This isn't rocket science
on
XBox Tidbits
·
· Score: 2
It is well known that the console makers are trying to position their next gen consoles as, in essence, the household "computer/internet" box. The makers such as Sony, Nintendo, et. all have come right out and stated exactly that. Does it surprize anyone that Microsoft has developed a strategy to fight this? This is not a new market that Microsoft is entering, but rather it's, at least with the newer consoles, an extension of the battle for the home PC market. By stalling purchases now and introducing an extremely powerful gaming platform soon Microsoft is doing a great job keeping the developers and users in "PC land". I don't fault them whatsoever for it, and I hope it's massively successful.
It is so intriguing when companies like Nintendo and Sony are seen as underdogs or the "good guys" in cases like this. Are you people all on crack or something?
Of course Nintendo is upset about MS stalling new purchases in lieu of the X-Box. Nintendo has a product on the shelves, an ancient product with games that are seriously overpriced, that they are rolling in the dough with and of course they don't like Microsoft threatening it. Good for them. However they are not holding a moral high ground here : This is cut-throat busienss.
You realize, of course, that it takes more electricity to manufacture a single compact florescent bulb than ten standard bulbs will use during their entire lifetimes. Not quite the green solution you thought it was, eh?
Where did this little factoid come from, because it sure sounds like a bunch of bullshit FUD. Lightbulbs use an enormous amount of energy, and comparatively the energy to manufacture is trivial (most CFs rate themselves for 10,000 hours of use, so a 20W instead of a 100W saved 800KWh over the lifetime. It takes 800KWh to create a CF (and I'm excluding subtracting the cost to make 10 regular lightbulbs because your point is so ridiculously silly it isn't worth the point)? You're an idiot). Let me guess : You work at an incandescent light plant and seeing your job in doubt you start up the FUD engine. Crawl back in your hole idiot.
Got my eTrex today and these things are incredible (even with the tiny screen with a 64x128 resolution, though the Venture offers 160x288). Totally offtopic but just had to mention it. What a brave new world.
So in other words some things with tiny screens are amazing.
Which ones are you using? Visible light output is measured in lumens and if two lights are a given lumen output they are measurabley and visibly putting out the same amount of light. The current 15W compact-flourescents put out the same lumens as a 75W incandescent.
If you mean quality of light I greatly disagree : I find that compact flourescents put out whiter, more natural light. There is no flicker with CFs.
You can buy all the power you want from us in Canada - it just isn't going to be cheap. Raise the price, and watch all those 15W bulbs fly off the shelves. Lower the enviromental regulations, and build some power plants. Just wait until people start using their A/C in summer - you have lots of people, well, you get lots of pollution to match.
As a sidenote I am from Canada (Ontario) and while we have a surplus of power in general, the fact that there is a large coal-burning power generation plant up the lake instantly tells me that we don't conserve enough, or we're not exploring more sustainable methods of power generation enough. With all the hydroelectric and alternative power generation, still we're burning coal?
Power generation, just like all industry, should be based upon real numbers. If you're running a plant that is emitting massive pollutants into the air, the degradation of quality of life, increased health costs, lowered land value in proximity, and future cleanup costs should all be assessed and built into the cost of that power. If that were the case there would be far more environmentally friendly power generation facilities because the real numbers would be more apparent. As it is we like to charge it on the environmental credit card and pretend it's cheaper while disparaging "environmentalist", when in the long run it always ends up costing us far more in health care costs, we live shorter lives, and we (the public) end up funding billions of dollars in clean up costs. Although I generally think nuclear power is a good option, that same dreamland thinking has proven detrimental because at the outset everyone talked about cheap nuclear power...not adding in the cost of tens of thousands of years of nuclear waste monitoring/cleanup.
You assume that the lightbulb is on all the time, which is incorrect. I hardly have any lights on ever at my place, and most people I know at most use bulbs for a few hours per day - and they're not going to spend a hundred bucks swapping bulbs - those 15W ones are expensive as hell.
Ah but therein lies the crunch : Most of the power system in place is to deal with momentary peaks because people do tend to all do the same things at the same time: Everyone cranks their ovens on at the same time, and generally at the same time AC powers up (and of course in warmer places like California every W of lighting turns into a W of heat that the AC has to remove from the air). At common times a good portion of the population has their hairdriers on in the morning, and their water heaters come on because they had a shower. Every W that is piled on top of that load is a W that has to be accomodated in the power grid.
