Call me clueless, I'm sure you will. It just seems to me that the tie between IE and Windows is viewed with logic that doesn't persist elsewhere.
Example: Gvoice doesn't have to follow certain rules because it is free. In a sense, there is no 'browser market' because they are all free.
Example: Recent reviews of the Palm Pre lauded the fact that the search function of the device spanned web and local content simultaneously. How the heck do you do that unless the OS has some sort of baseline web engine?
Is this all still the aftermath of IE v Netscape? Yes, I'm not a fan of what MS did there. Still, if you started with a blank sheet of paper to build an OS today, would you limit yourself to local files and hardware, or would you make the Internet an integral part of the OS? Chrome OS? Palm Pre? It's not a substantively bad idea. It's just an idea in MS's case that was conceived and executed in a manner that used their OS monopoly not only to kill a competitor, but realistically to kill a market itself. That history of bad behavior doesn't mean that an OS should be Web-neutered. Having a baseline web capability if key. If folks want a different browser, then absolutely give them every means to choose one. I happen to prefer Firefox.
So start the name calling. I just don't see how people who are so passionately against MS really care all that much about the persistence of IE components behind the scenes, even when they are free to choose Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc. Honestly, with that much passion it's time to leave Windows altogether. There are great alternatives. Macs are awesome. There are lots of excellent Linux distros available. And please, I have heard the argument about how a browser shouldn't be tied to or an integral part of the OS. Well, perhaps Explorer shouldn't be an integral part of the OS either, and MS should adopt a modular desktop technology as well. Why can't MS make those architectural decisions, and leave the customer to make the purchase decisions?
I'm not quite sure what the application would be for persistent current, although my wife might have some ideas on the subject. In any case, I'm always amazed at folks who can work and innovate at such a small scale. It's like they could build a model ship in a bottle wearing boxing gloves.
You can put it on Impulse, GameTap, or make it a direct download on your site. You can port it to console and put it on WiiWare, XBox Live, or PSN. Seriously, there's a lot of alternatives here, and its hard for me to think of Steam as a monopoly.
Agreed. Steam has the Valve titles plus a smattering of nice indies. But they're hardly a monopoly. Direct2Drive anyone? Just about every mainstream title is available now as a digital download from D2D except the Valve titles and Steam exclusives. If anything D2D should be the specimen under this pointless microscope.
These are all good thoughts, and the main theme in common is that something has to change. IMO the prime candidate for change is the outdated telephone rules and regulations. The more voice services that are exempt from those rules, the more willing the traditional telephone carriers will be to do away with them wholesale in favor of a more unified approach to data transmission. At the end of the day, it's all bits and bytes floating around from point A to point B. While changing the system isn't going to be simple, it is certainly inevitable. Who would have thought 20 years ago that we would end over-the-air analog broadcasting of television by now?
"That's why most businesses won't even look past the coverletters anymore
Problem with recruiters is that they send your resume all over without providing you the opportunity to compose a proper cover letter. Recruiters deal in volume, and use the biggest hammer possible to fit pegs of any size into holes of any shape. I've seen more bad behavior from recruiters than I would have ever imagined, including recruiters who send out resumes for clients that they don't actually represent (yet) in the hopes that if an interview is granted that they can lure the candidate to it. You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy....
While I don't think Gvoice is the end-state of the industry, I think it's going to put a lot of pressure on the concept of minutes altogether. Remember when people paid for blocks of time for dial-up access? I think we'd all agree that the new broadband model, although still not perfect, is vastly superior. Once connectivity over the airwaves starts to approach minimal broadband speeds in a pervasive way, I can see a model emerging where people start to pay by bandwidth tiers rather than minutes. Then, how you use your connection is entirely up to you. Perhaps bandwidth sufficient for regular voice and text are the lower tier, bandwidth for a decent Internet experiences might be the next tier, and bandwidth sufficient for rich media might be the top tier.
Agreed with most of the sentiments thus far. I really like my Nvidia GPU's and Intel chipsets. Both have been reliable and solid for the past few generations. Do I like the reduction in competition in the marketplace? No, not really. But I do like it when companies focus on their core competencies. These are both highly specialized markets. If Nvidia produced a better chipset I'd be more upset.
