Free does not mean one can do whatever one wishes. In most of the free world, we are free to express ourselves, free to move, free to love who we wish because we make an implicit civil contract to not do other things. We are free to move around as we wish, but if we move into someones house, then we can lose that freedom. We are free to express ourselves, but if that expreess results in a murder, we may lose our freedom. In the case of this deal, we pay for the right to listen to all the music in the library, on the device, with no other restrictions. Unless one is advocating extreme freedom, where one is free to impose beliefs on other people, free to murder other people, and free to take other people property, and other are free to do the same to you, then this is not such a bad deal. You are of course free to reject the deal and just enjoy rockin to the rhythm of the rain.
I think that most people look at this superficially. While I agree there is nothing wrong with insider trading, it is not a solution on it's own. If an insider is buying or selling stock, this may be an indication that some material event has occurred. However, the trade itself is very low quality information. First, many traders are not going to learn about the trade for at least tens of hours. Second, it can be difficult to correlate the trade to a material event. Without the material event, acting on an insider trade simply leads to irrational trading. All a company would have to do to boost it stock value would be to have an insider buy a significant of stock, stock that could be slowly sold off later, maybe with no net loss.
IN fact most issues with insider trading deals with use of insider information and compensation of workers at the expense of stockholder/owners of the company. I have seen this at places where I work. Trades increase, often mostly executives, in the days prior to big deal or a bad report. The workers who knew what was going to happen enrich themselves at the expense of the owners. This behavior is as inappropriate as taking a computer home for personal use. The second big issue with insider trades is that the insiders have the ability to back date the transaction to a time when the price was personally favorable. This also costs the owners money by inflating compensation beyond what was publicly agreed to during the board meeting.
I have mentioned before that if a company voluntarily decides to go public, there are guidelines that go along with that choice. No company is forced to go public, so no company has to follow these guidelines. They can be private, then the employees are freee to engage in any fraudulent activity tolerated by the private owners. But, as has been mentioned so often in the media when defending the government bailouts of irresponsible companies, the stockholder is the companies are common people, retirees, single mothers, etc, and when an insider conducts a fraudulent trade, or a trade the he or she knows primarily is for personal enrichment at the expense of the owners, then such a insider is taking food away form the retiree, children, etc, and I think even the most staunch defender of corporate america will say that is the wrong thing to do. Investors deserve all the money that they should have legitimately earned.
Clarke is part of a select group of people who really thought about what the machine might do, and what is might do to societal norms, and how things might go down differently given the use of the machines. It is not just space opera. It is not just a plot device. It is a deep thought of the long term impact of the industrial revelation. At the time when thes Clarke and other were writing the full effects of the industrial revolution and the possibilities were just becoming fully apparent. We know has machines and the learned techniques to build cylindrical shells big enough to construct a machine that would take a person to the moon. We were beginning to develop machines that would allow us to build a autonomous programing computing machine, that we would someday, we thought, lead to machines that would help us in our daily lives.
They got so much wrong, but the issues they got right. We don't have flying cars, but we are different people due to technology. We do not get our food from cubes, but the fast food is just presented manner meant to imitate the food it replaces. We had pocket calculators long before the cleaning work was autonomously taken over by machine, but the roomba exists. Children are being trained in ware fare using video games. The basis of our interactions are being changed by rapid instantaneous communication. Our basic functions, such as sex, have been changed by the picture phone and internet. No longer must anyone settle for the person next door, when one can surf for an attractive specimen in the morning, text during class, and set up the date for the evening at a bus stop midway between the two of you. In fact, we never have to settle when everything can be custom made to out specifications.
There are two things that disappoint me about many so-called intellectuals. The first is that they don't seem to read enough history. The second is that don't seem to read enough science fiction. To me this strikes me as a person who knows not where they came from, and who knows not where they are going. All they know is what is happening at the moment, their immediate desires, and all they care about is what they must do to fulfill those desires.
Clarke's writing clearly defines him as a different sort of person. The Foundation series clearly identifies him as a man who knew history. His life defines him as a man who knew where he as the rest of us were likely going. I wonder what the world would be like if our leaders were like this. People of history and vision, rather than people who apparently do not even both to hold a book correctly, and proudly states that they never read, or that they read the cliff notes versions. I am reminded of John F. Kennedy, the person who pushed the nation to space, for better or worse. It is claimed in Thirteen Days that JFK had read the Guns of August, did understand that many conflicts start because leaders assume they know what the other party is thinking, and then constructs inflexible plans based on those assumptions. As he knew history, he could do something different in his attempt to achieve a result. Again, history and vision of the future. Something we are sorely lacking, and something that is all too often ridiculed by those who are justing looking at how to swindle their first million by the time they are 25.
There is no confusion to the average user. Open Source means I can download and use it without anyone hassleing me, but I won't because it is free and therefore not as good as stuff I pay for. Closed source means that I can download and use it, and someone might hassle me, but probably not, so i won't bother to pay for it, but since I should have paid for it, it is better.
There are only two casses where I hear people claiming to be confused. The first is trying to close previously opened project. This obviously is not productive, as an open source project implicitely must be free to be used according to the license, and any investment that a firms makes in it's use must be protected. It would be quite detrimental to open source if at any moment a library of code could be pulled.
