The idea that you would pay an american to do what lots of people all over the world can do for a fraction of the cost is ludicrous, and that goes for "research" at universities as well... unless of course you are talking about stealth bombers or nuclear weapons research, which it is illegal to export. Now that they have the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, american research in physics, for example, is on its way to becoming second rate and other than Women's Studies and Business School, American universities have less and less to offer. The american university system is more about generating revenue through student loans than it is about actually producing first rate scholars. The student loan debt bubble, that has lasted for 30 years, is probably ending and with it you will see a dramatic decline in the international prestige of american universities. It was always about the money... and it was the money that attracted the foreign nationals to the united states to teach... and the foreign nationals who moved to america are the only reason american universities were ever all that good.
using "crowdfunding" sounds very contemporary but basically its all already paid for with taxes and if you cut out the administrative layer of ombudsmen then how on earth would anyone know how the money is really being spent? That's what the bureaucrats are for. And ultimately we are just going to sit through appeal after appeal for money just like when you try to listen to NPR and they are yet again just having another fund drive. Are research funding decisions really going to be left to a popularity contest on the Internet?
I did an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and I can't recall ever having a Black math professor, which is of course proof of the racist nature of whole enterprise. Hockey has the same problem. Are there any Hockey teams owned by Black people?
On a lot of DVDs there is a clear warning before any of the content actually plays that says it is illegal to copy to DVD even for home use... and then it says all that stuff about Felonies and the FBI and Interpol.
Here is I think an apt point about all of this: in Russia and China they pirate DVDs by the truckload and then just redistribute the movies without paying any royalties at all. It is a common practice. But the lawyers in America who make money on these kinds of cases can't do anything about Russians or Chinese pirates. Its like if a city wants to increase revenue by putting up speed traps all over town to catch speeding drivers. Its not that the people who get tickets are the only speeders but rather that the police target their enforcement in places that maximize their revenue. The movie industry will have a lot easier time wrenching money out of the hands of American who share DVDs than they will trying to get Chinese or Russian DVD bootlegging businesses to pay anything at all.
If we all had fiber in America then I think you would see movie sharing become just as ubiquitous as mp3 sharing... which would ultimately destroy the market for DVD sales. I have hundreds of DVDs that I have purchased of the years and although I don't do it (because there is no reason to) there would be no problem at all in ripping them into 8 GB files (with k9copy for example)... and if I had no real limitation on bandwidth, which is what fiber would provide to me, then of course I could share a full DVD with you in no time at all. Right now nobody is going to try to download 8 GB on even a good Cable Modem because it takes too long. But why would anyone ever need Netflix if several hundred thousand people in america made their video collections sharable online through the torrents (not as crappy 600 MB.avi files but as real DVDs with menus and features intact). You too could have 2 TB of movies sitting on your PC at no cost to you other than an internet connection. Anyway... the American internet providers are trying to find ways to meter service, not provide better or faster service. We will all end up capped at 50 GB per month I am sure.
Yes, self restraint used to be one of those things that people believed was required by the fact that god is always watching and the day of judgement is nigh but of course no one is watching... except on facebook.
I think the sodomy readiness might mean that the platform is especially suited to running porn sites that are massively scalable at 3 am when everyone is getting home from the pub looking for an easy spank.
sudo apt-get install banshee
It doesn't really matter to me what they put in the default anyway. I am currently running Xubuntu with the dolphin file manager because I prefer it to Thunar, by the way. You can install whatever you want with almost no effort at all.
incidentally, Canonical generates news/blog buzz by constantly announcing these changes as if they really matter.
It just doesn't make sense. Also, I have no doubt the government would make smaller devices than the one's pictured and moreover there is probably a backdoor in everyone's cell phone where the NSA can find your location instantly anyway. Why track his car? Unless the government knows that the car actually comes from an alternate universe and they are waiting to see if he meets Walternate at some point. Cue Fringe theme song.
Re:More fixing of things that weren't broken
on
Fedora 16 Released
·
· Score: 1
You don't have to upgrade at all, of course. If your system works and you have no problem with it, then you can just keep what you have.
And yet you ought to be able to describe a piece of software that hasn't even been made yet and describe in detail its functionality and then write a little bit of a computer program that may or may not actually do what you just described and WHAMMY... you get to patent that?