QFT - Phones, service, apps, etc. are all fine, but iTunes is really the killer app or Trojan Horse depending on your point of view. I don't see any application out there to manage content that's nearly as robust and sustainable as iTunes. There might be desktop applications that are better at one thing or another, but the whole package is compelling. I believe most people trust that iTunes and the Apple store will be there years down the road, and are more willing to bet their music libraries on Apple's reputation. Show me the iTunes killer first, then let's talk about an iPhone killer. Otherwise, we're putting the cart before the trojan horse.
Sounds fishy to me. Producing a 128 bit operating system before 64 bit is in wide use just seems like a waste of time. Of course this is microsoft so who knows by the time they have that out we may actually have 128bit chips.
Actually, we're all running 64-bit OSes now. It's just you.
It sounds like a good idea, but building DNA is a bit more complicated than reading it.
Absolutely. But in order to know what to build, we certainly must understand it better. Right now, DNA research is tedious work to say the least, and relatively few samples are taken, with relatively few theories tested. What if we had the ability to cost-effectively take thousands of samples from populations that exhibited traits we want or need to know more about, and then cross-reference all that data?
Now, if we added the storage and compute power necessary to complete the picture, imagine the ability to store massive populations of DNA information and then apply BI-like analytics. Genetic research could be greatly accelerated. The implications and applications of this technology at first glance seem broad and promising.
To my knowledge there isn't a 480p broadcast format. I believe that the choices in North America are 480i, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p. Again, this is broadcast. Some sets may support other resolutions for non-broadcast material.
in the USA, today, that 480 lines were being broadcast and sold as the low end of HD.
480 lines of resolution is the NTSC standard for what is now called standard definition TV. The marketing of it has used the term 'digital TV', but never has HD been applied to a 480 signal. And absolutely, 'digital TV' as a term goes is probably the most deceptive advertising in recent history. 'Digital TV' when rebroadcasting NTSC 480 programming in most cases is extremely compressed and looks like utter garbage. For a while, many cable operators had both analog and digital NTSC transmission, and you could always easily tell when you left analog the analog range(approx channels 2-70) and ventured into 'digital TV' (approx 70-900).
Sorry to disagree, but boy am I glad we're in the age of the digital signal and flat panel display now. I agree that there are future flat display technologies that might make things even better (i.e. OLED). My memories of CRT's while fading fast, are not quite so favorable.
Scientology was established as a very tongue-in-cheek 'religion' in order to work the tax code. Nothing more. The only problem, is that if the IRS ever can prove that Scientology is in fact not a religion, then all the tax benefits disappear. I'm not up on Scientology today, nor do I care to be. I'm sure there are some fine people within the Scientology community who are not 'in on the joke' so to speak. In any case, I tip my hat to Mr. Hubbard for sticking it to the IRS with deadpan delivery of the absurd.
Hash collisions are FUD spread around by IBM, who happened to buy the only deduplication company in existence that doesn't rely upon mathematics to compare signatures. Most deduplication uses multiple, independent algorithms to verify uniqueness. There has never been a confirmed instance of a hash collision on a deduplication system that uses independant algorithms. In the meantime, there are lots of other ways to lose data on a hard drive, not the least of which is the combination of a weak filesystem coupled with an OS prone to crashing (but I'm not naming names.)
I agree. I think that in games the percentage of discretionary income versus the fixed amount of income needed purely to survive are so fundamentally different from the real world that comparisons are going to be flawed at many levels. Even in the most prosperous of real world economies, much of the population is barely breaking even. What we've seen in the real world is also difficult to map to a game. Recently people have been working very hard to reduce their revolving debt, and this lack of discretionary spending has severely hammered the economy (among other factors of course). However, In games I don't feel that people really have the same fears and basic survival dynamics to motivate them. What games can show us is essentially that supply and demand is a fairly valid overarching principle. Nothing more.
On the rare occasion that I'm stuck in the checkout line behind the woman who starts writing a check for her groceries, I usually begin to *hope* she becomes a victim of identity theft. To make matters worse, the typical check-writer often waits until all the items are scanned and the total amount is asked for *before* opening her purse and taking out the checkbook to start writing. Newsflash: the date, name of the store, and your own signature can be treated as constants in the context of the checkout line.
