This may very well be true, but the fact that it is crappy code made for a specific merely indicates why the google model is not open. One can argue a key ingredient in the OS model, what makes is superior to closed source, is there is potentially objective eyeballs on the proces. Opening the software when it is done is little better than closed source code. It is one reason why people freaked when Oracle got a hold of OO.org and created libreoffice.
Then of course this proves that Google is not creating software that is meant to be used by the community. It is creating software for a specific prorpietary hardware manufacture, and then, if other manufacturers behave, will release the code to them. Like Apple, only the kernal/stack is OSS while all the stuff that makes the phone cool to use requires Google blessing. One can't use competing product like would be possible with true OSS software. One can't rework the product to meet end users needs. The phone exists to serve the interests of Google and the mobile provider, just like any average proprietary phone. Sure the Android can be broken in to just like any other phone, but why should this be necessary for an allegedly open phone. And sure Apps can be downloaded from any site, but if google were fully open to open source why would they not want to hast any software that wasn't malicious?
At the end of the day if Android were in fact open source and in fact freely available, none of the Google equivocating would be necessary..
In as much as the article is about tech that was not successful, the Zune should have been at the top of the list. No matter if the Zune was the best music player that ever was or will ever be designed, it was a flop. The only reason anyone knows about it is because MS has a huge budget to market it and pay people to sell it. It might have failed because it could not complete, or was irrelevant, or was the ugly color of stuff that we don't want to see, but the fact is it is not more. OTOH, MS Windows mobile products are not a failure as they actually were in wide use, even though the current crop of Kin and MS Windows 7 might become the laughing stock of the world, even though they did and do have a nearly infinite marketing budget.
8.5 billion is big money for this company with less than a billion in sales and barely breaking even. In the past when MS has done this it was to enforce the MS Windows only culture. For instance Connectix and Fox Software, it was to integrate technology into MS Product, generally eventually phasing out the original cross platform product. In the case of Connectix,my understanding is that VirtualPC was used to create compatibile layers between the incompatible versions of MS Windows. Both became MS Windows only products.
As it has done before through the purchasing of firms, MS can slap Google and Apple in the mobile area by realeasing inferiror products for Android and iOS. Obviously this was a strategic competitive move, and has little to do with Skype revenue of profits. MS can never hope to directly make 8.5 billion. The best hope is to have the only mobile devices to run the #1 internet phone client. As it is there is not Skype client designed specifically for iPad. I suspect we will see clients deeply integrated into all MS Windows products . Maybe MS Windows Phone 7 will automatically use Skype when a WiFi connection is available instead of the phone company connection. Over time, like FoxPro, we will likely see non MS Windows client become unsupported.
I would take it another way. Cable, due to the number of channels, has the possibility of providing much more targeted programming. The question is if half a million viewers can fund the production of costs of a science fictions show with high production values. This is the thing with SGU and Atlantis. Mostly the shooting can be done on sound stages with only occasional location shooting. SG1 had a lot of location shooting. Could something like SG1 be done on a small cable budget? Probably not. Richard Dean Anderson probably would not be there on a small cable budget, and in this climate Michael Shanks may have stayed gone.
But the lower production values is not really the big problem. Caprica, for instance was trying to be smallville or 90210 or the OC, but instead was hellcats. Pure and simple. SGU was too serious, too many random plot devices meant to push forth a incoherent story. Recall at the end of season 1 SG1 basically made fun of itself and the incoherent incomprehensible situations.
I don't watch cable, only the shows that are online, and I think that SyFy is producing some affordable and reasonable scripted products. Sanctuary, Eureka, Haven, Warehouse 13. Obviously they need syndicated and unscripted product for filler. If I had any complaints it is I would much rather see more or less original products rather than extension of existing franchises, like SGU and Sarah Conner. The later probably has higher costs due to licensing. If expensive products and high ratings is the goal, then syfy and cable in general is not the solution. But we can have some good products that might be covered with small audiences.
This means that a person cannot be tracked without their knowledge. These types of bills always destroy disreputable or legacy firns, but legitimate firms always finds a way to survive. In the case of Google and Facebook, they will merely have to gind an incentive to encourage people to not opt out. Both firms already do this. This why Google is succesful. While many end users have no problem turning off all the cookies for Yahoo and 2o7, because they provide no services that require cookies, I suspect the majority of people who use google and facebook have active cookies for these sites.
I have said many bad things about Google, and now I add to that Google is officially a bloated and lazy firm, not capable of meaningful innovation. If it were it would not be pulling the 'lost jobs' argument. Such an argument is only made of irrelevant companies such as US auto makers and book publishers.
Google, and to a lesser extent, facbook has made huge sums of money through consumer ignorance. What this is going to require that they share a bit more of those proceeds with the end user. Yes it will effect profits, and conceivably it will effect proficts enough that they will get out of the business, or leave california. Perhaps they can move to a desperate state like mississippi, and perhaps enough employee will follow. The reality is that California knows it has something that exists in few other places, and can enforce a code of conduct on the companies there. Othwise everyone would move 400 miles east to Nevada.
Doctors are just technicians who work on people. They get paid a lot because they work on people and the risks are higher than say if they worked on cars or computers. However the ordinary person seems to think doctors are geniuses that can keep a perfectly healthy and that a perfectly healthy person actually is possible. Doctors are screwed because if they tell the truth they can't charge enough to pay off medical school loans.
