Market share fallen by 38%- with Nokia being held up as the night in shining armour.
I'm not a habitual MS-hater- I wish them well with their mobile OS, and would be pleased to see more competition in a space so dominated by Apple and Android- but I'd hardly say they've been a roaring success so far. And relying on Nokia as a life-boat seems like a dire approach for both MS and Nokia, both of which will need more than just each other if they're going to survive in this market.
Seeing as €15,000 is not far off a year's salary for some people- I wonder how many man hours it actually takes to translate a book between two European languages? I'd be surprised if it really did take anything like close to a year.
1) Easily disabled (even a small glancing blow will be enough to make it unusable) 2) Will run away at the first sign of violence (... "Hey, all my survival gear is getting away!"). 3) Hard to train (stubborn as a what now?) 4) Noisy (I mean, silent as the grave, right up until the point it starts braying like a car horn)
Or perhaps the most important point- AlphaDog is designed by a robotics company, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Researching and developing complex new technologies is kind of their thing. DARPA are unlikely to invest in a mule-breeding programme.
Fair point- although I question if the difference in "flex" between walking on these tiles and walking on concrete is going to be much more than the difference between me walking in trainers and me walking in hard-soled shoes.
So onto the second point- when the UK (as with most of the Western world) is staring down the barrel of an obesity crisis- is it a bad thing if walking on these surfaces gives your calf muscles a bit of a work out? Would people really eat more, or would they eat the same but be a (very very tiny) bit fitter?
Didn't mean it wasn't worth doing though. New technology can be useful.
There would have been a point, like you say, when projectors were a sexy and novel new technological replacement for blackboards. After a while, they stopped seeming sexy and novel, and just became part of the standard classroom tool kit. But people still use them, because they're still far better than a blackboard.
If 3D projection is better than 2D projection for some uses, then even after it stops being novel it will still have a place in the lecture hall.
On the other hand, it could just be a passing fad.
It depends who you're trying to hide your data from. When I bin a hard drive, I'm only worried about two-bit scam artists going through my trash and finding some meet for identity theft, maybe manage to skim a credit card number, They'll be more than thwarted by bashing the thing with a hammer a couple of times until the plates rattle and the connector is mashed out of shape.
It might not protect me from the full might of the world's intelligence services- but they're not exactly a main concern of mine.
The energy is already there- it just currently dissipates as wasted energy, and does nothing. That would be like saying that the wind has to blow harder if you put up a wind turbine or maritime sail- the wind blows just the same, it's just you're capturing energy that would otherwise have been wasted.
The most you can say is that you're taking energy that would otherwise have been used to vibrate the concrete after every step, and are instead using it to power some sort of electrical generator. Which I suppose you could be cross about if you really like vibrating concrete.
That's a good idea. I'm tempted to set up the UK equivalent, (it's http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/ if anyone wants to beat me to it).
Of course the UK version needs 100,000 signatures, rather than 5,000, but it's still possible. I hope Slashdotters from other countries do so on their equivalents, where available.
Which third of senators are you expecting to put up a fight? Are you expecting the Democrats to rise up in rebellion against their President? Or are you expecting the Republicans to take a sudden lurch towards lax international property law, against the will of some of the US' biggest businesses?
Write to your representatives and let them know how you feel; but don't expect much.
If you needed evidence to disbelieve things, you would spend a lot of your life believing a lot of very strange things. If I tell you that the world was created by a celestial teapot, do you believe me? If not, why? Do you have any evidence that this isn't the case? I mean, I have no evidence that it is the case- but you can't possibly have evidence that disproves it (not least because I can make up the creation story as I go along). What about the Illuminati (shape shifting paedophile space lizards who occupy all positions of power in human society)? I bet you don't have any firm evidence that this isn't the case- so why don't you accept it as just as possible as all the other things you don't have evidence for?
What, indeed, about the other world religions? They're al more-or-less mutually exclusive, and they mostly have clauses in them to explain away the others. For example, how can a Muslim man know that he hasn't been tricked by a very Christian Satan? Or how can a Christian man know that Jesus wasn't a Buddhist higher being from higher up the reincarnation ladder, rather than the son of a monotheistic god? You have no proof that your religion of choice isn't actually the trickery of some other ("correct") religion's devil character, any more than you have proof that your religion of choice is divine and true. You can, of course, "take it on faith"- but in the circumstances, that's little more than a shot in the dark.