Having said that a couple of quick points
You can get those bulbs inexpensively now at places like IKEA (they're $3CDN here in Canada for an eq. to a 60W incandescent). Given that they last as long as 10 normal bulbs already they're a cost savings, but the 80% reduction in power consumption is an added bonus.
Even if everyone wasn't using them at the same time, a lot of power companies are moving to on demand power (i.e. banks of diesel engines in distributed locations). When you turn on that 100W light that diesel engine is cranking just a little bit harder, emitting just a bit more sulphur, etc., directly because of you. People underestimate their own effect on the environment, the power grid, etc., when in reality it is substantial.
Forest...trees... The amount of power being used completely unnecessarily by residential users is significant : Maybe it doesn't make a big difference when you consider one single home and you can laugh at initiatives for conservation, but when you consider an entire state it can be substantial. In 1999 there were 11,490,000 households in California. If every one of them replaced a single 100W lightbulb with a 15W compact flourescent, that is 976,650,000W of savings. Do you realize that most nuclear power plants only produce around 100,000,000W? So there you've potentially eliminated the need for >9 nuclear power plants by REPLACING A LIGHTBULB and you're talking about how individual users don't make a difference? Give me a break...
And you say that an extra 200W per PC, or >2,000MW over the state, isn't a big deal. Let me guess : You don't vote because your vote doesn't count, right?
However Company A only got $10/share, and its the traders who got rich.
In an IPO the company usually holds the vast majority of the shares (i.e. they aren't issued in the IPO), and they then slowly release them on the market after the price has crested. For example if you have an IPO today at $10 the $10 might be "undervalued" to make sure you get lots of interest at the outset for the 1,000,000 shares you release in your IPO, however you hold internally 49,000,000 shares. After the public bids up the stock (limited supply obviously because you've only released 2%) you start selling more of it, hopefully at many multiples that original $10.
One of the funny things about stocks is that while the #s may be based on fantasty land, fantasy companies can "buy" in stock swaps real companies and no one is the wiser until after the fact. i.e. I hype to the world that I'm going to revolutionize the e-Urination business and by carefully controlling the IPO stock quantity I push up my company, with no product or reasonable possibility of having a profit, to having a net capitalization worth of billions. Then I offer GM shareholders 1.72 UrinaXML LLC shares for each GM share and they say "Hey what a great deal! At current market prices 1 GM share is only equal to 1.5 UrinaXML LLC shares!" and soon I "own" GM and have a real product with real profit potential, etc. It's funny seeing that happen, with sucker victims getting stock swapped into oblivion.
I thought the same thing. And you know that a lot of psycho stalkers and revenge seekers use those sorts of tactics to try to get the info, and that particular story about coming in to find the words see you soon seemed incredibly fictional.
She could have called the police and the police could have dealt with it if there was an issue. AOL is completely right in not revealing that sort of info to everyone with a nonsense story calling up.
Firms can hire vaguely technical people to write ASP that could never get their head round PERL or PHP.
What a bunch of bullshit. Do you think you're in a mighty realm of super languages using PHP or Perl? Give me a break : They're both TRIVIAL. They're EASY. This whole whatever is mainstream must be easier than what I use nonsense is so bloody absurd I seriously question the integrity of anyone who spouts it (ignoring the fact that ASP is the basically plug in architecture and people don't actually program in "ASP", they use one of the plug-in languages which is usually either JScript or VBScript, though it could also be PHP, Perl, etc.).
People use ASP because it does the job in a lot of environments and it does it well. I use JScript for the basic scripting needs and it does the job admirably. When I want to do something that it doesn't cover I pull out Visual C++ and spit out some COM objects (because of course I'm 31337 and you sVxx0R with your crappy interpreted languages...granny).
Check the elitism at the door because 9 times out of 10 the clown yapping it doesn't have a clue what (s)he's talking about and is merely trying to convince others that they're special.
Re:Arent there any mandatory insurances in the US?
on
Linuxgruven Deorbits
·
· Score: 1
Actually you get less than you pay for as in Canada the system actually runs a large "profit" which the government subtly moves over to other departments. Of course when a downturn comes they talk about how the system is in peril (ignoring the billions they moved out of the system) and how they'll have to make cutbacks, etc.