The second case is that open source means 'gratis'. It does not always. most of us know that under certain circumstances changes must be passed back to the community and source must be passed to customers. Open source is not public domain, and it is my undersatanding this is intentional. Open Source develepors do not want thier code hi jacked and repackaged as closed source projects, for which they can subsequently be sued.
For those who need such licenses, it is no different than any other project. There are always a number of options, and a rational person conducts suffecient due dillagence prior to commiting to a particular option.
Visicalc and Applewriter started nearly instaneously on my Apple. I could create spreadsheets and write papers that would print rather quickly, any slowness was due to the mechanical printer.
I could dial into the big computer, download and compile code as fast as as any modern machine.
My video game consoles started immediately, and game play was real time.
Many computers started up rather quickly. Many applications started up rather quickly. MS did not.
I am not saying things did not suck, but it was more a matter of available resources and the state of the art. comparatively not that the code was bad. It is clear that code today is worse, and the good practices we were taught are no longer valid. At some point, programmers became more expensive than memory or cycles. At that point it no longer made economic sense to spend money writing something that would fit in 8K or ram, or run on the cheapest CPU, or avoid the need for a GPU. It would be cheaper for the consumer to go out and buy these things rather than pay the person-hours it would take to write. The end result is that we live in an age of clearly bloated framework, that require huge resources for even the simplest jobs, simply because it is cheaper for 1000 people to buy an extra gig of memory than to pay a person to write an efficient program. Who today would write a GUI(I have written parts of one, it is not the hardest thing to do) when there are so many available, even if one has to suffer with the bloat and silly API>
Which is fine with me. Flash is a power hog, and only about 5% of the content is reasonable or necessary. I can live without it. In fact, the primary issue with the safari browser is that it cannot natively block flash, unlike recent versions of camino.
The day that iphone supports flash, and the flash cannot be disabled, is the day that the iphone becomes quite useless to anyone other than advertisers and pron watchers.
Ebay would be great if it were still a trading site. Some people like to sell, some people like to buy. Those that like to sell put stuff up, and those that like to buy have a way to pay no more than they think it is worth, and those that like to sell know they got as much as possible at that particular moment. Those that are follow minimal ethics will suceed. A perfect, frictionless, massless, marketplace.
IMHO, ebay has done much to destroy the marketplace, likely as the perfect market is not really profitable, as much as theorist might argue otherwise. The buy it now option and reservem pricing kills the auction premise. Powersellers kill the idea that you are trading with an individual that is just trying to get rid of unwanted product. In the end, this is just a flea market, and eBay is just the booth renter trying to create a profit out of otherwise wasted space.
Beyond the obvious similarities, the reason, IMHO, that The Jeffersons succeeded was because it was a significantly different show. As entertaining as MacFarlane is, he does not seem to anything other than family guy. American Dad, for instance, just is not that different, simply the same show with a plot instead of arbitrarily strung together jokes. Recall that "All in the family" had many spin off, some good, some not. In particular "Archie Bunker's Place", though successful, was pretty bad.
This is going to do nothing but cause a false sense of security, will not block the soft stuff that most kids are perfectly happy with anyway, and will block legitimate sites. I often use an ISP connection that is highly filtered to weed out content not appropriate for kids. I sometimes even go further on put on google full safe search. The stuff that is supposed to filtered is still there, and often shows up on otherwise innocuous searches. OTOH, I have been blocked from perfectly reasonable content, for reasons I cannot fantom. I have had similar results on filtered pubic access connections.
The reality is that not everything can be filtered. Combine that with the fact that nearly every kid over the age of 10 have access to proxy server, and the whole notion of a g-rated filtered pipe becomes quite humorous. The only way to remotely sell a legitimate rated service is to white list acceptable sites. It si time consuming, but effective. There are still tricks to get around it, but the bar is significantly raised.
The average games may not be concerned about the format war, but MS was, since this is all about how we will pay for entertainment, and who will profit. In this way the format war was simply a skirmish in the larger "battle for the living room". MS has put a lot of money into winning the living room, most especially in selling MP3 players and game consoles at prices that are arguable below cost, and arguably at a loss that cannot reasonably be made up by secondary licensed sales.
If MS did not concern itself with a HD format, why did it not give users a choice of an add on player? Because Blu Ray does not include the features it MS wanted, features that could have been potentially used to tie content to a platform, not to mention long term royalties for MS, something no sane person wants, other than Apple and MS. In the end HP was used a proxy for the MS camp, HP was rejected, and Sony was able to use the broad based coalition to defeat the unilaterally supported HD-DVD.
XBox consoles have sold because MS has sold them cheap. They have a good market share right now because you can't get a better console for less. But the market share right now is meaningless, except to the average game player. What MS has to do is regroup and decide it the current strategy is going to win the living room, or if the battle is won but the victory will go to Sony and Apple. If MS does feel that new direction is needed, vis a vis Vista, then the average games may care very much, because they may be paying more for a console that is much less user centered.
What they are in fact doing is patenting a new method to interact with the computer. Interaction with the computer has become increasing complex, from a several switches, to a few dozen switches on a keyboard, back to a single switch that is used with a context sensitive position data, to a small touch area that responds to patterns of pressure and motion.
