To be fair, there were no real standards for what MS wanted to do, which was develop a cross-platform application front end for various MS Window systems. That is, create a front end that would look the same on current, past, and future versions of MS Windows. All the rendering vagaries would be contained in IE, while the code would remain the same.
The looking the same is they idea. HTML was never meant to look the same on all rendering engines, it was simply meant to define a context which could be rendered appropriately. That way someone could write an engine for a small screen, or an engine for people who had trouble seeing, or whatever. MS convinced the populous that such an idea of general rendering was not important. Rather, developers and managers began obsessing on the fact that different engines would look slightly different on different screens, and expending huge amounts of money fixing minor issues such as a character that is two pixels over.
So this is why IE and MS took over the web. Compulsive developers and managers. IE allowed the control freaks to gain a satisfaction that would not be available in the W3C standards until CSS. The web browser became an application front end, and web pages became highly sophisticated tools to deliver advertising to users. It did not have to be this way. We could have just put useful content on the web, and then allowed the browser to display the content in the most efficient way to the user, but that would have under monetized the web. A side effect of this is that MS would gain control of the web.
We still see this over active control today. On the iPhone many sites will redirect the user to a mobile subsection even though the iPhone can easily display a properly written web page. We iPhone users have to deal with limited content so the site can insure that advertising is prominently visible. Not that there is anything wrong with this. It is just that many willingly followed MS lead, and blaming MS now for IE is leaving out the hordes of developers and managers that willing ignored the HTML standard for short term gain.
So I was buying a ticket through Ticketmaster, which is a harrowing process. I don't normally do this, so I did not know how harrowing. I will not even discuss the deceptive practice of displaying a total price for tickets, then add in a $6 charge at the very end.
Here is what I found reprehensible is that when I choose to not store my credit card information on their site, a pop up window with the their privacy policy pops up. Clearly, if it so important to them that I keep my credit card information on their site, then it stands to reason that they intend to misuse it in some way. Ticketmaster already lied to me about the amount they were going to charge to credit card, who knows what else they lie about. Perhaps I was being enrolled in a club that would charge me $50 a month to have priority access to future purchase opportunities. I don't know. I don't know why they would confuse the user and kill a sale just to get to keep my credit information.
People are entitled to their opinions. I happen to think Are You Being Served is the height of comedy and Seinfeld, though it had some accidentally good shows, is uniformly crap. Different people like different things. Sometimes acting style or language is an issue. I have talked to people who don't like Red Dwarf because they cannot understand what is being said, mostly because they only hired one actor, Chris Barrie, for the show.
And of course, the Scotsman obsessed with money is an rather old joke, as well as the geek who gets bullied.
The nice thing about the iPad, as opposed to the Kindle or the Nook, is that there are many ways to buy a book. I buy many books as applications on my iPhone, and apps sell for the exact price this author wants to sell books for. Sure there is some investment in writing the App, and Apple is allowing sales through Apps, I believe. I also read books through my Kindle app. Sure Amazon might require that books be sold at the same price, but an App is not a book. It seems to me the author could also set up a store front and sell DRM free ebooks that could be read on many ebook readers.
About the only reason to sell through iBooks is that Apple is very good at marketing and riding on Apple coat tails could increase sales. The fear, as I get from the submission, is no one would buy any of these books if read some of it first, so the only hope is to sell it so cheaply that people will just read it, and not feel ripped off when they find out it is crap. The solution, then, is obvious. Write book that people are willing to pay for.
So it is not Apples fault or Amazons fault that the price is going up. There is no reason at all for anyone to sell books through them, except that Amazon, and soon Apple, are going to be selling a lot of books and both have already set up infrastructure and pay for advertising that is unfeasible for most authors. But that only matters to authors who want to sell a lot of crap. For the author in question, who obviously cares much more about the fact that Apple is out to rip off the public rather than volume sales, I think DRM free ebooks or Apps is the answer.
This is just another example of certain entitled people abusing the court system because the cannot take care of themselves. Here is a case of incompetent person asking the taxpayers to pay for consequences that should have never been necessary in the first place. For instance, would a jury really convict a person for twenty years if they stole a laptop left in a public location? Well, we will see what the Apple iPhone situation results in.
I see this most particularly in the war on drugs. Since Nixon the US has wasted trillions of dollars shutting down small businesses simply because a few incompetent people can't make good choices. Instead of educated the population and trying to apply free market philosophies, we simply waste money in the name of the nanny state.
The best thing to do here is hope the incompetence of this one person is a lesson to others who think that education and thoughtfulness and reasoned debate is a silly diversion, and the ignorance and untrue statements are the way forward. We are not so fortunate, and so the taxpayer has to will be picking up the tab for the next 20 years.