3DFX focused on quality over frame rate - for the time being the 5500 will sit.
Now _THAT'S_ a riot. When every other hardware company had moved to 24/32-bit color 3dfx was the only company not making the transition, trying to convince everyone that there wasn't a difference anyways. 3dfx' mantra was frame-rate over quality, and they were very explicit in stating this. It's just interesting seeing revisionist history such as what you are stating.
They bought out the competitoin and sold thier souls to Microsoft.
Bought out? 3dfx was headed to the grave. nvidia did what was reasonable and obtained the technology, though most likely purely to ensure there are no ridiculously broad patents in 3dfx' portfolio that a malicious buyer could use to harrass them with. Windows happens to be on the majority of home PCs, and many console makers are looking to supplant PCs and take over as your primary home entertainment/net access box and this represents a threat to both Microsoft and nvidia (mind you these vacuous threats are about as credible as Marc Andreeson's claims many years ago that Netscape would shortly be your operating system), so of course they coordinate to take on contenders such as Sony and Nintendo. More power to them.
There is nothing wasteful about entertainment in proper amounts. Life is about being happy and if you aren't happy then you've got your priorities all screwed up and need to re-evaluate.
The saddest thing about the goat people is that it's apparently a religion for you and you feel some need to spread the word of anus. I was in line at a New York Fries tonight and while the attendant was filling a little container full of ranch dressing it made a "fart" noise. Several ~8 year olds thought this was a riot. These are who I suspect are the goat people. I can totally understand if you're all around 9 years old and this whole net thing is all new and funny, but otherwise it really is sad. If you are around 9 you'll come to realize at some point that it's not funny, it's not witty, rather it's just simply lame. It's pathetic.
If you aren't a young adolescent trying to find your true path, I don't despise you but rather I feel pity for you. That is really a sad condition.
I am very much of the belief that it is far too early to make any statements about micropayments failing. The "free" content support network is collapsing at a staggering rate. Read the efront logs to understand fully the financial underpinnings of advertisement driven sites.
Again I, and I know there are many like me, am entirely willing to support sites (though not a voluntary "tip" jar because such concepts fade very quickly while everyone presumes everyone else tips. It's like the 15% standard tip for serving staff...most people are too much of weasles to follow it [and let's face it : If everyone DID tip that much that would be the job to have]) through a "micropayment" type system, though this is under the condition that there is almost no transaction fees, and _I_ am in control, not the content provider.
Disclaimer: Again when I say micropayments I am referring to small payments : Not necessarily per graphic or article. Could be a subscription based model.
Are you serious? Those in mega-corporations are always the ones in the most peril (apart from.COMs with absurd business models). MegaCorps print money by firing thousands of workers, and it's happening at an amazing clip lately.
Oh you don't feel like listening eh? Well that's pretty much too bad for you now isn't it? I would say the tone of your message pretty much set the tone for this reply.
Anyone who knows anyone with a Sega Dreamcast can tell you very quickly why Sega was brutalized on that system : Piracy. Of course with the DVD of the PS2 it's less likely (at least for the next short while) but if the games can be installed on a harddrive it will become prevelant.
Not that I wouldn't find this tactic incredibly annoying, but if you don't like it you don't have to buy one. These companies take multibillion dollar hits on these systems because the systems are subsidized by game sales. When piracy becomes so commonplace that Joe Average has a library of duped games they have to find alternatives.
In your article "The Case Against Micropayments" you state the case against micropayments. Has anything in the intervening time changed your mind (i.e. the collapse of content), or do you believe that the fundamentals of micropayments are impossible to achieve? Does your problem with micropayments stem primarily with pay-per-view, or rather the concept of mandatorily user supported sites (i.e. extrapolating micropayments to include subscriptions or content packs)?
A lot of people want that extra functionality. If you offer up a device and tell me that it's a contact database or time scheduler I'd laugh and point out the $30 Casio's that you can buy that achieve the same purpose and have for many years. If I am going to carry this thing it'd better be pretty full featured: Possibly an MP3 player, DEFINITELY capable of holding good maps (see PocketStreets and such. I can get a section of map in MapPoint and download it to a CE PDA), and preferably robust enough that it can be expanded to allow for versatile other functionality.
