There was a time when iTunes was the resource hog. Apple seems to have gotten it under control.
OTOH Flash seems to be getting worse. It would seem that a year of work to get Flash on mobile devices would help, but that is not the case. As MS appears to be giving up on Silverlight on mobile, the same energy issue might apply.
Netflix and Hulu seem to be able to get video on the iPhone without it. Given that there are only four major mobile devices, it may be beneficial to write code for each instead of depending on the type of vitalization on the PC. Cycles and energy is expensive on mobile devices.
Honestly, if a relationship lives and dies for St. Valentines day it is a pretty worthless relationship anyway. Valentines day is a good excuse for love and creating a lovin' environment and lovin' people one would not normally love, but anyone who would break up based on insufficient evidence on love on that single day is probably not anyone but the most shallow people would date.
It is much more likely that people break up immediately after valentines day because it would be pretty silly to break up immediately before Valentines day. For adults in a very friendly relationship, to be stereotypical, it might mean a chance, maybe the only chance, at sex. If nothing else the social stigma of being alone on valentines would make many tolerate even the most offensive partner. To be even more mercenary, who are you going to get to go out with the week before valentines? Only the most dispicable people, while after valentines the market it wide open.
The other days are less obvious. For adults I can imagine a someone taking a partner to meet the parents on thanksgiving, and that going horribly wrong.
Spring break is mostly for college kids, but a theory works for christmas as well. One have a partner at school, and one is off for a month. Does one go home to an old partner, or stay with someone you are not going to see for a while, and maybe lose interest in a month. Spring break is the same thing. Who is going to forgo companionship for a week, especially those that are so love crazy that they will update thier facebook page every time a relationship changes.
Which is another clarification in the headlines. People who want the world to know that they are dating only break up a times when it is appropriate.
I wonder if people worried about this when the land telephone system was being deployed. I mean these stupid people are spending hours on the phone. Why do they no just go over and have a face to face conversation. The telephone system was clearly not designed for people to spend all day on the phone, at least at the residential level. If people want to do that, they can pay extra to tie up a switch all day. Obviously people who want to do that will have to buy their own infrastructure.
To some extent that is what large users of the telephone system did. But mostly what happened is that other saw an opportunity to server customers at a profit, and so additional infrastructure was built. More cable was run, satellites replaced intercontinental physical lines, and bandwidth exploded. At some point the bloated cost structure along with the oversupply of voice bandwidth meant many of these phone companies went bust, but the point is there was never a time when we could not make a land line phone call.
The only issue with bandwidth is that the conservatives telcos refuse to run fiber to all places. Relatively dense locations only have cable TV internet because they do not have the demographics that the Telcos want. The other issue is that Telcos are pushing the fiber service, so they are letting DSL deteriorate. Otherwise I have an obscene number of options, all running through different pipes. I have a cable network, two fiber options, a DSL option, and two wireless options presumably running under two sperate spectrum allocations. Since no one would normally pay for all those services, or use all the bandwidth, I assume we have a slight oversupply.
The new BSG was basically a soap opera for the women and a sexy show for the men. It had a dash of pseudo spirituality, and a game where cylons were slowly revealed. The basic premise was slaves trying to destroy the former owners, and former owners feeling guilty about killing the former slaves, but they had no choice. The reason the techno-babble was minimal was because the whole technology thing was irrelevent. The show was purposely designed to not alienate viewers with the science fiction angle.
OTOH, more innovative shows like SG-1 and B5 did manage to use the plot device effectively, explore the broad impact of technology on our civilization, and the stress caused when different cultures mingle. These are real non-trivial problems that we need to explore. Not paranoid delusions that are featured on BSG, like one person getting seduced and destroying a world, or technology, like facebook, being used by kids to plan virtual or real sex parties, or us losing all our material goods to terrorists and having to live like them.
To boot, these other shows, especially B5, did at least attempt to make the physics work. How did the crew of BSG no float around, given that they were in space?
I was ok with the remake of BSG. It was a good story, though not really what I would call useful science fiction. Caprica is crap.
So we know that Android has a kill switch, and has used it. Furthermore, the carriers have full access to the code and can put in whatever limiting features they wish. Even if a user can install an App not through an official portal, anyone has the option to disable it.
