"Too big to fail" means so big that when a failure happens (which would have happened anyway), the powers that be need to step in and fix it rather than let it fail as the consequences would be too terrible for everyone else. It does not mean "so big that it'll never fail", nor "so big that it'll inevitably fail".
If humanity is "too big to fail"- who would step in to stop us failing?
Yeah, who cares about half of the world's population? Who needs them as customers, anyway? Isn't it unpatriotic to sell things to non-white people, anyway?
Before anyone says "piracy", that actually makes the figures even more interesting. People who pirate software can usually be trusted to use the software they want to use- because what other motivations are there? Legitimate customers (whether consumers or companies) have other factors at play; for example, the fact that their local Best Buy now only sells Windows 8 computers means that they'll definitely be using a Windows 8 computer. If the person who is willing to steal anything can't be persuaded to "upgrade" to your newest product, you should probably worry about the appeal of your newest product.
Of course they do, that's their job. But that's no bad thing. For a long time, the attitude from Procurement has been "if it doesn't have a Microsoft / IBM / Oracle logo on it, don't even think about it". Lots of guff about "strategic partnerships" and "proven support models" and so forth.
The fact that they've opened their mind to the concept of alternative suppliers, who should be judged on their own merits (or, at least, on Gartner's executive summary...) can only be a good thing. If it forces our Architecture or business area guys to work a bit harder to justify their first choices, so be it.
If you look at it from an angle of "lost economic output" it has more relevance than the egg-boiling metaphor.
1,522 man years is a long time. Can you imagine how much work you could do with a team of 400 people working for almost 4 years flat out? And that's per day; 555,000 man years per year is something like the same amount of effort that was put into the Apollo programme.
Obviously people aren't really doing it because no-one reads the EULA. But Adobe obviously "wants" people to. Adobe is basically expecting the world to put the same amount of work into reading their EULAs as was put into the Apollo space programme.
I think that does demonstrate the absurdity of what they're expecting people to do in order to stay legal and kosher.
Oxygen is highly reactive; it doesn't stay put in the atmosphere for very long at all before it bonds with something else and stops being elemental oxygen. In order to have free oxygen in our atmosphere, it needs to be constantly replenished- whether by life (as on Earth) or some other process.
Planets with an oxygen-rich atmosphere but no life just straight up can't happen.
Normally I'd reply with some dry cynicism, but actually I have noticed a bit of a sea change in my company recently (my company being a big UK national). We're just kicking off a project to implement a big MS software suite (SharePoint and peripheries, as an upgrade). The Architecture guys are dead set on the MS solution, which is no surprise (and the right choice, considering our ecosystem and our appetite for change at this exact moment). But what is a surprise is how much push back we've had from Procurement (who are not techies). They've been pushing us, HARD, to source alternatives and do a full tendering process.
I doubt it will come to anything, but it's the first time I've ever seen anyone with clout from outside of the IT department pushing against a Microsoft solution. If they have truly wised up and started to look at software sourcing with a bit more of a hard nose, future projects could be very interesting indeed.
Touch screens aren't free, in money terms. One of the premises of TFA is that "all laptops will have a touch screen one day". While it is certainly true that there's no harm in having every type of input available, do I really want to pay extra, have a sluightly heavier device with slightly lower battery life, so that it can have something that isn't relevant to my main use cases?
iPads and other tablets have proved that there's a market for devices which don't have the kitchen sink. The iPad has one button, one connector, no ethernet, no removable batteries or SD cards. In exchange it gets to be cheaper, thinner, etc. While it's true that it'd be great to have everything "just in case", Apple have proved that people are happy to buy a device that only has what is relevant to their use cases.
If my Thinkpad for work had a touchscreen, I wouldn't use it but barely at all. I certainly don't miss not having one. So if including one made the device less good in other ways, including one would be a retrograde step for me.
Don't get me wrong, I play AAA games, and I play FPS games and 3rd Person Action games. I don't mind buying from big developers (with a few morale exceptions), and I certainly have no objection to THQ.
