I donno, I appreciate humorous tags on slashdot far more than "useful" ones. They're akin to the commentary on Mystery Science Theater, when the article itself is boring, sometimes the tags add interest.
I suspect that part of Apple's restrictive software distribution strategy is to avoid malware and crapware from creeping into the iPhone ecosystem. And I suspect that most of the motivation behind Apple's restrictive software distribution strategy is to make buckets and buckets of money.
This is a pretty big deal, particularly depending on the methodology that the ISP's try and use to enforce this.
There's a big difference between Time Warner not providing Usenet hosting for its customers and Time Warner blocking its customers from accessing Giganews and the like.
I know the first rule of Usenet is that you don't talk about Usenet, but the day Time Warner blocks my access to Giganews is the day that I'll be switching ISP's. I mean, if they're going to cordon off entire portions of the internets, what's next? No FTP access? No Telnet connections? No SSH?
Sounds like it's for "friends and family of Sprint employees" only. Officially, yes, but practically it's open to just about anyone. And the definition of "friends" should be loose enough to allow even the most scrupled among us to get in on the action. I mean, if I go chat up a sales rep at the Sprint store, can't I call him at least some sort of "friend?"
You can learn just about everything you need to know about the SERO plan over here.
It's a great plan, but the downside is that you're stuck with Sprint's poor selection of phones. I'm desperately hoping that they get a good Android model or two before the year's out.
The question this begs is, why doesn't Sprint advertise this plan? Obviously they're managing to make money at this subscription level, so what not advertise it and allow the rest of America to realize that Sprint offers the best value going right now on cell service?
I've been trying to get an Hackintosh install working, and that process has illuminated how integral apple's being in control of the hardware really is to the OS X experience.
Case in point: I've been trying to get my wireless card working. The first time I successfully booted into the OS, I noticed that I didn't have wireless and thought, "Where do I go to choose my wireless driver?"
The answer is, of course, you don't. You have an Airport, or you don't have wireless.
It's a simple example, but made me think about how different using OS X would be if it could be installed on any hardware. I don't know that different necessarily means worse, but substantially different.
All that aside, trying to get my hackintosh working reminds me of trying to install Linux 5 or 10 years ago: Poor documentation, arcane procedures and the answer to many driver problems is, "Go buy new hardware." Ahh the memories.
Sadly, I think a lot of people don't realize, or forget just how much better home cooking is. Forget better (which it is, so long as you're comparing it to fast/frozen/in-a-can food and not The French Laundry), home cooking is funner. I'm surprised that there's not more crossover in the geek/cook arenas.
Cooking has everything that geeks should love: complex gadgets, arcane knowledge and the ability to hold a skill over the heads of the general population.
Given the time, I'd love the chance to make nearly everything for myself. Thus far the only DIY food that I haven't been able to make better than the commercially available version is Root Beer. Every batch I've come up with tastes like sweet fizzy bread dough. But I'll persevere.
Like I said, I really want Aptera, Tesla and all the other "right around the corner" electric cars to make it to the market and be what they promise.
My caution comes from the fact that ZAP has gotten away with screwing its investors for so long because people just like me so badly want the product that they buy into the hype and ignore the delays and the over-promising and under-delivering that plagues the industry.
I think that people like me would do well to tamper their enthusiasm with a bit of healthy skepticism.
While I absolutely and desperately want an electric car, I'm trying not to get too excited about anything that's not already on the market after the whole Zap Car debacle.
What is the statistic on how many people own HD display devices? I'm betting it's only in the 20% range of penetration compared to all TVs. I had the same question. According to these people, 39% in the US, 35% in the UK and 28% in Japan as of January.
Finally we're better at something than both the Japanese and British: Buying Expensive Shit.
I agree that there's little to no sense in people without HDTVs buying a BluRay player, but it looks like as of January of this year in the US HDTV penetration is at almost 40%.
