Maybe they turned down the bid because they wanted to stay independent and liked what they did?
Jesus, it drives me crazy listening to people go "what morons, they should have taken the money and ran." Why? What if they really like what they do?
Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with Foursquare's product or management, and I have this crazy notion that there are things that are worth more than money.
Social networking sites rise and fall relatively rapidly. The insinuation is that they should have taken the money because even if they love what they do, they probably won't be doing it for much longer. Having the money would enable them to easily go do something else they love.
Wikileaks would probably receive more support if they ditched their attempts at analyzing the materials they leak. I believe I can trust them to release the full context of whatever they publish, but I don't believe I can trust their analysis of that media to be independent of their political agenda. In other words, I trust them about the same as any other source of information: with skepticism.
That means that we should stop buying things made in China. period.
Have you actually been able to do this? Even if I shared your opinion, I doubt a China boycott is feasible.
China isn't where I'd like them to be, either, but take a step back and compare the China of 30 years ago to the China of today. They have undergone a remarkable change in a very short amount of time. There is more to come.
PNG was developed because of patent problems with GIF. Alpha channel, 24 bit color and better compression were just extra bonuses.
It's implied in your comment, but worth pointing out that the key in GIF vs. PNG is that the open format used to replace the proprietary one works better and offers more. This is an absolute requirement. It can't just be open, it must be equal to or better than the closed de-facto (and rapidly becoming incumbent) standard.
This is because most people don't really care about free-as-in-speech, they care about free-as-in-beer. They don't understand there is a difference between the two and, if they did, they still might not care. You cannot win a standards war just by standing on principals.
Repeat after me: The iPhone is not a general computing device.
There, you see now? If someone puts a microprocessor on a toaster, would you automatically expect it to do everything your laptop does?
-dZ.
I was responding to a comment where it was proposed that the iPhone OS is a revolutionary approach that should be applied to general computing devices.
I think that's a Bad Idea. From your comment I suspect you agree.
You mean like iPhone OS? Call the iPad a gimmick if you want, but it does bring with it a brand new concept on human-computer interaction. One that I feel will carry over into traditional keyboard/mouse computing in the future.
The iPhone UI is simple and works well on a mobile device, and it kicked the rest of the industry in the ass and made them realize that people wanted more than just crappy, difficult to find and install Java applications on their phones.
That being said, going back to the days of running a single application at a time without a quick and easy method of moving information between them is not a step forward, nor is it new. Having a single application which serves solely as a tool to launch other applications is as old as Windows 1.0. Older, even. I remember DOS-based menu programs that did the same thing.
As a consumer device to interact with media the iPad may find a niche, but it falls on the wrong side of the toy/tool line to be taken seriously.
They haven't raised the price because it has been made up in volume. How many copies of that $99 version of Windows sold as compared with Windows 7?
Any thing else with that sort of volume increase would be selling for $9.95 now.
You're neglecting to consider increased research and development costs. Not to mention sales, marketing, OEM relationship management, etc.. I'm pretty sure their legal costs are a lot larger these days, too. You're assuming it costs either the same or less to produce something like Windows 7 as it did to produce Windows 2.0. I'm not sure anyone except possibly Enron's accounting team would be able to "make it up in volume."
I can't say anything about video, but for audio all my CD collection is converted to Ogg instead of MP3, you can't even spot the difference in quality, thou the filesize is smaller. BTW, my MP3 player supports Ogg playing as well.
Audio quality and compression efficiency are controlled by the codec, not the container format. The article is critiquing the latter.
Both the county and the city inside the county are named Orange, which probably confused the submitter. The City of Orange is the one prosecuting, not the County of Orange.
Only to a point. A few months back I had this really nice red wine that was great after about an hour breathing, but then started getting worse from that point. Still good, just not as good. Aerating is tough and it's hard to find the sweet spot, since it can be different from varietal to varietal, vintage to vintage and even bottle to bottle. But yeah, generally speaking, adding some air to a freshly opened bottle is a good thing, but leaving it in a decanter for a week is not.
Guinness had to solve this exact problem, except with nitrogen instead of oxygen. I think they have a patent on the little plastic capsule filled with gas that only releases when the can/bottle is opened, but other than that I don't see why the same method couldn't be used to release oxygen.
