They actually first denied it, but when German authorities despite this assurance from Google demanded to audit the collected data, Google came out and admitted it (and would have been caught in the audit anyway). This was covered many places, this is one: http://lastwatchdog.com/googles-wifi-data-harvest-draws-widening-probes/
"In April, Google admitted to German privacy regulators that vehicles specially-equipped to systematically shoot photos of street scenes for Google Maps also carried gear to collect data moving across unencrypted wireless networks situated inside homes and businesses. The company insisted at the time that only basic Wi-Fi location data was being collected. But after Germany requested an audit, Google subsequently disclosed that it had mistakenly collected personal data, as well."
Apple themselves does not put out targets like this because the rampant speculation is bad enough now.
Actually they do, Apple do give out specific guidance and forward looking statements to the financial markets on expected earning targets. For this Q3 Apple said they would be making $34b revenue, and they did $35b, similar for profit - so they beat their own targets.
But, the problem is that they have historically so consistently given guidance significantly below actual results, quarter after quarter, even very close to publishing the results (and enjoying all the "Apple crushing expectations again" headlines), so that when this time the gap between the Apple guidance and actual results were much much less, it was a negative surprise even to the people trying to listen to the guidance directly from Apple themselves.
IMHO even if the next iphone is cooler than the previous ones and the competition, there can't be the same amount of emotion over the arrival of a fifth generation of whatever product. The next big thing needs to be different enough from the current way of interacting with iphone and tablets. Apple will still be dominant because apple products say: "I can afford to spend more money than what's needed" and there's a market for that.
It's not only that, but the coolness/fashion factor Apple has been riding is in danger of sliding over in having the opposite effect when every obnoxious tween and decidely uncool parents and grandparents has the latest iPhone..
Millions of iPad users have found out they did not need those ports, and the few who did got the Camera kit that had both. Storm in a tea cup. (But apparently with repercussions since some newer Android phones also has dropped the SD card slot.)
"Not needing" and "still buying" aren't necessarily the same. I have bought an iPad2, because I wanted a tablet and there wasn't really an alternative, but the lack of standard USB port is still a painpoint for me. If I at least had that I might manage without SD, as I just use the USB port for mye camera (yeah, I know that you can get extra camera connector kits, not the same as built in). Next time I buy a tablet, if there is a serious contender to iPad that has standard ports and connections built in, that will certainly be a big plus in my decision. As it already is with most gadgets I buy. I'm really favouring USB with standard connectors for charging and connecting. Resulting in only needing one charger and one cabel to cover multiple gadgets.
Is this a bad laptop, or a bad iPad wannabe? I can't really tell at this point.
Not sure I understand your point, the negative is that a snap on keyboard (a top selling accessory to iPad) is available at all? For me the design of that keyboard was a major plus compared to other tablets, but just ignore it then, and you have a RT tablet that is thinner than iPad3, a few grams heavier (slightly larger screen), high-tech build with attention to details, an OS built for tablets and touch. And fixing the iPad painpoint of lacking standard USB ports and memory card slots.
How does it tell the difference between a "rival" browser and any random application which uses a TCP/IP transport?
It doesn't, despite what the headline says the limitation isn't on browsers as such. But it is hard (maybe impossible) to write a rendering/javascript engine fast enough without lower level access/APIs than WinRT allows for any 3rd party apps. Opera mini would run just fine on WinRT, as it offloads this to server (which is why it is the only browser available in iOS which is not just a reskin/frontend to the built in Safari WebKit renderer).
and this would make it difficult to implement a competitive browser
If that was the case, IE10 Metro would be a dog, but that has not been the case for the Consumer Preview. WinRT is a very performant API, however if you've been writing programs in an unmanaged language then you're going to have to change, and this is something Mozilla doesn't want to do if they don't have to.
IE10 (as WebKit on Safari) do have special privileges for low level access that 3rd party apps wont get.
I actually RTFA because I thought it was odd and I was curious on how Windows could block browsers from a technical standpoint.