Best, in my opinion, to stick to Occam's Razor. If there's absolutely no indication of any sort that something is true, it's probably best to assume it isn't. Otherwise I'd barely be able to get anything done, with a life full of celestial teapots, spaghetti monsters, and space lizards.
Perhaps true; it is a game with a lot of copy-paste content. But on the flip side, they are the proud owner of easily the gaming industry's biggest computer cluster (it has been speculated amply that it would likely hit the lower ranges of the Top500 list, if only they could meet the benchmarking requirements (which would involve multiple-day downtime)), and an immensely complex back-end software ecosystem in order to host what is really quite a unique set up (single-world persistence, no instancing). Which I can only imagine doesn't come cheap.
The theory that they continue to grow throughout their lives due to a hormonal imbalance has been debunked too; it is now believed they simply have a longer "adolescent" period, and hence have a longer spell of normal growth spurts. While I remember from documentaries they can have health issues associated with large animals (the same health issues large breeds of dog tend to suffer from), the Wikipedia article on ligers says that they live into their twenties: about the same age that lions live to in captivity.
The fertility thing, particularly in mules, is usually assumed to be from the difference in chromosome numbers in the parent species (64 for horses and 62 for donkeys). In any species with the same numbers of chromosomes, that wouldn't be a problem.
It's pretty simple. If you work as a proper, paid translator, you get a salary from Valve. You don't mind them charging for games, because you get your own tiny cut. of the profits
If you work as a volunteer translator for an open source software project, you don't get any money. But you don't mind because you become a credited contributor- a copyright owner- on the programme. The software is given to you for free, and you get the warm fuzzy feeling that you contributed "for the greater good".
If you work as a volunteer translator for Valve, you get nothing. They don't pay you a cut of the extra profits they'll make from your hard work, you don't get to be credited copyright holder, you don't get free copies of the software, even for testing purposes; you get nothing.
EVE Online, that old standard, provides the client for free (including free upgrades whenever they launch an expansion pack), and charge ever so slightly less than those monthly costs. And unlike this new Star Wars game, they have niche gameplay and lacked a ready-made franchise fan base.
I've nothing against MMO pricing in general, but Star Wars: TOR prices aren't exactly cheap.
I wonder if we can take this to its logical conclusion, and just chuck a "I will not press criminal charges" clause in there too? Then they can come to your house and steal your TV, have sex with your wife, set fire to your kittens, etc., and they'll be protected by a clause in the EULA that says you won't tell the police,and will instead take the arbitration route.
My (rough) understanding of contract law is that contracts are not allowed to be unfairly one-sided, are not allowed to deprive you of any legal rights, and must not hide things in such a way that the signatory doesn't know what he's agreeing to. Seeing as suing through the civil courts is a legal right all people have, seeing as a contract which stops one side from suing the other (but not the other way around) is extremely one sided, and seeing they are unlikely to publicise this clause to their customers, all makes it sound rather suspicious to me.
I guess it depends if we're including "full sized laptop" in our definition of "desktop" (which pains me- but it seems to be pretty common where the two categories are "desktop" and "mobile" (tablets and smartphones)).
If you include laptops, power consumption is important; it's either longer battery life or smaller, lighter batteries. That's why an ARM-powered iPad has a 10 hour battery life and is still slim and portable. I don't know about you, but I'd happily go for some of that with my office laptop too.
If you use H.264, you (potentially, at least) will need to pay its owners a licensing fee.
In my mind, it's somewhat irrelevant as to whether that's regulated by copyright law, patent law, trademark law, contract law, or the laws of thermodynamics; the upshot is the same. If you are reliant on the owner's permission in order to use a piece of software, then that isn't "open".
Which gives 91% market share. Although to be fair, having thought about it for a day, I'm pretty dubious of that figure. Other sites give closer to 85%, which seems more sensible.
I despise "online only" single player games. They are the scourge of current PC gaming, and just one more example of pain-in-the-ass DRM. I see absolutely no reason why I shouldn't be able to buy games and then run them on boxes with no network connection; the inability to do so is a huge retrograde step.
