How well do you think twitter and facebook would be doing if you had to pay to use them?
Tablets DO solve a tangible problem: it fits well into situations where a phone is too small and underpowered, and a laptop is cumbersome and overkill.
Facebook actually solves a particularly tangible problem -- how to casually communicate with a broad set of people in an easy way. Nothing you can do in FB is stuff you couldn't do with six other sites before FB, but I sure as shit wasn't going to get my parents on them,
And yet this is more or less the same thing they said about mobile phones in the early 80's. No more than a few k needed in the world or something similarly stupid.
I keep seeing people using that argument, for some reason. Not sure why, because that wasn't actually the case. Not even remotely. The issue with cell phones in the early 80's was the cost and the combination of size/weight/battery life.
Car phones were plenty common, and people wanted them. Sure, they were expensive. But claiming that people said they were too nerdy, or not many people wanted them, or needed them is, frankly, so far from reality the statement had to have first been made by someone who wasn't even alive at the time.
I mean, maybe. But then a few centuries ago people were free to make a living off the land. Now they have to beg for jobs and no amount of work is going to help them without that when they have nothing to work with and there's no unclaimed land to farm.
It may well be that the only truly free people were those who came into lands that belonged to nobody and it also may well be that those in fitting climates weren't really bad off. The golden times of mankind are over. Maybe there are new golden times far in the future, but this would require some really hard work to get us off this rock. And with "us" I don't mean just a handful of stinking rich tourists in LEO.
Virtually no one in civilized recorded history had that ability.
And that's a VERY good thing -- we wouldn't have technology if the excess work of the masses wasn't being aggregated by the few.
The extremely wealthy footing the cost of investment in developing the technology is why we have it. A seamstress working at home wouldn't have the resources to build a programmable loom. Orville and Wilbur wouldn't have the resources to build a DC-9. A fisherman wouldn't be able to build the QE2.
The only reason we're not hunters and gathers, doomed to extinction, is because by might or by right, the labor of the many is used by the few... and that investment trickles down over time. That's why the vast majority of the "poor" are MASSIVELY wealthy compared to a century or two ago. I mean, light after dark? The possibility of clean water? A single coarse of antibiotics would've been worth an empire 400 years ago. Shit, having a pretty decent chance of living beyond 40 would!
Earth has more than enough resources for 20 billion people if we were not squandering them on welfare for the non-working leaches who live off the hard work of others. Of course I am talking about the owning class of billionaire plutocrats.
The total financial resources of all of the worlds' billionaires distributed evenly across the entire planet wouldn't put everyone at a lower-class American lifestyle for a year.
Keep in mind, the *vast* majority of that wealth is held in limbo -- in banks and investments, things like that. Its *not* being spent on things that chew up time, energy and resources. If a few trillion dollars suddenly showed up in the pockets of everyone on the planet, there wouldn't be resources for people to buy anything, power the things they buy, etc... Economics doesn't work that way.
A population of 7 billion absolutely -- by any measure -- requires the vast majority to live in poverty. The problem with economics is not the billionaires, its the 400 million middle class Chinese, 150 million middle class Americans, etc... The amount of resources used per dollar spent by someone poor is orders of magnitude higher than when a billionaire spends it.
Look at it this way -- you buy a $100 DVD player, you're able to do so because of the millions of people living in poverty who are mining the rare earths in it, assembling it in 12 hour shifts, etc... a billionaire spending $50m on a boat isn't penny pinching. The resources that go into a $50m boat is a lot lower than the resources that goes into $50m DVD players, because of the VAST markup.
The poor scramble for food, food stamps ( SNAP program ) is being cut The 20% of American children are in poverty Pensions and Social Security are being cut leaving people with a life of work out in the cold
Our priorities are wrong.
No, our priorities are just right. Unless you want to kill off 90% of the worlds population, people will be *forever* in poverty. There's not enough resources on the Earth -- by a substantial factor -- to support seven billion people without 3/4 of them living in poverty conditions.
If you let the plight of the unfortunate (and irresponsible -- those people living in poverty are continuing to procreate, after all) stop progress, humanity will go extinct on this planet, along with every other form of life. Five billion years of evolution, of living and dying, would be wiped out as the sun ages... for nothing.
