Seriously. You romance your companion characters. They are basically pets, you give them stuff or make decisions they like and eventually some of them will be willing to marry your character. You can have one out at a time, and the rest hang out on your ship. https://skydrive.live.com/view.aspx/.Public/Swtor%20companion%20gift%20guide%20vol%202.xlsx?cid=e77018d864cdb5c7&app=Excel provides an overview of what types of gifts companions like and specifically lists the different ones that you can romance (and how that changes what they like). No same sex romance in game presently (how they intended to patch it in while gracefully connecting to the existing consistency I don't know).
All those NPC's are the creation of Bioware... a studio of EA. All the voice acting, the creation of those characters is from EA. The KOTOR universe was created by BioWare before it was borged into EA, but SWTOR is an EA game.
This doesn't seem very complicated.
In SWG if you romanced anything it was entirely player driven. Maybe you could get a GM to show up and do a speech for you, but it's a completely different scenario. In SWTOR the crux of the plot is that *YOU* and only *YOU* are 'the sith inquisitor' or 'sith warrior' or the like*. Other players of the same base class are actually inconsistent with the world (at least for some classes, I've only played 2 through to 50).
*this isn't a criticism particularly I'm just explaining for clarity.
In SWG it was all player driven though. In Mass Effect and SWTOR you are having a relationship with NPC's who are written scripted and voiced out of EA's pockets.
Mass effect 3 has an "M" for mature rating. If children are playing it then the parents should take it away from them.
It's up to BioWare/EA/developers and publishers what rating they want to aim for on a game, the same as movies. You can disagree with ratings in general or specific, so, for example, I tend to think that by 15 or 16 you should be able to figure out that gay people exist and the content in mass effect is not going to somehow damage your brain. But if you're an 8 year old there is nothing in mass effect that is really suitable for your maturity level, the whole story, theme, romance etc. are a bit too grown up for that.
Just because it's a video game doesn't make it for children. People who can't grasp that aren't worth dealing with. They have ratings on them so parents can make intelligent decisions about what their kids should be playing or watching, and how much parental oversight might be required.
Which may actually make it unlikely in microsofts eyes. Being able to have a team of professional forensics experts potentially extract data from a console is a far cry from it being actively exploited by hackers.
If you look at the paper in question they ran half a dozen tools to try and extract part of a single credit card. And pretty much everything they're looking at is pretty standard hard drive forensics sort of problems, they're discussing in specific to the 360, but there's nothing there that doesn't apply to any HDD. How 'erased' is erased data (when you write 0's to the drive), the answer is not perfectly. A general 'delete personal data' just deletes files the same way most OS's do, it just forgets the links to the files, but they still hang out on the drive and can be extracted.
It seems like the trick with the Xbox is that it has various partitions and not all of them are always overwritten, and then the general problems with magnetic storage. So sure, if the police have a specific reason to dig through one xbox 360 they might be able to recover something. But beyond that, I wouldn't count on it being a major issue.
Ok, but they make 2300 of them in march. that puts them on track for what, 30-50k sales a year. That's not exactly a mass market vehicle, that's for the people who are the edge cases that will benefit from the particular usage scenario where it is advantageous. And it's for people who are relatively well off. It's not like you need a car with airbags on the sides as well as the front and passenger positions for example, the risk of being seriously injured from not having them is relatively rare, and they're fairly expensive. I bet in 10 years though every car with have them.
The Volt is a technology commercialization demonstrator, and it's out there to establish a brand presence and to find anything wrong with the design on a small market.
If (and it's a relatively big if) you're in that 80% of people who live within about 60km of your job, *and* you drive that every day, 5 days a week, say 250 days a year(2000hrs of work, 8 hours a day) works out to about 1500 dollars a year in gas ($1.30/litre as of yesterday, but that was for regular, the volt uses premium fuel). Where I am the volt, before tax credits is 43K which is, for sake of argument, about 25k more than a comparable 5 door hatback like the sonic (15-21K), but you'd get I think 8500 dollars back from the government (ontario), that might be old numbers though, hard to follow given that it's both budget time and tax season. So your price difference is somewhere in the 15-20k range. You're counting on the vehicle having otherwise identical maintenance costs for 10-15 years for it to be worthwhile. Move to europe though, and the average price of petrol is US 2.4 per litre more or less (1.58 EUR before 20 ish VAT http://www.energy.eu/), and you have a *much* different calculation, where in canada you're talking about 1500 dollars per year in gas prices, in europe it's more like 2700 dollars for the same driving distance. Suddenly a 15k price difference is only 5 years to pay itself off, which is pretty compelling.
