After some quick wikipedia, I realize that the cartoon I grew up loving in the late 80s was actually ripped from a comic book series I have never read. So I guess I prove my OP wrong. Some 12 year old kid could go see this movie, and it would forever represent the ninja turtles in their mind. Oh god, where is the art police when you need them?
If you didn't know that Michael Bay films are visceral extravaganzas that do not bother with substance, I just told you, so now you do. If you are worried about him ruining our beloved turtles, I doubt future generations will look to a 2012 blockbuster to understand a 1980s cartoon.
Complaining about bad art is like complaining that the ipad is not user serviceable.
Hahaha, you too have discovered the Unity back button hell!
Honestly, the ability to customize the time delay of the taskbar appearing when the mouse touches the edge of the screen is the most obvious and simple feature they could have added. I have always been amazed by Gnome and Ubuntu's distaste for configuration menus. One fully featured config menu would remedy 90% of the problems power users have.
I would disagree. In a world where screen resolution doubles, or CPU process halves in a generation, I cannot justify the effort to repair things. The pace of hardware development makes repair of old products imprudent. I have retired several perfectly good CPUs because the electricity savings alone warranted an upgrade.
Also, repairs can have significant material costs, regardless of who does the repairing. Batteries, for example, could represent half the cost of a mobile device. So if I replace the battery on a two year old device, I am paying for half of a new machine which would double my current performance, without actually getting that performance.
So I'm curious, what licensing scheme must services like AWS or other virtual desktop services use? If I sign up for a virtual Windows instance at an hourly price, and stop the instance after a few hours, I will pay much less than $10.
Do they buy a bunch of licenses, and then only allow that number of virtual machines to run at a time? Does Microsoft offer a virtualization license?
I would love to pay taxes on digital media if it meant I actually owned it. I have an xbmc htpc, and there is not a single legal avenue for getting movies onto it.
Just this weekend I did another periodical scouring of the internet for sane media outlets, and left more frustrated than you could imagine. Both Amazon Instant Video and Google Play will only "rent" the movies, which require streaming them through their locked down (and buggy) web players. The iTunes Store gives the illusion of purchase because they actually give you a file, but it's completely useless unless it's played in itunes on a registered computer.
I know this is a tired rant on slashdot, but it frustrates me because I WANT TO PAY FOR MY MOVIES! But I refuse to buy a product that I can't play on any platform I choose. Is that too much to ask?
The Pirate Bay's days are numbered. With the move to magnet links, their entire "collection" takes about 100MB. That is small enough that every user can have a copy that slowly updates between connected users. For an up and coming implementation of this, see Tribler.
If all p2p switched to a similar method, the only targets for authorities would be IP addresses in the swarm. Right now that rarely happens, but it could very easily become commonplace if there are no big targets left.
Mobile computing companies are all deathly afraid that their customers will wake up one day and realize that a tablet and a phone are the same device, just in different sizes. That is why you can't get cellular voice service on a tablet, and probably why you can't get siri as well.
God forbid, users might choose between tablet or phone, instead of having both.
Not this time, the article says it is expected to pass between us and Geostationary orbit. Even if it does impact intact, the worst the damage could be would be comparable to the Tunguska event.
Depending on location, it could be very bad, but not an extinction event. You are right though, if it was bigger, we would be screwed. Not even Bruce Willis could save us with one year notice.
If it does hit, maybe it will convince those with the cash that asteroid defense is a worthwhile expense.
I would rather they start over and create a Steam Console OS built on linux.
Yes, many games in my current library wouldn't translate, but it would eliminate the cost of a Windows license. Many Valve games have already been ported to the Mac, so that could provide the core offering of games until the third parties begin targeting the platform.
Also, if it catches on, game developers could target all the OpenGL platforms (Mac, Steam Console, Linux Desktop, Android) all at once. That would be a large enough market to actually stand a chance of unseating DirectX.
And of course, there is always Wine. In my experience, just about every game works on Wine, but most require so many extra tweaks it is easier to just install Windows. If the Steam Console OS included Wine and slowly added the necessary tweaks, a large percentage of the current library of Windows games could be made to work as seamlessly as a game written for the platform.
