Anyone has been able to register any domain (.com,.org,.net) since the mid/late-1990s. I don't think there was ever any real enforcement on the whole "com for commercial, org for organizations, net for networks" thing.
> ICultists wont touch it with a 10 foot pole at any price because it's > not made by Apple and everyone else that's on the fence is going > to see the identical price and buy the Ipad because either they saw > it on TV more / their ICult buddy recommended it and since they're > priced the same might as well get what everyone else is talking about
I am SO FUCKING SICK of all this "it's all because of fanboys/marketing/cultishness" shit! EVERY SINGLE MAJOR REVIEW of the TouchPad says it's barely in the same league with the iPad 1 and not even CLOSE to the iPad 2.
And because someone is bound to post a reply asking for proof, here are two major mainstream ones:
David Pogue, New York Times "... the TouchPad doesn't come close to being as complete or mature as the iPad or the best Android tablets..."
And if you think the big sites are just dumb and/or Apple whores, how about some tech sites, like Ars Technica or Engadget?
Engadget We all wanted the TouchPad to really compete, to give us a compelling third party to join the iOS and Android boxes on the ballot. But, alas, this isn't quite it... The shortage of apps is a problem, no doubt, but that will change with time. What won't change is the hardware, and there we're left a little disappointed. Holding this in one hand and either an iPad 2 or a Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the other leaves you wondering why you'd ever be compelled to buy the HP when you could have the thinner, lighter alternative for the same money. Meanwhile, the performance left us occasionally wanting and, well, what is there to say.
Ars Technica The HP TouchPad, if it were less expensive, could be an extremely strong, if slightly less polished, alternative to the iPad. But like other recently-released high-profile Android tablets, it's determined to take on the champ. And just like those Android tablets, its hard to recommend over an iPad at the same price.
That said, I would have snapped one up for $99 but it's now Saturday afternoon and there are none to be found. (I went to bed early last night and was out of the house first thing in the morning. Dammit!)
> Non Apple Tables are priced roughly $200-300 too expensive. Get > them around $199-$299 and they'll sell like gangbusters just like it > did for Android phones in the mobile market.
There is not magical "make it cheap" dust that can be sprinkled on non-iOS devices. The fact that the OS is free really doesn't amtter much at all. (Remember when everyone thought Linux would take over the desktop because it was considered to be as good as Windows?) Believe it or not, Apple is being DAMN price competitive on the iPad. Do you think multibillion dollar companies are spending billions of dollars to bring tablets to the market and then watching them fail just for fun? No, they're selling them for that much because they HAVE to in order to make any profit at all, and they're failing because they just aren't as good. You CAN NOT MAKE a tablet as good as the iPad for less. It has a good looking, responsive touchscreen, the best battery life out there, and it's within 1mm of being the thinnest as well. Lightest of all the 10" tablets, too, AFAIK. Cheaper tablets have screens that are worse looking and/or less sensitive, they're thicker, they're heavier, AND they have worse battery life.
There ARE cheap Android tablets out there (especially if you include things like the Pandigital Novel and B&N Nook Color) and they ARE NOT SELLING anywhere
If I'd started "Web Inc." it would have been just another proprietary system. You wouldn't have had this universality. For something like the Web to exist, it has to be based on public, nonproprietary standards.
"And now, continuing my review of every key on the keyboard, the next one is called 'caps lock.' HMM, WHAT DOES IT... OH MY GOD! THIS IS FUCKING SWEET!! I AM GOING TO USE THIS ALL THE TIME!!!!!"
And now here's some plain text to work around the lameness filter. I hope it goes by percent of capital letters and not by sheer number. Here's hoping...
> The phones need to evolve to have real web browsers
Yeah, there's no difference between using a desktop with a 30" screen and a handheld device with a 3" screen. You're right--99% less surface area shouldn't make any difference. I'll just pan and zoom until my fingertips bleed.