MS has pretty much locked down the MS Windows 7 phone to a limited number of variations. We now see that MS will control the platform, down to what users are allowed to run. Even if a user does not buy an App through the official portal, MS has said clearly they have the right to disable and delete any App they wish.
OTOH, Apple has a list of malicious applications, and it unclear what the purpose is. Will it warn the user that an installed App has been found to malicious? Will it shut down the phone until a clean restore is done? Will it brick the phone? What is true is that I have not heard of anyone paying for an and them Apple removing it from the phone.
Until Apple pulls an App from my iphone, I will not worry about this part of it.
Really this should not be an issue. Any customization should be a relatively high level, and if the device manufactures are playing fair any low level fixes should be put back into the source tree. If kernel fixes are going to negatively impact Android as implemented on individual devices, this would lead credence to the idea that Android will eventually die due to fragmentation. If the community cannot self enforce a strict set of guidelines to insure low level fixes will not break the higher level code, then there is no point.
Which means that it is the worst of both worlds. The App is not outright malicious, as it does not include secret functionality. It will still be available, users will simply have to go the black market, which will result in more users becoming familiair with the black market, which means they are more likely to use it. So the App store, which main purpose it protect users from malicious software, will have utterly failed in it's mission.
Furthermore, this shows a serious flaw in security model of Android. There is no reason to allow end user installed apps to run without any evidence to the user. Every App should have an icon somewhere announcing it's presence. Any app that communicates should have an indication that it is doing so. On iPhone , for example, there is a locations services panel that allows on to turn off any app that wants to know your location. It would be nice to also have one that would do the same for text or network access, but it seems that such would a feature on the Android that is an open platform.
At the very least this should not be an issue as there should be a password required to install an App, on the iPhone it is the ITMS password. If a person gives that password to the person they are cheating on, i don't see how that is anyone else's problem
When people deride Murdoch, they do so because much of what he does is opinion, not journalism. This is analogous with writing a coherent story as opposed to putting some fools on stage and letting them act like fools. One require thoughtful inquiry or analysis or reflection, the other requires...nothing.
The media outlets that survive will fulfill a need, either journalism, titilation, or vouyerism. The problem is that the later two are very easy to produce, and in the new media will not support a large ancillary staff and over paid executives, as The National Enquirer has learned.
Murdoch tends to try to create value by smoke and mirrors, putting crap in a shiny package and a bow. Some people like his crap and will pay for it. But will that be enough.
I hear the Hobbit is going to cost at least $500 million to produce. Add the advertising and distribution costs and you have billion dollar film. Clearly this is an positive economic decision because even if the near term gross is only 1.25 billion, someone stands to make a lot of money.
But what does the Hobbit give to Humanity long term. What does the billion buy us. Do we get experience building a reliable structure in a hostile, novel environment? Do we get to do science in an environment not available on earth? Do we get new technology?
Ok, on such film we do get new technology. But when we do science, especially big science, it is not on the same basis as a production job. In science we throw money at problems, sometimes it shows results, sometimes it doesn't, but when it does the economy is transformed and the value cannot be calculated.
I mean what is the value of radio? What is the value of tv? What is the value of being able to travel quickly from the US to New Zealand? What is the value of being to transmit data quickly form US to New Zealand? ATT certainly is not profiting off The Hobbits digital cameras, does that mean the CCD was a waste of money?
Part of the problem with the space station is it took money from a relatively small pile of money that can be used for big science, which means that other project leaders are pissed that they cannot do their big science. But the bigger problem is that the common person sees the billion dollars and thinks that it is a lot of money. But do you think all the money that was spent on basic research leading up to the creation of the NAND chip hasn't been paid over many times in the transformative technology of the solid state drive? Do we seriously think that space is not going to transform and improve our society?
In civilized conservative parts of the US, children can drink alcohol with parents perimision. This reflects the norm in the civilized world. Of course well meaning liberals and fake conservatives wants the big government that results from controlling every minutia of the citizenry. What we can read, what we eat, what we can drink.
This does not mean there are not consequences. I don't believe in requiring helmets, but I would hate to be in the insurance pool with a person who rides a motorcycle and does not wear a helment. Such a person is stealing from me. Likewise, if a parent is not serving a child appropriate amounts of alcohol, that parent is libel for the resulting damage. This consequence based model makes much more sense than the big government telling us what games we can play in our own houses.