The Palm's-are-fast argument usually revolves around a Palm doing very little versus a CE device doing a lot. i.e a tiny grayscale screen versus a larger full-color display (obviously the latter represents enormously more data that has to be moved around). Simply comparing could be apples to oranges. Like the old saying about which is faster : A sports car or a dump truck. Then measure with 50 tonnes on each.
Recently there was a discussion here regarding company loyalty, and a similar discussion was highlighted on last night's episode of CBC's MarketPlace. Of course the discussion was that it was "alarming" that many employees no longer feel loyalty to their employer, and it (I'm talking about the Marketplace episode) talked with managers who expressed their dismay over these unloyal young whippersnappers.
Then you see something like this regarding how 9 people working on software at O'Reilly will be "laid off" because the profitable, successful product that they were working on doesn't fit someone's grand scheme. In an instant you realize why loyalty is in the garbage can. To know that "lofty thinkers" sit around a meeting room table discussing the latest way to re-engineer themselves for the new-millenium, and other such tripe, and the end result could very well be the end of your job, puts a serious damper on any disposition towards loyalty.
Here's a more direct link for those who don't want to follow the yafla link (which is a story on the ".COM stock collapse which is how that is relevant).
Does anyone remember a while back when ESR got some shares in VA Linux for his contribution to the company and the open source movement? Did he sell his shares at the allowed time (I believe June of last year?)? Insider trading info seems to indicate that he hasn't, and if not that $32 million has dropped to about $600,000.
More details of it can be found at yafla. Note in particular the text on the link on "potential wealth disappear"
I've become incredibly wary of sending links to friends because of exactly what this article is talking about: Some of them encode individual information related to you. While most of them couple this with internal SessionIDs/cookies, and the unintended link follower gets nothing, some of them do as Slash does and plaintext includes it. I'm sure there's been plenty of people who have inadvertently set their login info to a friend when just trying to show them a new link.
Anyways I can't stand session unique URLs. You can't really bookmark them, and when they're somewhat properly designed you can't send them to a friend. So instead of saying "Here's the link to the blobbonator on sale" you have to direct them on how to navigate from the root to the item in question. Very lame.
Slashdot Mirror
It is well known that the console makers are trying to position their next gen consoles as, in essence, the household "computer/internet" box. The makers such as Sony, Nintendo, et. all have come right out and stated exactly that. Does it surprize anyone that Microsoft has developed a strategy to fight this? This is not a new market that Microsoft is entering, but rather it's, at least with the newer consoles, an extension of the battle for the home PC market. By stalling purchases now and introducing an extremely powerful gaming platform soon Microsoft is doing a great job keeping the developers and users in "PC land". I don't fault them whatsoever for it, and I hope it's massively successful.
It is so intriguing when companies like Nintendo and Sony are seen as underdogs or the "good guys" in cases like this. Are you people all on crack or something?
Of course Nintendo is upset about MS stalling new purchases in lieu of the X-Box. Nintendo has a product on the shelves, an ancient product with games that are seriously overpriced, that they are rolling in the dough with and of course they don't like Microsoft threatening it. Good for them. However they are not holding a moral high ground here : This is cut-throat busienss.
You realize, of course, that it takes more electricity to manufacture a single compact florescent bulb than ten standard bulbs will use during their entire lifetimes. Not quite the green solution you thought it was, eh?
Where did this little factoid come from, because it sure sounds like a bunch of bullshit FUD. Lightbulbs use an enormous amount of energy, and comparatively the energy to manufacture is trivial (most CFs rate themselves for 10,000 hours of use, so a 20W instead of a 100W saved 800KWh over the lifetime. It takes 800KWh to create a CF (and I'm excluding subtracting the cost to make 10 regular lightbulbs because your point is so ridiculously silly it isn't worth the point)? You're an idiot). Let me guess : You work at an incandescent light plant and seeing your job in doubt you start up the FUD engine. Crawl back in your hole idiot.
Got my eTrex today and these things are incredible (even with the tiny screen with a 64x128 resolution, though the Venture offers 160x288). Totally offtopic but just had to mention it. What a brave new world.