If humans get off the planet, there could be trillions of lives that get to exist because of it.
If a week in orbit drives advancement in technology that gets live off this planet for good, 'm morally comfortable with a few billion living in poverty for the opportunity for many trillions to live in the future. We don't get a second chance at this -- we've built up this opportunity on a technological house of cards that can't be rebuilt if it falls. There's no "easy" energy left. If people don't get off the planet and something happens that knocks us back from our "modern" level of technology, there won't be another industrial revolution to get us back. If we go extinct and some other species evolves intelligence 200 million years from now, they *won't* have the chance to do what we do -- because we won't have left the energy resources that drove advancement for the last 5000 years. Climate conditions have changed, you won't get new oil or new coal being laid down.
The morally correct thing to do would be to put vastly MORE resources into getting life multiplanet, as a stepping stone to getting it beyond there.
The first porn site would far pre-date this -- there were plenty of "story" porn sites running on Gopher servers, FTP sites, BBS sites running via telnet, newsgroups.
The Internet was full of porn for a very long time before HTTP came around.
I doubt that's the main reason why the shuttle flies upside down. The bottom of the shuttle is also black, while the top is white. From a simple light-absorption-radiation point of view, this configuration would lead to heating of the shuttle as a whole. The heat shield is designed to shield from heat conduction due to superheated compressed air in contact with the shuttle during reentry. Shielding from radiative heating makes use of reflective surfaces like what satellites are coated in.
It seems the shuttle would fly upside down to aid in radio communication with the earth, allow viewing of the earth through the windows (a human concern, but still an important one), and to protect the shuttle from earthbound debris (though I'd think the heat shield is the last thing you'd want to damage before attempting reentry).
Your doubt is misplaced -- that is precisely why it flew that way. The shuttle's radiators were on the inside of the cargo bay doors. The shuttle had a limited time, once on orbit, to get positioned and get the doors open because of the heat build-up.
They knew at some point helium will be gone and the telescope will become useless. It ran for four years more or less. Not as bad as the summary made it sound like.
They are in deep space, so they have an infinite sink at nearly zero deg kelvin. It should be possible to design a closed circuit cooling system that just uses energy from solar panels to pump the refrigerant. But in space applications the weight of such a system of compressors, radiators and pumps might prove to be prohibitive. Still feel sad such a fine piece of machinery is rotting away. Well, may be a better design next time.
No, they have near perfect insulation. The only heat they can get rid of has to happen by radiating it away.
Go step outside.
Notice how warm it is in the sun?
There's no way you can radiate much heat if you're in direct sunlight -- that's why the space shuttle flew upside down in orbit. It kept the heat shield towards the sun, so it had a chance to radiate heat away from the other side.
"So, put a big sun shade and block the sun", you might say... well that's easier said than done, the solar wind would apply a lot of pressure to it, and (for that matter) the solar wind itself is well above the operating temperature of the telescope.
But by all means, I'm sure you're smarter than the experts to designed it.
Why is it taking Virgin Galactic so long for development? Is it a financing or technical issue?
SpaceX was founded in 2002 and is already making re-supply missions to the ISS. Granted that's not quite the same as human spaceflight but it seems like there's a lot faster advancement occurring at SpaceX than at Virgin Galactic.
Politics, mostly. There's plenty written up on what has been going on, if you do some Google searching.
A lot of it boils down to the difference between a company that is good at research, and a company that is good at manufacturing. Another factor was the explosion in New Mexico, which set things back and reportedly demoralized some of the key people involved.
Do your math again. Using your numbers for a 360, if XBox Live is normally $5/mo, that's $120 for 2 years. Total cost of a 360 unsubsidized would be 120 + 299, or $419. A subsidized one would be $240 for two years + 99 = $339. So why choose an unsubsidized one if you're getting Live anyways?
For a 720, the numbers are similar, if they are correct as reported by the summary. $499 + 120 = $619 or 299 + 240 = $539.