The article leads to a Mozilla blog from which in turns links to another blog on from Microsoft which in no ways mention limiting browsers on Windows for Arm. So this quite strong claim has no actual source.
They are not blocking the browser as such, but any apps for Windows RT on ARM can only use the new WinRT ("Metro") API (as has been communicated on the MS dev blogs for quite some time), and this would make it difficult to implement a competitive browser (especially the Javascript engine as I understand). This is the same for iOS on iPad, the only third party browsers on iPad are either using the built in WebKit renderer or doing server based rendering (Opera Mini).
The official reason for only Apple and Microsoft software having low level system access on these tablets is to protect the tablet user experience in terms of responsiveness, battery life, security, etc. We can debate if these are the only reasons.., but as the iPad has shown there is clearly something to this. Pros and cons. And if not happy about it buy an Android, competition is good:)
It is btw. strange FireFox is not more upset by the same iPad limitations, surely the don't expect Windows 8 ARM tablets to overtake the iPad market share any time soon..
Sadly, in my circumstance, online backup isn't an option. I have about 800MB to back up. Doing this online would be prohibitively expensive. Amazon Cloud Drive, for example, would cost me $1,000 per year for 1TB of backup space. My solution is to have two 1TB hard drives. The data is backed up on one and then copied to the other. One drive stays in my house but the other is moved off-site. If one drive fails (or is stolen), I can buy another new drive and copy the data to that one. I could even buy two new drives every year (and thus be more assured that my drives wouldn't fail due to old age) for less than the cost of Amazon's offerings. (Two 2TB Western Digital drives from NewEgg would cost about $250. So I'd save $750.)
This doesn't even get into the time required to back up 800MB (although, admittedly, this would be a one-time backup followed by incremental backups) nor the time needed to download the files should I need them again (much slower via the Internet than via USB) nor the possibility that the online service would close down/be shut down.
For 800GB (I assume, not MB) that you need to back up I agree that multiple 2TB drives that you keep at separate locations are better. But I'm guessing that not all of those 800GB are your family photos, nor that you do this every day (though I might be wrong on both counts:). I don't use online as a full PC backup either, just for relevant important documents and photos. I will always have a to the minute up to date online copy that is also available (and shareable) from anywhere. Which was the context of this/. post, but I should have been clearer on that, I would never recommend it as a TB-size general backup solution.
Both GDrive and SkyDrive is $50-60 per year for 100GB (way below DropBox btw). And time isn't so much a consideration as it just syncs in the background. But again, for 800GB backup need I agree it doesn't fit.
Hard drive's fail much more predictably then web sites.
Sometimes hard drives also fail without warning. Your strategy is most certainly going to lead you to the loss of ALL your data.
That said, I agree with you that having data in your hands put YOU in control. For most people (you included if you're telling us the whole story about your data storage strategy) Facebook will be much safer.
Hard drives, including SSDs, do indeed fail both with and without warning (and can also get stolen or burn, which in both cases could make even multiple hard drives copies fail you if they are in the same location). Having had a few hard drives fail on me over the years (and also one break-in where both camera and all computer equipment was stolen) I wouldn't call it more predictable than web sites. And some photos you really do want to keep.
The best in my view is to combine the two. Have your photos on your harddrive, and sync with an online storage solution that doesn't mess with the files and where you control sharing (eg. you can share out individual photos/folders, if and when you want). The odds against both failing at once are astronomical, and the online storage has the added benefit of letting you (or others if and when you choose) access your photos from any device (I just switched from DropBox to the new SkyDrive for this, haven't tried GDrive, would stay away from iCloud, for this).
Where did you hear this? At the cooler in Redmond?
From the numbers it doesn't seem like an unlikely claim actually (single virus compromising percentage of installed base), though a citation would be nice so it made me check (source for numbers below):
The Mach Flashback virus compromised around 600.000 Macs, which is around 1% of installed base.
The single largest Windows-based infection ever was Conficker. At its peak in 2009, it infected about 0.7% of the total Windows installed base.
