Apologies for my crotchetiness but I have memories of trying to run Duke 3D on a 50Mhz 486 and it was painful. I remember it well because I upgraded with a Kingston Turbochip (133MHz AM5x86) and the difference was amazing. The single most impressive upgrade I have ever done to a computer.
How is this even newsworthy? 100 million years is less than 1% of 13.8 Billion years. Given how little of the Universe we have actually see so far the margin of error for any prediction like this has to be huge so a 0.7% change is meaningless.
Over two thousand years ago Eratosthenes estimated the circumference of the Earth from measurements taken in the vicinity of ancient Egypt. Given the limitations of his measurements we are amazed that he managed to get an answer that is in the right ballpark. Depending on interpretation his calculation was wrong by between 2% and 16%. The age of the Universe is a much bigger problem and the amount of it we have seen to date is a much smaller proportion than Egypt was to the size of the World so I think it is fair to assume that even if all the key assumptions underlying this age of universe calculation are correct the margin for error is huge. Of course it is even more likely that something we don't know yet will render the entire calculation invalid.
I tend to agree with the first post that if she isn't a gamer by now then you probably can't turn her into one. However here are some games that I have found from personal experience that gamers and non gamers can enjoy together. Some are co-op but some are solo games that you sit beside and help along.
Stay away from realistic violence. Sadly this probably rules out most of the games you enjoy yourself. Stay away from any game that requires significant mouse or controller dexterity. This rules out most first and third person action games and also many old school platformers.
Fantasy themed MMORPGS (WOW, LOTRO, GUILD WARS etc. Just don't expect to be doing raids together any time soon) Fantasy themed RPGS but beware of overly complex ones. Kingdoms of Amalur is very approachable. Point and click adventures used to be great for non gamers. See if you can find one made this century. Fantasy themed Co-Op: Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Trine 1/2, Dungeon Siege 1,2,3 Easy Driving games: Mario Kart, Trackmania Any of the Lego games (Harry Potter, Indiana, Batman etc) works great if you play Co-Op on a Wii In fact lots of of games on the Wii: Wii Sports, Just Dance (go on embarass yourself) World of Goo highly recommended and can be fun to solve levels together. Any game by Pop Cap (Plants versus Zombies especially recommended) Just about Facebook or mobile game is accessible to casual gamers but you'll probably hate them.
What I don't understand is why the content producers go along with it. By giving an exclusive rights to one distributor they are cutting the audience for their product. Sure they can charge over the odds to that one distributor but ultimately the more people see your product the more money in total comes in so surely it would be better for them to distribute their content widely at a reasonable price than to rely on one big payment from one distributor.
Even though I am a Netflix subscriber I completely disagree that this is a good move. My problem is with the word "exclusive". As long an individual distributors get exclusive rights to content it means that large groups of consumers (those who choose for various reasons to go with another distributor) are blocked from getting the content they would like. In my country for example I can't watch most HBO shows because HBO has signed an exclusive deal with a different cable provider but if I switched to that provider I would lose other stuff instead.
This has a long term distorting effect on the market. Instead of distributors competing against each other by "being a better distribution service" they spend all their money trying to lock up exclusive rights to content and we customers are forced to put up with a crappy service just to see the content we want to watch.
If you only use your phone to take drunken snapshots down the pub this won't bother you but quite a lot of folks care about the quality of their phone photo's. Instagram's 1 billion dollar success story was largely built on Iphone pictures. Up to now the Iphone camera has been rated as best in class but not any more it seems. Worst of all it doesn't sound like it will be easy to fix.
The original article seems to have raised a lot of geek hackles because of the implication that you need to con bright people into performing miracles to get your company off the ground and then promptly fire them as soon as the company starts to grow.
What every one seems to be missing is that there are plenty of brilliant people who are not jerks and there are plenty of jerks who are far from brilliant. I would strongly support the idea of getting rid of jerks because I have seen the damage they can do to organisations but you are firing them because they are jerks not because they are brilliant.
I hope this shames Dropbox into implementing proper client side encryption.
