It's a trademark-like thing (I don't know if there's actual trademark involved, though). They may not be making any more games, but their IP (there's that abbreviation again) is valuable and someone may be willing to pay big bucks for it even if it's just the name/concept (see: Atari). The mere existance a derivative work reduces the potential value of the original brand. Not saying they aren't assholes, just suggesting the reason they are.
Damn straight you'd better get your own damnes attorney. I sure wouldn't trust the amount of money in play to a generalist who spends a lot of time mediating personal disputes and rent contracts. Hell, I wouldn't ask my family medical doctor to do major surgery, either. The university is just telling these kids that they need real representation, by someone who knows the stuff.
Oh, don't worry, the government will write a check and your grandchildren will pay for it. Sure, there'll be a lot of teeth gnashing and such, but yuo gotta do what you gotta do, and the government isn't really in the business of doing things efficiently. Lest you feel I'm being overly harsh, I spent almost a decade with NASA and have seen the process up close, then a couple years on black programs. I now work in industry. It's almost frightening how inefficient such a large organization can be.
Actually, there are some pretty low level things that might not be "available" for WM for quite some time. The finger keyboard actually looks pretty cool - I wish my Hermes (8525) has that, and all the snazzy tie ins to the various parts of the system. Sadly, WM(5/6) is a PDA OS which has been bastardized for a phone device. Very different usability paradigm (sorry, the word fits or I wouldn't have used it). I'm not conviced that the multi-touch feature is all that big a deal. Maybe there's some really good reason for it, but I like my phone to be primarily one-handed. I use two hands for the slide-out keyboard, but that's a bit different. I suspect some of the really cool stuff is patented (insert flame war here).
I see the fact that it is not 3G (in 3G markets) a bid drawback. I'm in an EDGE area and let me just say that pulling 100kB of CSS before the page even starts to load is unbelievably painful (and embarrassing if you're trying to get something simple like news or the Weather from a non-mobile-optimized site). I'm guessing, though, that WM devices may get a leg up if/when Opera implements some of the zoom-and-pan coolness of the iPhone browser, and the WM phones run at 3G speed (which is very cool, btw).
Well, luckily we don't have to worry about the bird flu reacting psycologically to our attempts to stop it.
Actually, I do believe that the reaction affects the threat - both ways. I believe our actions have galvanized a segment of the population and have actually made the situation worse. "Surrendering" a state isn't really an option I reccommend (though I've never liked Texas all that much, and West Virginia doesn't seem to be very useful - I kid!). Dealing with the root cause for those who are "on the fence" of supporting terrorism, containing (quietly) the movement, and realizing that somebody, somewhere, will always hate you for an unmitigatable reason are the best ways to deal with it. Well, that and making it very difficult for them to fund their war against us (i.e. eliminating depedance on foreign energy supplies and/or changing the economics of said supplies).
Given the massive expenditure to try and reduce the threat, with no tangible evidence that the threat has decreased, doesn't seem like a good ROI.
Does anybody pronounce Martin without the glottal stop, unless they're trying to over-enunciate? I'm from Wash, D.C., live on the east coast of the US, and generally am considered to have a "neutral" accent (i.e. mid-west) when I'm not being lazy or hanging out with rednecks. I've only heard the T pronoucned in the movie Gross Pointe Blank, and I presumed it was done for effect.
It's a piece of cake. Unfortunately, it takes more energy to do your conversion than you will get out of the resulting fuel which means you're simply storing energy from another source (probably HC-based) - and in an amazingly inefficient way to boot. It's those damned laws of thermodynamics again.
This process is (at least slightly) energy positive based on a zero-energy input of waste material. The zero-energy input is valid here because the energy required to create the original items - which have been used and are now waste - is a "sunk cost". I.e. - whether you throw it in the landfill never to be used, or send it to be converted, there's no difference in the energy in.
This is the same problem with hydrogen vehicles - the hydrogen is merely an inefficient storage medium for some other form of energy.
2. It has four syllables, roughly two more than the average American can pronouce. Add to that the kh in there and that excludes about 95% of the US population from ever getting the pronunciation correct.