I don't know about the "nerds" screed but actually if you focus on the features of Android too much then the seeming advantages could be turned against you at the level of ordinary users. For example, "You are free to write any app you want for your phone and upload it to the Marketplace" can very easily be turned around as "The apps are shoddy and lack proper testing." Or how about "You are free to alter your phones OS any way you want!" which can just as easily be turned around with "First you have to root your phone and then you can do anything you want to it so long as you don't care that you just voided your warranty." In other words, the features of an Android phone were amazing a couple of years ago, but now there is no consistency across all the different hardware versions and the vetting process for what is actually being sold is somewhat lacking compared to the iPhone. The Robot ads are actually pretty good in terms of just creating a sort of mystique about the device that translates into desirability. Of course, the iPhones are more geared toward the features women want and so they are nicer and cute. That doesn't mean they are better. They are marketed to different demographics really.
One gigatonne of ice melting into the ocean adds about 3 microns to the surface. In this case, 880 square kilometers of ice that varies between 60 and 500 meters thick is going to take a very very long time to melt and will result an addition of water that is almost zero once evaporation is factored in... the article points out that this iceberg might end up being about the size, in terms of surface area, as Berlin. Antarctica is almost entirely covered in Ice, 44% of which is floating in the ocean, and its 1.3 time the size of all of EUROPE. Nasa, after the end of the Space Shuttle program, is looking for ways to keep itself in the news. This iceberg sounds sensational but its actually very tiny in the grand scheme of things.
Having done the BPhil at Oxford I can confirm that I am living proof that the standards are slipping!:)
Anyway, an apt literary reference here would be Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Yes, we are all pathological mental cases that the Enlightened State has to watch very closely lest anyone deviate. The state and its functionaries cannot be indifferent to deviation and its causes. It's their job to care.
Yes, they certainly are geniuses at selling your music collection back to you. But since an mp3 file uploaded to the internet has no value whatsoever, you have to give them credit at Apple for at least squeezing a nickel out of all those iTunes users somehow... and what a great christmas gift those iTunes cards make.
Interesting and informative for me. Thanks. In response to your post I googled it a little bit. You are correct! They really don't make that much money at all on anything and I was surprised by that. In the first Quarter of 2010 they only got $520 million in REVENUE from iTunes and overall its about $3 Billion a year in revenue. In contrast, Microsoft got almost $12 Billion in revenue for server software alone in 2007... and they got almost $11 billion in PROFIT alone from sales of Microsoft Office. Good lord. I guess I just transferred all the hype about apple into an intuitive number about the money they make on this stuff. So, when you buy an iPhone contract at ATT or Sprint and agree to pay upwards of $1200 a year for a phone contract how much of that is really profit for Apple? You could by a couple of Windows laptops a year for the rest of your life for what that iPhone contract costs. Is anyone actually making money here or is it all just "revenue."
I mean, they make like a billion dollars a month on iTunes... so it's not really accurate to focus on their computer business and act like they are somehow so much better than everyone else in they way they manufacture things. Sure Microsoft did an awful job with the Zune, so this makes Apple look like genuises... but Dell commands a far larger share of business workstation desktops and nobody on earth is out shopping for an Apple Server and every teenager in the world seems to own a playstation or an xbox. There are lots of categories where apple hasn't been successful/competitive AT ALL even though they have product to offer. Apple is at the crest of a wave but the iPod/iPhone/iPad is not going to be the must-have christmas item forever. Apple is a computer company that ended up designing and selling electronics as prestige fashion accessories because who on earth is going to buy their teenage daughter a walkman or make their wife walk town around texting on a blackberry anymore. Apple hit it out of the park with the iPad because everyone has been looking for a way for the last 30 years to sell more computers to women and women buy them.
If you have a superior product, then the approach you outline might work. Just let the bloggers tell everyone what they honestly think. But when it comes to Intel vs AMD practically everyone would say Intel is better except for those who are think price is a decisive factor. So, when you go to Best Buy and you see row after row of laptops with Intel chips and the sales people are telling you the battery will last 6 hours and they processor speed is this or that and its all because of the super efficient Intel chipset then who on earth is going to go for that refurbished Gateway with an Athlon II in it? The marketing team didn't so much fail to sell the consumer on AMD but rather they failed to sell the major computer assemblers/resellers on AMD. So now everyone wants an i3, i5, i7 in a new computer and that right there is a result of the failure of AMD's marketing team. They OUGHT to be held accountable for that failure.
