Depends on when you read the comic books I think it's golden age silver age where there is a whole city of kryptonians in a tiny bottle, he had a dog and a cousin. After the Crisis on infinite earths there was to be no others(DC's policy at the time) until Infinite Crisis brought some back in or at least around that time. Of course that rule was to be broken on occasion but the rule was typically he was the last son. That's probably the time frame where I read superman the most so it sits sturdy in my memory.
So while you are right, there are still instances where he is Superman and is alone in the sense that I described.
This might have been true in the past but it seems that Microsoft has taken it upon themselves to try and stay within standards more now. I think they are seeing a benefit now with multiple platforms where it's easier for developers to make software under 3rd party standards instead of what they dictate. Windows 7 and Windows 8 whether you like them or not are stable fast OS's. IE9-10 have been very standard compliant. Office 2013 runs so freaking quick on Windows 8 it's almost surprising.
The GUI is the problem in most cases for Microsoft's new software. They might not be where I would be happy, but the steps that they have taken since to be frank Ballmer took over and Bill stepped down as chief software architect in 2006, have been great in that regard(I think I puked in my mouth saying that).
It's hard but it's not impossible. There is a lot more to Superman than just being good, doing good and being super strong. He's lonely, fear full and caring. Yes he had a large amount of affection from Martha and Johnathan but he has no one who completely understands him in the whole Universe. His parents aren't just dead his whole species is dead. While he isn't hesitant to be a hero he sure is scared about people knowing who he really is. He might be indestructible but his friends and adopted family are not. There are a ton of instances where he fears for the safety of those that are close to him.
The man would die for Earth, to him they have given so much without knowing what he could have given them in return. Superman isn't just the man of steel he's smart. In some cannons of the story he's working on diseases in his fortress. A fortress of solitude. While he might be lonely he still needs a fortress, some connection to home to make him feel whole. His fortress, is pretty much the only thing he has left to remind him of home. It's his one place where he can feel whole. Superman at one point had to send Zod back to the Phantom Zone. I wonder how that must have felt to him. Sitting there fighting against someone who was his only other link to a life he will never know outside of his fortresses computers.
Then there is the time that he died. Doomsday came and decimated the justice league I believe he still had a hand tied behind his back. Superman comes in and holds his own against someone who took out the justice league in short order. Not only that he takes him out while at the same time supposivly dying. Everything turns to shit, the world needs him back. But Superman can't die, he awakens after considerable time under intense sunlight. He doesn't have all his powers, he's not the man of steel. He suits up iron-man style, doesn't bother to chop off his mullet and heads out to fight. He shows he's not just a man who fights because there's no fear for him he fights because he loves everything about humanity.
You can draw a complex feeling god from another world. He's not an emotionless lump. His convictions might be strong but he's second guessed things and made mistakes. He's learned from them and had his mistakes haunt him. He's might be a man of steel but there's so much to Superman that people just don't see because it's so easy to make him fall in love with Louis Lane and beat the crap out of everyone. Everyone knows he's going to win, superman isn't about that. It's about him doing what's right no matter the conflict that's in his head tells him. He can't kill Lex Luthor in cold blood even if he's destroyed millions of peoples lives. He's just a man, an Superman at some level kind of envies that. It might not be easy to make superman a complex character but it's been done a number of times, and when it's done right it can be amazing.
In this case you have a brain that will possibly be built to hold the memory thoughts and in a sense the consciousness of that other individual. But to achieve that do we have to have the human body loose it's consciousness? If we don't and we can do a bit by bit copy over, do we end up with two of the same consciousness and if that's the case have you really achieved your goal? You still die but you have a second you living on, the you still in your body is trapped waiting for death. If the mind can be transferred and not copied do the same rules apply? Does that person die and the new computer version live on in it's place circumventing death, or is the person not a new one but a cut and paste of that mind?
Finally a fun question, would you be willing to do it?
No it was because they balanced the price and quality over the PS3 which was priced much highers. Also the fact that they had a more developer friendly system than the PS3 was a huge factor. The PS3 is still not likely seeing it's full potential and that was a mistake on Sony's part. So you sit a PS3 and an xbox 360 side by side and even when you don't downscale the PS3 gfx you still have something at least comparable for less of a price point up front. The 360 did offer through their live service for years a better community. Yes you had to pay but most seen it as worth it at the time. That's not the case anymore but it was when it was released and like I said for years after.
