In my opinion, loudness was the worst thing that ever happened to music. Pretty much destroyed all good music, and retroactively made many recordings of old music worse. Now that is not all this man's fault and music had to be digital eventually (and with digital comes a volume control). But he seems like the first step in a staircase of inept musical decisions.
Wrong loudness.
The "loudness war" is really a "compression" war. And not data compression, but dynamic range compression (the difference between loudest and softest).
A good amplifier should have a huge dynamic range - it can make your ears strain to hear that soft tap, and a split second later blow them out when someone plays a riff. (The usual limiter is the noise floor).
The loudness war is basically taking soft sounds making them louder to compete with the loudest sounds, so it's all one level. (Some older albums may have you twidding the volume knob because of this).
Digital compression techniques like MP3 and AAC will reduce the dynamic range out of necessity (it takes a LOT of bits to have a wide dynamic range and still record soft and loud sounds accurately).
And none of it has anything to do with an amplifier. Heck, distortion effects often need wider dynamic range, especially in solid-state amps. A tube amp will distort when overdriven, which generates many harmonics that are often nicer on the ear. A transistor, when overdriven, clips and that generates nasty harmonics that ound terrible and grate the ear. Digital signal processing can emulate tube distortion and sond like many classic amps, but they have to avoid clipping which requires that the input amp and ADC stay below clipping even when applying heavy overdrive.
Sure, but the Joint Forces Command (aka the US millitary) even said that we hit peak oil in 2010.
We already have - oil supplies are slowly falling. It's just we have plenty of excess capacity at the moment, but world output has been declining for a few years now.
But - it won't be an immediate collapse where one day we wake up and there's no oil. It's more gradual as we're seeing now with gas prices slowly floating upwards. It took an entire recession to make gas prices low again.
In the meantime, we'll switch to alternative methods of transportation. North America has a glut of natural gas, for example, which can provide an extremely cheap way to retain our current lifestyle. As gas pices move upwards, alternatives like natural gas (most likely replacement as it's readily avialable), electric vehicles and such become more and more viable. First though, we'll see improving gas mileage across the board then popularity of hybrids will rise as we try to make the most of every drop of gas.
The funny thing is that Linux users still seem to be under this belief about their OS. The truth is that every OS gets malware, it's just about the market share.
Actually, the vulnerability used in OS X is also in Linux. So yes, it can infect Linux!
However, the payload only currently runs on OS X, so infecting Linux is a minor point since it does nothing.
It's a Java vulnerability. Which is interesting since Apple stopped supporting and shipping Java since what, Leopard (10.5)? Heck, we can blame Oracle for the mess...
Do people really want video stories? I thought it was just the old-media newspapers that pushed them because you can't skip ads as easily in a stream as you can on a website.
Hell, old media does it better. The old newspapers put up a text article but include a video sometimes because video sometimes expresses things better than text ever could. But the core content was in the text. Plus because they're old media, they stick to traditional techniques including, surprise suprrise, editing!
It's the new media (blogs, etc) trying to show how much they're "better" than the old lumbering media giants that are doing things worse. From crap twit-like newsposts with no in-depth reporting, poorly (if any) edited videos and stuff like that Just to get the news out first.. And what's worse is they're dragging everyone else down with them.
And that's the problem - good production takes time. Writing is probably the fastest way to get the news out - you write the rough draft, revise and edit it and post. Video requires a script, filming and post production (most "new media" skip the first and last step, leading to minutes of "um, oh, ah, err" fillers, "where I put this", poorly focused visuals, bad sound, etc).
And older shows have more episodes per season. Shows in the 60's routinely had 30, 70's 28, 80's 24..... now, a season has 16 and the really good shows have 12... ie Dexter and American Horror. So not only am I paying for 16 minutes of adverts per hour, I'm paying for reruns. We often check the DVR toward the end of the week and find nothing has been recorded (ie reruns this week).blockquote>
Well, shows do take longer to produce these days. It takes, pipelined, roughly 2 weeks to spit out an hour-long TV show these days (pipelined because it takes far longer - each stage is roughly 2 weeks). You have writers who have to write and get approval for the script, then set dressers who have to produce any necessary sets and props, then actual filming and post-production. This doesn't include overall season planning, making room in schedules for other TV shows and movies (actors will often mingle on other shows or movies, ditto writers). Plus all the other usuals - vacations and whatnot.
The average season is still 22-24 episodes or so - speciality ones tend to run 12-16 (animations, reality, cable chanels), but that's the limit really. It's only things like gameshows where they tape an entire week's worth in a day can they show throughout the year.
I started to write a longer top level about how refusal to support Clear QAM and forcing cables boxes on people with QAM capable TV's and forcing people to use cable company provided DVR's
The digital channels take less effort on the provider's part (even when you include the encryption work) and consume far less bandwidth per channel (that's the point of digital to begin with), and yet the cable companies get away with charging obnoxiously more for access to them.
