I saw a Radio Shack a bit back in a mall - that was just filled with cell phones and cell phone accessories.
I also was at a big Fry's Electronics... they had some stuff, but it's not like you could just pick up some random resistor or even set of resistors.
For components, and arduino's etc., online is really your friend.
What I don't get, however, is the projection of Best Buy going away. Would that be in favor of Walmarts and the like? Because I can't imagine somebody buying a a big screen TV or even a laptop based solely on online descriptions (unless you're determined to get Apple gear in which case going to a store and poking at the laptop adds nothing to the decision-making process). They might still buy them online to take advantage of lower pricing, of course..
Because people... A. Are unaware that they're doing better than others. B. Are aware but think Apple could still do even better and fall back to the previous arguments of why Apple makes an excellent 'target'.
Compare this to Nike. Nike still gets most of the flak even though they probably do much better than a random other brand of 'sports' shoes. Fair? Nope. Fallout from being the obvious choice thanks to your success? Yup.
As for why you would do better... good question. Why?
But somehow I doubt that Apple are just going to throw up their hands, say "there's no pleasing this crowd", and go back to circumstances as they were before they told the factories/suppliers to do a better job the first time around. So I guess they, at least, have the answer to 'why'.
In summary: Because Apple has the most exposure. It's kind of like if John Doe, Jane Smith and Lady Gaga shopped at a clothing store whose clothes come from sweatshops, and complaining that everybody is focusing on Lady Gaga. Whether or not that is actually more productive than if they treated all of the players equally in these matters is another discussion, albeit a predictable one.
oh yeah.. $400,000,000 might be a bit much (and even worse for some projects), you're right - got a little carried away there;) Let's go for 'over-funded by percent for projects with goal higher than $100,000'. Although things get a little arbitrary then:)
Its current backer pledging rate of about $1,000/minute (yes, I'm serious) is not the norm. Check out other game projects at KickStarter. Most don't even make it to their funding goal when their funding goal is $4,000 - let alone the $400,000 that Double Fine had set.
Double Fine, however, is well-known in the gaming community. As are some of the names that attached themselves to this project. This in term allows them to leverage their existing social networks (followers on twitter, friends at facebook), their industry contacts, and get noticed by other sites (such as Slashdot) more easily.
Compare this, if you will, to the Humble Bundle. Yes, games within the Humble Bundle generally do quite well. But do they do quite well because of the game, or because of the Humble Bundle association?
That said, this is still very cool, and I would be very surprised if this project didn't top the #1 slot for most funded, most over-funded (absolute and percentage-wise), fastest to reach funding goal, highest funding rate and more at KickStarter. In fact, I'm sure KickStarter staff did a double-take at suddenly gaining hundreds of new accounts, about 130 per minute in the last hour, backing this project alone.
Yes, I'm sure we're all civilized people here with great integrity. But that doesn't preclude the submitter from being evil and lord knows there's plenty of others who are nefarious. Even if you're not particularly evil, I know few people who wouldn't be tempted to see if that refurbished (camera+)memorycard had any fun photos on there.. just to have a peek. We're a curious bunch, after all.
No buy button, no having to fill in any additional information, no having to set up an account, works in your browser (although right now it's failing in firefox, their non-HTML5 interface works, though) and mobile (have been using it on my Android device).
And yes, in many ways this is 'pirating' because Grooveshark does not have agreements with every artist/label whose material is on there; the way they work is that they respect take-down requests, knowing that users will just upload the material again anyway, and offering the artist/label a contract as an alternative where that artist/label gets a few pennies (still more than $0.00 and no expensive legal costs in having to file DMCA/or similar complaints).
It hasn't displaced Spotify (similar to Pandora) here, though, as it doesn't do any of the recommendation / user stations stuff - so for discovering new music there's still better services that shy away from 'piracy'.
Aaah yes, because photographers actually use those colors...
We sure do.
oh wait, we don't
You mean you don't
and even the best cameras couldn't capture them anyway.
Are you sure you're even referring to the same thing I am, here?
I'm not talking about the color profile (or even CMYK work, as OP did), but about bit depth. The cameras will, of course, always only be able to capture what their color filters, sensors, etc. allow to be capture. If I'm hoping to capture IR with my camera, I'll want to remove the filter that blocks most of that first (or get a camera that lets it be flipped out of the way on demand). That is completely unrelated to the bit depth, however. With 8bpc there are 'only' 256 levels for each of the R, G and B channels. That may seem like a lot - until you start doing post processing; then you're going to wish you had a bit more to work with. Many cameras in RAW capture mode will capture 10bit (1024 levels), 12bit or even 14 bit. Even that 10bit is a lot nicer to work with. And that's just in the capture - the reason you'd want 16bit in the software is so that those 10bpc values don't keep getting re-converted to 10bit values while working with the file, accumulating error as you go (aspects of GEGL looks promising on this front, but for other reasons). You still do that in 16bit, but the error is much smaller.
