The wanting mostly happened circa 2000. Netscape 4 was getting long in the tooth; it choked on complex pages and the Javascript implementation was horrible. Netscape 5 (an update of 4) was abandoned, and the fruit of Netscape's ground-up reimplementation, Netscape 7 / Mozilla Suite 1.0, didn't reach full release until 2002 though many of us were using beta versions before that. IE was, for a brief time, the best readily available browser. I stuck with Netscape anyway because it was fully cross-platform; there was an IE for some versions of Unix but not for Linux.
The light pen wasn't too bad for drawing applications, though it didn't measure up to what you can do with a pressure sensitive pen. It was a horrible interface for pretty much everything else. A lot of that was implementation; if a light pen had been as responsive as a touchscreen it would have worked about as well as early touch systems that used a stylus or did only single-point touch with a finger.
Some miners can learn to code. But the ones who could learn to code AND who are willing to relocate out of mining country probably left a long time ago. There isn't a lot of call for coders in a typical mining town.
A good modern violin doesn't cost as much as a Stradivarius, but the price tag can reach into six figures. So this finding may ease the financial burdens of top violinists a bit but they're still going to need to take out loans to buy their instruments.
Google's first attempt at TV (Google TV) failed. Their second one (Chromecast) has been a success.
But the stick format isn't right for everybody; some users might prefer a Chromecast Box with more features. If your TV has a limited number of HDMI inputs you might not want to tie one up with a stick; a box could feature HDMI passthrough, picture-in-picture combining external input and internally-generated video, and perhaps switching of multiple HDMI inputs. A box can also include a wired Ethernet port, and a USB port and SD card slot to let you show pictures and movies. The Box could also add a faster processor, more memory, and a game controller option.
A new box from Google won't replace the existing Chromecast, just as the Roku Stick has not replaced their settop boxes. It will be a product line extension, and one that will appeal to many people if Google gets the features and price right.
The option doesn't cost anywhere near $500 in parts and labor currently. It likely did when it was first offered, but electronics always come down in price over time, and most of the parts needed for a backup camera are already produced in huge quantities for cell phones and tablets. I doubt that many car buyers are actually paying $500 for it as a separate option anyway; either they are getting it as standard equipment (as on many minivans) or buying it as part of an option bundle where the camera represents perhaps $100 of the bundle price.
Vehicle prices won't increase anywhere near $500 due to this requirement. The market wouldn't accept that, so competitive pressures will force automakers into a much smaller increase or none at all. By 2018 most cars will probably already include a touchscreen for other reasons (sound system, climate control, navigation on cars that offer that) so the cost increment for the backup camera will just be the camera and the wiring.
If you really want to talk about an overpriced option, let's look at onboard navigation systems. They cost many times the price of a good standalone GPS, they don't get map updates in a timely manner if at all (and certainly not for the entire life of the vehicle), and if updates are available they cost an arm and a leg. There is some convenience to having it built into the dashboard, but for me it doesn't even come close to outweighing the negatives.
Many (but far from all) titles give you a digital copy. But it's typically a DRM-ridden DVD-resolution digital copy. It's not even close to the quality of the Blu-Ray.
Physical objects like DVDs are governed by the First Sale Doctrine (reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), a legal principle that says that once you have bought something you are legally entitled to do anything you like with it. including renting it and reselling it. Although some rental outlets get their discs (and in the past, tapes) at a reduced price under different agreements (notably agreeing to share some of the rental revenue with the studio), the fact that the rental outlet can opt to buy the discs through normal channels and rent them without encumbrance sets an upper bound on what the content owner can charge for their movies or TV shows.
Streamed content has no such out. Content owners can charge anything they like for streaming agreements, offer exclusive deals, or withhold the content altogether. (There is a complex timing arrangement of availability of movies on disc, on pay-per-view, on premium movie channels like HBO, on broadcast TV, and so forth - streaming services are currently the bottom of the food chain and get A-list movies only after the other sources of revenue are mostly used up.) That is one reason why the streaming selection on Netflix and other streaming services doesn't match what they can offer on disc.
Fuel efficiency is an average over many kinds of driving. If one's driving skews toward the uses where electrics are especially good (stop and go urban driving) and away from uses where internal combustion engines are at their best (highway driving), the electric car will produce much less pollution.
The electric car has the advantage of removing the pollution from the point of use. This is important for city use; concentration of pollutants in a small densely populated area is much more of a public health problem than pollutants in remote areas.
If pollutants are produced on an industrial scale (power plants) it is easier to deploy mitigation technologies like exhaust scrubbing and carbon sequestering.