But the original source (Ed Bott from ZDNet) for those numbers is wrong - Conficker was only the worst PC infection in recent times. The ILOVEYOU mail virus infected 50 million PCs in 2000 - far more than 1%.
Fair enough, should have added the disclaimer 'in recent times', but still thinks that is what is of interest comparing; recent times, platforms that are relevant today. Or else you could talk about The Morris Worm infecting 10% of all Unix systems on the net as mentioned above and conclude that Unix is the worst.
Where did you hear this? At the cooler in Redmond?
From the numbers it doesn't seem like an unlikely claim actually (single virus compromising percentage of installed base), though a citation would be nice so it made me check (source for numbers below):
The Mach Flashback virus compromised around 600.000 Macs, which is around 1% of installed base.
The single largest Windows-based infection ever was Conficker. At its peak in 2009, it infected about 0.7% of the total Windows installed base.
I say it as a generalization. I don't actually mean, they never get infected. What I mean is a quick way of saying "There is a much lower probability of you coming across a virus designed for OSX that is not going to require you to enter your username and password".
I have never ran antivirus on my mac, I have never been infected. Do I think I will never get infected? No, but I think I am far less likely to be infected without antivirus on my mac than I am on windows. As the popularity of OSX rises however, I think this will not always be the case.
Just out of curiosity, but how do you know you are not infected if you don't run any detection software? Modern malware is so good at hiding that even very advanced users will be very hard pressed to discover it "manually" (sniffing and analyzing your network traffic fx at the router is one way to catch it)
So they block URLs, marking them as spam.
Use a URL shortener, like t.co / bit.ly / what.ever, so you can bypass the scheme.
No you don't, they actually resolve the target links, at least for the common URL shortener services. That said, it is not difficult to get past the block, and I don't think they even tried to make it hard, original intent was to protect normal users from getting malware, which was a big problem with IM earlier.
"Digital douchery" (otherwise known as "analysis") is accurate, where as your ears are imperfect perceptions interpreted by your imperfect brain. If you want to deliver useful information to people, you do it digitally and present the results.
So take your hipster nonsense and piss off. Any real audiophile would care about what's accurate and useful.
On of my favourite experiments one of the high-end HiFi magazines did a very long time ago, when CD was new, was to let a group of 'golden ears' audiophiles double blind test CD vs LP. And most of them could reliably distinguish between and prefer LP sound over CD in double blind test (which is good, a lot of people who are hellbent sure they know a difference will fail double blind testing). So far so good. Then they tested with CD-Rs recorded with LP as source.. Now they could no longer tell the difference, and thought the CD-Rs sounded just as good as LP. All that "warm, rich, musical, analogue" sound carried over to the CD-Rs, as they are distortion characteristics of LP playback. It is ok to prefer the sound, but it has nothing to do with CD vs LP or analogue vs digital (and digital is fully capable of reproducing it too if you want).
It is ok to diagree and propose better actions to take, but why are they stupid when they are affecting change for the better? They haven't turned low cost countries into a paradise, but the actions against Nike clearly made Nike work on improving the conditions of their supply chain, and, importantly, made competitors take notice and preventive actions. This definitely got attention and produced changes in the industry. Baby steps, but better than no steps. I work in a tech company that are actively looking into our supply chain conditions right now because of the focus on Apple (wish we had regardless, but take what I can get). This is how putting high profile targets on the spot for their actions (even if their actions are not unique, especially if their actions are not unique) produce results.
There still is a lot to critize, but all improvements are worth it - it is easy to "forget" about , but there are human sufferings behind us getting our brand icons a few dollars cheaper. All focus on this, and on improving this is worth it, in my view. But I'd be happy to hear about better alternative specific actions you and me can take to contribute.
I don't have any Apple products. You can't call me a blind fan. I felt nothing the day Jobs died.
But how is it just Apple that's being singled out here? WE PRACTICALLY GET EVERYTHING FROM CHINA and somehow ONLY APPLE is the offender?