Apple is patenting the method that makes the touchpad functional. In a way, they have a reason to do this as they were innovating the touchpad while everyone else was adding buttons to mice and arguing that the touch pad would never be as good as the mouse. These people lack creativity. It is easy to add buttons to a mouse, or a scroll wheel, or add USB ports to a computer, or other trivia that most firms rely on to imply innovation. But the trackpad is now a competitor to the mouse, and unless one has had issues, I see the mouse and mouselike interfaces going away on anything that is not a desktop machine.
OTOH, one reason that this patent may not cause too much trouble is that the engineering to make gestures happen may be expensive, and therefore we are much more likely to see cheap knockoffs, safe from the patents, rather than infringing duplication. For instance, MS did not go with a iPod style control on the original Zune, but the cheap click pad. Likewise, MS developed an affordable navigation pad on the new zune, rather than moving to a full touch screen model. Most manufacturers who wish to stay below the cost of the Apple product has done the same.
The last first. In that they likely had to go with a single carrier to meet profit goals, ATT is a good choice. Verizons tends to have the mindset that they are too good for the average customer, which works for them, but would have meant that many who wanted an iPhone would not have been able to sign up.
As far as the features go, this is how apple has always operated. Early computers did not have a parallel port. New computers only have a few USB ports. No Apple has a built in card reader. No Apple has a fingerprint reader. The Macbook Air does not have a firewire port. Apple tends to concentrate a feature set that most users can live with rather than a feature set that looks good on the spec sheet.
People try to compare Apple to a high performance car company just because the computer tends to be a somewhat more expensive. The performance is flawed. The Apple computers are as accessible as the average car. What more apt comparison is that the average computer manufacturer is like Hyundai, putting a 375 HP engine into a POS car. No reason not to, people who don't know any better will buy it, but when I am going that fast I would much prefer to be fully reinforced cabin developed by a company with experienced in these things. Likewise, I would like the components of my computer well matched as reliable. It does not have to be god awful expensive, like a Mercedes, but it can't be build with whatever has happened to fallen off the truck.
this is not so much about reverse engineering. It is about process engineering. To have some build something for you you have to give away many more secrets than they can get by re. Suppliers, forming, etc
Building in china is giving away the store, but I guess it is cheap it can't be helped. I think the Chinese price it that way
As technology changes, the expectation of privacy was high, even from your family. Not so long ago, one could travel for a week or a month and never has to see anyone you didn't like. Even 30 years ago travel and communication was expensive enough to have an excuse not to talk to anyone. In terms of more conventional privacy, it was pretty easy to wander into a field and have a secure conversation.
Today you are lucky to be able to lose yourself anywhere, be able to have a private conversation in any convenient location. Most of the time you will be caught on tape at least coming and going. This loss of privacy is accepted for obvious reasons.
So, when asked about privacy I wonder what they are talking about. Is it the people who put every detail of their lives on Facebook, then whine when those details are exploited? Is it those people who use the services of google, like gmail, with no worry that such mail may be used for profit? Or the people who send unencrypted email? Or the identity thieve issue, which is not so much a technology issue, as a going through people's garbage issue.
Basically privacy is a compromise. To get people hyper-concerned about privacy, they have to give up some luxuries they have become accustomed to. For people who will support torture to prevent a 1 in 10,000 million chance they might die in a terrorist attack, it seems like a deal that is unlikely to be closed.
Further clarification. I believe this deal, if it happens, is initially only worth $5 million.
My first impression is that the bankruptcy are having, or are about to have, some expanding negative effect. This seems a relatively cheap way to solve the problem. If SCO is private, pays off all debtors, then they can defend against external scrutiny, and are free to do as they wish.
The $ 100 million dollar pledge is simply there to say that the company will be funded well enough to pay off future obligations, should they manifest. Furthermore, the additional monies do not seem to be an investment, but a line of credit that the firm will have to repay.
So, in effect, this is appears to be some sort of fancy consolidation loan. Certainly likely done as some sort of personal favor, but I bet no one losses money on it. One hears about these kind of tax shelters all the time.
Equivalent non apple hardware is often more expensive, at least at the retail price. The idea that all Apple hardware has a 25% tax has not been true for quite some time. Even 10 years ago one could buy an Apple laptop for 1K. Even now, the differences often results from instant rebates.
Last summer I priced an HP laptop and Apple laptop. I needed a very light, yet powerful, machine, so I went with a 15" pro machine on both sides. Depending on what considered equivalent, the HP machine was 500-1000 more. It is anecdotal, but still a data point. The point is that Apple has gotten very efficient, and regular PC OEMs have a very hard time competing with them on the price/quality ratio. About the only thing apple does not have is the competitive $500 headless laptop. The Mac Mini is a joke, and the iMacs are over priced if one does not really need a fancy monitor.
Even without any mitigating circumstances, awards such as these serve the purpose of encouraging honesty and responsibility. Even from the skewed summary, one thing that stands out was it took three months for best buy to take responsibility. Just think of how it might have turned out if Best Buy has taken this tact. After a week admit that the laptop might be lost. Offer to replace the laptop, along with a gift card, no strings attached. if the laptop is found, the customer gets that one as well.
Assuming that Best buy only loses 1 laptop per hour, that is less than 2 million dollars a year, probably mostly tax deductible. Such a policy may even provide a competitive advantage as it will clearly indicate that Best Buy is dedicated to customer service and will not jerk their customers around. We know that the opposite is true, but such a gimmick could change this.