I like many others have become dependent on Dropbox for my work because it is so darn convenient but I know in the back of my mind that it poses a security risk. I would feel much more comfortable if everything was encrypted on my PC (and under my control) before it was transmitted.
You say that the information didn't come out to every one but nevertheless there was plenty written over the last few weeks saying that Facebook was overvalued. There was no shortage of warning signs so it is hard to feel sympathy for those who lost money on this. Caveat Emptor and all that.
Just to clarify the situation I guess we have to assume that the encrypted files are are in the cloud or already in the hands of the authorities so you cannot just destroy them.
Vegemeisters suggestion of a key-file on a Flash disk seems like the best idea so far but flash disks are pretty robust little devices how could you be sure of destroying it in time? You are hardly likely to carry a hammer or other heavy tool around with you everywhere and crushing it underfoot probably won't do enough damage. I guess you could have the keyfile on a phone along with an app that instantly garbles it beyond use but I amn't knowledgeable enough about such things to know how easy it is to permanently delete info on a phone.
If all else fails we could go back to the edible paper approach with a QR code password on it.
In the olden days folks had to eat their notebook pages or hastily burn them as the secret police were knocking on the door. Nowadays that information is likely to be stored in encrypted files and event the best passwords are susceptible to the judicious application of baseball bats. Is it possible to come up with a genuinely destructible password that can be quickly and discretely destroyed forever. My best guess is some kind of keyfile but how could you be sure to delete it in a manner that couldn't be reconstructed?
As long as you run dropbox on at least one desktop computer you have a local copy of your files. If you use more than one computer chances are you have multiple copies of those files. Of course you lose the ability to share those files when dropbox shuts down but at least you have the files in an easy to find place which should make it easier to move them to another cloud service. This seems like a fairly robust model to me.
It is true that gaming companies have refined the premium model to a fine art AND many of them are making good money out of it. They use all kinds of hooks to entice you into paying and to keep paying once you have made that first purchase. Even so, from what I have read it is generally accepted that 90% of your customers won't pay a dime so you just have to get enough revenue from the 10% who will. Personally I am quite uneasy about this aspect of freemium because by design the few paying customers have to subsidise the many and therefore they must pay way over the odds. In the gaming world you hear of committed players customers spending $100's every month on a fairly rudimentary games as opposed to the $15/month charged by the few remaining subscription games.
The game companies also have the support issue nailed. Free customers get no direct support. If lucky thy have access to a single forum.
There are already a few unofficial ports in advanced beta and threads on XDA developers indicate that everything works just fine. .
While I am somewhat disappointed by Samsung's lack of commitment to provide ongoing support such a successful product I am not sure this makes any difference really. Users who are not hacking their phones probably don't want such a radical upgrade. Users who are into hacking will get it unofficially.
Gosh how I loved that SSCSSHHHHHHH when it eventually did connect. In my mind I can still hear those bits pouring down the telephone line into my computer. Some modems (might have been pre 56k days) even let you keep the modem speaker on constantly so you could listen to your data all day long. The sheer nerdy joy of it.
As a parent who's eldest has just started secondary (high) school I say the sooner they move to e-books the better. Its not just about money. I am concerned about the weight of textbooks my 12 year old daughter has to lug around. They have lockers but regularly brings home 10kg or more of books for homework or study. The problem has gotten much worse than when I was a school kid because a. Schoolbooks are bigger, glossier and consequently heavier and b. Every subject now has a separate workbook which doubles up the number of books.
So I would welcome the transition to ebooks with open arms but I wonder if the technology is ready yet. On the hardware side battery life is critical. Between school time and homework the kids could be using the tablet for 8 hours a day. With even the best of current tablets that means forgetting to plug in overnight could lose you a whole schoolday. On the software side I am also concerned that the whole e-book industry is still a mess with conflicting standards and restrictive drm: "I am sorry but we won't be covering Lord of the Flies this year because you cannot get it in XYZ format".
"The publisher also provides the marketing, editing, proofreading, typesetting, illustrations and quite a few other services that the author cannot provide themselves."