So I would say if someone is offended by beer and cigs, then it is perfectly acceptable for other people to be offended by video games with gratuitous violence. If however we realize that everyone is going be be offended by something, and will tend to group all those things under one umbrella, then we can reach a point where we are confortable letting other people doing things that we find offended without getting offended by that fact that other think differently that we do.
The damage, of course, comes when one person thinks what they do is protected speech, maybe even art, and what other people do is simply random acts of terrorism.
This is why most sites with interstitial flash ads include a 'skip this ad'. If they didn't the ad is nearly the equivalent of a paywall. Therefore, if these ads cannot be skipped the content produces is saying, in effect, that they wish they could have a pay wall, but the content is not in fact valuable enough for a pay wall. In that case users are likely to agree and not bother to go through the hoops.
Content, is in fact, becoming sophisticated enough for me to pay for it. The problem is that the prices are quite high. It seems that many firms either don't want to steal from the distribution of their physical product and/or ad supported product, or the situation with ads is not nearly as dire as publicly states.
I think when a technology is just developing, it is sometimes really hard to say what the costs are going to be. It is easy to over think the problem and never even get a prototype, much less a production model. Often we do not see the full effects, or lack thereof, until mass production sets in.
When the shuttle was being developed, it was thought it would be much more environmentally destructive that it turned out to be. OTOH, if we were to have shuttle launches every day, we would probably see an unacceptable level of environmental destruction due to acid fallout.
That is my concern. When we have entrenched interests like coal mining, or auto manufacturers, or factory farming, that are clearly destructive, we can't get rid of them. Coal mining is fine until we blow up mountains and poison rivers. Autos are the most responsive, they got rid of lead, are safer, less fuel wasteful, but still resis some basic changes. Factory farming was never a good idea, but makes cheap meat so no one wants to give that up.
The point is that we need to let technology develop, and then have the wil to fix the problems, or scrap the technology, if it is destructive. We can do. Almost no one uses CRT monitors anymore, at a savings of 50% of the power. My computer runs on less than 100 watts. Of couse most of the time we let FUD keep up from solutions, as we see with windmills. Not ideal, but really fairer to everyone.
This is the primary reason I don't buy MS kit unless I have to. I have spent too many hours trying to fool MS into thinking that my legally purchased products were not pirated. It seems to me that MS puts much more time into making sure customers can't use the product than making sure the product is reliable.
And I know this is not really MS fault, just like it is not MS fault that if I upgrade a computer MS WIndows is considered a pirated copy or if I change computer MS Office is now pirated. It is the fault of the users that received a product and thought that it was usable.
This is essentially what is happening, and it has been going on for a few years.
Essentially a sphere will be created of a specific isotope of silicon and a specific diameter. This sphere will have a known number of atoms. This is superior not only because of degradation of a physical standard, but also because it will be easier to create a standard from basic principles using appropriate lab equipment.
The US is quite late in it's objection as the problem has been known and accepted for many years. TIme and distance is essentially measured with light, and only the kilogram still has a physical representation.
It is probably a simple matter for the US to accept the new standard.
I don't think that the situation is this dire. Sure, the high profile places with heavy promotion and profit opportunities are fully exploited. On the other hand highest does not mean most difficult to pursue, especially when every trail has been mapped.
I believe that their are a few high peaks that remain unclimbed. This might make them more important that tall peak. I mean any deity can hide in high peak. It takes a cleaver deity to live in a lower, but well protected, peak.
Also there are a few place on earth, particularly in South America, that are pretty unexplored. Although they are probably just like any other piece of real estate in the area, only the most dire hard explorer is going to go there.
MS pretty much did very little consumer computing. It works with commercial enterprises to use MS branded components to create complete products. Some of these products are consumer oriented. Sometimes MS will brand a consumer product as it's own, and sometimes they have even done a significant amount of the design work. The only significant example of a succesful consumer product that is both designed and branded by MS is Xbox.
The reason IE market dominance was important was because is fostered the market fragmentation that encouraged computer manufacturers to use MS products. IE, for all intents and purposes, was really only fully useful on MS Windows, so if the web was built for IE, then it was built for MS Windows computers. As IE became less used, firms were not willing to dismiss 10% of their customers, often the higher income customers, just because these customers did not wan to use IE. Advances in technology meant that there were other was to implement the IE functionality, so people started creating web sites that were not IE specific. In particular, Google was not likely to make money throwing huge amounts of money to MS, so they had to come up with techniques implemented with open standards.