Likewise, people have been convinced that expensive drugs are the cure all for everything. This leads to, for example, in the US the creation of medicare part D whose purpose is support the drug companies ability to charge higher than market values for drugs. The drug companies has the help of people like this who laugh at the medicine that has kept the human race healthy for thousands of years, and doesn't seem to understand that difference between marginal statistical efficacy and safety. We may choose to take a drug because it is necessary for our own health or the health of the community, but that in no way means the drug is safe, or the community should not ask for drugs with fewer potential side effects. At the root of this is the idea the inductive reasoning will conclusion that then become necessary conditions of life, rather than things that are probably good for you. This fallacy is promoted because it is useful, and most regular people don't know it is a fallacy.
If we have too many patients, the doctor is only partly to blame. We have an epidemic of cleanliness, kids using hand sanitizer and not getting sick to build up resistance to common bugs. We have people who never eat a real meal of fresh food, rather everything on thier paper plate is processed or synthetic. No one has a Aloe plant around. People are prescribed expensive drugs when, if the laws were tilted to the pharmcos, they could grow what the needed in a pot.
Which is not to say the many people are not genuinely out of kilter. I think the diabetes example might be silly because as we know more, we reset thresholds. Complaining about a new threshold is saying that inductive logic is infallible. In fact, all thresholds are guesses and needs to be reset with new data. In general saying people who were sick in that past are sick now is equally silly. Just because ALS was not written about until the late 19th century and was not widely known in the US until well into the 20th century means we should call these people sick and try to help them? To me this thing is not that doctors have too many patients, but that people do not seem to have a choice to become a patient or not. If you do not subject yourself to the leeches of modern medicine, you somehow are not a respectable person.
One would hope, but I think with a few exeptions, it will pass. Conservatives hate big government, but they hate the little tax payers even more. Look at the flexible/health spending accounts, the one way we little guys can save some tax. They keep taking out things we can use it on. It should be able to pay for any legal medical expenses, including any medications that one deems necessary. The government should not be involved in decided which medical expenses are covered. The little guys almost gets a break, and the conservatives should be with us, but they screw us.
Samt think for IRAs. There should be no limits on contributions, only limits to the amount of valid deductions per tax level. For instance, below average pay there should not limits, only a provision that there can be no refund based on the contribution. The IRA is a way for the little guy to invest. But what do they do. Screw the one good investment opportunity for the little guy and allow the big guys to take all the deductions they want.
So what we will see is a bunch of exceptions to eliminate the tax for most people how make over 100K, while those who need a car just to get to work and buy food for the kids will be taxed, because frankly, they don't care.
I think common sense changes to fit our circumstances. For the most we all think that it is common sense that those around us are equal or that we have the right to believe as wish. Most kids probably do not have the common sense to know which foods they can and cannot eat in the forest, but do have the common sense to send an email. I think that common sense tells us that things cannot move arbitrarily fast, or change the velocity instantaneously. It is common sense that things get bigger, the supports are not going to hold if they only get bigger linearly or less. It is common sense that all objects for the most part fall at the about the same rate. It is common sense that when you changea tire, you tighten the bolts in a crosswise fashion. When you walk in the wood always step on fallen logs carefully, not over them.
And it is common sense not to listen complain the we have become dependent on technology because they do not know what technology is. Written communication using a fiber surface and pigments helped us move information from generation to generation freeing us to discover new things instead of rediscovering the old things. The simple machines allow us to trade time for force and build large structures. Precision machining allowed us to build commodity products. The reality is without industrial age technology most of the population dies young because natural common sense is not that good at keeping us alive. A newborn, dependent on the parents, was in danger because the parents did not have the common sense and that child was as likely to die before 10 as not. The average person did not have the common sense to keep themselves alive past 40 or 50, but those who did have common sense lived to be quite old, even by modern standards. So when we are complaining about technology and common sense, what we are actually doing is complaining that technology allowing people with less common sense to live longer. In the process, I think, we are being a bit arrogant in assuming that we have the common sense to not have died prior to 10 years old, and it is the others that is pulling the median down.
It seems that google already bought at least one VOIP company, Gizmo. Maybe the lesson here is that there is not money in VOIP, but if for firm like Google and Facebook that is the business of collecting and selling personal data, knowing who you are calling can be a huge pile of money. Connecting telephone calls to ads could increase the value of the ads. Calling car repair shops, all of the sudden you are seeing ads for car dealers. All of the sudden many calls to another city. cheap airline tickets and romantic getaways. The possibilities boggles the minds.
It seems that the options for a more or less independent VOIP applications are diminishing greatly. I have not really been a fan of Skype since the killed the interface with the latest update, and since they had so much trouble for a month or so. I pay them so I can call land lines and out fo the country, but they really do not provide the service. With Google and Facebook, who really only treat the end user as a means to an end, I do not expect anything better.
Right Apple has pretty much gotten away from DVDs. All my stuff is on external hard disk on partitions. I can boot from the external hard disk as easily as I can book from any other media. On the new macbook air the recovery volume in on a USB drive.