In the end best buy will prefer to spend 2 millions dollars on lawyers rather than establish protocols to increase customer value.
What the article and many others imply is there is no free lunch. Useful work comes at the cost of proportionately larger increases in entropy, and those increases are manifested often unpredictably.
About a year ago Science also had a long analysis examining the impact of various plants to create biofuels. It concluded, essentially, that corn was the worst while natural weeds and crop waste was the best. This initial analysis did not effect US policy which is based on year over year profit rather than long term costs. The overcapacity we currently see in ethanol facilities is not a result of good analysis or market forces, but by the subversion of those market forces by government regulations, such as subsidizing the oil companies, for instance through the reduction of oil taxes, and the subsidy of corn as a biofuel over more advantageous plants.
It is unlikely that greenhouse gasses are going to fall without a reduction of consumption. We are talking a higher fuel economy in all vehicles, and a large tax on those vehicles that do not meet those fuel efficiencies, as well as a loss of other tax benefits for such vehicles. We are talking large tax benefits for small businesses that meet rigorous emission standards. We are talking a reduction in consumption of product made in factories that have no concern for efficiency, and a willingness to pay more for products that are made in more environmentally friendly patterns.
The only reason that such an article seems controversial is that consumers want a free lunch. People were hoping that corn would be a panacea, like nuclear power, too cheap to meter, with no negative consequences. It is like how some people drive on the freeway. With no regard to Newton's laws of motion. I guess they believe they drive fast enough so to be out of the domain of where such laws are valid.
Or, to look at it another way, Apple charges on the order of $1100 for the 64GB flash drive in the Macbook air.
Typically Apple has priced the iPod line to sell. The cost of the device is often about the same as the retail price of the storage media. Of course Apple contracts these in huge quantities, and is not as picky as they are with the pro machines. I imagine prices are falling, and it might be good to wait a year for a Macbook Air.
As an aside, I hear a lot about newegg.com. I went there to see about a sale price they had a refurbed camera. While reading the site, i read their recommendations. According to newegg, the most important thing about a camera is the stated number of pixels on the CCD. Wow, what insight. I suppose the most important spec on a compute is the processor speed, and that POS car with an over-clocked engine advertised on the superbowl is the most desirable automobile of the year. I would likely agree that cheap flash from them is exactly that.
Is that Apple tried to make a phone the old way, i.e. the rokr, and it failed. It failed because carriers want a phone to drive revenue, not serve customers. It failed because Motorola was not able to become an independent entity, but kept the culture as a servant to the carriers.
Apple designed a phone that is very good, and found a carrier that was desperate to play ball and risk a new world order. Apple exclusivity, therefore, serves that new world order. When Apple does not have to cripple a phone in order to insure that the carrier will make enough money. The phone is as Apple wants it for it's customers that are willing to pay for good hardware, not for the carrier customers who largely want believe they are getting a good deal by paying for 'services' throughout a long contract.
And this is where Apple may have blundered, at least in the US. The two year contract. We don't want it, we don't need it. Apple could charge half of what it made with the two year extension, $60, and still likely come out ahead in the long run.
MS has few long range plans other than extracting a cut from every computer sold. We saw this at the very beginning with Mr. Gates temper tantrum over not receiving payment for his primitive attempt to write a programming language.
IMHO, MS online services were very successful. They provided a research and development bed for MS server software products. If the MS online division is not making money, it is likely because the division is not covering all perceived costs, not because it does not cover all real costs. I do not think that competition with anyone was initially a concern, as it was assumed that customers would just use ISS and related products as they moved online, and MS would continue to get the cut.
The problem developed when, just like Mr. Gates first product, and later with the lack of vision on the Internet, MS realized that the quality of the products were not sufficient to compete in a changing market and heavy handed vendor lock in was required if MS was to continue to get it's cut. MS IE was developed specifically to make the Internet a MS only product. Yahoo is being bought to make online services an MS only product. If MS can continue to make it painful to use non MS sanctioned products, like google, for a few more years, then MS will likely be able to move to online services. What is happening with Google is not that MS is not competing in ad revenue, but MS can no longer maintain a monopoly in the desktop market. So it is using some of it's reserve cash to make a bet that it can create the same monopoly in the online market as it did in the desktop.
Which does the more damage. A greedy bunch of people that extort huge portions of one's personal income to attend events, or sports people who are so full of themselves that they would turn away a viewing audience just because some one might be profiting on their coattails.
One poster commented that the NFL has a hard time making money. Well, from the picture of the church property, it does not appear that the church has that problem. It would be nice if the NFL could scam as well as the average christian churches in America. Selective reading lets then demand a tithe, but forget that Jesus destroyed the temple due to money changers in the church. Have American flags and patriotic paraphernalia in the church, but do everything they can to avoid paying taxes, even on clearly profit making activities. Agree to certain political limitations in exchange for the tax exempt status, and then, like the hypocrite, ignore those limitations as they please.
This is nothing more than a whiny church complaining that once they are being held to rules of civilized society. I know it is a new experience for most churches, having to comply with the rule of law, but it happens. They can buy a smaller screen. They can choose not to have such a secular event in a sacred space, and forgo the tithe that members who are mostly interested in secular events might bring. They can, like most churches, have such secular events outside of the sacred space.