> It will be rare that you will save money by printing out your > own stuff even ignoring the cost of the machine itself.
What about repairs? I am champing at the bit for a good, affordable, home 3D printer for all the times when a little plastic bit breaks off of a toy or something. It's one of those things, just like any other new technology, where we can't see all the implications and possibilities just yet.
And relating to a point you did make, one-offs and small custom stuff will also be HUGELY useful. One trivial example: I was at Coit Tower in S.F. the other day, and in the gift shop, they sell souvenirs of all types EXCEPT little miniature towers! An afternoon with a printer and I'd have one.:-)
I thought it was odd that my bank only allowed A-Z, 0-9 for online access. Then I called up one day on the phone and was asked to punch in my password, so I guess that's why.
[M]icropayments create a double-standard. One cannot tell users that they need to place a monetary value on something while also suggesting that the fee charged is functionally zero... users will be persistently puzzled over the conflicting messages of "This is worth so much you have to decide whether to buy it or not" and "This is worth so little that it has virtually no cost to you."
There are many reasons why micropayments haven't caught on in the decade+ that we've been hearing about them and they're all covered very nicely in that article. His talk about the mental effort involved in transactions may sound like psychobabble BS but this part sums it up nicely:
Imagine you are moving and need to buy cardboard boxes. Now you could go and measure the height, width, and depth of every object in your house - every book, every fork, every shoe - and then create 3D models of how these objects could be most densely packed into cardboard boxes, and only then buy the actual boxes. This would allow you to use the minimum number of boxes.
But you don't care about cardboard boxes, you care about moving, so spending time and effort to calculate the exact number of boxes conserves boxes but wastes time. Furthermore, you know that having one box too many is not nearly as bad as having one box too few, so you will be willing to guess how many boxes you will need, and then pad the number.
For low-cost items, in other words, you are willing to overpay for cheap resources, in order to have a system that maximizes other, more important, preferences. Micropayment systems, by contrast, typically treat cheap resources (content, cycles, disk) as precious commodities, while treating the user's time as if were so abundant as to be free.
I'm not saying that small payments can't exist anywhere, in any form, but it's pretty obvious that the more small payments you ask for, the worse a game gets.
All of the above are true (or, are at least true for you) but they aren't important to the masses, and that's why other phones outsell the BlackBerry, and their management is too brain-dead to deal with it.
"BlackBerry smartphones will never have cameras because the No. 1 customer of ours is the U.S. government," Mike Lazaridis would say in meetings. "There will never be a BlackBerry with an MP3 player or camera."
And yet he was too fucking dumb and/or stubborn to realize that only 8% of working Americans work for the government, which means 92% of employed Americans DON'T work for the government. (And plenty of teens have disposable income and no jobs at all, so that's like 95% of the country he's ignoring.) Why limit yourself like that? Dumb, dumb, dumb. I agree that there's a market for less-featureful phones but if you think it's a big market you're deluding yourself. What's so hard about making both?
"The strength of a Blackberry is productivity." - depends on what you're used to. I know people who are fantastically productive with an iPhone. (Or any other device. You talk about taking lots of notes on one--if I were going to take lots of notes, I'd get a better device. Like the old joke: a handgun is what you use to defend yourself while you make way to a REAL weapon.) But for every person who can type a bit faster or eke out a little more battery life with a BlackBerry, there are 99 others who are 10x more productive due to apps that are orders of magnitude better than anything available on a BB. BlackBerries are very productive, within a very narrow definition of "productive."
One example: I had a BlackBerry Curve 8330 from work (right after they came out) and a personal iPhone. Having used the iPhone's awesome maps, I checked out the BB's maps one day. To say that the iPhone's maps are an order of magnitude better than the BB's is a gross understatement. They are two, maybe three orders better. For every one thing a BB does better than another device, there are ten things every other device does better than a BB. And unless your absolute top priorities are (for example) battery life, network usage, and a good physical keyboard, you're going to be better served by something else.