The question, IMHO, that the article is addressing is if the success in the desktop market can be reproduced in the mobile market in which a larger number of buying decisions in made at the consumer level and where compatibility with office equipment is not such an overriding issue. In this case, the consumer is more likley to buy something with a perceived brand value as opposed to vendor lock in. An iPhone, an Android phone, a Blackberry, can probably interface with the Outlook server and office documents as well or better as a MS Mobile phone. Such phones can also interface with social services better than a MS phone, which is limited in this respect.
The hope is that MS can subsidize the phone as they did with Xbox. If MS can get a buch of phones placed that cost $0 with a two year contract, then MS Mobile is probably a good enough product to start building brand loyalty. MS is certainly spending enough on ads and it look like they are giving ATT huge bags of money to push the phone, but if the consumer has to shell out cash to get one, there has to be some brand incentive.
When Apple installs Flash, it does not just get installed for Safari, it gets installed for all browsers and all users. If it only go installed for Safari, then the solution would be simple, simply never use Safari. In fact, I find Safari to often not be useful and still don't use Safari regularly. I agree that click to flash seems pretty benign.
Fortunately Chimera/Camino had a flash blocker off and on for a while, and such functionality is now built in. This is why it no longer matters if Flash is installed.
Years ago when safari was first released, I would always remove from my computer. A few flash items could really bog down a system and there was not a wide availability of flash blocker. Macromedia chose not to put in "default no play" option so I did not use it. The problem was that every time Safari updated Flash would be reinstalled and I had to uninstall it.
Now Flash can be easily blocked, so it is not such an issue. Flash is also easily installed, so i users wat they can get it.
I would say one small thing in defense of not shipping Flash. To be fail Apple should also ship Silverlight. While in such widespread use, every person who watches netflix on Mac needs it. It seems silly to give Flash preferential treatment. The only reason it Apple did so wsa becasuse Apples Ads at one time were flash heavy. Now they aren't.
Frnakly the only useful places I need flash is Google stocks and the fashion sites. Otherwise Flash has become increasingly lame afer a couple years of usefulness.
Life time of hard disk is very random. I shuttle my back up hard drives out every couple years because after that random mechanical issues can occur. I can use my laptop harddrives longer, but they are backed up.
SSDs are in fact getting very cheap, especially in the small form factor catagory. The issue is how much storage on needs and what size. An iPod classic is cheaper than a iPod Touch, but for most people 64GB will hold as much as they want, and an iPod classic does not have the extra features.
Additionally, SSDs do not seem to be driving prices. A 64GB iPad is $700 while and HP Slate with the same memory is $800, and that is for the cheap 32 bit version and a smaller screen and half the battery life.
For the average consumer I think SSDs will take over. They allow the computer to be smaller, which is a selling point. The require less cooling, which can reduct the cost. They increase battery life. 64GB, which is fine useless one is hoarding movies, will allow the sub $500 computer, especially since MS seems to be willing to play the net book game.
This reminds me of how everyone always said the laptop would never take over the desktop because it was not easy to upgrade, and not cheap, and as powerful and when the screen broke you lost the whole machine. Yet people paid more money for less machines because it was a much nicer form factor.
Absolutely. It is often not cost effective to write programs just for Mac, so many of the programs that Mac user depend on are written in Java. By not telling us if we will continue to run Java, we are left with uncertainty if the Mac will run mission critical code.
Many will say that Oracle can supply the JVM. That is not acceptable. This will lead to cases where the JVM is broken by an Apple update to the OS. This is not like Flash where if it breaks, who cars. There is nothing critical about flash. This is about Mac users getting work done.
I hope the situation is not as dire as some think. I think is is part of the launchpad/App store thing, which IMHO is just a gimmick to get iOS users to buy a mac. The one big problem with iOS is that it does not run Java, and it does the iPad cannot replace a laptop. If the Mac does not run Java, then it will have a much harder time competing with a PC, which means the high end Laptops will become much less atrractive.
From the books that the MS people published, it is clear that they theoretically knew how to write code. That they could get functional operating systems and applications programs out the door indicated that they could manage large projects.