Terrorism is real. It is being perpetrated by the leaders of most first world countries to scare the population into reducing freedoms and minimizing privacy rights at an alarming rate.
Oh, you meant the people who hate us and want to blow us up? Well, in the grand scheme of things (AIDS, cancer, automobile accidents, floods, tornadoes) I suppose there may be a small percentage of deaths attributed to such actions, and they also serve to scare portions of the population.
Yeah, there is terrorism out there, but mostly it's a smokescreen for larger, more expensive governmental oversight of the people who are unlikely to ever kill large numbers of people with the intent to scare a community or a nation.
20k to repeat a year. 60k you won't earn. 80k opportunity cost of repeating a year, plus or minus interest.
Best advice in the thread - you have a mind for business that escapes 90% of the workforce. Combine that with the fact that your second employer will never care what grades you got in school and - from a personal finance point of view - the answer is clear. You will never make up for the financial loss you suffer in the extra year at school, provided you can get a first job with your current GPA.
There are usually opportunities to pick up the extras in the evening if you really need more knowledge, and if you're looking to get training in something that directly replates to your job, larger employers will usually look favorablly on such endeavors (and often will help pay for it).
If you have to stay in school, see if you can find a MS program to get a clean grade-slate, otherwise hold off on the MS for a few years - it will mean much more (and be easier) once you've been in the workforce a while.
Actually, I'd say he's trolling and trying to incite a flamewar by making valid points about the knee jerk reactions to the Apple embedding peronal information in DRM-less files downloaded from their store. This is slashdot, after all.
And, quite honestly, unless the intent is to track the propagation of the files across the internet and be able to identify the source of the propagation, there's no realy reason to include the information - especially in plaintext. My take is that if you care about it, you should be able to remove the data; if you don't, don't remove it. If it burns you so bad, just don't buy from iTMS, though since you can't buy some of thof from anywhere else that's sort of a useless suggestion. It would be better if they didn't put the info in there to begin with, imho. Not that it matters to me - I don't buy digitally compressed tunes.
Well, with the exception of multitouch (which isn't yet supported on pda devices), you could port the interface to just about any existing PDA phone. Sure, the icons might be a bit lower res, but it this is supposed to be about functionality rather than pure eyecandy. It does, however, take more effort to (a) program for multiple interface sizes and (b) reduce the software footprint to something less than enormous (700MB? You'd think this was MS).
Personally, I think the problem with PDA phones is that they are a direct port of PDAs, where a styles is the ideal input device. On a phone, fingers are much better, but the interfaces are still written with icons sized for styluses (styli?). The iPhones screen really isn't significantly larger than, say, the HTC Hermes, so with the OS trimmed down to a reasonable size and some tweaks for the device particulars, there would be little reason to need the new device. But, then again, that's not Apples business model.
Item one: outlaw radios and passengers, as well as drive through fast food (since with no pasengers, only the driver would be ordering)
Item two: on most highways it's illegal to pull to the side of the road unless your vehicle is disabled or you are required to do so by law enforcement
Item three: how did you know they guy who almost sideswiped you was on a cell phone? Was he holding the phone, or did you just assume he was on the phone because he was talking to nobody in particular. You sould see the kind of yelling I do in the car if I accidentally scan the radio and Rush comes on.
Actually, it was the P90s. I had to petition to get three new machines new chips when I worked at NASA, since all of them were involved with finite element modeling of critical spaceflight hardware. That was back when I was hot shit for getting a P75 and overclocking it to 120Mhz (133 was unstable), and dropped $640 on 8MB of ram so I could run NT at home. *shakes head*
...that it takes more wire to set up a good wireless network than it does to set up a wired network. The number of APs required to get good, even coverage is far larger than anyone thinks, and the overall complexity tends to really tax all by the best installers.
Well, yes. Unless that 7.5% minority has an exceptional amount of money, they will lose out - in the grand scheme - to the 92.5% of the population that doesn't give a rat's ass about them. Is there something new in politics I've missed?
Maybe they're just trying to set up a new way to get a univeral email serive so that when Google pulls out there will be a free email service for Germans.