No point really as the human eye cannot discern them.
Except that it can. See: http://i.imgur.com/NCeAi.png ( If you can't see it at all, your vision may be impaired. If it stands out like a sore thumb, you may be viewing it on an LCD monitor that has shoddy mapping from 8 bit to its native (such as 5/6/5bit))
Granted, in straight photography without any post-processing work, the nature of the capture method imbues a natural type of dither (in the form of noise) to the image that breaks up any patterns that would make it obvious.
Out of the entire list, you found the one feature that is actually completely and utterly useless and made an issue about it.
I think other replies, and a quick Google search, would prove you wrong about whether or not it is useless - however, it may be useless to you.
That said, you pointed out that it is in the snapshots, so anybody who wants it can get it from those - but to the average user 'The GIMP' is the current stable offering.
P.S. If I had to pick anything out of The GIMP that I find lacking, it would be the transform tools rather than bit depth issues - but that's getting addressed in a future version and I happily use The GIMP in favor of e.g. Photoshop most of the time.
You mean you miss the good old days where your phone was just a phone and texting capabilities was a luxury?
Because you know they still sell those, right? And those now get two weeks to a month.
Let's face it, the reason our fancy phones with internet, apps, etc. don't last very long is two-fold... 1. They do use more power - not much you can do about that right now unless you want to give up the capabilities again. 2. We keep wanting smaller and/or thinner phones. I promise you that if people would accept a phone half an inch thick again, battery life would be much improved - simply by virtue of being able to fit a much, much greater capacity battery.
Except that there's a difference between "not releasing" for older iPhone models and "removing from" older iPhone models. Yes, I know Siri-as-on-4S is not the same as what was available from the App Store before.
Think of it, if you will, as follows: Apple buys Rovio Mobile. Then they take Angry Birds, and make a better version - one that uses the reality distortion field sensor in the iPhone 5, perhaps. Then they disable Angry Birds on the 4S and every model prior, citing quality issues on earlier models that make for an inferior experience.
Far-fetched? Sure. Now instead replace it with a sat nav app - iPhone 5 has a better GPS, so they disable support on earlier models citing quality issues. Or a stargazing app - iPhone 5 has a better set of accelerometer/compass sensors, so they disable support on earlier models citing quality issues.
Yes, it might save them from user complaints that the sky view is sometimes twitchy, that the nav app puts them on the wrong road in downtown NY, or that the angry birds are at times not particularly angry just as Siri might misunderstand a few commands once in a while (and there's no shortage of that even on the 4S). But is that a valid reason for pulling the feature from the devices?
Compare this to the Asus Transformer Prime. Its GPS apparently has issues. Rather than disabling it, they informed their users about it, offered updates that address it (but don't fix it entirely) and told users they can take it back for a refund, and removed the GPS feature from advertising materials so that those looking to buy one should know that the unadvertised GPS feature is, well, unadvertised.. use at own peril.
Apple's case would be even simpler, as iPhones didn't ship with Siri until the 4S - so existing users wouldn't have any expectation as to the reliability of the feature beyond that which they were used to, and they could still simply not offer it to new users.
The GIMP does 32bpc now? I know it does 32bpp - but that's just 8bpc - red, green, blue and alpha. As far as I know, it doesn't even do 16bpc. And as far as I can tell from googling around, higher bitdepths are slated for 2.8 - which is not available in stable yet.
Perhaps the development snapshot "does all those things" and then some. But the first thing you hit when you go to download The GIMP now is v2.6, which certainly doesn't do all those things.
The thing is, though... this amount of money, that amount of money.. is just some numbers on a computer, sort of disappearing or reappearing or naughts going.. you know. It must be very tempting, at the point when you realize that, for somebody to sneak up to you and goes 'Just type it back in.' There's no actual stuff I mean nothing's caught fire or exploded or sunk or anything. It's just a load of wanker-bankers having made stupid bets with each other when they're drunk. No bad thing has happened. It's not like all the pigs in South America suddenly died of blight(!) It is just people were just juggling with numbers that didn't exist, and it got out of hand, because they're arseholes
I, too, would like to know - but I can understand why he wouldn't want to reveal that (in any of his posts to date).
I don't think he would be branded an 'enemy of the people', however.
It's just that any follow-up discussion is far more likely to be used to attack him in these comments than it is to sympathize or offer genuine assistance.
Let's say he did mention the product's name and its name was NetCommand (if a product with that name exists it's coincidental.. he has mention his product has to do with IP (the networking variant) and server vs desktop stuff, and the name works).
