Yeah, but that's still a win for Amazon, since the other two can't scoop them on it. It's dicey as Amazon is going it alone, and if they win, it's also a win for G/A, but I'm guessing they figure it's worth the investment for the potential returns.
I'm not certain yet. Having a laptop - even a small one - in meeting is a bit awkward - though that may just be perception at the moment. Having a flat iPad is almost unnoticable (took my current meeting participants about half he meeting to notice mine today). I always have pencil and paper for meetings, though that might change if the tablets got a good pen-based input along with the capacitive interface. I already scan/pdf all of my meeting notes within a day or so of taking them, anyway.
My use will center around looking up lots of references in a meeting (building codes, material specs, etc.), or bringing up plans for review/reference, and I'm hoping it will fit my needs. I will say that it's a lot more fun to play games on than my phone, and nicer for surfing/casual reading - which is my non-business purpose for it. I've had a near-netbook for a year and a half, and it's indispensible for getting simple work done on the road, and it easier to carry than my old desktop replacement machine. I'll be interested to see how I end up using them and whether, in the end, I drop one in favor of the other.
They're out there. They used to be in Walmart (in a very, very small area), even. The problem with the box box stores is that the kits take time to build, so they only carry the RTF (ready to fly) models, which are pretty limited. Rocketry also requires a bit of set up equipment (launch controller and pad) which are "expensive". Along with the increase in engine prices - usu $5-8 for a 3 pack of the regular engines you remember, and $12-18 for a 3-pack of the larger D engines, it's an expensive hobby. They've mostly been phased out, but they still exist in the few hobby stores which survive.
A lot of the push has moved to online, as the small market for them is best aggregated. Hobbylinc has a good selection for reasonable prices, as does discount rocketry. I fly some with my 8yo daughter when we have time.
What if you buy it from Amazon and they upload it directly to your storage for you?
What if they then use deduplication across their servers to save space, and all the people who bought the same track is really stored just once? What about the people you "loaned" those MP3s to who also decided to upload them to Amazons service? Now they could be serving infringing copies from their deduplicated master file.
The question which may get raised - and this is part of a slippery slope - is what happens when Amazon puts your purchases in your storage area for you directly, and then uses deduplication to minimize the total storage on their servers? Because the Amazon versions are bit-identical copies, they would hold only one master which would be served to many end users. The only difference between Amazon and MP3.com at that point is that Amazon collected the first sale revenue.
There's a second part to this. Since many files will be copied, and even two independently ripped mp3s. flacs, wavs, etc, can be bit-identical, Amazon could be deduplicating and re-serving consumer uploaded content.
I hope they win, but there will be some sticky spots to get through along the way.
Please don't call it bribery. We prefer "contributions" or "assistance" or "lobbying." Bribery is such an ugly name, and quite honestly, expects or guarantees a specific outcome. With our modern means of revenue innovation, guarantees are not something you should expect.
Your watch really does suck. The casio on my wrist (which is helped by having my arm as a thermal sink & source), is rarely off by more than 10-15 seconds in the 8 (?) months between daylight and standard time. I say that seconds, because I rarely checked the seconds for accuracy, as there is nothing in my life which requires my wristwatch to be more precise than a minute or so.
As for accuracy, it almost exactly 3 minutes fast. That happens to be about how long it takes me to stop what I'm doing and start moving appreciably towards where I need to be at any given time.
It's a good idea, but as soon as you include "claims data" in your modeling, it becomes an insurance/actuarial process. Why would claims data matter? Besides, isn't this what primary care doctors are currently tasked with? Maybe they'd prefer to work both sized of that insurance equation - raise premiums and reduce personnel costs?
Actually, the absurdity is that these are fairly complex undertakings. These types of hobbies - or at least those that do it successfully - are generally for pretty smart folk, and there are precious few of those in these terrorist organizations (they do exist, but in very, very small numbers). There are far cheaper ways of working terror, and at the end of the day, everybody has a limited budget.
I happen to have played with both pyrotechnics (I was a PGI member for many years) and I now do high power rocketry. It's fun stuff, and it's far less usable to terrorists than a tank full of gasoline, but up until recently you could fill up a 300 gallon tank on the back of a pickup at any local gas station, but you couldn't store 64 grams of slow burning model rocket propellant in your garage without a BATFE inspected, plate steel, double hasp explosives magazine and a Low Explosives Users Permit. You're allowed to have 25lbs of black powder in your basement, but you still can't purchase a 0.5gram engine igniter without the aforementioned permit.
