"Interesting note, piracy forces prices higher which forces a reaction to integrate ever changing DRM., which in turn drives prices higher. Nasty cycle pirates have created."
Interesting. I can just as easily blame the media companies for driving people to piracy. The increased piracy is forcing them to think they need to raise prices and then they drive more people to piracy.
"Their distribution cost is completely irrelevant. Its a straw man's argument. Likewise is their profit. For it to be even slightly topical is to argue the free market and capitalism is wrong. Are you saying no one is entitled to make a profit?"
Quite opposite. I think these media companies are incompetent at capitalism. I think they would make MORE profit by distributing their media to more people at a lower price. The profit per person they sell to may be lower but the overall profit higher. The end result of lower prices would be more money for the media companies, more media for the consumer, and more people getting to enjoy the artists work.
"We can already imagine that with iPhone and Android applications. While not 0.25, piracy is live and well for $0.99 apps which have very real costs associated. People pirate because they feel entitled, not because of price."
The reduction in price to $.25 is more than 1/5 the price. Saying this system exists currently is a lie. 1/5 is a LOT. Cut the price of a Porsche by 1/5 and it is now the price of a cheap Honda.
"Yet another lie pirates tell each other. If they would have never bought the song in the first place, they would have listened to it once, deleted it, and never listened to it again. Like stock, they effectively devalued it. Go illegally grab up a bunch of stock and when you get arrested, tell them its all okay because you would have never bought it in the first place."
Stock in a company and copyright can not be compared. Copyright is 100% intangible, stock represents something tangible. Stealing stock is equal to stealing money. Copying a song is not equal to stealing money.
It is true that many pirates would have never bought the song if the pirating system didn't exist. A number of reasons can represent why: They don't have the money. They don't value the song at the selling price. They have never heard the music.
Piracy allows for people to download far more then they actually listen to because it doesn't hurt copyright holders to download extra. If I downloaded 1000 albums and never listened to them I do not represent 1000 albums worth of lost sales. This the the most common misconception about piracy: that people listen to all this music they download. I know pirates that have 100GB of music and listen to maybe 30 minutes of music a day, most of it from a handful of artists.
"Then you failed to read that issue seems to largely on affect iPhone users. And just the same, that's not true for all applications either. If the application remains installed, they are assigning value to it. If they use the application, they are assigning value to it. If an item has value, and it is obtained without paying for it, the item has been stolen. For IP, we call this piracy. For stock, its called theft, fraud and/or embezzlement."
First off, piracy is not stealing its copyright infringement. Get your facts straight first. Second, if people get burned by applications that don't generate value then they are going to become skeptical of all applications. Just like you think it is stealing for someone to download an app without paying, users think it is stealing from them to buy an app that doesn't provide any value to them (regardless of if it could create value to them). And once again, using stocks as a comparison here is not correct. Stocks are a security that represents real value. Piracy is not the same thing.
Pirates are not some other breed of human. If things were priced reasonably there would be far less of them. They will never go away 100%, much like regular criminals will never go away. But rig
The reason I enclosed reward in quotes is because the reward isn't always from others praising you. Internal reward of having programmed something that accomplishes a goal is very high(as a hobbyist programmer I would know as well). Typing up a document telling other how to use said program has far less intrinsic reward even if you do get praised on the outside. I had to write up such a document once, and was praised for writing it up but did I feel rewarded? No. I thought it was meaningless and easy work that was below me.
Busy work vs. intellectually stimulating work.
Icons are a tad bit different though because there is some creativity, thinking, etc. Many of the F/OSS issues are not 'pretty icon' problems but installation and integration issues. Not exciting programing 'problems' but rather tedious work involving getting already working features to work in all cases and on all systems.
Maybe I am wrong. May some people do enjoy doing those things.
DRM coupled with extremely high cost makes it dumb as hell to purchase many things.
Record companies sell millions and millions of copies of a song for $1 with virtually no distribution costs or anything. They just get millions of pure profits to stuff in their wallets. With today's economies of scale in IP copying prices for digital wares should be drastically lower. Yet they are rising. Have you ever considered that prices should be a fraction of what they are today. Imagine if record companies sold songs for $.25 and put them on a server where you could download them if you lost them. In other words 100% DRM free with even assisted recovery of your files. This would be a huge hit and the volume of sales would increase by far more than the loss by the price cut. It would be easier to download the songs than it would be to pirate and you would never have to worry about losing your songs because your HD crashed and you only had 1 copy.