Or more like, it's been 13 years since TiVo came out. Why do all cable DVRs continue to suck?. I can understand it if the cable DVR came out first, but they came out long after TiVo. The only redemption is that cableboxes in general have sucky UIs, and that carries forward, but still.
We know watching TV the set-top boxes do NOT have to suck - given TiVo, Moxi, and other set-top cable boxes, and non-cable boxes that sit there as well (game consoles, media streamers (AppleTV, Roku, WD TV, etc)), yet cable ones tend to suck the worst.
If you're lucky, you can get CableCARDs and something like TiVo (whose UI is hopelessly dated, yet still more usable than cable). Why do the schedulers suck so much? My TiVos pick up new shows easily when they worked (provider went all digital and no CableCARDs) so now I have to manually schedule shows. And if it forgets to record? I have to manually do it! (TiVo and Windows Media Center can automatically reschedule). Or season passes that work and don't try to recover EVERY instance of the show.
It's not just a price thing, but the awfulness of the cable DVR that's driving people away.
My own opinion is that solar, wind, and hydroelectric power are almost certainly the three cleanest and safest sources we have at present--but current practical considerations also stick them into the "can supplement, but not replace" category when compared to the dirtier and less safe sources (at least for now).
Hydro's been around for decades - aside from the one-time environmental destruction caused by damming up a river, it's a source of clean energy that's also baseload capable (e.g., Hoover dam). Short of catastrophic failure, it's pretty damn safe and around the longest.
Heck, run-of-river hydro's been around for centuries.
And yes, it's one-time environmental damage - spawning fish do actually get taken care of, and seeing spawning salmon jump up the ladders built for them to go over the dams is a wonder of nature.
I doubt the Government would put any secret info on a website.
No, but imagine putting up "banned information" on those websites - the great firewall doesn't work when the information is posted online on the allowed website. And it's not something they can block, because they'd be blocking a legitimate website. (What's the government going to do - take down their own web site?).
Post said information on several other sites like the government-controlled media sites and you'd get pretty wide coverage...
The new crop of android phones are android phones are in a serious pissing match over this very stat. I will say that i will be weighing this in my decision. my phone is my primary camera and I have missed several camera worthy moment by phone lag of getting to the camera (yes I have set the camera to be able to launch from lock )
Hell, the iPhone is also in on it, back when Jobs was alive it was something he remarked upon in iOS - getting to the camera and snapping a photo was to be much quicker. (Leading to the joke of one particular Motorola handset taking a good long 5+ seconds to snap a photo and lagging in subsequent ones after that).
Good to know that people are stepping up to the plate on the Android side as well
the word "billion" in british english means 10^12 to a lot of people too - hence the comment i replied to. before i went into science it meant 10^12 to me, as well, but spend long enough in science and you begin to see just how few people are aware of that - and it seems to get fewer each year.
Or a little thinking (not too much) can realize that a million-million makes no sense in this context.
1-million-million is 1,000,000,000,000 (10^12).
This image is 150,000-million, or 150,000,000,000.
If 1 billion referred to was defined as million-million, it's easy to see that there would be more stars than pixels in the image by over 6 stars to 1 pixel.
OTOH, using it as meaning 10^9, it means there's 1 star for ever 150 pixels, which seems to make MUCH more sense.
Those people are usually children or parents that don't care. Neither makes them idiots, just uninformed. GameStop (flagship chain doing it, not the only one) preys on these people. Unfortunately, most games are actually purchased by either uninformed parents or children.
There ARE some idiots out there, too, helping the process (I do know a few) but for the most part it's the children and parents.
Most people I know look at the difference between "used" and "new" to figure out if "new" is better. After all, at $2, I'd just ante up the $2+tax extra for a new copy - used/pre-owned already carries a certain stigma of "you don't know what you're gonna get".
Not that I don't buy used games - but it has to be a significant difference - $5 savings isn't much in the grand scheme of things. If it's something like a present for someone, the difference has to be even greater. In fact, most of my used game purchases tend to be older games...
The real state of Diablo III is that is has DRM forcing you to be online even to play single player. As a result, my almost two decade long love affair with Blizzard games has come to an end.
You can consider it "Activision-Blizzard" actually. The "Activision" part is important as it explains what happened to the Blizzard we knew and loved. Think "monetized" and "nickel and dimed".
It's not just the DRM that requires online stuff, it's so they can ding you as much as possible - if you didn't go online, there would be a bunch of ways to extract more money from you that you'd be missing, least of which would be giving you a permanent name on Bnet 2.0 that can only be changed with $$$. But doing so right at the beginning after you've excitedly ripped open the box and installed it and double-clicked the icon.
Everything's on a WoW type business plan - sell the game, and also try to ding them as much money as possible.
Also why I was horribly saddened when Bungie signed with Activision for an exclusive 10 year deal. They may not be a part, but you know those execs are seeing dollar signs in everything, and in 10 years, another good game developer will be nickle and diming players.
