Yes the only thing the casinos love more than a hopeful customer, is a hopeful customer who thinks they have an edge. As the hopeful player may bow out when down a mortgage payment, but the hopeful player with an "edge" will keep on waiting for the edge to turn until they are down a mortgage.
Ummm the members are the potential non members. No business would sign a death pact. There is bound to be some termination clause. So given a few months lead any member of the alliance can fork the code.
Eh technically if MS could be shown to know (or have reasonable cause to know) that most of their patents wouldn't hold up you'd only need to kill a substantial amount of them.
But yeah, killing a single patent is a massive time consuming battle you'd have to kill fifty or so to really make a good case.
FWIW, MS offers works effectively free for throwing in an office demo. IIRC it even becomes a revenue generator because if the demo office is purchased through certain means the OEM gets a kickback.
As to the ideas being the same, eh they all look like some of the product demos various companies (including microsoft research) were putting out in the mid-late 90s, not in detail but in the general glitz and glamour. There are a lot of things that people have wanted to do for a while, but the hardware wasn't there. Apple decided to press forth ahead of the hardware (there was a fair bit of complaining at the time) so they go the prettiness first. Microsoft on the other hand had to make even their flagship OS run on a bottom end $400 Monitor included PC. That is part of the reson MS split up Vista so much, the low end was holding them back some.
Further on the hardware Aero uses a lot more of the hardware then Quartz Extreme does, so it would make sense for Apple to come out with a quartz extreme 2 (or some such, if they kill extreme I would be happy), which would use all the pretty little shaders. They could then do all the fancy effects that hardware a few years ago simply couldn't do on the low end. I look forward to see where they push it. Apple has been... parsimonious with gfx cards lately though, so if they really want to push it they will probably lock out a lot of the market. So expect more complaining, and visuals awesome enough to make everyone run out and buy new machines (Apple is after all a hardware company).
You obviously haven't played around the energy field much. Oil companies and cartels use lots and lots of shell companies to counter global warming and other "negative" press. It is certainly a valid question to figure out where this entities loyalties are. A government funded entity (assuming those governments aren't OPEC members) is generally considered more reliable then, a private study paid for by interested parties. This is true on both sides.
In this case it seems to be estimating peak oil at 24 years out, instead of the now - 25 years out peak oil people are saying. They assume a clean shift away from oil at the "plateau" is all. There isn't a whole lot to dispute or refute. Their undulating plateau actually looks like it heads down quicklike around where the graph cuts off as a matter of fact. The best that can be said for it is that it is an optimistic peak oil aligned estimate.
For a previous generation version it sounds about right. iPods sucked for video, and now are... bad. Keep in mind that no one ever gets what the manufacturer says (Though Apple has gotten much better 2-3Gen iPods Audio times were 50% of spec for actual day to day use, now you lose 20% or so for both)
That isn't to say you can't get them (with the normal low backlight simple video simply encoded etc conditions) just that real world times aren't there.
Multi factor authorization provides only limited protection by itself. There is nothing stopping a phiser website from using the user/pass + external factor that very instant. The proxy delay the system induces is on the order of miliseconds. This has actually been done in the US. It does generally speaking reduce access to once though. So if you require a few days to set up a transfer out account you protect reasonably well. Actually such speed bumps are a big part of protection. The other option is out of band communication before big transactions (i.e. before you transfer your entire account balance to some place that you've never dealt with before you have to answer a phone call at your number of record, or copy a code from an email that explains what you are about to do) A combination of all three generally secures things well enough.
Obviously lossless compression is just as good as raw data (in terms of looks, and leaving aside problems such as possible colorspace conversions that a good system won't have). A highend lossless format can compress ~3x smaller then raw http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/l ossless_codecs_en.html
That being said lossless video is a pain to work with, and honestly most people would rather have more pixels that are, under normal source material coniditions, mostly right, then fewer pixels perfect. Which in the end is always what the choice will come down to. A format that can do HD lossless can do Ultra HDV lossy, the choice for the consumer then becomes rather clear, esp. as humans aren't that that picky about visual stimuli. Though someone will still probably come out with a lossless system, to be bought by people who probably can't tell the difference in normal use (as is the case with high end audio the irony is that the people who are most able to afford it are those least able to see/hear well enough to benefit from it)
Most ADFs can feed photos too. Hp even made a scanner (HP Scanjet 5500c) Just for this purpose. Of course image management gets tricky, but picasa could probably be a good starting place.
think to most people (including MS) it's pretty clear that Apple is going to create a better media experience. However, the three way battle for the lounge room is not being fought on a single front. The real competitors for the Mac Mini are the Xbox 360 & PS3, not Media Centre.