I think the thing about this launch that's really bad is that you're still paying for a good online service in an environment where the other two main competitors arn't and have comparable online services. The PS4 apparently has upped their game as far as developer friendliness which is huge, they have also made a huge improvement in hardware and exceeds the XBone. Essentially Nintendo decided to stay the course on their innovation, PS learned from their mistake and what put them behind the xbox in NA(A huge market not sure why you're knocking it). I'm not sure what Microsoft learned, but what they should have learned is, make a great CONSOLE then roll out new services and bring in other users. Get your fan base excited before you go out targeting new users. They had millions of people willing to be loyal now ready to jump ship. If they had done their game announcement before their hardware TV kinect announcement it would have went better I think. I don't think they are hooped but they better fucking show up for E3.
That's true but the idea is that before they sent up the mission there was no mirrors up there and after there was. Granted I guess you could say that they sent another unmanned probe up to drop off the mirror and seismic detector and that was the actual launch everyone watched. I believe the russians put theirs up unmanned in 1970 though it was lost track of.
I just think it's one more reason why a fake doesn't make sense.
I don't know about that, the PS3 had better hardware than the 360 but it still didn't blow away the 360 in north american sales. I think if they were going to save face on something they would be better off to look at, at least changing the name.
I think the difference here with the cloud computing is that the developers can rely on Microsoft themselves to provide the cloud computing. This would be good for smaller developers. Where as larger developers are going to have their own solution anyways like you suggested.
I like to point out to people that, the astronauts put a mirror array on the moon which reflects lasers back to earth. You can do some pretty sweet stuff with it too if you have the right equipment. There are a number of observatories around the world with the tech to do it and they track the distance to the moon(which changes) and lots of other cool stuff. Without that special mirror array placed by the astronauts we wouldn't be able to do that. Would be cool if there was one on mars I hope if NASA does get to a manned space flight to mars they set one up.
Yeah that seems pretty reasonable to me. Having the organization paying for Apple products out of the Microsoft founders funds seems like bad publicity. Get other funding or divert funding that you now don't have to put into other operations because of the donation into software if you need to. It's also not like the vast majority of opensource software costs money in the first place. Now if you are saying they can't buy anything but windows even from other funds not from the Gates foundation that's a bit more heavy handed but still might be understandable.
I wouldn't say it's a troll article as it is pointing out a flaw in the itunes software without exaggerating that. I would say they are being a little over dramatic on the whole "I don't think I'll keep my iphone because of it" for the reason you listed. I would say however that there are lots of people who would prefer to connect their devices to a computer for offloading of files and uploading of new files. Ripping personal CDs and uploading them via itunes is still quite handy for some folks(I prefer to have physical media). I don't really understand why after so many years itunes is so horrible on the windows machine compared to OSX. It's like it's intentionally poorly developed or crappily ported over to windows. I will say that it isn't as bad as it was 5 years ago(unstable slow and clunky) but flaws like this go to show that apple seems to put a minimum effort into their ports.
I do think that office 365 is a very nice response to cloud office suites but unless there is still a problem since that 2011 letter about the LA contract I don't know how they will break into that market. Google is a name that most IT people think of when they think of cloud processing suites. We started using 365 about 6-8 months ago and it works fantastically in my opinion. I also do know that other people have gone with google though because it's a big name and it does what it says it does. As far as I know there haven't been any complaints about google.
Does anyone know what happened between google and the city of L.A. after this was released? I hadn't heard about it. I would be interested to know what the security issues they had were and if they were able to be resolved. This letter is considerably old in terms of technology advancements.
Well it is a very important point though when you think about it. If you are stuck between buying a cable subscription and getting netflix and you want something like sports your kind of stuck getting cable. Some of the major sports have subscription based viewing but I think the MLB one is the only one that covers a substantial amount of live games(home and away) but you still have to pay around 100 bucks for their service.
This will change but it doesn't change the fact that netflix has a limited number of sports on it and as far as I'm aware none of them are live. That can make netflix a no go for a lot of people who are stuck choosing between one or the other. Personally I don't watch much for sports so netflix and other services work swimmingly for me.
But most ISP's aren't really paying more for bandwidth anyways except at the last mile. The converstation I had with a few network guys was that they figured it was probably costing a few fractions of a cent more a MB than it was a few years ago.
The reason is, is that most of the major ISPs are part of netflix openconnect program. This reduces the cost to last mile bandwidth which isn't exactly as expensive to provide fast speeds for, though over subscription on a cable provider for your area could cause some serious over saturation. https://www.netflix.com/openconnect
The openconnect I believe also saves netflix money too as they only have to update the openconnect instead of say 100 users. So when arrested development is out in the wild they will update the openconnect and everyone will be connecting to those to prevent over-saturation of netflix primary services.