So now you're gambling. Assuming you plan to keep the car for 5 years, and the maintenance is no more than a sonic (for sake of argument) and your price difference is down to 15K after a tax rebate. Well... what is the price you're going to pay for fuel over 5 years going to work out to? (And what will the resell value of the car be, if anything, after 5 years). If the price of oil drops, a lot, you've lost, and lost a few thousands of dollars. If, on the other hand, the price of oil, or generally the price of gas goes up then it may have worked out in your favour.
And again, it's a niche vehicle, some people buy boats, some people buy airplanes, some people are paying a premium on a car to be able to say 'it doesn't use gas' most of the time. It's also pretty clear from the numbers that while volt 1.0 may not be a great deal economically it's not all that far off. There's a premium because they are only making a small number of them, and there's a premium for being an early adopter in anything, but if they can consistently get the price down to say 30k or the price of oil goes up 30%, or a bit of both it starts looking like its' economical for everyone. It may also be economical much earlier in different vehicles where you could more easily handle a larger charge (think minivan or SUV format, where yes, you're less fuel efficient to begin with, but you could use up some of the space for more battery too), and once there is some reasonable expectation of a decent resale value, which I wouldn't count on for volt 1.0s. Not everyone buys the most economical vehicle either. If that were the case there would only be compacts on the road. And yet people still drive around in hummers. If the volt makes you feel good about not giving the oil companies as much money, but giving money to people who are trying to innovate our way out of this mess then it might be worth it.
Oh, and all of this depends heavily on usage scenarios. I would think an electric vehicle would have much better performance in stop and go tr
They seem to be trying, and not sure who's vision of the future is the right one. Which I suppose is always the challenge.
In their defence, they do kind of have this strategy outside the US, where they bought some services overseas and have made them into something over there. In the US they might have stuck their thumbs up their arses for a while waiting to see if MS could acquire them.
There are two main places you can cut and have that move you to profitability. First, is business areas that just aren't making you money, and don't appear to be likely to make you any money any time soon. For a long time Microsofts Xbox division was an example of this. They were playing a long game, hoping it would eventually start making them money. That's fine when you have positive cashflow from somewhere else to invest, but not a good plan when you are running out of money. Googles android is another example of something that they're pouring money into but isn't (or at least wasn't) making them cash. Some of these things evolve out of a changing market place too. I'm sure Yahoo's travel service at one point was top notch and a money maker, nowdays, I don't even know if it still exists.
Secondly are'unnanounced or not yet finished products. Things which are in development costing money. This can be cutting off your nose to spite your face, but it can also be eliminating dead weight. Projects that are massively over budget, underperforming or just don't seem to fit with your new product strategy. For example yahoo has a social service to compete with Twitter, called Yahoo Meme. Guess how good a plan that is?
And, I suppose the other way is a more one at a time thing. Every outfit has some employees who are just drains on productivity, they either spend all day posting on/. and not working or are disruptive to fellow employees. If you lay them off in batches you can claim it is for 'lack of work' rather than gross incompetence or just being a douche, and you don't need to go through a lawsuit.
Not quite true. There is a windows 8 for ARM that will be tablets and phones, and Windows x86 (or actually IA64 but whatever), that will be for Intel/AMD chips. Those could be phone, tablet, or desktop.
They're also streamlining the application development so you hopefully don't have to completely rewrite your application for ARM, it's just setting multiple build targets and off you go.
How similar that makes office is hard to say. If it really is just setting a new build target everything will just kind of be there, even if it performs differently (which, given how little office does with fancy CPU extensions might not be an issue).
The space thing presents a real artificially generated problem. It's not hard to get 120GB SSD's these days, or even 60-90GB ones, which, if you put that in a phone sort of negates the problems of space. They could also pull out the old DLL store that has all the old versions of various things, that would certainly shrink things down but who knows. I'd think any sort of Windows 8 device will need 64 gigs of storage, which isn't that bad, but it's hard to say how that would sell in the marketplace.
But people didn't buy vista. MS biggest competitor is themselves. Windows 8 will have to compete with windows 7, and I have a feeling a lot of people will be waiting to upgrade to windows 9, and by then they may move to a mac and an iphone. If only we could know the future...
And ya, windows phones *should* provide a great user experience. OS updates when they're actually released, compatibility with windows apps, full document/calendar/e-mail syncing, all automatically, that sort of thing. Whether they deliver on that I don't know, but I don't think they have the 'vision' yet.
Very true. I'm not in the US so I'm not sure how the market plays out there to individual users. Do they care more about upfront cost, where a 'free on a new plan' is a lot more appealing than a 200 iPhone 4S new plan or the longer term quality of the phone? I'm not even sure what happens to the monthly rate.
And again, the lumia 900 is positioned as a mid range phone, it is, on price competing with an iPhone 3Gs or an iPhone 4. Which is a really stupid place to try and position yourself in the market, but that's another discussion entirely.
Right, which is why they have the retail arrangement with AT&T, all the floor staff were given windows 7 phones, in the hopes that would encourage their enthusiasm.