So in other words some things with tiny screens are amazing.
Which ones are you using? Visible light output is measured in lumens and if two lights are a given lumen output they are measurabley and visibly putting out the same amount of light. The current 15W compact-flourescents put out the same lumens as a 75W incandescent.
If you mean quality of light I greatly disagree : I find that compact flourescents put out whiter, more natural light. There is no flicker with CFs.
You can buy all the power you want from us in Canada - it just isn't going to be cheap. Raise the price, and watch all those 15W bulbs fly off the shelves. Lower the enviromental regulations, and build some power plants. Just wait until people start using their A/C in summer - you have lots of people, well, you get lots of pollution to match.
As a sidenote I am from Canada (Ontario) and while we have a surplus of power in general, the fact that there is a large coal-burning power generation plant up the lake instantly tells me that we don't conserve enough, or we're not exploring more sustainable methods of power generation enough. With all the hydroelectric and alternative power generation, still we're burning coal?
Power generation, just like all industry, should be based upon real numbers. If you're running a plant that is emitting massive pollutants into the air, the degradation of quality of life, increased health costs, lowered land value in proximity, and future cleanup costs should all be assessed and built into the cost of that power. If that were the case there would be far more environmentally friendly power generation facilities because the real numbers would be more apparent. As it is we like to charge it on the environmental credit card and pretend it's cheaper while disparaging "environmentalist", when in the long run it always ends up costing us far more in health care costs, we live shorter lives, and we (the public) end up funding billions of dollars in clean up costs. Although I generally think nuclear power is a good option, that same dreamland thinking has proven detrimental because at the outset everyone talked about cheap nuclear power...not adding in the cost of tens of thousands of years of nuclear waste monitoring/cleanup.
You assume that the lightbulb is on all the time, which is incorrect. I hardly have any lights on ever at my place, and most people I know at most use bulbs for a few hours per day - and they're not going to spend a hundred bucks swapping bulbs - those 15W ones are expensive as hell.
Ah but therein lies the crunch : Most of the power system in place is to deal with momentary peaks because people do tend to all do the same things at the same time: Everyone cranks their ovens on at the same time, and generally at the same time AC powers up (and of course in warmer places like California every W of lighting turns into a W of heat that the AC has to remove from the air). At common times a good portion of the population has their hairdriers on in the morning, and their water heaters come on because they had a shower. Every W that is piled on top of that load is a W that has to be accomodated in the power grid.
Having said that a couple of quick points
Forest...trees... The amount of power being used completely unnecessarily by residential users is significant : Maybe it doesn't make a big difference when you consider one single home and you can laugh at initiatives for conservation, but when you consider an entire state it can be substantial. In 1999 there were 11,490,000 households in California. If every one of them replaced a single 100W lightbulb with a 15W compact flourescent, that is 976,650,000W of savings. Do you realize that most nuclear power plants only produce around 100,000,000W? So there you've potentially eliminated the need for >9 nuclear power plants by REPLACING A LIGHTBULB and you're talking about how individual users don't make a difference? Give me a break...
And you say that an extra 200W per PC, or >2,000MW over the state, isn't a big deal. Let me guess : You don't vote because your vote doesn't count, right?
However Company A only got $10/share, and its the traders who got rich.
In an IPO the company usually holds the vast majority of the shares (i.e. they aren't issued in the IPO), and they then slowly release them on the market after the price has crested. For example if you have an IPO today at $10 the $10 might be "undervalued" to make sure you get lots of interest at the outset for the 1,000,000 shares you release in your IPO, however you hold internally 49,000,000 shares. After the public bids up the stock (limited supply obviously because you've only released 2%) you start selling more of it, hopefully at many multiples that original $10.
One of the funny things about stocks is that while the #s may be based on fantasty land, fantasy companies can "buy" in stock swaps real companies and no one is the wiser until after the fact. i.e. I hype to the world that I'm going to revolutionize the e-Urination business and by carefully controlling the IPO stock quantity I push up my company, with no product or reasonable possibility of having a profit, to having a net capitalization worth of billions. Then I offer GM shareholders 1.72 UrinaXML LLC shares for each GM share and they say "Hey what a great deal! At current market prices 1 GM share is only equal to 1.5 UrinaXML LLC shares!" and soon I "own" GM and have a real product with real profit potential, etc. It's funny seeing that happen, with sucker victims getting stock swapped into oblivion.
