The Desktop PCs that our parents bought from Dell that cost around $300 and are mainly used to check e-mail and surf the web (basically all it can do anyway) are dead.
It just no longer makes sense for the average consumer to own such a large device to do such simple computing.
My step-dad recently told me he uses his Galaxy S3 in place of his desktop...
This article would have made sense to me ten years ago but today I feel like Spotify and Grooveshark (streaming audio) is the new radio.
Spotify only streams at 160kbps for non-subscribers using the Ogg Vorbis format:
q3 (~96 kbps) mobile
q5 (~160 kbps) desktop non-paid
q9 (~320 kbps) desktop pay service
And you never know what Grooveshark is going to give you.
I personally can't detect a huge difference above 160kbps and for the sake of my own collection, I used to rip at 190kbps and only 320kbps if it was an artist I absolutely loved to blow my speakers out too. Even then, my ears and sound system couldn't capture the difference.
I don't really see the problem, as bandwidth and memory costs continually drop it only seems natural that we'll migrate to higher bit-rates, especially with the prevalence of so many high-end headphones lately. I would be surprised if Spotify free fully utilizes Beats headphones and don't get me started about people using Beats to stream Pandora at 96kbps...
I can't believe that Islamic attempts are this inconsistent and will always contend that 9/11 was not purely initiated by outside Islamic forces.
Also, nothing has changed in regard to the Cold War threat of nuclear war except a direct confrontation with Soviet Russia is much less likely at this time. The threat of nuclear fallout destroying the planet is still here plus we have the added benefit of religious radicals in third world countries blowing shit up at every chance they get.
Instead of incidental speeding tickets (for those that rarely speed) or hazardous driving in heavy traffic where cops aren't always free to pursue, the driving community could flag vehicles using some heads-up, windshield interface. After X amount of flags, the driver could be reviewed and disciplined. Speed snapshots could be taken at the time of a flag for cross-referencing purposes.
The point of this would be to eliminate the "I need to meet my end of the month ticket quota" tickets and get back to actually moderating bad drivers. So in my world, speeding could be more hazardous in some contexts and less in others and it would seem fair for the driving community to moderate that.
The trick when you're planning to do something like this is to pick a large organization like Microsoft so that by the time they realize you're trolling they're licensing system you've made enough money to survive the lawsuits.
there is a rising sentiment in the gaming world that the current generation consoles are 'good enough' and that the next generation of consoles might be the last
By "good enough" I read this to mean, "graphical plateau". Obviously there will be another plateau, but at least for the next 2-3 years I don't really expect to go from Final Fantasy 7 to Mass Effect 3 in terms of magnitude of graphics performance improvement.
My thoughts are, so what? We're slowly itching toward the day when I fire up a game and its as realistic and stunning as anything on a flat screen could be.
And yes yes, 3D TVs blah blah blah, makes no different honestly, its still the same glorified plateau as long as I'm staring at a screen.
The next plateau is when I fire up a game and it connects to some neural interface in my brain and I play the entire game in the mind's eye.
Anything before then is just piling frosting on a ten year old cake, still tastes the same underneath it all.
Great. now my tires have a wireless key and if they get hacked everyone will know when I'm neglecting to keep optimum tire pressure, how embarrassing!
Let's at least get those things on WPA2 with certificates.
Apple plays off the naivety and ignorance of the average user.
Think about all the support that exists for Windows based PCs in terms of software, hardware, and technical documentation that the average person never thinks to consider as a perk of owning a Windows PC.
Similarly people who buy foreign cars usually don't consider the extra cost of parts and the possibility of no one knowing how to work on their weird car.
It's just ignorant user syndrome being exploited commercially.
For a tech like me, I would gladly take a higher failure rate, even twice the failure rate, of Windows PCs for the comfort of knowing that I have the support I need to fix them myself. When you look at it this way, in all reality, my Windows PCs have a 0% failure rate since I've never had one I could not fix in some way.
Will Apple develop some large, enterprise wide management software for all those Apple devices on one network?
I may end up doing IT at a large university soon and I can't imagine how this works, there just isn't enterprise support for Apple products like there is for Microsoft.
Right and even though it'll be masked under the guise of creating really really specific advertisement (life Facebook adds but worse), we'll still shudder at stories of Google recording random personal information, like cough* wireless router info *cough
I can honestly say that I strongly dislike the Digg community for multiple reasons. The most prominent being that the community is largely unbalanced. Anything on the most dug list not pertaining to legalizing weed, @#4% the RIAA!, socializing healthcare, or praising everything Obama does is immediately flamed and trolled.