Arizona is embarking on a grand experiment, and as a free state it should be allowed to so do. We have heard the hypothesis that undocumented persons cause so much social and financial harm that any measure to thwart such persons from entering the state. Some would go as far as saying that even documented foreigners should be extremely limited as they take our jobs.
I fully support Arizona in this experiment. I suspect the reason they have done this is because, unlike other border states like Texas and New Mexico( all three of which showed incredible job growth pre-2009), Arizona now has the county with the highest percentage job loss in the country. I am sure scaring foreign visitors to Texas and New Mexico, instead of Arizona, to shop at the stores, pay sales tax, eat at the restaurants, and even take helicopter rides from the airport to our shopping malls, will help their economy greatly. The kids may even go to university and settle down to engineering jobs that pay huge amounts of payroll and income tax. So far, at least in Texas, it has worked well.
But that is fine. If Arizona thinks that foreign money has negative value due to documentation or the blight of having people looking for work instead of playing video games or skin color(arizona is the only of the three states that is majority white non-hispanic) or whatever, so be it. We will see if they can achieve economic growth in an isolationist environment. Given that they have one of the highest federal support rate in the country, I doubt it.
none of which relates to legal drug consumption, so none of the examples apply. Violent games often have fantasy criminal activity, such as rape, murder, and illicit drug use, which some object to.
I see tons of apps on iTunes that relate to legal drug use. Many smoking, wine beer, etc. The problem is that many people clump everything they don't like together and make it equally bad, or rationalize their sinful nature as natural, while others as bad. So while having a glass of wine is sophisticated, smoking is indication of low breeding, equal to watching naked people dance.
I agree that the it seems the Apple censorship can seem to be random. In this case, however, there is no evidence of it. Legal drug apps are plentiful. It is just that a few clueless people would lump drug use in with other unrelated things that they don't like, and think that if Apple blocks one thing they don't like, Apple should block everything they don't like.
It is kind of ridiculous, and Omega needs to lose the case, but that does not mean that Costco is not equally wrong with respect to the consumer. This is because the first sale doctrine can work both ways. Not only does the manufacturer not have any control of the second so, and this is how is should be, but the second buyer also cannot automatically assume that the manufacturer has to support the goods. To use your example, if you sold it on Ebay, and said that Omega fully covered the watch, it would be fraud.
Mont Blanc does uses this idea of not covering the second sale. One can buy a Mont Blanc product anywhere, but if it is not through an authorized dealer(presumably any sale not through an authorized dealer is a second sale) then Mont Blanc does not cover warranty repairs for free. Many manufacturers protect themselves with warranty that only apply to the original purchases. I don't know what the Omega warranty is, but if is has a limitation to the first purchaser, and Costco is the first purchases, then Costco is either defrauding Omega of the Costco customer. If Omega does have a transferable warranty, then that is an error on the part of Omega.{I just looked at the warrenty and Omega does require a stamp at least for some watches, so if costco is not telling customers this, then that is a problem.)
The fact is that these luxury goods are in fact luxuries, and no one needs them, especially of a certain brand. People who are willing to buy these goods from Costco to save a few bucks might as well just buy them from the trunk of a car. If one can afford an Omega, fine, but if one is saving and struggling enough to need to go to Costco, then maybe the priorities are not in order. It is a catch-22. On one hand we want to pay for the logo so that people think we are rich and desirable, OTOH we depreciate the logo by buying it from warehouse stores to the point that all it conveys is a owner that is so insecure he or she needs a logo to validate a low self esteem.
I wonder if it is development tools, or some specification, that causes the problem as well. For instance, I use a web interface that won't load unless it detects IE. This is no real problem, as I merely set Safari to send the IE identification, and all works well. There is nothing that requires IE, it just seems to be somewhere in the web application.
If I were an executive, and did not really understand anything technical, I might think that IE was necessary and forbid things like Firefox. Furthermore, if all my development work was done using tools that assumed IE6, I might think that we had to keep IE6, even if all the site was doing was simple tasks.
Like any technology, the problem is not the technology but that the technology allows unskilled persons to do work previously done by skilled persons. It is not surprising that the results tend to be of low quality. For instance, as much as we like WYSIG editing, it unleashed a whole bunch of crap on the world. OTOH, it allowed a lot of creativity to be unfurled that otherwise would have been hidden by the cost of entry.
For those who do not know, Ed Tufte writes books about how to display information so that it is attractive and easy to understand. His books are fabulous and should be read by anyone who puts information in front of people. We can't all be experts, but we should try not be incompetent.