Just like an organism must have enough food to survive, a company must be profitable to survive, and there just isn't enough market to keep RIM in business much longer. (Or if there is, they'll be a shadow of their former selves and a fraction of the total market, unless they really drastically change--which they haven't shown much indication of doing.)
An SGI O2 that I fire up every once in a while, and a pizzabox Sparc in my closet that I'm going to set up Real Soon Now. Gear that cost thousands and thousands of dollars when I first started working with computers (professionally, that is) can now be acquired for $0 - $25.
Oh, and every time I'm in the SF bay area, I try to hit the computer history museum. If you are EVER in range, go. Seriously. It's great.
Long story short: there is very little IP protection in the fashion industry (both in the U.S. and worldwide) and they do very well, thankyouverymuch. It's a surprisingly interesting video from a geek's point of view. It's like a game, really: here are the rules, here are the limitations, now solve the problem and check out the unexpected results.
In the last year I've gotten spam from accounts belonging to nearly a dozen people I personally know--nearly a dozen hotmail, yahoo, and gmail accounts compromised. Including one of my own. Strong passwords, everyone! Letters, numbers, punctuation. Even something like "Help?1234" is infinitely* better than a dictionary word or common name. Grouping characters by type makes it easier to remember and makes it easier to work with on soft keyboards on mobile devices--letter letter letter letter, shift to "numbers and punctuation" mode, number number number number.
My biggest problem now (not with spam, but with passwords in general) is financial institutions that restrict you to letters and numbers so you can punch them in on a phone keypad.
I always thought the main difference was that those who think they're actually accomplishing something by being a fan (i.e., denoted by "trekker") are the sadder of the lot. At least trekkies can admit "hey, this is just something I'm into." Anyone who calls himself a trekker is taking himself way too seriously.
The "douce" came from your use of that overused, snarky little "fixed that for you" since there was actually no fixing happening at all. Google felt it was a big enough problem (again: 80 minutes, a million users) to warrant posting about, and the article said "many." Lacking any other facts, I see no reason not to believe them. There is no evidence you fixed anything at all.
Wow, what a douche you are, and what stupid mods we have out today for modding you up. Google+ already has over 1,000,000 users. If just 1% (10,000) got spammed, I would call that "many."
"Many" does not imply a majority or a minority. It just means "a lot." TFA doesn't have any numbers other than saying they have over a million users and the outage lasted 80 minutes, so I think yeah, it's pretty likely that "many" users were spammed.
The only way your one piece of evidence could prove or disprove anything would have been if it had said "all Google+ users were spammed." Or if you controlled 51% of all Google+ accounts and didn't get spammed once, then that would disprove "most." But as it sits, your one piece of evidence demonstrates exactly nothing with regard to the validity of this report.
There was a little more to it than that. Quark took YEARS before they released a native version for OS X, versions 5 and 6 were not big improvments over 4, those updates were years apart, and they got really, really behind in features, especially the quality of their typesetting engines. And since the other 2 parts of the Holy Trinity of desktop publishing were both Adobe apps (Photoshop and Illustrator), InDesign's integration with them (like being able to import layered Photoshop files, rather than requiring flattened TIFFs or EPSs, and handling transparent layers instead of requiring clipping paths) sped up workflows like crazy.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone has been able to register any domain (.com, .org, .net) since the mid/late-1990s. I don't think there was ever any real enforcement on the whole "com for commercial, org for organizations, net for networks" thing.
> ICultists wont touch it with a 10 foot pole at any price because it's
> not made by Apple and everyone else that's on the fence is going
> to see the identical price and buy the Ipad because either they saw
> it on TV more / their ICult buddy recommended it and since they're
> priced the same might as well get what everyone else is talking about
I am SO FUCKING SICK of all this "it's all because of fanboys/marketing/cultishness" shit! EVERY SINGLE MAJOR REVIEW of the TouchPad says it's barely in the same league with the iPad 1 and not even CLOSE to the iPad 2.