People leave stuff on planes. That's a fact. People carry weird looking electronics on board. That's a fact too. You can't scream bloody murder unless there's one. Just because someone has wires n'shit doesn't mean it's dangerous.
Of course, I suppose people have hidden bombs in checked luggage as well. (This was one of the incidents that led to the rules where if a passenger fails to board the plane, their baggage is offloaded as well).
All this happened prior to 9/11. People are a wee bit more paranoid now.
In terms of Microsoft's future, I certainly see them as competitors. Microsoft's innovation (and especially growth) has been practically stagnant over the past decade. Apple, on the other hand, is poised to take over the desktop market leveraging their huge mobile device market share. If Windows 8 (or whatever follows) doesn't hold consumers' loyalty to Microsoft, I expect to see a quick change in the market numbers as current Windows machines become obsolete.
Unlikely. First, Apple's in a *really* nice spot on the computer side. It's a spot everyone else doing Windows PCs wish they were in. They're making money hand-over-fist on computers - and they move less product that say, Dell. Yet Dell's not making much (if any) more money on computers than Apple is, but Dell's shipping at least 10 times more computers than Apple.
Sure Windows 8 may move some more people to Apple, but not enough to make a significant dent for Microsoft. After all, Apple has deliberately chosen not to participate in several PC markets - like low-cost (sub $500) market. They only have one portable computer below $1000 (and really, at $999 it's splitting hairs).
Apple's strategy is to stick to premium products - nicer screens (1366x768 is fine on an 11" screen, but not a 13", and the top end comes with 1920x1200 (not 1080) by default), nicer processors (Mini uses an i5, not say, an Atom or even i3) and so forth. Sure there's some lock in (iMac hard drive anyone?), but the premium experience is what Apple is selling.
And Apple's concentrating more on iOS than OS X these days, given how people have established they want a "computing device" but without all the hassles of owning a fully-functional computer. A locked-down experience is perfectly fine for them without worrying that that "Your PC in infected!" popup will steal all their information.
I can't stress that enough. software and semi-software raid is a joke.
Not until the hardware fails and you need the data that was on there but not on the backup (or realized the backup failed a long time ago...).
For performance, yes, hardware is fastest. For reliability though, software RAID is better (hardware RAID can have interesting firmware version issues).
Linux running an md RAID array? If the server goes down, pop the drives in another server, a couple of mdadm commands later and the array is up and running. Hell, even Windows' software RAID ought to be able to work to recover an array where the server hardware died.
So if you're using RAID not for performance reasons, but for protection against hard drive failure, soft-RAID works very well. Hell, one of my NAS appliances died, and all I did was take the drive out, attach 4 USB adapters to them, and plug them into my Linux box. Instant access to the data,
There's nothing like the panic that happens when an array goes down due to non-drive hardware failure.
Re:Can't wait to see the rebranded offerings
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Dell To Acquire Wyse
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· Score: 3, Informative
Maybe Dell can finally offer an affordable thinclient. I am a big fan of their FX100, but it is priced out of range. By the time you license it and plug it in, it costs as much as a small form factor desktop. Not exactly the value customers are looking at with thin clients.
The point was I think that the savings would come from not having to replace it ever unless it broke - so it would last 10+ years or three or four generations of desktops. The other savings was on the IT side - less management (these things boot up, there's nothing to break, nothing the user can download and infect it, etc) and just having to upgrade the server when necessary.
Of course, most businesses got sticker shock since they had to make huge IT investments, which they were loathe to do - big powerful servers/blades had to be bought, and terminals that cost the same as a desktop. From an initial investment, it didn't make sense since few businesses plan for such timespans...
Java's pretty big in the consumer market - every blu-ray player uses it, most cellphones (vast majority) have a JVM, and Android uses it as a development language (though the bytecode used by Android isn't Java bytecode).
It's become the embedded language - used everywhere but few people noticing.
We have gone insane in the United States. Our constitution is consistantly being ignored, and our freedoms are dwindling. This is just one more example.
Move elsewhere. Stephen Harper's about to reveal his new law-and-order omnibus crime bill, and busy photocopying all those nice big-brother laws the US has...
Google countered that a) Sun never raised the issue back when Android first came out and Oracle shouldn't now be able to claim damages (legal term: laches) b) Dalvik was based on the Apache Harmony project, a "clean-room" implementation c) many/all of the patents now claimed by Oracle are dubious.
I really hope those weren't Google's arguments. Because we know submarine patents exist, and they don't have to be sued the instant an infringing product is released - see every patent lawsuit in recent history, including bogus ones and legit ones. Even ones like Nokia v. Apple involving FRAND patents.
Clean-room implementations ditto - all throughout history it's happened where two inventors invented the same thing and one got the patent. Telephone, Radio, suchforth.
No love for Oracle, but I really hope those weren't the arguments to dismiss. Maybe arguments to reduce licensing...