I thought the same thing. And you know that a lot of psycho stalkers and revenge seekers use those sorts of tactics to try to get the info, and that particular story about coming in to find the words see you soon seemed incredibly fictional.
She could have called the police and the police could have dealt with it if there was an issue. AOL is completely right in not revealing that sort of info to everyone with a nonsense story calling up.
Are you Zamey?
It's so easy to write your Granny could do it.
Firms can hire vaguely technical people to write ASP that could never get their head round PERL or PHP.
What a bunch of bullshit. Do you think you're in a mighty realm of super languages using PHP or Perl? Give me a break : They're both TRIVIAL. They're EASY. This whole whatever is mainstream must be easier than what I use nonsense is so bloody absurd I seriously question the integrity of anyone who spouts it (ignoring the fact that ASP is the basically plug in architecture and people don't actually program in "ASP", they use one of the plug-in languages which is usually either JScript or VBScript, though it could also be PHP, Perl, etc.).
People use ASP because it does the job in a lot of environments and it does it well. I use JScript for the basic scripting needs and it does the job admirably. When I want to do something that it doesn't cover I pull out Visual C++ and spit out some COM objects (because of course I'm 31337 and you sVxx0R with your crappy interpreted languages...granny).
Check the elitism at the door because 9 times out of 10 the clown yapping it doesn't have a clue what (s)he's talking about and is merely trying to convince others that they're special.
Actually you get less than you pay for as in Canada the system actually runs a large "profit" which the government subtly moves over to other departments. Of course when a downturn comes they talk about how the system is in peril (ignoring the billions they moved out of the system) and how they'll have to make cutbacks, etc.
3DFX focused on quality over frame rate - for the time being the 5500 will sit.
Now _THAT'S_ a riot. When every other hardware company had moved to 24/32-bit color 3dfx was the only company not making the transition, trying to convince everyone that there wasn't a difference anyways. 3dfx' mantra was frame-rate over quality, and they were very explicit in stating this. It's just interesting seeing revisionist history such as what you are stating.
They bought out the competitoin and sold thier souls to Microsoft.
Bought out? 3dfx was headed to the grave. nvidia did what was reasonable and obtained the technology, though most likely purely to ensure there are no ridiculously broad patents in 3dfx' portfolio that a malicious buyer could use to harrass them with. Windows happens to be on the majority of home PCs, and many console makers are looking to supplant PCs and take over as your primary home entertainment/net access box and this represents a threat to both Microsoft and nvidia (mind you these vacuous threats are about as credible as Marc Andreeson's claims many years ago that Netscape would shortly be your operating system), so of course they coordinate to take on contenders such as Sony and Nintendo. More power to them.
That's pretty funny if you're a pathetic weakling sack of human waste that finds picking on helpless animals funny.
If there's anyone out there like that : KILL YOURSELF. Save someone a bullet.
There is nothing wasteful about entertainment in proper amounts. Life is about being happy and if you aren't happy then you've got your priorities all screwed up and need to re-evaluate.
That's real nice.
The saddest thing about the goat people is that it's apparently a religion for you and you feel some need to spread the word of anus. I was in line at a New York Fries tonight and while the attendant was filling a little container full of ranch dressing it made a "fart" noise. Several ~8 year olds thought this was a riot. These are who I suspect are the goat people. I can totally understand if you're all around 9 years old and this whole net thing is all new and funny, but otherwise it really is sad. If you are around 9 you'll come to realize at some point that it's not funny, it's not witty, rather it's just simply lame. It's pathetic.
If you aren't a young adolescent trying to find your true path, I don't despise you but rather I feel pity for you. That is really a sad condition.
I am very much of the belief that it is far too early to make any statements about micropayments failing. The "free" content support network is collapsing at a staggering rate. Read the efront logs to understand fully the financial underpinnings of advertisement driven sites.
Again I, and I know there are many like me, am entirely willing to support sites (though not a voluntary "tip" jar because such concepts fade very quickly while everyone presumes everyone else tips. It's like the 15% standard tip for serving staff...most people are too much of weasles to follow it [and let's face it : If everyone DID tip that much that would be the job to have]) through a "micropayment" type system, though this is under the condition that there is almost no transaction fees, and _I_ am in control, not the content provider.