This is an important point. Traditional publishers provided a lot of valuable services to authors not least of which were marketing and publicity. However in return for these services publishers asked a very high price - up to and sometimes even including all ownership of the creative work. They got away with this because of the monoploy power they held due to the huge barrier to entry caused by high printing and distribution costs. Ebooks have effectively eliminated printing and distribution costs and have undermined that entire business model. I don't think traditional publishers can continue as they are now that their main source of power is vanishing. The question as to who will take over from publishers as the dominant power in the market is as yet unresolved:
In my favourite scenario it will be the authors themselves. A small number of successful self published authors are showing this is possible and when a superstar like J K Rowling opts to self publish you have to take it seriously. Unfortunately the much larger number of poor quality self published works makes me suspect that most authors lack the knowledge and skills to critically evaluate, edit and market their own works.
In my least favourite (bud sadly more likely) scenario it will be a small number of (possibly only one) mega online retailers who will own the market.
As for the publishers, well everything they used to do will probably become just a service for hire.
I know that in Europe we have fairly strong advertising standards regulation and in theory every ad is supposed to be "legal, decent honest and truthful". I see the odd case of outrageous ads being challenged but for the most part we get exactly the same litany of gullible customers being sold products they don't need: €100 hdmi cables, ultimate broadband for Facebook browsing etc.
I am not sure that any amount of regulation can stop it. I have become quite resigned to the whole business and I accept it as a kind of ignorance tax. While I can be smug about the fact that I am knowledgeable enough about tech products to avoid paying this ignorance tax I am quite sure that in other areas where I am less knowledgeable I am probably duped into paying more than I should.
Slashdot Mirror
..are doomed to repeat it.
Apologies for my crotchetiness but I have memories of trying to run Duke 3D on a 50Mhz 486 and it was painful. I remember it well because I upgraded with a Kingston Turbochip (133MHz AM5x86) and the difference was amazing. The single most impressive upgrade I have ever done to a computer.
Anyways Duke 3D on 20MHz 486 won't work.
How is this even newsworthy? 100 million years is less than 1% of 13.8 Billion years. Given how little of the Universe we have actually see so far the margin of error for any prediction like this has to be huge so a 0.7% change is meaningless.
Over two thousand years ago Eratosthenes estimated the circumference of the Earth from measurements taken in the vicinity of ancient Egypt. Given the limitations of his measurements we are amazed that he managed to get an answer that is in the right ballpark. Depending on interpretation his calculation was wrong by between 2% and 16%. The age of the Universe is a much bigger problem and the amount of it we have seen to date is a much smaller proportion than Egypt was to the size of the World so I think it is fair to assume that even if all the key assumptions underlying this age of universe calculation are correct the margin for error is huge. Of course it is even more likely that something we don't know yet will render the entire calculation invalid.
I tend to agree with the first post that if she isn't a gamer by now then you probably can't turn her into one. However here are some games that I have found from personal experience that gamers and non gamers can enjoy together. Some are co-op but some are solo games that you sit beside and help along.
Stay away from realistic violence. Sadly this probably rules out most of the games you enjoy yourself.
Stay away from any game that requires significant mouse or controller dexterity. This rules out most first and third person action games and also many old school platformers.
Fantasy themed MMORPGS (WOW, LOTRO, GUILD WARS etc. Just don't expect to be doing raids together any time soon)
Fantasy themed RPGS but beware of overly complex ones. Kingdoms of Amalur is very approachable.
Point and click adventures used to be great for non gamers. See if you can find one made this century.
Fantasy themed Co-Op: Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Trine 1/2, Dungeon Siege 1,2,3
Easy Driving games: Mario Kart, Trackmania
Any of the Lego games (Harry Potter, Indiana, Batman etc) works great if you play Co-Op on a Wii
In fact lots of of games on the Wii: Wii Sports, Just Dance (go on embarass yourself)
World of Goo highly recommended and can be fun to solve levels together.
Any game by Pop Cap (Plants versus Zombies especially recommended)
Just about Facebook or mobile game is accessible to casual gamers but you'll probably hate them.