I didn't RTFA (this is slashdot, after all), but for $250,000, I'm guessing that the engineering, assembly, overhead, and all other costs other than raw parts were not included. It's like watching HGTV renovate a kitchen for $4,000, and then asking if a local GC can renovate yours for the same amount.
It's cool that they got to do it, but when the "cost" you claim is two orders of magnitude smaller than what it actually costs, and the reason is that you didn't actually account for the total costs of the mission, it rings a bit hollow.
"Note, too, that when you typically text a donation, the organization receiving it has to pay a transaction fee which may or may not be passed along to you on your bill. The mGive Foundation is a non-profit, that charges nothing to certify a charity to the carriers. The carriers forward 100% of the donation amount to the charitable organization. But both the carrier and the similarly named "mGive.com" may still charge a transaction fee. mGive.com is a for-profit arm of the company Mobile Accord. It runs the technology involved in taking text donations (and performing other mobile fundraising campaigns for non-profits). In addition to setup fees and monthly fees it charges a per transaction fee of $0.35 + 3.5 %."
So mGive Foundation - the one you'll probably find if you do an internet search, is a non-profit who will certify the charity and tell you that 100% of the donation goes to the cause, but mGive.com - a separate entity - is for profit and takes their cut off of the top, then forwarding the remaining "donation" to be sent along. Nice. I wonder which MBA thought that one up. Whoever he is, he's probably sitting on a beach somewhere safe, sipping a Mai Tai right now.
Yes, but what is it really worth to you for that, and how many places will you go to to pay on a recurring basis for the news? Just processing and dispute resolution can easily suck up $5-$10 a month on an account. How many of those sites are you going to pony up for? If a large scale micropayment system existed, it might work, but there are still a lot of content creators or managers who feel that the smallest discrete chunk of material is worth $1-$2. That is, of course, unsustainable if you want people to read it every day. In that case, maybe $10 a month sounds reasonable. But if you read news from half a dozen or more sources, you're looking at a very large monthly outlay.
On the flip side, it's been shown time and again that any population interested enough in a content pool to return on a regular basis for access also has a good demographic base for advertising. It will end up with advertising eventually, and you'll still be paying. And advertisers have the advantage of being a single source for collecting revenue. It's easy to charge them 1-10c/article, because you can guarantee you'll be getting them for 100,000 hits a month - much easier than tracking 100,000 individual accounts.
Enjoy that unlimited plan while you have it. Verizon wants more money for tethering, more money for voice services, and gives less data for the same fee at the low end of the bracket. Oh, and as a bonus, their phones won't work outside the US (I try to get to the USVI in the winter). They're not much of an alternative.
MediaNet was not for smart phones or phones with keyboards or iPhones - any CS rep knows that 's the case. Either you're utterly oblivious to everything phone service related, or just pissed that they found you out. Besides, iPhones have their own plan, and they have since day 1. Looks like they found out you were on the wrong plan and switched you (they probably did it on day 1, too).
I know because I tricked my way into a Media Net plan when I had my HTC/AT&T 8525.
FWIW, my wife and I are perfectly happy with 250MB cap - actually, it's a bummer they won't let us share a single cap, as we combine for less than 150MB/mo in data.
Huh? There's a clause in there specifically about tethering, and if you do, you have to pay the advertised rates. They're not suggesting a penalty - just that you pay if you're using the "service".
Is it bullshit? Of course. Do you have a choice? Not really - Verizon is even more expensive and the rest of the carriers, even if they work marginaly with the iPhone (the 3G freqs differ) have lower density coverage.
I'm on the 250MB plan, and most months I'm around 60-70MB for all my data needs, and I'm on the damned thing nearly all the time. If I could tether, I'd still be under 250MB because I just don't need it very often. A tethering plan is a waste of money for me for the 1-2 times a month it would be convenient to have. As soon as there's a real alternative I'm in, but I'm not holding my breath.
I have a poor frame of reference for this. Before getting an iPhone (3gs last spring, then 4 last summer) I had a Win Mobile phone ( HTC TouchPro). Compared to the browser on win mobile, the ability to double tap any frame and have it expand to fill the screen width for reading is a killer feature. I rarely have to pinch-zoom because of it. The transitions are smooth and the response to pan/zoom/fill frame vs tap-to-follow-link are generally very accurate, which means fewer page loads - which at 100-500kbps can be pretty fucking slow and frustrating, and that's independent of processor speed.