All well and good except at the moment ummm MS wins, by a lot. For one it actually has an integrated interface for acting as PVR, (and HP for example bundles an iTunes connector in).
The real iss ue with the article is they seem to be comparing a home built machine that they installed media center on to a mac mini. Since they don't say what the problem was, well it is just as likely to be their not building the system right. Eh, stupid stupid article.
In this case I think Amazon is very happy they don't have a trusted third party involved. For most businesses, a trusted third party is going to bite them more often then not. (After all, if the turned over emails show no evidence of say sexual harassment, you can't get a conviction on vauge intimations of unreliability) So more or less the burden of proof works against keeping unimpeachable records. (After all, a company is not going to depend on anything external that isn't in a contract.) Kind of sad really.
I feel you might be handling this the wrong way, the problem is that right now the only incentive to submit stories is to get a link, if you add incentive (ad free for a week or something) you will get more and better submisions, reducing the people who just want a link. Also maybe add no follow tags if a submitter has submitted more then 4 in a week or something? Also you could limit submissions per account, which would decrease the spaming of articles (maybe a system where accepted articles allow more submissions while rejected for cause (i.e. not those who submitted an article that wasn't published yet, but weren't first) reducing the number of submissions. You need to increase the value of an accepted submission while simulatenously increasing the cost of submission.
Or is he saying "If you thought the X360 bundles were heinous, wait until you see us bundle a Sony HDTV with the PS3!"
Hey at least it makes sense, and would be useful. The real problem will be the bundled Stealh BluD and any other real bombs Sony can fit in. I mean there is precedent for them bundling movies, they did it with the PSP. And what a way to pull out ahead in the disc wars, at least in terms of discs "sold". Who cares if they all end up being dumped in haz mat bins.
Really if they knew what was good for them, they would just not bundle and charge more, lots more... people will pay $1000 for a console, ebay has shown us that. And there is no real reason to let the speculators make that money. Charge more, then lower the price when you actually have units sitting on the shelves for more then a day.
This not a digital timebomb sort of thing, the chances of both cameras failing in the same short time period are low. One should always check the cameras before heading out of course.
But there is a lot of damage you can do with cheap/free lvl 5 chars, mostly in the form of spamming, and the like. Everone having to pay keeps it sane, since the publisher can lock out your cd key, and account, and let that be that. But with no cost of entry, well imagine hordes of zombie machines running WoW spaming "free Cialis message fdlkfjs@aol.com".
There are ways around it, but it is a side effect. Also, personally I like the begining parts a lot better then the middle levels where it is a grind. So no money fromm me and my ilk.
They didn't want to sell every possible copy. With the copies they realeased they had enough trouble meeting demand, physical copies in this case served another purpose, to restrict the number of players (at least initially).
One should keep in mind the bill of materials cost for producing a graphics chip is actually pretty low. Nvidia places a massive markup to cover research, and product development (and marketing and other things). So there is no cost to eat. They lose some margin, but make it up in volume, and since you can't rip the chips out and use them in a pc, they don't hurt any other market (except for those few that would have bought a high end card that will now buy a console)
Because it isn't an economic free ride. Keep in mind that Mickey Mouse would be Disney's as long as it is exploited because it is trademarked. Some of the older shorts would be no longer be monoplized by Disney. Monopoly is in itself a market distorting thing, and where monopoly is not a natural aspect of the system it leads to poor utilization of resources. However monopoly is a potent reward for creation of novel things. Yet realistically, only a certain ammount of monopoly is needed. (for one thing future rewards are discounted). Past a certain point you get nothing but inefficent market distribution and little gain in marginal incentive for new work.
Letting things into the public domain removes the market distorting costs the monopoly imposes and allows the material to be used for cost of reproduction, which is more similiar to other products. Placing existing material into the public domain encourages new work as profit is best secured through the chasing of the monopoly.
They are voluntary but it is more like how a car dealer will "volunatirly" give you an advertised price if you go to the trade commision and they start poking around. It isn't a praiseworthy thing.
There is a difference between illegal and "illegal". Very few companies will be so brazen and open as to publicly and wihout question break a statute. I mean spaming peoples cell phones is fairly clearly in breach, now if google wanted to be EVIL what they could do is change the EULA and give 30 days to opt out of sms mail notifications with an ad or something.
In general though, well some pretty bad companies have large phone number databases and a lot of those are going to be cell phones, and no big spamming. It is is just a little too open, corporate evil is behind doors.
Slashdot Mirror
It means they they plant a tree for every orc they kill.
Yes the only thing the casinos love more than a hopeful customer, is a hopeful customer who thinks they have an edge. As the hopeful player may bow out when down a mortgage payment, but the hopeful player with an "edge" will keep on waiting for the edge to turn until they are down a mortgage.