What I don't understand is why the content producers go along with it. By giving an exclusive rights to one distributor they are cutting the audience for their product. Sure they can charge over the odds to that one distributor but ultimately the more people see your product the more money in total comes in so surely it would be better for them to distribute their content widely at a reasonable price than to rely on one big payment from one distributor.
Even though I am a Netflix subscriber I completely disagree that this is a good move. My problem is with the word "exclusive". As long an individual distributors get exclusive rights to content it means that large groups of consumers (those who choose for various reasons to go with another distributor) are blocked from getting the content they would like. In my country for example I can't watch most HBO shows because HBO has signed an exclusive deal with a different cable provider but if I switched to that provider I would lose other stuff instead.
This has a long term distorting effect on the market. Instead of distributors competing against each other by "being a better distribution service" they spend all their money trying to lock up exclusive rights to content and we customers are forced to put up with a crappy service just to see the content we want to watch.
If you only use your phone to take drunken snapshots down the pub this won't bother you but quite a lot of folks care about the quality of their phone photo's. Instagram's 1 billion dollar success story was largely built on Iphone pictures. Up to now the Iphone camera has been rated as best in class but not any more it seems. Worst of all it doesn't sound like it will be easy to fix.
The original article seems to have raised a lot of geek hackles because of the implication that you need to con bright people into performing miracles to get your company off the ground and then promptly fire them as soon as the company starts to grow.
What every one seems to be missing is that there are plenty of brilliant people who are not jerks and there are plenty of jerks who are far from brilliant. I would strongly support the idea of getting rid of jerks because I have seen the damage they can do to organisations but you are firing them because they are jerks not because they are brilliant.
Sorry but since you don't pay them any money you are not entitled to call yourself a customer and your opinion is irrelevant.
Can't you just upgrade the memory with a microSD? You certainly could with the original Galaxy.
I hope this shames Dropbox into implementing proper client side encryption.
I like many others have become dependent on Dropbox for my work because it is so darn convenient but I know in the back of my mind that it poses a security risk. I would feel much more comfortable if everything was encrypted on my PC (and under my control) before it was transmitted.
You say that the information didn't come out to every one but nevertheless there was plenty written over the last few weeks saying that Facebook was overvalued. There was no shortage of warning signs so it is hard to feel sympathy for those who lost money on this. Caveat Emptor and all that.
This seems relevant to me even if it dates from the dawn of computer time:
http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html
I am surprised it hasn't been linked to yet.
I am pretty sure you mean Jonathan Swift's modest proposal. I know this only because I work right beside the cathedral where he was Dean.
Pretty cool idea to put passengers to sleep by the way. Apart from security concerns it would finally allow me to get some sleep on long haul flights.
to see if they can they release version 1.0 of ReactOS before the X86 architecture becomes obsolete.
Just to clarify the situation I guess we have to assume that the encrypted files are are in the cloud or already in the hands of the authorities so you cannot just destroy them.
Vegemeisters suggestion of a key-file on a Flash disk seems like the best idea so far but flash disks are pretty robust little devices how could you be sure of destroying it in time? You are hardly likely to carry a hammer or other heavy tool around with you everywhere and crushing it underfoot probably won't do enough damage. I guess you could have the keyfile on a phone along with an app that instantly garbles it beyond use but I amn't knowledgeable enough about such things to know how easy it is to permanently delete info on a phone.
If all else fails we could go back to the edible paper approach with a QR code password on it.
In the olden days folks had to eat their notebook pages or hastily burn them as the secret police were knocking on the door. Nowadays that information is likely to be stored in encrypted files and event the best passwords are susceptible to the judicious application of baseball bats. Is it possible to come up with a genuinely destructible password that can be quickly and discretely destroyed forever. My best guess is some kind of keyfile but how could you be sure to delete it in a manner that couldn't be reconstructed?
As long as you run dropbox on at least one desktop computer you have a local copy of your files. If you use more than one computer chances are you have multiple copies of those files. Of course you lose the ability to share those files when dropbox shuts down but at least you have the files in an easy to find place which should make it easier to move them to another cloud service. This seems like a fairly robust model to me.