The claim was that cell phones have radiation that can damage DNA and cause cancer. That's not true, microwaves don't cause DNA damage, though I suppose cooking you might cause damage to your DNA it's not the radiation that's doing it, it's a side effect of the heat produced. Seeing as how I've never seen a cell phone melt a chocolate bar let alone a person I doubt it's going to cause DNA damage, nor would that be my first concern in that case.
There are sometimes good reasons why companies are reluctant to upgrade from old hardware.
One of the big ones I've seen over the years has been specialty software that was developed for windows 2000 in some cases. This can sometimes run on windows XP but going beyond that it can be difficult to get to work or downright buggy. Most companies don't have the resources to build a new software suite in house and when you can be in a small market you might be stuck with 1 or 2 options. If the alternative option looks promising then that can lead to the second issue of upgrading.
The second issue that I've seen with upgrading is migration of data to the new systems. Most companies that I've ran into do a splendid job of stripping the data sets out of competitors software and importing it into their own. There are cases where this doesn't happen though. So you could end up in a phase where your re-entering all of your previous data into the new system. That can take a long time especially if you don't want to have downtime as the data sets can change over the course of a day if the old system remains live. Sometimes that's the only option though. This can bring up a large cost in getting the data over to the new system if it has to be done manually.
Cost. You might say well I can understand a small company not wanting to switch they don't have the resources to upgrade like a larger company. That's not always true. If you are looking to upgrade multiple systems and services you might be hiring on multiple people or even contracting out to get that job done. You have to be aware that their might be downtime and even complete system failure over the course of an upgrade. Recently a friend of mine was working at a company that changed their inventory software over to a new version. During the migration they lost everything and backups weren't helpful. This shouldn't have ever happened and I question some of their methods but that's besides the point. They lost almost a week of productivity and ended up having 100's of employees standing around or being sent home because they couldn't do work on machinery. That downtime cost them huge as contracts weren't being filled in time and the employees were still being paid. They just finished a round of layoffs.
So let's say you do proper project planning and everything goes smooth there's not much work to the transition to new software roll over is quite easy. You can still end up with bugs in the new system which might bring down time over the course of the first few months. Retraining people on new software packages might require outside resources that you have to pay and productivity generally drops over this time.
These are some of the reasons why I've seen management veto doing upgrades on something even as simple as IE6. I've seen IE8-10 break internal applications multiple times. Currently we can't run IE10 unless it's in compatibility mode until we have our web team rebuild a few of our resources. It's nice that we have that resource to be able to do that and we can do upgrades to newer versions of software, but not all companies do. Management sees it as, we haven't been hacked so what are the chances of something being breached compared to the cost of upgrades. If we do get breached how much is that going to cost us compared to upgrades? While I would say significantly more sometimes that's not an option, that decision can end up falling into the hands of upper management which might veto upgrades.
I think the whole point isn't that they are sorry and people might even forgive them for it, the point is do they deserve our trust? They don't quite frankly. Apologizing only goes so far they need to prove that they can be trusted again. That doesn't mean throwing credit at people and donating money to charity. All that shows is that they aren't assholes. It goes a long way to rebuilding their reputation but only time and good behavior can fix the trust issue.
All this apologizing does is show that they are capable of earning trust back, they don't yet deserve it and we shouldn't give it to them so freely just because they righted the wrong after they were caught.
I mean who does an April fools joke that's testing something and doesn't shut it off and tells no one they had the joke played on them? I robbed a bank on April 1st, but it's OK because it was an April fools joke.
There are different countries that do have levies for copy-written works. Canada has/had levies on different writable material like blank music cds cassettes and that sort of thing, they also wanted it to apply to ipods but thankfully itunes proved that content could generally be purchased legally so they didn't. I think that's a good case to look at here. If all you could use your internet connection for was piracy or the majority of people were using it for piracy then maybe I would be OK with this. But the majority of people online at least in North America I believe aren't inherently pirating music, videos and games.
So how do you justify taxing people who don't infringe to those that do? That's like asking everyone to pay a fine because most people speed. Also how do you distribute the money from the levies? Does it go to the game industry, music, video, book, or art? What percentage? It was a problem with Canada's levies, money wasn't ever considered for software developers which I assume have a significant portion of their wares pirated.
I also don't like to be charged for a crime I didn't commit so there's that too.
I guess I may be a little biased because while I haven't used siri I have used my Motorola roadster to write up text responses, and answer the phone while driving. I can also make a call with one press of a button but usually don't(even though it's legal where I am to do so). I find it thousands of times more safe to do than text by hand, which I will have to admit I did years ago when I first got my blackberry(I'm quite ashamed to admit now).