Ummm the members are the potential non members. No business would sign a death pact. There is bound to be some termination clause. So given a few months lead any member of the alliance can fork the code.
Eh technically if MS could be shown to know (or have reasonable cause to know) that most of their patents wouldn't hold up you'd only need to kill a substantial amount of them.
But yeah, killing a single patent is a massive time consuming battle you'd have to kill fifty or so to really make a good case.
FWIW, MS offers works effectively free for throwing in an office demo. IIRC it even becomes a revenue generator because if the demo office is purchased through certain means the OEM gets a kickback.
As to the ideas being the same, eh they all look like some of the product demos various companies (including microsoft research) were putting out in the mid-late 90s, not in detail but in the general glitz and glamour. There are a lot of things that people have wanted to do for a while, but the hardware wasn't there. Apple decided to press forth ahead of the hardware (there was a fair bit of complaining at the time) so they go the prettiness first. Microsoft on the other hand had to make even their flagship OS run on a bottom end $400 Monitor included PC. That is part of the reson MS split up Vista so much, the low end was holding them back some.
... parsimonious with gfx cards lately though, so if they really want to push it they will probably lock out a lot of the market. So expect more complaining, and visuals awesome enough to make everyone run out and buy new machines (Apple is after all a hardware company).
Further on the hardware Aero uses a lot more of the hardware then Quartz Extreme does, so it would make sense for Apple to come out with a quartz extreme 2 (or some such, if they kill extreme I would be happy), which would use all the pretty little shaders. They could then do all the fancy effects that hardware a few years ago simply couldn't do on the low end. I look forward to see where they push it. Apple has been
You obviously haven't played around the energy field much. Oil companies and cartels use lots and lots of shell companies to counter global warming and other "negative" press. It is certainly a valid question to figure out where this entities loyalties are. A government funded entity (assuming those governments aren't OPEC members) is generally considered more reliable then, a private study paid for by interested parties. This is true on both sides.
In this case it seems to be estimating peak oil at 24 years out, instead of the now - 25 years out peak oil people are saying. They assume a clean shift away from oil at the "plateau" is all. There isn't a whole lot to dispute or refute. Their undulating plateau actually looks like it heads down quicklike around where the graph cuts off as a matter of fact. The best that can be said for it is that it is an optimistic peak oil aligned estimate.
The idea (as I understand it) is total taxes (including VAT corporate etc.). I.e. tax burden as a percentage of GDP
a te.cfm?PubID=9732
It isn't 70% though, but Sweden is the highest at 50.06%
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/templ
For a previous generation version it sounds about right. iPods sucked for video, and now are... bad. Keep in mind that no one ever gets what the manufacturer says (Though Apple has gotten much better 2-3Gen iPods Audio times were 50% of spec for actual day to day use, now you lose 20% or so for both)
That isn't to say you can't get them (with the normal low backlight simple video simply encoded etc conditions) just that real world times aren't there.
Multi factor authorization provides only limited protection by itself. There is nothing stopping a phiser website from using the user/pass + external factor that very instant. The proxy delay the system induces is on the order of miliseconds. This has actually been done in the US. It does generally speaking reduce access to once though. So if you require a few days to set up a transfer out account you protect reasonably well. Actually such speed bumps are a big part of protection. The other option is out of band communication before big transactions (i.e. before you transfer your entire account balance to some place that you've never dealt with before you have to answer a phone call at your number of record, or copy a code from an email that explains what you are about to do) A combination of all three generally secures things well enough.
Obviously lossless compression is just as good as raw data (in terms of looks, and leaving aside problems such as possible colorspace conversions that a good system won't have). A highend lossless format can compress ~3x smaller then raw http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/l ossless_codecs_en.html
That being said lossless video is a pain to work with, and honestly most people would rather have more pixels that are, under normal source material coniditions, mostly right, then fewer pixels perfect. Which in the end is always what the choice will come down to. A format that can do HD lossless can do Ultra HDV lossy, the choice for the consumer then becomes rather clear, esp. as humans aren't that that picky about visual stimuli. Though someone will still probably come out with a lossless system, to be bought by people who probably can't tell the difference in normal use (as is the case with high end audio the irony is that the people who are most able to afford it are those least able to see/hear well enough to benefit from it)
Most ADFs can feed photos too. Hp even made a scanner (HP Scanjet 5500c) Just for this purpose. Of course image management gets tricky, but picasa could probably be a good starting place.
think to most people (including MS) it's pretty clear that Apple is going to create a better media experience. However, the three way battle for the lounge room is not being fought on a single front. The real competitors for the Mac Mini are the Xbox 360 & PS3, not Media Centre.