And because someone is bound to post a reply asking for proof, here are two major mainstream ones:
"... the TouchPad doesn't come close to being as complete or mature as the iPad or the best Android tablets..."
"Bottom line:
And if you think the big sites are just dumb and/or Apple whores, how about some tech sites, like Ars Technica or Engadget?
We all wanted the TouchPad to really compete, to give us a compelling third party to join the iOS and Android boxes on the ballot. But, alas, this isn't quite it... The shortage of apps is a problem, no doubt, but that will change with time. What won't change is the hardware, and there we're left a little disappointed. Holding this in one hand and either an iPad 2 or a Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the other leaves you wondering why you'd ever be compelled to buy the HP when you could have the thinner, lighter alternative for the same money. Meanwhile, the performance left us occasionally wanting and, well, what is there to say.
The HP TouchPad, if it were less expensive, could be an extremely strong, if slightly less polished, alternative to the iPad. But like other recently-released high-profile Android tablets, it's determined to take on the champ. And just like those Android tablets, its hard to recommend over an iPad at the same price.
That said, I would have snapped one up for $99 but it's now Saturday afternoon and there are none to be found. (I went to bed early last night and was out of the house first thing in the morning. Dammit!)
> Non Apple Tables are priced roughly $200-300 too expensive. Get
> them around $199-$299 and they'll sell like gangbusters just like it
> did for Android phones in the mobile market.
There is not magical "make it cheap" dust that can be sprinkled on non-iOS devices. The fact that the OS is free really doesn't amtter much at all. (Remember when everyone thought Linux would take over the desktop because it was considered to be as good as Windows?) Believe it or not, Apple is being DAMN price competitive on the iPad. Do you think multibillion dollar companies are spending billions of dollars to bring tablets to the market and then watching them fail just for fun? No, they're selling them for that much because they HAVE to in order to make any profit at all, and they're failing because they just aren't as good. You CAN NOT MAKE a tablet as good as the iPad for less. It has a good looking, responsive touchscreen, the best battery life out there, and it's within 1mm of being the thinnest as well. Lightest of all the 10" tablets, too, AFAIK. Cheaper tablets have screens that are worse looking and/or less sensitive, they're thicker, they're heavier, AND they have worse battery life.
There ARE cheap Android tablets out there (especially if you include things like the Pandigital Novel and B&N Nook Color) and they ARE NOT SELLING anywhere
Agree with Lyons or Gruber? Ugh. :-)
Well, looking at it, I think I'll go with Gruber on this one.
> I Googled Motorola mobility
Actually, Google just googled Motorola Mobility. :-)
Tim Berners-Lee in Wired, March 1997
Do you wish you'd started the Web as a business?
If I'd started "Web Inc." it would have been just another proprietary system. You wouldn't have had this universality. For something like the Web to exist, it has to be based on public, nonproprietary standards.
PS: That's Sir Tim Berners-Lee to you, bub. :-)
"And now, continuing my review of every key on the keyboard, the next one is called 'caps lock.' HMM, WHAT DOES IT... OH MY GOD! THIS IS FUCKING SWEET!! I AM GOING TO USE THIS ALL THE TIME!!!!!"
And now here's some plain text to work around the lameness filter. I hope it goes by percent of capital letters and not by sheer number. Here's hoping...
> Fucking hipsters and their phone apps.
Fucking retarded A/Cs and their dumbass opinions.
> The phones need to evolve to have real web browsers
Yeah, there's no difference between using a desktop with a 30" screen and a handheld device with a 3" screen. You're right--99% less surface area shouldn't make any difference. I'll just pan and zoom until my fingertips bleed.
> It will be rare that you will save money by printing out your
> own stuff even ignoring the cost of the machine itself.
