the same.
Eventualy dedicated MP3 players (including iPods) will be a niche market.
It seems to me that once again the patents system is not protecting real innovation, but instead protects "Being the first to write down a patent for an obvious approach to solve a problem".
Creating and using one standard format for various types of data is the kind of solution that has been used for loads of years in the area of software, more specifically EAI (Enterprise Application Integration).
So some guys got together and said - "Hey, lets do the same but over a transmission line!" - and this stuff is actually worthy of patent protection!!!
Kinda fits with the pattern of most business and software patents - grab a solution already used in one domain and write a patent for using the same solution on another domain.
Now, i don't dispute the fact that things like the actual standard format (including things like headers and such) is worthy of protection (the competition should go through the trouble of making up their own format themselfs), but then again copyright already protects it. What pisses me off is that having a solution based on the concept of encoding multiple types of data in a single format and transmiting it is now a state granted monopoly of this guys.
If the contract between Spamhuis and Tucows was not done under US contract law (likelly, since Tucows is a Canadian company and Spamhuis is based in the UK), wouldn't Tucows be liable for breach of contract if the unilaterally terminated the contract since only Canadian courts can order a termination of the contract?
Even if IANAL, it seems logical that a court in a country cannot order the termination of a contract done under another country's law - otherwise it would be a widespread scam to engage in a contract to recieve services, recieve said services and then pay some judge in some currupt 3rd world country to order the termination of the contract (before payment).
Simple: The light was sent free of charge - it's an offer.
Well, recently it came to the attention the authorities that a number of companies where granting stock options and (either immediatly or later) backdating them to a date when the stock price was low (ie, it was as if the options had been granted at a date when the stock price was lower, and thus the exercise price on the option was said low price from the chosen date).
This is illegal.
So the authorities started investigating and lo-and-behold, quite a number of tech companies had been backdating their options or commmiting other types of irregularities with their options.
<RANT>
Surprise, surprise - guess that during the last market bust a lot of managers on technology companies where patting each other on their backs and saying to each other "Its not your fault that the share price is going down, it's an industry wide problem and you should still be rewarded for all your hard work". I'm sure they conveniently forgot the fat bonuses they got when the stock prices were going up, even though that was not due to the success of the company but instead due to the bull market.
Now they got caught. I'm sure the favorite excuses are:
- Everybody else was doing it.
- It would be impossible to retain our best people without doing it.
</RANT>
As soon as i read "Web 2.0" on the article my mind immediately went into "white noise" mode with intermitent messages of "buzzword filled overhyped crap" and i couldn't read any further.
Could you people please stop feeding the traders trying to re-enact the Internet boom.
Thanks in advance.
Advantages and disadvantages of a gagdet are only valid in the context in which the gadget is released.
..... the mobile phone that also plays MP3s. And here's 2 reason's why:
...) and the music majors see the light and the Big Online Library of All The Music There Is will be a reality and any portable music player will just stream music from the Big Library over the wireless city networks.
Sure, now and by comparisson with other available gadgets, the Walkman is bulky and the media used to store the music is bulky and can only store a very limited amount of music - this is probably the reason why now nobody uses walkmans.
However, in the 80s the closest competition to the walkman was either a boombox (way much more bulky and using the same media to store the music) or the portable radio (smaller but offering no control about the music one could hear and prone to reception problems in some locations).
If you're really serious in trying to prove the iPod's "inherent superiority" i suggest you look at the present and future gadgets instead of doing an evaluation of 20 year-old technologies in a 21st century environment.
Personally i reckon the iPod killer will be
- If you want to keep in touch nowadays you have to have a mobile phone. For a couple of extra bucks you can get one that plays MP3s and has enough storage for a week worth of music, and it's still cheaper than getting a standard phone plus an iPod.
- The room occupide by a mobile phone will always be less than the room occupied by a mobile phone plus an iPod.
Then again i might be wrong - maybe the iPod killer will be a little gadget that you put in you ear which, using the cheapest communications transport media available at your location (Wi-Fi, GSM, Wi-Max, etc), plays music streamed from your personal music store hosted on the Internet.