The CO2 profile of the electric car is likely to improve over time as the power grid shifts toward use of renewable energy sources. The gasoline powered car is what it is, and may get worse over time if petroleum production moves to higher-impact sources such as tar sands.
Finally, the electric car is likely to have a longer service life. We don't have enough data yet on electric cars, but the record of things like electrified trains and trolleys compared to diesel trains and buses suggests it. Longer vehicle life means fewer resources used to produce new vehicles. Major exception: the batteries. We need to work on low-impact ways to recycle battery materials. Developing batteries with a longer lifetime - I don't just mean more energy storage but also more charge cycles - should be a priority.
Mazda's improvements to internal combustion technology have value. They may be a more responsible choice for some car owners. But there will be many car owners for whom an electric car makes more environmental sense.
The era of Facebook is not completely unlike the heyday of big network TV, when people got most of their entertainment from three big sources. Or the age of newspapers and news magazines, when they got their news from one or two sources. Concentration has existed before.
The question is whether the network effects of social networking will be strong enough to keep Facebook dominant. There are realms where being big is an advantage because people will tend to come to whatever place is big, like eBay and online auctions. eBay has more buyers so sellers come there, which means there is more to buy and so more buyers come... you get the idea. Publishing and broadcasting have weaker network effects than social networking sites do; a newspaper may be slightly more interesting to you because your neighbor also reads it (which gives the two of you something to talk about together) but it's not as big a deal. What kept those businesses on top in their day was the capital cost of entering the business and economies of scale in content production.
My personal guess is that Facebook will survive as a big network for loose social connections but people will start spending more time in other, more exclusive spaces as well. That is, you will go to Facebook for the broad social overlook and to whatever affinity site appeals to you to communicate with your closer tribe. The inherent problem that Facebook is up against in that niche is that it's a niche where there is inherently only one winner. If people get dissatisfied with it and start going elsewhere, the tipping point could come as quickly as it did for MySpace.
Nowadays, better means above all better service. People are keeping their cars longer and having more of the work done by dealers. A dealer that respects the value of your time and has your car ready when they say it will be ready, offers transportation to the service facility or loaner cars as appropriate, and actually fixes your car when they say they are going to fix it... that's a dealer that will keep customers. Making the buying experience more pleasant doesn't hurt, either.
I was thinking of large urban areas like the one where I live. Real competition among car dealerships exists here because the distance between dealerships is fairly small; for most brands if you don't like the dealership closest to you, you can buy the car from one a few miles farther away. That doesn't work so well for smaller markets where the next dealership might be 50 miles away instead of 5. Although a badly run dealership might muddle through because of convenience, it will tend to lose business to a better but slightly more distant dealership, and a few especially badly run ones HAVE folded.
I'm trying it on my Xperia Z Ultra right now; it's playing in HD. Seems to be working well. This is a 6.4" phablet with a 2.2GHz Snapdragon 800 so it's a pretty serious device; people have said that playback is poor on lesser phones.
I would still like to see an official app from Amazon. Not releasing an Android app is a heavy-handed way of trying to get people to buy the Kindle Fire. Aside from the fact that I prefer a full Android device, Amazon doesn't make a Kindle Phablet so they have no comparable device.
This is no longer true. I have streamed HD content in Chrome on my Windows 7 HTPC and my Chromebook. (Haven't tried other browsers with it recently.) You have to have a solid connection to Amazon; their HD streaming is 2.5Mbps.
So far as I know, Comcast is not yet forcing people to use their routers. You can still provide your own cable modem or integrated router/modem. If you get your equipment from Comcast, they may be only providing integrated router/modems now, and if you have one of their routers you can't change its configuration.
Car sales are a bit different from most retail because there is an ongoing service relationship with the dealer. It has become increasingly difficult to get modern cars repaired by anybody other than the official repair centers (mostly because of the need for specialized diagnostic equipment), so it is important to choose a car where the quality of that service is high and that it is easy for you to get to. (Tesla has taken care of the latter issue: they pick up your car for service.)
Cars are also a product where it can be important to try out the product before buying. Test drives can reveal problems with a car that will make it unsuitable for you: not fitting well in the driver's seat, poor sight lines for somebody of your dimensions, inability to hold things that you carry on a regular basis, and so on. More extended tests are even more revealing. I don't think I would buy a car unless I had the opportunity to live with a similar car for a day, and I'm willing to pay the cost of renting my prime purchase candidate to make that happen if I can't borrow one from a friend.