I remember reading books like Solid Code and understanding how to put together a program, not just write functions that would compile. MS Press filled the time between the old time books like Composite Structured Design and the Mythical Man Month and more contemporary books like the Pragmatic Programmer. What I saw, however, was that MS was not moving forward with modern techniques and design patterns. At least from the outside, it appeared that they were stuck in the 80's.
Nevertheless, one cold do worse than reading these books as a basis in programming, not just coding.
The top of the MBA is extremely susceptible to dents. Expect damage. I don't know how that effects warrenty. The side and top bottom half of the MBA, and I am sure this is the same, are thick and rigid and provide much of the structure.. They do not tend to show damage after a dent. The hinges, on the other hand, are unreliable. Let us hope the fixed these.
As far as the other complaints, the MBA is not built for speed. It is slow. At times it just sits there and thinks. There is no such thing as a free lunch. It is fast enough for many common tasks. I run LaTex and Keynote all day long.
The battery life is bad. What is worse is the charge time. I doubt this has been fixed. Hours and hours to charge.
I find it funny that people still want an ethernet port. What is next, a floppy disk drive? I feel like I an in the stone age if I have to 'plug in' Carry an airport express on trips for those primitive places that do not offer wireless. I guess older people just need to have things done they way they always have been done.
Looking quickly at this, Colombia hasn't signed the treaty, so it could be launched from there. There is some infrastructure in Colombia, and certainly South America has mineral stores and processing equipment. One wonders if the US would bomb such a venture as it does other legitimate business activities. The satellite could also be launched into geosynchronous orbit. Colombia is may 30 degrees from a stable point, and it is only a couple degrees off the equator, so there could be good line of sight there. Access to a seaports on the Atlantic and Pacific this could be the new industry.
This just happened again the other day. Older version of MS Word on an older machine. I know that updates can loaded and filters can be installed, what I do not understand is why file formats cannot be made somewhat backwards compatible by establishing a system of conditional statements. Of course such a feature would only encourage people not to pay for upgrades, which would be very bad.
Anyway Openoffice solved the problem. There are features that open office does not have, like collaboration, is handled by Google Docs. I had no problem paying MS money until the day when reliability was called into question.
Apple has never played the clock cycle game. There are just too many other things that are important, like bus speed, like the fact that there is a solid state hard disk, like a 1066 MHz front side bus. By comparison, many computer have faster chips, but FSB of 800 MHz.
The older Airs have chips around 1.5 GHz, but the real problem, IMHO, is that Mac OS now wants lots of ram, lots of disk space, and more than one processor. The new Air fixes all this, so I think it could be a pretty fast machine, even though the chip is not so fast. I think it will be faster than many of the other machines that can be had for around $1000.
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OTOH Flash seems to be getting worse. It would seem that a year of work to get Flash on mobile devices would help, but that is not the case. As MS appears to be giving up on Silverlight on mobile, the same energy issue might apply.
Netflix and Hulu seem to be able to get video on the iPhone without it. Given that there are only four major mobile devices, it may be beneficial to write code for each instead of depending on the type of vitalization on the PC. Cycles and energy is expensive on mobile devices.
It is much more likely that people break up immediately after valentines day because it would be pretty silly to break up immediately before Valentines day. For adults in a very friendly relationship, to be stereotypical, it might mean a chance, maybe the only chance, at sex. If nothing else the social stigma of being alone on valentines would make many tolerate even the most offensive partner. To be even more mercenary, who are you going to get to go out with the week before valentines? Only the most dispicable people, while after valentines the market it wide open.
The other days are less obvious. For adults I can imagine a someone taking a partner to meet the parents on thanksgiving, and that going horribly wrong.
Spring break is mostly for college kids, but a theory works for christmas as well. One have a partner at school, and one is off for a month. Does one go home to an old partner, or stay with someone you are not going to see for a while, and maybe lose interest in a month. Spring break is the same thing. Who is going to forgo companionship for a week, especially those that are so love crazy that they will update thier facebook page every time a relationship changes.
Which is another clarification in the headlines. People who want the world to know that they are dating only break up a times when it is appropriate.