But Humble Bundles usually offer a selection of something different from what I see in the Amazon "best sellers" table. Usually the indy games have something interesting or different about them which makes me really want to dive in. This THQ bundle is just 7 games of the same sort that I've already got a whole shelf full of. Nothing wrong with that, and it's great that they're cheap/pay what you want/for charity. It's just...meh. Nothing to get me excited.
I was just thinking the opposite. Other HBs have made me excited by the weird and wonderful indie titles on offer, giddy at the thought of what unusual gaming treats await me (note: the reality does not always live up to the anticipation, but that's just life all over really). This HB is a big old "so what"- five first person shooters and two third person actioners. I mean I'm sure they're good games and everything, but it hardly sets the soul on fire does it?
In the era of gold-standard currencies, gold was for all intents and purposes not limited- it was a continually growing supply, as mines continued to flood the market with produce, and new mines were established every year. When the supply stopped growing so consistently- known mines started to dry up, and "undiscovered country" became scarce- deflation kicked in and was disastrous. The Great Depression is often blamed on this deflationary effect. That is why all major economies abandoned it.
Look at gold prices now. The price has tripled in the last decade- massive over-valuation, due to demand hugely outstripping demand (mostly from investors and speculators, rather than anyone wanting to do anything practical with it). Nobody knows if the price is going to spike even higher, or crash spectacularly; it is extraordinarily volatile.
Well it is fairly interesting. Yawning (to me) is an activity which involves a large amount of inhaling and exhaling. Foetuses don't breathe, so that's kind of odd. Some people have mooted that yawning is a social (even socially learned) activity- the fact that foetuses can't have socially learned it is interesting too.
Feeding it into the "is abortion OK" argument, though, is stupid.
If someone offers to sell you magic beans for $1 million and you do so, and then you find the beans to not have been magic after all, then yes you are a victim of fraud and the perpetrator should go to jail. But that doesn't mean you weren't an absolute blithering idiot.
Criminal negligence is a much underused bit of law, but it basically means- when you're so stupid or lazy that something terrible happens, even though you haven't committed any other specific criminal act, you are still criminally negligent.
The Amazon river and rainforest doesn't have a country code. Brazil, Peru etc. do, but there isn't one specifically for transnational Amazon-related issues. Sounds pretty reasonable that they would want one for it now that it's up for grabs.
Remember that the Amazon is not a country- it's a river and a rain forest. Barring a global calamity, the river will definitely outlast the internet shopping company.
Presumably we're comparing like-for-like in terms of price here. I can find the Samsung Chromebook from TFA for £229. In terms of Windows-loaded netbooks, the best processor I can find for that money is the Asus Eee PC 1025C, which comes with an Atom N2800.
If you can find a device with the same form factor (ultra-portable) and same price but with an Intel Core processor, link away.
Autonomy was a successful money-making business. When HP bought it, there wasn't a soul alive who couldn't see that they were paying an extremely generous price. Take the following article on the BBC at the time: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14582489
HP paid 64% above the publicly-traded market price for the company. On the markets hearing the news, HP shares ended the trading day 7.6% down, making them the worst faller in the Dow Jones Industrial Average that day.
Maybe the management at Autonomy were telling porkies to convince HP to pay that much- but why the hell would HP swallow it? If everybody else could see it was mad, why couldn't they?
I remember when I first moved in to this house and got Virgin Media broadband set up, it had ISP-end content filtering in place for "adult content", and was quite a chore to turn off.
I noticed it was on when, in the first day of having it set up, I went to watch a clip of some BBC adaptation of Canterbury Tales on YouTube. The particular episode had a sex scene in it, and was blocked. Any "adult content" filter which prevents people from watching BBC adaptations of Chaucer because there's a glimpse of nipple for half a second is clearly broken beyond usefulness. And if Baby Timmy is really going to be scarred for life at a half-second glimpse of a soap actress's nipple and 10 seconds of giggling and groaning, Baby Timmy is probably too fragile to survive until adulthood.