When I see a slide like the ones being discussed, I see simply too much information. I often make that mistake as well. A slide is a few bits of information. It is not there to impress people with how much you know. It should be there to help them know what you know. It should not be there to show that you know how to use a graphviz.
I pretty much did not do presentation until I started to use Keynote. The animations were easy to use so I could add and relate information on a slide. Equations can be built, substitutions made, chemicals reacted. This to me is useful. It is not just putting a piece of plastic on an overhead. It is using technology to present information in a way that is useful.
Money is the only motivator. Huge losses in one department offset huge profits in another division, limiting taxes. Or, huge gains in a mature business is used to develop a new business. These losses are only on paper, as the company itself shows a 35% gain in profit.
MS is like the US a few years back. More money than sense, more money than opportunities. MS knows that it can spend until it's kills off the competition, and when a conservative administration in white house, can buy the executive branch since conservatives a pro-free market and can get away with it.
I don't think there was any good idea in it. They wanted phones to run an OS that would benefit them, but focused on Google instead of the customer. They then did what Apple did and created a phone that was designed for the customer, not the mobile phone carriers, but then told everyone that it was not a Google phone, and we have no support, and, if you don't like it, we will bill you card an exorbitant amount, on top of the exorbitant amount you already paid. And now we learn that they were lying when they said they was a deal with Verizon, which was not wishful thinking but statements from google.
I think google is very good at what it does, but like the mobile carriers the customer they serve is not the end user but the advertisers. We don't need another group of people between us and our telephone. We already have the mobile carriers. Google wants to add itself, the advertisers, and who knows who else. Sure it is an open phone, but open to whom.
It is not just data, but programs. On the Apple ][, tons of programs and data could fit on one floppy. Many of us carried a few floppies around with everything we needed, hand notched so we could use both sides. On the Apple///, two drives were necessary as code was written with a hard disk in mind. The situation changed with the Mac with the 3.5" disks holding a bit more information. On disk would hold the systen and a couple program, the other disk the data, and we would swap. We had relatively rich data, full WYSIWG editing, with as many fonts and colors. We also had programs that fit on one floppy.
The wide introduction of the hard disk is what caused the floppy to go away. Operating systems and programs no longer had to fit on a disk. Microsoft office went from a few disks to over 20, IIRC. We began creating more data and we did not have to woryy about managing it so it would fit on a disk. Backup was also an issue. For backup I went to IOmega in the mid 90's, then went to optical which replaced the floppy in my laptop.
Pretty much after that the PC was the only machine with floppy, and that was only the case because the CD burning was not built in, and the PC could not handle USB drives seamlessly, a problem that has not been fixed to this day(maybe it has in MS Windows 7).
In any case we have programs delivered on CD or DVD or online, and data is stored 'in the cloud" on solid state devices. The 1TB hard disk spelt the end of the floppy by dropping the price of storage from a $1/MB to about 0.01 cents per megabyte.
OTOH, 17 of these are senior level managers making more than base GS-15. I wonder how many top level managers there are? Of course would expect that managers would surf porn at 10X the rate of those that actually do work.
Let's see about christians. Killing civilians at the holocaust museum. Killing civilians at the Atlanta Olympics. Killing children in Oklahoma. Enetering a church and shooting at children, killing others who are at church. Killing children in Waco. Killing Doctors in small towns. Torturing and killing minorities. Pickiting funerals expressing how glad they are the people are dead because god obviously wants them dead. Telling the public that it is god's will that thousands of men, women and children are dead.
I am sure that many will say that the persons who do these things aren't christian. But who are you to say? They say they are christian. When a self identified muslim kills someone, people are fast enough to implicate the entire faith of Islam, no one seems to think that these people are just wingnuts, rougue elements. But when a prominent member of the First Baptist Church in North Myrtle Beach threatens a elected leaders life, we do not condemn the entire congregation, or the baptist faith, we just assume that one member is a dangerous wingnut, and pray that she never has any authority.
I don't know why there is not more christian violence. I say more because there is a lot. For instance the kids who are going around killing immigrants. What is think is that we don't think about because most of is random. Very little of it is directed, you know, some wacko sending anthrax though the mail. Alot of it is just some good old boys thinking they start beating up on their fellow students, and then crying when the fellow students start beating back.
I find Hulu to be nearly unwatchable about the time that California starts evening TV. I have some problems with netflix, but not as much as Hulu.
I think the problem with Hulu, and other services like it, is that it the maximum amount of show it will buffer is very short(maybe a minute or two) and so the trick of setting the show and waiting 10 or 20 minutes for the show to buffer will not work.