Why was Nike singled out and boycotted? Because going after high-profile high-profit brand names that need to protect their image is an effective strategy to drive change. Is it unfair for these profit machines to be singled out when somebody else also is bad? Cry me a river.
...I'd like to know how much ad revenue have they generated in the past year, which would be a small fraction of it's valuation....
To extend on those remarks, two years ago the entire online advertising market was about $25B annually, with about half that going to GOOG for search placement. Old timers like myself will be surprised that only about a third of the online ad market is banner ads. I suppose adblocker-type technology will eventually completely kill off that market segment, or at least I hope it does. Anyway, FB can only be a small fraction of $10B ad revenue.
In normal market conditions companies used to sell for P.E. ratios in the single digit-ish range, but for a couple decades ultra high PE ratios have taken over. Once the baby boomers cash in their 401Ks that'll drop back to normal. Anyway it would not be all that out of line for a couple billion in revenue to account for a couple dozen billion in valuation.
Also the data they have is useful for spam services that are not online. Expect it to be mandatory to link your postal spam mail address and your social security number to your FB account, supposedly to cut down on griefers and spammers, but more likely to make the data they have on you more valuable.
Facebook has become a giant in web advertising. Their revenue was estimated at $3.8 billion in 2011 (slightly lower than their own prediction of $4b), and to reach $7b next year (2013). Similar numbers have been reported many places, but one source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008598
Where are they selling it? Don't get me wrong. I have a netbook. My wife has one. My son has one. We all use them... well, I haven't used mine for a long time... it is something of a backup/skype device but that's about it.
All the tablets and things coming out now are running ARM. Microsoft has already buried both the Atom and the netbook by blocking and discouraging them in every way they could imagine. Windows XP is no longer available through OEM and Microsoft somehow has the power to make everyone cripple their implementation of Atom to 2GB or less RAM supported. So what is Intel targeting?
I have an Atom based media center PC that I'm very happy with. With SSD disk. No fans, no sounds, it is completely silent. And not much bigger than a book. Running Win7 MCE performance has been good, no issues playing back any HD format video.
Since you did put the link up, you should have read it.
They don't claim that their motto is "don't be evil", they claim that they believe that you can make money without doing evil. It is different.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil:
While the official corporate philosophy of Google[4] does not contain the words "Don't be evil", they were included in the prospectus (aka "S-1") of Google's 2004 IPO (a letter from Google's founders, later called the "'Don't Be Evil' manifesto"): "Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."[5
How many times do people need to read the follow-ups to that story to realize that it was wrong? Even Dan Sullivan who were central in driving the original story went back on this claim in a follow-up blog post after he learned more about it.
In this case that would be a step in the right direction. Flash is much more widely available than Silverlight is at present.
Flash might be more widely available, but the Silverlight performance is clearly better, so it would be a step in the direction of lower video quality and higher processor and memory utilization.
Wow. That would be about as bad as the VCR market adopting VHS over the vastly superiour quality of Betamax!
Pet peeve. VHS did not win as result of marketing, or porn, and Betamax wasn't really a better product. As someone there at the time, the Betamax had somewhat better image quality, yes. Vastly is just going overboard, but partly depending on PAL or NTSC you did see it as somewhat better. But a video recorder that couldn't tape a full movie without you returning home from your dinner to turn the tape before leaving again is not a superior home video technology. And, another reason you would think Slashdot appreciated, VHS won because it was an open standard a myriad of manufactors freely adopted, Betamax wasn't - it was controlled and licensed at significant cost. Because of this obvious stronger consumer appeal, they got the content owners betting on them, including porn.
Slashdot Mirror
(they weren't caught, they admitted it.)
They actually first denied it, but when German authorities despite this assurance from Google demanded to audit the collected data, Google came out and admitted it (and would have been caught in the audit anyway). This was covered many places, this is one: http://lastwatchdog.com/googles-wifi-data-harvest-draws-widening-probes/
"In April, Google admitted to German privacy regulators that vehicles specially-equipped to systematically shoot photos of street scenes for Google Maps also carried gear to collect data moving across unencrypted wireless networks situated inside homes and businesses. The company insisted at the time that only basic Wi-Fi location data was being collected. But after Germany requested an audit, Google subsequently disclosed that it had mistakenly collected personal data, as well."