I haven't played with Android enough to really assess the UI feel, though the few times I have I've been a bit disappointed. It would take a little while for me to set up an Android phone the way I liked it, probably not too different from my old WinMo phone.
Though they really mean white, male landowners, we've expanded that definition to include all citizens of voting age. Children, alas, do not fully qualify.
Page load speed, that's their metric? And 50% faster is spanked? We're talking about computers, not 100m dash times - I expect an order of magnitude difference. How is the actual browsing experience - how easy is it to read and navigate on a 4" device?
I will go so far as to quote from TFA:
"Users don’t always notice the speed gap because websites are sometimes tailored to mobile phones, Blaze said. The difference will become more obvious as users demand richer experiences and move to tablet computers with larger screens.
So the metric their using to judge the devices isn't very noticeable, and probably won't matter on a device this size ever. Great. Guess if you have to break out a ruler to feel good about yourself...
This is why you should always be careful of conflicts of interest. Those in professional positions are made aware by their professional licensure of the dangers of conflicts - even apparent conflicts. This isn't some poor schmoe - he's a professor intimately aware of the internal workings of the mortgage market. This is the kind of guy who needed to say, "hey, this is wrong; this is fraudulent" but instead partook in the scheme for personal financial benefit.
The blogger may be an asshole, but the prof set himself up.
Perhaps, but they're just not optimized for the larger screen. With such a large disparity in screen resolution, that makes a difference. An exxample would be a piano keyboard app - on the phone, you get an octave, on a tablet you get two (or perhaps two octaves and a third). That makes a big difference in usability. That's just a simple example, but there are no free tablet piano apps on Android (at least not that I could find three weeks ago). Android will catch up eventually, but it'll take another year to get all the "good" apps to tablet resolution.
I waited to see what Apple would do with the iPad2, and I'm not impressed. I'll probably try to pick up a low end / refurb'd ipad 1 and wait out the year to see what's next...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but that's still a win for Amazon, since the other two can't scoop them on it. It's dicey as Amazon is going it alone, and if they win, it's also a win for G/A, but I'm guessing they figure it's worth the investment for the potential returns.
I'm not certain yet. Having a laptop - even a small one - in meeting is a bit awkward - though that may just be perception at the moment. Having a flat iPad is almost unnoticable (took my current meeting participants about half he meeting to notice mine today). I always have pencil and paper for meetings, though that might change if the tablets got a good pen-based input along with the capacitive interface. I already scan/pdf all of my meeting notes within a day or so of taking them, anyway.
My use will center around looking up lots of references in a meeting (building codes, material specs, etc.), or bringing up plans for review/reference, and I'm hoping it will fit my needs. I will say that it's a lot more fun to play games on than my phone, and nicer for surfing/casual reading - which is my non-business purpose for it. I've had a near-netbook for a year and a half, and it's indispensible for getting simple work done on the road, and it easier to carry than my old desktop replacement machine. I'll be interested to see how I end up using them and whether, in the end, I drop one in favor of the other.
They're out there. They used to be in Walmart (in a very, very small area), even. The problem with the box box stores is that the kits take time to build, so they only carry the RTF (ready to fly) models, which are pretty limited. Rocketry also requires a bit of set up equipment (launch controller and pad) which are "expensive". Along with the increase in engine prices - usu $5-8 for a 3 pack of the regular engines you remember, and $12-18 for a 3-pack of the larger D engines, it's an expensive hobby. They've mostly been phased out, but they still exist in the few hobby stores which survive.
A lot of the push has moved to online, as the small market for them is best aggregated. Hobbylinc has a good selection for reasonable prices, as does discount rocketry. I fly some with my 8yo daughter when we have time.
What if you buy it from Amazon and they upload it directly to your storage for you?
What if they then use deduplication across their servers to save space, and all the people who bought the same track is really stored just once? What about the people you "loaned" those MP3s to who also decided to upload them to Amazons service? Now they could be serving infringing copies from their deduplicated master file.
The question which may get raised - and this is part of a slippery slope - is what happens when Amazon puts your purchases in your storage area for you directly, and then uses deduplication to minimize the total storage on their servers? Because the Amazon versions are bit-identical copies, they would hold only one master which would be served to many end users. The only difference between Amazon and MP3.com at that point is that Amazon collected the first sale revenue.