The very first thing people will do is figure out what NetCommand is, and suggest that it's not worth the money he's asking anyway. Whether that's $1 or $100. Next come alternatives that are free (as in beer and/or speech). Next come links to other sites where the cracked copy is and telling him "See how much good your DMCA request has done in curtailing its piracy? Doing it is just a waste of your time and money". Then come the friendly suggestions on how he should just offer incentives to those who do buy it. Features not available to the pirates (at least until a few days later when the new pirated copy is released). Access to a support forum (which he probably can't staff and personally I know I get more support from random forums than official forums any time of day - so that's pointless anyway). Make his money instead with contract work and charge big for that (but maybe there's very little interest in that). Make his money by selling merchandise (because who doesn't want the NetCommand mug, right?). Suggest that he needs to find something else to do if he wants money because clearly his trade is dead and he needs to just accept it.
That of course alongside out-of-the-behind figures on how much money he has already made and that he shouldn't whine and moan about supposedly 'lost' sales - he's rich already. And the pirates wouldn't have purchased anyway.
etc. etc.
Unfortunately, the flip side is that he doesn't mention the name of the product and so he gets modded down (because hey, where's the proof?) and the AC who wants to know the name (whether genuinely curious or just looking to incite exactly the kind of 'debate' I sketched above) gets modded up.
All in all, however, he stands far more to lose in revealing the name than in not revealing it. So his karma may get dented - big deal, better than people parading around after pummeling his product into the ground.
Weird... I'm currently in the U.S., and the Fry's, WalMart, etc. here seem to have no problem whatsoever taking out an A5 paper size for all sorts of crap about the product... how it's on sale no.. how you can get 2/$3.00 and 10/$12.00. Something tells me they could make space for:
Product: $N State tax: S% = $S County tax: C% = $C City tax: Y% = $Y YOUR TOTAL: $T
Where the first few could easily be in smaller type.
I share OP's complaint - it even applies to airports.. you go to buy an already overpriced bottle of drink for $2.50 but when you get to the register with two $1 bills and two quarters in hand, you'll have to fumble with your wallet again because the actual price is what.. $2.84?
The above suggestion would do away with that nonsense and re-assure people that taxes and tax increases aren't sneakily being hidden.
I think you'd have to do a little more than sneeze on it - but I am well aware of stories in the past where e.g. sporters who sweated a little (much) got told by the service center that the humidity indicators in their iPod (or similar) indicated the device got wet and thus the warranty was void.
But just to address your specific example - your $15 Walgreens watch probably has little to no openings and whatever interface controls are there are very easy to make waterproof. Compare to the many slots and compartments on a typical smartphone which often are required to be easily user-accessible. You wouldn't want to have to unscrew the back of your smartphone every time you'd just want to recharge it (if it ran for 2 years on a few button cells like your watch, then that wouldn't be much of an issue).
But, more importantly, your $15 Walgreens watch is $15. If they actually got a claim from somebody with valid proof that they only dove to 19.95m and not over 20.00m, sending out a new $15 Walgreens watch is a heck of a lot cheaper than going over that paperwork and trying to tell you that you must be mistaken. For $400+ devices, on the other hand, it's a lot cheaper to open it up, point at the humidity tags, and say "sucks to be you".
haha - no, I think we share that lawn. I still reach for tables every now and again and I never did understand the real reason behind removing b and i tags (then later adding them back in).
However, there are good reasons for the separation and while the implementation initially is a real hindrance, good things are on the horizon.. although.. I guess I've been saying that since HTML 4.01
I'm curious what you (and others) think of the trend that's currently in its infancy; 4K. ( For those who have missed it - more cameras and displays supporting 4k have been announced in recent months than new 3D announcements at trade shows. )
A lot of people have suggested that HD was a very noticeable improvement over SD, while 3D is marginal (and gives headaches, needs glasses, etc. etc.). Somebody replying down below is already noting that 720p over 480p was a huge step, but 1080p over 720p just wasn't as interesting. So what about 2160p over 1080p? Will people find that more interesting, or would that pretty much hit a "isn't enough of an improvement" barrier?
If that usher were there for the specific purpose of keeping an eye on everybody and what, exactly, they're doing? Yes - I do think a lot of people would feel that as an invasion of their privacy, just as they would if it were camera-monitored.
Similarly, if a waiter were to sit down at your table and watch you eat, listen to your conversations, etc. don't you think that people would also think that to be an invasion of their privacy? We all go to restaurants accepting that what we do and what we say can be seen and heard by those in our vicinity - it doesn't mean we would accept somebody going out of their way to do exactly that.
People quite reasonably expect that when they pay for entertainment at a venue (anything from a bar to an amusement park) they don't have to stick around and help with the washing up.
Well I didn't suggest that at the end of the movie, everybody grab some water and soap and wash off their seats, now did I?
To turn your statement around, are you suggesting that it's quite reasonable for people to knowingly throw their trash around in the theater, dunk over their bags of popcorn and by all means why not empty that half a gallon of coke on the floor because hey.. they pay some kid to clean that up anyway, so why bother taking your trash with you and dunking it in the trashbins conveniently placed throughout the facility?