First the touch screen as the user for embedded devices, like phones, gas pumps, store check out registers, has long been established. These devices serve limited well defined purposes, can be sold at high enough prices to support the hardware and integration engineering,
Second, just because one as a touch screen does not mean on does not have a WIMP. This is such a basic flaw in the article, that I stopped reading TFA. In the simples case, the Pointer is the touch part of the screen. In more extreme cases, the menu structure may be simplified to pre-WIMP norms, though in most cases such menus will be based on configurable icons, not text. This does not, however, mean that the menu does not exist.
What we have been seeing lately, and what does exist on the general purpose computer, like a Mac or x86 running an MS OS, is the point taking on additional functionality, such as scrolling, zooming, etc. The complexity of completing such tasks vary. On the Apple, touch pads used gestures to scroll while an HP might have a dedicated part of the touch pad scroll. IN particular, Apple did not import the functionality of the iPhone as a touch screen application, but as a touch pad enhancement, an enhancement that appears to be mostly hardware related.
The question we have to ask is do we want our screen to be both out input and output device. For compact integrate devices like phones there is some advantage. But for a GPC, is there an advantage over a mouse, or even the command line? Mice are very efficient at moving quickly over large screen real estate, and can be very precise. Mice can be more efficient at moving through large documents than even the command line. Do I think I can edit this document faster if I had to touch the screen to move around? I don't think so.
Touch screens will continue to proliferate as interfaces to embedded devices. If they get cheaper, they will added on as a gee whiz accessory, just like the 238 USB ports and memory card readers and even floppy drives Re now added just so the feature list does not look so inferior. But it will still be a WIMP interface.
The cool thing was that every thing was a game on the Apple. Shape tables made programming games relatively easy. Disk Muncher should have probably been on the controlled substances list as it was the gateway drug to what is now referred to as piracy. Even trig function took on a whole new meaning when manipulated on an Apple.
The programming in particular was transformative. I already had opportunities to code in basic and Fortran on teletypes and dumb terminals. The graphics on the Apple were fascinating, though primitive. It also took more code, and as mentioned above, more mathematics, than with modern high level graphic API, and the results were certainly less sophisticated, but the effect on us kids seemed intense. It was something we made, not just downloaded and consumed.
To me tasting is a relic of a past time, specifcally when registering a domain was a significant expenditure of time and money.
Now that domains are cheap and easy, there is no reason to have a trail period. It is like having a trial period box of candy or some other trivial consumable. Sure, if the product is defective the retailer will take it back, but otherwise you made the choice, you keep the product. This kind of return policy is disruptive to consumers and retailers.
Speaking directly to your case, I might have kept both domain, but have the less dominant redirect to the domain of the current preferred spelling. This way one get the old people, at a nearly insignificant marginal cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Free does not mean one can do whatever one wishes. In most of the free world, we are free to express ourselves, free to move, free to love who we wish because we make an implicit civil contract to not do other things. We are free to move around as we wish, but if we move into someones house, then we can lose that freedom. We are free to express ourselves, but if that expreess results in a murder, we may lose our freedom. In the case of this deal, we pay for the right to listen to all the music in the library, on the device, with no other restrictions. Unless one is advocating extreme freedom, where one is free to impose beliefs on other people, free to murder other people, and free to take other people property, and other are free to do the same to you, then this is not such a bad deal. You are of course free to reject the deal and just enjoy rockin to the rhythm of the rain.
IN fact most issues with insider trading deals with use of insider information and compensation of workers at the expense of stockholder/owners of the company. I have seen this at places where I work. Trades increase, often mostly executives, in the days prior to big deal or a bad report. The workers who knew what was going to happen enrich themselves at the expense of the owners. This behavior is as inappropriate as taking a computer home for personal use. The second big issue with insider trades is that the insiders have the ability to back date the transaction to a time when the price was personally favorable. This also costs the owners money by inflating compensation beyond what was publicly agreed to during the board meeting.
I have mentioned before that if a company voluntarily decides to go public, there are guidelines that go along with that choice. No company is forced to go public, so no company has to follow these guidelines. They can be private, then the employees are freee to engage in any fraudulent activity tolerated by the private owners. But, as has been mentioned so often in the media when defending the government bailouts of irresponsible companies, the stockholder is the companies are common people, retirees, single mothers, etc, and when an insider conducts a fraudulent trade, or a trade the he or she knows primarily is for personal enrichment at the expense of the owners, then such a insider is taking food away form the retiree, children, etc, and I think even the most staunch defender of corporate america will say that is the wrong thing to do. Investors deserve all the money that they should have legitimately earned.
They got so much wrong, but the issues they got right. We don't have flying cars, but we are different people due to technology. We do not get our food from cubes, but the fast food is just presented manner meant to imitate the food it replaces. We had pocket calculators long before the cleaning work was autonomously taken over by machine, but the roomba exists. Children are being trained in ware fare using video games. The basis of our interactions are being changed by rapid instantaneous communication. Our basic functions, such as sex, have been changed by the picture phone and internet. No longer must anyone settle for the person next door, when one can surf for an attractive specimen in the morning, text during class, and set up the date for the evening at a bus stop midway between the two of you. In fact, we never have to settle when everything can be custom made to out specifications.
