As it has done with Lenovo and the other manufacturers, the quality will decline.
Because of disruptive tablet and other mobile technologies in this market, the quality will decline regardless of the manufacturer. IBM has rightfully recognized this and is selling off before that decline can hurt the IBM brand. Look at HP for a comparison of inevitable dropping quality on commoditized (race to the bottom) hardware hurting the parent brand.
Makes perfect sense because IBM has not been a consumer company for quite some time now. They are as much a "good high-margin hardware company" as Apple is a set-top-box manufacturer. Sure, they essentially brought the PC to market, but those Model-M keyboards/.ers love and the Thinkpad division they dropped years ago were already then tiny slices of their business.
There's no innovation left in POS. It's a solved problem. IBM makes their money as an extremely large scale systems innovator. That's what they're good at, and that's what they can market well. At this point, the only innovation happening in POS is wireless/mobility use, and there are countless tiny little startups cornering that market via iOS and Android apps.
Build cash registers is a commodity market and essentially a race to the bottom. IBM is smart for selling off this business segment while it still has value, and focusing on the big systems and big data that is their core business.
Would you rather that IBM operated on the MS model? They could buy everything under the sun and have incredible research, but then do a shitty job trying to manage and integrate across their product lines and business services. Or they could go the Xerox route and not put any of their cool research into anything usable.
No, as both a shareholder and a consumer who has respect for the brand, I'm glad they can focus on what works for them, and sell off divisions that are in stagnating industries that no longer benefit from the innovation focus they've had for the last 100 years. I don't see anyone here complaining that they sold off their typewriter division (thus forming Lexmark).
There is no markup needed to use proportional width fonts. You get that for free with 0 extra effort in any system. For the few times you need a fixed-width font, any WYSIWYG email client makes it trivial to format a block of text monospaced.
Proportional spaced fonts does not require HTML. Plaintext can be rendered in monospace or proportional space and even the command line works fine either way. The OP was bitching about a "ghastly proportional font". The GP's point about proportional fonts being more legible, and the ubiquity of HTML are two different points.
/. is using Ooyala for their video hosting/playback service.
Ooyala does support HTML5 video delivery, but I believe it only triggers the switch away from Flash on iOS devices. I'm not sure there's a workaround as I haven't hacked around much with the Ooyala player code.
the whole thing needs to be chopped up and processed as hazardous waste. Unless, of course, you think we are safe to just pitch it in the ocean since "its not as bad as an oil spill..."
Your argument actually gives more weight to nuclear. Because it was on land we CAN clean up and dispose of a large amount of the contamination. We can't clean up anywhere near as much of the BP Gulf mess.
The obvious way is to take to the sea and fly a drone over real debris and see what happens. It uses a lot of fuel and generates a lot of sea sickness.
I think a lot of tenured teachers and administrators justifiably look at the past 20-30 years of computing history in schools. Invariably every 5 years there's been a new cutting-edge way of doing things that completely invalidates previous methods. Transitioning and training the switch between systems is expensive, and often can require advanced technical assistance to accomplish, not to mention hardware/software prerequisites that may not be yet available through the usual provisioning channels.
5 years ago, using Wordpress on a daily basis to make available the kind of stuff the submitter is describing would have been almost impossible for any but the teachers most dedicated to blogging.
10 years ago, publishing this stuff on a daily basis would have been nigh impossible for any teachers who didn't want to learn about HTML and FTP.
15 years ago, publishing this stuff on a daily basis would have been nigh impossible for any teachers who didn't have access to their own webservers.
20 years ago, publishing this stuff on a daily basis would have been nigh possible except in University environments.
We're still in the early days of computing and much of what we see online is essentially experimental. While we definitely should be exposing our kids to this rapid change in the classroom, expecting underfunded institutions to be able to keep their systems and staff on the cutting edge is a laughable pipe dream
Oh I'm certain the GP was using sarcasm... which is why I interpreted it as trolling (looks like some mods agree with me). The GP was implying that FF did not need to implement a Metro interface because that continues in the tradition of "Let's make Firefox worse!!"
In order to provide an alternative to IE on Windows 8, Firefox needs a Metro UI.
Right, because normal programs won't run on Windows 8.
Nice trolling.
Normal programs will run just fine in Desktop mode on Win8. However, if you want your program to be on the new default dashboard interface (Metro) then it has to be a Metro app. And since both IE and Chrome can appear there, it makes absolute sense that FF should have the feature included as well.
If you want to be a full replacement to IE, you need to be a full replacement to IE, and that means showing up in the system wherever IE can show up. If you actually RTFA, you'll see they're talking about hooking into Win8's built-in browser search and sharing hooks, as well as showing how easy it is to add a Metro interface to FF because of the already existing theming layer within FF.