I think Hulu will improve over time and will cause TV and cable to become much less relevent, limited only to the often gender specific real time shows like sports events or pageants. Something like Apple tv with a custom web browser that can interface with Hulu or Netflix or maybe even blockbuster(if they don't go out of business before they realize that mac owners are few but have expendable incomes) could make what we do now obsolete. I suspect that sports will eventually have to adjust to what the next generation expects, which is video feed on their smart phones for little or no money, and settle for teams the teams will in the mid 8 figures instead of high 8 figures.
Before we go willy nilly into this new technology here are some questions.
How much more expensive are these notes? While notes in australia might only last six months, in the US the replacement rate is more like 2 years. If plastic notes are, for example, 3X more expensive to produce, then that is kind of false economy.
How much harder are they to counterfeit? Right now a counterfeit bill might only stay in circulation a few years. With plastic money, it might be harder to counterfeit, but if it stays in circulation, the damage in increased through repeated circulation.
Of course no one thinks the corollary would be more realistic: apple wants tp make sure ARM stays relevant to Apple products.
As has been stated, ARM processors are used in many devices, and Apple is a small part of the market. This, I think, has been a big problem for Apple. It needs high performance specialized parts, but can no longer part a huge markup to get them. It has control of it's systems, so it can place huge orders, but not enough to control to the research. I think this is what to PowerPC Macs. The direction went off in a direction that eventually made the chips unsuitable for Apple. Fortunately Apple was able to negotiate with Intel to get chips. I think this was because the PC market was driven by prices, not technology, and Intel really had no one else to sell to.
It could be that if Apple buys ARM it is to make sure that the direction of the company is to provide future chips suitable for Apple devices. This could have the consequence of ARM chips not being suitable for other high performance devices, like Android phones, or maybe not. I don't think it would in Apples interest to destroy the general embedded device market, as 8 billion is 8 billion, and such devices will provide a ROI without hurting Apple device sales.
Which is not to say the purchase represents an aggressive act, just that I see no reason for everyone to run around screaming that sky is falling.
Ok, so to clarify, iPhone is for people who don't want to pay for it or do not want the evidence prominently displayed on their phone, while Android is for those proud users that want everyone to know they enjoy 'traffic with thyself'.
The thing with built in nav systems is many people do not use a nav system outside of the car. If one uses it outside the car, one often wants a much smaller unit. The smaller screen size does not make it easy to use in the car. For instance, I hardly every need a nav unit, so I use my phone when I do need one, but it is hardly an easy option.
I suspect that parents that use these things to distract their kids tend to want to distract the kids even when they are outside of the car. While a phone is good, it seems that a single device that can keep a kid continuously distracted 24 hours a day, seamlessly, without interruption, would be a superior solution.
As far as not playing DVDs, DVD is added mass when traveling, and the selection must be made before hand. With the iPad, the well off parent can not only preload a selection, but also buy new movies on the fly, or, if they are in a WiFi area, such as an airport, stream on netflix. Perhaps the money that would be spent on the entertainment system can be spent on the more general mobile hotspot so the parents can also enjoy the internet access on their phones.
But above all, the option of a stylus --- we're no longer Pythagoras reduced to drawing figures in the sand w/ our fingers --- people are the tool using animal, let's provide the most natural possible tool for drawing, writing and calculating.
Exactly. But a stylus has the accuracy of stick in the sand. What I would like to see is more parametric drawing programs. Something where we can sketch, and then form the sketch into lines or curves, with dimension, maybe even adding volume. Back in the 80's we drew with stylus because that is what we did on paper. Then people realized that is not what we had to do, because the computer was more powerful than pencil and paper. So graphical input became a rough sketch which was refined through equations.
Here is the thing. It would be nice if we in the US were not so afraid of bodies. OTOH, this is changing. There was a time not so long ago when we could not show a woman wearing a bra on TV. Now women's bodies are becoming less of a taboo, but men's bodies seem to be almost as much as taboo. With this the case, it seems as if there is some sort of objectifying going on rather than just the depiction of the natural form. It would be different if both genders were parading around in skivvies.
But in the real world there are rules. And the biggest rule is, and should be, that we are in control of our own bodies and the depictions of our own bodies. The next biggest rule is a most kids are not often making long term decisions. How many of us ditched high school to go have some fun. Such decisions are not death, and the there is nothing wrong with taking naked pictures as kids have been doing for years. These pictures have even gotten passed around. What happens now is it becomes very easy to lose control of those images and negative consequences can be long term. Therefore most parents want to limit the possibility that their kids will do such things, and if a phone seems to be centered on sending pictures, perhaps the parent won't buy it. It is not that anyone things that phones are not used to take and send such pictures, no one is that stupid, it is just, IMHO, few people would buy a phone advertised as such activity being the primary purpose, as appeared to be in the MS video. Likewise, I think most parents would not buy their kids a subscription to Adult Friend Finder, even though online dating is likely going to play a big part in any kids future. There is just no reason to emphasize casual sex at that age.