I just put Xubuntu 11.10 on my netbook and the upshot of that install is basically the same as the Debian approach in that yes you do get a working desktop from one CD but then in reality you are going to have to download a lot of extra packages that are not absolutely required. For example, having never used the XFCE Thunar file manager before, I was somewhat surprised that I couldn't browse network shares. Of course, samba sharing worked just fine from the command line but it's not very pleasant to use ftp-like commands to share files with other computers on my network at home. So, I ended up installing both Dolphin, Konqueror, and pyNeighborhood in Xubuntu. If Xubuntu was being shipped with the goal that every newbie should be able to do everything they are doing with a Windows computer in roughly the same way that Windows works, as one could say Ubuntu is trying to do as much as possible in general, then Xubuntu would need multiple CDs or a DVD to install because to the ordinary lay person the 600MB install iso would be lacking functionalities. The it-all-fits-on-one-CD approach for Ubuntu was actually a good idea in the beginning because Ubuntu wanted to make the install iso as easy as possible to transfer from computer to computer. Not only was the install thereby going to be quick and easy for the new person but also it could be distributed for free to the end user on a mass scale through magazine inserts. The marketing and technical limitations that made the 600MB install such a good idea have become less of a factor in the last few years, though.
This concept gives a whole new meaning to "Blue Screen of Death"... if your elderly parents are wearing a smart, web-enabled track suit that tells you their vital signs on your smart phone... who the heck wants to see their parents flatline in real time? And suppose the smart clothes crash or go offline?
This seems to me to be akin to what we get from car alarms: I hear car alarms going off in parked cars all the time without ever checking to see if the car is actually being stolen. Its just security theater. Criminals aren't actually deterred by the sound of car alarms. I guess that seeing my father flatline several times because of hardware or network failure will prepare me for the inevitable end of his life.
So, ATT can start marketing a line of clothing that is linked to your cell phone bill... sure, everyone would by a web enabled shirt for their elderly parents but in reality all those shirts are going to end up hanging unworn in closets all over America. It sounds like a great way for ATT to open up a whole new revenue stream without actually having to deliver very much at all in terms of service.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea that you would pay an american to do what lots of people all over the world can do for a fraction of the cost is ludicrous, and that goes for "research" at universities as well... unless of course you are talking about stealth bombers or nuclear weapons research, which it is illegal to export. Now that they have the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, american research in physics, for example, is on its way to becoming second rate and other than Women's Studies and Business School, American universities have less and less to offer. The american university system is more about generating revenue through student loans than it is about actually producing first rate scholars. The student loan debt bubble, that has lasted for 30 years, is probably ending and with it you will see a dramatic decline in the international prestige of american universities. It was always about the money... and it was the money that attracted the foreign nationals to the united states to teach... and the foreign nationals who moved to america are the only reason american universities were ever all that good.
using "crowdfunding" sounds very contemporary but basically its all already paid for with taxes and if you cut out the administrative layer of ombudsmen then how on earth would anyone know how the money is really being spent? That's what the bureaucrats are for. And ultimately we are just going to sit through appeal after appeal for money just like when you try to listen to NPR and they are yet again just having another fund drive. Are research funding decisions really going to be left to a popularity contest on the Internet?
I did an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and I can't recall ever having a Black math professor, which is of course proof of the racist nature of whole enterprise. Hockey has the same problem. Are there any Hockey teams owned by Black people?
The miracle of k9copy.
On a lot of DVDs there is a clear warning before any of the content actually plays that says it is illegal to copy to DVD even for home use... and then it says all that stuff about Felonies and the FBI and Interpol. Here is I think an apt point about all of this: in Russia and China they pirate DVDs by the truckload and then just redistribute the movies without paying any royalties at all. It is a common practice. But the lawyers in America who make money on these kinds of cases can't do anything about Russians or Chinese pirates. Its like if a city wants to increase revenue by putting up speed traps all over town to catch speeding drivers. Its not that the people who get tickets are the only speeders but rather that the police target their enforcement in places that maximize their revenue. The movie industry will have a lot easier time wrenching money out of the hands of American who share DVDs than they will trying to get Chinese or Russian DVD bootlegging businesses to pay anything at all.