Only question is - if you choose a subsidized model - what is the cost of XBox Live Gold after the two years are up? Is it 5, or 10?
Xbox Live is $10 / month. Its only $5 if you pay a year at a time. You can sometimes find it on sale for less.
So, yes, its not as good of a deal if you aren't paying month-to-month, but if you can afford to pay it all at once, you probably don't need to finance the Xbox, either.
And, of course, you can often find Xboxes on sale -- that makes the comparison worse, too... but again, you don't have to finance it. You can just buy one.
Only for the subsidized price. You can buy a 360 the same way already -- $99 instead of $299. You pay $10 more a month for Live, so you're basically paying $40 to finance it for two years.
So you're right, I'd say these things aren't likely to happen for most people. Unless your dad just happens to be a director at a major investment bank and just happens to know some of the most wealthy people around who also just happen to have strong media platforms to hype your product from that is.
Business has always worked that way. Why do you think CEOs get paid so much? Connections, leverage, wealth, politics -- once you're bigger than a small local company, those are the real differentiators, and behind virtually every "successful" startup is a similar story. Names and details may change, but the plot is the same.
And that's not new -- it was just as true 50, 100, 200, and 2000 years ago. Wealthy Babylonian merchants got so for the same reasons, as did ancient Greek, Roman, Chinese, etc... you name it, that's how it has always worked.
And only in oem numbers. Volume licensing is way, way up. They're kicking ass everywhere but windows sales, and that's commensurate with the decline in pc sales.
They're doing fine, and even win8 isn't doing badly.
And more significantly, Windows sales are doing very well -- its only new PC sales that aren't. Revenue is flat, because it was being sold for less, but there's no drop in per-seat demand for it.
The PC slump is a manufacturer problem, not a Microsoft problem... yet.
It'd be bigger news if he quit for another company, while Microsoft is on the decline it's going to be a very slow death spread across a decade or two. They've still got considerable assets which will take a long time to bleed out. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=msft+balance+sheet&annual
Its also a carefully changed edit to the original quote which was either done or ignored by Slashdot's editors deliberately to fan the anti-MS flames here, or their incompetence let through.
The words of the quote are verbatim from the article, however the quote about Microsoft's market share was *not* quoted in the original article. The Slashdot "edit" of putting quotes around it makes it sound like a quote from Peter Klein or Microsoft, whereas its actually a quote from whoever wrote the article at Yahoo.
Your reading comprehension is low, possibly because you fall under that average. 90th percentile IQ is somewhere around an IQ of 120, and 97th percentile is somewhere between 128-130.
Clearly, gifted children. However, as someone else pointed out, IQ is malleable, and a cultural thing. Many very smart children lose their advantage by the time they are adults, and many average or above average children can end up in the genius IQ range as an adult once they realize they can be as intelligent as they want to be.
Be nice. I don't know who this "Anonymous Coward" person is, but after fifteen years of their posting, its pretty clear they're developmentally challenged.
Not that I'll be using it, but let me go out on a limb and say Google Glass is AWESOME. Alright you cynics, who shall cast the first stone?
Nothing cynical -- Google already tracks your browsing via their ad network, to increase the value of the ads they sell. Remember, you're their product, not their customer.
Add to that warehouse of information about you online all the things you do offline, and you become a much more valuable product for them to sell.
Slashdot Mirror
Facebook actually solves a particularly tangible problem -- how to casually communicate with a broad set of people in an easy way.
Email had already solved that, plus users didn't have to all be on the same network, use a particular client, give up their privacy, and so forth.
And yet, it didn't. Because its point-to-point, doesn't handle media well, is plagued by spam.
These systems are obsolete, the benefits in question have been replaced by others. This is just a feeble attempt to drum up ad views.
Fixed that for you.
If you can afford a Mac, or a computer newer than XP, you don't need to be sucking off the public teat.
And if you're running Linux, you're probably living with your parents, anyway.
(*ducks*)
How well do you think twitter and facebook would be doing if you had to pay to use them?
Tablets DO solve a tangible problem: it fits well into situations where a phone is too small and underpowered, and a laptop is cumbersome and overkill.