A system like this would cater to a few pirates but guess what; They are the people that would never have bought music to begin with. They are not even in the market for music. On the other hand you would capture millions of people who pirate because they are filling their iPods with every song they like but can't afford to pay the price to fill it up. Times have changed when it comes to digital wares. Spreading your costs over more people at a lower price is the future of how media will be distributed, it is just a matter of who steps up and does it first. There are millions of people just like me, willing to pay for TV series, movies, music and games once the price is cut and they spread the cost over more people. Right now media companies are being greedy and paying the price.
Times have changed from the CD production days when they could charge $1 - $2 a song. It is easier to record, there are more buyers, and the prices are the same. There are less distribution costs. Yet you are telling me to be sorry for these people? It is their own damn fault for being blind to the way society has evolved in the last 10 years.
As for the phone apps that you are quoting. Go read some articles on why that may be. I have read a ton of articles and most of them point to the 'one use' phenomenon: Apps get downloaded used once, then never used again. In other words even if you think the app is amazing, the average user is only using it once then never using it again. When this happens with nearly every app people are going to have a hard time paying for something they know they will never use again.
With my iPhone I only use about 1% of what I have downloaded. Now I will only buy something if I have used a trial version for a few weeks and see if I really use it, or if it is just a gimmick app that sounds great but you never end up using.
Also, don't think I am advocating piracy. I think that all piracy is doing is giving these media companies someone to blame for their issues and they are going to get even more powerful because lawyers are their buddies, and lawyers are in charge of the country. Soon we will be paying a media tax and in the end it is only going to help the big dogs. Not little cell phone devs (that is what you are right?).
Like the parent said: Give me a good value and the money will flow easier than ever. Take a look at steam and how well they are doing by charging less for games.
Which is why F/OSS is generally struggling despite delivering what some would consider equal or superior products. It seems people enjoy the hobby of building things, but once it is all built... its done. Seems a lot like building the frame for a car and putting the engine in starting it up and rolling it off the line. No manual, no body, no paint. Technically it works but it is still missing something.
I think it is more than just technical writers not donating time, I think it is people not donating time to areas that are tedious and boring or provide little 'reward'. It makes sense and I don't blame people but at the same time it does point to a major flaw of the F/OSS movement. Proprietary software has goals and people are going to get paid to meet them regardless of how shitty or seemingly meaningless the job is.
The size of the sample is fine, the method for picking the same is the main issue. 10,000 PC's is well over enough to get a +/- 2% error if the sample is random.
Doing a little cost comparison doesn't show this as much cheaper unless economies of scale are(not) present. But right now I can buy a 'real' solar panel from just about any major retailer for less per watt than this panel and that doesn't even account for the selling price, that is only the cost of production of these panels. Cool but not cheaper, sorry.
That is why this AI shit is dumb. We just need to continue to make purpose built robots. If we do give anything AI make it an immobile server that just computes based on outside inputs. The last thing we need is true AI roaming the world unless we model it to be inherently dumb (like humans) so that it wont mess with our terrible decision making. Humans are social creatures and we operate based on "if everyone else that matters believes it then we are all right". Having a robot challenge this is dangerous for our way of life. You could never have a robot friend... it would constantly be calling you out in conversations about the 'idiot bf/gf' you broke up with.
But if we are going to program robots to be as dumb as humans, give them rights, and all that good stuff... why don't we just start having sex and making tons of them right now.
Also, I am positive that many animals are self aware. They behave way too much like humans to claim they are just masses of flesh roaming for food. Does that mean we can't eat meat, ride horses, etc.
This theory makes sense until you do look at reloading and see that the government controls the primers because they are a 'high explosive' and thus they control the cost and supply of primers(which is the real shortage).
Now of course reloading will still be cheaper, but if you think reloading is the answer to the control of ammo you are screwed. When the governemnt decides that consumers shouldn't have primers they will take them away. They already have the power.
We are already disarmed. The purposed of the clause in the constitution was to enable the general public to have equal ability to overthrow/control the government if it tried to overstep its boundaries. That is what our nation was founded on and that is what the founding fathers wanted to give the people. Now are are just like every other nation, ruled by our government and not the other way around. In terms of relative firepower the best a regular citizen can get might as well be a water pistol compared to what the government has.
They don't even need to stigmatize gun ownership. Rather than taking guns away they are just taking the ammo away. Every store I have been to lately has been out of nearly everything that most guns use excluding shotgun shells and.22's. Now you can buy all the guns you want and still be unarmed.