The Oyster card in London which copycats the Octopus card in Hong Kong are both essentially anonymous digital payments. They were built as transit token systems and you can buy cards and fill them up at kiosks all over town anonymously. The cool thing though is that the card readers have been made available to private merchants as well (mostly convenience stores, restaurants, etc.)
From my experience with both, the HK version is far more widely used and seemed to work quite well.
It won't be easy to get governments to pass digital cash into law, though, not with big banks and megacorps lobbying for centralized, electronic, traceable currency.
You have that a bit backwards. It's not the megacorps lobbying for traceable currency, it's the government forcing the banks to have traceable currency so that they can monitor and shut down terrorists, drug cartels, tax frauds, etc. Hint: the term "money laundering" means moving money through transactions not traceable by the government. Plenty of banks and megacorps have in the past and continue to provide essentially untraceable transactions.
If Bitcoin has taught us anything, it's possible to create an irreversible, cryptographic currency — but so far it has failed because it doesn't have sovereign backing.
You're going to need to provide some evidence for the claim that bitcoins have failed because of a lack of sovereign entity backing them. There's a whole slew of other reasons that probably contribute far more to the poor adoption rate of bitcoins.
Why would any government endorse an untraceable digital currency scheme, when the whole point of the scheme is to circumvent the government's regulatory and investigatory powers?
From the original video it looks like taking apart and repairing the new iPad is pretty much the same as the iPad 2.
But don't let that stop you from writing a scaremongering blog rant that links together FBI practices, human rights abuse, and environmental issues in electronics manufacturing,
It says in the summary (and in the article) that the LED at very low electrical input levels, acts as a heat pump. It absorbs local heat energy and converts into photons.
So you get more light out than electricity in, because you're stealing heat and converting it to light. It's not more than 100% efficient, it's multiple energy sources being used. No breaking the laws of thermodynamics.
Yeah... try that and see what it does to program UI layouts. You'll be amazed at how few actually work properly.
UI toolkits are almost all pixel-based, and make it tedious to do vector-based work. So while the text may scale up, the button sizes and positions don't, so everything ends up cropped and overlapping for a hideous mess.
College in the early-mid 80's was very different than 1992. By '92 a 386 IBM-compatibile PC bought from Costco came standard with Windows 2.5 and an internal ISA modem with Compuserve and Prodigy pre-installed.
Even thought the WWW didn't yet exist like we know it today, Internet use had spread well beyond BBS. Even my local library had a dial-in digital catalog. A lot of people had machines at the time that were capable of getting the virus, even if they didn't know how to use their machine in a way that would risk them getting it in the first place.
This was the dawn of the Information Superhighway, there was even an Outland/Bloom County comic in the Sunday papers where Bill the Cat is roadkill on the Information Superhighway, and Opus is ticketed for trying to get on with a typewriter. The general public knew internets existed, even if they didn't have the slightest clue about how to access or use them. The media at the time created a frenzy about this virus, scaring everyone who had a computer at home with a telephone jack.
And right at the beginning of public awareness of the internet age meant that people were panicking and incredibly misinformed.
News reports said the virus was transmitted over the phone lines (dial up internet) and suggested turning off potentially infected machines on the day of as a precaution. My father took this to mean he should unplug his answering machine that day because it had a computer chip that timestamped messages and other nifty features. In his mind, computer chip + telephone line = susceptible to the virus.
Everyone was touting the Information Superhighway at the time, but no one knew what it was, and very few people actually understood the risk a virus could pose. The media drummed up scare stories (just like those nightly investigations into some obscure not-really-dangerous thing) and the uneducated public took the bait. I'm not going to put the blame on the AV manufacturers for this one.
The problem is that classic console resolutions aren't scaled up linearly to HD resolutions.
What I'd like to see is linear scaling, so crisp pixel edges and lo-def lines remain sharp at high resolutions. But because of the bicubic and other scaling algorithms, the edges of pixels* are blurred on higher-resolution displays, so everything just looks fuzzy. It's not all that noticeable for live-action video footage, but put something like an NES on there and its almost painful to look at. Even the Wii looks horrendous on a large-screen 1080p display because it only does 480p.
Basically, everything looks like if you put your LCD monitor into 640x480 mode... blurry as hell.
*(yes I know NTSC scanline doesn't map equivalently to modern pixel-based displays, but I'm illustrating a point)
I'm not convinced about the commuter-only viability. In the 90s I knew a woman driving some Chrysler sedan with a CNG conversion kit. Several times a month she would drive round trip to Las Vegas from San Diego (300 miles each way) without the need to fill up. That's far better range than any gasoline/diesel equivalent unless you have a truck with spare capacity tanks.