While it is technically interesting that they can do this in coupons, and it is bad that consumers are too often not told what is being communicated, the reality is that this is not shocking at all. Like affinity cards, coupons on the internet are an exchange for information that can be monetized. Perhaps affinity are slightly more honest, but the concept is the same. The consumer chooses to buy at one location or one brand over another because they will receive a discount. Perhaps the discount make them feel special, or allows them to buy in a location or brand they could not normally afford. In many cases there an alternative that is a comparable price without the discount. The choice is made.
Making coupons more honest is not likely to reduce the flow of information. That requires convincing people that privacy is worth more than a bag of potato chips. One thing that Walmart did that was probably good is give people an realistic option to the overpriced brands they were brain washed in to buying during the 60's, 70's and 80's. Paying twice as much for laundry detergent, even when one could not afford it, was not sustainable. Sure, you got your stories on TV during the day, but was it worth it? Marketing is getting more direct because people still want brands, but they are not willing to pay for them.
This is why it is not censorship. If Texas chooses to not teach a part of history, that is censoring history because most kids do not have the ability to move to another state, or find various points of view. They are pretty much limited to the school, the city, the state in which they live.
All that is happening here is that this one device is not in possession of one App. The SFGate is still available on the iPhone through Safari, and if it is not available it is only because the SFGate censors itself by requiring registration. This is not a case where a country is keeping it's people from viewing the material. It is one machine, with maybe 30% of market share, saying this App is not for it. If I could not use a web browser, or did not know how to buy another phone, I might care.
Unfortunately place like Fox News has lowered the standards of debate so much that there is no point of any discussion on any meaningful topic. Fact is now what one wants to believe, not what is verifiably true. If a banner looks like it might be promoting Islam, it must be, even it is a representation of an atom.
I think a better analogy is the recreational drug trade. Like spam, there are a few vendors and many recipients. To combat the trade, as ill conceived as such efforts are, requires prosecution of the users and the vendors. Furthermore, it requires the suspension of constitutional rights of the vendors, as vendors may be deprived of personal property without due process. If we are to destroy spam, we must do the same thing
I think the analogy is valid at other levels. Like recreational drugs, people seem to have lost all sense of proportions. A single unsolicited email can make some people believe that they have been injured beyond all recourse. Some has used tainted their computer, used the bandwidth they paid for, to send a 20 KB message. Call out the FBI, send the CIA to the country, at any cost in terms of lives and tax payer money. We must stamp out this threat.
Of course, like drugs, some significant harm can come of spam. Some spam does contain payloads that can damage computers. Some spam can shut down servers. And the amount of spam does have a non trivial effect on costs to the consumer. But I wonder if part of the reaction to spam, like recreational drugs, is simply emotional. It is something we do not like, so it should not exist.
I think that if we concentrated on functional harm, and minimizing that function, rather than focusing so much on the potential, we might end up doing more good. Of course, like the pharmcos, google is going to feel harmed by any spam email, so it will of course insist that spam must be destroyed. But what is good for google is not neccesarily good for the world.
Slashdot Mirror
The looking the same is they idea. HTML was never meant to look the same on all rendering engines, it was simply meant to define a context which could be rendered appropriately. That way someone could write an engine for a small screen, or an engine for people who had trouble seeing, or whatever. MS convinced the populous that such an idea of general rendering was not important. Rather, developers and managers began obsessing on the fact that different engines would look slightly different on different screens, and expending huge amounts of money fixing minor issues such as a character that is two pixels over.
So this is why IE and MS took over the web. Compulsive developers and managers. IE allowed the control freaks to gain a satisfaction that would not be available in the W3C standards until CSS. The web browser became an application front end, and web pages became highly sophisticated tools to deliver advertising to users. It did not have to be this way. We could have just put useful content on the web, and then allowed the browser to display the content in the most efficient way to the user, but that would have under monetized the web. A side effect of this is that MS would gain control of the web.
We still see this over active control today. On the iPhone many sites will redirect the user to a mobile subsection even though the iPhone can easily display a properly written web page. We iPhone users have to deal with limited content so the site can insure that advertising is prominently visible. Not that there is anything wrong with this. It is just that many willingly followed MS lead, and blaming MS now for IE is leaving out the hordes of developers and managers that willing ignored the HTML standard for short term gain.