If we all had fiber in America then I think you would see movie sharing become just as ubiquitous as mp3 sharing... which would ultimately destroy the market for DVD sales. I have hundreds of DVDs that I have purchased of the years and although I don't do it (because there is no reason to) there would be no problem at all in ripping them into 8 GB files (with k9copy for example)... and if I had no real limitation on bandwidth, which is what fiber would provide to me, then of course I could share a full DVD with you in no time at all. Right now nobody is going to try to download 8 GB on even a good Cable Modem because it takes too long. But why would anyone ever need Netflix if several hundred thousand people in america made their video collections sharable online through the torrents (not as crappy 600 MB .avi files but as real DVDs with menus and features intact). You too could have 2 TB of movies sitting on your PC at no cost to you other than an internet connection. Anyway... the American internet providers are trying to find ways to meter service, not provide better or faster service. We will all end up capped at 50 GB per month I am sure.
Yes, self restraint used to be one of those things that people believed was required by the fact that god is always watching and the day of judgement is nigh but of course no one is watching... except on facebook.
I think the sodomy readiness might mean that the platform is especially suited to running porn sites that are massively scalable at 3 am when everyone is getting home from the pub looking for an easy spank.
Or just forward your gmail account emails to your account on your exchange server and read your emails from there instead.
sudo apt-get install banshee It doesn't really matter to me what they put in the default anyway. I am currently running Xubuntu with the dolphin file manager because I prefer it to Thunar, by the way. You can install whatever you want with almost no effort at all. incidentally, Canonical generates news/blog buzz by constantly announcing these changes as if they really matter.
It just doesn't make sense. Also, I have no doubt the government would make smaller devices than the one's pictured and moreover there is probably a backdoor in everyone's cell phone where the NSA can find your location instantly anyway. Why track his car? Unless the government knows that the car actually comes from an alternate universe and they are waiting to see if he meets Walternate at some point. Cue Fringe theme song.
You don't have to upgrade at all, of course. If your system works and you have no problem with it, then you can just keep what you have.
And yet you ought to be able to describe a piece of software that hasn't even been made yet and describe in detail its functionality and then write a little bit of a computer program that may or may not actually do what you just described and WHAMMY... you get to patent that?
I don't know about the "nerds" screed but actually if you focus on the features of Android too much then the seeming advantages could be turned against you at the level of ordinary users. For example, "You are free to write any app you want for your phone and upload it to the Marketplace" can very easily be turned around as "The apps are shoddy and lack proper testing." Or how about "You are free to alter your phones OS any way you want!" which can just as easily be turned around with "First you have to root your phone and then you can do anything you want to it so long as you don't care that you just voided your warranty." In other words, the features of an Android phone were amazing a couple of years ago, but now there is no consistency across all the different hardware versions and the vetting process for what is actually being sold is somewhat lacking compared to the iPhone. The Robot ads are actually pretty good in terms of just creating a sort of mystique about the device that translates into desirability. Of course, the iPhones are more geared toward the features women want and so they are nicer and cute. That doesn't mean they are better. They are marketed to different demographics really.
One gigatonne of ice melting into the ocean adds about 3 microns to the surface. In this case, 880 square kilometers of ice that varies between 60 and 500 meters thick is going to take a very very long time to melt and will result an addition of water that is almost zero once evaporation is factored in... the article points out that this iceberg might end up being about the size, in terms of surface area, as Berlin. Antarctica is almost entirely covered in Ice, 44% of which is floating in the ocean, and its 1.3 time the size of all of EUROPE. Nasa, after the end of the Space Shuttle program, is looking for ways to keep itself in the news. This iceberg sounds sensational but its actually very tiny in the grand scheme of things.
Having done the BPhil at Oxford I can confirm that I am living proof that the standards are slipping! :)
Anyway, an apt literary reference here would be Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Yes, we are all pathological mental cases that the Enlightened State has to watch very closely lest anyone deviate. The state and its functionaries cannot be indifferent to deviation and its causes. It's their job to care.
as for the car analogy... you can drive a Prius around the Earth 75 times on the amount of electricity it took to produce that result.
Yes, they certainly are geniuses at selling your music collection back to you. But since an mp3 file uploaded to the internet has no value whatsoever, you have to give them credit at Apple for at least squeezing a nickel out of all those iTunes users somehow... and what a great christmas gift those iTunes cards make.