If the first argument worked, though, it would put a stop to a lot of patent lawsuits (sadly, not ones by Apple since they're pretty quick on the draw, though a lot of them against Apple might have to be withdrawn). Though it raises a pile of fairness issues since smaller companies may not be able to sue in a timely fashion due to resource constraints.
The second would be quite interesting if it ever succeeded because it would basically kill the entire patent system.
I think Oracle was hoping for a quick settlement, in exchange for a piece of the Android pie. Look how they squandered J2ME for years and then they go seeking damages from Google on the basis of some spurious patents.
You mean plundered, right? J2ME was the cash cow of Java - all those cellphones running Java on them, all paying the license fees. J2SE, J2EE, Sun could care less about them - that was all given away. It's why the patent licenses were given to J2SE implementations, but never to J2ME because people were paying big bucks for it. Including companies like IBM who had their own J2ME implementation (j9, considered at the time superior in every way).
Now Oracle sees an unlicensed J2ME implementation floating about... which threatens their cash cow.
Another example: the oil industry. In fact, I don't even really have to go into detail on that one; I think pretty much everyone who buys gasoline (which, consequently, is pretty much everyone) is fully aware of how the oil cartels collude to fix prices and get away with it.
ARE they colluding, though? Or just responding to price rises/drops very quickly and economically efficiently?
I mean, take a common situation of two gas stations at opposite corners at an intersection. For simplicity, we'll call them A and B. Doing this we eliminate disparty in local taxation (assuming a road isn't the dividing line between two towns/cities/etc), and assume for the most part, everything is equal. We'll also make the assumption that consumers don't have brand loyalty.
Now say gas station A drops their price 10 cents. Gas station B can decide to drop their price, or leave it be, or raise it. Gas station B observes - if A's traffic increases, B's drops, the obvious reaction is to drop the price 10 cents to match A's.
However, it's also possible that A's traffic increases, B's remains constant, which means the disparity isn't hurting business. In the case, maybe B might decide to RAISE prices a little bit, say, 2 cents. Or if A only dropped 5 cents, to riase by 5 cents (increasing the difference to 10 cents between the two).
Now look at it from A's perspective - B drops the price, picks up extra customers. A needs to decide if the loss in profit from selling cheaper is outweighed by the extra traffic. Perhaps the required extra traffic hasn't materialized, so A is making a loss (sell for less profit, make it up in volume) - making A consider raising prices or holding steady.
However, if B decided to not join in the price war, and customers still go to B such that B can raise the price, A would be leaving money on the table since B's making more per unit of gas. A rational business will then raise prices - perhaps still under B , but not much so. Or match prices.
The neat thing with gas stations is - the change in traffic is practically instantaneous - you'll know within minutes of changing the gas price if it was a good idea.
And the reason traffic to B, even though its more expensive, might not drop is easy - if A has more customers they can service, then people may see B as a more expensive alternative, but avoid waiting in long gas queues. Or maybe the difference isn't large enough to justify potential inconvenience of having to turn around.
Competition doesn't necessarily lower prices - it can lead to prices stabilizing to some arbitrary level. Depending on how easy it is for customers to switch between compeitors, it determines how closely prices track one another. If it's really easy (like gas), prices rise and fall pretty much simultaneously (the geographical are of which is determined by customers' willingness to go farther in search of cheaper gas). This applies too to TV and internet, and cellphones to some extent. But take something like food staples where customers might wish to stick with brand names rather than the considerably cheaper store brands.
Remember, in a perfectly functioning market, the prices will be the same amongst competitors to equalize supply and demand. New competitors might come in and increase supply, lowering prices, but that depends on how much capital investment is required - cellphones and gas stations being particularly heavy (equipment is expensive/haz-mat concerns).
And yes, prices rise faster than they fall, because a business that sees someone making greater profit by selling product more expensive will tend to have others selling at the higher price. Case in point - netbooks. They started at $200, then rapidly jumped to $300, then "premium" netbooks starts showing up costing $400, $500 or more (barging into low-end laptop territory), until the whole market collapsed with the tablet craze.
Heck, tablets are the same - they were released at $500, and everyone questioned why get one when you can buy an iPad. So they dropped to $400 and hovered there ever since (with the iPad being Apple able to command a premium).
The flight time listed for ATL-> RIC when purchasing tickets is about 90 minutes, but the time from takeoff to touchdown is only 63 minutes. They've padded the flight time to account for issues at the airport so that they can more often meet this punctuality window. For example, my flight yesterday took off 11 minutes late, and still arrived 10 minutes early.
Seems like good planning. The flight time (takeoff to touchdown) is 63 minutes. But the gate-to-gate time (what really matters to people) is far longer. For taking off, you have to taxi from the gate to the runway, and depending on the airport, that can involve planes queuing up before takeoff - either waiting for necessary services (like deicing) or just handling a crowd of planes lining up to use the runway. Or for very big airports, it can take 5-10 minutes taxiing!