There are a small percentage of people able to process alcohol in such a way that they _never_ get hangovers, at least according to my doctor. Since you've never had one, it's possible that you're one of them and would never get a hangover no matter what you did or didn't do.
Staying hydrated helps, but there is no guaranteed method that will work for everyone.
And yet they'll at the same time start complaining about how they're being oppressed by moderation, even though they'll easily be dominating in the mod count. Mark my words.
It's really ridiculous. What ever happened to modding based on how reasonably a person is debating rather than whether the person matches your political ideology?
We've both been on Slashdot a long time. If you remember a time when your last sentence was true, I must have missed it.
learning a new language is easy. Learning to program is hard.
QFT
IANAP but have written code as a hobbyist. I'll spend hours writing and rewriting something only mildly complex because, while I understand the languages and syntax well enough, I use trial and error to find the right methods. Starting with only a vague idea of how I want something to work doesn't help, either. Good programmers know the right methods already, and learning how those methods are applied in any particular language is trivial.
am also still running Outlook under virtualization; enterprise messaging on the Mac is currently not very good
Why not use MS Entourage?
If you've used Entourage, you already know the answer to that question.
There are three main problems with Entourage:
1) Large mail files cause problems with Time Machine backups and Spotlight indexing. When they don't corrupt themselves first.
2) There is no Webex meeting integration with the calendar. I use Webex for meetings several times every day. Meeting invite integration with Webex is must-have functionality for me.
I've never heard of anyone who works at a company that uses Macs. The company I work at uses PCs exclusively, and probably saves quite a bit of money by doing so. My work PC has never crashed, has never had a virus, runs relatively fast, and was probably quite cheap. I do have to have an IT person mess with computer every now and then, and thats usually because a poorly written application fails and needs to be reinstalled.
For most businesses switching to Macs would require new IT people, retraining of employees, and finding applications that function in OS X. The computers would also likely cost considerably more than PCs.
Ever heard of Cisco? We are free to run a Mac that the company will pay for, as long as IT doesn't have to support it. We have an internal user community that provides its own support in lieu of IT. There are thousands of Mac users here. I switched about four months ago thinking that the worst-case scenario is that I could still run Windows on the hardware if switching to a new OS didn't work out. So far, I'm still running OSX, but am also still running Outlook under virtualization; enterprise messaging on the Mac is currently not very good.
Obviously this type of solution is not for everyone, but it works for us.
So, is there any actual evidence backing all this up, or is it just more anti-Chinese vilification?
(Remember, we have always been at war with Eastasia.)
Don't go talking sense, that sort of thing of frowned upon around here.
When all these negative posters donate their Chinese-manufactured iPhones and Android-based devices to charity I'll stop thinking of them as tin-foil hat wearing hypocrites.
Serious? Really? How are most technology CEO's scammers on a level that this guy is on? Can you name a legit technology CEO that you think is at that same 'scam level'?
Kenneth Lay, former CEO of now-defunct Enron. Although good old Ken was at a much higher level than this guy.
I'm not sure I understand your thoughts around a license costing more equaling better or more serious drivers. The USA is not even in the top 10 for deaths due to vehicle accidents per capita; we're ranked #15 in the world even though, surprisingly, we're #7 per capita in the number of vehicles.
Taking out some money to buy some spectrum so they can start their own mobile carrier. Its part of a long term plan that I haven't entirely figured out yet, but this is just an extension of the FCC auction stuff. ChromeOS and the android devices plays into it as well of course, maybe their going to offer free wireless service in exchange for being a bitch to their ads in everything you do.
Smart people don't use (a lot of) their own money for stuff like this. Very unlikely they will be seeding a wireless startup with their own cash.
Good question! What are they planning to do with the money? Something that the shareholders of Google wouldn't approve of I think, since otherwise they would do it with Google money and not be forced to pay taxes.
You mean like spend it on something Google wouldn't then own? Perhaps they would simply like to acquire some personal assets. And, since they currently control the majority of Google's stock, the only people that need to approve of whatever Google does is them anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they turned down the bid because they wanted to stay independent and liked what they did?
Jesus, it drives me crazy listening to people go "what morons, they should have taken the money and ran." Why? What if they really like what they do?
Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with Foursquare's product or management, and I have this crazy notion that there are things that are worth more than money.
Social networking sites rise and fall relatively rapidly. The insinuation is that they should have taken the money because even if they love what they do, they probably won't be doing it for much longer. Having the money would enable them to easily go do something else they love.