There are two things that disappoint me about many so-called intellectuals. The first is that they don't seem to read enough history. The second is that don't seem to read enough science fiction. To me this strikes me as a person who knows not where they came from, and who knows not where they are going. All they know is what is happening at the moment, their immediate desires, and all they care about is what they must do to fulfill those desires.
Clarke's writing clearly defines him as a different sort of person. The Foundation series clearly identifies him as a man who knew history. His life defines him as a man who knew where he as the rest of us were likely going. I wonder what the world would be like if our leaders were like this. People of history and vision, rather than people who apparently do not even both to hold a book correctly, and proudly states that they never read, or that they read the cliff notes versions. I am reminded of John F. Kennedy, the person who pushed the nation to space, for better or worse. It is claimed in Thirteen Days that JFK had read the Guns of August, did understand that many conflicts start because leaders assume they know what the other party is thinking, and then constructs inflexible plans based on those assumptions. As he knew history, he could do something different in his attempt to achieve a result. Again, history and vision of the future. Something we are sorely lacking, and something that is all too often ridiculed by those who are justing looking at how to swindle their first million by the time they are 25.
There are only two casses where I hear people claiming to be confused. The first is trying to close previously opened project. This obviously is not productive, as an open source project implicitely must be free to be used according to the license, and any investment that a firms makes in it's use must be protected. It would be quite detrimental to open source if at any moment a library of code could be pulled.
The second case is that open source means 'gratis'. It does not always. most of us know that under certain circumstances changes must be passed back to the community and source must be passed to customers. Open source is not public domain, and it is my undersatanding this is intentional. Open Source develepors do not want thier code hi jacked and repackaged as closed source projects, for which they can subsequently be sued.
For those who need such licenses, it is no different than any other project. There are always a number of options, and a rational person conducts suffecient due dillagence prior to commiting to a particular option.
I could dial into the big computer, download and compile code as fast as as any modern machine.
My video game consoles started immediately, and game play was real time.
Many computers started up rather quickly. Many applications started up rather quickly. MS did not.
I am not saying things did not suck, but it was more a matter of available resources and the state of the art. comparatively not that the code was bad. It is clear that code today is worse, and the good practices we were taught are no longer valid. At some point, programmers became more expensive than memory or cycles. At that point it no longer made economic sense to spend money writing something that would fit in 8K or ram, or run on the cheapest CPU, or avoid the need for a GPU. It would be cheaper for the consumer to go out and buy these things rather than pay the person-hours it would take to write. The end result is that we live in an age of clearly bloated framework, that require huge resources for even the simplest jobs, simply because it is cheaper for 1000 people to buy an extra gig of memory than to pay a person to write an efficient program. Who today would write a GUI(I have written parts of one, it is not the hardest thing to do) when there are so many available, even if one has to suffer with the bloat and silly API>
The day that iphone supports flash, and the flash cannot be disabled, is the day that the iphone becomes quite useless to anyone other than advertisers and pron watchers.
IMHO, ebay has done much to destroy the marketplace, likely as the perfect market is not really profitable, as much as theorist might argue otherwise. The buy it now option and reservem pricing kills the auction premise. Powersellers kill the idea that you are trading with an individual that is just trying to get rid of unwanted product. In the end, this is just a flea market, and eBay is just the booth renter trying to create a profit out of otherwise wasted space.
Beyond the obvious similarities, the reason, IMHO, that The Jeffersons succeeded was because it was a significantly different show. As entertaining as MacFarlane is, he does not seem to anything other than family guy. American Dad, for instance, just is not that different, simply the same show with a plot instead of arbitrarily strung together jokes. Recall that "All in the family" had many spin off, some good, some not. In particular "Archie Bunker's Place", though successful, was pretty bad.
The reality is that not everything can be filtered. Combine that with the fact that nearly every kid over the age of 10 have access to proxy server, and the whole notion of a g-rated filtered pipe becomes quite humorous. The only way to remotely sell a legitimate rated service is to white list acceptable sites. It si time consuming, but effective. There are still tricks to get around it, but the bar is significantly raised.
If MS did not concern itself with a HD format, why did it not give users a choice of an add on player? Because Blu Ray does not include the features it MS wanted, features that could have been potentially used to tie content to a platform, not to mention long term royalties for MS, something no sane person wants, other than Apple and MS. In the end HP was used a proxy for the MS camp, HP was rejected, and Sony was able to use the broad based coalition to defeat the unilaterally supported HD-DVD.
XBox consoles have sold because MS has sold them cheap. They have a good market share right now because you can't get a better console for less. But the market share right now is meaningless, except to the average game player. What MS has to do is regroup and decide it the current strategy is going to win the living room, or if the battle is won but the victory will go to Sony and Apple. If MS does feel that new direction is needed, vis a vis Vista, then the average games may care very much, because they may be paying more for a console that is much less user centered.
Apple is patenting the method that makes the touchpad functional. In a way, they have a reason to do this as they were innovating the touchpad while everyone else was adding buttons to mice and arguing that the touch pad would never be as good as the mouse. These people lack creativity. It is easy to add buttons to a mouse, or a scroll wheel, or add USB ports to a computer, or other trivia that most firms rely on to imply innovation. But the trackpad is now a competitor to the mouse, and unless one has had issues, I see the mouse and mouselike interfaces going away on anything that is not a desktop machine.