Ditto on landing - there can be a large number of planes stacked up for landing in the holding pattern and it can easily add to another 5-10 minutes in the air.
Thing is, airlines know this - they know which airports generally have aircraft stacking up for takeoff or landings, and what times of day it can happen. Of course, like traffic, it's unpredictable. But if the airline says the plane will arrive at 2:30pm, then you can plan for that - if it arrives early, great. If it arrives on time, great as well. If it arrives late, well, hopefully you didn't need to get somewhere.
Far better to have a flight that's "on time" arriving at 2:30pm than a flight that's going to arrive at 2:00pm and be late. That 2:30pm arrival may mean you skip the 3:00pm connection and book it for 4:00pm. The 2:00pm arrival may get you to book the 3:00pm connection, then it arrives late and you're scrambling through the airport trying to make it.
And yes, "on time" is measured from gate to gate time. The same reason why you don't plan to have your car in the same block at your destination at your arrival time - you plan on being parked 10 minutes or so earlier to give you time to walk and possibly freshen up. Perhaps it takes a long time to find parking, so you schedule that into when planning your departure.
These services do absolutely not make it obvious that you are telling things to the entire internet, rather than just to friends.
That's nothing but blaming the victim.
It just goes to show that everyone who think the world is different with social media is deluded. EVERYTHING posted online is available to EVERYONE. I believe we called it "don't post anything online you don't want the world to know". Back when "online" meant two computers dialing each other up via modem, and probably before personal computers, as well.
There's no such thing as privacy settings. At best, they're equivalent to sharing a secret with a bunch of friends - and anyone who's done that knows that it leaks rapidly. Someone will tell someone else, and soon the whole world knows.
And really, anything you put online will get known. Unless you write it only for yourself, at which point why bother putting it online? The Internet's memory is long and unforgiving and anything put online basically lives forever - it can ever be deleted, nor controlled.
This is really amusing to me, that the EU has laws that mandate minimum warranty policies for devices sold.
I believe Americans would go nuts if they were forced to buy extended warranties. And that's all that's happening, really - Europe mandates 2 year warranty, you get a "free" extended warranty (the cost of which is built into the price).
I mean, Apple's probably going to absorb the cost of the extra AppleCare (which provides for 2 years technical support via phone, too) for this round of devices, but you can bet the next round the price the devices will go up.
And then you'll have Europeans complaining about why it's $500 US here, and $900 US over there (ignoring the fact that the $900 includes sales tax (excluded from US price), duties and import fees), and the leftover goes into providing the extended warranty.
Warranty isn't free, and you can bet the reason why Americans get "screwed" over 90 day warranties is to get stuff cheaper by stiffing on the extended warranty. All the EU has done is make the extended warranty mandatory.
But other than being vigilant about any city rezoning plans, and raising a stink if some developer decides to apply to have it rezoned so they can drop a condo on the lot there's not much one can really do.
You could buy the surrounding land and personally control its fate.
Not always possible. If it's zoned as a park, the city probably won't sell it since they expect you to lobby them to rezone it and have to put up with the rezoning process. If it's undeveloped land zoned for housing, there can be convenants specifying the land must be improved within X months.
It all depends on the goals of city hall and what they intend for the land.
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Please, offer the videos on YouTube and offer up the YouTube link. Or Vimeo.
YouTube has support on practically everything networked, while both sites offer both HTML5 and Flash support (and work well on iOS).
These sites also have embed that works and do allow saving videos for later viewing.
Wrong loudness.
The "loudness war" is really a "compression" war. And not data compression, but dynamic range compression (the difference between loudest and softest).
A good amplifier should have a huge dynamic range - it can make your ears strain to hear that soft tap, and a split second later blow them out when someone plays a riff. (The usual limiter is the noise floor).
The loudness war is basically taking soft sounds making them louder to compete with the loudest sounds, so it's all one level. (Some older albums may have you twidding the volume knob because of this).
Digital compression techniques like MP3 and AAC will reduce the dynamic range out of necessity (it takes a LOT of bits to have a wide dynamic range and still record soft and loud sounds accurately).
And none of it has anything to do with an amplifier. Heck, distortion effects often need wider dynamic range, especially in solid-state amps. A tube amp will distort when overdriven, which generates many harmonics that are often nicer on the ear. A transistor, when overdriven, clips and that generates nasty harmonics that ound terrible and grate the ear. Digital signal processing can emulate tube distortion and sond like many classic amps, but they have to avoid clipping which requires that the input amp and ADC stay below clipping even when applying heavy overdrive.
We already have - oil supplies are slowly falling. It's just we have plenty of excess capacity at the moment, but world output has been declining for a few years now.
But - it won't be an immediate collapse where one day we wake up and there's no oil. It's more gradual as we're seeing now with gas prices slowly floating upwards. It took an entire recession to make gas prices low again.