Slashdot works because it is small. I don't use G+ yet, but I use Facebook and Reddit daily, and what always brings me back here is the signal to noise ratio. Big sites just have sooooo many bad posts, you have to implement crude sorting mechanisms to pick which ones you are going to read, which kills any kind of continuous discussion. Yes, there are plenty of lame comments here, but the ratio is better.
Of course, so far I have just been talking about anonymous social networking. If you want to social network with people you know personally, there are different problems. For instance, as much as I love my real life friends, we have pretty varying sets of interests. That's how real life friendships work, proximity and loyalty are far stronger social bonds than common interest.
So say I am in the mood to discuss the AMD business strategy, I can either join a monstrous discussion on/r/technology/ or a similar Facebook page, or I could try to talk to my real life friends about something they aren't enthusiastic about. G+'s circles could solve the problem by collecting people with similar interests into small enough groups that you could potentially read all the posts, but then how is that any better than sites like/.?
And this is all about simple usability. I'll leave it to others to reiterate why placing your entire online presence in the hands of a single company is a bad idea.
Yes, Amazon is most certainly not a follower. I also consider them to be the most honest internet company. Unlike Google, they don't really need to do personally invasive data mining, because they know exactly what you actually buy on Amazon marketplace. The only thing that comes close to advertising from Amazon is product suggestions based upon what you have previously bought. Far more useful and less intrusive than fake drug ads.
Also, Amazon Web Services is absolutely unmatched. It shocks me that Google has missed the boat so severely in that market, but I guess they were too focused on forcing you to use the cloud through their own services to see the potential of letting people inovate with the underlying technologies.
The first Kindle came out three years before the first ipad, and while the ipad is obviously far more advanced, both devices are simply following the general trend of portable electronics that has been going for two decades.
My ethics are simply not that rigid. I like many mainstream media contributions, so I will watch them for the pleasure and cultural insight they provide.
If they are distributed in an open manner that encourages the spread of culture, I will pay for it. If they are distributed in an closed antisocial manner which encourages control, I will watch it elsewhere without paying.
Good question, I just checked. The exe was emailed from an address at the ISP's domain. Not sure how hard that is to fake, but I would have trusted it too.
However, after reading the rest of this thread, I think I have changed my mind. Malware control is a job for OS developers, and in extreme cases the police. The ISP really shouldn't get involved.
Ok, try on this car analogy. Cars have been around for 100 years. They have been a defining aspect of our culture for 60 years, and nearly 100% of people know how to drive. And yet, only a very small subset of the population have any idea of how a car works.
I don't see how any other technology should be expected to be different. People who grow up on computers and the internet will either take an interest in them because they are curious, or they will treat them like an appliance and have occasional problems, just like people have problems with their cars.
I would use caution when attributing characteristics to "generations", the effects of individual personalities seem much stronger.
My brother's windows 7 box started running slow two weeks ago, but other than that there was no sign of a problem. He attributed it to ageing hardware and kept it on. Within 24 hours the ISP called him and told him he had a serious malware infection. They sent him an exe (apparantly they knew exactly what was wrong), and it fixed it perfectly.
This shocked me, because usually I love to hate the local ISP, but you have to admit, that is some good service. So I guess I would draw the line at being able to identify a specific problem. If it is just suspicious traffic patterns, innocent until proven guilty.
Well perhaps aluminum isn't the best choice, but I am actually writing this on one of those titanium roll-cage carbon-fiber thinkpads (t410), and I have been less than impressed.
I have a cracked handrest (a common problem), a clicky keyboard, a broken ultra-bay, multiple screws that have worn through their threadings to become useless, and an overheating problem that renders the discrete graphics unusable. The only saving grace is the nice matte screen.
I understand that constructing something like a laptop isn't easy, but I rarely hear of people who have problems with their Macbook Pro's construction, so it must be possible. I just wish other companies (like Lenovo) offered something of equal quality.
Why is it so difficult to compete in the same market as Apple?
Ever since Apple became a dominant player, it is impossible to find high end non-Apple products. Every other manufacturer simply accepts that Apple owns the high end, and instead of competing they offer 9000 different models of the same low quality plastic junk.