Apple themselves does not put out targets like this because the rampant speculation is bad enough now.
Actually they do, Apple do give out specific guidance and forward looking statements to the financial markets on expected earning targets. For this Q3 Apple said they would be making $34b revenue, and they did $35b, similar for profit - so they beat their own targets.
But, the problem is that they have historically so consistently given guidance significantly below actual results, quarter after quarter, even very close to publishing the results (and enjoying all the "Apple crushing expectations again" headlines), so that when this time the gap between the Apple guidance and actual results were much much less, it was a negative surprise even to the people trying to listen to the guidance directly from Apple themselves.
IMHO even if the next iphone is cooler than the previous ones and the competition, there can't be the same amount of emotion over the arrival of a fifth generation of whatever product. The next big thing needs to be different enough from the current way of interacting with iphone and tablets. Apple will still be dominant because apple products say: "I can afford to spend more money than what's needed" and there's a market for that.
It's not only that, but the coolness/fashion factor Apple has been riding is in danger of sliding over in having the opposite effect when every obnoxious tween and decidely uncool parents and grandparents has the latest iPhone..
Millions of iPad users have found out they did not need those ports, and the few who did got the Camera kit that had both. Storm in a tea cup. (But apparently with repercussions since some newer Android phones also has dropped the SD card slot.)
"Not needing" and "still buying" aren't necessarily the same. I have bought an iPad2, because I wanted a tablet and there wasn't really an alternative, but the lack of standard USB port is still a painpoint for me. If I at least had that I might manage without SD, as I just use the USB port for mye camera (yeah, I know that you can get extra camera connector kits, not the same as built in). Next time I buy a tablet, if there is a serious contender to iPad that has standard ports and connections built in, that will certainly be a big plus in my decision. As it already is with most gadgets I buy. I'm really favouring USB with standard connectors for charging and connecting. Resulting in only needing one charger and one cabel to cover multiple gadgets.
Is this a bad laptop, or a bad iPad wannabe? I can't really tell at this point.
Not sure I understand your point, the negative is that a snap on keyboard (a top selling accessory to iPad) is available at all? For me the design of that keyboard was a major plus compared to other tablets, but just ignore it then, and you have a RT tablet that is thinner than iPad3, a few grams heavier (slightly larger screen), high-tech build with attention to details, an OS built for tablets and touch. And fixing the iPad painpoint of lacking standard USB ports and memory card slots.
How does it tell the difference between a "rival" browser and any random application which uses a TCP/IP transport?
It doesn't, despite what the headline says the limitation isn't on browsers as such. But it is hard (maybe impossible) to write a rendering/javascript engine fast enough without lower level access/APIs than WinRT allows for any 3rd party apps. Opera mini would run just fine on WinRT, as it offloads this to server (which is why it is the only browser available in iOS which is not just a reskin/frontend to the built in Safari WebKit renderer).
If that was the case, IE10 Metro would be a dog, but that has not been the case for the Consumer Preview. WinRT is a very performant API, however if you've been writing programs in an unmanaged language then you're going to have to change, and this is something Mozilla doesn't want to do if they don't have to.
IE10 (as WebKit on Safari) do have special privileges for low level access that 3rd party apps wont get.
I actually RTFA because I thought it was odd and I was curious on how Windows could block browsers from a technical standpoint.
The article leads to a Mozilla blog from which in turns links to another blog on from Microsoft which in no ways mention limiting browsers on Windows for Arm. So this quite strong claim has no actual source.
They are not blocking the browser as such, but any apps for Windows RT on ARM can only use the new WinRT ("Metro") API (as has been communicated on the MS dev blogs for quite some time), and this would make it difficult to implement a competitive browser (especially the Javascript engine as I understand). This is the same for iOS on iPad, the only third party browsers on iPad are either using the built in WebKit renderer or doing server based rendering (Opera Mini).