For what it's worth - there are a few groups working on solutions to this dissociation between layout and content to us visual beings.
Others have already pointed out that layout and content should be separate, allowing the layout to differ completely while serving up the same content in order to facilitate different clients (screen sizes, screen readers, etc.)
But most of them missed the part that you actually complained about - that it's practically impossible to glance at either HTML or CSS and have an impression of how it should look for the given medium.
It essentially specifies a grid onto which you specify certain reference characters (a,b,c, etc.) which you can then reference in your CSS. If you then ever wish to swap the left and right columns, you don't even have to worry about the exact CSS markup, you simply swap the two characters in the grid layout.
There are many others - some simpler, some vastly most sophisticated (almost in line with professional publishing software and practically requiring a WYSIWYG editor.. at which point the underlying code becomes a bit secondary) - but it looks like the problem you're facing now should become a thing of the past 'soon' (depending on browser implementation and finalization, basically).
Just saying... even if his project worked out (and for most people, it doesn't - Louis CK was already popular and had a large following, and a comfortable enough living style to go into this adventure without wondering what to do if it didn't pan out at all), what if every single download from TPB were instead that $5 purchase? I guess the charities would be even happier. What would it take to get those pirates on board with that purchase? Lower the price to $3? $1? How many would have to purchase to offset for the lower price? How would that affect future productions? etc.
That's basically the game the studios are playing - and right now they're still convinced that their tiered pricing model (expensive at launch, $3 in the bargain bin a few months down the road, and everything in between) nets them (the studios, not the kid on the floor bringing coffees) more income than if they started out with a $5 pricing from the get-go. Unfortunately (for us) they can't just risk an experiment where they start selling all of their new productions at $5 for, say, 2 months to see if that would get them a greater net income - because if they don't, raising the prices will just make everybody who did purchase at $5 (prior consumers as well as pirates who decided that $5 wasn't a bad dea) go 'wtf?' at the bumped-back-up prices and risk turning them (back) to piracy.
Copyrights themselves aren't the problem, copyrights that extend for decades without the creator having to extend them and without regard to the creator's interests that are the problem. The reality is that there's a bunch of content that's been abandoned by the owners that would have been public domain after 28 years previously, but now thanks to the super long automatic copyright terms isn't available to anybody.
But... the reality is also that most people don't 'pirate' content from, say, the 1950's nearly as much as that they pirate content from right now. That movie that just came out 2 weeks ago, that album that was to be released in 3 weeks, etc.
In addition, while there are some works that are simply 'unavailable' because whoever are holding them aren't releasing them in any way, shape or form, those works are still available in the hands of others - and this very article dictates that if people want a copy, they'll go right ahead and make one despite all of the copyright extensions. Similarly, while one could argue that Seven Samurai from 1954 should have entered the Public Domain (and I agree - in fact, it should have a long time ago), that argument shouldn't be used to suggest it's 'not available to anybody'; Amazon sells it in a myriad of formats (VHS through Blu-Ray) and packaging options (individual, box sets).
( And yes, I realize there's more to public domain than just the 'free as in beer' aspect - remakes, incorporation of the content without having to deal with licensing hassles, etc. Which is the foremost reason to be against extensions of copyright, but one 'pirates' care little about. )
And in actual fact, it seems that pirates spend more money on music and other types of media than other people, according to studies from many countries such as Sweden and the Netherlands.
Keep in mind though that those studies (at least the two I'm aware of for The Netherlands) did not imply causation - only correlation.
I.e. they didn't say that somebody who turns to 'piracy' will magically start purchasing more media than they did before as a result of that pirating.
It's entirely possible that people who were, say, buying 10 times as much media as the average person are now also exactly the people who are more likely to turn to 'piracy' to satiate their media desires. If that means they now buy 5 times as much media as the average person, that still suggests the notion that pirates buy more stuff than non-pirates; but they're still buying less than before.
If I missed an NL study that did research historical purchasing behavior, please post the link. ( wouldn't know about Sweden - Dutch law already allows downloads of media regardless of whether or not the copyright owners like it, which may impact behavior to begin with. )
The copies didn't necessarily sound that poor if you had good gear and good quality tapes.
The thing is, though - even if you copied them at twice the normal speed, it would still take you at least half an hour for the most common tapes.. and you couldn't even use that 'cheat' if you were recording from the radio.
Even if you duplicated that tape twice (1 hour, 3 tapes), gave that to two friends, and they also made two copies each (1 hour, 7 tapes) and so on, getting it out to 1,000 people would still take a horribly long time.. and that's ignoring the time it takes to actually get people those physical copies which severely impacts things.
Now, though, if I put up a good quality song on a file sharing network, 1,000 people can easily have it within the first 10 minutes.