OTOH, one reason that this patent may not cause too much trouble is that the engineering to make gestures happen may be expensive, and therefore we are much more likely to see cheap knockoffs, safe from the patents, rather than infringing duplication. For instance, MS did not go with a iPod style control on the original Zune, but the cheap click pad. Likewise, MS developed an affordable navigation pad on the new zune, rather than moving to a full touch screen model. Most manufacturers who wish to stay below the cost of the Apple product has done the same.
As far as the features go, this is how apple has always operated. Early computers did not have a parallel port. New computers only have a few USB ports. No Apple has a built in card reader. No Apple has a fingerprint reader. The Macbook Air does not have a firewire port. Apple tends to concentrate a feature set that most users can live with rather than a feature set that looks good on the spec sheet.
People try to compare Apple to a high performance car company just because the computer tends to be a somewhat more expensive. The performance is flawed. The Apple computers are as accessible as the average car. What more apt comparison is that the average computer manufacturer is like Hyundai, putting a 375 HP engine into a POS car. No reason not to, people who don't know any better will buy it, but when I am going that fast I would much prefer to be fully reinforced cabin developed by a company with experienced in these things. Likewise, I would like the components of my computer well matched as reliable. It does not have to be god awful expensive, like a Mercedes, but it can't be build with whatever has happened to fallen off the truck.
this is not so much about reverse engineering. It is about process engineering. To have some build something for you you have to give away many more secrets than they can get by re. Suppliers, forming, etc Building in china is giving away the store, but I guess it is cheap it can't be helped. I think the Chinese price it that way
Today you are lucky to be able to lose yourself anywhere, be able to have a private conversation in any convenient location. Most of the time you will be caught on tape at least coming and going. This loss of privacy is accepted for obvious reasons.
So, when asked about privacy I wonder what they are talking about. Is it the people who put every detail of their lives on Facebook, then whine when those details are exploited? Is it those people who use the services of google, like gmail, with no worry that such mail may be used for profit? Or the people who send unencrypted email? Or the identity thieve issue, which is not so much a technology issue, as a going through people's garbage issue.
Basically privacy is a compromise. To get people hyper-concerned about privacy, they have to give up some luxuries they have become accustomed to. For people who will support torture to prevent a 1 in 10,000 million chance they might die in a terrorist attack, it seems like a deal that is unlikely to be closed.
My first impression is that the bankruptcy are having, or are about to have, some expanding negative effect. This seems a relatively cheap way to solve the problem. If SCO is private, pays off all debtors, then they can defend against external scrutiny, and are free to do as they wish.
The $ 100 million dollar pledge is simply there to say that the company will be funded well enough to pay off future obligations, should they manifest. Furthermore, the additional monies do not seem to be an investment, but a line of credit that the firm will have to repay.
So, in effect, this is appears to be some sort of fancy consolidation loan. Certainly likely done as some sort of personal favor, but I bet no one losses money on it. One hears about these kind of tax shelters all the time.
Last summer I priced an HP laptop and Apple laptop. I needed a very light, yet powerful, machine, so I went with a 15" pro machine on both sides. Depending on what considered equivalent, the HP machine was 500-1000 more. It is anecdotal, but still a data point. The point is that Apple has gotten very efficient, and regular PC OEMs have a very hard time competing with them on the price/quality ratio. About the only thing apple does not have is the competitive $500 headless laptop. The Mac Mini is a joke, and the iMacs are over priced if one does not really need a fancy monitor.
Assuming that Best buy only loses 1 laptop per hour, that is less than 2 million dollars a year, probably mostly tax deductible. Such a policy may even provide a competitive advantage as it will clearly indicate that Best Buy is dedicated to customer service and will not jerk their customers around. We know that the opposite is true, but such a gimmick could change this.
In the end best buy will prefer to spend 2 millions dollars on lawyers rather than establish protocols to increase customer value.
About a year ago Science also had a long analysis examining the impact of various plants to create biofuels. It concluded, essentially, that corn was the worst while natural weeds and crop waste was the best. This initial analysis did not effect US policy which is based on year over year profit rather than long term costs. The overcapacity we currently see in ethanol facilities is not a result of good analysis or market forces, but by the subversion of those market forces by government regulations, such as subsidizing the oil companies, for instance through the reduction of oil taxes, and the subsidy of corn as a biofuel over more advantageous plants.
It is unlikely that greenhouse gasses are going to fall without a reduction of consumption. We are talking a higher fuel economy in all vehicles, and a large tax on those vehicles that do not meet those fuel efficiencies, as well as a loss of other tax benefits for such vehicles. We are talking large tax benefits for small businesses that meet rigorous emission standards. We are talking a reduction in consumption of product made in factories that have no concern for efficiency, and a willingness to pay more for products that are made in more environmentally friendly patterns.
The only reason that such an article seems controversial is that consumers want a free lunch. People were hoping that corn would be a panacea, like nuclear power, too cheap to meter, with no negative consequences. It is like how some people drive on the freeway. With no regard to Newton's laws of motion. I guess they believe they drive fast enough so to be out of the domain of where such laws are valid.