Yes and talking to someone in the car is distracting too. So is having kids kicking you in the back of the seat, changing radio stations. Billboards with flashy lights are distracting or they wouldn't have them. Oh I'm sure I'm missing a few more things.
My point is, is that there are a ton of distracting things going on around us as we barrel down the road. The question is, is one more safe than the other. It would be logical that if you can speak to the device instead of type it would be safer. Having your head down and hand off the wheel or if your driving a standard no hand on the wheel or some form of wtf. Having these studies are important for trying to understand how safe something is so we can judge if it's within an acceptable margin. I think texting manually falls into being unsafe and I don't want to share the road with people that are doing it.
It would appear speaking into Siri or other applications that do speech to text hasn't been studied enough to make a final decision, but I think it's going to end up OK. This study is a piece of garbage though and falls into bad research, as the software wasn't used as intended in the car.
He could be right, to think that Samsung, Google, and apple are going to sit around and push out incremental updates once tablets hit market saturation is crazy. Tablets have to be getting close to that now, in a few years you might see a peak and then possibly a fall. I wouldn't say tablets will die off but the crazy amount of sales they have seen could possibly. I wouldn't be surprised if those companies and possibly even blackberry are working on new projects to be the next new thing. Google is already taking a shot with glass. While it doesn't seem super exciting now it could be the next step in 5 years.
Anyways I could see sales at a peak in 5 years and I wouldn't be surprised if a new device doesn't show up to overshadow tablets before then. 5 years is a substantially long time.
You do have some valid points, I forget that in non cold climates having a plugin outside is a little strange. I live up in Canada and we have something called a block heater in all of our cars, it comes standard(I'm sure most Northern U.S. states have them as well). So most apartment complexes have plugins for each car already, I'm not sure what you would have to change with them if you were to retrofit those to charge a car overnight or if you would have to. It's standard 120volts that you would find in the house.
Getting a used car for 5,000 of course is going to be an economical option compared to any new vehicle gas or electric(especially electric) so I'm not going to say much about that.
Distilled water on an industrial scale isn't necessarily cheaper. I buy jugs of distilled water now for different purposes. The 1 gallon jug I bought last week cost ~4 dollars(Canadian if you're wondering). It does become cheaper the more you buy. A distillation unit can cost from ~400-2000 depending on how big you want to go(you could build your own for significantly less). I'm not sure how much water is required for operation but it is something that I might consider if it was a substantial amount. It's something to keep in mind. But for comparison you can't exactly go about making your own gas, unless you're planning on distilling alcohol for that purpose. Here the laws are pretty strict on it and you need proper licensing but you could I suppose.
I think in the end it's not ready for prime time. Anyone who would buy into it now would be doing it for the smug factor. I don't even know how must more environmentally friendly something that's electric would be when you have coal fire plants producing the electricity. In the end you're paying less for gas and that's after the premium of spending a good percentage more to have heavy batteries that are not exactly environmentally friendly hauled around.
I think that's hard to say for sure. Phones are getting bigger and bigger and you can get some now that I would classify as a tablet anyways. So if that's what your suggesting then yes the tablets now are going to go away. I highly doubt it though. They aren't usually good for work devices but as technology in them keeps improving they are turning out some really awesome features. The note 10.1(I currently own), surface, lenovo, and a few others have wacom tech in them. While it's not as nice to use as say a cintiq it could be(I believe the mike at penny-arcade reviewed the surface for this).
In the classroom(I'm a tech at a school) they can serve as a tool to assist in research, building video/audio projects, and so on. The new tablets out now have attachable keyboards that can make them operate like small laptops. The windows tablets can have full office suites for some projects. It's not going to replace the cart of laptops we have or the lab of computers but it's a huge classroom resource.
I'm not saying that the tablet isn't a fad I could have raved about netbooks as well and the well kind of faded. But to say that the functionality is lacking is just obsurd. They have a place be it on a work bench with a schematic(it's easier to look at something flat then up at a screen sometimes) in the kitchen as a recipe book to on the road as a very portable video player, magazine/book. There are uses for them but saying in 5 years something new won't come down the pipe to replace them is silly. I'm sure everyone wants the next ~40 million unit device.
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Depends on when you read the comic books I think it's golden age silver age where there is a whole city of kryptonians in a tiny bottle, he had a dog and a cousin. After the Crisis on infinite earths there was to be no others(DC's policy at the time) until Infinite Crisis brought some back in or at least around that time. Of course that rule was to be broken on occasion but the rule was typically he was the last son. That's probably the time frame where I read superman the most so it sits sturdy in my memory.