Actually if you look, the summary is wrong, it's only the ars review of the ones listed that doesn't have a generally very positive set of things to say about the phone, and the ars review is comparing it to a galaxy nexus and iphone 4s (which are 200 dollars more expensive, but much better hardware phones).
They're building up hype because they've made a pretty good mid range product, whether or not it gets any traction with consumers or AT&T retail monkeys (who then convince consumers to buy it ) who knows. They're not aiming for the 600 dollar phone market, stupidly, there should be a flagship device positioned there. But for what it is price wise, it's pretty good overall.
Billions? They've been at this a while. Kin was dead out the door, they knew it, you knew it, I knew it. Everyone knew it. But contracts must be honoured.
That doesn't mean they'll ever make any money however, it could be billions invested for nothing. The windows 8 strategy of unifying all the device OS's is actually a good idea. A decent phone these days is basically a half speed laptop (with a dual core 1.x GHz processor and a gig or so of ram that's like half a laptop), which means you really can run the same OS on everything. If you try out the windows 8 preview it seems more like it's for phones than desktops, so this might be shooting themselves in the foot with a rocket launcher overall, but we'll see. They certainly seem to be all in on this plan.
That's sort of the point of the reviews. For the price (and that does count a lot) the Lumia 900 is a decent phone. It struggles to compete with dual core phones which are much more expensive, which is a problem for the windows brand, since the Galaxy Nexus and iPhone 4s are powerful flagship devices, but as a Nokia Phone that isn't going to just be sold to rich people who can afford 500+ dollar phones it's pretty good overall (where I am the Galaxy Nexus and iPhone 4s run 575 and 650 dollars respectively, where the Lumia 900 is about 450).
Now, overall, given the circumstances I don't think that makes it a great launch. Nokia, or one of the WP7.5 launch partners should have a quad core phone out the door nowish (but then I figured the playstation vita should be a phone as well), and the lumia 900 could be a mid range device. There's a big gap in the user experience between iphone and android in terms of software updates, and it's an area on the PC that MS does surprisingly well at in terms of how updates are delivered and what works/doesn't on them. But MS doesn't seem to have delivered very well, and that's not good for anyone, least of all nokia employees and shareholders.
That isn't really true. Lots of hard drives have various states of failure, and you might be able to write data to it even if it has SMART errors. There isn't a universal way to tell if a drive is going to permanently die.
A classic example is a hard drive 'clicking'. The read head is contacting something intermittently, but it may still appear to work. You want to get that data off and onto another drive ASAP. Now if you get a drive out of the box like that, there's no point in even putting it into a machine to need to deal with it later. Unfortunately lots of problems can't be noticed with a visual or audio inspection.
You should still be prepared to recover when, inevitably, drives will fail without warning, but that's not the same as verifying equipment before it fails. It's also the same problem as trying to figure out if a drive in a raid 5 has actually failed (or otherwise has a physical problem) or if there is something wrong with your software.
There are lots of other astronomers, last I checked the US graduates about 200 PhD's in astronomy and astrophysics a year, but the vast majority of them don't get excited at the mere notion of talking about science the way Dr Tyson does. Which is why he ended up doing science outreach at planetarium, which is why they put him on TV etc.
He is by no means the only, and probably not the best scientist in the world. But his enthusiasm and energy are infectious, most of the other scientists you talk to are more concerned with publishing their next paper or making sure they have enough money to pay their graduate students. If you look at his CV he hasn't published anything academic since 2008 (nor did I immediately find anything on google scholar that would indicate he's just lazy about updating his webpage, but admittedly I don't normally search for astrophysics), and the work he's published recently seems to more be him as part of the planetarium or american museum of natural history than personal research, and he doesn't appear to take on grad students. That sets him apart from probably 90% of the practicing astronomers, in that he is actually focused full time on science communication rather than doing science. That makes him rare in the field, he's reasonably good at it, and he happens to have been in the right place at the right time with proximity to TV shows to go from a good career as a directory and writer to a particularly good one as TV personality.
My undergrad is in theoretical physics, with most of that on optics and semiconductors, optics is largely 'laboratory astrophysics'. I find now several years after having finished my undergrad that I have a lot of trouble following most astrophysicists giving talks, because they're talking at a 4th year level, and seeing as how I'm a game developer and computer scientist these days that's far removed from understanding astrophysics. Dr. Tyson when he talks is able to mostly limit himself to first year intro to astronomy level, where people can actually understand what the hell he's talking about most of the time, finding people who can do that is unfortunately rather difficult.
A computer no one has any clue how to use, configure, get help with, or deal with if anything goes wrong with it, and it needs internet access. Depending on how it performs it may be just a time waster, for a parent who could be doing something else, like.. parenting, rather than constant mucking with technology, or waiting for technology.