Here is what I found reprehensible is that when I choose to not store my credit card information on their site, a pop up window with the their privacy policy pops up. Clearly, if it so important to them that I keep my credit card information on their site, then it stands to reason that they intend to misuse it in some way. Ticketmaster already lied to me about the amount they were going to charge to credit card, who knows what else they lie about. Perhaps I was being enrolled in a club that would charge me $50 a month to have priority access to future purchase opportunities. I don't know. I don't know why they would confuse the user and kill a sale just to get to keep my credit information.
And of course, the Scotsman obsessed with money is an rather old joke, as well as the geek who gets bullied.
About the only reason to sell through iBooks is that Apple is very good at marketing and riding on Apple coat tails could increase sales. The fear, as I get from the submission, is no one would buy any of these books if read some of it first, so the only hope is to sell it so cheaply that people will just read it, and not feel ripped off when they find out it is crap. The solution, then, is obvious. Write book that people are willing to pay for.
So it is not Apples fault or Amazons fault that the price is going up. There is no reason at all for anyone to sell books through them, except that Amazon, and soon Apple, are going to be selling a lot of books and both have already set up infrastructure and pay for advertising that is unfeasible for most authors. But that only matters to authors who want to sell a lot of crap. For the author in question, who obviously cares much more about the fact that Apple is out to rip off the public rather than volume sales, I think DRM free ebooks or Apps is the answer.
I see this most particularly in the war on drugs. Since Nixon the US has wasted trillions of dollars shutting down small businesses simply because a few incompetent people can't make good choices. Instead of educated the population and trying to apply free market philosophies, we simply waste money in the name of the nanny state.
The best thing to do here is hope the incompetence of this one person is a lesson to others who think that education and thoughtfulness and reasoned debate is a silly diversion, and the ignorance and untrue statements are the way forward. We are not so fortunate, and so the taxpayer has to will be picking up the tab for the next 20 years.
I fully support Arizona in this experiment. I suspect the reason they have done this is because, unlike other border states like Texas and New Mexico( all three of which showed incredible job growth pre-2009), Arizona now has the county with the highest percentage job loss in the country. I am sure scaring foreign visitors to Texas and New Mexico, instead of Arizona, to shop at the stores, pay sales tax, eat at the restaurants, and even take helicopter rides from the airport to our shopping malls, will help their economy greatly. The kids may even go to university and settle down to engineering jobs that pay huge amounts of payroll and income tax. So far, at least in Texas, it has worked well.
But that is fine. If Arizona thinks that foreign money has negative value due to documentation or the blight of having people looking for work instead of playing video games or skin color(arizona is the only of the three states that is majority white non-hispanic) or whatever, so be it. We will see if they can achieve economic growth in an isolationist environment. Given that they have one of the highest federal support rate in the country, I doubt it.
I see tons of apps on iTunes that relate to legal drug use. Many smoking, wine beer, etc. The problem is that many people clump everything they don't like together and make it equally bad, or rationalize their sinful nature as natural, while others as bad. So while having a glass of wine is sophisticated, smoking is indication of low breeding, equal to watching naked people dance.
I agree that the it seems the Apple censorship can seem to be random. In this case, however, there is no evidence of it. Legal drug apps are plentiful. It is just that a few clueless people would lump drug use in with other unrelated things that they don't like, and think that if Apple blocks one thing they don't like, Apple should block everything they don't like.
Mont Blanc does uses this idea of not covering the second sale. One can buy a Mont Blanc product anywhere, but if it is not through an authorized dealer(presumably any sale not through an authorized dealer is a second sale) then Mont Blanc does not cover warranty repairs for free. Many manufacturers protect themselves with warranty that only apply to the original purchases. I don't know what the Omega warranty is, but if is has a limitation to the first purchaser, and Costco is the first purchases, then Costco is either defrauding Omega of the Costco customer. If Omega does have a transferable warranty, then that is an error on the part of Omega.{I just looked at the warrenty and Omega does require a stamp at least for some watches, so if costco is not telling customers this, then that is a problem.)
The fact is that these luxury goods are in fact luxuries, and no one needs them, especially of a certain brand. People who are willing to buy these goods from Costco to save a few bucks might as well just buy them from the trunk of a car. If one can afford an Omega, fine, but if one is saving and struggling enough to need to go to Costco, then maybe the priorities are not in order. It is a catch-22. On one hand we want to pay for the logo so that people think we are rich and desirable, OTOH we depreciate the logo by buying it from warehouse stores to the point that all it conveys is a owner that is so insecure he or she needs a logo to validate a low self esteem.