So while you are right, there are still instances where he is Superman and is alone in the sense that I described.
This might have been true in the past but it seems that Microsoft has taken it upon themselves to try and stay within standards more now. I think they are seeing a benefit now with multiple platforms where it's easier for developers to make software under 3rd party standards instead of what they dictate. Windows 7 and Windows 8 whether you like them or not are stable fast OS's. IE9-10 have been very standard compliant. Office 2013 runs so freaking quick on Windows 8 it's almost surprising.
The GUI is the problem in most cases for Microsoft's new software. They might not be where I would be happy, but the steps that they have taken since to be frank Ballmer took over and Bill stepped down as chief software architect in 2006, have been great in that regard(I think I puked in my mouth saying that).
It's hard but it's not impossible. There is a lot more to Superman than just being good, doing good and being super strong. He's lonely, fear full and caring. Yes he had a large amount of affection from Martha and Johnathan but he has no one who completely understands him in the whole Universe. His parents aren't just dead his whole species is dead. While he isn't hesitant to be a hero he sure is scared about people knowing who he really is. He might be indestructible but his friends and adopted family are not. There are a ton of instances where he fears for the safety of those that are close to him.
The man would die for Earth, to him they have given so much without knowing what he could have given them in return. Superman isn't just the man of steel he's smart. In some cannons of the story he's working on diseases in his fortress. A fortress of solitude. While he might be lonely he still needs a fortress, some connection to home to make him feel whole. His fortress, is pretty much the only thing he has left to remind him of home. It's his one place where he can feel whole. Superman at one point had to send Zod back to the Phantom Zone. I wonder how that must have felt to him. Sitting there fighting against someone who was his only other link to a life he will never know outside of his fortresses computers.
Then there is the time that he died. Doomsday came and decimated the justice league I believe he still had a hand tied behind his back. Superman comes in and holds his own against someone who took out the justice league in short order. Not only that he takes him out while at the same time supposivly dying. Everything turns to shit, the world needs him back. But Superman can't die, he awakens after considerable time under intense sunlight. He doesn't have all his powers, he's not the man of steel. He suits up iron-man style, doesn't bother to chop off his mullet and heads out to fight. He shows he's not just a man who fights because there's no fear for him he fights because he loves everything about humanity.
You can draw a complex feeling god from another world. He's not an emotionless lump. His convictions might be strong but he's second guessed things and made mistakes. He's learned from them and had his mistakes haunt him. He's might be a man of steel but there's so much to Superman that people just don't see because it's so easy to make him fall in love with Louis Lane and beat the crap out of everyone. Everyone knows he's going to win, superman isn't about that. It's about him doing what's right no matter the conflict that's in his head tells him. He can't kill Lex Luthor in cold blood even if he's destroyed millions of peoples lives. He's just a man, an Superman at some level kind of envies that. It might not be easy to make superman a complex character but it's been done a number of times, and when it's done right it can be amazing.
I find the discussion interesting.
In this case you have a brain that will possibly be built to hold the memory thoughts and in a sense the consciousness of that other individual. But to achieve that do we have to have the human body loose it's consciousness? If we don't and we can do a bit by bit copy over, do we end up with two of the same consciousness and if that's the case have you really achieved your goal? You still die but you have a second you living on, the you still in your body is trapped waiting for death. If the mind can be transferred and not copied do the same rules apply? Does that person die and the new computer version live on in it's place circumventing death, or is the person not a new one but a cut and paste of that mind?
Finally a fun question, would you be willing to do it?
No it was because they balanced the price and quality over the PS3 which was priced much highers. Also the fact that they had a more developer friendly system than the PS3 was a huge factor. The PS3 is still not likely seeing it's full potential and that was a mistake on Sony's part. So you sit a PS3 and an xbox 360 side by side and even when you don't downscale the PS3 gfx you still have something at least comparable for less of a price point up front. The 360 did offer through their live service for years a better community. Yes you had to pay but most seen it as worth it at the time. That's not the case anymore but it was when it was released and like I said for years after.
I think the thing about this launch that's really bad is that you're still paying for a good online service in an environment where the other two main competitors arn't and have comparable online services. The PS4 apparently has upped their game as far as developer friendliness which is huge, they have also made a huge improvement in hardware and exceeds the XBone. Essentially Nintendo decided to stay the course on their innovation, PS learned from their mistake and what put them behind the xbox in NA(A huge market not sure why you're knocking it). I'm not sure what Microsoft learned, but what they should have learned is, make a great CONSOLE then roll out new services and bring in other users. Get your fan base excited before you go out targeting new users. They had millions of people willing to be loyal now ready to jump ship. If they had done their game announcement before their hardware TV kinect announcement it would have went better I think. I don't think they are hooped but they better fucking show up for E3.