If a company like HP (or Samsung, who actually manufactures hardware) sold a sleek aluminum unibody laptop with an SSD and a high quality screen, I have no doubt they could eat into the Macbook Pro market, even at a similar price point. For tech support, hire the same type of people who apple hires.
Apple gives people what they want and just charges a lot. That's fine, it's what I wanted. Everyone else seems hellbent on giving me something I don't want for a only slightly less money.
And yet all of that should not be necessary. If I produce a phone compatible with their network technology, I should be able to activate it as pay-as-you-go. But alas, there is not a single cell provider who will activate a smart phone this way. Not even the resellers.
So I am stuck using my phone from 2006 until either me or othe carriers give in. And my battery is dying.
As someone who has spent time as an electronics sales rep, I say good riddance.
I was always as honest and informative as I could be (much more so than my coworkers), but you really can't give meaningful advice in a 10 minute sales pitch. Half of the people are coming cold to the technology, they are not going to be educated in time to make a good decision. The other half have made up their minds because of marketing, and nothing you say will convince them otherwise. And then add to that the fact that most technology purchasing is rather subjective. Just look at the heated discussions on any tech website about which products are the right choice, they go on for pages and pages. And that is between people who are already very well informed about the basic principles.
Spending a few hours reading user reviews on amazon or newegg, and being able to google unfamiliar terms, is more valuable than the most tech savy and personable sales rep. And because most sales reps are subpar, internet shopping wins by a landslide.
My ideal search engine would be a meta-search to access a specific set of domains.
For instance, I would love to be able to search only the shopping sites I choose, only the journal databases I choose, only the encyclopedias I choose, and only the social networks I choose, only the news websites I choose, etc, all from one search box. That gives you the freedom of using individual websites, with the convienence of a search engine.
DuckDuckGo is on the right track, but I would love even more customization.
Slashdot Mirror
Reply to self:
After some quick wikipedia, I realize that the cartoon I grew up loving in the late 80s was actually ripped from a comic book series I have never read. So I guess I prove my OP wrong. Some 12 year old kid could go see this movie, and it would forever represent the ninja turtles in their mind. Oh god, where is the art police when you need them?
If you didn't know that Michael Bay films are visceral extravaganzas that do not bother with substance, I just told you, so now you do. If you are worried about him ruining our beloved turtles, I doubt future generations will look to a 2012 blockbuster to understand a 1980s cartoon.
Complaining about bad art is like complaining that the ipad is not user serviceable.
Hahaha, you too have discovered the Unity back button hell!
Honestly, the ability to customize the time delay of the taskbar appearing when the mouse touches the edge of the screen is the most obvious and simple feature they could have added. I have always been amazed by Gnome and Ubuntu's distaste for configuration menus. One fully featured config menu would remedy 90% of the problems power users have.
I would disagree. In a world where screen resolution doubles, or CPU process halves in a generation, I cannot justify the effort to repair things. The pace of hardware development makes repair of old products imprudent. I have retired several perfectly good CPUs because the electricity savings alone warranted an upgrade.
Also, repairs can have significant material costs, regardless of who does the repairing. Batteries, for example, could represent half the cost of a mobile device. So if I replace the battery on a two year old device, I am paying for half of a new machine which would double my current performance, without actually getting that performance.
So I'm curious, what licensing scheme must services like AWS or other virtual desktop services use? If I sign up for a virtual Windows instance at an hourly price, and stop the instance after a few hours, I will pay much less than $10.
Do they buy a bunch of licenses, and then only allow that number of virtual machines to run at a time? Does Microsoft offer a virtualization license?
I would love to pay taxes on digital media if it meant I actually owned it. I have an xbmc htpc, and there is not a single legal avenue for getting movies onto it.
Just this weekend I did another periodical scouring of the internet for sane media outlets, and left more frustrated than you could imagine. Both Amazon Instant Video and Google Play will only "rent" the movies, which require streaming them through their locked down (and buggy) web players. The iTunes Store gives the illusion of purchase because they actually give you a file, but it's completely useless unless it's played in itunes on a registered computer.