Not everyone can use e-mail. My mother, who would get custody of my children if I had any and something happened to me can't manage e-mail. She can cook and clean and drive, and she doesn't have Alzheimers, and has a decent pension income, but computers and e-mail are simply too complicated for her. Programming her VCR is too complicated for her. When I lived in the same city as she did, she could sort of manage, if I came by every day or two to help her out, but now that I'm 4 hours away it's simply not realistic.
If anything in that situation it would be the kid running the computing in the house (as happened even when I was in high school). Neither my mother nor father got to the point of using e-mail at home, although my father used e-mail at work and picked it up in his retirement, my mother, not so much (divorced).
Computers are any or all of expensive, complicated and insecure. Poverty is certainly a major issue, on both ends, running reliable IT systems isn't cheap, and if your e-mail system is down for the day does that mean you're not 'effectively communicating with parents' or some other regulation? A lot of guardians for children lack the capabilities to effectively manage any sort of electronic communication, and by extension that may make the system insecure. Paper isn't secure either, but e-mails to parents is the sort of thing begging to be hacked by some industrious students.
Actually we're in a half linux half windows environment. Realizing that, in 10 years, not one of our employees or students has contributed a single line of code to linux or an OSS productivity project was a good clue that wasn't a selling point.
I'm on the windows side of things, because I'm a game developer mainly, and an IT guy on the side, and well, no one writes games on linux. PS3 games that run on linux, written in visual studio, android, written on windows. But that's beside the point.
When you realize that contributing to open source is mostly outside the skillset of employees, most of whom are at the level of needing to have.exes blocked, you'll realize why OSS doesn't,mean anything to most employees. If you want to meaningfully contribute to OSS you need people who know how to actually write code, design code, etc. most people don't. In fact if they try, they'll do more harm than good, and waste time. There's a reason most big OSS projects are actually built on code from big outfits (intel IBM etc.) For them it's worth the investment. For a 20 person shop that sells widgets not only is contributing a waste of manpower resources but the idea that you can somehow magically 'customize it' to suit your experience is going to lead you to having to re build your whole IT infrastructure later when no one has a clue how to use Libreoffice or Linux. Which is what tends to happen, in fact, I'm helping a migration right now, because some jackass got the brilliant idea that their shop should all be on libreoffice because it's free, but equations and fonts aren't cross compatible with word docs all the time, and almost nothing prints the way you expect it to, so guess what? I'm not re-writing major portions of software to fix their problem, I'm getting them a sharepoint server, and MS office, because they know how to use it, and it works with clients. Using OSS is mostly for computer nerds, writing OSS is for programming nerds, those are perfectly legitimate markets (including servers at small outfits). But most people are neither of those things. When you realize that you'll start actually increasing clients productivity.
Keep in mind that we have air travel and border agreements as well, 3 of the aforementioned (canada the UK and mexico) all have particular agreements with the US, and Cuba well, you can't fly to cuba from the US directly anyway, so canadian flights for example must go around US airspace. But the US could make that a lot less pleasant.
Tigerdirect, ncix. canada computers all do really well with 2 day shipping even for next to nothing. I got a graphics card from tiger direct that I ordered late night on the 26th and it arrived on the 29th for 7 dollars in shipping. I fairly regularly get 2 day shipping from NCIX (who are out in BC) to where I am outside the GTA. It's not really practical to expect overnight shipping outisde of the GTA.
I don't think your shopping experience has been in any way reflective of mine. And I do 90% of my shopping online, and have for years, and have done business ordering online for probably 8 or so years as well, and 'next day' shipping is generally not reasonable, but 2 days for next to nothing is pretty common. I don't usually want to spend 3-5x as much on shipping for 'faster' service when I can get 2 days for cheap.
Bestbuy has about 1000 stores. Where I am (in canada) they bought out futureshop as they moved into the market, as a result there is literally a bestbuy 300m from a futureshop, on the same street. One of those two could go easily. Same products, same prices, different name on the door.
As with any business that big, some of your floorspace isn't going to be working out.
and yes, I'd love to see them largely out of business or be forced to radically transform their business model, just like everyone else, but I'm not sure this is what we'd like them moving to.
if the problem is solved with a pill all the parenting in the world won't fix it. If you try beating the child and it doesn't work because you don't know any better you aren't likely to get a productive response either.
Research advances knowledge, that includes techniques and chemistry. If it really is genetic and chemical well, then we'll have a solution.
Also, if it is genetic then it becomes something that can be tested for. Otherwise you're just finding someone quirky, and lets face it, there are a lot of quirky people.
Which still warrants a different look. If we can now recognize what it is, and can do something about it that's better than just writing the situation off as a collection of unsolvable oddities that aren't worth investing much in.
Slashdot Mirror
Um... the game itself?