Maybe cheap city-wide wireless Internet access will become a reality (blimps in the sky; municipal networks,
Think big!
Jokes about female avatars being all men aside, it's quite possible that this result is true. However this is only for online gaming, not gaming in general.
;)) would spend a lot more time chatting than men (which tended more often to go exploring and slaying monsters).
;))
Given that on average women tend to be more adept of social activities than men (at least that's my experience), it isn't surprising at all that women go for games where they are in contact with other people.
In my long experience with online RPGs (from MUDs all the way to WoW and Guild Wars), women (as in confirmed women
Online gaming is usually more appropriated to socializing (pretty much the only exception being FPSs and RTSs) than offline gaming (unless you invite your buddies over for a session of drinking and blasting each other out with RPGs
On WoW, most sexilly claded female dark elves characters had (teenage) masculine voices whenever we got them on teamspeak ...
In this game you play the role of an electron. The game will feature ground breaking new features such as:
- You never see your character, you just see an out of focus misty blob. This is to simulate Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty
- Sometimes your character will be able to go through solid walls due to tunnel effect.
- The scenario will look suspiciously like a madman's vision of atoms and crystaline structures
- The caracter will spend most of it's time buzzing around the same place (atom) and will only be able to go somewhere else after being hit by photons with the right amount of energy.
This is scheduled to ship right after Duke Nukem Forever.
I do agree that central governing authorities tend to promote the status quo - they obviously want things to remain as they are (since after all they have power and they would very much like to continue having it) - which by definition makes them conservative (as in, they don't want change).
However i don't think a lack of a central governing authority would switch the political gears on a whole information-exchange media all the way from conservative to liberal - to me, it seems more logical that the Net is more or less politically neutral and whichever slight political bias it might have comes from the demographics of it's users - if most of it's users are young people instead of old people, expect to find more opinions from apolitical, progressive and/or liberal people than from conservative people (in average young people tend to be in the "disapointed with politics"/"wanting change" field while old people tend to be in the "keep things as they are" field).
As more people join the discussions going on the Net (discussion groups, blogs, etc), expect that the range and intensity of the opinions being voiced on the Net more closelly match the "outside" world.
Note however that there are two factors which might skew what you see on Net vs what you see outside:
Quite possibly, the Net is much more representative of full range of opinions (political or otherwise) throughout the world than any local media would be (which tend to focus on the "accepted" mainstream opinions on a specific country). For an American the contrast might be even more glaring since American mainstream media seems to be even more guilty of navel gazing and always painting everything with the same two political colors ("Democrat" or "Republican") than most mainstream media i've been exposed to (the mainstream media of several countries, which mainstream media do have a tendency for navel gazing and for often using a restricted palette of political colors, though rarelly quite as extreme as the American one).
iTunes is selling MP3s? Since when? Last i heard they where only selling DRM encumbered stuff (which is the reason i personally haven't bought anything from iTunes
Nobody decides to become a junkie - they try stuff, usually in their teens, and get addicted to it.
Since the price of hard drugs is so high (thanks to the so called war on drugs), a person addicted to a hard drug turns into a junkie (since they can't afford the drugs while still leading a normal life).
Experiments in some countries where they provide the drug to those addicted to hard drugs (btw i live in Holland were one such experiment is going on) have shown they can be normal members of the society (with a steady job, a house, a family - not junkies anymore).
Be very happy that your parents have warned you about the dangers of hard-drugs and your peers have not pressured you into taking them - some people don't have such luxuries.
This is not to say that people should be forgiven their crimes because of how they became what they are (far from it - those that commit a crime should pay for it), it's just me pointing out that nobody chooses to live a miserable life, usually there's a story behind it envolving some stupid choice or other usually in one's teen years.
Not anymore: they were good when they began but for the last couple of years they've become very US-centric (you can almost hear the US anthem in the background) and biased by comparisson with BBC, Dutch news and TV5 (french).
Mostly you can figure out the bias on CNN news from the stuff they don't show and by the way that when reporting on a conflict where the US or Israel are present, they concentrate on showing the "suffering", "valour" and "good reasons" of that side and ignore the fact that the other side also has "suffering", "value" and "good reasons".