That's the real major difference. Even if there were some manner of 'digital degradation' with each copy, every single person of those 1,000 could get a direct copy from the original well within 4 hours (provided they all have a reasonable internet connection).
Slashdot Mirror
I saw a Radio Shack a bit back in a mall - that was just filled with cell phones and cell phone accessories.
I also was at a big Fry's Electronics... they had some stuff, but it's not like you could just pick up some random resistor or even set of resistors.
For components, and arduino's etc., online is really your friend.
What I don't get, however, is the projection of Best Buy going away. Would that be in favor of Walmarts and the like? Because I can't imagine somebody buying a a big screen TV or even a laptop based solely on online descriptions (unless you're determined to get Apple gear in which case going to a store and poking at the laptop adds nothing to the decision-making process).
They might still buy them online to take advantage of lower pricing, of course..
Because people...
A. Are unaware that they're doing better than others.
B. Are aware but think Apple could still do even better and fall back to the previous arguments of why Apple makes an excellent 'target'.
Compare this to Nike. Nike still gets most of the flak even though they probably do much better than a random other brand of 'sports' shoes. Fair? Nope. Fallout from being the obvious choice thanks to your success? Yup.
As for why you would do better... good question. Why?
But somehow I doubt that Apple are just going to throw up their hands, say "there's no pleasing this crowd", and go back to circumstances as they were before they told the factories/suppliers to do a better job the first time around. So I guess they, at least, have the answer to 'why'.
You sound an awful lot like David Pogue.
Which means that for karmawhoring, people should just copy/paste the comments to his blog at the NY Times, explaining why people target Apple.
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/the-dilemma-of-cheap-electronics/
In summary: Because Apple has the most exposure. It's kind of like if John Doe, Jane Smith and Lady Gaga shopped at a clothing store whose clothes come from sweatshops, and complaining that everybody is focusing on Lady Gaga. Whether or not that is actually more productive than if they treated all of the players equally in these matters is another discussion, albeit a predictable one.
oh yeah.. $400,000,000 might be a bit much (and even worse for some projects), you're right - got a little carried away there ;) :)
Let's go for 'over-funded by percent for projects with goal higher than $100,000'. Although things get a little arbitrary then
Keep in mind that this is Double Fine.
Its current backer pledging rate of about $1,000/minute (yes, I'm serious) is not the norm. Check out other game projects at KickStarter. Most don't even make it to their funding goal when their funding goal is $4,000 - let alone the $400,000 that Double Fine had set.
Double Fine, however, is well-known in the gaming community. As are some of the names that attached themselves to this project. This in term allows them to leverage their existing social networks (followers on twitter, friends at facebook), their industry contacts, and get noticed by other sites (such as Slashdot) more easily.
Compare this, if you will, to the Humble Bundle. Yes, games within the Humble Bundle generally do quite well. But do they do quite well because of the game, or because of the Humble Bundle association?
That said, this is still very cool, and I would be very surprised if this project didn't top the #1 slot for most funded, most over-funded (absolute and percentage-wise), fastest to reach funding goal, highest funding rate and more at KickStarter. In fact, I'm sure KickStarter staff did a double-take at suddenly gaining hundreds of new accounts, about 130 per minute in the last hour, backing this project alone.
Choice #3: Mine the data, use to your advantage.
Yes, I'm sure we're all civilized people here with great integrity. But that doesn't preclude the submitter from being evil and lord knows there's plenty of others who are nefarious.
Even if you're not particularly evil, I know few people who wouldn't be tempted to see if that refurbished (camera+)memorycard had any fun photos on there.. just to have a peek. We're a curious bunch, after all.
Yes, easier.
The days of opening a desktop app or TPB to find a single song and instead end up with viruses or a full album download of 200MB are well behind.
1. Open html5.grooveshark.com .
2. Search
3. Click the result of interest
No buy button, no having to fill in any additional information, no having to set up an account, works in your browser (although right now it's failing in firefox, their non-HTML5 interface works, though) and mobile (have been using it on my Android device).
And yes, in many ways this is 'pirating' because Grooveshark does not have agreements with every artist/label whose material is on there; the way they work is that they respect take-down requests, knowing that users will just upload the material again anyway, and offering the artist/label a contract as an alternative where that artist/label gets a few pennies (still more than $0.00 and no expensive legal costs in having to file DMCA/or similar complaints).
It hasn't displaced Spotify (similar to Pandora) here, though, as it doesn't do any of the recommendation / user stations stuff - so for discovering new music there's still better services that shy away from 'piracy'.
We sure do.
You mean you don't
Are you sure you're even referring to the same thing I am, here?