To some extent that is what large users of the telephone system did. But mostly what happened is that other saw an opportunity to server customers at a profit, and so additional infrastructure was built. More cable was run, satellites replaced intercontinental physical lines, and bandwidth exploded. At some point the bloated cost structure along with the oversupply of voice bandwidth meant many of these phone companies went bust, but the point is there was never a time when we could not make a land line phone call.
The only issue with bandwidth is that the conservatives telcos refuse to run fiber to all places. Relatively dense locations only have cable TV internet because they do not have the demographics that the Telcos want. The other issue is that Telcos are pushing the fiber service, so they are letting DSL deteriorate. Otherwise I have an obscene number of options, all running through different pipes. I have a cable network, two fiber options, a DSL option, and two wireless options presumably running under two sperate spectrum allocations. Since no one would normally pay for all those services, or use all the bandwidth, I assume we have a slight oversupply.
OTOH, more innovative shows like SG-1 and B5 did manage to use the plot device effectively, explore the broad impact of technology on our civilization, and the stress caused when different cultures mingle. These are real non-trivial problems that we need to explore. Not paranoid delusions that are featured on BSG, like one person getting seduced and destroying a world, or technology, like facebook, being used by kids to plan virtual or real sex parties, or us losing all our material goods to terrorists and having to live like them.
To boot, these other shows, especially B5, did at least attempt to make the physics work. How did the crew of BSG no float around, given that they were in space?
I was ok with the remake of BSG. It was a good story, though not really what I would call useful science fiction. Caprica is crap.
MS has pretty much locked down the MS Windows 7 phone to a limited number of variations. We now see that MS will control the platform, down to what users are allowed to run. Even if a user does not buy an App through the official portal, MS has said clearly they have the right to disable and delete any App they wish.
OTOH, Apple has a list of malicious applications, and it unclear what the purpose is. Will it warn the user that an installed App has been found to malicious? Will it shut down the phone until a clean restore is done? Will it brick the phone? What is true is that I have not heard of anyone paying for an and them Apple removing it from the phone.
Until Apple pulls an App from my iphone, I will not worry about this part of it.
Really this should not be an issue. Any customization should be a relatively high level, and if the device manufactures are playing fair any low level fixes should be put back into the source tree. If kernel fixes are going to negatively impact Android as implemented on individual devices, this would lead credence to the idea that Android will eventually die due to fragmentation. If the community cannot self enforce a strict set of guidelines to insure low level fixes will not break the higher level code, then there is no point.
Furthermore, this shows a serious flaw in security model of Android. There is no reason to allow end user installed apps to run without any evidence to the user. Every App should have an icon somewhere announcing it's presence. Any app that communicates should have an indication that it is doing so. On iPhone , for example, there is a locations services panel that allows on to turn off any app that wants to know your location. It would be nice to also have one that would do the same for text or network access, but it seems that such would a feature on the Android that is an open platform.
At the very least this should not be an issue as there should be a password required to install an App, on the iPhone it is the ITMS password. If a person gives that password to the person they are cheating on, i don't see how that is anyone else's problem
The media outlets that survive will fulfill a need, either journalism, titilation, or vouyerism. The problem is that the later two are very easy to produce, and in the new media will not support a large ancillary staff and over paid executives, as The National Enquirer has learned.
Murdoch tends to try to create value by smoke and mirrors, putting crap in a shiny package and a bow. Some people like his crap and will pay for it. But will that be enough.
But what does the Hobbit give to Humanity long term. What does the billion buy us. Do we get experience building a reliable structure in a hostile, novel environment? Do we get to do science in an environment not available on earth? Do we get new technology?
Ok, on such film we do get new technology. But when we do science, especially big science, it is not on the same basis as a production job. In science we throw money at problems, sometimes it shows results, sometimes it doesn't, but when it does the economy is transformed and the value cannot be calculated.
I mean what is the value of radio? What is the value of tv? What is the value of being able to travel quickly from the US to New Zealand? What is the value of being to transmit data quickly form US to New Zealand? ATT certainly is not profiting off The Hobbits digital cameras, does that mean the CCD was a waste of money?
Part of the problem with the space station is it took money from a relatively small pile of money that can be used for big science, which means that other project leaders are pissed that they cannot do their big science. But the bigger problem is that the common person sees the billion dollars and thinks that it is a lot of money. But do you think all the money that was spent on basic research leading up to the creation of the NAND chip hasn't been paid over many times in the transformative technology of the solid state drive? Do we seriously think that space is not going to transform and improve our society?