They paint the world black and white (it's grey people, GREY) and the US and it's main allies are always painted as white as pure snow.
PS: I'm talking about CNN-international here.
Waking up one day and finding out one's pension is gone sounds pretty violent to me.
Now multiply this by 10000.
So, who's more deserving of jailtime:
a) The guy that stole $50 at gunpoint?
b) The guy that stole 10000 pensions via accounting tricks?
It's not the violence of the crime that counts, it's the damage it has caused.
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As for the point about usefullness to society and rehabilitation, consider the following:
- Who's more ethically challenged - the well paid manager that knowingly steals the pensions of 10000 people or the junkie going through cold turkey that steals someone to pay for his next dose?
Could you really ever trust the manager which has stollen from thousands without need?
At least the junkie, if he can be freed from his adiction, can quite possibly turn into a productive member of society. The manager on the other hand has pretty much proven his lack the necessary ethics and morals the have any responsability whatesoever for anything belonging to other people.
People don't just learn the value of ethics when their punishment is being sent around giving lectures in universities - they (and all other potential white-collar thiefs watching) will just learn that crime pays.
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Sending the manager to prision is not a waste of resources because:
a) Said manager has proven unsuited to take responsability on other people's things. One cannot manage anything if one cannot be trusted not to steal it. As such this person's main abilities (management) cannot be used and beyond that he's no more than an inexperience person with a high education. As such sending him to prison wastes little value.
b) To satisfy society, a punishment must be given that matches the damage caused by the crime.
c) To avoid that other ethically challanged managers commit crimes of this dimension, it must be clear that the risk*loss factor of commiting such a crime outweights the potential gains.
No, no, no.
....
America is the greatest country in the world.
You hear it on the News and from the politicians every day: America is so much beter than the rest of the world - freer than North Korea, wealthier than Burkina Faso, more Democratic than China.
There's nowhere else in the world where people live so well - no need for rioting.
Now bend over and pull your pants down for another session of indoctrination
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This post brought to you by the "Brainwashing Of The Masses Is Alive And Well In Modern Democracies Department".
Actually, most of the productivity problems with cubicles have to do with noise and visual distractions.
Working in a "team cubicle" does indeed (in my experience) provide easier communication within the team but it also increases noise and visual distractions since:
A) A lot of work is done by sub-groups within the team - typically experts in related areas. These will engage in conversations/discussions related to their specific part of the work which break everybody else's concentration.
B) There is a lot more "random" movements which can distract the eye (and the human eye is hardwired to detected movement and call attention to it) in a "team cubicle" than in a single person cubicle. This can be reduced a lot by having people work facing the cubicle walls.
This increase in noise and visual distraction actually decreases concentration and thus productivity. In the programming stage of a project this is actually a bad thing since a lot more time is spent coding than communicating (unless you have no design, in which case your whole development process is probably broken and communication is the least of your problems)
Well, there was the small issue of a civil war, so i reckon there's probably a couple of constitutions with a beter track record.
The part about democratic is also flawed: i suggest that investigate "gerrymandering" to see how politicians make sure they get reelected whether or not they do a good job and "proportional vote" to see how a real democracy (all votes are equal) really works.
As for freedom, i suggest you check the latest couple of laws passed in the US - more specifically the ones about torture and indefinite detainment of foreign non-combatants and how a US citizen can easilly be declared a non-combatant and stripped of his/her citizenship and thus become subject to those laws.
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It's really entertaining to see how people can get brainwashed into ignoring the flaws of the political/social systems under which they live (and they all have flaws) and into spewing propaganda about how "my country is the greatest of them all".
I guess never having lived in another country (vacations don't count) and being surrounded by media which almost exclusivelly spews country-centered news probably makes one especially prone to believing nacionalistic bullshit.
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If you want to be a real patriot, then be proud of the good things of your country, do your best to improve those that are not-so-good and always suspect the sleazy politicians that go around patting people on the back and saying "we live in a perfect country, the best there is, nothing needs changing".