Wikileaks would probably receive more support if they ditched their attempts at analyzing the materials they leak. I believe I can trust them to release the full context of whatever they publish, but I don't believe I can trust their analysis of that media to be independent of their political agenda. In other words, I trust them about the same as any other source of information: with skepticism.
It must be insult to injury to get sued over an Uwe Boll film. Not only did they watch it, but they got sued for doing so. Nobody needs that!
It's like getting kicked in the balls after consuming a large meal consisting entirely of broken glass bottles.
That means that we should stop buying things made in China. period.
Have you actually been able to do this? Even if I shared your opinion, I doubt a China boycott is feasible.
China isn't where I'd like them to be, either, but take a step back and compare the China of 30 years ago to the China of today. They have undergone a remarkable change in a very short amount of time. There is more to come.
PNG was developed because of patent problems with GIF. Alpha channel, 24 bit color and better compression were just extra bonuses.
It's implied in your comment, but worth pointing out that the key in GIF vs. PNG is that the open format used to replace the proprietary one works better and offers more. This is an absolute requirement. It can't just be open, it must be equal to or better than the closed de-facto (and rapidly becoming incumbent) standard.
This is because most people don't really care about free-as-in-speech, they care about free-as-in-beer. They don't understand there is a difference between the two and, if they did, they still might not care. You cannot win a standards war just by standing on principals.
Repeat after me: The iPhone is not a general computing device.
There, you see now? If someone puts a microprocessor on a toaster, would you automatically expect it to do everything your laptop does?
-dZ.
I was responding to a comment where it was proposed that the iPhone OS is a revolutionary approach that should be applied to general computing devices.
I think that's a Bad Idea. From your comment I suspect you agree.
You mean like iPhone OS? Call the iPad a gimmick if you want, but it does bring with it a brand new concept on human-computer interaction. One that I feel will carry over into traditional keyboard/mouse computing in the future.
The iPhone UI is simple and works well on a mobile device, and it kicked the rest of the industry in the ass and made them realize that people wanted more than just crappy, difficult to find and install Java applications on their phones.
That being said, going back to the days of running a single application at a time without a quick and easy method of moving information between them is not a step forward, nor is it new. Having a single application which serves solely as a tool to launch other applications is as old as Windows 1.0. Older, even. I remember DOS-based menu programs that did the same thing.
As a consumer device to interact with media the iPad may find a niche, but it falls on the wrong side of the toy/tool line to be taken seriously.
They haven't raised the price because it has been made up in volume. How many copies of that $99 version of Windows sold as compared with Windows 7?
Any thing else with that sort of volume increase would be selling for $9.95 now.
You're neglecting to consider increased research and development costs. Not to mention sales, marketing, OEM relationship management, etc.. I'm pretty sure their legal costs are a lot larger these days, too. You're assuming it costs either the same or less to produce something like Windows 7 as it did to produce Windows 2.0. I'm not sure anyone except possibly Enron's accounting team would be able to "make it up in volume."
I can't say anything about video, but for audio all my CD collection is converted to Ogg instead of MP3, you can't even spot the difference in quality, thou the filesize is smaller. BTW, my MP3 player supports Ogg playing as well.
Audio quality and compression efficiency are controlled by the codec, not the container format. The article is critiquing the latter.
I get what you're saying, but how is this different for Matroska than any other container format?
Both the county and the city inside the county are named Orange, which probably confused the submitter. The City of Orange is the one prosecuting, not the County of Orange.
Microsoft Security Essentials is free too, and works pretty good.
AFAIK, it doesn't work on pirated Windows, nor does it work on Win2K.
It does work on pirated Windows. Not that I would know, myself. But some guy told me. I think he lives in Canada but I don't remember.
That's the sound of a grasshopper riding a tumbleweed.
Only to a point. A few months back I had this really nice red wine that was great after about an hour breathing, but then started getting worse from that point. Still good, just not as good. Aerating is tough and it's hard to find the sweet spot, since it can be different from varietal to varietal, vintage to vintage and even bottle to bottle. But yeah, generally speaking, adding some air to a freshly opened bottle is a good thing, but leaving it in a decanter for a week is not.
