Apple has become something of a fashion brand. While they still make some very good technology clearly many people buy their products for other qualities. Perhaps Apple think they risk being seen as an old persons brand and young people might defect to the competition. Buying Beats seems like a way to try and buy credibility amongst a new generation. Given that many tech buyers are fairly ignorant pushing branding and celebrity endorsements probably isn't a bad way to go for shareholders. I might think Beats is rubbish but I think most things teenagers like are rubbish so I would never make money out of them.
If they start selling MacBook Pros by Dre with loud colours, crap specs, celebrity endorsements and even higher margins than currently I think Apple will have lost the plot.
I pay Foxtel $120/month in Australia to stream non-HD garbage to me.
Well there is the problem. Foxtel has protected its monopoly by signing up exclusive deals and they can outbid anyone else thanks to the money they get from subscribers willing to pay $120/month. The people who do the "right thing" and pay the ridiculous prices contribute to the problems for Australian consumers. Hollywood studios who have signed these exclusive deals and who control services like Hulu have no real option but uphold restrictions to meet their contracts.
Usually the correct answer with anything owned by News Corporation is to block it, burn it, wipe your arse on it, but never, ever pay for it. You will never get your $10/month service while Foxtel can outbid them by charging ten times the price.
Abbott and his mates can legislate Pi to be 22/7 for all I care though they will have to convince the senate. Anyone who depends on modern technology to conduct business will just move elsewhere just as manufacturing has. The poor bastards like me who are too tied down to consider moving will just work around their stupidity as we always have. Fortunately unless my fellow Australians have gone completely insane he will be out after one term and the Libs can take a broom to the arsehole conservatives who have poisoned their party and get back to their core values of individual liberty, free from the tyranny of government interference.
Doctor Who: The Invasion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invasion_(Doctor_Who) has companion Zoe Heriot http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Zoe_Heriot from the 21st century disable a computer by giving it a program she claims is in ALGOL. I am guessing in the Doctor Who universe ALGOL makes a resurgence later this century when someone builds a web framework for it and it becomes the next fad.
...I just want a Haswell Retina MacBook Pro. Unless I get sick of waiting and just get an Ultrabook. Going back to a Linux desktop full time which would suit me fine anyway.
I went into an Apple store and held my Android phone up against one of their tiny child sized iPhone screens and just laughed. iOS apps aren't too bad, I really like iPads but their tiny phones are a joke. They aren't going to get people back from Android with those things and they are going to lose OS X users if they can't be bothered to refresh their other products.
Many years ago I setup some school filters with Squid and DansGuardian. If wouldn't make any sense to do it today. Kids have unfiltered Internet at home and usb keys and phones to carry files around. Lots of school Internet connections have quotas and performance that are years out of date and filters that go completely overboard. Many kids have faster Internet connections in their pocket. The Internet isn't a scarce resource you can be gatekeeper of anymore. Adults, both parents and teachers, need to engage with kids again instead of relying on companies and technology to do their job for them.
Now we get to see if Microsoft really has cut back on the number of people they pay to troll on Slashdot.
It is a strange list. Some of the items are sort of correct but being addressed and some of them are a complete non-issue. Not sure what AD support has to do with the success of Linux on the desktop. I don't think Grandma gives a shit about Active Directory. I certainly don't.
Australia's constitution was not made by criminals. It was written by a wealthy land owning elite. The criminals were their parents cheap labour. Australia did not exist until federation in 1901. Transportation of convicts ended in 1857.
Prior to 1901 the states were self governing colonies. The colony of South Australia was settled by free settlers not convicts. People settled my state for religious freedom, to own land and for profit - not a convict in sight.
The reason the Australian constitution is not as noble as the US constitution is that Australia was not founded by revolutionaries. We remained part of the British empire and inherited the attitudes and structures of England. The US adopted a republic based on the French model which celebrated liberty and equality.
The filter is the result of a coalition between anti-liberal socialists and catholics. The ALP right faction is strongly influenced by catholicism and is socially conservative. The ALP left factions may have championed social change once, but it I suspect it was just a reaction to the conservatism of the times and they have no real commitment to individual freedom being socialists.
So the ALP are just as crazy as the GOP religious right but far more dangerous as there is not a libertarian amongst them to stand up for freedom.
The current government used to be a socially progressive, center left workers party but probably should change their name to the Christian Democrats as they are basically a front for Roman Catholicism these days.
Sol gambled and the shareholders lost. A triumph of greed over common sense. Has his reality distortion field finally shattered?
The current Telstra management seemed to have brought a lot of anti-regulation baggage with them from the US. They seemed unable or unwilling to adapt their management style to the realities of operating in Australia.