I suspect what they are talking about here is a network boot install of the upgrade, which I believe is already possible. Since the Mac App store is connected to an account, and not a computer, one should be able to upgrade all machines for a single purchase. If the continue with the $30 price, which pretty much just covers retail cost and media, then this would be a savings over the $50 price for the family pack. I would not expect it go below $30 as they already reduced it 50%.
As far as specific boot media is concerned, I suspect that there will not be a way to create a bootable disk. I don't know many people who know how to do this on the Mac. The ability to not create a bootable volume on a harddisk might be a reason for some people not to go this right, and stick with the traditional media.
which is all fine and good if the customer was told about this and they initialed next to the section indicating that the capability is there and some random tech would have the ability to watch yo uhave sex so maybe the computer should go somewhere else. Of course if the customer knew, they would tape the camera. So that would defeat the purpose.
What we are talking about is is the right of a firm to have a customer sign away basic rights. For instance, would Aaron's include a cluase that if the rent was late, a rep would have the right to molest a person, child or adult, in the family of thier choice. Of course not. Then why should Aaron's have the right to watch a peep show. Sure the policy is that this feature will only be used under certain circumstances, and I am sure 99.9999% of the well paid professionals that have access to the computer will do this, but really, why take the risk that the one remaining employee is not going to be jacking off to some kid? What is the rational? To catch the customers that say the computer was stolen but in fact are still using it? Does Aarons have such equipment on furniture and TV so they can watch kids make out? I think not, yet they are doing well without it.
This is just a case where a firm is being an arrogant dumbass. If the customers were told and they initialed their consent, then I am wrong. If the customers do not know that some creppy guy is potentially watching the kids run around the trailer, then Aarons deserves to be sued for all it can be sued for. It is not because the business model is inherently bad. It is because firms all to often think they can do anything for profit. Sell drugs to kids, frisk customers on the way out, intimidate them into an upsale. As consumers, even those with just enough money to rent to own, we must assert ourselves as the powerful agents in this relationship. After all, we are the ones that have the money, and the retailers are the one's who need it. By accepting the fiction that we are the weak one's, we allow the retailers to screw us.
I don't cherish my intel chips. I don't cherish what Apple has felt they had to do to prevent Mac OS from being used on junk machines, which has been universally bad. I do like the fact that I can run Ubuntu or MS Windows Vista on my mac faster than most machines built for MS Windows.
I believe Intel became acceptable for two reasons. First, the PC and MS Windows really did not provide a market for high end products, so I think Intel became more willing to expand beyond the WinTel monopoly. Second, the RISC vs. CISC thing became less of an issue, with CISC becoming more acceptable on the desktop, and dying in mobile. Therefore Intel has some breathing room, but has to move to RISC if it is going to remain relevant. Again Intel is changing to meet Apple users needs.
Not to beat a dead horse, but this is hardly an issue with the internet. The internet was around when Bush II president, and there were many people who thought he deserted his post during his conscripted military duty, and documents were posted all over the place, but he was never offically branded a traitor by new organizaions.
The Al Gore medal thing did get traction however, and this may or may not have been because of the internet. It was probably because people wanted to believe he was a bad man, and this was the excuse.
There have been radical theories running around for years. People deal with their trauma in many different ways, and the internet may enable them, but it hardly creates an alternative reality. The internet did not create the reality that Reagan was the greatest president ever while at the same time he doubled the national debt as a percentage of GDP.What the internet might do is make these delusions accesible to greater number of people so we see what these radical believe, for instance that debt is bad except when it is created by someone they like.
This current birther thing is flat out discomfort with race. Even liberals have an issue with him. It has cost the democratic party many votes because we had a choice between a nice blond woman and a black man. Good golly, we chose the black man. What is the world coming to.
Honestly, I think we can say that the birther thing has nothing to do with the internet. It has to do with the rating of one particlar cable station.
The one I use the most is
Safari 5: Easy user agent alterations
While most modern web sites do not check for user agent, at least not to prevent access, there are a few that still are loyal to MS, so block non-IE browsers from accessing content. In a perfect world we could just all ignore these sites and let them fail, but unfortunately most of these sites are corporate and so much deal with them to keep our jobs. I was sad to discover that most browsers had removed this functionality, and that Safari was pretty much the only one that had it build in,
I agree. The issue that Google has it that is always has collected information on users without explicit consent, beyond the DCMA, and so it is used to doing so. The difference is that prior to this the information collected was generic usage information. Abig difference was that Google provided a free service, search, mail, docs, in exchange for such information. In this way it provides a good value.
So Google is used to collecting data, and users are used to give it. Apple users are not so used to privacy violations because Apple users pay for products, so are not accustomed to trading information for product. This, I believe, is why there is such a backlash against Apple but Google is left relatively unscathed. User simply expect Google to behave badly.
The problem is that Android users are not getting a product for free, or at least they don't perceive they are getting a product for free. After all Android is open sourced, and provided essentially free to the OEM, but users don't separate the software stack from the phone anymore than they separate the OS from the PC. So in the same way we might say Linux is free the user stills buys a MS Windows machine since the total cost is often less than a *nix machine.
I was surprised with the nexus because I really though that Google might share and create an inexpensive smart phone supported with ad revenue and usage data. Then the first indication that Google was going to cave into the cell phone carriers, instead of as Apple providing phones that meet the needs of the end user, when it abandoned the nexus 1.