Guinness had to solve this exact problem, except with nitrogen instead of oxygen. I think they have a patent on the little plastic capsule filled with gas that only releases when the can/bottle is opened, but other than that I don't see why the same method couldn't be used to release oxygen.
There are a small percentage of people able to process alcohol in such a way that they _never_ get hangovers, at least according to my doctor. Since you've never had one, it's possible that you're one of them and would never get a hangover no matter what you did or didn't do.
Staying hydrated helps, but there is no guaranteed method that will work for everyone.
And yet they'll at the same time start complaining about how they're being oppressed by moderation, even though they'll easily be dominating in the mod count. Mark my words.
It's really ridiculous. What ever happened to modding based on how reasonably a person is debating rather than whether the person matches your political ideology?
We've both been on Slashdot a long time. If you remember a time when your last sentence was true, I must have missed it.
learning a new language is easy. Learning to program is hard.
QFT
IANAP but have written code as a hobbyist. I'll spend hours writing and rewriting something only mildly complex because, while I understand the languages and syntax well enough, I use trial and error to find the right methods. Starting with only a vague idea of how I want something to work doesn't help, either. Good programmers know the right methods already, and learning how those methods are applied in any particular language is trivial.
am also still running Outlook under virtualization; enterprise messaging on the Mac is currently not very good
Why not use MS Entourage?
If you've used Entourage, you already know the answer to that question.
There are three main problems with Entourage:
1) Large mail files cause problems with Time Machine backups and Spotlight indexing. When they don't corrupt themselves first.
2) There is no Webex meeting integration with the calendar. I use Webex for meetings several times every day. Meeting invite integration with Webex is must-have functionality for me.
3) It's freaking lavender. LAVENDER!
I've never heard of anyone who works at a company that uses Macs. The company I work at uses PCs exclusively, and probably saves quite a bit of money by doing so. My work PC has never crashed, has never had a virus, runs relatively fast, and was probably quite cheap. I do have to have an IT person mess with computer every now and then, and thats usually because a poorly written application fails and needs to be reinstalled.
For most businesses switching to Macs would require new IT people, retraining of employees, and finding applications that function in OS X. The computers would also likely cost considerably more than PCs.
Ever heard of Cisco? We are free to run a Mac that the company will pay for, as long as IT doesn't have to support it. We have an internal user community that provides its own support in lieu of IT. There are thousands of Mac users here. I switched about four months ago thinking that the worst-case scenario is that I could still run Windows on the hardware if switching to a new OS didn't work out. So far, I'm still running OSX, but am also still running Outlook under virtualization; enterprise messaging on the Mac is currently not very good.
Obviously this type of solution is not for everyone, but it works for us.
So, is there any actual evidence backing all this up, or is it just more anti-Chinese vilification?
(Remember, we have always been at war with Eastasia.)
Don't go talking sense, that sort of thing of frowned upon around here.
When all these negative posters donate their Chinese-manufactured iPhones and Android-based devices to charity I'll stop thinking of them as tin-foil hat wearing hypocrites.
Serious? Really? How are most technology CEO's scammers on a level that this guy is on? Can you name a legit technology CEO that you think is at that same 'scam level'?
Kenneth Lay, former CEO of now-defunct Enron. Although good old Ken was at a much higher level than this guy.
I'm not sure I understand your thoughts around a license costing more equaling better or more serious drivers. The USA is not even in the top 10 for deaths due to vehicle accidents per capita; we're ranked #15 in the world even though, surprisingly, we're #7 per capita in the number of vehicles.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/mor_car_occ_col_wit_car_pic_up_tru_or_van_percap-up-truck-van-per-capita
Taking out some money to buy some spectrum so they can start their own mobile carrier. Its part of a long term plan that I haven't entirely figured out yet, but this is just an extension of the FCC auction stuff. ChromeOS and the android devices plays into it as well of course, maybe their going to offer free wireless service in exchange for being a bitch to their ads in everything you do.
Smart people don't use (a lot of) their own money for stuff like this. Very unlikely they will be seeding a wireless startup with their own cash.
Good question! What are they planning to do with the money? Something that the shareholders of Google wouldn't approve of I think, since otherwise they would do it with Google money and not be forced to pay taxes.
You mean like spend it on something Google wouldn't then own? Perhaps they would simply like to acquire some personal assets. And, since they currently control the majority of Google's stock, the only people that need to approve of whatever Google does is them anyway.