A lower return to shareholders would still have been a return but they had to be greedy. Now they might be a footnote in the countries broadband history.
It is also a modern language. You can learn functional programming - it has closures, map and reduce functions (in 1.8) etc.
The performance is getting good with V8, tracemonkey and squirrelfish, and it is embedded in the single most useful non-game app that any teenager uses - the browser.
Pick up some c as well. Always handy, particularly in a *nix platform.
Getting ripped off while ripping other people of with Limewire then complaining on/. and you don't expect to get trolled?
I am sure the Czech Republic and their socialist ways are just great. But welcome to capitalism mate. A land line, and free pirate downloads are not a right guaranteed by the state here.
Anybody with half a brain would be on a capped plan or have some bandwidth monitoring. If you did your research before signing your lease you could have ADSL2+ from a non-Telstra ISP and be filling it with bittorrents. You didn't think to ask where the phone was?
Your choice. Perhaps the rent was cheaper for a reason?
Telstra demands $700 to connect the house to the phone line, and neither the landlord nor the tenants will cough up the money.
Who should cough up the money? Seconds after they install the line it will be on a naked ADSL2+ plan. Landlines are not a good investment for phone companies anymore.
One day, my girlfriend left LimeWire open on her laptop when she left for work in the morning; that month we had a $360 bill.
Perhaps your girlfriend should buy her doggie porn instead of steal it.
I apologise to the rest of the world for the minority of whinging Aussies.
Yes we have a hopeless government, bastard phone company and an awkward geographic location. But it could be a lot worse. This is still the best country on earth and those milliseconds of lag are distance between us and war, famine and countless other miseries.
The previous Australian government subsidized ADSL DSLAMS for rural communities and subsidized wireless and satellite for people beyond DSL range.
Some farms do have unbelievably bad land lines. I have seen some that can't sustain 9600 but these are line faults. I have seen others that are not much better where it is an infrastructure issue - the phone company refuses to lay more copper, fix ongoing problems or is using obsolete pair gain systems. Affordable digital line plans got withdrawn by Telstra, perhaps so they could push people onto more expensive cell phone plans.
Your farms might be closer to your towns than here. Someone on a farm 20km from town is not going to get DSL, would be lucky to get a digital land line, possibly doesn't have cell coverage for 3G but could get subsidised 2 way satellite.
When people buy a house in a flight path and complain about the noise I get a bit skeptical. I live in a rural town of 4000 and sync at 8M and could get 20M if I wanted to pay for it. I own a vacant house which thanks to drought and global credit crisis is worth less by the minute. If the original poster wants to upgrade to an area with broadband access there are options.
Broadband access is not bad in Australia. It just isn't as good as some other places.
We have a small population and we are a long way from the rest of the world.
We all speak English (debatable I know) and consume massive amounts of US culture (and UK,Canada,NZ etc). So our links to the rest of the world work hard, we have download caps and lag! Arghhh! So a fast national network doesn't mean the same thing to us that it might to a country like Korea.
Unless there is a cavern with a big switch buried somewhere that can move the island we are screwed on this bit.
As far as ADSL generation broadband goes we are well served.
I live in a rural town pop. 4000, 160miles from the nearest city. No problem getting ADSL1 or ADSL2+. The previous government made sure nearly everyone had access to affordable broadband.
We have a low population density. Consider spreading population of tri-state area over 48 contiguous states of US. Except nearly everyone lives in major cities, so there aren't a lot of excuses for poor infrastructure in the major cities.
The nature of ADSL technology means though ADSL access is almost universal some people miss out due to line quality and distance. Ignore them for a moment as they are a statistical inevitability. Most cities are well served with ADSL2+ and most people get good speeds.
But we have to move forward. So where do we go from here...
The federal governments grand solution is to build a new national network. Ofcourse it will be too expensive and we would have to move the country to Canada to get any benefit since we all want to download from the US, not locally but anyway...
Investment by the dominant telco, Telstra is (they claim) threatened by government regulation which could erode margins so they want a free hand to establish a new monopoly. Investment by anyone else is threatened by the dominant telco so they are happy to keep the status quo. Instead of trying to address the fundamental issues the government is resorting to its core competency - wasting taxpayers money.
Fortunately their incompetency is so great it might be decades before they work out how exactly to waste the money. By which time the private sector could have delivered something far superior if they hadn't frozen their investment waiting to see what the government was doing.
Fortunately the US led recession is finally having some flow on via China and as tax income from the resource boom dwindles the whole project will most likely be scrapped soon.