All this to stop what? Urban violence? I am sorry but just because big cities have a problem with guns does not mean the solution is banning them. Politicians need to get out of their sheltered city environments and see why gun ownership is not such an absurd idea. See that most gun owners are true Americans and not gangsters.
If everyone was disarmed a criminal will still be able to get guns, and if they can't they will still be able to get other weapons. Banning guns to fight crime is like banning cheeseburgers to fight obesity. They are related but there are other ways to get fat than cheeseburgers.
Your cost issue may be related to: private university. You didn't say where but most private universities are multiple times more expensive than their public cousins. Everything else is true though. Skating by with A's and a few hand picked B's is cakewalk for those who put in the effort to turn in papers and assignments and show up to tests. I think caring about the subject you are studying might play a role in the perception of ease though.
That is a terrible analogy since income is an inherent characteristic of a job. You work the job and you get a defined paycheck. Also, quit being so narcissistic, it seems you have had a very specific incident with a specific game and then you are extrapolating that out to "frame rates (which aren't constant for a game) are a measure of a GAMES immersiveness". Obviously if you tried to follow this through logically it wouldn't make any sense. Let me explain.
Frame rate alone can be a factor in immersion, but you can't tie frame rate to a game, thus a game's immersiveness is not related to 'it's frame rate' because it doesn't have a frame rate.
You can't say that because YOU get a shitty frame rate on a specific game that the game lacks an immersive experience.
FYI you don't need to spend anywhere near $1000 on hardware to play the latest and greatest games unless you want to max every setting.
What AC is trying to say is that frame rate is not an inherent characteristic of a game. Any game, if played on the wrong hardware, can have frame rate issues. So for the purpose of evaluating a game you cannot look at frame rate. That is like saying Zelda sucks because you don't have a nunchuk controller and it requires one. Get the correct hardware before playing top end games. Also, laptops are not 'gaming rigs' regardless of the marketing that the company used to sell it to you but that is a different story so I will leave it at that.
You are assuming we will reach a 'pure' cloud system where every operation is done in the cloud. I don't think this will ever be the case. Small cheap chips are going to keep a good chunk of processing on the devices. The fact is, you are going to have to buy new 'terminals' on a regular basis. Networks have an inherent latency that will never be fixed without some huge breakthrough and that alone is going to drive the 'terminals' to be upgraded and tweaked to be better and faster.
I think we will end up with a hybrid system but I think mostly storage will end up on the cloud, with computing split between the terminals and the cloud. But as cheaper and cheaper storage and CPU's are produced I am still willing to bet that there will be large classes of devices that will have modest storage and computing power even if we evolve to 'the age of the cloud'.
The cloud is actually an ambiguous term that describes the use of computing resources that are not directly controlled by the user.
Many current resources we use are cloud based, but only recently has the term been thrown about so freely. G-mail, google docs, and the internet are all cloud based systems that you might know. Although your stuff may end up hosted in datacenter, it might be hosted by several companies and several datacenters that you will never interact with. These are customer based cloud systems, but businesses are getting involved with the idea now. Really it seems to me that for a business it is outsourcing. For a consumer it is more of a feature as it is nowhere near economical to run your own servers to provide the same services. The idea of 'the cloud' is merely a term for what has been going on for ages: using computing resources that others control but you have access to.
The new application of 'the cloud' for consumers is to move ALL of your stuff online so you are just a dumb terminal that can display the 'clouds' services.
The new application of 'the cloud' for business is outsourcing large chunks of the IT department to companies that specialize in IT. This is supposed to cut costs.
Yeah, this gives me lots of faith in my assignment to look at a specified wiki entry and verify the entry by using.... articles from journalists. Maybe I will write my paper instead on how this assignment proves nothing since the journalist probably used Wikipedia to write the damn thing.
*ponders the consequences of being right vs doing what I am told*
Does this really have anything to do with twitter though? It seems to me that a TCP/IP request sent to your microwave would be just as if not more efficient at retrieving the desired information... why do we need to add another layer of complexity?
Maybe I don't get it but I don't see why it needs to go through twitter.
Slashdot Mirror
Why didn't they tell us earlier? Seems odd to me.
Why should it have to self propagate and at what degree do current bot nets self propagate without users compromising their systems.
Servers don't roam the net downloading porn and music.
"Interesting note, piracy forces prices higher which forces a reaction to integrate ever changing DRM., which in turn drives prices higher. Nasty cycle pirates have created."