So what many people were confused by is the fact that we had Saudis trained in Afganistan attacking the US, but when we went to all out war it was not against the Saudis, not against Afganistan, but against Iraq. While I understand that the people in the Presidential Office has a particular problem with Iraq, it was really inappropriate to spend taxpayer money to solve a personal problem.
What is more the funding can't come from Afganistan or Iraq or countries like this, as they really don't have the funds. Such money has to come from the rich aristocracies in the region such as the residents of Saudi Arabia, Libya, Korea. So what do in America? Buy cars and create energy policy where US citizens fund the states that are funding the people who want to kill US citizens. At current prices, the Saudis are making tens of dollar of profit on each barrel of oil, a percentage of that potentially is used to murder innocent citizens. And all we can do is say we have to drill more, coincidentally in areas that require high prices to support, which in turn support the mass killing of US citizens. Makes wonderful sense.
To be even less politically correct, I don't know where we get this idea that we could not fight a war in Afganistan, because the people there were not part of the problem. The people in Iraq were not part of the problem, but we certainly inconvenienced them. Afganistan was the training location, but to justify action in Iraq we created a fiction of special circumstances for the people in Afganistan. In fact the cowards in the US military, not all, but some, simply wanted the simple fight against the old and ill trained troops of Iraq instead of the more difficult fight in Afganistan. Distract the people with a good show, while leaving the fundamental problems for future generations to solve.
Of course if one is happy with a development environment that "lack the full breadth of features found in higher-end Visual Studio and SQL Server Editions" and all one wants to be is a "hobbyist, student, and novice developer" then one can develop for MS Windows Phone 7. Otherwise it costs $1300 with a $800 yearly upgrade.
OTOH, the mac mini is $700 plus 4.99 for Xcode or $100 a year for Xcode and full documentation. Over three years, for a professional developer, not someone who is just knocking off fart applications, this is $1000 for the iPhone vesus $2900 for the MS WIndows Phone 7.
Of course all this, and android, can pretty much done on shoestring using Eclipse which costs nothing. Which is why even with this lame escuse for a cross compiler I can't see people leaving in droves from iPhone, much less Android, to write for MS Windows Phone 7.
MS has to decide what it's core mission is. Is it selling development tools and enabling the use of the code, in which case other software, especially the OS, should be much cheaper. Is it selling an OS and supporting apps, in which the development tools should be much cheaper. Is it hardware, in which case the software should not be forefront. It is this lack of focus that has allowed Apple to surpass MS in terms of revenue and profit.
It to a while for Androd phones to compete. Google basically had to stop playing it's game of sort-of-open solftware that would be given to one vendor as a treat so that other vendors would stay in line. The mobile phone companies had to have the freedom to effectively close the handsets so that profits could be created. And, at a basic level, the software had to mature to a stable product. A lot of early adopters got screwed because after six months their phones were out of date bricks. Who is going to take that change with a $500 tablet, that in six months it can't be upgraded.
So basically we are seeing this again. Google gave Motorola a treat and let it ocme out with the first tablet. No one who is not an uber early adopter is going to buy this table because, unlike the iPhone and iPad for which Apple will provide a couple years of support(my 3 is still getting updates), there is no way to know if the real Honeycomb is going to run on it. We have at least 5 vaporware machines, but they do not exist? So, do we do like MS fanbois and wait for a machine that may or may not be real, or simply buy an iPad?
It is way to early to say whether Honeycomb will succeed in that tablet market. Google is still playing games, and no casual end user would touch it anymore than the Nexus one. It is very likely when there are 10 models out there, all running variations of Android, and if the look and feel and interconnectivity are superior to Apple, then we will likely see Honeycomb take a significant share of the market. However, as the iPhone now, it is likely that the iPad will take the top position for quite a while. However, unless the tablets can undercut the price of the iPad(meaning not the xoom for $600) they will have a hard time competeing. Price, is, after all why the 3GS is in the number two sales position, even though it is an extremely anemic phone.
I was going to create some conspiracy theory about how the UN, who is pushed the Obama Presidency on the America people to subjugate the good and wholesome light of legitimate americans to the international jewish conspiracy, crashed the plane because people on board were in possession of personal knowledge of the illegitimacy of his presidency, and subsequently had to push a secret meeting to disintegrate the data from the black box using well known but secret technology that was stolen from the allien space ship that crashed in Tunguska in 1947.
But that all went away when it the article made it clear that all that found was the chasis for the data recorder, and none of the actual black boxes, i.e. crash survivable memory units, have in fact been seen or recovered.
I was thinking about this as well as group think. By making everyone do certain things, one is imposing a regimen of work and though. While this might work as some places, it can also drive good people away who don't want to think the way that everyone else does, or need quiet time in the middle of the day to process. This idea of lunch every day is precisely to insure that everyone is in lockstep. The better model, IMHO, is have a work provided informal luncheon once a week or once a month where someone gives a talk, for a few minutes, then everyone is allowed to discuss amongst themselves.
This reminds me of a conflict that can happen with new couples. Many of us think about the current days event or coming days events in the shower. We process, we plan, we rearrange. As introverts while we might enjoy the shower with our partner, doing such a thing everyday may put us off balance. As such, when we find ourselves with such a person who requires such immersive intimacy, it becomes a problem. This lunch thing is the same thing. It speaks more of an excessively needy management rather than a required means to create a cohesive team.