I'm not talking about the color profile (or even CMYK work, as OP did), but about bit depth. The cameras will, of course, always only be able to capture what their color filters, sensors, etc. allow to be capture. If I'm hoping to capture IR with my camera, I'll want to remove the filter that blocks most of that first (or get a camera that lets it be flipped out of the way on demand). That is completely unrelated to the bit depth, however. With 8bpc there are 'only' 256 levels for each of the R, G and B channels. That may seem like a lot - until you start doing post processing; then you're going to wish you had a bit more to work with. Many cameras in RAW capture mode will capture 10bit (1024 levels), 12bit or even 14 bit. Even that 10bit is a lot nicer to work with.
And that's just in the capture - the reason you'd want 16bit in the software is so that those 10bpc values don't keep getting re-converted to 10bit values while working with the file, accumulating error as you go (aspects of GEGL looks promising on this front, but for other reasons). You still do that in 16bit, but the error is much smaller.
Except that it can. See: http://i.imgur.com/NCeAi.png
( If you can't see it at all, your vision may be impaired. If it stands out like a sore thumb, you may be viewing it on an LCD monitor that has shoddy mapping from 8 bit to its native (such as 5/6/5bit))
Granted, in straight photography without any post-processing work, the nature of the capture method imbues a natural type of dither (in the form of noise) to the image that breaks up any patterns that would make it obvious.
I think other replies, and a quick Google search, would prove you wrong about whether or not it is useless - however, it may be useless to you.
That said, you pointed out that it is in the snapshots, so anybody who wants it can get it from those - but to the average user 'The GIMP' is the current stable offering.
P.S. If I had to pick anything out of The GIMP that I find lacking, it would be the transform tools rather than bit depth issues - but that's getting addressed in a future version and I happily use The GIMP in favor of e.g. Photoshop most of the time.
You mean you miss the good old days where your phone was just a phone and texting capabilities was a luxury?
Because you know they still sell those, right? And those now get two weeks to a month.
Let's face it, the reason our fancy phones with internet, apps, etc. don't last very long is two-fold...
1. They do use more power - not much you can do about that right now unless you want to give up the capabilities again.
2. We keep wanting smaller and/or thinner phones. I promise you that if people would accept a phone half an inch thick again, battery life would be much improved - simply by virtue of being able to fit a much, much greater capacity battery.
Except that there's a difference between "not releasing" for older iPhone models and "removing from" older iPhone models. Yes, I know Siri-as-on-4S is not the same as what was available from the App Store before.
Think of it, if you will, as follows:
Apple buys Rovio Mobile. Then they take Angry Birds, and make a better version - one that uses the reality distortion field sensor in the iPhone 5, perhaps. Then they disable Angry Birds on the 4S and every model prior, citing quality issues on earlier models that make for an inferior experience.
Far-fetched? Sure. Now instead replace it with a sat nav app - iPhone 5 has a better GPS, so they disable support on earlier models citing quality issues. Or a stargazing app - iPhone 5 has a better set of accelerometer/compass sensors, so they disable support on earlier models citing quality issues.
Yes, it might save them from user complaints that the sky view is sometimes twitchy, that the nav app puts them on the wrong road in downtown NY, or that the angry birds are at times not particularly angry just as Siri might misunderstand a few commands once in a while (and there's no shortage of that even on the 4S). But is that a valid reason for pulling the feature from the devices?
Compare this to the Asus Transformer Prime. Its GPS apparently has issues. Rather than disabling it, they informed their users about it, offered updates that address it (but don't fix it entirely) and told users they can take it back for a refund, and removed the GPS feature from advertising materials so that those looking to buy one should know that the unadvertised GPS feature is, well, unadvertised.. use at own peril.
Apple's case would be even simpler, as iPhones didn't ship with Siri until the 4S - so existing users wouldn't have any expectation as to the reliability of the feature beyond that which they were used to, and they could still simply not offer it to new users.
I know I'm late to the party, but...
The GIMP does 32bpc now? I know it does 32bpp - but that's just 8bpc - red, green, blue and alpha. As far as I know, it doesn't even do 16bpc. And as far as I can tell from googling around, higher bitdepths are slated for 2.8 - which is not available in stable yet.
Perhaps the development snapshot "does all those things" and then some. But the first thing you hit when you go to download The GIMP now is v2.6, which certainly doesn't do all those things.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdF76QhVEFE#t=22s
I, too, would like to know - but I can understand why he wouldn't want to reveal that (in any of his posts to date).
I don't think he would be branded an 'enemy of the people', however.
It's just that any follow-up discussion is far more likely to be used to attack him in these comments than it is to sympathize or offer genuine assistance.
Let's say he did mention the product's name and its name was NetCommand (if a product with that name exists it's coincidental.. he has mention his product has to do with IP (the networking variant) and server vs desktop stuff, and the name works).
The very first thing people will do is figure out what NetCommand is, and suggest that it's not worth the money he's asking anyway. Whether that's $1 or $100.