Side note: one reason the Apple Store has been such a success is that they let you test drive their computers. They have multiple units of everything they sell set up in the store and they will let you use them for significant periods of time. The test computers have full Internet access and allow you to download and install programs (no password required) so you can try them out and determine whether their computer will work well with the programs YOU care about before buying. (They restore the systems regularly with a factory disk image.)
Many car dealers make the buying process painful. What I want is the opportunity to learn about and drive the cars that interest me with no pressure from sales people. Help me if I ask for it; leave me alone if I don't. Give me the opportunity to drive the car, preferably with no sales person present. Forget about trying pressure sales tactics like saying that I must buy NOW to get a deal; I'll walk out the door if you attempt that. And forget all the stupid price negotiations: tell me what your real price is and let me decide whether I like the deal. I'll find out what your real price is on the Internet anyway so you might as well just tell me - or better yet, put it on signs on the cars. Your profits all come from the service relationship anyway.
Not quite true. Like any business, running a car dealership (and even more so if one has a chain of them, as many companies do now) requires management skills, and education can help one acquire those skills. The typical pattern seems to be that the founder was a self-made man (and they're pretty much all men) but the next generation is educated.
A big factor in the quality and price of cell service is population density. Density matters because it is directly related to the cost of providing service. Lots of people in a small area are less expensive to serve than a population spread out over a large area.
Europe (the entire continent), the USA, and Canada all have roughly the same land mass. Europe has a bit over twice the population of the US. Canada has just over one-tenth the population of the US. The ranking of their price and quality of service matches their rank of density. Want even better prices than you can get in Europe? Try Japan or South Korea, which have population densities considerably higher than Europe. Want to pay a lot? Move to Australia, which has population density similar to Canada.
Boost is another Sprint brand so the coverage will be identical to Virgin. (The same goes for Sprint-based virtual networks they don't own such as Credo.) Actual Sprint service has a bit more coverage because it includes some roaming agreements that their prepaid brands don't include.
Presumably they feel that the use you get of other people's wireless when you are away from home is compensation for the fact that other people are getting use of yours. For most people that's likely true, but people who live near a busy commercial area or a popular park will suffer.
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One big debt that the open source community owes to Gnome: Qt being licensed under more favorable terms :)
I wish I hadn't already commented in this thread; otherwise I'd use a mod point to mark this "funny".
Some 90 year old people can drive safely. Some can't. Their fitness to drive should be judged case by case, not categorically.
The wanting mostly happened circa 2000. Netscape 4 was getting long in the tooth; it choked on complex pages and the Javascript implementation was horrible. Netscape 5 (an update of 4) was abandoned, and the fruit of Netscape's ground-up reimplementation, Netscape 7 / Mozilla Suite 1.0, didn't reach full release until 2002 though many of us were using beta versions before that. IE was, for a brief time, the best readily available browser. I stuck with Netscape anyway because it was fully cross-platform; there was an IE for some versions of Unix but not for Linux.
The light pen wasn't too bad for drawing applications, though it didn't measure up to what you can do with a pressure sensitive pen. It was a horrible interface for pretty much everything else. A lot of that was implementation; if a light pen had been as responsive as a touchscreen it would have worked about as well as early touch systems that used a stylus or did only single-point touch with a finger.
Some miners can learn to code. But the ones who could learn to code AND who are willing to relocate out of mining country probably left a long time ago. There isn't a lot of call for coders in a typical mining town.
A good modern violin doesn't cost as much as a Stradivarius, but the price tag can reach into six figures. So this finding may ease the financial burdens of top violinists a bit but they're still going to need to take out loans to buy their instruments.
Google's first attempt at TV (Google TV) failed. Their second one (Chromecast) has been a success.
But the stick format isn't right for everybody; some users might prefer a Chromecast Box with more features. If your TV has a limited number of HDMI inputs you might not want to tie one up with a stick; a box could feature HDMI passthrough, picture-in-picture combining external input and internally-generated video, and perhaps switching of multiple HDMI inputs. A box can also include a wired Ethernet port, and a USB port and SD card slot to let you show pictures and movies. The Box could also add a faster processor, more memory, and a game controller option.
A new box from Google won't replace the existing Chromecast, just as the Roku Stick has not replaced their settop boxes. It will be a product line extension, and one that will appeal to many people if Google gets the features and price right.
The Chromebook version of Chrome also got this. Don't know when it's coming to the Linux version.
The option doesn't cost anywhere near $500 in parts and labor currently. It likely did when it was first offered, but electronics always come down in price over time, and most of the parts needed for a backup camera are already produced in huge quantities for cell phones and tablets. I doubt that many car buyers are actually paying $500 for it as a separate option anyway; either they are getting it as standard equipment (as on many minivans) or buying it as part of an option bundle where the camera represents perhaps $100 of the bundle price.