It is easy to write off RIM, just like it es easy to write off Apple. The iPhone will never compete against Nokia. The iPhone will never sell through a single vendor. Globally Nokia stills dominates, and does not use Android. Apple is becoming the top handset seller. In fact, Android does not apear to be able to compete direct against the iPhone, as now that there is Verizon iPhone, Android market share has fallen.
Android is the current thing. Many vendors are making many phones, and they are selling. yet the iPhone 4 and 3GS i s still outselling any individual Android phones according to current figures. Google did the right thing in not trying to recreate the iPhone experience, i.e. the end user comes before the telco, but instead creating a variation of the traditional model in which handset manufacturers build to the needs of the mobile phone companies.
Likewise, RIM is doing something good by building products that meet the needs of corporate goverence. With an iPhone or an Android, when cental admin wipes your phone you feel violated. With a RIM this is SOP. Rim would be silly to just replicate the iPad. Even MS is not silly enough to do that. To build sales they must incrementally create a market for a different kind of tablet. The motorola xoom, with a weak 250K sales in the quarter, tells us that there is a very small market for the iPad clone. Apple sold 10X that many iPads. iPad 1 sold 1 million the first week week.
I am not going to use a Blackberry device for the exact reason that it is not a personal device. But i know that certain firms like the blackberry work flow, and they want a tablet. MS is not giving them a solution, but if Blackberry does then presumably such firms will buy such a tablet. Furthermore it seems that consumers are sometimes choosing an iPad over a MS Windows PC. If Blackberry can make a tablet that corporate chooses over a MS Windows PC, then that would be a good growth area.
I think this kind of bad deals are more frequent than we think. The difference is that some firms are allowed to fail, and some are not. Some of it has to do when the management is just so incompentant and criminal that nothing can be done, as in the case of Enron who paid 100 million to put their name on a baseball stadium. It is one thing for Newscorp or AOL to pay 850 million for a firm, another for $100 million billboard.
Then there is the financial firm and car manufacturers who seem to make equally silly decisions, paying huge sums for services that produce no product, and then the public is expected to foot the bills when the parties get so expensive they dwarf revenue. Certainly is appropriate for companies with the financial capability to risk some of the funds in prudently risky ventures. They key here is that the risk should be to the firm, and not spread out over a population that was not going to benefit significantly if the risk paid off.
Many bugs are design decisions. Either someone decides to implement a feature using particular rules, or decides not to check input, or decides not test for a particular event.
For instance, buffer overflows involves a design decision not to test boundaries. Many would blame the language or the complier for this, but in fact is the developer. The compiler or language does not do this because it was inefficient on older machines to have this overhead even when it was not needed. it was left up to the developer to implement these procedures when it was needed, either as code that would not run in production, or single instance code that would not be efficiently run in production. The decision not to do such checks is a design decision made by the developer, possible a good and defensible decision until someone hacks the code.
Ignoring the fact that cops often assume guilt, criminals with weapons is why I can't exactly condemn local, state and federal authorities coming in with major artillery. The probable cause is there, the arrest must be made, and I am not willing to let someone I pay through tax dollars be killed in the line of that arrest. It is expensive to train a new person and to pay off the family of the old one. It is much cheaper to pay off the family of the suspect, especially if the suspect begins firing after the agents identify themselves. Mistakes are made, and often the police do not show the kind of thought they should when executing a warrant, but that has to with the ways the law is written, mostly due to paranoid people who pretty much think everyone except for them is a criminal.
Slashdot Mirror
Then of course this proves that Google is not creating software that is meant to be used by the community. It is creating software for a specific prorpietary hardware manufacture, and then, if other manufacturers behave, will release the code to them. Like Apple, only the kernal/stack is OSS while all the stuff that makes the phone cool to use requires Google blessing. One can't use competing product like would be possible with true OSS software. One can't rework the product to meet end users needs. The phone exists to serve the interests of Google and the mobile provider, just like any average proprietary phone. Sure the Android can be broken in to just like any other phone, but why should this be necessary for an allegedly open phone. And sure Apps can be downloaded from any site, but if google were fully open to open source why would they not want to hast any software that wasn't malicious?
At the end of the day if Android were in fact open source and in fact freely available, none of the Google equivocating would be necessary..
In as much as the article is about tech that was not successful, the Zune should have been at the top of the list. No matter if the Zune was the best music player that ever was or will ever be designed, it was a flop. The only reason anyone knows about it is because MS has a huge budget to market it and pay people to sell it. It might have failed because it could not complete, or was irrelevant, or was the ugly color of stuff that we don't want to see, but the fact is it is not more. OTOH, MS Windows mobile products are not a failure as they actually were in wide use, even though the current crop of Kin and MS Windows 7 might become the laughing stock of the world, even though they did and do have a nearly infinite marketing budget.
As it has done before through the purchasing of firms, MS can slap Google and Apple in the mobile area by realeasing inferiror products for Android and iOS. Obviously this was a strategic competitive move, and has little to do with Skype revenue of profits. MS can never hope to directly make 8.5 billion. The best hope is to have the only mobile devices to run the #1 internet phone client. As it is there is not Skype client designed specifically for iPad. I suspect we will see clients deeply integrated into all MS Windows products . Maybe MS Windows Phone 7 will automatically use Skype when a WiFi connection is available instead of the phone company connection. Over time, like FoxPro, we will likely see non MS Windows client become unsupported.