(Would that be flamebait or troll? Lucky I just posted in another thread or this would have been a FP - and that would have made it a hard choice for the mods!)
Hey, I'd be pissed if I paid a direct tax (which my gov't like to call a "user fee") and then DRM'd the programming. I mean, it's paid for already, right? I have the same issue with toll roads - I'm paying $.35/gallon for gas to cover road building and maintenance...why the extra charge? I know, don't argue with the europeans over gas/petrol taxes, it's a losing battle of you're on the US side!
Anyway, even 7.5% is a paltry amount for the government to listen to. The only time a government listens to such a small percentage of the population is when that particular percentage controls a disproportionately large portion of wealth and/or donations to political campaigns. I still agree that it sucks.
No, but there are anecdotal tales of service issues with people who use an extraordinary amount of data. Cincular has stratitifed its plans based on the device type, so the unlimited has a different cost for phones, smartphones, pdas without qwerty keyboards, pdas with qwerty keyboards, and tethered devices. The presumption is that as you go up the ladder you are likely to use more data in an all-you-can-eat scenereo.
If you significantly exceed their expected level for your device type, they may address it some way (termination, fee increase). I have a qwerty pda phone (htc hermes) and talked my way into the smartphone-only MediaMax. It means I go through a NAT instead of direct so email is harder (though I don't use mobile email), but the service is basically the same. I'm not in 3G land, and I don't surf much, so I'll probably use less b/w than most active smartphone users. I haven't figured out the tehtering with my laptop yet, wo that may change things, but it's still rare that I'd be somewhere with my laptop but without access to wifi.
I'm guessing that iPhone users who buy from iTMS will send a small cut of the price to AT&T, so as long as you keep buying stuff, AT&T will be happy.
Well, attfs, you can choose any AT&T plan to go with your iPhone, but I think you'll find that the deal they're offering is better than the current crop of plans. Presuming this is classified as a pda-phone, then unlimited data alone will run you $40/mo. 200mms another $10. That's $50 plus your voice plan. Sure, you might game the system with a MediaMax plan for $20 to get the unlimited data + 200mms if you're lucky, but by the book it's pretty good. FWIW, if you're a big texter, there's a new plan that will extend any fixed mms plan to unlimited mms for $5. You can probably still buy the free time since it's just an add on.
My god, that's like ignoring close to half of a very small village! As an American, I'm so glad that _my_ government wouldn't go about ignoring minority views...oh, right. Sorry.
Huh? This is a high end pda device...and its priced in the same range (The Hermes was about $400 at launch...a 4GB uSD would probably be $100 if you could buy one today). Now, it's not likely to fall as quickly or be discounted as heavily since it's not at resellers, but it's not that far out there.
As for the service, the cost is pretty good given the plan. AT&T (aka cingular) is not known ofr being the cheapest, but it also is not the most expensive. If you were to as for a basic, no frills voice plan, you'd be hard pressed to get one "at retail" for less than $30 a month. Unlimited data? Most are about $40, I believe the best are in the $20 range. Throw in 200MMS at a nickel a piece and - guess what - $30+$20+(200*$0.05)=$60.
FWIW, I currently pay $60 for my Hermes on cingular, and I had to game the system to get the data+mms for $20 instead of the $40 "pda" unlim data plan without any MMS. And don't even think of comparing it to the extortion they charge for the blackberry plans.
Is it cheap? No. Is it overpriced for the market segment? Not at all. If you're one of those "got to have the cool stuff" people, that extra $100-$200 is a small price to pay over Mr. Jones's new Blackberry in the next cube.
I got a cingular 8525 five months ago (aka HTC Hermes), and dropped the full data to a non-pda data plan (NATed access, email requires a workaround). I don't do email or IM, but I've used the browser for lookups when I'm out, and it's my full up planner and GPS (in the car with a BT GPS unit). I've even used it to entertain my 4yo when she gets antsy (the bubble game is her favorite, though I put Madagascar on the phone as a test of the video and that's nice for longer waits).