As prices continue to fall, I'm sure that number is going to grow quickly. I notice a big difference on my comparatively small (42") HD-display between upscaled DVD quality content and 1080p content. Not a big enough difference to drop $400 on a BluRay payer, but if I were more wealthy or the player cheaper, it would be a no brainer.
Every Sunday I get both the New York Times and LA Times delivered. I like to sit and drink coffee and read a newspaper on Sunday morning. Now, I could do that on my laptop, or desktop, or a Kindle, but here's the important quality of dead-tree based newspapers: Once I'm done reading them, their combined size is perfect to line the bottom of my rabbit's cage, and for the next week, he gets to crap on All the News That's Fit to Print.
Until my bunny can defecate on the internets, I'll keep on subscribing to old fashioned newspapers.
As soon as the movie studios will let me take the money I'm giving Netflix every month and spend it on a service that lets me download to rent any movie in HD at any time, my days of movie piracy will be over.
These "flaws" in the iPhone are obscure enough that I don't think most regular people would even understand them. The thing is that this isn't regular people, this is Slashdot.
It's definitely a nifty little RC vehicle, but why not make it more remote and control it with a live video feed? Coupled with gyroscopic input from a video headset, ala here, this thing could be controlled from the dude's bar. I mean, when you watch the CNN video, it does seem a bit dorky to have this guy walking 10 feet behind the robot. I'm sure the good people over at RC Groups would be happy to help him out.
Plus, you know, if the thing really pisses off a dealer, it'd be nice to be a good distance away.
CS3 is the last thing that keeps me dual-booting between Vista and Ubuntu regularly, and I presume that I'm far from the only one. The most recent release of Wine does mostly support CS2, but I'm loathe to sacrifice the niftyness of CS3. I'm thrilled to hear that some muscle is falling in behind getting Photoshop working under Wine.
I really hope they extend their efforts to the entire Creative Suite. Bridge + Photoshop = An excellent RAW photo processing work flow.
1. Play your games on as many computers as you like, downloading them as many times as you want. 2. Install them on a friend's computer, and just like lending a book, your friend can use it any time that you're not. 3. Receive automatic content updates 4. Often chose to buy games individually or as a package. 5. Back up your downloaded copies of games 6. With HL2 Engine based games, even play them in Linux with Wine.
While I suppose you don't "own" physical copies of Steam games, I have enough rights that I never notice the downside.
The music and movie industries could learn a thing or six from Valve. I've never even thought of pirating a Valve game because they're so convenient and affordable to purchase.
There's probably nothing in particular that can be done to stop it. It's simply the strong taking from the weak, where in this case the weak are the uninformed. The current moral climate in the United States seems to accept that it is perfectly OK for the strong to take from the weak as long as there's no law against it, and as long as it only involves money. But it leaves a bad taste in my mouth nonetheless. Wow. This is my favorite "What The Hell" comment from Slashdot all day (though it is only 10:00).
It's immoral for companies to discount their products? Really.
If you're going to get morally outraged about something on the issue, get morally outraged by the fact that the studios are forcing customers to choose. There's really no reason that every studio couldn't produce both formats and let consumers choose their favorite. It's not like the cost of mastering a blockbuster in HDDVD and BluRay is prohibitive.
And don't tell me about SmartCars. They cost over $20K. Actually, the 2008 Smart Car in the USA will start at under 12K. Far more expensive than the Tata Nano, but it will go at highway speeds, comes with ABS and Airbags, gets 33/41mpg (2008 mpg) and given its size performs pretty well in crashes.
I've been thinking about getting one for my commute, but even with its safety features, I'm still a bit worried about getting run over by a Hummer on Southern California's highways.
I'm surprised that neither camp seems to be targeting that under-35 market with burnable media.
Most of the popular HD-movie rips I see on Usenet (you know, when I'm just browsing by) are in the 4-6GB range. It'd be nice to fit 10 of those onto one disc for, you know, backup...
1) Make your standard affordable as writable storage media 2) Everyone puts a drive for your format in their computer 3) Win the format war!!!