Numbers for consoles in 2010 http://www.shacknews.com/article/63785/worldwide-console-sales-numbers-revealed
Numbers for consoles in 2011 http://www.andrewfreedman.net/post/16987501105/xbox-360-tops-global-yearly-sales-2011
2012 numbers aren't a very good picture as people were anticipating the release of new consoles.
That's true but the idea is that before they sent up the mission there was no mirrors up there and after there was. Granted I guess you could say that they sent another unmanned probe up to drop off the mirror and seismic detector and that was the actual launch everyone watched. I believe the russians put theirs up unmanned in 1970 though it was lost track of.
I just think it's one more reason why a fake doesn't make sense.
I didn't know that, interesting.
I don't know about that, the PS3 had better hardware than the 360 but it still didn't blow away the 360 in north american sales. I think if they were going to save face on something they would be better off to look at, at least changing the name.
I think the difference here with the cloud computing is that the developers can rely on Microsoft themselves to provide the cloud computing. This would be good for smaller developers. Where as larger developers are going to have their own solution anyways like you suggested.
I like to point out to people that, the astronauts put a mirror array on the moon which reflects lasers back to earth. You can do some pretty sweet stuff with it too if you have the right equipment. There are a number of observatories around the world with the tech to do it and they track the distance to the moon(which changes) and lots of other cool stuff. Without that special mirror array placed by the astronauts we wouldn't be able to do that. Would be cool if there was one on mars I hope if NASA does get to a manned space flight to mars they set one up.
Yeah that seems pretty reasonable to me. Having the organization paying for Apple products out of the Microsoft founders funds seems like bad publicity. Get other funding or divert funding that you now don't have to put into other operations because of the donation into software if you need to. It's also not like the vast majority of opensource software costs money in the first place. Now if you are saying they can't buy anything but windows even from other funds not from the Gates foundation that's a bit more heavy handed but still might be understandable.
I wouldn't say it's a troll article as it is pointing out a flaw in the itunes software without exaggerating that. I would say they are being a little over dramatic on the whole "I don't think I'll keep my iphone because of it" for the reason you listed. I would say however that there are lots of people who would prefer to connect their devices to a computer for offloading of files and uploading of new files. Ripping personal CDs and uploading them via itunes is still quite handy for some folks(I prefer to have physical media). I don't really understand why after so many years itunes is so horrible on the windows machine compared to OSX. It's like it's intentionally poorly developed or crappily ported over to windows. I will say that it isn't as bad as it was 5 years ago(unstable slow and clunky) but flaws like this go to show that apple seems to put a minimum effort into their ports.
It didn't seem to work for me so I went to http://techland.time.com/2013/05/12 and then was able to browse to the article.
Here's the actual link see if it works if you have issues http://techland.time.com/2013/05/12/facebook-comments/
I do think that office 365 is a very nice response to cloud office suites but unless there is still a problem since that 2011 letter about the LA contract I don't know how they will break into that market. Google is a name that most IT people think of when they think of cloud processing suites. We started using 365 about 6-8 months ago and it works fantastically in my opinion. I also do know that other people have gone with google though because it's a big name and it does what it says it does. As far as I know there haven't been any complaints about google.
Does anyone know what happened between google and the city of L.A. after this was released? I hadn't heard about it. I would be interested to know what the security issues they had were and if they were able to be resolved. This letter is considerably old in terms of technology advancements.
Well it is a very important point though when you think about it. If you are stuck between buying a cable subscription and getting netflix and you want something like sports your kind of stuck getting cable. Some of the major sports have subscription based viewing but I think the MLB one is the only one that covers a substantial amount of live games(home and away) but you still have to pay around 100 bucks for their service.
This will change but it doesn't change the fact that netflix has a limited number of sports on it and as far as I'm aware none of them are live. That can make netflix a no go for a lot of people who are stuck choosing between one or the other. Personally I don't watch much for sports so netflix and other services work swimmingly for me.
But most ISP's aren't really paying more for bandwidth anyways except at the last mile. The converstation I had with a few network guys was that they figured it was probably costing a few fractions of a cent more a MB than it was a few years ago.
The reason is, is that most of the major ISPs are part of netflix openconnect program. This reduces the cost to last mile bandwidth which isn't exactly as expensive to provide fast speeds for, though over subscription on a cable provider for your area could cause some serious over saturation.
https://www.netflix.com/openconnect
The openconnect I believe also saves netflix money too as they only have to update the openconnect instead of say 100 users. So when arrested development is out in the wild they will update the openconnect and everyone will be connecting to those to prevent over-saturation of netflix primary services.