Seriously. You romance your companion characters. They are basically pets, you give them stuff or make decisions they like and eventually some of them will be willing to marry your character. You can have one out at a time, and the rest hang out on your ship. https://skydrive.live.com/view.aspx/.Public/Swtor%20companion%20gift%20guide%20vol%202.xlsx?cid=e77018d864cdb5c7&app=Excel provides an overview of what types of gifts companions like and specifically lists the different ones that you can romance (and how that changes what they like). No same sex romance in game presently (how they intended to patch it in while gracefully connecting to the existing consistency I don't know).
All those NPC's are the creation of Bioware... a studio of EA. All the voice acting, the creation of those characters is from EA. The KOTOR universe was created by BioWare before it was borged into EA, but SWTOR is an EA game.
This doesn't seem very complicated.
In SWG if you romanced anything it was entirely player driven. Maybe you could get a GM to show up and do a speech for you, but it's a completely different scenario. In SWTOR the crux of the plot is that *YOU* and only *YOU* are 'the sith inquisitor' or 'sith warrior' or the like*. Other players of the same base class are actually inconsistent with the world (at least for some classes, I've only played 2 through to 50).
*this isn't a criticism particularly I'm just explaining for clarity.
In SWG it was all player driven though. In Mass Effect and SWTOR you are having a relationship with NPC's who are written scripted and voiced out of EA's pockets.
Mass effect 3 has an "M" for mature rating. If children are playing it then the parents should take it away from them.
It's up to BioWare/EA/developers and publishers what rating they want to aim for on a game, the same as movies. You can disagree with ratings in general or specific, so, for example, I tend to think that by 15 or 16 you should be able to figure out that gay people exist and the content in mass effect is not going to somehow damage your brain. But if you're an 8 year old there is nothing in mass effect that is really suitable for your maturity level, the whole story, theme, romance etc. are a bit too grown up for that.
Just because it's a video game doesn't make it for children. People who can't grasp that aren't worth dealing with. They have ratings on them so parents can make intelligent decisions about what their kids should be playing or watching, and how much parental oversight might be required.
Which may actually make it unlikely in microsofts eyes. Being able to have a team of professional forensics experts potentially extract data from a console is a far cry from it being actively exploited by hackers.
If you look at the paper in question they ran half a dozen tools to try and extract part of a single credit card. And pretty much everything they're looking at is pretty standard hard drive forensics sort of problems, they're discussing in specific to the 360, but there's nothing there that doesn't apply to any HDD. How 'erased' is erased data (when you write 0's to the drive), the answer is not perfectly. A general 'delete personal data' just deletes files the same way most OS's do, it just forgets the links to the files, but they still hang out on the drive and can be extracted.
It seems like the trick with the Xbox is that it has various partitions and not all of them are always overwritten, and then the general problems with magnetic storage. So sure, if the police have a specific reason to dig through one xbox 360 they might be able to recover something. But beyond that, I wouldn't count on it being a major issue.
Ok, but they make 2300 of them in march. that puts them on track for what, 30-50k sales a year. That's not exactly a mass market vehicle, that's for the people who are the edge cases that will benefit from the particular usage scenario where it is advantageous. And it's for people who are relatively well off. It's not like you need a car with airbags on the sides as well as the front and passenger positions for example, the risk of being seriously injured from not having them is relatively rare, and they're fairly expensive. I bet in 10 years though every car with have them.
The Volt is a technology commercialization demonstrator, and it's out there to establish a brand presence and to find anything wrong with the design on a small market.
If (and it's a relatively big if) you're in that 80% of people who live within about 60km of your job, *and* you drive that every day, 5 days a week, say 250 days a year(2000hrs of work, 8 hours a day) works out to about 1500 dollars a year in gas ($1.30/litre as of yesterday, but that was for regular, the volt uses premium fuel). Where I am the volt, before tax credits is 43K which is, for sake of argument, about 25k more than a comparable 5 door hatback like the sonic (15-21K), but you'd get I think 8500 dollars back from the government (ontario), that might be old numbers though, hard to follow given that it's both budget time and tax season. So your price difference is somewhere in the 15-20k range. You're counting on the vehicle having otherwise identical maintenance costs for 10-15 years for it to be worthwhile. Move to europe though, and the average price of petrol is US 2.4 per litre more or less (1.58 EUR before 20 ish VAT http://www.energy.eu/), and you have a *much* different calculation, where in canada you're talking about 1500 dollars per year in gas prices, in europe it's more like 2700 dollars for the same driving distance. Suddenly a 15k price difference is only 5 years to pay itself off, which is pretty compelling.
So now you're gambling. Assuming you plan to keep the car for 5 years, and the maintenance is no more than a sonic (for sake of argument) and your price difference is down to 15K after a tax rebate. Well... what is the price you're going to pay for fuel over 5 years going to work out to? (And what will the resell value of the car be, if anything, after 5 years). If the price of oil drops, a lot, you've lost, and lost a few thousands of dollars. If, on the other hand, the price of oil, or generally the price of gas goes up then it may have worked out in your favour.