I'm obviously not an absolutist and can easily side both ways on a lot of issues, but watching an entire community resort to petty trolling when I would much rather read intelligent comments and debate these issues rather than shred the ones I don't like with high school obscenity.
I am fairly happy knowing someone was trying to hopelessly fight the hardcore Digg users, but its a sinking ship.
After a year of using Digg I started to feel like I was hanging out with a bunch of angry internet thugs on the wrong side of town and even though no place on the internet is free of asinine trolling and ignorant flame wars, the last thing I want to do is join a community dedicated to it.
Greed.
Although a collaborative and unified effort on a large scale aimed at colonizing a new planet is highly unlikely for reasons already stated, its my personal opinion that if some substance or new material was discovered on Mars that was more valuable than crude oil and cell phone market share combined, we would start terraforming it tomorrow.
Its sad that the simple welfare of our race and future generations is not enough incentive to plan for the future, but in no way is it surprising. Say what you will about individual aspects of human nature, but as a whole we are quite dysfunctional and destructive.
But any further application of this is just lost on me, unless 8-bit side scrollers come back in full force.
Howerver if this is a step in the direction of true neural interfaces I am all in.
All the cool crap we'll have in 25 years!
Just think of what you had gadget wise in 1985...yeah me neither, now imagine 1995...yeah still not a lot but better...then think of 2005...holy crap it got better...now think of that progression 25 years into the future and tell me it wont kick ass!
Have you ever even read through the WoW forums or any internet forum?
Being able to use an online alias removes any accountability or liability that a poster has when using a forum...meaning you can say absolutely horrible things to people and not feel bad.
Example: Ikillnewbs says in the Warrior forum: "anyone who asks what his armor value should be before tanking 10ICC does not deserve to live or play this game".
-->You would never say this to a person's face in real life.
Blizzard is probably just tired of paying people to moderate a bunch of angry nerds with tourette syndrome.
If there is any humanity left on the internet, this may return some of it to the forums.
Also, from an IT perspective having someone's full name from a forum post is not exactly a huge tip off, there would still be some moderately involved hacking to exploit that person further which could be initiated with or without the last name.
Anyone looking for exploitable WoW players can get all they want from Facebook, they are the real jerks selling your private info to the world!
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it not perceived as intolerant to not tolerate those who are intolerant of religion?
The Desktop PCs that our parents bought from Dell that cost around $300 and are mainly used to check e-mail and surf the web (basically all it can do anyway) are dead. It just no longer makes sense for the average consumer to own such a large device to do such simple computing. My step-dad recently told me he uses his Galaxy S3 in place of his desktop...
This article would have made sense to me ten years ago but today I feel like Spotify and Grooveshark (streaming audio) is the new radio.
Spotify only streams at 160kbps for non-subscribers using the Ogg Vorbis format:
q3 (~96 kbps) mobile
q5 (~160 kbps) desktop non-paid
q9 (~320 kbps) desktop pay service
And you never know what Grooveshark is going to give you.
I personally can't detect a huge difference above 160kbps and for the sake of my own collection, I used to rip at 190kbps and only 320kbps if it was an artist I absolutely loved to blow my speakers out too. Even then, my ears and sound system couldn't capture the difference.
I don't really see the problem, as bandwidth and memory costs continually drop it only seems natural that we'll migrate to higher bit-rates, especially with the prevalence of so many high-end headphones lately. I would be surprised if Spotify free fully utilizes Beats headphones and don't get me started about people using Beats to stream Pandora at 96kbps...
I can't believe that Islamic attempts are this inconsistent and will always contend that 9/11 was not purely initiated by outside Islamic forces.
Also, nothing has changed in regard to the Cold War threat of nuclear war except a direct confrontation with Soviet Russia is much less likely at this time. The threat of nuclear fallout destroying the planet is still here plus we have the added benefit of religious radicals in third world countries blowing shit up at every chance they get.
Instead of incidental speeding tickets (for those that rarely speed) or hazardous driving in heavy traffic where cops aren't always free to pursue, the driving community could flag vehicles using some heads-up, windshield interface. After X amount of flags, the driver could be reviewed and disciplined. Speed snapshots could be taken at the time of a flag for cross-referencing purposes.
The point of this would be to eliminate the "I need to meet my end of the month ticket quota" tickets and get back to actually moderating bad drivers. So in my world, speeding could be more hazardous in some contexts and less in others and it would seem fair for the driving community to moderate that.
What do you think?