4) Put the movie studios out of business!! 5) Fail because there's nothing left to pirate! Alternate 5) Give everybody hugs because the decline of the movie studios leads humanity into a post-capitalist utopia.
It's such lame and dishonest branding the marketing group should be ashamed. As someone who writes advertisements for a living, let me assure that it will take far more than being accused of lameness and dishonesty to shame a marketing group.
Actually, lameness and dishonesty are generally marks of distinction in the advertising world. In fact, just the other day my creative director was telling me, "What is this crap?! It's neither lame nor dishonest!"
Seriously though, you can't expect anything beyond the most vague truthiness from marketing. Even the FTC's guidelines for truth in advertising are brilliantly open for interpretation.
While I'm all for a good Microsoft Bashing Session, just about every marketing department everywhere could be pinned for this type of "deceptive" practice.
Slashdot Mirror
Either way, it's like 10 Euros.
I donno, I appreciate humorous tags on slashdot far more than "useful" ones. They're akin to the commentary on Mystery Science Theater, when the article itself is boring, sometimes the tags add interest.
The only reason Microsoft could have to do something Non-Evil would be to mask an even deeper and more nefarious purpose.
Hate to do it, but Mod Parent Up!
This is a pretty big deal, particularly depending on the methodology that the ISP's try and use to enforce this.
There's a big difference between Time Warner not providing Usenet hosting for its customers and Time Warner blocking its customers from accessing Giganews and the like.
I know the first rule of Usenet is that you don't talk about Usenet, but the day Time Warner blocks my access to Giganews is the day that I'll be switching ISP's. I mean, if they're going to cordon off entire portions of the internets, what's next? No FTP access? No Telnet connections? No SSH?
No. The iPhone's $199 price is carrier subsidized, and the RAZR's price is around $0 when subsidized by the carrier.
You can learn just about everything you need to know about the SERO plan over here.
It's a great plan, but the downside is that you're stuck with Sprint's poor selection of phones. I'm desperately hoping that they get a good Android model or two before the year's out.
The question this begs is, why doesn't Sprint advertise this plan? Obviously they're managing to make money at this subscription level, so what not advertise it and allow the rest of America to realize that Sprint offers the best value going right now on cell service?
I've been trying to get an Hackintosh install working, and that process has illuminated how integral apple's being in control of the hardware really is to the OS X experience.
Case in point: I've been trying to get my wireless card working. The first time I successfully booted into the OS, I noticed that I didn't have wireless and thought, "Where do I go to choose my wireless driver?"
The answer is, of course, you don't. You have an Airport, or you don't have wireless.
It's a simple example, but made me think about how different using OS X would be if it could be installed on any hardware. I don't know that different necessarily means worse, but substantially different.
All that aside, trying to get my hackintosh working reminds me of trying to install Linux 5 or 10 years ago: Poor documentation, arcane procedures and the answer to many driver problems is, "Go buy new hardware." Ahh the memories.
Welcome to Slashdot.
Cooking has everything that geeks should love: complex gadgets, arcane knowledge and the ability to hold a skill over the heads of the general population.
Given the time, I'd love the chance to make nearly everything for myself. Thus far the only DIY food that I haven't been able to make better than the commercially available version is Root Beer. Every batch I've come up with tastes like sweet fizzy bread dough. But I'll persevere.
Like I said, I really want Aptera, Tesla and all the other "right around the corner" electric cars to make it to the market and be what they promise.
My caution comes from the fact that ZAP has gotten away with screwing its investors for so long because people just like me so badly want the product that they buy into the hype and ignore the delays and the over-promising and under-delivering that plagues the industry.
I think that people like me would do well to tamper their enthusiasm with a bit of healthy skepticism.
While I absolutely and desperately want an electric car, I'm trying not to get too excited about anything that's not already on the market after the whole Zap Car debacle.
Finally we're better at something than both the Japanese and British: Buying Expensive Shit.
Suck it down rest of the world.