At least that's my understanding.
The claim was that cell phones have radiation that can damage DNA and cause cancer. That's not true, microwaves don't cause DNA damage, though I suppose cooking you might cause damage to your DNA it's not the radiation that's doing it, it's a side effect of the heat produced. Seeing as how I've never seen a cell phone melt a chocolate bar let alone a person I doubt it's going to cause DNA damage, nor would that be my first concern in that case.
There are sometimes good reasons why companies are reluctant to upgrade from old hardware.
One of the big ones I've seen over the years has been specialty software that was developed for windows 2000 in some cases. This can sometimes run on windows XP but going beyond that it can be difficult to get to work or downright buggy. Most companies don't have the resources to build a new software suite in house and when you can be in a small market you might be stuck with 1 or 2 options. If the alternative option looks promising then that can lead to the second issue of upgrading.
The second issue that I've seen with upgrading is migration of data to the new systems. Most companies that I've ran into do a splendid job of stripping the data sets out of competitors software and importing it into their own. There are cases where this doesn't happen though. So you could end up in a phase where your re-entering all of your previous data into the new system. That can take a long time especially if you don't want to have downtime as the data sets can change over the course of a day if the old system remains live. Sometimes that's the only option though. This can bring up a large cost in getting the data over to the new system if it has to be done manually.
Cost. You might say well I can understand a small company not wanting to switch they don't have the resources to upgrade like a larger company. That's not always true. If you are looking to upgrade multiple systems and services you might be hiring on multiple people or even contracting out to get that job done. You have to be aware that their might be downtime and even complete system failure over the course of an upgrade. Recently a friend of mine was working at a company that changed their inventory software over to a new version. During the migration they lost everything and backups weren't helpful. This shouldn't have ever happened and I question some of their methods but that's besides the point. They lost almost a week of productivity and ended up having 100's of employees standing around or being sent home because they couldn't do work on machinery. That downtime cost them huge as contracts weren't being filled in time and the employees were still being paid. They just finished a round of layoffs.
So let's say you do proper project planning and everything goes smooth there's not much work to the transition to new software roll over is quite easy. You can still end up with bugs in the new system which might bring down time over the course of the first few months. Retraining people on new software packages might require outside resources that you have to pay and productivity generally drops over this time.
These are some of the reasons why I've seen management veto doing upgrades on something even as simple as IE6. I've seen IE8-10 break internal applications multiple times. Currently we can't run IE10 unless it's in compatibility mode until we have our web team rebuild a few of our resources. It's nice that we have that resource to be able to do that and we can do upgrades to newer versions of software, but not all companies do. Management sees it as, we haven't been hacked so what are the chances of something being breached compared to the cost of upgrades. If we do get breached how much is that going to cost us compared to upgrades? While I would say significantly more sometimes that's not an option, that decision can end up falling into the hands of upper management which might veto upgrades.
I think the whole point isn't that they are sorry and people might even forgive them for it, the point is do they deserve our trust? They don't quite frankly. Apologizing only goes so far they need to prove that they can be trusted again. That doesn't mean throwing credit at people and donating money to charity. All that shows is that they aren't assholes. It goes a long way to rebuilding their reputation but only time and good behavior can fix the trust issue.
All this apologizing does is show that they are capable of earning trust back, they don't yet deserve it and we shouldn't give it to them so freely just because they righted the wrong after they were caught.
I mean who does an April fools joke that's testing something and doesn't shut it off and tells no one they had the joke played on them? I robbed a bank on April 1st, but it's OK because it was an April fools joke.
There are different countries that do have levies for copy-written works. Canada has/had levies on different writable material like blank music cds cassettes and that sort of thing, they also wanted it to apply to ipods but thankfully itunes proved that content could generally be purchased legally so they didn't. I think that's a good case to look at here. If all you could use your internet connection for was piracy or the majority of people were using it for piracy then maybe I would be OK with this. But the majority of people online at least in North America I believe aren't inherently pirating music, videos and games.
So how do you justify taxing people who don't infringe to those that do? That's like asking everyone to pay a fine because most people speed. Also how do you distribute the money from the levies? Does it go to the game industry, music, video, book, or art? What percentage? It was a problem with Canada's levies, money wasn't ever considered for software developers which I assume have a significant portion of their wares pirated.
I also don't like to be charged for a crime I didn't commit so there's that too.