Any 1/2 ton truck should have a reliable lifespan of at least 150,000 - 200,000 miles. So if you switch immediately after initial purchase to CNG only you should be able to pay off the conversion at least 3 times over.
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Because of disruptive tablet and other mobile technologies in this market, the quality will decline regardless of the manufacturer. IBM has rightfully recognized this and is selling off before that decline can hurt the IBM brand. Look at HP for a comparison of inevitable dropping quality on commoditized (race to the bottom) hardware hurting the parent brand.
Makes perfect sense because IBM has not been a consumer company for quite some time now. They are as much a "good high-margin hardware company" as Apple is a set-top-box manufacturer. Sure, they essentially brought the PC to market, but those Model-M keyboards /.ers love and the Thinkpad division they dropped years ago were already then tiny slices of their business.
There's no innovation left in POS. It's a solved problem. IBM makes their money as an extremely large scale systems innovator. That's what they're good at, and that's what they can market well. At this point, the only innovation happening in POS is wireless/mobility use, and there are countless tiny little startups cornering that market via iOS and Android apps.
Build cash registers is a commodity market and essentially a race to the bottom. IBM is smart for selling off this business segment while it still has value, and focusing on the big systems and big data that is their core business.
Would you rather that IBM operated on the MS model? They could buy everything under the sun and have incredible research, but then do a shitty job trying to manage and integrate across their product lines and business services. Or they could go the Xerox route and not put any of their cool research into anything usable.
No, as both a shareholder and a consumer who has respect for the brand, I'm glad they can focus on what works for them, and sell off divisions that are in stagnating industries that no longer benefit from the innovation focus they've had for the last 100 years. I don't see anyone here complaining that they sold off their typewriter division (thus forming Lexmark).
The patent clearly states 3D/VR implementations.
Except the wounds aren't healed... that sounds more like a zombie than a respawn.
BS.
There is no markup needed to use proportional width fonts. You get that for free with 0 extra effort in any system. For the few times you need a fixed-width font, any WYSIWYG email client makes it trivial to format a block of text monospaced.
Proportional spaced fonts does not require HTML. Plaintext can be rendered in monospace or proportional space and even the command line works fine either way. The OP was bitching about a "ghastly proportional font". The GP's point about proportional fonts being more legible, and the ubiquity of HTML are two different points.
/. is using Ooyala for their video hosting/playback service.
Ooyala does support HTML5 video delivery, but I believe it only triggers the switch away from Flash on iOS devices. I'm not sure there's a workaround as I haven't hacked around much with the Ooyala player code.
Your argument actually gives more weight to nuclear. Because it was on land we CAN clean up and dispose of a large amount of the contamination. We can't clean up anywhere near as much of the BP Gulf mess.
If it's a drone, how is there sea sickness?
I don't think it's a luddite issue.
I think a lot of tenured teachers and administrators justifiably look at the past 20-30 years of computing history in schools. Invariably every 5 years there's been a new cutting-edge way of doing things that completely invalidates previous methods. Transitioning and training the switch between systems is expensive, and often can require advanced technical assistance to accomplish, not to mention hardware/software prerequisites that may not be yet available through the usual provisioning channels.
5 years ago, using Wordpress on a daily basis to make available the kind of stuff the submitter is describing would have been almost impossible for any but the teachers most dedicated to blogging.
10 years ago, publishing this stuff on a daily basis would have been nigh impossible for any teachers who didn't want to learn about HTML and FTP.
15 years ago, publishing this stuff on a daily basis would have been nigh impossible for any teachers who didn't have access to their own webservers.
20 years ago, publishing this stuff on a daily basis would have been nigh possible except in University environments.
We're still in the early days of computing and much of what we see online is essentially experimental. While we definitely should be exposing our kids to this rapid change in the classroom, expecting underfunded institutions to be able to keep their systems and staff on the cutting edge is a laughable pipe dream
Oh I'm certain the GP was using sarcasm... which is why I interpreted it as trolling (looks like some mods agree with me). The GP was implying that FF did not need to implement a Metro interface because that continues in the tradition of "Let's make Firefox worse!!"
Any transaction is only anonymous if you fund it with cash, not credit or debit cards.
Nice trolling.
Normal programs will run just fine in Desktop mode on Win8. However, if you want your program to be on the new default dashboard interface (Metro) then it has to be a Metro app. And since both IE and Chrome can appear there, it makes absolute sense that FF should have the feature included as well.
If you want to be a full replacement to IE, you need to be a full replacement to IE, and that means showing up in the system wherever IE can show up. If you actually RTFA, you'll see they're talking about hooking into Win8's built-in browser search and sharing hooks, as well as showing how easy it is to add a Metro interface to FF because of the already existing theming layer within FF.
Hmmm... that reminds me...