And again, it's a niche vehicle, some people buy boats, some people buy airplanes, some people are paying a premium on a car to be able to say 'it doesn't use gas' most of the time. It's also pretty clear from the numbers that while volt 1.0 may not be a great deal economically it's not all that far off. There's a premium because they are only making a small number of them, and there's a premium for being an early adopter in anything, but if they can consistently get the price down to say 30k or the price of oil goes up 30%, or a bit of both it starts looking like its' economical for everyone. It may also be economical much earlier in different vehicles where you could more easily handle a larger charge (think minivan or SUV format, where yes, you're less fuel efficient to begin with, but you could use up some of the space for more battery too), and once there is some reasonable expectation of a decent resale value, which I wouldn't count on for volt 1.0s. Not everyone buys the most economical vehicle either. If that were the case there would only be compacts on the road. And yet people still drive around in hummers. If the volt makes you feel good about not giving the oil companies as much money, but giving money to people who are trying to innovate our way out of this mess then it might be worth it.
Oh, and all of this depends heavily on usage scenarios. I would think an electric vehicle would have much better performance in stop and go tr
They seem to be trying, and not sure who's vision of the future is the right one. Which I suppose is always the challenge.
In their defence, they do kind of have this strategy outside the US, where they bought some services overseas and have made them into something over there. In the US they might have stuck their thumbs up their arses for a while waiting to see if MS could acquire them.
Depends what you're spending money on.
There are two main places you can cut and have that move you to profitability. First, is business areas that just aren't making you money, and don't appear to be likely to make you any money any time soon. For a long time Microsofts Xbox division was an example of this. They were playing a long game, hoping it would eventually start making them money. That's fine when you have positive cashflow from somewhere else to invest, but not a good plan when you are running out of money. Googles android is another example of something that they're pouring money into but isn't (or at least wasn't) making them cash. Some of these things evolve out of a changing market place too. I'm sure Yahoo's travel service at one point was top notch and a money maker, nowdays, I don't even know if it still exists.
Secondly are'unnanounced or not yet finished products. Things which are in development costing money. This can be cutting off your nose to spite your face, but it can also be eliminating dead weight. Projects that are massively over budget, underperforming or just don't seem to fit with your new product strategy. For example yahoo has a social service to compete with Twitter, called Yahoo Meme. Guess how good a plan that is?
And, I suppose the other way is a more one at a time thing. Every outfit has some employees who are just drains on productivity, they either spend all day posting on /. and not working or are disruptive to fellow employees. If you lay them off in batches you can claim it is for 'lack of work' rather than gross incompetence or just being a douche, and you don't need to go through a lawsuit.
Not quite true. There is a windows 8 for ARM that will be tablets and phones, and Windows x86 (or actually IA64 but whatever), that will be for Intel/AMD chips. Those could be phone, tablet, or desktop.
They're also streamlining the application development so you hopefully don't have to completely rewrite your application for ARM, it's just setting multiple build targets and off you go.
How similar that makes office is hard to say. If it really is just setting a new build target everything will just kind of be there, even if it performs differently (which, given how little office does with fancy CPU extensions might not be an issue).
The space thing presents a real artificially generated problem. It's not hard to get 120GB SSD's these days, or even 60-90GB ones, which, if you put that in a phone sort of negates the problems of space. They could also pull out the old DLL store that has all the old versions of various things, that would certainly shrink things down but who knows. I'd think any sort of Windows 8 device will need 64 gigs of storage, which isn't that bad, but it's hard to say how that would sell in the marketplace.
But people didn't buy vista. MS biggest competitor is themselves. Windows 8 will have to compete with windows 7, and I have a feeling a lot of people will be waiting to upgrade to windows 9, and by then they may move to a mac and an iphone. If only we could know the future...
And ya, windows phones *should* provide a great user experience. OS updates when they're actually released, compatibility with windows apps, full document/calendar/e-mail syncing, all automatically, that sort of thing. Whether they deliver on that I don't know, but I don't think they have the 'vision' yet.
Very true. I'm not in the US so I'm not sure how the market plays out there to individual users. Do they care more about upfront cost, where a 'free on a new plan' is a lot more appealing than a 200 iPhone 4S new plan or the longer term quality of the phone? I'm not even sure what happens to the monthly rate.
And again, the lumia 900 is positioned as a mid range phone, it is, on price competing with an iPhone 3Gs or an iPhone 4. Which is a really stupid place to try and position yourself in the market, but that's another discussion entirely.
Right, which is why they have the retail arrangement with AT&T, all the floor staff were given windows 7 phones, in the hopes that would encourage their enthusiasm.