Vehicle prices won't increase anywhere near $500 due to this requirement. The market wouldn't accept that, so competitive pressures will force automakers into a much smaller increase or none at all. By 2018 most cars will probably already include a touchscreen for other reasons (sound system, climate control, navigation on cars that offer that) so the cost increment for the backup camera will just be the camera and the wiring.
If you really want to talk about an overpriced option, let's look at onboard navigation systems. They cost many times the price of a good standalone GPS, they don't get map updates in a timely manner if at all (and certainly not for the entire life of the vehicle), and if updates are available they cost an arm and a leg. There is some convenience to having it built into the dashboard, but for me it doesn't even come close to outweighing the negatives.
Many (but far from all) titles give you a digital copy. But it's typically a DRM-ridden DVD-resolution digital copy. It's not even close to the quality of the Blu-Ray.
But it doesn't hold a candle to Blu-Ray.
Physical objects like DVDs are governed by the First Sale Doctrine (reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), a legal principle that says that once you have bought something you are legally entitled to do anything you like with it. including renting it and reselling it. Although some rental outlets get their discs (and in the past, tapes) at a reduced price under different agreements (notably agreeing to share some of the rental revenue with the studio), the fact that the rental outlet can opt to buy the discs through normal channels and rent them without encumbrance sets an upper bound on what the content owner can charge for their movies or TV shows.
Streamed content has no such out. Content owners can charge anything they like for streaming agreements, offer exclusive deals, or withhold the content altogether. (There is a complex timing arrangement of availability of movies on disc, on pay-per-view, on premium movie channels like HBO, on broadcast TV, and so forth - streaming services are currently the bottom of the food chain and get A-list movies only after the other sources of revenue are mostly used up.) That is one reason why the streaming selection on Netflix and other streaming services doesn't match what they can offer on disc.
Fuel efficiency is an average over many kinds of driving. If one's driving skews toward the uses where electrics are especially good (stop and go urban driving) and away from uses where internal combustion engines are at their best (highway driving), the electric car will produce much less pollution.
The electric car has the advantage of removing the pollution from the point of use. This is important for city use; concentration of pollutants in a small densely populated area is much more of a public health problem than pollutants in remote areas.
If pollutants are produced on an industrial scale (power plants) it is easier to deploy mitigation technologies like exhaust scrubbing and carbon sequestering.
The CO2 profile of the electric car is likely to improve over time as the power grid shifts toward use of renewable energy sources. The gasoline powered car is what it is, and may get worse over time if petroleum production moves to higher-impact sources such as tar sands.
Finally, the electric car is likely to have a longer service life. We don't have enough data yet on electric cars, but the record of things like electrified trains and trolleys compared to diesel trains and buses suggests it. Longer vehicle life means fewer resources used to produce new vehicles. Major exception: the batteries. We need to work on low-impact ways to recycle battery materials. Developing batteries with a longer lifetime - I don't just mean more energy storage but also more charge cycles - should be a priority.
Mazda's improvements to internal combustion technology have value. They may be a more responsible choice for some car owners. But there will be many car owners for whom an electric car makes more environmental sense.
The era of Facebook is not completely unlike the heyday of big network TV, when people got most of their entertainment from three big sources. Or the age of newspapers and news magazines, when they got their news from one or two sources. Concentration has existed before.
The question is whether the network effects of social networking will be strong enough to keep Facebook dominant. There are realms where being big is an advantage because people will tend to come to whatever place is big, like eBay and online auctions. eBay has more buyers so sellers come there, which means there is more to buy and so more buyers come... you get the idea. Publishing and broadcasting have weaker network effects than social networking sites do; a newspaper may be slightly more interesting to you because your neighbor also reads it (which gives the two of you something to talk about together) but it's not as big a deal. What kept those businesses on top in their day was the capital cost of entering the business and economies of scale in content production.
My personal guess is that Facebook will survive as a big network for loose social connections but people will start spending more time in other, more exclusive spaces as well. That is, you will go to Facebook for the broad social overlook and to whatever affinity site appeals to you to communicate with your closer tribe. The inherent problem that Facebook is up against in that niche is that it's a niche where there is inherently only one winner. If people get dissatisfied with it and start going elsewhere, the tipping point could come as quickly as it did for MySpace.