All well and good except at the moment ummm MS wins, by a lot. For one it actually has an integrated interface for acting as PVR, (and HP for example bundles an iTunes connector in).
The real iss ue with the article is they seem to be comparing a home built machine that they installed media center on to a mac mini. Since they don't say what the problem was, well it is just as likely to be their not building the system right. Eh, stupid stupid article.
In this case I think Amazon is very happy they don't have a trusted third party involved. For most businesses, a trusted third party is going to bite them more often then not. (After all, if the turned over emails show no evidence of say sexual harassment, you can't get a conviction on vauge intimations of unreliability) So more or less the burden of proof works against keeping unimpeachable records. (After all, a company is not going to depend on anything external that isn't in a contract.) Kind of sad really.
Actually movies were first invtented 1888. The first MUD in 1977, so we are now about 1917, or so. Still early years yet.
And of course if this is a sucess producers will follow, that is what they do.
I feel you might be handling this the wrong way, the problem is that right now the only incentive to submit stories is to get a link, if you add incentive (ad free for a week or something) you will get more and better submisions, reducing the people who just want a link. Also maybe add no follow tags if a submitter has submitted more then 4 in a week or something? Also you could limit submissions per account, which would decrease the spaming of articles (maybe a system where accepted articles allow more submissions while rejected for cause (i.e. not those who submitted an article that wasn't published yet, but weren't first) reducing the number of submissions. You need to increase the value of an accepted submission while simulatenously increasing the cost of submission.
Or is he saying "If you thought the X360 bundles were heinous, wait until you see us bundle a Sony HDTV with the PS3!"
Hey at least it makes sense, and would be useful. The real problem will be the bundled Stealh BluD and any other real bombs Sony can fit in. I mean there is precedent for them bundling movies, they did it with the PSP. And what a way to pull out ahead in the disc wars, at least in terms of discs "sold". Who cares if they all end up being dumped in haz mat bins.
Really if they knew what was good for them, they would just not bundle and charge more, lots more... people will pay $1000 for a console, ebay has shown us that. And there is no real reason to let the speculators make that money. Charge more, then lower the price when you actually have units sitting on the shelves for more then a day.
Good catch, don't suppose you know the per unit cost? Can't be that high with 30,000 of them.
This not a digital timebomb sort of thing, the chances of both cameras failing in the same short time period are low. One should always check the cameras before heading out of course.
But there is a lot of damage you can do with cheap/free lvl 5 chars, mostly in the form of spamming, and the like. Everone having to pay keeps it sane, since the publisher can lock out your cd key, and account, and let that be that. But with no cost of entry, well imagine hordes of zombie machines running WoW spaming "free Cialis message fdlkfjs@aol.com".
There are ways around it, but it is a side effect. Also, personally I like the begining parts a lot better then the middle levels where it is a grind. So no money fromm me and my ilk.
They didn't want to sell every possible copy. With the copies they realeased they had enough trouble meeting demand, physical copies in this case served another purpose, to restrict the number of players (at least initially).
One should keep in mind the bill of materials cost for producing a graphics chip is actually pretty low. Nvidia places a massive markup to cover research, and product development (and marketing and other things). So there is no cost to eat. They lose some margin, but make it up in volume, and since you can't rip the chips out and use them in a pc, they don't hurt any other market (except for those few that would have bought a high end card that will now buy a console)
Because it isn't an economic free ride. Keep in mind that Mickey Mouse would be Disney's as long as it is exploited because it is trademarked. Some of the older shorts would be no longer be monoplized by Disney. Monopoly is in itself a market distorting thing, and where monopoly is not a natural aspect of the system it leads to poor utilization of resources. However monopoly is a potent reward for creation of novel things. Yet realistically, only a certain ammount of monopoly is needed. (for one thing future rewards are discounted). Past a certain point you get nothing but inefficent market distribution and little gain in marginal incentive for new work.
Letting things into the public domain removes the market distorting costs the monopoly imposes and allows the material to be used for cost of reproduction, which is more similiar to other products. Placing existing material into the public domain encourages new work as profit is best secured through the chasing of the monopoly.
They are voluntary but it is more like how a car dealer will "volunatirly" give you an advertised price if you go to the trade commision and they start poking around. It isn't a praiseworthy thing.
There is a difference between illegal and "illegal". Very few companies will be so brazen and open as to publicly and wihout question break a statute. I mean spaming peoples cell phones is fairly clearly in breach, now if google wanted to be EVIL what they could do is change the EULA and give 30 days to opt out of sms mail notifications with an ad or something.
In general though, well some pretty bad companies have large phone number databases and a lot of those are going to be cell phones, and no big spamming. It is is just a little too open, corporate evil is behind doors.