I live in a built up area with great connectivity, but even here the internet goes down every now and again. Not to mention some of the hassle I've had with temperamental WiFi routers over the years. Serving games up through the browser is fine, I guess, if they can do it right- but the inability to "install" (to save the game locally to my computer) would be a huge turn off for me- it might finally push me off PC gaming altogether if it became widespread.
Zero, if you exclude the Chinese-language market (which is presumably of little interest to US regulators). Google's market share is somewhere around 10x all their main English-language competitors combined.
Depends how many well qualified IT people you can find who will work for not-much-more-than-minimum wage in a call centre. If you find them, I bet HP would hire them.
It's an interesting thought (and if this had been a halfway scientific study maybe we would actually know). The blurb could just as easily have read "Telecommuters 700% more productive than traditional office workers".
Although I suppose the pyjamas thing is a little trickier, I guess there's no real reason why working in your underwear should make you a less effective worker. I only dress in fancy office clothes because that's the thing to do at my office; I can't imagine I'd work any differently if I were wearing anything else.
Cartographers (people who draw maps) are not climate scientists. Some cartographers made a mistake because they misinterpreted some scientific data. The scientists told them they were wrong. The cartographers corrected it.
I'm not sure who's supposed to be exaggerating what in this anecdote. If it were a map of anything other than Arctic ice it wouldn't even be an anecdote. Just a deadly dull story about some map makers who drew a line in the wrong place because they misinterpreted a survey.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is good for him (CEO's can say the darndest things, can't they?), but the last set of headlines I saw for WinPhone market share figures was that they were dropping, fast. A quick Google search gives me this:
http://www.tgdaily.com/mobility-brief/57750-windows-phone-market-share-falling-fast
Market share fallen by 38%- with Nokia being held up as the night in shining armour.
I'm not a habitual MS-hater- I wish them well with their mobile OS, and would be pleased to see more competition in a space so dominated by Apple and Android- but I'd hardly say they've been a roaring success so far. And relying on Nokia as a life-boat seems like a dire approach for both MS and Nokia, both of which will need more than just each other if they're going to survive in this market.
Seeing as €15,000 is not far off a year's salary for some people- I wonder how many man hours it actually takes to translate a book between two European languages? I'd be surprised if it really did take anything like close to a year.
It still seems like a hefty price tag to me.
But that would have probably required a fourth war to occupy Yemen.
Yemen is a US ally. If they had asked, they probably would have received...
1) Easily disabled (even a small glancing blow will be enough to make it unusable) ... "Hey, all my survival gear is getting away!").
2) Will run away at the first sign of violence (
3) Hard to train (stubborn as a what now?)
4) Noisy (I mean, silent as the grave, right up until the point it starts braying like a car horn)
Or perhaps the most important point- AlphaDog is designed by a robotics company, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Researching and developing complex new technologies is kind of their thing. DARPA are unlikely to invest in a mule-breeding programme.
Fair point- although I question if the difference in "flex" between walking on these tiles and walking on concrete is going to be much more than the difference between me walking in trainers and me walking in hard-soled shoes.
So onto the second point- when the UK (as with most of the Western world) is staring down the barrel of an obesity crisis- is it a bad thing if walking on these surfaces gives your calf muscles a bit of a work out? Would people really eat more, or would they eat the same but be a (very very tiny) bit fitter?
Didn't mean it wasn't worth doing though. New technology can be useful.
There would have been a point, like you say, when projectors were a sexy and novel new technological replacement for blackboards. After a while, they stopped seeming sexy and novel, and just became part of the standard classroom tool kit. But people still use them, because they're still far better than a blackboard.
If 3D projection is better than 2D projection for some uses, then even after it stops being novel it will still have a place in the lecture hall.
On the other hand, it could just be a passing fad.
It depends who you're trying to hide your data from. When I bin a hard drive, I'm only worried about two-bit scam artists going through my trash and finding some meet for identity theft, maybe manage to skim a credit card number, They'll be more than thwarted by bashing the thing with a hammer a couple of times until the plates rattle and the connector is mashed out of shape.