It is true that gaming companies have refined the premium model to a fine art AND many of them are making good money out of it. They use all kinds of hooks to entice you into paying and to keep paying once you have made that first purchase. Even so, from what I have read it is generally accepted that 90% of your customers won't pay a dime so you just have to get enough revenue from the 10% who will. Personally I am quite uneasy about this aspect of freemium because by design the few paying customers have to subsidise the many and therefore they must pay way over the odds. In the gaming world you hear of committed players customers spending $100's every month on a fairly rudimentary games as opposed to the $15/month charged by the few remaining subscription games.
The game companies also have the support issue nailed. Free customers get no direct support. If lucky thy have access to a single forum.
There are already a few unofficial ports in advanced beta and threads on XDA developers indicate that everything works just fine. .
While I am somewhat disappointed by Samsung's lack of commitment to provide ongoing support such a successful product I am not sure this makes any difference really. Users who are not hacking their phones probably don't want such a radical upgrade. Users who are into hacking will get it unofficially.
Gosh how I loved that SSCSSHHHHHHH when it eventually did connect. In my mind I can still hear those bits pouring down the telephone line into my computer. Some modems (might have been pre 56k days) even let you keep the modem speaker on constantly so you could listen to your data all day long. The sheer nerdy joy of it.
As a parent who's eldest has just started secondary (high) school I say the sooner they move to e-books the better. Its not just about money. I am concerned about the weight of textbooks my 12 year old daughter has to lug around. They have lockers but regularly brings home 10kg or more of books for homework or study. The problem has gotten much worse than when I was a school kid because
a. Schoolbooks are bigger, glossier and consequently heavier and
b. Every subject now has a separate workbook which doubles up the number of books.
So I would welcome the transition to ebooks with open arms but I wonder if the technology is ready yet. On the hardware side battery life is critical. Between school time and homework the kids could be using the tablet for 8 hours a day. With even the best of current tablets that means forgetting to plug in overnight could lose you a whole schoolday. On the software side I am also concerned that the whole e-book industry is still a mess with conflicting standards and restrictive drm: "I am sorry but we won't be covering Lord of the Flies this year because you cannot get it in XYZ format".
"The publisher also provides the marketing, editing, proofreading, typesetting, illustrations and quite a few other services that the author cannot provide themselves."
This is an important point. Traditional publishers provided a lot of valuable services to authors not least of which were marketing and publicity. However in return for these services publishers asked a very high price - up to and sometimes even including all ownership of the creative work. They got away with this because of the monoploy power they held due to the huge barrier to entry caused by high printing and distribution costs. Ebooks have effectively eliminated printing and distribution costs and have undermined that entire business model. I don't think traditional publishers can continue as they are now that their main source of power is vanishing. The question as to who will take over from publishers as the dominant power in the market is as yet unresolved:
In my favourite scenario it will be the authors themselves. A small number of successful self published authors are showing this is possible and when a superstar like J K Rowling opts to self publish you have to take it seriously. Unfortunately the much larger number of poor quality self published works makes me suspect that most authors lack the knowledge and skills to critically evaluate, edit and market their own works.
In my least favourite (bud sadly more likely) scenario it will be a small number of (possibly only one) mega online retailers who will own the market.
As for the publishers, well everything they used to do will probably become just a service for hire.
I know that in Europe we have fairly strong advertising standards regulation and in theory every ad is supposed to be "legal, decent honest and truthful". I see the odd case of outrageous ads being challenged but for the most part we get exactly the same litany of gullible customers being sold products they don't need: €100 hdmi cables, ultimate broadband for Facebook browsing etc.
I am not sure that any amount of regulation can stop it. I have become quite resigned to the whole business and I accept it as a kind of ignorance tax. While I can be smug about the fact that I am knowledgeable enough about tech products to avoid paying this ignorance tax I am quite sure that in other areas where I am less knowledgeable I am probably duped into paying more than I should.
According to the article they want to take the stock options back so they can use them to attract new employees.
Surely the act of taking them back greatly reduces the attractiveness of any future options Zynga issues?