I have seen the blue blocks at a few places around South Australia as well. A local pub has them. They seem to work well. The place has very clean toilets and doesn't smell.
What pisses me off about musicians is that they think their particular talent (or often lack of)automatically gives them a right to be stinking rich because they grew up in an era when producing and distributing a recording was cheaper than copying or sharing it.
And there is a corrupt greedy industry behind them ready to legislate our freedoms away to maintain this accidental fortune.
If equally talented people in other arts and sciences had got the deal musicians have had for the last 40 years perhaps the world would be more equitable, and musicians wouldn't sound like such whingers.
Unfortunately NASA can not do metric conversion even if their space craft depend on it. Since, like most world citizens I have no concept of how big a mile is, it is a relief we can all speak in STU.
Everyone knows that Texas is big (except for Alaskans). Not as big as a decent Australian state(or electoral division or farm) but bigger than any of those puny little European countries.
I can envision Texas sitting in the bottom quarter of Western Australia, or taking up two thirds of South Australia, and I can start to think in terms of how often I would have to fill my car to drive around it.
But New Mexico! Nobody knows or gives a shit about them. Keep to multiples of Texas or nothing!
I don't think XML by itself carries enough metadata to understand much beyond whether a document is valid or not. I think RDF and RDFS have a big role to play in getting XML database ready.
Perhaps hopping on the XML database bandwagon before RDF technologies mature could be a mistake. Forget the semantic web, I want to see the sematic database.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple has become something of a fashion brand. While they still make some very good technology clearly many people buy their products for other qualities. Perhaps Apple think they risk being seen as an old persons brand and young people might defect to the competition. Buying Beats seems like a way to try and buy credibility amongst a new generation. Given that many tech buyers are fairly ignorant pushing branding and celebrity endorsements probably isn't a bad way to go for shareholders. I might think Beats is rubbish but I think most things teenagers like are rubbish so I would never make money out of them.
If they start selling MacBook Pros by Dre with loud colours, crap specs, celebrity endorsements and even higher margins than currently I think Apple will have lost the plot.
I pay Foxtel $120/month in Australia to stream non-HD garbage to me.
Well there is the problem. Foxtel has protected its monopoly by signing up exclusive deals and they can outbid anyone else thanks to the money they get from subscribers willing to pay $120/month. The people who do the "right thing" and pay the ridiculous prices contribute to the problems for Australian consumers. Hollywood studios who have signed these exclusive deals and who control services like Hulu have no real option but uphold restrictions to meet their contracts.
Usually the correct answer with anything owned by News Corporation is to block it, burn it, wipe your arse on it, but never, ever pay for it. You will never get your $10/month service while Foxtel can outbid them by charging ten times the price.
Abbott and his mates can legislate Pi to be 22/7 for all I care though they will have to convince the senate. Anyone who depends on modern technology to conduct business will just move elsewhere just as manufacturing has. The poor bastards like me who are too tied down to consider moving will just work around their stupidity as we always have. Fortunately unless my fellow Australians have gone completely insane he will be out after one term and the Libs can take a broom to the arsehole conservatives who have poisoned their party and get back to their core values of individual liberty, free from the tyranny of government interference.
Doctor Who: The Invasion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invasion_(Doctor_Who) has companion Zoe Heriot http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Zoe_Heriot from the 21st century disable a computer by giving it a program she claims is in ALGOL. I am guessing in the Doctor Who universe ALGOL makes a resurgence later this century when someone builds a web framework for it and it becomes the next fad.
Just need an old Nissan or Toyota and a few hours to spare.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS8KXHBCimo
...I just want a Haswell Retina MacBook Pro. Unless I get sick of waiting and just get an Ultrabook. Going back to a Linux desktop full time which would suit me fine anyway.
I went into an Apple store and held my Android phone up against one of their tiny child sized iPhone screens and just laughed. iOS apps aren't too bad, I really like iPads but their tiny phones are a joke. They aren't going to get people back from Android with those things and they are going to lose OS X users if they can't be bothered to refresh their other products.
Many years ago I setup some school filters with Squid and DansGuardian. If wouldn't make any sense to do it today. Kids have unfiltered Internet at home and usb keys and phones to carry files around. Lots of school Internet connections have quotas and performance that are years out of date and filters that go completely overboard. Many kids have faster Internet connections in their pocket. The Internet isn't a scarce resource you can be gatekeeper of anymore. Adults, both parents and teachers, need to engage with kids again instead of relying on companies and technology to do their job for them.
Now we get to see if Microsoft really has cut back on the number of people they pay to troll on Slashdot.