Disclaimer: Again when I say micropayments I am referring to small payments : Not necessarily per graphic or article. Could be a subscription based model.
What happens when a Zamey does a yafla?
Are you serious? Those in mega-corporations are always the ones in the most peril (apart from .COMs with absurd business models). MegaCorps print money by firing thousands of workers, and it's happening at an amazing clip lately.
Oh you don't feel like listening eh? Well that's pretty much too bad for you now isn't it? I would say the tone of your message pretty much set the tone for this reply.
Anyone who knows anyone with a Sega Dreamcast can tell you very quickly why Sega was brutalized on that system : Piracy. Of course with the DVD of the PS2 it's less likely (at least for the next short while) but if the games can be installed on a harddrive it will become prevelant.
Not that I wouldn't find this tactic incredibly annoying, but if you don't like it you don't have to buy one. These companies take multibillion dollar hits on these systems because the systems are subsidized by game sales. When piracy becomes so commonplace that Joe Average has a library of duped games they have to find alternatives.
yafla!
In your article "The Case Against Micropayments" you state the case against micropayments. Has anything in the intervening time changed your mind (i.e. the collapse of content), or do you believe that the fundamentals of micropayments are impossible to achieve? Does your problem with micropayments stem primarily with pay-per-view, or rather the concept of mandatorily user supported sites (i.e. extrapolating micropayments to include subscriptions or content packs)?
yafla!
A lot of people want that extra functionality. If you offer up a device and tell me that it's a contact database or time scheduler I'd laugh and point out the $30 Casio's that you can buy that achieve the same purpose and have for many years. If I am going to carry this thing it'd better be pretty full featured: Possibly an MP3 player, DEFINITELY capable of holding good maps (see PocketStreets and such. I can get a section of map in MapPoint and download it to a CE PDA), and preferably robust enough that it can be expanded to allow for versatile other functionality.
The Palm's-are-fast argument usually revolves around a Palm doing very little versus a CE device doing a lot. i.e a tiny grayscale screen versus a larger full-color display (obviously the latter represents enormously more data that has to be moved around). Simply comparing could be apples to oranges. Like the old saying about which is faster : A sports car or a dump truck. Then measure with 50 tonnes on each.
yafla!
Recently there was a discussion here regarding company loyalty, and a similar discussion was highlighted on last night's episode of CBC's MarketPlace. Of course the discussion was that it was "alarming" that many employees no longer feel loyalty to their employer, and it (I'm talking about the Marketplace episode) talked with managers who expressed their dismay over these unloyal young whippersnappers.
Then you see something like this regarding how 9 people working on software at O'Reilly will be "laid off" because the profitable, successful product that they were working on doesn't fit someone's grand scheme. In an instant you realize why loyalty is in the garbage can. To know that "lofty thinkers" sit around a meeting room table discussing the latest way to re-engineer themselves for the new-millenium, and other such tripe, and the end result could very well be the end of your job, puts a serious damper on any disposition towards loyalty.
yafla!
Here's a more direct link for those who don't want to follow the yafla link (which is a story on the ".COM stock collapse which is how that is relevant).
http://linuxtoday.com/stories/13512.html
Does anyone remember a while back when ESR got some shares in VA Linux for his contribution to the company and the open source movement? Did he sell his shares at the allowed time (I believe June of last year?)? Insider trading info seems to indicate that he hasn't, and if not that $32 million has dropped to about $600,000.
More details of it can be found at yafla. Note in particular the text on the link on "potential wealth disappear"
Cheers!
I've become incredibly wary of sending links to friends because of exactly what this article is talking about: Some of them encode individual information related to you. While most of them couple this with internal SessionIDs/cookies, and the unintended link follower gets nothing, some of them do as Slash does and plaintext includes it. I'm sure there's been plenty of people who have inadvertently set their login info to a friend when just trying to show them a new link.
Anyways I can't stand session unique URLs. You can't really bookmark them, and when they're somewhat properly designed you can't send them to a friend. So instead of saying "Here's the link to the blobbonator on sale" you have to direct them on how to navigate from the root to the item in question. Very lame.
yafla!