But the lower production values is not really the big problem. Caprica, for instance was trying to be smallville or 90210 or the OC, but instead was hellcats. Pure and simple. SGU was too serious, too many random plot devices meant to push forth a incoherent story. Recall at the end of season 1 SG1 basically made fun of itself and the incoherent incomprehensible situations.
I don't watch cable, only the shows that are online, and I think that SyFy is producing some affordable and reasonable scripted products. Sanctuary, Eureka, Haven, Warehouse 13. Obviously they need syndicated and unscripted product for filler. If I had any complaints it is I would much rather see more or less original products rather than extension of existing franchises, like SGU and Sarah Conner. The later probably has higher costs due to licensing. If expensive products and high ratings is the goal, then syfy and cable in general is not the solution. But we can have some good products that might be covered with small audiences.
I have said many bad things about Google, and now I add to that Google is officially a bloated and lazy firm, not capable of meaningful innovation. If it were it would not be pulling the 'lost jobs' argument. Such an argument is only made of irrelevant companies such as US auto makers and book publishers.
Google, and to a lesser extent, facbook has made huge sums of money through consumer ignorance. What this is going to require that they share a bit more of those proceeds with the end user. Yes it will effect profits, and conceivably it will effect proficts enough that they will get out of the business, or leave california. Perhaps they can move to a desperate state like mississippi, and perhaps enough employee will follow. The reality is that California knows it has something that exists in few other places, and can enforce a code of conduct on the companies there. Othwise everyone would move 400 miles east to Nevada.
Likewise, people have been convinced that expensive drugs are the cure all for everything. This leads to, for example, in the US the creation of medicare part D whose purpose is support the drug companies ability to charge higher than market values for drugs. The drug companies has the help of people like this who laugh at the medicine that has kept the human race healthy for thousands of years, and doesn't seem to understand that difference between marginal statistical efficacy and safety. We may choose to take a drug because it is necessary for our own health or the health of the community, but that in no way means the drug is safe, or the community should not ask for drugs with fewer potential side effects. At the root of this is the idea the inductive reasoning will conclusion that then become necessary conditions of life, rather than things that are probably good for you. This fallacy is promoted because it is useful, and most regular people don't know it is a fallacy.
If we have too many patients, the doctor is only partly to blame. We have an epidemic of cleanliness, kids using hand sanitizer and not getting sick to build up resistance to common bugs. We have people who never eat a real meal of fresh food, rather everything on thier paper plate is processed or synthetic. No one has a Aloe plant around. People are prescribed expensive drugs when, if the laws were tilted to the pharmcos, they could grow what the needed in a pot.
Which is not to say the many people are not genuinely out of kilter. I think the diabetes example might be silly because as we know more, we reset thresholds. Complaining about a new threshold is saying that inductive logic is infallible. In fact, all thresholds are guesses and needs to be reset with new data. In general saying people who were sick in that past are sick now is equally silly. Just because ALS was not written about until the late 19th century and was not widely known in the US until well into the 20th century means we should call these people sick and try to help them? To me this thing is not that doctors have too many patients, but that people do not seem to have a choice to become a patient or not. If you do not subject yourself to the leeches of modern medicine, you somehow are not a respectable person.
Samt think for IRAs. There should be no limits on contributions, only limits to the amount of valid deductions per tax level. For instance, below average pay there should not limits, only a provision that there can be no refund based on the contribution. The IRA is a way for the little guy to invest. But what do they do. Screw the one good investment opportunity for the little guy and allow the big guys to take all the deductions they want.
So what we will see is a bunch of exceptions to eliminate the tax for most people how make over 100K, while those who need a car just to get to work and buy food for the kids will be taxed, because frankly, they don't care.
And it is common sense not to listen complain the we have become dependent on technology because they do not know what technology is. Written communication using a fiber surface and pigments helped us move information from generation to generation freeing us to discover new things instead of rediscovering the old things. The simple machines allow us to trade time for force and build large structures. Precision machining allowed us to build commodity products. The reality is without industrial age technology most of the population dies young because natural common sense is not that good at keeping us alive. A newborn, dependent on the parents, was in danger because the parents did not have the common sense and that child was as likely to die before 10 as not. The average person did not have the common sense to keep themselves alive past 40 or 50, but those who did have common sense lived to be quite old, even by modern standards. So when we are complaining about technology and common sense, what we are actually doing is complaining that technology allowing people with less common sense to live longer. In the process, I think, we are being a bit arrogant in assuming that we have the common sense to not have died prior to 10 years old, and it is the others that is pulling the median down.
It seems that the options for a more or less independent VOIP applications are diminishing greatly. I have not really been a fan of Skype since the killed the interface with the latest update, and since they had so much trouble for a month or so. I pay them so I can call land lines and out fo the country, but they really do not provide the service. With Google and Facebook, who really only treat the end user as a means to an end, I do not expect anything better.