Well, aside from other obvious reasons- the UK is technically a theocratic country with a state religion. The head of state (the Queen) is also head of the Church of England, and bishops get 25 seats in Parliament (the House of Lords- the upper house) without needing to be elected.
I mean obviously that doesn't make much difference in a modern context, but it does give the Religious Right rather a lot of ammunition whenever anyone suggests anything that might not be to a Christian's tastes. For example, see the gay marriage furore.
I believe their real plan is to have ISPs implement an on-by-default "adult content" blocker. This smacks of that technique used by teenagers to get things out of their parents: ask for something outrageous, have it refused, then suggest a "compromise"- which is the thing you were after all along. By proposing something insanely draconian, they're hoping that when they "compromise" with their simple ISP filter the liberal lobbyists will think "phew, that's a relief!" and accept it.
It doesn't have to be the biggest selling game of all time to still catch the eye of the publishers. If it can sell as well as the middle of the game charts, not cost the earth to develop, and turn a profit- there will be plenty of publishers itching to dip their toe into the genre. Look at the strategy game genre for an example- that's not topped the charts in years (if ever), and yet hundreds of games are still churned out in the genre (some of which are pretty boilerplate and mediocre).
If "makes $500 million on day one" was the only thing that counted as a success, the overwhelming majority of games, films, music and television would be dead in the water.
Slashdot Mirror
"Too big to fail" means so big that when a failure happens (which would have happened anyway), the powers that be need to step in and fix it rather than let it fail as the consequences would be too terrible for everyone else. It does not mean "so big that it'll never fail", nor "so big that it'll inevitably fail".
If humanity is "too big to fail"- who would step in to stop us failing?
Yeah, who cares about half of the world's population? Who needs them as customers, anyway? Isn't it unpatriotic to sell things to non-white people, anyway?
Before anyone says "piracy", that actually makes the figures even more interesting. People who pirate software can usually be trusted to use the software they want to use- because what other motivations are there? Legitimate customers (whether consumers or companies) have other factors at play; for example, the fact that their local Best Buy now only sells Windows 8 computers means that they'll definitely be using a Windows 8 computer. If the person who is willing to steal anything can't be persuaded to "upgrade" to your newest product, you should probably worry about the appeal of your newest product.
Of course they do, that's their job. But that's no bad thing. For a long time, the attitude from Procurement has been "if it doesn't have a Microsoft / IBM / Oracle logo on it, don't even think about it". Lots of guff about "strategic partnerships" and "proven support models" and so forth.
The fact that they've opened their mind to the concept of alternative suppliers, who should be judged on their own merits (or, at least, on Gartner's executive summary...) can only be a good thing. If it forces our Architecture or business area guys to work a bit harder to justify their first choices, so be it.
You mean aside from:
The 2006 probe on its way to Pluto, which will leave the Solar System right behind Voyager 1.
The most sophisticated deep space telescope ever conceived.
The car sized vehicle trundling around on Mars that was delivered by a rocket powered crane.
The Mercury orbiter (Mercury being the most difficult planet to reach in the Solar System, FYI) which has discovered billions of tonnes of water.
The space station as big as St Paul's Cathedral.
The 24km supercollider working with the primal forces that constituted the Big Bang.
For an enthusiast of scientific discovery, this is a fantastic time to be alive.
If you look at it from an angle of "lost economic output" it has more relevance than the egg-boiling metaphor.
1,522 man years is a long time. Can you imagine how much work you could do with a team of 400 people working for almost 4 years flat out? And that's per day; 555,000 man years per year is something like the same amount of effort that was put into the Apollo programme.
Obviously people aren't really doing it because no-one reads the EULA. But Adobe obviously "wants" people to. Adobe is basically expecting the world to put the same amount of work into reading their EULAs as was put into the Apollo space programme.
I think that does demonstrate the absurdity of what they're expecting people to do in order to stay legal and kosher.
It does depend on who you ask:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201111-201211
Android = 31.7%
iOS = 23.7%
Sort of shows up how useless these website-based stat trackers actually are, considering how widely they vary.