Wait, WHAT? Cali has way more money/ability to get money than most states. Not to mention they have more of a 'need' for this type of transport. Most other states probably wouldn't have the numbers of people to justify building it. Imagine a state in the midwest asking for 5 billion so that the tiny train riding population can ride in style. Ya right. So if by any state you mean New York and surrounding area then yes. The population density throughout the US is not really set up for a bullet train system because even if you did connect major cities, you would need cars and buses to get people to their spread out homes.
How in the world did this get modded up to insightful? This is the most inaccurate drivel I've read all day. This is the state that issues IOU's, created furlough days for all state employees over the next year, and still had to delay the last paycheck for all state employees in June of 2010 until July 2010 as a financial trick to make this fiscal year's budget work. If this post is +4 then please tell me the/. point system has just been modified to a 1-100 scale.
If you don't want to get sued for copyright infringement, I suggest you stop infringing copyrights. It's a pretty good solution that works for me.
but oh noes, Congress is evil for taking away your bullshit "I didn't know I was sharing everything in my "My Shared Folder" folder" defense that was never true in the first place.
You don't have to participate in file sharing to know that many of the people who have come under the assault of the MPAA and RIAA legal efforts are generally decent people who have receieved disproportionate attention relative to their alleged crimes. Now you want to arm these McCarthy-like legal teams with more effective ammunition because their present legal recourse is somewhat impotent? Give me a break! BTW - I own every movie and song I posses in any format. I may be a criminal because I have chosen to alter the format for my own convenience. Of course, this is completely legal under fair use, so the evil media companies had to push for the DMCA to make it illegal under certain circumstances due to a technicality. Please, continue to ignore history and reality. DMCA superseding fair use was a noble act. We need more laws drawn up by the big media lobby. Hey, maybe we can even start patenting movies and audio recordings. After all, each new song or film transforms the machine upon which its played.
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Call me clueless, I'm sure you will. It just seems to me that the tie between IE and Windows is viewed with logic that doesn't persist elsewhere.
Example: Gvoice doesn't have to follow certain rules because it is free. In a sense, there is no 'browser market' because they are all free.
Example: Recent reviews of the Palm Pre lauded the fact that the search function of the device spanned web and local content simultaneously. How the heck do you do that unless the OS has some sort of baseline web engine?
Is this all still the aftermath of IE v Netscape? Yes, I'm not a fan of what MS did there. Still, if you started with a blank sheet of paper to build an OS today, would you limit yourself to local files and hardware, or would you make the Internet an integral part of the OS? Chrome OS? Palm Pre? It's not a substantively bad idea. It's just an idea in MS's case that was conceived and executed in a manner that used their OS monopoly not only to kill a competitor, but realistically to kill a market itself. That history of bad behavior doesn't mean that an OS should be Web-neutered. Having a baseline web capability if key. If folks want a different browser, then absolutely give them every means to choose one. I happen to prefer Firefox.
So start the name calling. I just don't see how people who are so passionately against MS really care all that much about the persistence of IE components behind the scenes, even when they are free to choose Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc. Honestly, with that much passion it's time to leave Windows altogether. There are great alternatives. Macs are awesome. There are lots of excellent Linux distros available. And please, I have heard the argument about how a browser shouldn't be tied to or an integral part of the OS. Well, perhaps Explorer shouldn't be an integral part of the OS either, and MS should adopt a modular desktop technology as well. Why can't MS make those architectural decisions, and leave the customer to make the purchase decisions?
I'm not quite sure what the application would be for persistent current, although my wife might have some ideas on the subject. In any case, I'm always amazed at folks who can work and innovate at such a small scale. It's like they could build a model ship in a bottle wearing boxing gloves.
You can put it on Impulse, GameTap, or make it a direct download on your site. You can port it to console and put it on WiiWare, XBox Live, or PSN. Seriously, there's a lot of alternatives here, and its hard for me to think of Steam as a monopoly.
Agreed. Steam has the Valve titles plus a smattering of nice indies. But they're hardly a monopoly. Direct2Drive anyone? Just about every mainstream title is available now as a digital download from D2D except the Valve titles and Steam exclusives. If anything D2D should be the specimen under this pointless microscope.
These are all good thoughts, and the main theme in common is that something has to change. IMO the prime candidate for change is the outdated telephone rules and regulations. The more voice services that are exempt from those rules, the more willing the traditional telephone carriers will be to do away with them wholesale in favor of a more unified approach to data transmission. At the end of the day, it's all bits and bytes floating around from point A to point B. While changing the system isn't going to be simple, it is certainly inevitable. Who would have thought 20 years ago that we would end over-the-air analog broadcasting of television by now?