I agree that there's little to no sense in people without HDTVs buying a BluRay player, but it looks like as of January of this year in the US HDTV penetration is at almost 40%.
As prices continue to fall, I'm sure that number is going to grow quickly. I notice a big difference on my comparatively small (42") HD-display between upscaled DVD quality content and 1080p content. Not a big enough difference to drop $400 on a BluRay payer, but if I were more wealthy or the player cheaper, it would be a no brainer.
Every Sunday I get both the New York Times and LA Times delivered. I like to sit and drink coffee and read a newspaper on Sunday morning. Now, I could do that on my laptop, or desktop, or a Kindle, but here's the important quality of dead-tree based newspapers: Once I'm done reading them, their combined size is perfect to line the bottom of my rabbit's cage, and for the next week, he gets to crap on All the News That's Fit to Print.
Until my bunny can defecate on the internets, I'll keep on subscribing to old fashioned newspapers.
As soon as the movie studios will let me take the money I'm giving Netflix every month and spend it on a service that lets me download to rent any movie in HD at any time, my days of movie piracy will be over.
It's definitely a nifty little RC vehicle, but why not make it more remote and control it with a live video feed? Coupled with gyroscopic input from a video headset, ala here, this thing could be controlled from the dude's bar. I mean, when you watch the CNN video, it does seem a bit dorky to have this guy walking 10 feet behind the robot. I'm sure the good people over at RC Groups would be happy to help him out.
Plus, you know, if the thing really pisses off a dealer, it'd be nice to be a good distance away.
CS3 is the last thing that keeps me dual-booting between Vista and Ubuntu regularly, and I presume that I'm far from the only one. The most recent release of Wine does mostly support CS2, but I'm loathe to sacrifice the niftyness of CS3. I'm thrilled to hear that some muscle is falling in behind getting Photoshop working under Wine.
I really hope they extend their efforts to the entire Creative Suite. Bridge + Photoshop = An excellent RAW photo processing work flow.
Exactly. With Valve games on Steam, you can:
1. Play your games on as many computers as you like, downloading them as many times as you want.
2. Install them on a friend's computer, and just like lending a book, your friend can use it any time that you're not.
3. Receive automatic content updates
4. Often chose to buy games individually or as a package.
5. Back up your downloaded copies of games
6. With HL2 Engine based games, even play them in Linux with Wine.
While I suppose you don't "own" physical copies of Steam games, I have enough rights that I never notice the downside.
The music and movie industries could learn a thing or six from Valve. I've never even thought of pirating a Valve game because they're so convenient and affordable to purchase.
It's immoral for companies to discount their products? Really.
If you're going to get morally outraged about something on the issue, get morally outraged by the fact that the studios are forcing customers to choose. There's really no reason that every studio couldn't produce both formats and let consumers choose their favorite. It's not like the cost of mastering a blockbuster in HDDVD and BluRay is prohibitive.
I've been thinking about getting one for my commute, but even with its safety features, I'm still a bit worried about getting run over by a Hummer on Southern California's highways.
I'm surprised that neither camp seems to be targeting that under-35 market with burnable media.
Most of the popular HD-movie rips I see on Usenet (you know, when I'm just browsing by) are in the 4-6GB range. It'd be nice to fit 10 of those onto one disc for, you know, backup...
1) Make your standard affordable as writable storage media
2) Everyone puts a drive for your format in their computer
3) Win the format war!!!
4) Put the movie studios out of business!!
5) Fail because there's nothing left to pirate!
Alternate 5) Give everybody hugs because the decline of the movie studios leads humanity into a post-capitalist utopia.
Actually, lameness and dishonesty are generally marks of distinction in the advertising world. In fact, just the other day my creative director was telling me, "What is this crap?! It's neither lame nor dishonest!"
Seriously though, you can't expect anything beyond the most vague truthiness from marketing. Even the FTC's guidelines for truth in advertising are brilliantly open for interpretation.
While I'm all for a good Microsoft Bashing Session, just about every marketing department everywhere could be pinned for this type of "deceptive" practice.