Next come alternatives that are free (as in beer and/or speech).
Next come links to other sites where the cracked copy is and telling him "See how much good your DMCA request has done in curtailing its piracy? Doing it is just a waste of your time and money".
Then come the friendly suggestions on how he should just offer incentives to those who do buy it. Features not available to the pirates (at least until a few days later when the new pirated copy is released). Access to a support forum (which he probably can't staff and personally I know I get more support from random forums than official forums any time of day - so that's pointless anyway). Make his money instead with contract work and charge big for that (but maybe there's very little interest in that). Make his money by selling merchandise (because who doesn't want the NetCommand mug, right?). Suggest that he needs to find something else to do if he wants money because clearly his trade is dead and he needs to just accept it.
That of course alongside out-of-the-behind figures on how much money he has already made and that he shouldn't whine and moan about supposedly 'lost' sales - he's rich already. And the pirates wouldn't have purchased anyway.
etc. etc.
Unfortunately, the flip side is that he doesn't mention the name of the product and so he gets modded down (because hey, where's the proof?) and the AC who wants to know the name (whether genuinely curious or just looking to incite exactly the kind of 'debate' I sketched above) gets modded up.
All in all, however, he stands far more to lose in revealing the name than in not revealing it. So his karma may get dented - big deal, better than people parading around after pummeling his product into the ground.
Weird... I'm currently in the U.S., and the Fry's, WalMart, etc. here seem to have no problem whatsoever taking out an A5 paper size for all sorts of crap about the product... how it's on sale no.. how you can get 2/$3.00 and 10/$12.00. Something tells me they could make space for:
Product: $N
State tax: S% = $S
County tax: C% = $C
City tax: Y% = $Y
YOUR TOTAL: $T
Where the first few could easily be in smaller type.
I share OP's complaint - it even applies to airports.. you go to buy an already overpriced bottle of drink for $2.50 but when you get to the register with two $1 bills and two quarters in hand, you'll have to fumble with your wallet again because the actual price is what.. $2.84?
The above suggestion would do away with that nonsense and re-assure people that taxes and tax increases aren't sneakily being hidden.
I think you'd have to do a little more than sneeze on it - but I am well aware of stories in the past where e.g. sporters who sweated a little (much) got told by the service center that the humidity indicators in their iPod (or similar) indicated the device got wet and thus the warranty was void.
But just to address your specific example - your $15 Walgreens watch probably has little to no openings and whatever interface controls are there are very easy to make waterproof. Compare to the many slots and compartments on a typical smartphone which often are required to be easily user-accessible. You wouldn't want to have to unscrew the back of your smartphone every time you'd just want to recharge it (if it ran for 2 years on a few button cells like your watch, then that wouldn't be much of an issue).
But, more importantly, your $15 Walgreens watch is $15. If they actually got a claim from somebody with valid proof that they only dove to 19.95m and not over 20.00m, sending out a new $15 Walgreens watch is a heck of a lot cheaper than going over that paperwork and trying to tell you that you must be mistaken.
For $400+ devices, on the other hand, it's a lot cheaper to open it up, point at the humidity tags, and say "sucks to be you".
Looks more like somebody projectile vomiting... but I guess I turned my head the wrong way.
Maybe giving it a perfectly reasonable name rather than something that you'd expect to find on a packing list would be better marketing altogether.
haha - no, I think we share that lawn. I still reach for tables every now and again and I never did understand the real reason behind removing b and i tags (then later adding them back in).
However, there are good reasons for the separation and while the implementation initially is a real hindrance, good things are on the horizon.. although.. I guess I've been saying that since HTML 4.01
I'm curious what you (and others) think of the trend that's currently in its infancy; 4K. ( For those who have missed it - more cameras and displays supporting 4k have been announced in recent months than new 3D announcements at trade shows. )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution
A lot of people have suggested that HD was a very noticeable improvement over SD, while 3D is marginal (and gives headaches, needs glasses, etc. etc.). Somebody replying down below is already noting that 720p over 480p was a huge step, but 1080p over 720p just wasn't as interesting. So what about 2160p over 1080p? Will people find that more interesting, or would that pretty much hit a "isn't enough of an improvement" barrier?
If that usher were there for the specific purpose of keeping an eye on everybody and what, exactly, they're doing? Yes - I do think a lot of people would feel that as an invasion of their privacy, just as they would if it were camera-monitored.
Similarly, if a waiter were to sit down at your table and watch you eat, listen to your conversations, etc. don't you think that people would also think that to be an invasion of their privacy? We all go to restaurants accepting that what we do and what we say can be seen and heard by those in our vicinity - it doesn't mean we would accept somebody going out of their way to do exactly that.
Well I didn't suggest that at the end of the movie, everybody grab some water and soap and wash off their seats, now did I?