This does not mean there are not consequences. I don't believe in requiring helmets, but I would hate to be in the insurance pool with a person who rides a motorcycle and does not wear a helment. Such a person is stealing from me. Likewise, if a parent is not serving a child appropriate amounts of alcohol, that parent is libel for the resulting damage. This consequence based model makes much more sense than the big government telling us what games we can play in our own houses.
So I would say if someone is offended by beer and cigs, then it is perfectly acceptable for other people to be offended by video games with gratuitous violence. If however we realize that everyone is going be be offended by something, and will tend to group all those things under one umbrella, then we can reach a point where we are confortable letting other people doing things that we find offended without getting offended by that fact that other think differently that we do.
The damage, of course, comes when one person thinks what they do is protected speech, maybe even art, and what other people do is simply random acts of terrorism.
Content, is in fact, becoming sophisticated enough for me to pay for it. The problem is that the prices are quite high. It seems that many firms either don't want to steal from the distribution of their physical product and/or ad supported product, or the situation with ads is not nearly as dire as publicly states.
When the shuttle was being developed, it was thought it would be much more environmentally destructive that it turned out to be. OTOH, if we were to have shuttle launches every day, we would probably see an unacceptable level of environmental destruction due to acid fallout.
That is my concern. When we have entrenched interests like coal mining, or auto manufacturers, or factory farming, that are clearly destructive, we can't get rid of them. Coal mining is fine until we blow up mountains and poison rivers. Autos are the most responsive, they got rid of lead, are safer, less fuel wasteful, but still resis some basic changes. Factory farming was never a good idea, but makes cheap meat so no one wants to give that up.
The point is that we need to let technology develop, and then have the wil to fix the problems, or scrap the technology, if it is destructive. We can do. Almost no one uses CRT monitors anymore, at a savings of 50% of the power. My computer runs on less than 100 watts. Of couse most of the time we let FUD keep up from solutions, as we see with windmills. Not ideal, but really fairer to everyone.
And I know this is not really MS fault, just like it is not MS fault that if I upgrade a computer MS WIndows is considered a pirated copy or if I change computer MS Office is now pirated. It is the fault of the users that received a product and thought that it was usable.
Essentially a sphere will be created of a specific isotope of silicon and a specific diameter. This sphere will have a known number of atoms. This is superior not only because of degradation of a physical standard, but also because it will be easier to create a standard from basic principles using appropriate lab equipment.
The US is quite late in it's objection as the problem has been known and accepted for many years. TIme and distance is essentially measured with light, and only the kilogram still has a physical representation.
It is probably a simple matter for the US to accept the new standard.
I believe that their are a few high peaks that remain unclimbed. This might make them more important that tall peak. I mean any deity can hide in high peak. It takes a cleaver deity to live in a lower, but well protected, peak.
Also there are a few place on earth, particularly in South America, that are pretty unexplored. Although they are probably just like any other piece of real estate in the area, only the most dire hard explorer is going to go there.
The reason IE market dominance was important was because is fostered the market fragmentation that encouraged computer manufacturers to use MS products. IE, for all intents and purposes, was really only fully useful on MS Windows, so if the web was built for IE, then it was built for MS Windows computers. As IE became less used, firms were not willing to dismiss 10% of their customers, often the higher income customers, just because these customers did not wan to use IE. Advances in technology meant that there were other was to implement the IE functionality, so people started creating web sites that were not IE specific. In particular, Google was not likely to make money throwing huge amounts of money to MS, so they had to come up with techniques implemented with open standards.
The question, IMHO, that the article is addressing is if the success in the desktop market can be reproduced in the mobile market in which a larger number of buying decisions in made at the consumer level and where compatibility with office equipment is not such an overriding issue. In this case, the consumer is more likley to buy something with a perceived brand value as opposed to vendor lock in. An iPhone, an Android phone, a Blackberry, can probably interface with the Outlook server and office documents as well or better as a MS Mobile phone. Such phones can also interface with social services better than a MS phone, which is limited in this respect.