Oh, yeah, it makes phone calls too. Actually, it's really good at that. Go figure.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a trademark-like thing (I don't know if there's actual trademark involved, though). They may not be making any more games, but their IP (there's that abbreviation again) is valuable and someone may be willing to pay big bucks for it even if it's just the name/concept (see: Atari). The mere existance a derivative work reduces the potential value of the original brand. Not saying they aren't assholes, just suggesting the reason they are.
Damn straight you'd better get your own damnes attorney. I sure wouldn't trust the amount of money in play to a generalist who spends a lot of time mediating personal disputes and rent contracts. Hell, I wouldn't ask my family medical doctor to do major surgery, either. The university is just telling these kids that they need real representation, by someone who knows the stuff.
Oh, don't worry, the government will write a check and your grandchildren will pay for it. Sure, there'll be a lot of teeth gnashing and such, but yuo gotta do what you gotta do, and the government isn't really in the business of doing things efficiently. Lest you feel I'm being overly harsh, I spent almost a decade with NASA and have seen the process up close, then a couple years on black programs. I now work in industry. It's almost frightening how inefficient such a large organization can be.
Actually, there are some pretty low level things that might not be "available" for WM for quite some time. The finger keyboard actually looks pretty cool - I wish my Hermes (8525) has that, and all the snazzy tie ins to the various parts of the system. Sadly, WM(5/6) is a PDA OS which has been bastardized for a phone device. Very different usability paradigm (sorry, the word fits or I wouldn't have used it). I'm not conviced that the multi-touch feature is all that big a deal. Maybe there's some really good reason for it, but I like my phone to be primarily one-handed. I use two hands for the slide-out keyboard, but that's a bit different. I suspect some of the really cool stuff is patented (insert flame war here).
I see the fact that it is not 3G (in 3G markets) a bid drawback. I'm in an EDGE area and let me just say that pulling 100kB of CSS before the page even starts to load is unbelievably painful (and embarrassing if you're trying to get something simple like news or the Weather from a non-mobile-optimized site). I'm guessing, though, that WM devices may get a leg up if/when Opera implements some of the zoom-and-pan coolness of the iPhone browser, and the WM phones run at 3G speed (which is very cool, btw).
Well, luckily we don't have to worry about the bird flu reacting psycologically to our attempts to stop it.
Actually, I do believe that the reaction affects the threat - both ways. I believe our actions have galvanized a segment of the population and have actually made the situation worse. "Surrendering" a state isn't really an option I reccommend (though I've never liked Texas all that much, and West Virginia doesn't seem to be very useful - I kid!). Dealing with the root cause for those who are "on the fence" of supporting terrorism, containing (quietly) the movement, and realizing that somebody, somewhere, will always hate you for an unmitigatable reason are the best ways to deal with it. Well, that and making it very difficult for them to fund their war against us (i.e. eliminating depedance on foreign energy supplies and/or changing the economics of said supplies).
Given the massive expenditure to try and reduce the threat, with no tangible evidence that the threat has decreased, doesn't seem like a good ROI.
Does anybody pronounce Martin without the glottal stop, unless they're trying to over-enunciate? I'm from Wash, D.C., live on the east coast of the US, and generally am considered to have a "neutral" accent (i.e. mid-west) when I'm not being lazy or hanging out with rednecks. I've only heard the T pronoucned in the movie Gross Pointe Blank, and I presumed it was done for effect.
It's a piece of cake. Unfortunately, it takes more energy to do your conversion than you will get out of the resulting fuel which means you're simply storing energy from another source (probably HC-based) - and in an amazingly inefficient way to boot. It's those damned laws of thermodynamics again.
This process is (at least slightly) energy positive based on a zero-energy input of waste material. The zero-energy input is valid here because the energy required to create the original items - which have been used and are now waste - is a "sunk cost". I.e. - whether you throw it in the landfill never to be used, or send it to be converted, there's no difference in the energy in.
This is the same problem with hydrogen vehicles - the hydrogen is merely an inefficient storage medium for some other form of energy.
Kitchen shears.
1. There is a popular song
2. It has four syllables, roughly two more than the average American can pronouce. Add to that the kh in there and that excludes about 95% of the US population from ever getting the pronunciation correct.