Facebook actually solves a particularly tangible problem -- how to casually communicate with a broad set of people in an easy way. Nothing you can do in FB is stuff you couldn't do with six other sites before FB, but I sure as shit wasn't going to get my parents on them,
Thread closed.
And yet this is more or less the same thing they said about mobile phones in the early 80's. No more than a few k needed in the world or something similarly stupid.
I keep seeing people using that argument, for some reason. Not sure why, because that wasn't actually the case. Not even remotely. The issue with cell phones in the early 80's was the cost and the combination of size/weight/battery life.
Car phones were plenty common, and people wanted them. Sure, they were expensive. But claiming that people said they were too nerdy, or not many people wanted them, or needed them is, frankly, so far from reality the statement had to have first been made by someone who wasn't even alive at the time.
"everywhere" is a bit of a stretch. Pidgin doesn't support any of the most popular networks: whatsapp, bbm, ...
Facebook: 1b users ...
Skype: 700m users
MSN: 500m users
etc
I don't think "most" means what you think it means.
[Citation needed]
I mean, maybe. But then a few centuries ago people were free to make a living off the land. Now they have to beg for jobs and no amount of work is going to help them without that when they have nothing to work with and there's no unclaimed land to farm.
It may well be that the only truly free people were those who came into lands that belonged to nobody and it also may well be that those in fitting climates weren't really bad off. The golden times of mankind are over. Maybe there are new golden times far in the future, but this would require some really hard work to get us off this rock. And with "us" I don't mean just a handful of stinking rich tourists in LEO.
Virtually no one in civilized recorded history had that ability.
And that's a VERY good thing -- we wouldn't have technology if the excess work of the masses wasn't being aggregated by the few.
The extremely wealthy footing the cost of investment in developing the technology is why we have it. A seamstress working at home wouldn't have the resources to build a programmable loom. Orville and Wilbur wouldn't have the resources to build a DC-9. A fisherman wouldn't be able to build the QE2.
The only reason we're not hunters and gathers, doomed to extinction, is because by might or by right, the labor of the many is used by the few... and that investment trickles down over time. That's why the vast majority of the "poor" are MASSIVELY wealthy compared to a century or two ago. I mean, light after dark? The possibility of clean water? A single coarse of antibiotics would've been worth an empire 400 years ago. Shit, having a pretty decent chance of living beyond 40 would!
Earth has more than enough resources for 20 billion people if we were not squandering them on welfare for the non-working leaches who live off the hard work of others. Of course I am talking about the owning class of billionaire plutocrats.
The total financial resources of all of the worlds' billionaires distributed evenly across the entire planet wouldn't put everyone at a lower-class American lifestyle for a year.
Keep in mind, the *vast* majority of that wealth is held in limbo -- in banks and investments, things like that. Its *not* being spent on things that chew up time, energy and resources. If a few trillion dollars suddenly showed up in the pockets of everyone on the planet, there wouldn't be resources for people to buy anything, power the things they buy, etc ... Economics doesn't work that way.
A population of 7 billion absolutely -- by any measure -- requires the vast majority to live in poverty. The problem with economics is not the billionaires, its the 400 million middle class Chinese, 150 million middle class Americans, etc ... The amount of resources used per dollar spent by someone poor is orders of magnitude higher than when a billionaire spends it.
Look at it this way -- you buy a $100 DVD player, you're able to do so because of the millions of people living in poverty who are mining the rare earths in it, assembling it in 12 hour shifts, etc ... a billionaire spending $50m on a boat isn't penny pinching. The resources that go into a $50m boat is a lot lower than the resources that goes into $50m DVD players, because of the VAST markup.
The poor scramble for food, food stamps ( SNAP program ) is being cut
The 20% of American children are in poverty
Pensions and Social Security are being cut leaving people with a life of work out in the cold
Our priorities are wrong.
No, our priorities are just right. Unless you want to kill off 90% of the worlds population, people will be *forever* in poverty. There's not enough resources on the Earth -- by a substantial factor -- to support seven billion people without 3/4 of them living in poverty conditions.