Interesting. I can just as easily blame the media companies for driving people to piracy. The increased piracy is forcing them to think they need to raise prices and then they drive more people to piracy.
"Their distribution cost is completely irrelevant. Its a straw man's argument. Likewise is their profit. For it to be even slightly topical is to argue the free market and capitalism is wrong. Are you saying no one is entitled to make a profit?"
Quite opposite. I think these media companies are incompetent at capitalism. I think they would make MORE profit by distributing their media to more people at a lower price. The profit per person they sell to may be lower but the overall profit higher. The end result of lower prices would be more money for the media companies, more media for the consumer, and more people getting to enjoy the artists work.
"We can already imagine that with iPhone and Android applications. While not 0.25, piracy is live and well for $0.99 apps which have very real costs associated. People pirate because they feel entitled, not because of price."
The reduction in price to $.25 is more than 1/5 the price. Saying this system exists currently is a lie. 1/5 is a LOT. Cut the price of a Porsche by 1/5 and it is now the price of a cheap Honda.
"Yet another lie pirates tell each other. If they would have never bought the song in the first place, they would have listened to it once, deleted it, and never listened to it again. Like stock, they effectively devalued it. Go illegally grab up a bunch of stock and when you get arrested, tell them its all okay because you would have never bought it in the first place."
Stock in a company and copyright can not be compared. Copyright is 100% intangible, stock represents something tangible. Stealing stock is equal to stealing money. Copying a song is not equal to stealing money.
It is true that many pirates would have never bought the song if the pirating system didn't exist. A number of reasons can represent why: They don't have the money. They don't value the song at the selling price. They have never heard the music.
Piracy allows for people to download far more then they actually listen to because it doesn't hurt copyright holders to download extra. If I downloaded 1000 albums and never listened to them I do not represent 1000 albums worth of lost sales. This the the most common misconception about piracy: that people listen to all this music they download. I know pirates that have 100GB of music and listen to maybe 30 minutes of music a day, most of it from a handful of artists.
"Then you failed to read that issue seems to largely on affect iPhone users. And just the same, that's not true for all applications either. If the application remains installed, they are assigning value to it. If they use the application, they are assigning value to it. If an item has value, and it is obtained without paying for it, the item has been stolen. For IP, we call this piracy. For stock, its called theft, fraud and/or embezzlement."
First off, piracy is not stealing its copyright infringement. Get your facts straight first. Second, if people get burned by applications that don't generate value then they are going to become skeptical of all applications. Just like you think it is stealing for someone to download an app without paying, users think it is stealing from them to buy an app that doesn't provide any value to them (regardless of if it could create value to them). And once again, using stocks as a comparison here is not correct. Stocks are a security that represents real value. Piracy is not the same thing.
Pirates are not some other breed of human. If things were priced reasonably there would be far less of them. They will never go away 100%, much like regular criminals will never go away. But rig
The reason I enclosed reward in quotes is because the reward isn't always from others praising you. Internal reward of having programmed something that accomplishes a goal is very high(as a hobbyist programmer I would know as well). Typing up a document telling other how to use said program has far less intrinsic reward even if you do get praised on the outside. I had to write up such a document once, and was praised for writing it up but did I feel rewarded? No. I thought it was meaningless and easy work that was below me.
Busy work vs. intellectually stimulating work.
Icons are a tad bit different though because there is some creativity, thinking, etc. Many of the F/OSS issues are not 'pretty icon' problems but installation and integration issues. Not exciting programing 'problems' but rather tedious work involving getting already working features to work in all cases and on all systems.
Maybe I am wrong. May some people do enjoy doing those things.
DRM coupled with extremely high cost makes it dumb as hell to purchase many things.
Record companies sell millions and millions of copies of a song for $1 with virtually no distribution costs or anything. They just get millions of pure profits to stuff in their wallets. With today's economies of scale in IP copying prices for digital wares should be drastically lower. Yet they are rising. Have you ever considered that prices should be a fraction of what they are today. Imagine if record companies sold songs for $.25 and put them on a server where you could download them if you lost them. In other words 100% DRM free with even assisted recovery of your files. This would be a huge hit and the volume of sales would increase by far more than the loss by the price cut. It would be easier to download the songs than it would be to pirate and you would never have to worry about losing your songs because your HD crashed and you only had 1 copy.