I suspect what they are talking about here is a network boot install of the upgrade, which I believe is already possible. Since the Mac App store is connected to an account, and not a computer, one should be able to upgrade all machines for a single purchase. If the continue with the $30 price, which pretty much just covers retail cost and media, then this would be a savings over the $50 price for the family pack. I would not expect it go below $30 as they already reduced it 50%.
As far as specific boot media is concerned, I suspect that there will not be a way to create a bootable disk. I don't know many people who know how to do this on the Mac. The ability to not create a bootable volume on a harddisk might be a reason for some people not to go this right, and stick with the traditional media.
What we are talking about is is the right of a firm to have a customer sign away basic rights. For instance, would Aaron's include a cluase that if the rent was late, a rep would have the right to molest a person, child or adult, in the family of thier choice. Of course not. Then why should Aaron's have the right to watch a peep show. Sure the policy is that this feature will only be used under certain circumstances, and I am sure 99.9999% of the well paid professionals that have access to the computer will do this, but really, why take the risk that the one remaining employee is not going to be jacking off to some kid? What is the rational? To catch the customers that say the computer was stolen but in fact are still using it? Does Aarons have such equipment on furniture and TV so they can watch kids make out? I think not, yet they are doing well without it.
This is just a case where a firm is being an arrogant dumbass. If the customers were told and they initialed their consent, then I am wrong. If the customers do not know that some creppy guy is potentially watching the kids run around the trailer, then Aarons deserves to be sued for all it can be sued for. It is not because the business model is inherently bad. It is because firms all to often think they can do anything for profit. Sell drugs to kids, frisk customers on the way out, intimidate them into an upsale. As consumers, even those with just enough money to rent to own, we must assert ourselves as the powerful agents in this relationship. After all, we are the ones that have the money, and the retailers are the one's who need it. By accepting the fiction that we are the weak one's, we allow the retailers to screw us.
I believe Intel became acceptable for two reasons. First, the PC and MS Windows really did not provide a market for high end products, so I think Intel became more willing to expand beyond the WinTel monopoly. Second, the RISC vs. CISC thing became less of an issue, with CISC becoming more acceptable on the desktop, and dying in mobile. Therefore Intel has some breathing room, but has to move to RISC if it is going to remain relevant. Again Intel is changing to meet Apple users needs.
The Al Gore medal thing did get traction however, and this may or may not have been because of the internet. It was probably because people wanted to believe he was a bad man, and this was the excuse.
There have been radical theories running around for years. People deal with their trauma in many different ways, and the internet may enable them, but it hardly creates an alternative reality. The internet did not create the reality that Reagan was the greatest president ever while at the same time he doubled the national debt as a percentage of GDP.What the internet might do is make these delusions accesible to greater number of people so we see what these radical believe, for instance that debt is bad except when it is created by someone they like.
This current birther thing is flat out discomfort with race. Even liberals have an issue with him. It has cost the democratic party many votes because we had a choice between a nice blond woman and a black man. Good golly, we chose the black man. What is the world coming to.
Honestly, I think we can say that the birther thing has nothing to do with the internet. It has to do with the rating of one particlar cable station.
Now we not only have MS shills, Apple shills, GOATSE shills, but also Fox news shills. When will it all end.
Safari 5: Easy user agent alterations
While most modern web sites do not check for user agent, at least not to prevent access, there are a few that still are loyal to MS, so block non-IE browsers from accessing content. In a perfect world we could just all ignore these sites and let them fail, but unfortunately most of these sites are corporate and so much deal with them to keep our jobs. I was sad to discover that most browsers had removed this functionality, and that Safari was pretty much the only one that had it build in,
So Google is used to collecting data, and users are used to give it. Apple users are not so used to privacy violations because Apple users pay for products, so are not accustomed to trading information for product. This, I believe, is why there is such a backlash against Apple but Google is left relatively unscathed. User simply expect Google to behave badly.
The problem is that Android users are not getting a product for free, or at least they don't perceive they are getting a product for free. After all Android is open sourced, and provided essentially free to the OEM, but users don't separate the software stack from the phone anymore than they separate the OS from the PC. So in the same way we might say Linux is free the user stills buys a MS Windows machine since the total cost is often less than a *nix machine.
I was surprised with the nexus because I really though that Google might share and create an inexpensive smart phone supported with ad revenue and usage data. Then the first indication that Google was going to cave into the cell phone carriers, instead of as Apple providing phones that meet the needs of the end user, when it abandoned the nexus 1.
What is more the funding can't come from Afganistan or Iraq or countries like this, as they really don't have the funds. Such money has to come from the rich aristocracies in the region such as the residents of Saudi Arabia, Libya, Korea. So what do in America? Buy cars and create energy policy where US citizens fund the states that are funding the people who want to kill US citizens. At current prices, the Saudis are making tens of dollar of profit on each barrel of oil, a percentage of that potentially is used to murder innocent citizens. And all we can do is say we have to drill more, coincidentally in areas that require high prices to support, which in turn support the mass killing of US citizens. Makes wonderful sense.
To be even less politically correct, I don't know where we get this idea that we could not fight a war in Afganistan, because the people there were not part of the problem. The people in Iraq were not part of the problem, but we certainly inconvenienced them. Afganistan was the training location, but to justify action in Iraq we created a fiction of special circumstances for the people in Afganistan. In fact the cowards in the US military, not all, but some, simply wanted the simple fight against the old and ill trained troops of Iraq instead of the more difficult fight in Afganistan. Distract the people with a good show, while leaving the fundamental problems for future generations to solve.