Still, these figures do show up an effect a sibling poster mentioned- iOS users do seem to use the web more than their market share would suggest.
Oxygen is highly reactive; it doesn't stay put in the atmosphere for very long at all before it bonds with something else and stops being elemental oxygen. In order to have free oxygen in our atmosphere, it needs to be constantly replenished- whether by life (as on Earth) or some other process.
Planets with an oxygen-rich atmosphere but no life just straight up can't happen.
Normally I'd reply with some dry cynicism, but actually I have noticed a bit of a sea change in my company recently (my company being a big UK national). We're just kicking off a project to implement a big MS software suite (SharePoint and peripheries, as an upgrade). The Architecture guys are dead set on the MS solution, which is no surprise (and the right choice, considering our ecosystem and our appetite for change at this exact moment). But what is a surprise is how much push back we've had from Procurement (who are not techies). They've been pushing us, HARD, to source alternatives and do a full tendering process.
I doubt it will come to anything, but it's the first time I've ever seen anyone with clout from outside of the IT department pushing against a Microsoft solution. If they have truly wised up and started to look at software sourcing with a bit more of a hard nose, future projects could be very interesting indeed.
RTFA. It is from NetApplications, no location filters:
http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0
Win7 = 44.71%
WinXP = 39.82%
Win Vista = 5.70%
Win8 =1.11%
Touch screens aren't free, in money terms. One of the premises of TFA is that "all laptops will have a touch screen one day". While it is certainly true that there's no harm in having every type of input available, do I really want to pay extra, have a sluightly heavier device with slightly lower battery life, so that it can have something that isn't relevant to my main use cases?
iPads and other tablets have proved that there's a market for devices which don't have the kitchen sink. The iPad has one button, one connector, no ethernet, no removable batteries or SD cards. In exchange it gets to be cheaper, thinner, etc. While it's true that it'd be great to have everything "just in case", Apple have proved that people are happy to buy a device that only has what is relevant to their use cases.
If my Thinkpad for work had a touchscreen, I wouldn't use it but barely at all. I certainly don't miss not having one. So if including one made the device less good in other ways, including one would be a retrograde step for me.
Don't get me wrong, I play AAA games, and I play FPS games and 3rd Person Action games. I don't mind buying from big developers (with a few morale exceptions), and I certainly have no objection to THQ.
But Humble Bundles usually offer a selection of something different from what I see in the Amazon "best sellers" table. Usually the indy games have something interesting or different about them which makes me really want to dive in. This THQ bundle is just 7 games of the same sort that I've already got a whole shelf full of. Nothing wrong with that, and it's great that they're cheap/pay what you want/for charity. It's just...meh. Nothing to get me excited.
I was just thinking the opposite. Other HBs have made me excited by the weird and wonderful indie titles on offer, giddy at the thought of what unusual gaming treats await me (note: the reality does not always live up to the anticipation, but that's just life all over really). This HB is a big old "so what"- five first person shooters and two third person actioners. I mean I'm sure they're good games and everything, but it hardly sets the soul on fire does it?
The knowledge that there is intelligent life in the universe seems like a pretty big benefit to me. Knowledge is beneficial in its own right.
Just because it's not going to give you a flying car or a cure for cancer doesn't mean it isn't beneficial.
In the era of gold-standard currencies, gold was for all intents and purposes not limited- it was a continually growing supply, as mines continued to flood the market with produce, and new mines were established every year. When the supply stopped growing so consistently- known mines started to dry up, and "undiscovered country" became scarce- deflation kicked in and was disastrous. The Great Depression is often blamed on this deflationary effect. That is why all major economies abandoned it.
Look at gold prices now. The price has tripled in the last decade- massive over-valuation, due to demand hugely outstripping demand (mostly from investors and speculators, rather than anyone wanting to do anything practical with it). Nobody knows if the price is going to spike even higher, or crash spectacularly; it is extraordinarily volatile.