The official reason for only Apple and Microsoft software having low level system access on these tablets is to protect the tablet user experience in terms of responsiveness, battery life, security, etc. We can debate if these are the only reasons.., but as the iPad has shown there is clearly something to this. Pros and cons. And if not happy about it buy an Android, competition is good :)
It is btw. strange FireFox is not more upset by the same iPad limitations, surely the don't expect Windows 8 ARM tablets to overtake the iPad market share any time soon..
Sadly, in my circumstance, online backup isn't an option. I have about 800MB to back up. Doing this online would be prohibitively expensive. Amazon Cloud Drive, for example, would cost me $1,000 per year for 1TB of backup space. My solution is to have two 1TB hard drives. The data is backed up on one and then copied to the other. One drive stays in my house but the other is moved off-site. If one drive fails (or is stolen), I can buy another new drive and copy the data to that one. I could even buy two new drives every year (and thus be more assured that my drives wouldn't fail due to old age) for less than the cost of Amazon's offerings. (Two 2TB Western Digital drives from NewEgg would cost about $250. So I'd save $750.)
This doesn't even get into the time required to back up 800MB (although, admittedly, this would be a one-time backup followed by incremental backups) nor the time needed to download the files should I need them again (much slower via the Internet than via USB) nor the possibility that the online service would close down/be shut down.
For 800GB (I assume, not MB) that you need to back up I agree that multiple 2TB drives that you keep at separate locations are better. But I'm guessing that not all of those 800GB are your family photos, nor that you do this every day (though I might be wrong on both counts :). I don't use online as a full PC backup either, just for relevant important documents and photos. I will always have a to the minute up to date online copy that is also available (and shareable) from anywhere. Which was the context of this /. post, but I should have been clearer on that, I would never recommend it as a TB-size general backup solution.
Both GDrive and SkyDrive is $50-60 per year for 100GB (way below DropBox btw). And time isn't so much a consideration as it just syncs in the background. But again, for 800GB backup need I agree it doesn't fit.
Hard drive's fail much more predictably then web sites.
Sometimes hard drives also fail without warning. Your strategy is most certainly going to lead you to the loss of ALL your data.
That said, I agree with you that having data in your hands put YOU in control. For most people (you included if you're telling us the whole story about your data storage strategy) Facebook will be much safer.
Hard drives, including SSDs, do indeed fail both with and without warning (and can also get stolen or burn, which in both cases could make even multiple hard drives copies fail you if they are in the same location). Having had a few hard drives fail on me over the years (and also one break-in where both camera and all computer equipment was stolen) I wouldn't call it more predictable than web sites. And some photos you really do want to keep.
The best in my view is to combine the two. Have your photos on your harddrive, and sync with an online storage solution that doesn't mess with the files and where you control sharing (eg. you can share out individual photos/folders, if and when you want). The odds against both failing at once are astronomical, and the online storage has the added benefit of letting you (or others if and when you choose) access your photos from any device (I just switched from DropBox to the new SkyDrive for this, haven't tried GDrive, would stay away from iCloud, for this).
Where did you hear this? At the cooler in Redmond?
From the numbers it doesn't seem like an unlikely claim actually (single virus compromising percentage of installed base), though a citation would be nice so it made me check (source for numbers below):
The Mach Flashback virus compromised around 600.000 Macs, which is around 1% of installed base. The single largest Windows-based infection ever was Conficker. At its peak in 2009, it infected about 0.7% of the total Windows installed base.
But the original source (Ed Bott from ZDNet) for those numbers is wrong - Conficker was only the worst PC infection in recent times. The ILOVEYOU mail virus infected 50 million PCs in 2000 - far more than 1%.
Fair enough, should have added the disclaimer 'in recent times', but still thinks that is what is of interest comparing; recent times, platforms that are relevant today. Or else you could talk about The Morris Worm infecting 10% of all Unix systems on the net as mentioned above and conclude that Unix is the worst.