A system like this would cater to a few pirates but guess what; They are the people that would never have bought music to begin with. They are not even in the market for music. On the other hand you would capture millions of people who pirate because they are filling their iPods with every song they like but can't afford to pay the price to fill it up. Times have changed when it comes to digital wares. Spreading your costs over more people at a lower price is the future of how media will be distributed, it is just a matter of who steps up and does it first. There are millions of people just like me, willing to pay for TV series, movies, music and games once the price is cut and they spread the cost over more people. Right now media companies are being greedy and paying the price.
Times have changed from the CD production days when they could charge $1 - $2 a song. It is easier to record, there are more buyers, and the prices are the same. There are less distribution costs. Yet you are telling me to be sorry for these people? It is their own damn fault for being blind to the way society has evolved in the last 10 years.
As for the phone apps that you are quoting. Go read some articles on why that may be. I have read a ton of articles and most of them point to the 'one use' phenomenon: Apps get downloaded used once, then never used again. In other words even if you think the app is amazing, the average user is only using it once then never using it again. When this happens with nearly every app people are going to have a hard time paying for something they know they will never use again.
With my iPhone I only use about 1% of what I have downloaded. Now I will only buy something if I have used a trial version for a few weeks and see if I really use it, or if it is just a gimmick app that sounds great but you never end up using.
Also, don't think I am advocating piracy. I think that all piracy is doing is giving these media companies someone to blame for their issues and they are going to get even more powerful because lawyers are their buddies, and lawyers are in charge of the country. Soon we will be paying a media tax and in the end it is only going to help the big dogs. Not little cell phone devs (that is what you are right?).
Like the parent said: Give me a good value and the money will flow easier than ever.
Take a look at steam and how well they are doing by charging less for games.
Which is why F/OSS is generally struggling despite delivering what some would consider equal or superior products. It seems people enjoy the hobby of building things, but once it is all built... its done. Seems a lot like building the frame for a car and putting the engine in starting it up and rolling it off the line. No manual, no body, no paint. Technically it works but it is still missing something.
I think it is more than just technical writers not donating time, I think it is people not donating time to areas that are tedious and boring or provide little 'reward'. It makes sense and I don't blame people but at the same time it does point to a major flaw of the F/OSS movement. Proprietary software has goals and people are going to get paid to meet them regardless of how shitty or seemingly meaningless the job is.
These last few FF updates have caused problems for me too. Although the latest one is working fine now.
unintentional genocide
airlines are way safer than cars
The size of the sample is fine, the method for picking the same is the main issue. 10,000 PC's is well over enough to get a +/- 2% error if the sample is random.
Doing a little cost comparison doesn't show this as much cheaper unless economies of scale are(not) present. But right now I can buy a 'real' solar panel from just about any major retailer for less per watt than this panel and that doesn't even account for the selling price, that is only the cost of production of these panels. Cool but not cheaper, sorry.
That is why this AI shit is dumb. We just need to continue to make purpose built robots. If we do give anything AI make it an immobile server that just computes based on outside inputs. The last thing we need is true AI roaming the world unless we model it to be inherently dumb (like humans) so that it wont mess with our terrible decision making. Humans are social creatures and we operate based on "if everyone else that matters believes it then we are all right". Having a robot challenge this is dangerous for our way of life. You could never have a robot friend... it would constantly be calling you out in conversations about the 'idiot bf/gf' you broke up with.
But if we are going to program robots to be as dumb as humans, give them rights, and all that good stuff... why don't we just start having sex and making tons of them right now.
Also, I am positive that many animals are self aware. They behave way too much like humans to claim they are just masses of flesh roaming for food. Does that mean we can't eat meat, ride horses, etc.
A journalist needed to write a story. The worst part is these types of errors are common in things that matter, not just articles about toys.
This theory makes sense until you do look at reloading and see that the government controls the primers because they are a 'high explosive' and thus they control the cost and supply of primers(which is the real shortage).
Now of course reloading will still be cheaper, but if you think reloading is the answer to the control of ammo you are screwed. When the governemnt decides that consumers shouldn't have primers they will take them away. They already have the power.
We are already disarmed. The purposed of the clause in the constitution was to enable the general public to have equal ability to overthrow/control the government if it tried to overstep its boundaries. That is what our nation was founded on and that is what the founding fathers wanted to give the people. Now are are just like every other nation, ruled by our government and not the other way around. In terms of relative firepower the best a regular citizen can get might as well be a water pistol compared to what the government has.
They don't even need to stigmatize gun ownership. Rather than taking guns away they are just taking the ammo away. Every store I have been to lately has been out of nearly everything that most guns use excluding shotgun shells and .22's. Now you can buy all the guns you want and still be unarmed.