What about repairs? I am champing at the bit for a good, affordable, home 3D printer for all the times when a little plastic bit breaks off of a toy or something. It's one of those things, just like any other new technology, where we can't see all the implications and possibilities just yet.
And relating to a point you did make, one-offs and small custom stuff will also be HUGELY useful. One trivial example: I was at Coit Tower in S.F. the other day, and in the gift shop, they sell souvenirs of all types EXCEPT little miniature towers! An afternoon with a printer and I'd have one. :-)
Funny, I read that domain as "American select" which also makes sense. :-)
I thought it was odd that my bank only allowed A-Z, 0-9 for online access. Then I called up one day on the phone and was asked to punch in my password, so I guess that's why.
Original first choice: "Bing minus"
This was covered in detail over a decade ago.
[M]icropayments create a double-standard. One cannot tell users that they need to place a monetary value on something while also suggesting that the fee charged is functionally zero... users will be persistently puzzled over the conflicting messages of "This is worth so much you have to decide whether to buy it or not" and "This is worth so little that it has virtually no cost to you."
There are many reasons why micropayments haven't caught on in the decade+ that we've been hearing about them and they're all covered very nicely in that article. His talk about the mental effort involved in transactions may sound like psychobabble BS but this part sums it up nicely:
Imagine you are moving and need to buy cardboard boxes. Now you could go and measure the height, width, and depth of every object in your house - every book, every fork, every shoe - and then create 3D models of how these objects could be most densely packed into cardboard boxes, and only then buy the actual boxes. This would allow you to use the minimum number of boxes.
But you don't care about cardboard boxes, you care about moving, so spending time and effort to calculate the exact number of boxes conserves boxes but wastes time. Furthermore, you know that having one box too many is not nearly as bad as having one box too few, so you will be willing to guess how many boxes you will need, and then pad the number.
For low-cost items, in other words, you are willing to overpay for cheap resources, in order to have a system that maximizes other, more important, preferences. Micropayment systems, by contrast, typically treat cheap resources (content, cycles, disk) as precious commodities, while treating the user's time as if were so abundant as to be free.
I'm not saying that small payments can't exist anywhere, in any form, but it's pretty obvious that the more small payments you ask for, the worse a game gets.
All of the above are true (or, are at least true for you) but they aren't important to the masses, and that's why other phones outsell the BlackBerry, and their management is too brain-dead to deal with it.
"BlackBerry smartphones will never have cameras because the No. 1 customer of ours is the U.S. government," Mike Lazaridis would say in meetings. "There will never be a BlackBerry with an MP3 player or camera."
And yet he was too fucking dumb and/or stubborn to realize that only 8% of working Americans work for the government, which means 92% of employed Americans DON'T work for the government. (And plenty of teens have disposable income and no jobs at all, so that's like 95% of the country he's ignoring.) Why limit yourself like that? Dumb, dumb, dumb. I agree that there's a market for less-featureful phones but if you think it's a big market you're deluding yourself. What's so hard about making both?
"The strength of a Blackberry is productivity." - depends on what you're used to. I know people who are fantastically productive with an iPhone. (Or any other device. You talk about taking lots of notes on one--if I were going to take lots of notes, I'd get a better device. Like the old joke: a handgun is what you use to defend yourself while you make way to a REAL weapon.) But for every person who can type a bit faster or eke out a little more battery life with a BlackBerry, there are 99 others who are 10x more productive due to apps that are orders of magnitude better than anything available on a BB. BlackBerries are very productive, within a very narrow definition of "productive."
One example: I had a BlackBerry Curve 8330 from work (right after they came out) and a personal iPhone. Having used the iPhone's awesome maps, I checked out the BB's maps one day. To say that the iPhone's maps are an order of magnitude better than the BB's is a gross understatement. They are two, maybe three orders better. For every one thing a BB does better than another device, there are ten things every other device does better than a BB. And unless your absolute top priorities are (for example) battery life, network usage, and a good physical keyboard, you're going to be better served by something else.