Actually if you look, the summary is wrong, it's only the ars review of the ones listed that doesn't have a generally very positive set of things to say about the phone, and the ars review is comparing it to a galaxy nexus and iphone 4s (which are 200 dollars more expensive, but much better hardware phones).
They're building up hype because they've made a pretty good mid range product, whether or not it gets any traction with consumers or AT&T retail monkeys (who then convince consumers to buy it ) who knows. They're not aiming for the 600 dollar phone market, stupidly, there should be a flagship device positioned there. But for what it is price wise, it's pretty good overall.
Billions? They've been at this a while. Kin was dead out the door, they knew it, you knew it, I knew it. Everyone knew it. But contracts must be honoured.
That doesn't mean they'll ever make any money however, it could be billions invested for nothing. The windows 8 strategy of unifying all the device OS's is actually a good idea. A decent phone these days is basically a half speed laptop (with a dual core 1.x GHz processor and a gig or so of ram that's like half a laptop), which means you really can run the same OS on everything. If you try out the windows 8 preview it seems more like it's for phones than desktops, so this might be shooting themselves in the foot with a rocket launcher overall, but we'll see. They certainly seem to be all in on this plan.
That's sort of the point of the reviews. For the price (and that does count a lot) the Lumia 900 is a decent phone. It struggles to compete with dual core phones which are much more expensive, which is a problem for the windows brand, since the Galaxy Nexus and iPhone 4s are powerful flagship devices, but as a Nokia Phone that isn't going to just be sold to rich people who can afford 500+ dollar phones it's pretty good overall (where I am the Galaxy Nexus and iPhone 4s run 575 and 650 dollars respectively, where the Lumia 900 is about 450).
Now, overall, given the circumstances I don't think that makes it a great launch. Nokia, or one of the WP7.5 launch partners should have a quad core phone out the door nowish (but then I figured the playstation vita should be a phone as well), and the lumia 900 could be a mid range device. There's a big gap in the user experience between iphone and android in terms of software updates, and it's an area on the PC that MS does surprisingly well at in terms of how updates are delivered and what works/doesn't on them. But MS doesn't seem to have delivered very well, and that's not good for anyone, least of all nokia employees and shareholders.
That isn't really true. Lots of hard drives have various states of failure, and you might be able to write data to it even if it has SMART errors. There isn't a universal way to tell if a drive is going to permanently die.
A classic example is a hard drive 'clicking'. The read head is contacting something intermittently, but it may still appear to work. You want to get that data off and onto another drive ASAP. Now if you get a drive out of the box like that, there's no point in even putting it into a machine to need to deal with it later. Unfortunately lots of problems can't be noticed with a visual or audio inspection.
You should still be prepared to recover when, inevitably, drives will fail without warning, but that's not the same as verifying equipment before it fails. It's also the same problem as trying to figure out if a drive in a raid 5 has actually failed (or otherwise has a physical problem) or if there is something wrong with your software.
His enthusiasm.
There are lots of other astronomers, last I checked the US graduates about 200 PhD's in astronomy and astrophysics a year, but the vast majority of them don't get excited at the mere notion of talking about science the way Dr Tyson does. Which is why he ended up doing science outreach at planetarium, which is why they put him on TV etc.
He is by no means the only, and probably not the best scientist in the world. But his enthusiasm and energy are infectious, most of the other scientists you talk to are more concerned with publishing their next paper or making sure they have enough money to pay their graduate students. If you look at his CV he hasn't published anything academic since 2008 (nor did I immediately find anything on google scholar that would indicate he's just lazy about updating his webpage, but admittedly I don't normally search for astrophysics), and the work he's published recently seems to more be him as part of the planetarium or american museum of natural history than personal research, and he doesn't appear to take on grad students. That sets him apart from probably 90% of the practicing astronomers, in that he is actually focused full time on science communication rather than doing science. That makes him rare in the field, he's reasonably good at it, and he happens to have been in the right place at the right time with proximity to TV shows to go from a good career as a directory and writer to a particularly good one as TV personality.
My undergrad is in theoretical physics, with most of that on optics and semiconductors, optics is largely 'laboratory astrophysics'. I find now several years after having finished my undergrad that I have a lot of trouble following most astrophysicists giving talks, because they're talking at a 4th year level, and seeing as how I'm a game developer and computer scientist these days that's far removed from understanding astrophysics. Dr. Tyson when he talks is able to mostly limit himself to first year intro to astronomy level, where people can actually understand what the hell he's talking about most of the time, finding people who can do that is unfortunately rather difficult.
A computer no one has any clue how to use, configure, get help with, or deal with if anything goes wrong with it, and it needs internet access. Depending on how it performs it may be just a time waster, for a parent who could be doing something else, like.. parenting, rather than constant mucking with technology, or waiting for technology.
Not just poor people.