The hope is that MS can subsidize the phone as they did with Xbox. If MS can get a buch of phones placed that cost $0 with a two year contract, then MS Mobile is probably a good enough product to start building brand loyalty. MS is certainly spending enough on ads and it look like they are giving ATT huge bags of money to push the phone, but if the consumer has to shell out cash to get one, there has to be some brand incentive.
Fortunately Chimera/Camino had a flash blocker off and on for a while, and such functionality is now built in. This is why it no longer matters if Flash is installed.
Now Flash can be easily blocked, so it is not such an issue. Flash is also easily installed, so i users wat they can get it.
I would say one small thing in defense of not shipping Flash. To be fail Apple should also ship Silverlight. While in such widespread use, every person who watches netflix on Mac needs it. It seems silly to give Flash preferential treatment. The only reason it Apple did so wsa becasuse Apples Ads at one time were flash heavy. Now they aren't.
Frnakly the only useful places I need flash is Google stocks and the fashion sites. Otherwise Flash has become increasingly lame afer a couple years of usefulness.
SSDs are in fact getting very cheap, especially in the small form factor catagory. The issue is how much storage on needs and what size. An iPod classic is cheaper than a iPod Touch, but for most people 64GB will hold as much as they want, and an iPod classic does not have the extra features.
Additionally, SSDs do not seem to be driving prices. A 64GB iPad is $700 while and HP Slate with the same memory is $800, and that is for the cheap 32 bit version and a smaller screen and half the battery life.
For the average consumer I think SSDs will take over. They allow the computer to be smaller, which is a selling point. The require less cooling, which can reduct the cost. They increase battery life. 64GB, which is fine useless one is hoarding movies, will allow the sub $500 computer, especially since MS seems to be willing to play the net book game.
This reminds me of how everyone always said the laptop would never take over the desktop because it was not easy to upgrade, and not cheap, and as powerful and when the screen broke you lost the whole machine. Yet people paid more money for less machines because it was a much nicer form factor.
Many will say that Oracle can supply the JVM. That is not acceptable. This will lead to cases where the JVM is broken by an Apple update to the OS. This is not like Flash where if it breaks, who cars. There is nothing critical about flash. This is about Mac users getting work done.
I hope the situation is not as dire as some think. I think is is part of the launchpad/App store thing, which IMHO is just a gimmick to get iOS users to buy a mac. The one big problem with iOS is that it does not run Java, and it does the iPad cannot replace a laptop. If the Mac does not run Java, then it will have a much harder time competing with a PC, which means the high end Laptops will become much less atrractive.
I remember reading books like Solid Code and understanding how to put together a program, not just write functions that would compile. MS Press filled the time between the old time books like Composite Structured Design and the Mythical Man Month and more contemporary books like the Pragmatic Programmer. What I saw, however, was that MS was not moving forward with modern techniques and design patterns. At least from the outside, it appeared that they were stuck in the 80's.
Nevertheless, one cold do worse than reading these books as a basis in programming, not just coding.
As far as the other complaints, the MBA is not built for speed. It is slow. At times it just sits there and thinks. There is no such thing as a free lunch. It is fast enough for many common tasks. I run LaTex and Keynote all day long.
The battery life is bad. What is worse is the charge time. I doubt this has been fixed. Hours and hours to charge.
I find it funny that people still want an ethernet port. What is next, a floppy disk drive? I feel like I an in the stone age if I have to 'plug in' Carry an airport express on trips for those primitive places that do not offer wireless. I guess older people just need to have things done they way they always have been done.
Looking quickly at this, Colombia hasn't signed the treaty, so it could be launched from there. There is some infrastructure in Colombia, and certainly South America has mineral stores and processing equipment. One wonders if the US would bomb such a venture as it does other legitimate business activities. The satellite could also be launched into geosynchronous orbit. Colombia is may 30 degrees from a stable point, and it is only a couple degrees off the equator, so there could be good line of sight there. Access to a seaports on the Atlantic and Pacific this could be the new industry.
Anyway Openoffice solved the problem. There are features that open office does not have, like collaboration, is handled by Google Docs. I had no problem paying MS money until the day when reliability was called into question.
The older Airs have chips around 1.5 GHz, but the real problem, IMHO, is that Mac OS now wants lots of ram, lots of disk space, and more than one processor. The new Air fixes all this, so I think it could be a pretty fast machine, even though the chip is not so fast. I think it will be faster than many of the other machines that can be had for around $1000.