It might not protect me from the full might of the world's intelligence services- but they're not exactly a main concern of mine.
The energy is already there- it just currently dissipates as wasted energy, and does nothing. That would be like saying that the wind has to blow harder if you put up a wind turbine or maritime sail- the wind blows just the same, it's just you're capturing energy that would otherwise have been wasted.
The most you can say is that you're taking energy that would otherwise have been used to vibrate the concrete after every step, and are instead using it to power some sort of electrical generator. Which I suppose you could be cross about if you really like vibrating concrete.
That's a good idea. I'm tempted to set up the UK equivalent, (it's http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/ if anyone wants to beat me to it).
Of course the UK version needs 100,000 signatures, rather than 5,000, but it's still possible. I hope Slashdotters from other countries do so on their equivalents, where available.
Which third of senators are you expecting to put up a fight? Are you expecting the Democrats to rise up in rebellion against their President? Or are you expecting the Republicans to take a sudden lurch towards lax international property law, against the will of some of the US' biggest businesses?
Write to your representatives and let them know how you feel; but don't expect much.
A brief search on the BBC reveals that they do talk about it- rarely.
Last article that mentions it (in passing): 21/09/2010.
Before that: March 2010.
Then: April 2009.
Then: July 2008.
And all the articles seem to be written by the same two columnists; not exactly by the current affairs journalists.
Like you say; it stinks.
If you needed evidence to disbelieve things, you would spend a lot of your life believing a lot of very strange things. If I tell you that the world was created by a celestial teapot, do you believe me? If not, why? Do you have any evidence that this isn't the case? I mean, I have no evidence that it is the case- but you can't possibly have evidence that disproves it (not least because I can make up the creation story as I go along). What about the Illuminati (shape shifting paedophile space lizards who occupy all positions of power in human society)? I bet you don't have any firm evidence that this isn't the case- so why don't you accept it as just as possible as all the other things you don't have evidence for?
What, indeed, about the other world religions? They're al more-or-less mutually exclusive, and they mostly have clauses in them to explain away the others. For example, how can a Muslim man know that he hasn't been tricked by a very Christian Satan? Or how can a Christian man know that Jesus wasn't a Buddhist higher being from higher up the reincarnation ladder, rather than the son of a monotheistic god? You have no proof that your religion of choice isn't actually the trickery of some other ("correct") religion's devil character, any more than you have proof that your religion of choice is divine and true. You can, of course, "take it on faith"- but in the circumstances, that's little more than a shot in the dark.
Best, in my opinion, to stick to Occam's Razor. If there's absolutely no indication of any sort that something is true, it's probably best to assume it isn't. Otherwise I'd barely be able to get anything done, with a life full of celestial teapots, spaghetti monsters, and space lizards.
Perhaps true; it is a game with a lot of copy-paste content. But on the flip side, they are the proud owner of easily the gaming industry's biggest computer cluster (it has been speculated amply that it would likely hit the lower ranges of the Top500 list, if only they could meet the benchmarking requirements (which would involve multiple-day downtime)), and an immensely complex back-end software ecosystem in order to host what is really quite a unique set up (single-world persistence, no instancing). Which I can only imagine doesn't come cheap.
They do create offspring, called tigons and ligers, but they are anything but "normal", and are actually infertile.
You're incorrect there; while they were long assumed to be infertile, they have since been shown to be fertile (if only on the female side).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiglon#Fertility
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liger#Fertility
The theory that they continue to grow throughout their lives due to a hormonal imbalance has been debunked too; it is now believed they simply have a longer "adolescent" period, and hence have a longer spell of normal growth spurts. While I remember from documentaries they can have health issues associated with large animals (the same health issues large breeds of dog tend to suffer from), the Wikipedia article on ligers says that they live into their twenties: about the same age that lions live to in captivity.
The fertility thing, particularly in mules, is usually assumed to be from the difference in chromosome numbers in the parent species (64 for horses and 62 for donkeys). In any species with the same numbers of chromosomes, that wouldn't be a problem.
It's pretty simple. If you work as a proper, paid translator, you get a salary from Valve. You don't mind them charging for games, because you get your own tiny cut. of the profits
If you work as a volunteer translator for an open source software project, you don't get any money. But you don't mind because you become a credited contributor- a copyright owner- on the programme. The software is given to you for free, and you get the warm fuzzy feeling that you contributed "for the greater good".