Not everyone can use e-mail. My mother, who would get custody of my children if I had any and something happened to me can't manage e-mail. She can cook and clean and drive, and she doesn't have Alzheimers, and has a decent pension income, but computers and e-mail are simply too complicated for her. Programming her VCR is too complicated for her. When I lived in the same city as she did, she could sort of manage, if I came by every day or two to help her out, but now that I'm 4 hours away it's simply not realistic.
If anything in that situation it would be the kid running the computing in the house (as happened even when I was in high school). Neither my mother nor father got to the point of using e-mail at home, although my father used e-mail at work and picked it up in his retirement, my mother, not so much (divorced).
Computers are any or all of expensive, complicated and insecure. Poverty is certainly a major issue, on both ends, running reliable IT systems isn't cheap, and if your e-mail system is down for the day does that mean you're not 'effectively communicating with parents' or some other regulation? A lot of guardians for children lack the capabilities to effectively manage any sort of electronic communication, and by extension that may make the system insecure. Paper isn't secure either, but e-mails to parents is the sort of thing begging to be hacked by some industrious students.
Actually we're in a half linux half windows environment. Realizing that, in 10 years, not one of our employees or students has contributed a single line of code to linux or an OSS productivity project was a good clue that wasn't a selling point.
I'm on the windows side of things, because I'm a game developer mainly, and an IT guy on the side, and well, no one writes games on linux. PS3 games that run on linux, written in visual studio, android, written on windows. But that's beside the point.
When you realize that contributing to open source is mostly outside the skillset of employees, most of whom are at the level of needing to have .exes blocked, you'll realize why OSS doesn't ,mean anything to most employees. If you want to meaningfully contribute to OSS you need people who know how to actually write code, design code, etc. most people don't. In fact if they try, they'll do more harm than good, and waste time. There's a reason most big OSS projects are actually built on code from big outfits (intel IBM etc.) For them it's worth the investment. For a 20 person shop that sells widgets not only is contributing a waste of manpower resources but the idea that you can somehow magically 'customize it' to suit your experience is going to lead you to having to re build your whole IT infrastructure later when no one has a clue how to use Libreoffice or Linux. Which is what tends to happen, in fact, I'm helping a migration right now, because some jackass got the brilliant idea that their shop should all be on libreoffice because it's free, but equations and fonts aren't cross compatible with word docs all the time, and almost nothing prints the way you expect it to, so guess what? I'm not re-writing major portions of software to fix their problem, I'm getting them a sharepoint server, and MS office, because they know how to use it, and it works with clients. Using OSS is mostly for computer nerds, writing OSS is for programming nerds, those are perfectly legitimate markets (including servers at small outfits). But most people are neither of those things. When you realize that you'll start actually increasing clients productivity.
Ah, my mistake
But then it's also fair that passengers on board have to be cleared by DHS. Entering US airspace means you play by their rules, stupid or not.
Guantanamo bay would presumably add a layer of general confusion to this whole mess.
Keep in mind that we have air travel and border agreements as well, 3 of the aforementioned (canada the UK and mexico) all have particular agreements with the US, and Cuba well, you can't fly to cuba from the US directly anyway, so canadian flights for example must go around US airspace. But the US could make that a lot less pleasant.
Uh.... not intended to be factual statements?
Tigerdirect, ncix. canada computers all do really well with 2 day shipping even for next to nothing. I got a graphics card from tiger direct that I ordered late night on the 26th and it arrived on the 29th for 7 dollars in shipping. I fairly regularly get 2 day shipping from NCIX (who are out in BC) to where I am outside the GTA. It's not really practical to expect overnight shipping outisde of the GTA.
I don't think your shopping experience has been in any way reflective of mine. And I do 90% of my shopping online, and have for years, and have done business ordering online for probably 8 or so years as well, and 'next day' shipping is generally not reasonable, but 2 days for next to nothing is pretty common. I don't usually want to spend 3-5x as much on shipping for 'faster' service when I can get 2 days for cheap.
Bestbuy has about 1000 stores. Where I am (in canada) they bought out futureshop as they moved into the market, as a result there is literally a bestbuy 300m from a futureshop, on the same street. One of those two could go easily. Same products, same prices, different name on the door.
As with any business that big, some of your floorspace isn't going to be working out.
and yes, I'd love to see them largely out of business or be forced to radically transform their business model, just like everyone else, but I'm not sure this is what we'd like them moving to.
if the problem is solved with a pill all the parenting in the world won't fix it. If you try beating the child and it doesn't work because you don't know any better you aren't likely to get a productive response either.
Research advances knowledge, that includes techniques and chemistry. If it really is genetic and chemical well, then we'll have a solution.
Also, if it is genetic then it becomes something that can be tested for. Otherwise you're just finding someone quirky, and lets face it, there are a lot of quirky people.
Which still warrants a different look. If we can now recognize what it is, and can do something about it that's better than just writing the situation off as a collection of unsolvable oddities that aren't worth investing much in.