To turn your statement around, are you suggesting that it's quite reasonable for people to knowingly throw their trash around in the theater, dunk over their bags of popcorn and by all means why not empty that half a gallon of coke on the floor because hey.. they pay some kid to clean that up anyway, so why bother taking your trash with you and dunking it in the trashbins conveniently placed throughout the facility?
For what it's worth - there are a few groups working on solutions to this dissociation between layout and content to us visual beings.
Others have already pointed out that layout and content should be separate, allowing the layout to differ completely while serving up the same content in order to facilitate different clients (screen sizes, screen readers, etc.)
But most of them missed the part that you actually complained about - that it's practically impossible to glance at either HTML or CSS and have an impression of how it should look for the given medium.
Here's one such solution...
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-layout/
It essentially specifies a grid onto which you specify certain reference characters (a,b,c, etc.) which you can then reference in your CSS. If you then ever wish to swap the left and right columns, you don't even have to worry about the exact CSS markup, you simply swap the two characters in the grid layout.
There are many others - some simpler, some vastly most sophisticated (almost in line with professional publishing software and practically requiring a WYSIWYG editor.. at which point the underlying code becomes a bit secondary) - but it looks like the problem you're facing now should become a thing of the past 'soon' (depending on browser implementation and finalization, basically).
Which one of these would that be?
Just saying... even if his project worked out (and for most people, it doesn't - Louis CK was already popular and had a large following, and a comfortable enough living style to go into this adventure without wondering what to do if it didn't pan out at all), what if every single download from TPB were instead that $5 purchase? I guess the charities would be even happier. What would it take to get those pirates on board with that purchase? Lower the price to $3? $1? How many would have to purchase to offset for the lower price? How would that affect future productions? etc.
That's basically the game the studios are playing - and right now they're still convinced that their tiered pricing model (expensive at launch, $3 in the bargain bin a few months down the road, and everything in between) nets them (the studios, not the kid on the floor bringing coffees) more income than if they started out with a $5 pricing from the get-go. Unfortunately (for us) they can't just risk an experiment where they start selling all of their new productions at $5 for, say, 2 months to see if that would get them a greater net income - because if they don't, raising the prices will just make everybody who did purchase at $5 (prior consumers as well as pirates who decided that $5 wasn't a bad dea) go 'wtf?' at the bumped-back-up prices and risk turning them (back) to piracy.
But... the reality is also that most people don't 'pirate' content from, say, the 1950's nearly as much as that they pirate content from right now. That movie that just came out 2 weeks ago, that album that was to be released in 3 weeks, etc.
In addition, while there are some works that are simply 'unavailable' because whoever are holding them aren't releasing them in any way, shape or form, those works are still available in the hands of others - and this very article dictates that if people want a copy, they'll go right ahead and make one despite all of the copyright extensions.
Similarly, while one could argue that Seven Samurai from 1954 should have entered the Public Domain (and I agree - in fact, it should have a long time ago), that argument shouldn't be used to suggest it's 'not available to anybody'; Amazon sells it in a myriad of formats (VHS through Blu-Ray) and packaging options (individual, box sets).
( And yes, I realize there's more to public domain than just the 'free as in beer' aspect - remakes, incorporation of the content without having to deal with licensing hassles, etc. Which is the foremost reason to be against extensions of copyright, but one 'pirates' care little about. )
Keep in mind though that those studies (at least the two I'm aware of for The Netherlands) did not imply causation - only correlation.
I.e. they didn't say that somebody who turns to 'piracy' will magically start purchasing more media than they did before as a result of that pirating.
It's entirely possible that people who were, say, buying 10 times as much media as the average person are now also exactly the people who are more likely to turn to 'piracy' to satiate their media desires. If that means they now buy 5 times as much media as the average person, that still suggests the notion that pirates buy more stuff than non-pirates; but they're still buying less than before.
If I missed an NL study that did research historical purchasing behavior, please post the link.
( wouldn't know about Sweden - Dutch law already allows downloads of media regardless of whether or not the copyright owners like it, which may impact behavior to begin with. )
The copies didn't necessarily sound that poor if you had good gear and good quality tapes.
The thing is, though - even if you copied them at twice the normal speed, it would still take you at least half an hour for the most common tapes.. and you couldn't even use that 'cheat' if you were recording from the radio.
Even if you duplicated that tape twice (1 hour, 3 tapes), gave that to two friends, and they also made two copies each (1 hour, 7 tapes) and so on, getting it out to 1,000 people would still take a horribly long time.. and that's ignoring the time it takes to actually get people those physical copies which severely impacts things.
Now, though, if I put up a good quality song on a file sharing network, 1,000 people can easily have it within the first 10 minutes.
That's the real major difference. Even if there were some manner of 'digital degradation' with each copy, every single person of those 1,000 could get a direct copy from the original well within 4 hours (provided they all have a reasonable internet connection).