It is a strange list. Some of the items are sort of correct but being addressed and some of them are a complete non-issue. Not sure what AD support has to do with the success of Linux on the desktop. I don't think Grandma gives a shit about Active Directory. I certainly don't.
Conforming to stereotypes is a guaranteed way not to get noticed.
I occasionally borrow my wifes MSI Wind and it does attract female attention. I guess it is the computer equivalent of carrying a small fluffy dog.
If you don't like female attention you can probably get the other sort my slapping an Apple logo on it.
Actually the US was founded by religious extremists which the british rightfully tried to get rid of.
I thought the US was founded by lawyers, merchants and plantation owners.
and the government generally doesn't shoot at you or lock you up unless you're misbehaving.
So, it's like in North Korea, then.
More like the US really but with funny accents.
Oh, wait, no! They DO shoot you and lock you up for nothing in the US.
So yeah, North Korea. So ronery and sadry arone.
Australia's constitution was not made by criminals. It was written by a wealthy land owning elite. The criminals were their parents cheap labour. Australia did not exist until federation in 1901. Transportation of convicts ended in 1857.
Prior to 1901 the states were self governing colonies. The colony of South Australia was settled by free settlers not convicts. People settled my state for religious freedom, to own land and for profit - not a convict in sight.
The reason the Australian constitution is not as noble as the US constitution is that Australia was not founded by revolutionaries. We remained part of the British empire and inherited the attitudes and structures of England. The US adopted a republic based on the French model which celebrated liberty and equality.
The filter is the result of a coalition between anti-liberal socialists and catholics. The ALP right faction is strongly influenced by catholicism and is socially conservative. The ALP left factions may have championed social change once, but it I suspect it was just a reaction to the conservatism of the times and they have no real commitment to individual freedom being socialists.
So the ALP are just as crazy as the GOP religious right but far more dangerous as there is not a libertarian amongst them to stand up for freedom.
The current government used to be a socially progressive, center left workers party but probably should change their name to the Christian Democrats as they are basically a front for Roman Catholicism these days.
Sol gambled and the shareholders lost. A triumph of greed over common sense. Has his reality distortion field finally shattered?
The current Telstra management seemed to have brought a lot of anti-regulation baggage with them from the US. They seemed unable or unwilling to adapt their management style to the realities of operating in Australia.
A lower return to shareholders would still have been a return but they had to be greedy. Now they might be a footnote in the countries broadband history.
Debugging js with firebug is not so bad.
Libraries like jquery, mootools etc fix most compatibility issues.
Javascript has design flaws but it is a much better language than most people seem to realise.
As an introductory language it has a lot to recommend it. c-like syntax. real world, not a toy language etc.
Oh, and if not lua, then javascript.
It is also a modern language. You can learn functional programming - it has closures, map and reduce functions (in 1.8) etc.
The performance is getting good with V8, tracemonkey and squirrelfish, and it is embedded in the single most useful non-game app that any teenager uses - the browser.
Pick up some c as well. Always handy, particularly in a *nix platform.
Yes Lua.
You can run it on a PDA or PSP. It has relevance because it can be used to script well known commercial games and networking tools.
It has a very friendly and informative community.
The ease of c/c++ integration can be a helper getting started on those.
Being exposed to first class functions, closures, coroutines etc will help learning other languages.
Getting ripped off while ripping other people of with Limewire then complaining on /. and you don't expect to get trolled?
I am sure the Czech Republic and their socialist ways are just great. But welcome to capitalism mate. A land line, and free pirate downloads are not a right guaranteed by the state here.
Anybody with half a brain would be on a capped plan or have some bandwidth monitoring. If you did your research before signing your lease you could have ADSL2+ from a non-Telstra ISP and be filling it with bittorrents. You didn't think to ask where the phone was?
my house isn't even wired for a phone line.
Your choice. Perhaps the rent was cheaper for a reason?
Telstra demands $700 to connect the house to the phone line, and neither the landlord nor the tenants will cough up the money.
Who should cough up the money? Seconds after they install the line it will be on a naked ADSL2+ plan. Landlines are not a good investment for phone companies anymore.
One day, my girlfriend left LimeWire open on her laptop when she left for work in the morning; that month we had a $360 bill.
Perhaps your girlfriend should buy her doggie porn instead of steal it.
I apologise to the rest of the world for the minority of whinging Aussies.
Yes we have a hopeless government, bastard phone company and an awkward geographic location. But it could be a lot worse. This is still the best country on earth and those milliseconds of lag are distance between us and war, famine and countless other miseries.
The previous Australian government subsidized ADSL DSLAMS for rural communities and subsidized wireless and satellite for people beyond DSL range.