In the meantime, we'll switch to alternative methods of transportation. North America has a glut of natural gas, for example, which can provide an extremely cheap way to retain our current lifestyle. As gas pices move upwards, alternatives like natural gas (most likely replacement as it's readily avialable), electric vehicles and such become more and more viable. First though, we'll see improving gas mileage across the board then popularity of hybrids will rise as we try to make the most of every drop of gas.
Actually, the vulnerability used in OS X is also in Linux. So yes, it can infect Linux!
However, the payload only currently runs on OS X, so infecting Linux is a minor point since it does nothing.
It's a Java vulnerability. Which is interesting since Apple stopped supporting and shipping Java since what, Leopard (10.5)? Heck, we can blame Oracle for the mess...
Hell, old media does it better. The old newspapers put up a text article but include a video sometimes because video sometimes expresses things better than text ever could. But the core content was in the text. Plus because they're old media, they stick to traditional techniques including, surprise suprrise, editing!
It's the new media (blogs, etc) trying to show how much they're "better" than the old lumbering media giants that are doing things worse. From crap twit-like newsposts with no in-depth reporting, poorly (if any) edited videos and stuff like that Just to get the news out first.. And what's worse is they're dragging everyone else down with them.
And that's the problem - good production takes time. Writing is probably the fastest way to get the news out - you write the rough draft, revise and edit it and post. Video requires a script, filming and post production (most "new media" skip the first and last step, leading to minutes of "um, oh, ah, err" fillers, "where I put this", poorly focused visuals, bad sound, etc).
Hydro's been around for decades - aside from the one-time environmental destruction caused by damming up a river, it's a source of clean energy that's also baseload capable (e.g., Hoover dam). Short of catastrophic failure, it's pretty damn safe and around the longest.
Heck, run-of-river hydro's been around for centuries.
And yes, it's one-time environmental damage - spawning fish do actually get taken care of, and seeing spawning salmon jump up the ladders built for them to go over the dams is a wonder of nature.
No, but imagine putting up "banned information" on those websites - the great firewall doesn't work when the information is posted online on the allowed website. And it's not something they can block, because they'd be blocking a legitimate website. (What's the government going to do - take down their own web site?).
Post said information on several other sites like the government-controlled media sites and you'd get pretty wide coverage...
Hell, the iPhone is also in on it, back when Jobs was alive it was something he remarked upon in iOS - getting to the camera and snapping a photo was to be much quicker. (Leading to the joke of one particular Motorola handset taking a good long 5+ seconds to snap a photo and lagging in subsequent ones after that).
Good to know that people are stepping up to the plate on the Android side as well
Or a little thinking (not too much) can realize that a million-million makes no sense in this context.
1-million-million is 1,000,000,000,000 (10^12).
This image is 150,000-million, or 150,000,000,000.
If 1 billion referred to was defined as million-million, it's easy to see that there would be more stars than pixels in the image by over 6 stars to 1 pixel.
OTOH, using it as meaning 10^9, it means there's 1 star for ever 150 pixels, which seems to make MUCH more sense.
Most people I know look at the difference between "used" and "new" to figure out if "new" is better. After all, at $2, I'd just ante up the $2+tax extra for a new copy - used/pre-owned already carries a certain stigma of "you don't know what you're gonna get".
Not that I don't buy used games - but it has to be a significant difference - $5 savings isn't much in the grand scheme of things. If it's something like a present for someone, the difference has to be even greater. In fact, most of my used game purchases tend to be older games...
You can consider it "Activision-Blizzard" actually. The "Activision" part is important as it explains what happened to the Blizzard we knew and loved. Think "monetized" and "nickel and dimed".
It's not just the DRM that requires online stuff, it's so they can ding you as much as possible - if you didn't go online, there would be a bunch of ways to extract more money from you that you'd be missing, least of which would be giving you a permanent name on Bnet 2.0 that can only be changed with $$$. But doing so right at the beginning after you've excitedly ripped open the box and installed it and double-clicked the icon.
Everything's on a WoW type business plan - sell the game, and also try to ding them as much money as possible.
Also why I was horribly saddened when Bungie signed with Activision for an exclusive 10 year deal. They may not be a part, but you know those execs are seeing dollar signs in everything, and in 10 years, another good game developer will be nickle and diming players.
And people have left bombs behind on aircraft as well. Designed to blow up AFTER the plane took off again. And the bomber left at the stopover, too.
Of course, I suppose people have hidden bombs in checked luggage as well. (This was one of the incidents that led to the rules where if a passenger fails to board the plane, their baggage is offloaded as well).
All this happened prior to 9/11. People are a wee bit more paranoid now.
Unlikely. First, Apple's in a *really* nice spot on the computer side. It's a spot everyone else doing Windows PCs wish they were in. They're making money hand-over-fist on computers - and they move less product that say, Dell. Yet Dell's not making much (if any) more money on computers than Apple is, but Dell's shipping at least 10 times more computers than Apple.