There's a second part to this. Since many files will be copied, and even two independently ripped mp3s. flacs, wavs, etc, can be bit-identical, Amazon could be deduplicating and re-serving consumer uploaded content.
I hope they win, but there will be some sticky spots to get through along the way.
Please don't call it bribery. We prefer "contributions" or "assistance" or "lobbying." Bribery is such an ugly name, and quite honestly, expects or guarantees a specific outcome. With our modern means of revenue innovation, guarantees are not something you should expect.
Your watch really does suck. The casio on my wrist (which is helped by having my arm as a thermal sink & source), is rarely off by more than 10-15 seconds in the 8 (?) months between daylight and standard time. I say that seconds, because I rarely checked the seconds for accuracy, as there is nothing in my life which requires my wristwatch to be more precise than a minute or so.
As for accuracy, it almost exactly 3 minutes fast. That happens to be about how long it takes me to stop what I'm doing and start moving appreciably towards where I need to be at any given time.
It's a good idea, but as soon as you include "claims data" in your modeling, it becomes an insurance/actuarial process. Why would claims data matter? Besides, isn't this what primary care doctors are currently tasked with? Maybe they'd prefer to work both sized of that insurance equation - raise premiums and reduce personnel costs?
Actually, the absurdity is that these are fairly complex undertakings. These types of hobbies - or at least those that do it successfully - are generally for pretty smart folk, and there are precious few of those in these terrorist organizations (they do exist, but in very, very small numbers). There are far cheaper ways of working terror, and at the end of the day, everybody has a limited budget.
I happen to have played with both pyrotechnics (I was a PGI member for many years) and I now do high power rocketry. It's fun stuff, and it's far less usable to terrorists than a tank full of gasoline, but up until recently you could fill up a 300 gallon tank on the back of a pickup at any local gas station, but you couldn't store 64 grams of slow burning model rocket propellant in your garage without a BATFE inspected, plate steel, double hasp explosives magazine and a Low Explosives Users Permit. You're allowed to have 25lbs of black powder in your basement, but you still can't purchase a 0.5gram engine igniter without the aforementioned permit.
I didn't RTFA (this is slashdot, after all), but for $250,000, I'm guessing that the engineering, assembly, overhead, and all other costs other than raw parts were not included. It's like watching HGTV renovate a kitchen for $4,000, and then asking if a local GC can renovate yours for the same amount.
It's cool that they got to do it, but when the "cost" you claim is two orders of magnitude smaller than what it actually costs, and the reason is that you didn't actually account for the total costs of the mission, it rings a bit hollow.
"Note, too, that when you typically text a donation, the organization receiving it has to pay a transaction fee which may or may not be passed along to you on your bill. The mGive Foundation is a non-profit, that charges nothing to certify a charity to the carriers. The carriers forward 100% of the donation amount to the charitable organization. But both the carrier and the similarly named "mGive.com" may still charge a transaction fee. mGive.com is a for-profit arm of the company Mobile Accord. It runs the technology involved in taking text donations (and performing other mobile fundraising campaigns for non-profits). In addition to setup fees and monthly fees it charges a per transaction fee of $0.35 + 3.5 %."
So mGive Foundation - the one you'll probably find if you do an internet search, is a non-profit who will certify the charity and tell you that 100% of the donation goes to the cause, but mGive.com - a separate entity - is for profit and takes their cut off of the top, then forwarding the remaining "donation" to be sent along. Nice. I wonder which MBA thought that one up. Whoever he is, he's probably sitting on a beach somewhere safe, sipping a Mai Tai right now.
Yes, but what is it really worth to you for that, and how many places will you go to to pay on a recurring basis for the news? Just processing and dispute resolution can easily suck up $5-$10 a month on an account. How many of those sites are you going to pony up for? If a large scale micropayment system existed, it might work, but there are still a lot of content creators or managers who feel that the smallest discrete chunk of material is worth $1-$2. That is, of course, unsustainable if you want people to read it every day. In that case, maybe $10 a month sounds reasonable. But if you read news from half a dozen or more sources, you're looking at a very large monthly outlay.
On the flip side, it's been shown time and again that any population interested enough in a content pool to return on a regular basis for access also has a good demographic base for advertising. It will end up with advertising eventually, and you'll still be paying. And advertisers have the advantage of being a single source for collecting revenue. It's easy to charge them 1-10c/article, because you can guarantee you'll be getting them for 100,000 hits a month - much easier than tracking 100,000 individual accounts.