Really? because we keep getting Authentication Error 0xc004f050
42
Interesting and informative for me. Thanks. In response to your post I googled it a little bit. You are correct! They really don't make that much money at all on anything and I was surprised by that. In the first Quarter of 2010 they only got $520 million in REVENUE from iTunes and overall its about $3 Billion a year in revenue. In contrast, Microsoft got almost $12 Billion in revenue for server software alone in 2007... and they got almost $11 billion in PROFIT alone from sales of Microsoft Office. Good lord. I guess I just transferred all the hype about apple into an intuitive number about the money they make on this stuff. So, when you buy an iPhone contract at ATT or Sprint and agree to pay upwards of $1200 a year for a phone contract how much of that is really profit for Apple? You could by a couple of Windows laptops a year for the rest of your life for what that iPhone contract costs. Is anyone actually making money here or is it all just "revenue."
I mean, they make like a billion dollars a month on iTunes... so it's not really accurate to focus on their computer business and act like they are somehow so much better than everyone else in they way they manufacture things. Sure Microsoft did an awful job with the Zune, so this makes Apple look like genuises... but Dell commands a far larger share of business workstation desktops and nobody on earth is out shopping for an Apple Server and every teenager in the world seems to own a playstation or an xbox. There are lots of categories where apple hasn't been successful/competitive AT ALL even though they have product to offer. Apple is at the crest of a wave but the iPod/iPhone/iPad is not going to be the must-have christmas item forever. Apple is a computer company that ended up designing and selling electronics as prestige fashion accessories because who on earth is going to buy their teenage daughter a walkman or make their wife walk town around texting on a blackberry anymore. Apple hit it out of the park with the iPad because everyone has been looking for a way for the last 30 years to sell more computers to women and women buy them.
If you have a superior product, then the approach you outline might work. Just let the bloggers tell everyone what they honestly think. But when it comes to Intel vs AMD practically everyone would say Intel is better except for those who are think price is a decisive factor. So, when you go to Best Buy and you see row after row of laptops with Intel chips and the sales people are telling you the battery will last 6 hours and they processor speed is this or that and its all because of the super efficient Intel chipset then who on earth is going to go for that refurbished Gateway with an Athlon II in it? The marketing team didn't so much fail to sell the consumer on AMD but rather they failed to sell the major computer assemblers/resellers on AMD. So now everyone wants an i3, i5, i7 in a new computer and that right there is a result of the failure of AMD's marketing team. They OUGHT to be held accountable for that failure.
I just put Xubuntu 11.10 on my netbook and the upshot of that install is basically the same as the Debian approach in that yes you do get a working desktop from one CD but then in reality you are going to have to download a lot of extra packages that are not absolutely required. For example, having never used the XFCE Thunar file manager before, I was somewhat surprised that I couldn't browse network shares. Of course, samba sharing worked just fine from the command line but it's not very pleasant to use ftp-like commands to share files with other computers on my network at home. So, I ended up installing both Dolphin, Konqueror, and pyNeighborhood in Xubuntu. If Xubuntu was being shipped with the goal that every newbie should be able to do everything they are doing with a Windows computer in roughly the same way that Windows works, as one could say Ubuntu is trying to do as much as possible in general, then Xubuntu would need multiple CDs or a DVD to install because to the ordinary lay person the 600MB install iso would be lacking functionalities. The it-all-fits-on-one-CD approach for Ubuntu was actually a good idea in the beginning because Ubuntu wanted to make the install iso as easy as possible to transfer from computer to computer. Not only was the install thereby going to be quick and easy for the new person but also it could be distributed for free to the end user on a mass scale through magazine inserts. The marketing and technical limitations that made the 600MB install such a good idea have become less of a factor in the last few years, though.
This concept gives a whole new meaning to "Blue Screen of Death"... if your elderly parents are wearing a smart, web-enabled track suit that tells you their vital signs on your smart phone... who the heck wants to see their parents flatline in real time? And suppose the smart clothes crash or go offline? This seems to me to be akin to what we get from car alarms: I hear car alarms going off in parked cars all the time without ever checking to see if the car is actually being stolen. Its just security theater. Criminals aren't actually deterred by the sound of car alarms. I guess that seeing my father flatline several times because of hardware or network failure will prepare me for the inevitable end of his life. So, ATT can start marketing a line of clothing that is linked to your cell phone bill... sure, everyone would by a web enabled shirt for their elderly parents but in reality all those shirts are going to end up hanging unworn in closets all over America. It sounds like a great way for ATT to open up a whole new revenue stream without actually having to deliver very much at all in terms of service.