If you let the plight of the unfortunate (and irresponsible -- those people living in poverty are continuing to procreate, after all) stop progress, humanity will go extinct on this planet, along with every other form of life. Five billion years of evolution, of living and dying, would be wiped out as the sun ages... for nothing.
If humans get off the planet, there could be trillions of lives that get to exist because of it.
If a week in orbit drives advancement in technology that gets live off this planet for good, 'm morally comfortable with a few billion living in poverty for the opportunity for many trillions to live in the future. We don't get a second chance at this -- we've built up this opportunity on a technological house of cards that can't be rebuilt if it falls. There's no "easy" energy left. If people don't get off the planet and something happens that knocks us back from our "modern" level of technology, there won't be another industrial revolution to get us back. If we go extinct and some other species evolves intelligence 200 million years from now, they *won't* have the chance to do what we do -- because we won't have left the energy resources that drove advancement for the last 5000 years. Climate conditions have changed, you won't get new oil or new coal being laid down.
The morally correct thing to do would be to put vastly MORE resources into getting life multiplanet, as a stepping stone to getting it beyond there.
The first porn site restored . . .
Surely, this is archived somewhere.
The first porn site would far pre-date this -- there were plenty of "story" porn sites running on Gopher servers, FTP sites, BBS sites running via telnet, newsgroups.
The Internet was full of porn for a very long time before HTTP came around.
I doubt that's the main reason why the shuttle flies upside down. The bottom of the shuttle is also black, while the top is white. From a simple light-absorption-radiation point of view, this configuration would lead to heating of the shuttle as a whole. The heat shield is designed to shield from heat conduction due to superheated compressed air in contact with the shuttle during reentry. Shielding from radiative heating makes use of reflective surfaces like what satellites are coated in.
It seems the shuttle would fly upside down to aid in radio communication with the earth, allow viewing of the earth through the windows (a human concern, but still an important one), and to protect the shuttle from earthbound debris (though I'd think the heat shield is the last thing you'd want to damage before attempting reentry).
Your doubt is misplaced -- that is precisely why it flew that way. The shuttle's radiators were on the inside of the cargo bay doors. The shuttle had a limited time, once on orbit, to get positioned and get the doors open because of the heat build-up.
They knew at some point helium will be gone and the telescope will become useless. It ran for four years more or less. Not as bad as the summary made it sound like.
They are in deep space, so they have an infinite sink at nearly zero deg kelvin. It should be possible to design a closed circuit cooling system that just uses energy from solar panels to pump the refrigerant. But in space applications the weight of such a system of compressors, radiators and pumps might prove to be prohibitive.
Still feel sad such a fine piece of machinery is rotting away. Well, may be a better design next time.
No, they have near perfect insulation. The only heat they can get rid of has to happen by radiating it away.
Go step outside.
Notice how warm it is in the sun?
There's no way you can radiate much heat if you're in direct sunlight -- that's why the space shuttle flew upside down in orbit. It kept the heat shield towards the sun, so it had a chance to radiate heat away from the other side.
"So, put a big sun shade and block the sun", you might say... well that's easier said than done, the solar wind would apply a lot of pressure to it, and (for that matter) the solar wind itself is well above the operating temperature of the telescope.
But by all means, I'm sure you're smarter than the experts to designed it.
Why is it taking Virgin Galactic so long for development? Is it a financing or technical issue?
SpaceX was founded in 2002 and is already making re-supply missions to the ISS. Granted that's not quite the same as human spaceflight but it seems like there's a lot faster advancement occurring at SpaceX than at Virgin Galactic.
Politics, mostly. There's plenty written up on what has been going on, if you do some Google searching.
A lot of it boils down to the difference between a company that is good at research, and a company that is good at manufacturing. Another factor was the explosion in New Mexico, which set things back and reportedly demoralized some of the key people involved.
Do your math again. Using your numbers for a 360, if XBox Live is normally $5/mo, that's $120 for 2 years. Total cost of a 360 unsubsidized would be 120 + 299, or $419. A subsidized one would be $240 for two years + 99 = $339. So why choose an unsubsidized one if you're getting Live anyways?
For a 720, the numbers are similar, if they are correct as reported by the summary. $499 + 120 = $619 or 299 + 240 = $539.