If I were an executive, and did not really understand anything technical, I might think that IE was necessary and forbid things like Firefox. Furthermore, if all my development work was done using tools that assumed IE6, I might think that we had to keep IE6, even if all the site was doing was simple tasks.
For those who do not know, Ed Tufte writes books about how to display information so that it is attractive and easy to understand. His books are fabulous and should be read by anyone who puts information in front of people. We can't all be experts, but we should try not be incompetent.
When I see a slide like the ones being discussed, I see simply too much information. I often make that mistake as well. A slide is a few bits of information. It is not there to impress people with how much you know. It should be there to help them know what you know. It should not be there to show that you know how to use a graphviz.
I pretty much did not do presentation until I started to use Keynote. The animations were easy to use so I could add and relate information on a slide. Equations can be built, substitutions made, chemicals reacted. This to me is useful. It is not just putting a piece of plastic on an overhead. It is using technology to present information in a way that is useful.
MS is like the US a few years back. More money than sense, more money than opportunities. MS knows that it can spend until it's kills off the competition, and when a conservative administration in white house, can buy the executive branch since conservatives a pro-free market and can get away with it.
I think google is very good at what it does, but like the mobile carriers the customer they serve is not the end user but the advertisers. We don't need another group of people between us and our telephone. We already have the mobile carriers. Google wants to add itself, the advertisers, and who knows who else. Sure it is an open phone, but open to whom.
The wide introduction of the hard disk is what caused the floppy to go away. Operating systems and programs no longer had to fit on a disk. Microsoft office went from a few disks to over 20, IIRC. We began creating more data and we did not have to woryy about managing it so it would fit on a disk. Backup was also an issue. For backup I went to IOmega in the mid 90's, then went to optical which replaced the floppy in my laptop.
Pretty much after that the PC was the only machine with floppy, and that was only the case because the CD burning was not built in, and the PC could not handle USB drives seamlessly, a problem that has not been fixed to this day(maybe it has in MS Windows 7).
In any case we have programs delivered on CD or DVD or online, and data is stored 'in the cloud" on solid state devices. The 1TB hard disk spelt the end of the floppy by dropping the price of storage from a $1/MB to about 0.01 cents per megabyte.
OTOH, 17 of these are senior level managers making more than base GS-15. I wonder how many top level managers there are? Of course would expect that managers would surf porn at 10X the rate of those that actually do work.
I am sure that many will say that the persons who do these things aren't christian. But who are you to say? They say they are christian. When a self identified muslim kills someone, people are fast enough to implicate the entire faith of Islam, no one seems to think that these people are just wingnuts, rougue elements. But when a prominent member of the First Baptist Church in North Myrtle Beach threatens a elected leaders life, we do not condemn the entire congregation, or the baptist faith, we just assume that one member is a dangerous wingnut, and pray that she never has any authority.
I don't know why there is not more christian violence. I say more because there is a lot. For instance the kids who are going around killing immigrants. What is think is that we don't think about because most of is random. Very little of it is directed, you know, some wacko sending anthrax though the mail. Alot of it is just some good old boys thinking they start beating up on their fellow students, and then crying when the fellow students start beating back.
I think the problem with Hulu, and other services like it, is that it the maximum amount of show it will buffer is very short(maybe a minute or two) and so the trick of setting the show and waiting 10 or 20 minutes for the show to buffer will not work.
I think Hulu will improve over time and will cause TV and cable to become much less relevent, limited only to the often gender specific real time shows like sports events or pageants. Something like Apple tv with a custom web browser that can interface with Hulu or Netflix or maybe even blockbuster(if they don't go out of business before they realize that mac owners are few but have expendable incomes) could make what we do now obsolete. I suspect that sports will eventually have to adjust to what the next generation expects, which is video feed on their smart phones for little or no money, and settle for teams the teams will in the mid 8 figures instead of high 8 figures.
How much more expensive are these notes? While notes in australia might only last six months, in the US the replacement rate is more like 2 years. If plastic notes are, for example, 3X more expensive to produce, then that is kind of false economy.
How much harder are they to counterfeit? Right now a counterfeit bill might only stay in circulation a few years. With plastic money, it might be harder to counterfeit, but if it stays in circulation, the damage in increased through repeated circulation.
As has been stated, ARM processors are used in many devices, and Apple is a small part of the market. This, I think, has been a big problem for Apple. It needs high performance specialized parts, but can no longer part a huge markup to get them. It has control of it's systems, so it can place huge orders, but not enough to control to the research. I think this is what to PowerPC Macs. The direction went off in a direction that eventually made the chips unsuitable for Apple. Fortunately Apple was able to negotiate with Intel to get chips. I think this was because the PC market was driven by prices, not technology, and Intel really had no one else to sell to.