Nowadays, better means above all better service. People are keeping their cars longer and having more of the work done by dealers. A dealer that respects the value of your time and has your car ready when they say it will be ready, offers transportation to the service facility or loaner cars as appropriate, and actually fixes your car when they say they are going to fix it... that's a dealer that will keep customers. Making the buying experience more pleasant doesn't hurt, either.
I was thinking of large urban areas like the one where I live. Real competition among car dealerships exists here because the distance between dealerships is fairly small; for most brands if you don't like the dealership closest to you, you can buy the car from one a few miles farther away. That doesn't work so well for smaller markets where the next dealership might be 50 miles away instead of 5. Although a badly run dealership might muddle through because of convenience, it will tend to lose business to a better but slightly more distant dealership, and a few especially badly run ones HAVE folded.
I'm trying it on my Xperia Z Ultra right now; it's playing in HD. Seems to be working well. This is a 6.4" phablet with a 2.2GHz Snapdragon 800 so it's a pretty serious device; people have said that playback is poor on lesser phones.
I would still like to see an official app from Amazon. Not releasing an Android app is a heavy-handed way of trying to get people to buy the Kindle Fire. Aside from the fact that I prefer a full Android device, Amazon doesn't make a Kindle Phablet so they have no comparable device.
This is no longer true. I have streamed HD content in Chrome on my Windows 7 HTPC and my Chromebook. (Haven't tried other browsers with it recently.) You have to have a solid connection to Amazon; their HD streaming is 2.5Mbps.
So far as I know, Comcast is not yet forcing people to use their routers. You can still provide your own cable modem or integrated router/modem. If you get your equipment from Comcast, they may be only providing integrated router/modems now, and if you have one of their routers you can't change its configuration.
Car sales are a bit different from most retail because there is an ongoing service relationship with the dealer. It has become increasingly difficult to get modern cars repaired by anybody other than the official repair centers (mostly because of the need for specialized diagnostic equipment), so it is important to choose a car where the quality of that service is high and that it is easy for you to get to. (Tesla has taken care of the latter issue: they pick up your car for service.)
Cars are also a product where it can be important to try out the product before buying. Test drives can reveal problems with a car that will make it unsuitable for you: not fitting well in the driver's seat, poor sight lines for somebody of your dimensions, inability to hold things that you carry on a regular basis, and so on. More extended tests are even more revealing. I don't think I would buy a car unless I had the opportunity to live with a similar car for a day, and I'm willing to pay the cost of renting my prime purchase candidate to make that happen if I can't borrow one from a friend.
Side note: one reason the Apple Store has been such a success is that they let you test drive their computers. They have multiple units of everything they sell set up in the store and they will let you use them for significant periods of time. The test computers have full Internet access and allow you to download and install programs (no password required) so you can try them out and determine whether their computer will work well with the programs YOU care about before buying. (They restore the systems regularly with a factory disk image.)
Many car dealers make the buying process painful. What I want is the opportunity to learn about and drive the cars that interest me with no pressure from sales people. Help me if I ask for it; leave me alone if I don't. Give me the opportunity to drive the car, preferably with no sales person present. Forget about trying pressure sales tactics like saying that I must buy NOW to get a deal; I'll walk out the door if you attempt that. And forget all the stupid price negotiations: tell me what your real price is and let me decide whether I like the deal. I'll find out what your real price is on the Internet anyway so you might as well just tell me - or better yet, put it on signs on the cars. Your profits all come from the service relationship anyway.
Not quite true. Like any business, running a car dealership (and even more so if one has a chain of them, as many companies do now) requires management skills, and education can help one acquire those skills. The typical pattern seems to be that the founder was a self-made man (and they're pretty much all men) but the next generation is educated.
A big factor in the quality and price of cell service is population density. Density matters because it is directly related to the cost of providing service. Lots of people in a small area are less expensive to serve than a population spread out over a large area.
Europe (the entire continent), the USA, and Canada all have roughly the same land mass. Europe has a bit over twice the population of the US. Canada has just over one-tenth the population of the US. The ranking of their price and quality of service matches their rank of density. Want even better prices than you can get in Europe? Try Japan or South Korea, which have population densities considerably higher than Europe. Want to pay a lot? Move to Australia, which has population density similar to Canada.
Boost is another Sprint brand so the coverage will be identical to Virgin. (The same goes for Sprint-based virtual networks they don't own such as Credo.) Actual Sprint service has a bit more coverage because it includes some roaming agreements that their prepaid brands don't include.
Presumably they feel that the use you get of other people's wireless when you are away from home is compensation for the fact that other people are getting use of yours. For most people that's likely true, but people who live near a busy commercial area or a popular park will suffer.