Wait, so is Apple dead, or is it Steve Jobs?
Enjoy that unlimited plan while you have it. Verizon wants more money for tethering, more money for voice services, and gives less data for the same fee at the low end of the bracket. Oh, and as a bonus, their phones won't work outside the US (I try to get to the USVI in the winter). They're not much of an alternative.
MediaNet was not for smart phones or phones with keyboards or iPhones - any CS rep knows that 's the case. Either you're utterly oblivious to everything phone service related, or just pissed that they found you out. Besides, iPhones have their own plan, and they have since day 1. Looks like they found out you were on the wrong plan and switched you (they probably did it on day 1, too).
I know because I tricked my way into a Media Net plan when I had my HTC/AT&T 8525.
FWIW, my wife and I are perfectly happy with 250MB cap - actually, it's a bummer they won't let us share a single cap, as we combine for less than 150MB/mo in data.
Huh? There's a clause in there specifically about tethering, and if you do, you have to pay the advertised rates. They're not suggesting a penalty - just that you pay if you're using the "service".
Is it bullshit? Of course. Do you have a choice? Not really - Verizon is even more expensive and the rest of the carriers, even if they work marginaly with the iPhone (the 3G freqs differ) have lower density coverage.
I'm on the 250MB plan, and most months I'm around 60-70MB for all my data needs, and I'm on the damned thing nearly all the time. If I could tether, I'd still be under 250MB because I just don't need it very often. A tethering plan is a waste of money for me for the 1-2 times a month it would be convenient to have. As soon as there's a real alternative I'm in, but I'm not holding my breath.
You've never used a Kenwood high end system. It's all about the touchscreen for selecting everything except volume. And, yes, it's stupid.
I have a poor frame of reference for this. Before getting an iPhone (3gs last spring, then 4 last summer) I had a Win Mobile phone ( HTC TouchPro). Compared to the browser on win mobile, the ability to double tap any frame and have it expand to fill the screen width for reading is a killer feature. I rarely have to pinch-zoom because of it. The transitions are smooth and the response to pan/zoom/fill frame vs tap-to-follow-link are generally very accurate, which means fewer page loads - which at 100-500kbps can be pretty fucking slow and frustrating, and that's independent of processor speed.
I haven't played with Android enough to really assess the UI feel, though the few times I have I've been a bit disappointed. It would take a little while for me to set up an Android phone the way I liked it, probably not too different from my old WinMo phone.
When it falls under the criminal offenses of harassment, bribery, and/or blackmail; or the tortuous offense of libel and/or slander.
Though they really mean white, male landowners, we've expanded that definition to include all citizens of voting age. Children, alas, do not fully qualify.
Page load speed, that's their metric? And 50% faster is spanked? We're talking about computers, not 100m dash times - I expect an order of magnitude difference. How is the actual browsing experience - how easy is it to read and navigate on a 4" device?
I will go so far as to quote from TFA:
"Users don’t always notice the speed gap because websites are sometimes tailored to mobile phones, Blaze said. The difference will become more obvious as users demand richer experiences and move to tablet computers with larger screens.
So the metric their using to judge the devices isn't very noticeable, and probably won't matter on a device this size ever. Great. Guess if you have to break out a ruler to feel good about yourself...
Good thing that whole DRM idea is smoothing the way for implementation.
This. My kingdom for a mod point.
This is why you should always be careful of conflicts of interest. Those in professional positions are made aware by their professional licensure of the dangers of conflicts - even apparent conflicts. This isn't some poor schmoe - he's a professor intimately aware of the internal workings of the mortgage market. This is the kind of guy who needed to say, "hey, this is wrong; this is fraudulent" but instead partook in the scheme for personal financial benefit.
The blogger may be an asshole, but the prof set himself up.
Perhaps, but they're just not optimized for the larger screen. With such a large disparity in screen resolution, that makes a difference. An exxample would be a piano keyboard app - on the phone, you get an octave, on a tablet you get two (or perhaps two octaves and a third). That makes a big difference in usability. That's just a simple example, but there are no free tablet piano apps on Android (at least not that I could find three weeks ago). Android will catch up eventually, but it'll take another year to get all the "good" apps to tablet resolution.
I waited to see what Apple would do with the iPad2, and I'm not impressed. I'll probably try to pick up a low end / refurb'd ipad 1 and wait out the year to see what's next...