Typically Apple has priced the iPod line to sell. The cost of the device is often about the same as the retail price of the storage media. Of course Apple contracts these in huge quantities, and is not as picky as they are with the pro machines. I imagine prices are falling, and it might be good to wait a year for a Macbook Air.
As an aside, I hear a lot about newegg.com. I went there to see about a sale price they had a refurbed camera. While reading the site, i read their recommendations. According to newegg, the most important thing about a camera is the stated number of pixels on the CCD. Wow, what insight. I suppose the most important spec on a compute is the processor speed, and that POS car with an over-clocked engine advertised on the superbowl is the most desirable automobile of the year. I would likely agree that cheap flash from them is exactly that.
Apple designed a phone that is very good, and found a carrier that was desperate to play ball and risk a new world order. Apple exclusivity, therefore, serves that new world order. When Apple does not have to cripple a phone in order to insure that the carrier will make enough money. The phone is as Apple wants it for it's customers that are willing to pay for good hardware, not for the carrier customers who largely want believe they are getting a good deal by paying for 'services' throughout a long contract.
And this is where Apple may have blundered, at least in the US. The two year contract. We don't want it, we don't need it. Apple could charge half of what it made with the two year extension, $60, and still likely come out ahead in the long run.
IMHO, MS online services were very successful. They provided a research and development bed for MS server software products. If the MS online division is not making money, it is likely because the division is not covering all perceived costs, not because it does not cover all real costs. I do not think that competition with anyone was initially a concern, as it was assumed that customers would just use ISS and related products as they moved online, and MS would continue to get the cut.
The problem developed when, just like Mr. Gates first product, and later with the lack of vision on the Internet, MS realized that the quality of the products were not sufficient to compete in a changing market and heavy handed vendor lock in was required if MS was to continue to get it's cut. MS IE was developed specifically to make the Internet a MS only product. Yahoo is being bought to make online services an MS only product. If MS can continue to make it painful to use non MS sanctioned products, like google, for a few more years, then MS will likely be able to move to online services. What is happening with Google is not that MS is not competing in ad revenue, but MS can no longer maintain a monopoly in the desktop market. So it is using some of it's reserve cash to make a bet that it can create the same monopoly in the online market as it did in the desktop.
One poster commented that the NFL has a hard time making money. Well, from the picture of the church property, it does not appear that the church has that problem. It would be nice if the NFL could scam as well as the average christian churches in America. Selective reading lets then demand a tithe, but forget that Jesus destroyed the temple due to money changers in the church. Have American flags and patriotic paraphernalia in the church, but do everything they can to avoid paying taxes, even on clearly profit making activities. Agree to certain political limitations in exchange for the tax exempt status, and then, like the hypocrite, ignore those limitations as they please.
This is nothing more than a whiny church complaining that once they are being held to rules of civilized society. I know it is a new experience for most churches, having to comply with the rule of law, but it happens. They can buy a smaller screen. They can choose not to have such a secular event in a sacred space, and forgo the tithe that members who are mostly interested in secular events might bring. They can, like most churches, have such secular events outside of the sacred space.
Second, just because one as a touch screen does not mean on does not have a WIMP. This is such a basic flaw in the article, that I stopped reading TFA. In the simples case, the Pointer is the touch part of the screen. In more extreme cases, the menu structure may be simplified to pre-WIMP norms, though in most cases such menus will be based on configurable icons, not text. This does not, however, mean that the menu does not exist.
What we have been seeing lately, and what does exist on the general purpose computer, like a Mac or x86 running an MS OS, is the point taking on additional functionality, such as scrolling, zooming, etc. The complexity of completing such tasks vary. On the Apple, touch pads used gestures to scroll while an HP might have a dedicated part of the touch pad scroll. IN particular, Apple did not import the functionality of the iPhone as a touch screen application, but as a touch pad enhancement, an enhancement that appears to be mostly hardware related.
The question we have to ask is do we want our screen to be both out input and output device. For compact integrate devices like phones there is some advantage. But for a GPC, is there an advantage over a mouse, or even the command line? Mice are very efficient at moving quickly over large screen real estate, and can be very precise. Mice can be more efficient at moving through large documents than even the command line. Do I think I can edit this document faster if I had to touch the screen to move around? I don't think so.
Touch screens will continue to proliferate as interfaces to embedded devices. If they get cheaper, they will added on as a gee whiz accessory, just like the 238 USB ports and memory card readers and even floppy drives Re now added just so the feature list does not look so inferior. But it will still be a WIMP interface.
The programming in particular was transformative. I already had opportunities to code in basic and Fortran on teletypes and dumb terminals. The graphics on the Apple were fascinating, though primitive. It also took more code, and as mentioned above, more mathematics, than with modern high level graphic API, and the results were certainly less sophisticated, but the effect on us kids seemed intense. It was something we made, not just downloaded and consumed.
Now that domains are cheap and easy, there is no reason to have a trail period. It is like having a trial period box of candy or some other trivial consumable. Sure, if the product is defective the retailer will take it back, but otherwise you made the choice, you keep the product. This kind of return policy is disruptive to consumers and retailers.
Speaking directly to your case, I might have kept both domain, but have the less dominant redirect to the domain of the current preferred spelling. This way one get the old people, at a nearly insignificant marginal cost.