Where did you hear this? At the cooler in Redmond?
From the numbers it doesn't seem like an unlikely claim actually (single virus compromising percentage of installed base), though a citation would be nice so it made me check (source for numbers below):
The Mach Flashback virus compromised around 600.000 Macs, which is around 1% of installed base.
The single largest Windows-based infection ever was Conficker. At its peak in 2009, it infected about 0.7% of the total Windows installed base.
Facebook may never make $1b
ftfy
Facebook made $1b profit in 2011, on revenue of $3.7b
I say it as a generalization. I don't actually mean, they never get infected. What I mean is a quick way of saying "There is a much lower probability of you coming across a virus designed for OSX that is not going to require you to enter your username and password".
I have never ran antivirus on my mac, I have never been infected. Do I think I will never get infected? No, but I think I am far less likely to be infected without antivirus on my mac than I am on windows. As the popularity of OSX rises however, I think this will not always be the case.
Just out of curiosity, but how do you know you are not infected if you don't run any detection software? Modern malware is so good at hiding that even very advanced users will be very hard pressed to discover it "manually" (sniffing and analyzing your network traffic fx at the router is one way to catch it)
So they block URLs, marking them as spam. Use a URL shortener, like t.co / bit.ly / what.ever, so you can bypass the scheme.
No you don't, they actually resolve the target links, at least for the common URL shortener services. That said, it is not difficult to get past the block, and I don't think they even tried to make it hard, original intent was to protect normal users from getting malware, which was a big problem with IM earlier.
Oh, not so different, eh?
How about those who use keyboard shortcuts? Alt+F, P. Hmmm, no printing? WTF? Alt+F, A. No save as?
Yes, totally identical.
What about those keyboard shortcuts? A quick test in Excel 2010:
Alt+F,P -> Print
Alt+F,A -> Save As
Total bullshit.
"Digital douchery" (otherwise known as "analysis") is accurate, where as your ears are imperfect perceptions interpreted by your imperfect brain. If you want to deliver useful information to people, you do it digitally and present the results.
So take your hipster nonsense and piss off. Any real audiophile would care about what's accurate and useful.
On of my favourite experiments one of the high-end HiFi magazines did a very long time ago, when CD was new, was to let a group of 'golden ears' audiophiles double blind test CD vs LP. And most of them could reliably distinguish between and prefer LP sound over CD in double blind test (which is good, a lot of people who are hellbent sure they know a difference will fail double blind testing). So far so good. Then they tested with CD-Rs recorded with LP as source.. Now they could no longer tell the difference, and thought the CD-Rs sounded just as good as LP. All that "warm, rich, musical, analogue" sound carried over to the CD-Rs, as they are distortion characteristics of LP playback. It is ok to prefer the sound, but it has nothing to do with CD vs LP or analogue vs digital (and digital is fully capable of reproducing it too if you want).
Why was Nike singled out and boycotted?
Because those people were fucking stupid, too.
It is ok to diagree and propose better actions to take, but why are they stupid when they are affecting change for the better? They haven't turned low cost countries into a paradise, but the actions against Nike clearly made Nike work on improving the conditions of their supply chain, and, importantly, made competitors take notice and preventive actions. This definitely got attention and produced changes in the industry. Baby steps, but better than no steps. I work in a tech company that are actively looking into our supply chain conditions right now because of the focus on Apple (wish we had regardless, but take what I can get). This is how putting high profile targets on the spot for their actions (even if their actions are not unique, especially if their actions are not unique) produce results.
There still is a lot to critize, but all improvements are worth it - it is easy to "forget" about , but there are human sufferings behind us getting our brand icons a few dollars cheaper. All focus on this, and on improving this is worth it, in my view. But I'd be happy to hear about better alternative specific actions you and me can take to contribute.
I don't have any Apple products. You can't call me a blind fan. I felt nothing the day Jobs died.