Well it is fairly interesting. Yawning (to me) is an activity which involves a large amount of inhaling and exhaling. Foetuses don't breathe, so that's kind of odd. Some people have mooted that yawning is a social (even socially learned) activity- the fact that foetuses can't have socially learned it is interesting too.
Feeding it into the "is abortion OK" argument, though, is stupid.
(Yes, mice do yawn by the way)
Off the hook?
If someone offers to sell you magic beans for $1 million and you do so, and then you find the beans to not have been magic after all, then yes you are a victim of fraud and the perpetrator should go to jail. But that doesn't mean you weren't an absolute blithering idiot.
Criminal negligence is a much underused bit of law, but it basically means- when you're so stupid or lazy that something terrible happens, even though you haven't committed any other specific criminal act, you are still criminally negligent.
Countries use their country code. UK uses .gov.uk.
The Amazon river and rainforest doesn't have a country code. Brazil, Peru etc. do, but there isn't one specifically for transnational Amazon-related issues. Sounds pretty reasonable that they would want one for it now that it's up for grabs.
Remember that the Amazon is not a country- it's a river and a rain forest. Barring a global calamity, the river will definitely outlast the internet shopping company.
Touche. And that would actually be the most obvious like-for-like, seeing as it's a Chromebook.
Presumably we're comparing like-for-like in terms of price here. I can find the Samsung Chromebook from TFA for £229. In terms of Windows-loaded netbooks, the best processor I can find for that money is the Asus Eee PC 1025C, which comes with an Atom N2800.
If you can find a device with the same form factor (ultra-portable) and same price but with an Intel Core processor, link away.
Autonomy was a successful money-making business. When HP bought it, there wasn't a soul alive who couldn't see that they were paying an extremely generous price. Take the following article on the BBC at the time:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14582489
HP paid 64% above the publicly-traded market price for the company. On the markets hearing the news, HP shares ended the trading day 7.6% down, making them the worst faller in the Dow Jones Industrial Average that day.
Maybe the management at Autonomy were telling porkies to convince HP to pay that much- but why the hell would HP swallow it? If everybody else could see it was mad, why couldn't they?
I remember when I first moved in to this house and got Virgin Media broadband set up, it had ISP-end content filtering in place for "adult content", and was quite a chore to turn off.
I noticed it was on when, in the first day of having it set up, I went to watch a clip of some BBC adaptation of Canterbury Tales on YouTube. The particular episode had a sex scene in it, and was blocked. Any "adult content" filter which prevents people from watching BBC adaptations of Chaucer because there's a glimpse of nipple for half a second is clearly broken beyond usefulness. And if Baby Timmy is really going to be scarred for life at a half-second glimpse of a soap actress's nipple and 10 seconds of giggling and groaning, Baby Timmy is probably too fragile to survive until adulthood.
Well, aside from other obvious reasons- the UK is technically a theocratic country with a state religion. The head of state (the Queen) is also head of the Church of England, and bishops get 25 seats in Parliament (the House of Lords- the upper house) without needing to be elected.
I mean obviously that doesn't make much difference in a modern context, but it does give the Religious Right rather a lot of ammunition whenever anyone suggests anything that might not be to a Christian's tastes. For example, see the gay marriage furore.
I believe their real plan is to have ISPs implement an on-by-default "adult content" blocker. This smacks of that technique used by teenagers to get things out of their parents: ask for something outrageous, have it refused, then suggest a "compromise"- which is the thing you were after all along. By proposing something insanely draconian, they're hoping that when they "compromise" with their simple ISP filter the liberal lobbyists will think "phew, that's a relief!" and accept it.
It doesn't have to be the biggest selling game of all time to still catch the eye of the publishers. If it can sell as well as the middle of the game charts, not cost the earth to develop, and turn a profit- there will be plenty of publishers itching to dip their toe into the genre. Look at the strategy game genre for an example- that's not topped the charts in years (if ever), and yet hundreds of games are still churned out in the genre (some of which are pretty boilerplate and mediocre).
If "makes $500 million on day one" was the only thing that counted as a success, the overwhelming majority of games, films, music and television would be dead in the water.