"That's why most businesses won't even look past the coverletters anymore
Problem with recruiters is that they send your resume all over without providing you the opportunity to compose a proper cover letter. Recruiters deal in volume, and use the biggest hammer possible to fit pegs of any size into holes of any shape. I've seen more bad behavior from recruiters than I would have ever imagined, including recruiters who send out resumes for clients that they don't actually represent (yet) in the hopes that if an interview is granted that they can lure the candidate to it. You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy....
Remember way back in 2008...you know, VMware ESX 3.5 update 2. I love the smell of a software time-bomb in the morning.
While I don't think Gvoice is the end-state of the industry, I think it's going to put a lot of pressure on the concept of minutes altogether. Remember when people paid for blocks of time for dial-up access? I think we'd all agree that the new broadband model, although still not perfect, is vastly superior. Once connectivity over the airwaves starts to approach minimal broadband speeds in a pervasive way, I can see a model emerging where people start to pay by bandwidth tiers rather than minutes. Then, how you use your connection is entirely up to you. Perhaps bandwidth sufficient for regular voice and text are the lower tier, bandwidth for a decent Internet experiences might be the next tier, and bandwidth sufficient for rich media might be the top tier.
The main reason why I don't own an iphone is because of itunes, you insensitive clod!
I am simply stating the market realities. There is no need to get personal. I am sorry if iTunes is a sensitive subject for you. I truly had no idea.
Agreed with most of the sentiments thus far. I really like my Nvidia GPU's and Intel chipsets. Both have been reliable and solid for the past few generations. Do I like the reduction in competition in the marketplace? No, not really. But I do like it when companies focus on their core competencies. These are both highly specialized markets. If Nvidia produced a better chipset I'd be more upset.
iTunes-wise...
QFT - Phones, service, apps, etc. are all fine, but iTunes is really the killer app or Trojan Horse depending on your point of view. I don't see any application out there to manage content that's nearly as robust and sustainable as iTunes. There might be desktop applications that are better at one thing or another, but the whole package is compelling. I believe most people trust that iTunes and the Apple store will be there years down the road, and are more willing to bet their music libraries on Apple's reputation. Show me the iTunes killer first, then let's talk about an iPhone killer. Otherwise, we're putting the cart before the trojan horse.
Games could sure use it. In particular, driving with WASD. No one should let friends drive WASD.
Sounds fishy to me. Producing a 128 bit operating system before 64 bit is in wide use just seems like a waste of time. Of course this is microsoft so who knows by the time they have that out we may actually have 128bit chips.
Actually, we're all running 64-bit OSes now. It's just you.
It sounds like a good idea, but building DNA is a bit more complicated than reading it.
Absolutely. But in order to know what to build, we certainly must understand it better. Right now, DNA research is tedious work to say the least, and relatively few samples are taken, with relatively few theories tested. What if we had the ability to cost-effectively take thousands of samples from populations that exhibited traits we want or need to know more about, and then cross-reference all that data?
Now, if we added the storage and compute power necessary to complete the picture, imagine the ability to store massive populations of DNA information and then apply BI-like analytics. Genetic research could be greatly accelerated. The implications and applications of this technology at first glance seem broad and promising.
To my knowledge there isn't a 480p broadcast format. I believe that the choices in North America are 480i, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p. Again, this is broadcast. Some sets may support other resolutions for non-broadcast material.
in the USA, today, that 480 lines were being broadcast and sold as the low end of HD.
480 lines of resolution is the NTSC standard for what is now called standard definition TV. The marketing of it has used the term 'digital TV', but never has HD been applied to a 480 signal. And absolutely, 'digital TV' as a term goes is probably the most deceptive advertising in recent history. 'Digital TV' when rebroadcasting NTSC 480 programming in most cases is extremely compressed and looks like utter garbage. For a while, many cable operators had both analog and digital NTSC transmission, and you could always easily tell when you left analog the analog range(approx channels 2-70) and ventured into 'digital TV' (approx 70-900).
I still miss the crisp, solid, and reliable CRT.