But how is it just Apple that's being singled out here? WE PRACTICALLY GET EVERYTHING FROM CHINA and somehow ONLY APPLE is the offender?
Why was Nike singled out and boycotted? Because going after high-profile high-profit brand names that need to protect their image is an effective strategy to drive change. Is it unfair for these profit machines to be singled out when somebody else also is bad? Cry me a river.
...I'd like to know how much ad revenue have they generated in the past year, which would be a small fraction of it's valuation....
To extend on those remarks, two years ago the entire online advertising market was about $25B annually, with about half that going to GOOG for search placement. Old timers like myself will be surprised that only about a third of the online ad market is banner ads. I suppose adblocker-type technology will eventually completely kill off that market segment, or at least I hope it does. Anyway, FB can only be a small fraction of $10B ad revenue.
In normal market conditions companies used to sell for P.E. ratios in the single digit-ish range, but for a couple decades ultra high PE ratios have taken over. Once the baby boomers cash in their 401Ks that'll drop back to normal. Anyway it would not be all that out of line for a couple billion in revenue to account for a couple dozen billion in valuation.
Also the data they have is useful for spam services that are not online. Expect it to be mandatory to link your postal spam mail address and your social security number to your FB account, supposedly to cut down on griefers and spammers, but more likely to make the data they have on you more valuable.
Facebook has become a giant in web advertising. Their revenue was estimated at $3.8 billion in 2011 (slightly lower than their own prediction of $4b), and to reach $7b next year (2013). Similar numbers have been reported many places, but one source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008598
Total online ad market is at $31b, so Facebook has 12% market share of the global online ad market. source: http://www.iab.net/insights_research/industry_data_and_landscape/1675/1816825 . Their market share of users and time is even higher than that - 16% -- source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-is-destroying-google-in-time-spent-online-chart/4183
Where are they selling it? Don't get me wrong. I have a netbook. My wife has one. My son has one. We all use them... well, I haven't used mine for a long time ... it is something of a backup/skype device but that's about it.
All the tablets and things coming out now are running ARM. Microsoft has already buried both the Atom and the netbook by blocking and discouraging them in every way they could imagine. Windows XP is no longer available through OEM and Microsoft somehow has the power to make everyone cripple their implementation of Atom to 2GB or less RAM supported. So what is Intel targeting?
I have an Atom based media center PC that I'm very happy with. With SSD disk. No fans, no sounds, it is completely silent. And not much bigger than a book. Running Win7 MCE performance has been good, no issues playing back any HD format video.
Since you did put the link up, you should have read it.
They don't claim that their motto is "don't be evil", they claim that they believe that you can make money without doing evil. It is different.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil: While the official corporate philosophy of Google[4] does not contain the words "Don't be evil", they were included in the prospectus (aka "S-1") of Google's 2004 IPO (a letter from Google's founders, later called the "'Don't Be Evil' manifesto"): "Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."[5
How many damn times do people need telling?
How many times do people need to read the follow-ups to that story to realize that it was wrong? Even Dan Sullivan who were central in driving the original story went back on this claim in a follow-up blog post after he learned more about it.
In this case that would be a step in the right direction. Flash is much more widely available than Silverlight is at present.
Flash might be more widely available, but the Silverlight performance is clearly better, so it would be a step in the direction of lower video quality and higher processor and memory utilization.
Wow. That would be about as bad as the VCR market adopting VHS over the vastly superiour quality of Betamax!
Pet peeve. VHS did not win as result of marketing, or porn, and Betamax wasn't really a better product. As someone there at the time, the Betamax had somewhat better image quality, yes. Vastly is just going overboard, but partly depending on PAL or NTSC you did see it as somewhat better. But a video recorder that couldn't tape a full movie without you returning home from your dinner to turn the tape before leaving again is not a superior home video technology. And, another reason you would think Slashdot appreciated, VHS won because it was an open standard a myriad of manufactors freely adopted, Betamax wasn't - it was controlled and licensed at significant cost. Because of this obvious stronger consumer appeal, they got the content owners betting on them, including porn.