Sure Windows 8 may move some more people to Apple, but not enough to make a significant dent for Microsoft. After all, Apple has deliberately chosen not to participate in several PC markets - like low-cost (sub $500) market. They only have one portable computer below $1000 (and really, at $999 it's splitting hairs).
Apple's strategy is to stick to premium products - nicer screens (1366x768 is fine on an 11" screen, but not a 13", and the top end comes with 1920x1200 (not 1080) by default), nicer processors (Mini uses an i5, not say, an Atom or even i3) and so forth. Sure there's some lock in (iMac hard drive anyone?), but the premium experience is what Apple is selling.
And Apple's concentrating more on iOS than OS X these days, given how people have established they want a "computing device" but without all the hassles of owning a fully-functional computer. A locked-down experience is perfectly fine for them without worrying that that "Your PC in infected!" popup will steal all their information.
Not until the hardware fails and you need the data that was on there but not on the backup (or realized the backup failed a long time ago...).
For performance, yes, hardware is fastest. For reliability though, software RAID is better (hardware RAID can have interesting firmware version issues).
Linux running an md RAID array? If the server goes down, pop the drives in another server, a couple of mdadm commands later and the array is up and running. Hell, even Windows' software RAID ought to be able to work to recover an array where the server hardware died.
So if you're using RAID not for performance reasons, but for protection against hard drive failure, soft-RAID works very well. Hell, one of my NAS appliances died, and all I did was take the drive out, attach 4 USB adapters to them, and plug them into my Linux box. Instant access to the data,
There's nothing like the panic that happens when an array goes down due to non-drive hardware failure.
The point was I think that the savings would come from not having to replace it ever unless it broke - so it would last 10+ years or three or four generations of desktops. The other savings was on the IT side - less management (these things boot up, there's nothing to break, nothing the user can download and infect it, etc) and just having to upgrade the server when necessary.
Of course, most businesses got sticker shock since they had to make huge IT investments, which they were loathe to do - big powerful servers/blades had to be bought, and terminals that cost the same as a desktop. From an initial investment, it didn't make sense since few businesses plan for such timespans...
Java's pretty big in the consumer market - every blu-ray player uses it, most cellphones (vast majority) have a JVM, and Android uses it as a development language (though the bytecode used by Android isn't Java bytecode).
It's become the embedded language - used everywhere but few people noticing.
Move elsewhere. Stephen Harper's about to reveal his new law-and-order omnibus crime bill, and busy photocopying all those nice big-brother laws the US has...
I really hope those weren't Google's arguments. Because we know submarine patents exist, and they don't have to be sued the instant an infringing product is released - see every patent lawsuit in recent history, including bogus ones and legit ones. Even ones like Nokia v. Apple involving FRAND patents.
Clean-room implementations ditto - all throughout history it's happened where two inventors invented the same thing and one got the patent. Telephone, Radio, suchforth.
No love for Oracle, but I really hope those weren't the arguments to dismiss. Maybe arguments to reduce licensing...
If the first argument worked, though, it would put a stop to a lot of patent lawsuits (sadly, not ones by Apple since they're pretty quick on the draw, though a lot of them against Apple might have to be withdrawn). Though it raises a pile of fairness issues since smaller companies may not be able to sue in a timely fashion due to resource constraints.
The second would be quite interesting if it ever succeeded because it would basically kill the entire patent system.
You mean plundered, right? J2ME was the cash cow of Java - all those cellphones running Java on them, all paying the license fees. J2SE, J2EE, Sun could care less about them - that was all given away. It's why the patent licenses were given to J2SE implementations, but never to J2ME because people were paying big bucks for it. Including companies like IBM who had their own J2ME implementation (j9, considered at the time superior in every way).
Now Oracle sees an unlicensed J2ME implementation floating about... which threatens their cash cow.
ARE they colluding, though? Or just responding to price rises/drops very quickly and economically efficiently?
I mean, take a common situation of two gas stations at opposite corners at an intersection. For simplicity, we'll call them A and B. Doing this we eliminate disparty in local taxation (assuming a road isn't the dividing line between two towns/cities/etc), and assume for the most part, everything is equal. We'll also make the assumption that consumers don't have brand loyalty.
Now say gas station A drops their price 10 cents. Gas station B can decide to drop their price, or leave it be, or raise it. Gas station B observes - if A's traffic increases, B's drops, the obvious reaction is to drop the price 10 cents to match A's.
However, it's also possible that A's traffic increases, B's remains constant, which means the disparity isn't hurting business. In the case, maybe B might decide to RAISE prices a little bit, say, 2 cents. Or if A only dropped 5 cents, to riase by 5 cents (increasing the difference to 10 cents between the two).
Now look at it from A's perspective - B drops the price, picks up extra customers. A needs to decide if the loss in profit from selling cheaper is outweighed by the extra traffic. Perhaps the required extra traffic hasn't materialized, so A is making a loss (sell for less profit, make it up in volume) - making A consider raising prices or holding steady.