I guess I may be a little biased because while I haven't used siri I have used my Motorola roadster to write up text responses, and answer the phone while driving. I can also make a call with one press of a button but usually don't(even though it's legal where I am to do so). I find it thousands of times more safe to do than text by hand, which I will have to admit I did years ago when I first got my blackberry(I'm quite ashamed to admit now).
Also your friend frightens me.
Yes and talking to someone in the car is distracting too. So is having kids kicking you in the back of the seat, changing radio stations. Billboards with flashy lights are distracting or they wouldn't have them. Oh I'm sure I'm missing a few more things.
My point is, is that there are a ton of distracting things going on around us as we barrel down the road. The question is, is one more safe than the other. It would be logical that if you can speak to the device instead of type it would be safer. Having your head down and hand off the wheel or if your driving a standard no hand on the wheel or some form of wtf. Having these studies are important for trying to understand how safe something is so we can judge if it's within an acceptable margin. I think texting manually falls into being unsafe and I don't want to share the road with people that are doing it.
It would appear speaking into Siri or other applications that do speech to text hasn't been studied enough to make a final decision, but I think it's going to end up OK. This study is a piece of garbage though and falls into bad research, as the software wasn't used as intended in the car.
AKA "phablet". Yes, it's dumb, but it's widespread.
Crazy I didn't even know it had a name.
He could be right, to think that Samsung, Google, and apple are going to sit around and push out incremental updates once tablets hit market saturation is crazy. Tablets have to be getting close to that now, in a few years you might see a peak and then possibly a fall. I wouldn't say tablets will die off but the crazy amount of sales they have seen could possibly. I wouldn't be surprised if those companies and possibly even blackberry are working on new projects to be the next new thing. Google is already taking a shot with glass. While it doesn't seem super exciting now it could be the next step in 5 years.
Anyways I could see sales at a peak in 5 years and I wouldn't be surprised if a new device doesn't show up to overshadow tablets before then. 5 years is a substantially long time.
You do have some valid points, I forget that in non cold climates having a plugin outside is a little strange. I live up in Canada and we have something called a block heater in all of our cars, it comes standard(I'm sure most Northern U.S. states have them as well). So most apartment complexes have plugins for each car already, I'm not sure what you would have to change with them if you were to retrofit those to charge a car overnight or if you would have to. It's standard 120volts that you would find in the house.
Getting a used car for 5,000 of course is going to be an economical option compared to any new vehicle gas or electric(especially electric) so I'm not going to say much about that.
Distilled water on an industrial scale isn't necessarily cheaper. I buy jugs of distilled water now for different purposes. The 1 gallon jug I bought last week cost ~4 dollars(Canadian if you're wondering). It does become cheaper the more you buy. A distillation unit can cost from ~400-2000 depending on how big you want to go(you could build your own for significantly less). I'm not sure how much water is required for operation but it is something that I might consider if it was a substantial amount. It's something to keep in mind. But for comparison you can't exactly go about making your own gas, unless you're planning on distilling alcohol for that purpose. Here the laws are pretty strict on it and you need proper licensing but you could I suppose.
I think in the end it's not ready for prime time. Anyone who would buy into it now would be doing it for the smug factor. I don't even know how must more environmentally friendly something that's electric would be when you have coal fire plants producing the electricity. In the end you're paying less for gas and that's after the premium of spending a good percentage more to have heavy batteries that are not exactly environmentally friendly hauled around.
I think that's hard to say for sure. Phones are getting bigger and bigger and you can get some now that I would classify as a tablet anyways. So if that's what your suggesting then yes the tablets now are going to go away. I highly doubt it though. They aren't usually good for work devices but as technology in them keeps improving they are turning out some really awesome features. The note 10.1(I currently own), surface, lenovo, and a few others have wacom tech in them. While it's not as nice to use as say a cintiq it could be(I believe the mike at penny-arcade reviewed the surface for this).
In the classroom(I'm a tech at a school) they can serve as a tool to assist in research, building video/audio projects, and so on. The new tablets out now have attachable keyboards that can make them operate like small laptops. The windows tablets can have full office suites for some projects. It's not going to replace the cart of laptops we have or the lab of computers but it's a huge classroom resource.
I'm not saying that the tablet isn't a fad I could have raved about netbooks as well and the well kind of faded. But to say that the functionality is lacking is just obsurd. They have a place be it on a work bench with a schematic(it's easier to look at something flat then up at a screen sometimes) in the kitchen as a recipe book to on the road as a very portable video player, magazine/book. There are uses for them but saying in 5 years something new won't come down the pipe to replace them is silly. I'm sure everyone wants the next ~40 million unit device.