The Oyster card in London which copycats the Octopus card in Hong Kong are both essentially anonymous digital payments. They were built as transit token systems and you can buy cards and fill them up at kiosks all over town anonymously. The cool thing though is that the card readers have been made available to private merchants as well (mostly convenience stores, restaurants, etc.)
From my experience with both, the HK version is far more widely used and seemed to work quite well.
You have that a bit backwards. It's not the megacorps lobbying for traceable currency, it's the government forcing the banks to have traceable currency so that they can monitor and shut down terrorists, drug cartels, tax frauds, etc. Hint: the term "money laundering" means moving money through transactions not traceable by the government. Plenty of banks and megacorps have in the past and continue to provide essentially untraceable transactions.
You're going to need to provide some evidence for the claim that bitcoins have failed because of a lack of sovereign entity backing them. There's a whole slew of other reasons that probably contribute far more to the poor adoption rate of bitcoins.
Why would any government endorse an untraceable digital currency scheme, when the whole point of the scheme is to circumvent the government's regulatory and investigatory powers?
From the original video it looks like taking apart and repairing the new iPad is pretty much the same as the iPad 2.
But don't let that stop you from writing a scaremongering blog rant that links together FBI practices, human rights abuse, and environmental issues in electronics manufacturing,
In theory.
It says in the summary (and in the article) that the LED at very low electrical input levels, acts as a heat pump. It absorbs local heat energy and converts into photons.
So you get more light out than electricity in, because you're stealing heat and converting it to light. It's not more than 100% efficient, it's multiple energy sources being used. No breaking the laws of thermodynamics.
You missed the "yourself" part of "yourself and your kids".
This is why so many digital cameras have displays that can flip out to face the same way as the lens.
Yeah... try that and see what it does to program UI layouts. You'll be amazed at how few actually work properly.
UI toolkits are almost all pixel-based, and make it tedious to do vector-based work. So while the text may scale up, the button sizes and positions don't, so everything ends up cropped and overlapping for a hideous mess.
College in the early-mid 80's was very different than 1992. By '92 a 386 IBM-compatibile PC bought from Costco came standard with Windows 2.5 and an internal ISA modem with Compuserve and Prodigy pre-installed.
Even thought the WWW didn't yet exist like we know it today, Internet use had spread well beyond BBS. Even my local library had a dial-in digital catalog. A lot of people had machines at the time that were capable of getting the virus, even if they didn't know how to use their machine in a way that would risk them getting it in the first place.
This was the dawn of the Information Superhighway, there was even an Outland/Bloom County comic in the Sunday papers where Bill the Cat is roadkill on the Information Superhighway, and Opus is ticketed for trying to get on with a typewriter. The general public knew internets existed, even if they didn't have the slightest clue about how to access or use them. The media at the time created a frenzy about this virus, scaring everyone who had a computer at home with a telephone jack.
And right at the beginning of public awareness of the internet age meant that people were panicking and incredibly misinformed.
News reports said the virus was transmitted over the phone lines (dial up internet) and suggested turning off potentially infected machines on the day of as a precaution. My father took this to mean he should unplug his answering machine that day because it had a computer chip that timestamped messages and other nifty features. In his mind, computer chip + telephone line = susceptible to the virus.
Everyone was touting the Information Superhighway at the time, but no one knew what it was, and very few people actually understood the risk a virus could pose. The media drummed up scare stories (just like those nightly investigations into some obscure not-really-dangerous thing) and the uneducated public took the bait. I'm not going to put the blame on the AV manufacturers for this one.
The problem is that classic console resolutions aren't scaled up linearly to HD resolutions.
What I'd like to see is linear scaling, so crisp pixel edges and lo-def lines remain sharp at high resolutions. But because of the bicubic and other scaling algorithms, the edges of pixels* are blurred on higher-resolution displays, so everything just looks fuzzy. It's not all that noticeable for live-action video footage, but put something like an NES on there and its almost painful to look at. Even the Wii looks horrendous on a large-screen 1080p display because it only does 480p.
Basically, everything looks like if you put your LCD monitor into 640x480 mode... blurry as hell.
*(yes I know NTSC scanline doesn't map equivalently to modern pixel-based displays, but I'm illustrating a point)
I'm not convinced about the commuter-only viability. In the 90s I knew a woman driving some Chrysler sedan with a CNG conversion kit. Several times a month she would drive round trip to Las Vegas from San Diego (300 miles each way) without the need to fill up. That's far better range than any gasoline/diesel equivalent unless you have a truck with spare capacity tanks.
Any 1/2 ton truck should have a reliable lifespan of at least 150,000 - 200,000 miles. So if you switch immediately after initial purchase to CNG only you should be able to pay off the conversion at least 3 times over.