The trick when you're planning to do something like this is to pick a large organization like Microsoft so that by the time they realize you're trolling they're licensing system you've made enough money to survive the lawsuits.
there is a rising sentiment in the gaming world that the current generation consoles are 'good enough' and that the next generation of consoles might be the last
By "good enough" I read this to mean, "graphical plateau". Obviously there will be another plateau, but at least for the next 2-3 years I don't really expect to go from Final Fantasy 7 to Mass Effect 3 in terms of magnitude of graphics performance improvement. My thoughts are, so what? We're slowly itching toward the day when I fire up a game and its as realistic and stunning as anything on a flat screen could be. And yes yes, 3D TVs blah blah blah, makes no different honestly, its still the same glorified plateau as long as I'm staring at a screen. The next plateau is when I fire up a game and it connects to some neural interface in my brain and I play the entire game in the mind's eye. Anything before then is just piling frosting on a ten year old cake, still tastes the same underneath it all.
Great. now my tires have a wireless key and if they get hacked everyone will know when I'm neglecting to keep optimum tire pressure, how embarrassing! Let's at least get those things on WPA2 with certificates.
Apple plays off the naivety and ignorance of the average user.
Think about all the support that exists for Windows based PCs in terms of software, hardware, and technical documentation that the average person never thinks to consider as a perk of owning a Windows PC.
Similarly people who buy foreign cars usually don't consider the extra cost of parts and the possibility of no one knowing how to work on their weird car.
It's just ignorant user syndrome being exploited commercially.
For a tech like me, I would gladly take a higher failure rate, even twice the failure rate, of Windows PCs for the comfort of knowing that I have the support I need to fix them myself. When you look at it this way, in all reality, my Windows PCs have a 0% failure rate since I've never had one I could not fix in some way.
Will Apple develop some large, enterprise wide management software for all those Apple devices on one network? I may end up doing IT at a large university soon and I can't imagine how this works, there just isn't enterprise support for Apple products like there is for Microsoft.
I agree. Religious related slander could be an entire section on Digg and that way I would never have to see any of it.
Right and even though it'll be masked under the guise of creating really really specific advertisement (life Facebook adds but worse), we'll still shudder at stories of Google recording random personal information, like cough* wireless router info *cough
I can honestly say that I strongly dislike the Digg community for multiple reasons. The most prominent being that the community is largely unbalanced. Anything on the most dug list not pertaining to legalizing weed, @#4% the RIAA!, socializing healthcare, or praising everything Obama does is immediately flamed and trolled.
I'm obviously not an absolutist and can easily side both ways on a lot of issues, but watching an entire community resort to petty trolling when I would much rather read intelligent comments and debate these issues rather than shred the ones I don't like with high school obscenity.
I am fairly happy knowing someone was trying to hopelessly fight the hardcore Digg users, but its a sinking ship.
After a year of using Digg I started to feel like I was hanging out with a bunch of angry internet thugs on the wrong side of town and even though no place on the internet is free of asinine trolling and ignorant flame wars, the last thing I want to do is join a community dedicated to it.
Greed. Although a collaborative and unified effort on a large scale aimed at colonizing a new planet is highly unlikely for reasons already stated, its my personal opinion that if some substance or new material was discovered on Mars that was more valuable than crude oil and cell phone market share combined, we would start terraforming it tomorrow. Its sad that the simple welfare of our race and future generations is not enough incentive to plan for the future, but in no way is it surprising. Say what you will about individual aspects of human nature, but as a whole we are quite dysfunctional and destructive.
But any further application of this is just lost on me, unless 8-bit side scrollers come back in full force. Howerver if this is a step in the direction of true neural interfaces I am all in.
the sun farted...?
All the cool crap we'll have in 25 years! Just think of what you had gadget wise in 1985...yeah me neither, now imagine 1995...yeah still not a lot but better...then think of 2005...holy crap it got better...now think of that progression 25 years into the future and tell me it wont kick ass!
Exactly.
Less people trolling those forums is not a bad thing either, knowing that everyone QQing about this wont be on the WoW forums anymore makes my day
Have you ever even read through the WoW forums or any internet forum?
Being able to use an online alias removes any accountability or liability that a poster has when using a forum...meaning you can say absolutely horrible things to people and not feel bad.
Example: Ikillnewbs says in the Warrior forum: "anyone who asks what his armor value should be before tanking 10ICC does not deserve to live or play this game". -->You would never say this to a person's face in real life.
Blizzard is probably just tired of paying people to moderate a bunch of angry nerds with tourette syndrome.
If there is any humanity left on the internet, this may return some of it to the forums.
Also, from an IT perspective having someone's full name from a forum post is not exactly a huge tip off, there would still be some moderately involved hacking to exploit that person further which could be initiated with or without the last name.
Anyone looking for exploitable WoW players can get all they want from Facebook, they are the real jerks selling your private info to the world!