However, if B decided to not join in the price war, and customers still go to B such that B can raise the price, A would be leaving money on the table since B's making more per unit of gas. A rational business will then raise prices - perhaps still under B , but not much so. Or match prices.
The neat thing with gas stations is - the change in traffic is practically instantaneous - you'll know within minutes of changing the gas price if it was a good idea.
And the reason traffic to B, even though its more expensive, might not drop is easy - if A has more customers they can service, then people may see B as a more expensive alternative, but avoid waiting in long gas queues. Or maybe the difference isn't large enough to justify potential inconvenience of having to turn around.
Competition doesn't necessarily lower prices - it can lead to prices stabilizing to some arbitrary level. Depending on how easy it is for customers to switch between compeitors, it determines how closely prices track one another. If it's really easy (like gas), prices rise and fall pretty much simultaneously (the geographical are of which is determined by customers' willingness to go farther in search of cheaper gas). This applies too to TV and internet, and cellphones to some extent. But take something like food staples where customers might wish to stick with brand names rather than the considerably cheaper store brands.
Remember, in a perfectly functioning market, the prices will be the same amongst competitors to equalize supply and demand. New competitors might come in and increase supply, lowering prices, but that depends on how much capital investment is required - cellphones and gas stations being particularly heavy (equipment is expensive/haz-mat concerns).
And yes, prices rise faster than they fall, because a business that sees someone making greater profit by selling product more expensive will tend to have others selling at the higher price. Case in point - netbooks. They started at $200, then rapidly jumped to $300, then "premium" netbooks starts showing up costing $400, $500 or more (barging into low-end laptop territory), until the whole market collapsed with the tablet craze.
Heck, tablets are the same - they were released at $500, and everyone questioned why get one when you can buy an iPad. So they dropped to $400 and hovered there ever since (with the iPad being Apple able to command a premium).
Seems like good planning. The flight time (takeoff to touchdown) is 63 minutes. But the gate-to-gate time (what really matters to people) is far longer. For taking off, you have to taxi from the gate to the runway, and depending on the airport, that can involve planes queuing up before takeoff - either waiting for necessary services (like deicing) or just handling a crowd of planes lining up to use the runway. Or for very big airports, it can take 5-10 minutes taxiing!
Ditto on landing - there can be a large number of planes stacked up for landing in the holding pattern and it can easily add to another 5-10 minutes in the air.
Thing is, airlines know this - they know which airports generally have aircraft stacking up for takeoff or landings, and what times of day it can happen. Of course, like traffic, it's unpredictable. But if the airline says the plane will arrive at 2:30pm, then you can plan for that - if it arrives early, great. If it arrives on time, great as well. If it arrives late, well, hopefully you didn't need to get somewhere.
Far better to have a flight that's "on time" arriving at 2:30pm than a flight that's going to arrive at 2:00pm and be late. That 2:30pm arrival may mean you skip the 3:00pm connection and book it for 4:00pm. The 2:00pm arrival may get you to book the 3:00pm connection, then it arrives late and you're scrambling through the airport trying to make it.
And yes, "on time" is measured from gate to gate time. The same reason why you don't plan to have your car in the same block at your destination at your arrival time - you plan on being parked 10 minutes or so earlier to give you time to walk and possibly freshen up. Perhaps it takes a long time to find parking, so you schedule that into when planning your departure.
It just goes to show that everyone who think the world is different with social media is deluded. EVERYTHING posted online is available to EVERYONE. I believe we called it "don't post anything online you don't want the world to know". Back when "online" meant two computers dialing each other up via modem, and probably before personal computers, as well.
There's no such thing as privacy settings. At best, they're equivalent to sharing a secret with a bunch of friends - and anyone who's done that knows that it leaks rapidly. Someone will tell someone else, and soon the whole world knows.
And really, anything you put online will get known. Unless you write it only for yourself, at which point why bother putting it online? The Internet's memory is long and unforgiving and anything put online basically lives forever - it can ever be deleted, nor controlled.
I believe Americans would go nuts if they were forced to buy extended warranties. And that's all that's happening, really - Europe mandates 2 year warranty, you get a "free" extended warranty (the cost of which is built into the price).
I mean, Apple's probably going to absorb the cost of the extra AppleCare (which provides for 2 years technical support via phone, too) for this round of devices, but you can bet the next round the price the devices will go up.
And then you'll have Europeans complaining about why it's $500 US here, and $900 US over there (ignoring the fact that the $900 includes sales tax (excluded from US price), duties and import fees), and the leftover goes into providing the extended warranty.
Warranty isn't free, and you can bet the reason why Americans get "screwed" over 90 day warranties is to get stuff cheaper by stiffing on the extended warranty. All the EU has done is make the extended warranty mandatory.
Not always possible. If it's zoned as a park, the city probably won't sell it since they expect you to lobby them to rezone it and have to put up with the rezoning process. If it's undeveloped land zoned for housing, there can be convenants specifying the land must be improved within X months.
It all depends on the goals of city hall and what they intend for the land.