If you work as a volunteer translator for Valve, you get nothing. They don't pay you a cut of the extra profits they'll make from your hard work, you don't get to be credited copyright holder, you don't get free copies of the software, even for testing purposes; you get nothing.
EVE Online, that old standard, provides the client for free (including free upgrades whenever they launch an expansion pack), and charge ever so slightly less than those monthly costs. And unlike this new Star Wars game, they have niche gameplay and lacked a ready-made franchise fan base.
I've nothing against MMO pricing in general, but Star Wars: TOR prices aren't exactly cheap.
I wonder if we can take this to its logical conclusion, and just chuck a "I will not press criminal charges" clause in there too? Then they can come to your house and steal your TV, have sex with your wife, set fire to your kittens, etc., and they'll be protected by a clause in the EULA that says you won't tell the police,and will instead take the arbitration route.
My (rough) understanding of contract law is that contracts are not allowed to be unfairly one-sided, are not allowed to deprive you of any legal rights, and must not hide things in such a way that the signatory doesn't know what he's agreeing to. Seeing as suing through the civil courts is a legal right all people have, seeing as a contract which stops one side from suing the other (but not the other way around) is extremely one sided, and seeing they are unlikely to publicise this clause to their customers, all makes it sound rather suspicious to me.
I guess it depends if we're including "full sized laptop" in our definition of "desktop" (which pains me- but it seems to be pretty common where the two categories are "desktop" and "mobile" (tablets and smartphones)).
If you include laptops, power consumption is important; it's either longer battery life or smaller, lighter batteries. That's why an ARM-powered iPad has a 10 hour battery life and is still slim and portable. I don't know about you, but I'd happily go for some of that with my office laptop too.
If you use H.264, you (potentially, at least) will need to pay its owners a licensing fee.
In my mind, it's somewhat irrelevant as to whether that's regulated by copyright law, patent law, trademark law, contract law, or the laws of thermodynamics; the upshot is the same. If you are reliant on the owner's permission in order to use a piece of software, then that isn't "open".
I'm not sure it has ever been true that Google had >91% of the search market, but it's certainly not true now. .
Think global, my friend (Google certainly would):
http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-ww-monthly-201008-201108
Which gives 91% market share. Although to be fair, having thought about it for a day, I'm pretty dubious of that figure. Other sites give closer to 85%, which seems more sensible.
I despise "online only" single player games. They are the scourge of current PC gaming, and just one more example of pain-in-the-ass DRM. I see absolutely no reason why I shouldn't be able to buy games and then run them on boxes with no network connection; the inability to do so is a huge retrograde step.
I live in a built up area with great connectivity, but even here the internet goes down every now and again. Not to mention some of the hassle I've had with temperamental WiFi routers over the years. Serving games up through the browser is fine, I guess, if they can do it right- but the inability to "install" (to save the game locally to my computer) would be a huge turn off for me- it might finally push me off PC gaming altogether if it became widespread.
Zero, if you exclude the Chinese-language market (which is presumably of little interest to US regulators). Google's market share is somewhere around 10x all their main English-language competitors combined.
Depends how many well qualified IT people you can find who will work for not-much-more-than-minimum wage in a call centre. If you find them, I bet HP would hire them.
It's an interesting thought (and if this had been a halfway scientific study maybe we would actually know). The blurb could just as easily have read "Telecommuters 700% more productive than traditional office workers".
Although I suppose the pyjamas thing is a little trickier, I guess there's no real reason why working in your underwear should make you a less effective worker. I only dress in fancy office clothes because that's the thing to do at my office; I can't imagine I'd work any differently if I were wearing anything else.
Cartographers (people who draw maps) are not climate scientists. Some cartographers made a mistake because they misinterpreted some scientific data. The scientists told them they were wrong. The cartographers corrected it.
I'm not sure who's supposed to be exaggerating what in this anecdote. If it were a map of anything other than Arctic ice it wouldn't even be an anecdote. Just a deadly dull story about some map makers who drew a line in the wrong place because they misinterpreted a survey.