All this to stop what? Urban violence? I am sorry but just because big cities have a problem with guns does not mean the solution is banning them. Politicians need to get out of their sheltered city environments and see why gun ownership is not such an absurd idea. See that most gun owners are true Americans and not gangsters.
If everyone was disarmed a criminal will still be able to get guns, and if they can't they will still be able to get other weapons. Banning guns to fight crime is like banning cheeseburgers to fight obesity. They are related but there are other ways to get fat than cheeseburgers.
Must be a quality university then :). I don't know my IQ but it certainly isn't near 140. Also the EE major is probably relatively difficult.
In state tuition is a fraction of the cost of out of state. Not to mention you get room and board included in the price tag you quoted.
The real quote for just tuition is $8,816.
I'm not saying this is cheap or a bargain but lets stick to comparing apple to apples here.
Your cost issue may be related to: private university. You didn't say where but most private universities are multiple times more expensive than their public cousins. Everything else is true though. Skating by with A's and a few hand picked B's is cakewalk for those who put in the effort to turn in papers and assignments and show up to tests. I think caring about the subject you are studying might play a role in the perception of ease though.
That is a terrible analogy since income is an inherent characteristic of a job. You work the job and you get a defined paycheck. Also, quit being so narcissistic, it seems you have had a very specific incident with a specific game and then you are extrapolating that out to "frame rates (which aren't constant for a game) are a measure of a GAMES immersiveness". Obviously if you tried to follow this through logically it wouldn't make any sense. Let me explain.
Frame rate alone can be a factor in immersion, but you can't tie frame rate to a game, thus a game's immersiveness is not related to 'it's frame rate' because it doesn't have a frame rate.
You can't say that because YOU get a shitty frame rate on a specific game that the game lacks an immersive experience.
FYI you don't need to spend anywhere near $1000 on hardware to play the latest and greatest games unless you want to max every setting.
What AC is trying to say is that frame rate is not an inherent characteristic of a game. Any game, if played on the wrong hardware, can have frame rate issues. So for the purpose of evaluating a game you cannot look at frame rate. That is like saying Zelda sucks because you don't have a nunchuk controller and it requires one. Get the correct hardware before playing top end games. Also, laptops are not 'gaming rigs' regardless of the marketing that the company used to sell it to you but that is a different story so I will leave it at that.
You are assuming we will reach a 'pure' cloud system where every operation is done in the cloud. I don't think this will ever be the case. Small cheap chips are going to keep a good chunk of processing on the devices. The fact is, you are going to have to buy new 'terminals' on a regular basis. Networks have an inherent latency that will never be fixed without some huge breakthrough and that alone is going to drive the 'terminals' to be upgraded and tweaked to be better and faster.
I think we will end up with a hybrid system but I think mostly storage will end up on the cloud, with computing split between the terminals and the cloud. But as cheaper and cheaper storage and CPU's are produced I am still willing to bet that there will be large classes of devices that will have modest storage and computing power even if we evolve to 'the age of the cloud'.
The cloud is actually an ambiguous term that describes the use of computing resources that are not directly controlled by the user.
Many current resources we use are cloud based, but only recently has the term been thrown about so freely. G-mail, google docs, and the internet are all cloud based systems that you might know. Although your stuff may end up hosted in datacenter, it might be hosted by several companies and several datacenters that you will never interact with. These are customer based cloud systems, but businesses are getting involved with the idea now. Really it seems to me that for a business it is outsourcing. For a consumer it is more of a feature as it is nowhere near economical to run your own servers to provide the same services. The idea of 'the cloud' is merely a term for what has been going on for ages: using computing resources that others control but you have access to.
The new application of 'the cloud' for consumers is to move ALL of your stuff online so you are just a dumb terminal that can display the 'clouds' services.
The new application of 'the cloud' for business is outsourcing large chunks of the IT department to companies that specialize in IT. This is supposed to cut costs.
16 GB of flash is way less than $200. I can get 8 at a best buy for $20.
Yeah, this gives me lots of faith in my assignment to look at a specified wiki entry and verify the entry by using.... articles from journalists. Maybe I will write my paper instead on how this assignment proves nothing since the journalist probably used Wikipedia to write the damn thing.
*ponders the consequences of being right vs doing what I am told*
Does this really have anything to do with twitter though? It seems to me that a TCP/IP request sent to your microwave would be just as if not more efficient at retrieving the desired information... why do we need to add another layer of complexity?
Maybe I don't get it but I don't see why it needs to go through twitter.