Just like an organism must have enough food to survive, a company must be profitable to survive, and there just isn't enough market to keep RIM in business much longer. (Or if there is, they'll be a shadow of their former selves and a fraction of the total market, unless they really drastically change--which they haven't shown much indication of doing.)
Once upon a time they were the only game in town. Now they aren't. The end.
An SGI O2 that I fire up every once in a while, and a pizzabox Sparc in my closet that I'm going to set up Real Soon Now. Gear that cost thousands and thousands of dollars when I first started working with computers (professionally, that is) can now be acquired for $0 - $25.
Oh, and every time I'm in the SF bay area, I try to hit the computer history museum. If you are EVER in range, go. Seriously. It's great.
Intel Giveth, and Microsoft Taketh Away. :-)
Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture
Long story short: there is very little IP protection in the fashion industry (both in the U.S. and worldwide) and they do very well, thankyouverymuch. It's a surprisingly interesting video from a geek's point of view. It's like a game, really: here are the rules, here are the limitations, now solve the problem and check out the unexpected results.
The only man in the airport who's truly entitled to say "I've got to catch my plane." :-)
In the last year I've gotten spam from accounts belonging to nearly a dozen people I personally know--nearly a dozen hotmail, yahoo, and gmail accounts compromised. Including one of my own. Strong passwords, everyone! Letters, numbers, punctuation. Even something like "Help?1234" is infinitely* better than a dictionary word or common name. Grouping characters by type makes it easier to remember and makes it easier to work with on soft keyboards on mobile devices--letter letter letter letter, shift to "numbers and punctuation" mode, number number number number.
My biggest problem now (not with spam, but with passwords in general) is financial institutions that restrict you to letters and numbers so you can punch them in on a phone keypad.
* more or less
> this guy can't even make it through a Taco post?
Maybe it's all the typos. ;-)
I always thought the main difference was that those who think they're actually accomplishing something by being a fan (i.e., denoted by "trekker") are the sadder of the lot. At least trekkies can admit "hey, this is just something I'm into." Anyone who calls himself a trekker is taking himself way too seriously.
Awesome, awesome pic, taken from a Shuttle Training Aircraft:
http://i.space.com/images/i/10816/original/atlantis-launch-view-above.jpg
#3 in the series at http://www.space.com/12208-nasa-final-space-shuttle-launch-photos.html . #11 is also cool.
The "douce" came from your use of that overused, snarky little "fixed that for you" since there was actually no fixing happening at all. Google felt it was a big enough problem (again: 80 minutes, a million users) to warrant posting about, and the article said "many." Lacking any other facts, I see no reason not to believe them. There is no evidence you fixed anything at all.
Wow, what a douche you are, and what stupid mods we have out today for modding you up. Google+ already has over 1,000,000 users. If just 1% (10,000) got spammed, I would call that "many."
"Many" does not imply a majority or a minority. It just means "a lot." TFA doesn't have any numbers other than saying they have over a million users and the outage lasted 80 minutes, so I think yeah, it's pretty likely that "many" users were spammed.
The only way your one piece of evidence could prove or disprove anything would have been if it had said "all Google+ users were spammed." Or if you controlled 51% of all Google+ accounts and didn't get spammed once, then that would disprove "most." But as it sits, your one piece of evidence demonstrates exactly nothing with regard to the validity of this report.
There was a little more to it than that. Quark took YEARS before they released a native version for OS X, versions 5 and 6 were not big improvments over 4, those updates were years apart, and they got really, really behind in features, especially the quality of their typesetting engines. And since the other 2 parts of the Holy Trinity of desktop publishing were both Adobe apps (Photoshop and Illustrator), InDesign's integration with them (like being able to import layered Photoshop files, rather than requiring flattened TIFFs or EPSs, and handling transparent layers instead of requiring clipping paths) sped up workflows like crazy.