I know this is a tired rant on slashdot, but it frustrates me because I WANT TO PAY FOR MY MOVIES! But I refuse to buy a product that I can't play on any platform I choose. Is that too much to ask?
They can't discern platitudes and doublespeak from actual wisdom.
How do you think the bible got so popular? Now excuse me while I duck.
Care to share some of those options? I would be genuinely interested.
The Pirate Bay's days are numbered. With the move to magnet links, their entire "collection" takes about 100MB. That is small enough that every user can have a copy that slowly updates between connected users. For an up and coming implementation of this, see Tribler.
If all p2p switched to a similar method, the only targets for authorities would be IP addresses in the swarm. Right now that rarely happens, but it could very easily become commonplace if there are no big targets left.
Mobile computing companies are all deathly afraid that their customers will wake up one day and realize that a tablet and a phone are the same device, just in different sizes. That is why you can't get cellular voice service on a tablet, and probably why you can't get siri as well.
God forbid, users might choose between tablet or phone, instead of having both.
Not this time, the article says it is expected to pass between us and Geostationary orbit. Even if it does impact intact, the worst the damage could be would be comparable to the Tunguska event.
Depending on location, it could be very bad, but not an extinction event. You are right though, if it was bigger, we would be screwed. Not even Bruce Willis could save us with one year notice.
If it does hit, maybe it will convince those with the cash that asteroid defense is a worthwhile expense.
I would rather they start over and create a Steam Console OS built on linux.
Yes, many games in my current library wouldn't translate, but it would eliminate the cost of a Windows license. Many Valve games have already been ported to the Mac, so that could provide the core offering of games until the third parties begin targeting the platform.
Also, if it catches on, game developers could target all the OpenGL platforms (Mac, Steam Console, Linux Desktop, Android) all at once. That would be a large enough market to actually stand a chance of unseating DirectX.
And of course, there is always Wine. In my experience, just about every game works on Wine, but most require so many extra tweaks it is easier to just install Windows. If the Steam Console OS included Wine and slowly added the necessary tweaks, a large percentage of the current library of Windows games could be made to work as seamlessly as a game written for the platform.
Slashdot works because it is small. I don't use G+ yet, but I use Facebook and Reddit daily, and what always brings me back here is the signal to noise ratio. Big sites just have sooooo many bad posts, you have to implement crude sorting mechanisms to pick which ones you are going to read, which kills any kind of continuous discussion. Yes, there are plenty of lame comments here, but the ratio is better.
Of course, so far I have just been talking about anonymous social networking. If you want to social network with people you know personally, there are different problems. For instance, as much as I love my real life friends, we have pretty varying sets of interests. That's how real life friendships work, proximity and loyalty are far stronger social bonds than common interest.
So say I am in the mood to discuss the AMD business strategy, I can either join a monstrous discussion on /r/technology/ or a similar Facebook page, or I could try to talk to my real life friends about something they aren't enthusiastic about. G+'s circles could solve the problem by collecting people with similar interests into small enough groups that you could potentially read all the posts, but then how is that any better than sites like /.?
And this is all about simple usability. I'll leave it to others to reiterate why placing your entire online presence in the hands of a single company is a bad idea.
Fantastic explanation.
Yes, Amazon is most certainly not a follower. I also consider them to be the most honest internet company. Unlike Google, they don't really need to do personally invasive data mining, because they know exactly what you actually buy on Amazon marketplace. The only thing that comes close to advertising from Amazon is product suggestions based upon what you have previously bought. Far more useful and less intrusive than fake drug ads.
Also, Amazon Web Services is absolutely unmatched. It shocks me that Google has missed the boat so severely in that market, but I guess they were too focused on forcing you to use the cloud through their own services to see the potential of letting people inovate with the underlying technologies.
The first Kindle came out three years before the first ipad, and while the ipad is obviously far more advanced, both devices are simply following the general trend of portable electronics that has been going for two decades.
My ethics are simply not that rigid. I like many mainstream media contributions, so I will watch them for the pleasure and cultural insight they provide.
If they are distributed in an open manner that encourages the spread of culture, I will pay for it. If they are distributed in an closed antisocial manner which encourages control, I will watch it elsewhere without paying.