Terrorism is real. It is being perpetrated by the leaders of most first world countries to scare the population into reducing freedoms and minimizing privacy rights at an alarming rate.
Oh, you meant the people who hate us and want to blow us up? Well, in the grand scheme of things (AIDS, cancer, automobile accidents, floods, tornadoes) I suppose there may be a small percentage of deaths attributed to such actions, and they also serve to scare portions of the population.
Yeah, there is terrorism out there, but mostly it's a smokescreen for larger, more expensive governmental oversight of the people who are unlikely to ever kill large numbers of people with the intent to scare a community or a nation.
20k to repeat a year. 60k you won't earn. 80k opportunity cost of repeating a year, plus or minus interest.
Best advice in the thread - you have a mind for business that escapes 90% of the workforce. Combine that with the fact that your second employer will never care what grades you got in school and - from a personal finance point of view - the answer is clear. You will never make up for the financial loss you suffer in the extra year at school, provided you can get a first job with your current GPA.
There are usually opportunities to pick up the extras in the evening if you really need more knowledge, and if you're looking to get training in something that directly replates to your job, larger employers will usually look favorablly on such endeavors (and often will help pay for it).
If you have to stay in school, see if you can find a MS program to get a clean grade-slate, otherwise hold off on the MS for a few years - it will mean much more (and be easier) once you've been in the workforce a while.
Actually, I'd say he's trolling and trying to incite a flamewar by making valid points about the knee jerk reactions to the Apple embedding peronal information in DRM-less files downloaded from their store. This is slashdot, after all.
And, quite honestly, unless the intent is to track the propagation of the files across the internet and be able to identify the source of the propagation, there's no realy reason to include the information - especially in plaintext. My take is that if you care about it, you should be able to remove the data; if you don't, don't remove it. If it burns you so bad, just don't buy from iTMS, though since you can't buy some of thof from anywhere else that's sort of a useless suggestion. It would be better if they didn't put the info in there to begin with, imho. Not that it matters to me - I don't buy digitally compressed tunes.
Well, with the exception of multitouch (which isn't yet supported on pda devices), you could port the interface to just about any existing PDA phone. Sure, the icons might be a bit lower res, but it this is supposed to be about functionality rather than pure eyecandy. It does, however, take more effort to (a) program for multiple interface sizes and (b) reduce the software footprint to something less than enormous (700MB? You'd think this was MS).
Personally, I think the problem with PDA phones is that they are a direct port of PDAs, where a styles is the ideal input device. On a phone, fingers are much better, but the interfaces are still written with icons sized for styluses (styli?). The iPhones screen really isn't significantly larger than, say, the HTC Hermes, so with the OS trimmed down to a reasonable size and some tweaks for the device particulars, there would be little reason to need the new device. But, then again, that's not Apples business model.
Item one: outlaw radios and passengers, as well as drive through fast food (since with no pasengers, only the driver would be ordering)
Item two: on most highways it's illegal to pull to the side of the road unless your vehicle is disabled or you are required to do so by law enforcement
Item three: how did you know they guy who almost sideswiped you was on a cell phone? Was he holding the phone, or did you just assume he was on the phone because he was talking to nobody in particular. You sould see the kind of yelling I do in the car if I accidentally scan the radio and Rush comes on.
Actually, it was the P90s. I had to petition to get three new machines new chips when I worked at NASA, since all of them were involved with finite element modeling of critical spaceflight hardware. That was back when I was hot shit for getting a P75 and overclocking it to 120Mhz (133 was unstable), and dropped $640 on 8MB of ram so I could run NT at home. *shakes head*
...that it takes more wire to set up a good wireless network than it does to set up a wired network. The number of APs required to get good, even coverage is far larger than anyone thinks, and the overall complexity tends to really tax all by the best installers.
Well, yes. Unless that 7.5% minority has an exceptional amount of money, they will lose out - in the grand scheme - to the 92.5% of the population that doesn't give a rat's ass about them. Is there something new in politics I've missed?
Maybe they're just trying to set up a new way to get a univeral email serive so that when Google pulls out there will be a free email service for Germans.
(Would that be flamebait or troll? Lucky I just posted in another thread or this would have been a FP - and that would have made it a hard choice for the mods!)