Sorry to disagree, but boy am I glad we're in the age of the digital signal and flat panel display now. I agree that there are future flat display technologies that might make things even better (i.e. OLED). My memories of CRT's while fading fast, are not quite so favorable.
Scientology was established as a very tongue-in-cheek 'religion' in order to work the tax code. Nothing more. The only problem, is that if the IRS ever can prove that Scientology is in fact not a religion, then all the tax benefits disappear. I'm not up on Scientology today, nor do I care to be. I'm sure there are some fine people within the Scientology community who are not 'in on the joke' so to speak. In any case, I tip my hat to Mr. Hubbard for sticking it to the IRS with deadpan delivery of the absurd.
Hash collisions are FUD spread around by IBM, who happened to buy the only deduplication company in existence that doesn't rely upon mathematics to compare signatures. Most deduplication uses multiple, independent algorithms to verify uniqueness. There has never been a confirmed instance of a hash collision on a deduplication system that uses independant algorithms. In the meantime, there are lots of other ways to lose data on a hard drive, not the least of which is the combination of a weak filesystem coupled with an OS prone to crashing (but I'm not naming names.)
I don't always agree with Curis Preston, but I think the hash collision FUD has effectively put to rest here. http://www.backupcentral.com/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=145
That's the best question of all. Why not call 'em out?
re: your sig, what's the third type?
I agree. I think that in games the percentage of discretionary income versus the fixed amount of income needed purely to survive are so fundamentally different from the real world that comparisons are going to be flawed at many levels. Even in the most prosperous of real world economies, much of the population is barely breaking even. What we've seen in the real world is also difficult to map to a game. Recently people have been working very hard to reduce their revolving debt, and this lack of discretionary spending has severely hammered the economy (among other factors of course). However, In games I don't feel that people really have the same fears and basic survival dynamics to motivate them. What games can show us is essentially that supply and demand is a fairly valid overarching principle. Nothing more.
On the rare occasion that I'm stuck in the checkout line behind the woman who starts writing a check for her groceries, I usually begin to *hope* she becomes a victim of identity theft. To make matters worse, the typical check-writer often waits until all the items are scanned and the total amount is asked for *before* opening her purse and taking out the checkbook to start writing. Newsflash: the date, name of the store, and your own signature can be treated as constants in the context of the checkout line.
Wait, WHAT? Cali has way more money/ability to get money than most states. Not to mention they have more of a 'need' for this type of transport. Most other states probably wouldn't have the numbers of people to justify building it. Imagine a state in the midwest asking for 5 billion so that the tiny train riding population can ride in style. Ya right. So if by any state you mean New York and surrounding area then yes. The population density throughout the US is not really set up for a bullet train system because even if you did connect major cities, you would need cars and buses to get people to their spread out homes.
How in the world did this get modded up to insightful? This is the most inaccurate drivel I've read all day. This is the state that issues IOU's, created furlough days for all state employees over the next year, and still had to delay the last paycheck for all state employees in June of 2010 until July 2010 as a financial trick to make this fiscal year's budget work. If this post is +4 then please tell me the /. point system has just been modified to a 1-100 scale.
If you don't want to get sued for copyright infringement, I suggest you stop infringing copyrights. It's a pretty good solution that works for me.
but oh noes, Congress is evil for taking away your bullshit "I didn't know I was sharing everything in my "My Shared Folder" folder" defense that was never true in the first place.
You don't have to participate in file sharing to know that many of the people who have come under the assault of the MPAA and RIAA legal efforts are generally decent people who have receieved disproportionate attention relative to their alleged crimes. Now you want to arm these McCarthy-like legal teams with more effective ammunition because their present legal recourse is somewhat impotent? Give me a break! BTW - I own every movie and song I posses in any format. I may be a criminal because I have chosen to alter the format for my own convenience. Of course, this is completely legal under fair use, so the evil media companies had to push for the DMCA to make it illegal under certain circumstances due to a technicality. Please, continue to ignore history and reality. DMCA superseding fair use was a noble act. We need more laws drawn up by the big media lobby. Hey, maybe we can even start patenting movies and audio recordings. After all, each new song or film transforms the machine upon which its played.
"All the stability of a Microsoft Product, All the User Friendliness of Lotus Notes!"
I'm sure it'll be an instant hit!
Linus Torvalds and Marc Andreeson would both take offense on behalf of Microsoft for the insult of being put on the same level as Lotus products.