It could be that if Apple buys ARM it is to make sure that the direction of the company is to provide future chips suitable for Apple devices. This could have the consequence of ARM chips not being suitable for other high performance devices, like Android phones, or maybe not. I don't think it would in Apples interest to destroy the general embedded device market, as 8 billion is 8 billion, and such devices will provide a ROI without hurting Apple device sales.
Which is not to say the purchase represents an aggressive act, just that I see no reason for everyone to run around screaming that sky is falling.
Ok, so to clarify, iPhone is for people who don't want to pay for it or do not want the evidence prominently displayed on their phone, while Android is for those proud users that want everyone to know they enjoy 'traffic with thyself'.
I suspect that parents that use these things to distract their kids tend to want to distract the kids even when they are outside of the car. While a phone is good, it seems that a single device that can keep a kid continuously distracted 24 hours a day, seamlessly, without interruption, would be a superior solution.
As far as not playing DVDs, DVD is added mass when traveling, and the selection must be made before hand. With the iPad, the well off parent can not only preload a selection, but also buy new movies on the fly, or, if they are in a WiFi area, such as an airport, stream on netflix. Perhaps the money that would be spent on the entertainment system can be spent on the more general mobile hotspot so the parents can also enjoy the internet access on their phones.
Exactly. But a stylus has the accuracy of stick in the sand. What I would like to see is more parametric drawing programs. Something where we can sketch, and then form the sketch into lines or curves, with dimension, maybe even adding volume. Back in the 80's we drew with stylus because that is what we did on paper. Then people realized that is not what we had to do, because the computer was more powerful than pencil and paper. So graphical input became a rough sketch which was refined through equations.
But in the real world there are rules. And the biggest rule is, and should be, that we are in control of our own bodies and the depictions of our own bodies. The next biggest rule is a most kids are not often making long term decisions. How many of us ditched high school to go have some fun. Such decisions are not death, and the there is nothing wrong with taking naked pictures as kids have been doing for years. These pictures have even gotten passed around. What happens now is it becomes very easy to lose control of those images and negative consequences can be long term. Therefore most parents want to limit the possibility that their kids will do such things, and if a phone seems to be centered on sending pictures, perhaps the parent won't buy it. It is not that anyone things that phones are not used to take and send such pictures, no one is that stupid, it is just, IMHO, few people would buy a phone advertised as such activity being the primary purpose, as appeared to be in the MS video. Likewise, I think most parents would not buy their kids a subscription to Adult Friend Finder, even though online dating is likely going to play a big part in any kids future. There is just no reason to emphasize casual sex at that age.
Making coupons more honest is not likely to reduce the flow of information. That requires convincing people that privacy is worth more than a bag of potato chips. One thing that Walmart did that was probably good is give people an realistic option to the overpriced brands they were brain washed in to buying during the 60's, 70's and 80's. Paying twice as much for laundry detergent, even when one could not afford it, was not sustainable. Sure, you got your stories on TV during the day, but was it worth it? Marketing is getting more direct because people still want brands, but they are not willing to pay for them.
All that is happening here is that this one device is not in possession of one App. The SFGate is still available on the iPhone through Safari, and if it is not available it is only because the SFGate censors itself by requiring registration. This is not a case where a country is keeping it's people from viewing the material. It is one machine, with maybe 30% of market share, saying this App is not for it. If I could not use a web browser, or did not know how to buy another phone, I might care.
Unfortunately place like Fox News has lowered the standards of debate so much that there is no point of any discussion on any meaningful topic. Fact is now what one wants to believe, not what is verifiably true. If a banner looks like it might be promoting Islam, it must be, even it is a representation of an atom.
I think the analogy is valid at other levels. Like recreational drugs, people seem to have lost all sense of proportions. A single unsolicited email can make some people believe that they have been injured beyond all recourse. Some has used tainted their computer, used the bandwidth they paid for, to send a 20 KB message. Call out the FBI, send the CIA to the country, at any cost in terms of lives and tax payer money. We must stamp out this threat.
Of course, like drugs, some significant harm can come of spam. Some spam does contain payloads that can damage computers. Some spam can shut down servers. And the amount of spam does have a non trivial effect on costs to the consumer. But I wonder if part of the reaction to spam, like recreational drugs, is simply emotional. It is something we do not like, so it should not exist.
I think that if we concentrated on functional harm, and minimizing that function, rather than focusing so much on the potential, we might end up doing more good. Of course, like the pharmcos, google is going to feel harmed by any spam email, so it will of course insist that spam must be destroyed. But what is good for google is not neccesarily good for the world.