Hey, I'd be pissed if I paid a direct tax (which my gov't like to call a "user fee") and then DRM'd the programming. I mean, it's paid for already, right? I have the same issue with toll roads - I'm paying $.35/gallon for gas to cover road building and maintenance...why the extra charge? I know, don't argue with the europeans over gas/petrol taxes, it's a losing battle of you're on the US side!
Anyway, even 7.5% is a paltry amount for the government to listen to. The only time a government listens to such a small percentage of the population is when that particular percentage controls a disproportionately large portion of wealth and/or donations to political campaigns. I still agree that it sucks.
No, but there are anecdotal tales of service issues with people who use an extraordinary amount of data. Cincular has stratitifed its plans based on the device type, so the unlimited has a different cost for phones, smartphones, pdas without qwerty keyboards, pdas with qwerty keyboards, and tethered devices. The presumption is that as you go up the ladder you are likely to use more data in an all-you-can-eat scenereo.
If you significantly exceed their expected level for your device type, they may address it some way (termination, fee increase). I have a qwerty pda phone (htc hermes) and talked my way into the smartphone-only MediaMax. It means I go through a NAT instead of direct so email is harder (though I don't use mobile email), but the service is basically the same. I'm not in 3G land, and I don't surf much, so I'll probably use less b/w than most active smartphone users. I haven't figured out the tehtering with my laptop yet, wo that may change things, but it's still rare that I'd be somewhere with my laptop but without access to wifi.
I'm guessing that iPhone users who buy from iTMS will send a small cut of the price to AT&T, so as long as you keep buying stuff, AT&T will be happy.
Well, attfs, you can choose any AT&T plan to go with your iPhone, but I think you'll find that the deal they're offering is better than the current crop of plans. Presuming this is classified as a pda-phone, then unlimited data alone will run you $40/mo. 200mms another $10. That's $50 plus your voice plan. Sure, you might game the system with a MediaMax plan for $20 to get the unlimited data + 200mms if you're lucky, but by the book it's pretty good. FWIW, if you're a big texter, there's a new plan that will extend any fixed mms plan to unlimited mms for $5. You can probably still buy the free time since it's just an add on.
My god, that's like ignoring close to half of a very small village! As an American, I'm so glad that _my_ government wouldn't go about ignoring minority views...oh, right. Sorry.
Huh? This is a high end pda device...and its priced in the same range (The Hermes was about $400 at launch...a 4GB uSD would probably be $100 if you could buy one today). Now, it's not likely to fall as quickly or be discounted as heavily since it's not at resellers, but it's not that far out there.
As for the service, the cost is pretty good given the plan. AT&T (aka cingular) is not known ofr being the cheapest, but it also is not the most expensive. If you were to as for a basic, no frills voice plan, you'd be hard pressed to get one "at retail" for less than $30 a month. Unlimited data? Most are about $40, I believe the best are in the $20 range. Throw in 200MMS at a nickel a piece and - guess what - $30+$20+(200*$0.05)=$60.
FWIW, I currently pay $60 for my Hermes on cingular, and I had to game the system to get the data+mms for $20 instead of the $40 "pda" unlim data plan without any MMS. And don't even think of comparing it to the extortion they charge for the blackberry plans.
Is it cheap? No. Is it overpriced for the market segment? Not at all. If you're one of those "got to have the cool stuff" people, that extra $100-$200 is a small price to pay over Mr. Jones's new Blackberry in the next cube.
I got a cingular 8525 five months ago (aka HTC Hermes), and dropped the full data to a non-pda data plan (NATed access, email requires a workaround). I don't do email or IM, but I've used the browser for lookups when I'm out, and it's my full up planner and GPS (in the car with a BT GPS unit). I've even used it to entertain my 4yo when she gets antsy (the bubble game is her favorite, though I put Madagascar on the phone as a test of the video and that's nice for longer waits).
Oh, yeah, it makes phone calls too. Actually, it's really good at that. Go figure.
Don't tell the linux folks...they'd love to hit 4% market penetration!
(maybe I should post this AC, naaaaa)