Only question is - if you choose a subsidized model - what is the cost of XBox Live Gold after the two years are up? Is it 5, or 10?
Xbox Live is $10 / month. Its only $5 if you pay a year at a time. You can sometimes find it on sale for less.
So, yes, its not as good of a deal if you aren't paying month-to-month, but if you can afford to pay it all at once, you probably don't need to finance the Xbox, either.
And, of course, you can often find Xboxes on sale -- that makes the comparison worse, too... but again, you don't have to finance it. You can just buy one.
And doubled the cost of Live, apparently.
Only for the subsidized price. You can buy a 360 the same way already -- $99 instead of $299. You pay $10 more a month for Live, so you're basically paying $40 to finance it for two years.
Great balls of fire.
Seriously, though. Science is awesome.
Why couldn't a male flight attendant say this?
The male flight attendants know why you've got wireless in your magazine ... for the ... um ... articles.
So you're right, I'd say these things aren't likely to happen for most people. Unless your dad just happens to be a director at a major investment bank and just happens to know some of the most wealthy people around who also just happen to have strong media platforms to hype your product from that is.
Business has always worked that way. Why do you think CEOs get paid so much? Connections, leverage, wealth, politics -- once you're bigger than a small local company, those are the real differentiators, and behind virtually every "successful" startup is a similar story. Names and details may change, but the plot is the same.
And that's not new -- it was just as true 50, 100, 200, and 2000 years ago. Wealthy Babylonian merchants got so for the same reasons, as did ancient Greek, Roman, Chinese, etc ... you name it, that's how it has always worked.
that wouldnt have happened if all the info had been shared you moron
No, instead they would've gotten off in court.
There are processes that have to be followed in evidence handling.
Shockingly, the experts seem to know more about that than you or Reddit.
Perhaps this is why a defined legal system is more valuable than the historically-standard mob rule.
And only in oem numbers. Volume licensing is way, way up. They're kicking ass everywhere but windows sales, and that's commensurate with the decline in pc sales.
They're doing fine, and even win8 isn't doing badly.
And more significantly, Windows sales are doing very well -- its only new PC sales that aren't. Revenue is flat, because it was being sold for less, but there's no drop in per-seat demand for it.
The PC slump is a manufacturer problem, not a Microsoft problem ... yet.
It'd be bigger news if he quit for another company, while Microsoft is on the decline it's going to be a very slow death spread across
a decade or two. They've still got considerable assets which will take a long time to bleed out.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=msft+balance+sheet&annual
Its also a carefully changed edit to the original quote which was either done or ignored by Slashdot's editors deliberately to fan the anti-MS flames here, or their incompetence let through.
The words of the quote are verbatim from the article, however the quote about Microsoft's market share was *not* quoted in the original article. The Slashdot "edit" of putting quotes around it makes it sound like a quote from Peter Klein or Microsoft, whereas its actually a quote from whoever wrote the article at Yahoo.
Going to be flamed for it, but Windows Azure is probably your best bet. Supports all of that, and a ton more, and is cheap.
You can do it all with AWS, too, but in my experience Azure tends to take less time to manage, and leave more time for developing. YMMV.
Your reading comprehension is low, possibly because you fall under that average. 90th percentile IQ is somewhere around an IQ of 120, and 97th percentile is somewhere between 128-130.
Clearly, gifted children. However, as someone else pointed out, IQ is malleable, and a cultural thing. Many very smart children lose their advantage by the time they are adults, and many average or above average children can end up in the genius IQ range as an adult once they realize they can be as intelligent as they want to be.
Be nice. I don't know who this "Anonymous Coward" person is, but after fifteen years of their posting, its pretty clear they're developmentally challenged.
Not that I'll be using it, but let me go out on a limb and say Google Glass is AWESOME. Alright you cynics, who shall cast the first stone?
Nothing cynical -- Google already tracks your browsing via their ad network, to increase the value of the ads they sell. Remember, you're their product, not their customer.
Add to that warehouse of information about you online all the things you do offline, and you become a much more valuable product for them to sell.