Some farms do have unbelievably bad land lines. I have seen some that can't sustain 9600 but these are line faults. I have seen others that are not much better where it is an infrastructure issue - the phone company refuses to lay more copper, fix ongoing problems or is using obsolete pair gain systems. Affordable digital line plans got withdrawn by Telstra, perhaps so they could push people onto more expensive cell phone plans.
Your farms might be closer to your towns than here. Someone on a farm 20km from town is not going to get DSL, would be lucky to get a digital land line, possibly doesn't have cell coverage for 3G but could get subsidised 2 way satellite.
When people buy a house in a flight path and complain about the noise I get a bit skeptical. I live in a rural town of 4000 and sync at 8M and could get 20M if I wanted to pay for it. I own a vacant house which thanks to drought and global credit crisis is worth less by the minute. If the original poster wants to upgrade to an area with broadband access there are options.
Broadband access is not bad in Australia. It just isn't as good as some other places.
We have a small population and we are a long way from the rest of the world.
We all speak English (debatable I know) and consume massive amounts of US culture (and UK,Canada,NZ etc). So our links to the rest of the world work hard, we have download caps and lag! Arghhh! So a fast national network doesn't mean the same thing to us that it might to a country like Korea.
Unless there is a cavern with a big switch buried somewhere that can move the island we are screwed on this bit.
As far as ADSL generation broadband goes we are well served.
I live in a rural town pop. 4000, 160miles from the nearest city. No problem getting ADSL1 or ADSL2+. The previous government made sure nearly everyone had access to affordable broadband.
We have a low population density. Consider spreading population of tri-state area over 48 contiguous states of US. Except nearly everyone lives in major cities, so there aren't a lot of excuses for poor infrastructure in the major cities.
The nature of ADSL technology means though ADSL access is almost universal some people miss out due to line quality and distance. Ignore them for a moment as they are a statistical inevitability. Most cities are well served with ADSL2+ and most people get good speeds.
But we have to move forward. So where do we go from here...
The federal governments grand solution is to build a new national network. Ofcourse it will be too expensive and we would have to move the country to Canada to get any benefit since we all want to download from the US, not locally but anyway...
Investment by the dominant telco, Telstra is (they claim) threatened by government regulation which could erode margins so they want a free hand to establish a new monopoly. Investment by anyone else is threatened by the dominant telco so they are happy to keep the status quo. Instead of trying to address the fundamental issues the government is resorting to its core competency - wasting taxpayers money.
Fortunately their incompetency is so great it might be decades before they work out how exactly to waste the money. By which time the private sector could have delivered something far superior if they hadn't frozen their investment waiting to see what the government was doing.
Fortunately the US led recession is finally having some flow on via China and as tax income from the resource boom dwindles the whole project will most likely be scrapped soon.
I have seen the blue blocks at a few places around South Australia as well. A local pub has them. They seem to work well. The place has very clean toilets and doesn't smell.
The distributors have a website at Desert Ecosystems.
For people running Firefox in a business or school with centrally locked down settings I think a quick fix might be to add
lockpref("xpinstall.enabled","false");
xpinstall.enabled seems to be the preference changed by "Allow websites to install software"
What pisses me off about musicians is that they think their particular talent (or often lack of)automatically gives them a right to be stinking rich because they grew up in an era when producing and distributing a recording was cheaper than copying or sharing it.
And there is a corrupt greedy industry behind them ready to legislate our freedoms away to maintain this accidental fortune.
If equally talented people in other arts and sciences had got the deal musicians have had for the last 40 years perhaps the world would be more equitable, and musicians wouldn't sound like such whingers.
I like the concept of the STU.
Unfortunately NASA can not do metric conversion even if their space craft depend on it. Since, like most world citizens I have no concept of how big a mile is, it is a relief we can all speak in STU.
Everyone knows that Texas is big (except for Alaskans). Not as big as a decent Australian state(or electoral division or farm) but bigger than any of those puny little European countries.
I can envision Texas sitting in the bottom quarter of Western Australia, or taking up two thirds of South Australia, and I can start to think in terms of how often I would have to fill my car to drive around it.
But New Mexico! Nobody knows or gives a shit about them. Keep to multiples of Texas or nothing!
I don't think XML by itself carries enough metadata to understand much beyond whether a document is valid or not. I think RDF and RDFS have a big role to play in getting XML database ready.
Perhaps hopping on the XML database bandwagon before RDF technologies mature could be a mistake. Forget the semantic web, I want to see the sematic database.
W3 RDF
A Good RDF resource