Either way, I sleep soundly.
Good question, I just checked. The exe was emailed from an address at the ISP's domain. Not sure how hard that is to fake, but I would have trusted it too.
However, after reading the rest of this thread, I think I have changed my mind. Malware control is a job for OS developers, and in extreme cases the police. The ISP really shouldn't get involved.
Ok, try on this car analogy. Cars have been around for 100 years. They have been a defining aspect of our culture for 60 years, and nearly 100% of people know how to drive. And yet, only a very small subset of the population have any idea of how a car works.
I don't see how any other technology should be expected to be different. People who grow up on computers and the internet will either take an interest in them because they are curious, or they will treat them like an appliance and have occasional problems, just like people have problems with their cars.
I would use caution when attributing characteristics to "generations", the effects of individual personalities seem much stronger.
My brother's windows 7 box started running slow two weeks ago, but other than that there was no sign of a problem. He attributed it to ageing hardware and kept it on. Within 24 hours the ISP called him and told him he had a serious malware infection. They sent him an exe (apparantly they knew exactly what was wrong), and it fixed it perfectly.
This shocked me, because usually I love to hate the local ISP, but you have to admit, that is some good service. So I guess I would draw the line at being able to identify a specific problem. If it is just suspicious traffic patterns, innocent until proven guilty.
Well perhaps aluminum isn't the best choice, but I am actually writing this on one of those titanium roll-cage carbon-fiber thinkpads (t410), and I have been less than impressed.
I have a cracked handrest (a common problem), a clicky keyboard, a broken ultra-bay, multiple screws that have worn through their threadings to become useless, and an overheating problem that renders the discrete graphics unusable. The only saving grace is the nice matte screen.
I understand that constructing something like a laptop isn't easy, but I rarely hear of people who have problems with their Macbook Pro's construction, so it must be possible. I just wish other companies (like Lenovo) offered something of equal quality.
Why is it so difficult to compete in the same market as Apple?
Ever since Apple became a dominant player, it is impossible to find high end non-Apple products. Every other manufacturer simply accepts that Apple owns the high end, and instead of competing they offer 9000 different models of the same low quality plastic junk.
If a company like HP (or Samsung, who actually manufactures hardware) sold a sleek aluminum unibody laptop with an SSD and a high quality screen, I have no doubt they could eat into the Macbook Pro market, even at a similar price point. For tech support, hire the same type of people who apple hires.
Apple gives people what they want and just charges a lot. That's fine, it's what I wanted. Everyone else seems hellbent on giving me something I don't want for a only slightly less money.
And yet all of that should not be necessary. If I produce a phone compatible with their network technology, I should be able to activate it as pay-as-you-go. But alas, there is not a single cell provider who will activate a smart phone this way. Not even the resellers.
So I am stuck using my phone from 2006 until either me or othe carriers give in. And my battery is dying.
1. Install virtual machine
2. Install Chrome
3. Write Python script to browse web continuously
4. ???^h^h^h Sell cache
5. Profit!
As someone who has spent time as an electronics sales rep, I say good riddance.
I was always as honest and informative as I could be (much more so than my coworkers), but you really can't give meaningful advice in a 10 minute sales pitch. Half of the people are coming cold to the technology, they are not going to be educated in time to make a good decision. The other half have made up their minds because of marketing, and nothing you say will convince them otherwise. And then add to that the fact that most technology purchasing is rather subjective. Just look at the heated discussions on any tech website about which products are the right choice, they go on for pages and pages. And that is between people who are already very well informed about the basic principles.
Spending a few hours reading user reviews on amazon or newegg, and being able to google unfamiliar terms, is more valuable than the most tech savy and personable sales rep. And because most sales reps are subpar, internet shopping wins by a landslide.
My ideal search engine would be a meta-search to access a specific set of domains.
For instance, I would love to be able to search only the shopping sites I choose, only the journal databases I choose, only the encyclopedias I choose, and only the social networks I choose, only the news websites I choose, etc, all from one search box. That gives you the freedom of using individual websites, with the convienence of a search engine.
DuckDuckGo is on the right track, but I would love even more customization.