OTOH, the mac mini is $700 plus 4.99 for Xcode or $100 a year for Xcode and full documentation. Over three years, for a professional developer, not someone who is just knocking off fart applications, this is $1000 for the iPhone vesus $2900 for the MS WIndows Phone 7.
Of course all this, and android, can pretty much done on shoestring using Eclipse which costs nothing. Which is why even with this lame escuse for a cross compiler I can't see people leaving in droves from iPhone, much less Android, to write for MS Windows Phone 7.
MS has to decide what it's core mission is. Is it selling development tools and enabling the use of the code, in which case other software, especially the OS, should be much cheaper. Is it selling an OS and supporting apps, in which the development tools should be much cheaper. Is it hardware, in which case the software should not be forefront. It is this lack of focus that has allowed Apple to surpass MS in terms of revenue and profit.
So basically we are seeing this again. Google gave Motorola a treat and let it ocme out with the first tablet. No one who is not an uber early adopter is going to buy this table because, unlike the iPhone and iPad for which Apple will provide a couple years of support(my 3 is still getting updates), there is no way to know if the real Honeycomb is going to run on it. We have at least 5 vaporware machines, but they do not exist? So, do we do like MS fanbois and wait for a machine that may or may not be real, or simply buy an iPad?
It is way to early to say whether Honeycomb will succeed in that tablet market. Google is still playing games, and no casual end user would touch it anymore than the Nexus one. It is very likely when there are 10 models out there, all running variations of Android, and if the look and feel and interconnectivity are superior to Apple, then we will likely see Honeycomb take a significant share of the market. However, as the iPhone now, it is likely that the iPad will take the top position for quite a while. However, unless the tablets can undercut the price of the iPad(meaning not the xoom for $600) they will have a hard time competeing. Price, is, after all why the 3GS is in the number two sales position, even though it is an extremely anemic phone.
But that all went away when it the article made it clear that all that found was the chasis for the data recorder, and none of the actual black boxes, i.e. crash survivable memory units, have in fact been seen or recovered.
This reminds me of a conflict that can happen with new couples. Many of us think about the current days event or coming days events in the shower. We process, we plan, we rearrange. As introverts while we might enjoy the shower with our partner, doing such a thing everyday may put us off balance. As such, when we find ourselves with such a person who requires such immersive intimacy, it becomes a problem. This lunch thing is the same thing. It speaks more of an excessively needy management rather than a required means to create a cohesive team.
Android is the current thing. Many vendors are making many phones, and they are selling. yet the iPhone 4 and 3GS i s still outselling any individual Android phones according to current figures. Google did the right thing in not trying to recreate the iPhone experience, i.e. the end user comes before the telco, but instead creating a variation of the traditional model in which handset manufacturers build to the needs of the mobile phone companies.
Likewise, RIM is doing something good by building products that meet the needs of corporate goverence. With an iPhone or an Android, when cental admin wipes your phone you feel violated. With a RIM this is SOP. Rim would be silly to just replicate the iPad. Even MS is not silly enough to do that. To build sales they must incrementally create a market for a different kind of tablet. The motorola xoom, with a weak 250K sales in the quarter, tells us that there is a very small market for the iPad clone. Apple sold 10X that many iPads. iPad 1 sold 1 million the first week week.
I am not going to use a Blackberry device for the exact reason that it is not a personal device. But i know that certain firms like the blackberry work flow, and they want a tablet. MS is not giving them a solution, but if Blackberry does then presumably such firms will buy such a tablet. Furthermore it seems that consumers are sometimes choosing an iPad over a MS Windows PC. If Blackberry can make a tablet that corporate chooses over a MS Windows PC, then that would be a good growth area.
Then there is the financial firm and car manufacturers who seem to make equally silly decisions, paying huge sums for services that produce no product, and then the public is expected to foot the bills when the parties get so expensive they dwarf revenue. Certainly is appropriate for companies with the financial capability to risk some of the funds in prudently risky ventures. They key here is that the risk should be to the firm, and not spread out over a population that was not going to benefit significantly if the risk paid off.
For instance, buffer overflows involves a design decision not to test boundaries. Many would blame the language or the complier for this, but in fact is the developer. The compiler or language does not do this because it was inefficient on older machines to have this overhead even when it was not needed. it was left up to the developer to implement these procedures when it was needed, either as code that would not run in production, or single instance code that would not be efficiently run in production. The decision not to do such checks is a design decision made by the developer, possible a good and defensible decision until someone hacks the code.
Ignoring the fact that cops often assume guilt, criminals with weapons is why I can't exactly condemn local, state and federal authorities coming in with major artillery. The probable cause is there, the arrest must be made, and I am not willing to let someone I pay through tax dollars be killed in the line of that arrest. It is expensive to train a new person and to pay off the family of the old one. It is much cheaper to pay off the family of the suspect, especially if the suspect begins firing after the agents identify themselves. Mistakes are made, and often the police do not show the kind of thought they should when executing a warrant, but that has to with the ways the law is written, mostly due to paranoid people who pretty much think everyone except for them is a criminal.