I bought a lifetime subscription to Tivo 6 years ago. Haven't paid anything since.
And true or not (I have no reason to think you know Apple's accounting structure) you have proved my point - Apple could have done the same thing with the iTouch as they did for the AppleTV, but (according to you) they CHOSE to use a different accounting method and hence CHOSE to charge the customer more over time for new features.
The amount of revenue that Apple sees from third-party software sales will translate into probably very little if any profit when you figure in the bandwidth and them eating the credit card fees
Why is this "informative"? Hello, Apple doesn't have to charge your credit card for every purchase - they already have a system in place to handle small transactions... have you heard of iTunes?
Also, the SOX excuse is bullshit. Look at Tivo - people have been receiving free MAJOR upgrades to the software for years. Hell, look at the AppleTV - they just did a major upgrade to that and didn't charge anything.
Apple is less about choice and more about giving them the best experience possible.
I'd say it's more about giving users the experience Apple thinks they should have. It's clear that many of the decisions are not based on giving the user the best experience.
I remember many claims that Apple was not allowing users to pick any MP3 on the iPhone as a ringtone because of "asthetic reasons" (ie "not another stupid ringtone!"). I could almost support that - but then their defaults are HORRIBLE, and as soon as was ready they started selling songs as ringtones at a ridiculously profitable price on iTunes.
Don't pretend that Apple is somehow more driven by pleasing the customer and not their bottom line than any other company... not that doing that correctly won't result in some great products people want to buy - I have an iPhone...
Are you KIDDING? Comcast is worth $60B. If you somehow managed to find people willing to buy over half of it (at which point it would inevitably be worth over $100B anyway, I'm sure...) Why would they then intentionally try to destroy their investment by working against the company's interest??
If you want to organize the masses and get the attention of Comcast, wouldn't just having people switch to a competing service (satellite TV, DSL Internet, etc) be the sensical way to send a message?
If you don't think so, then I have an amazing plan to destroy all the oil companies involving not buying gas on Tuesdays...
The technology that's being talked about is carbon mineralifcation - the technology to turn CO2 into graphite, or diamond, or soot. That's would be a huge help in fighting global warming.
Hah. ok, the obvious problem with this is that turning CO2 into coal is the opposite of what we have been doing for the past 200 years. How do you accomplish that? Put the energy back into the coal! But if we could do that, the first thing we'd do is use all of that energy to replace the energy we still obtain by burning coal (and other hydrocarbons) in the first place.
So, it seems like the only way to do that is to solve the "energy problem" that is putting so much CO2 into our atmosphere already. Once we fix that, then the surplus energy can be used to remove all the CO2 we have already put into the atmosphere...
I understand that's a total oversimplification, but the point is: cure the disease, not the symptoms!
That's what eBay is for! You can still find tons of old but working Laserdisc players for under $100 (often with an entire movie colletion thrown in for free...)
Interesting fact: The same number of Old people eat FAR more than a football team.
Ok, this is getting way off topic, but... that's not a fact, it's an anecdote, and it's wrong anyway. Worst case if an "old person" ate their whole meal once a day that's still only 2000 calories. I knew football players in college who would eat more than 2000 calories at the *breakfast* training table (which of course they would immediately burn off in the next 2 hour practice).
I read that a 300lb lineman consumes 5000+ calories a day during the season and up to 10,000 during training camp. "Old people vs young people" is one thing. "Old people vs a pro football team" is ENTIRELY different.
Your problem is that you are somehow tied to the ideal of a "party" (which is of course the norm in US politics) when the reality is that the current major issues are for the most part not relevant to traditional Democratic/Republican party lines (or where they are, things are becoming so blurred it doesn't matter).
Are you kidding? Tivo is pretty much screwed at this point because most people are content (happy is too strong a word - have you SEEN an Explorer 8300!?) with the crappy DVRs their cable/satellite providers now give them.
They NEVER "got plenty of money" - I don't believe they have had more than a couple profitable quarters in 10 years (and those were probably due to lawsuits!)
Their only hope of survival at this point is to protect their patents (that probably still have a good 7-8 years left). Patents that seem to be violated by most of the other DVRs. They are just going after Dish because DirecTV still has Tivo DVRs in service, they made a deal with Comcast (which uses Motorola), and Time Warner uses Scientific Atlanta which is a stretch to call it a DVR ("piece of crap" is a better term).
The idea is not that no one else can make DVRs - it's that Tivo gets more money from Echostar. They only have to stop selling DVRs if they are not willing to come to an agreement. Though Echostar is the kind of company that is happy to screw over it's customers and blame someone else just to be cheap.
But you see, every cell in your body is replaced every seven years, so you aren't that exact set of cells.
Poetic, but inaccurate. With a few exceptions, almost all nerve cells do not get replaced over your entire lifespan. And in the end, those are the cells that define your personality, which is what you would call an "identity".
I actually agree with the idea that if one could replicate the exact quantum state of every particle in your body, then there is no difference from the original. But everything you said to get to that point is fairly ridiculous, and sounds more like a Star Trek episode than science...
Now you are bastardizing the *correct* pronunciation of the word "eh" from its proper Canadian! It's pronounced "ay" just like saying letter "A" - as in "take off, eh!" If you need to hear the pronunciation... watch Strange Brew.
Universities have patent licensing programs for this, and often support their facultry or students in founding companies based on their research.
I'm sure Stanford has made a killing by licensing to or investing in companies. Here's a list of their startup investments - not necessarily patent related, but I'm sure many were founded by Stanford professors or alumni with patents licensed back from the university...
Several grandmothers, who are unlikely to even know what P2P is.
I don't understand why being a "grandmother" (defined as having a child who has a child) automatically makes you a complete luddite around here. Probably because most/. posters would have to actually have kids (implying they actually had sex with a real, live woman) for their moms to become grandmothers...
My mother - who also happens to be a grandmother - understands P2P perfectly well. *My* grandmother on the other hand - who is 87 - probably does not.
"The Killing Star is one of the most terrifying books I have read in a long time. It paints a frightening picture of civilizations exterminating their interstellar neighbors, not from malice, but simply because it is the most logical action. A universe, where successful genocide is the norm, the "right" way. The novel illustrates its premise in frightening ways."
That's the first result I found searching for "The Killing Star". Is this guy so stupid he doesn't think people know how to use the same search engine he used?
Right, I'm sure all those churches, schools, etc that agreed (with compensation, of course) to put a cleverly inconspicuous cell tower in their steeples and flag poles are going to love 1000 sq feet of solar panels, or a giant wind turbine in the middle of town.
Though as the article mentions, it's not like they are going to allow a big generator and battery, either...
To package, promote, and distribute the end product
Don't underestimate this. Packaging and promoting the "artist" is probably a bigger job for the labels than promoting their music.
Just think - without these big labels, all of the amazing manufactured acts like NSync, The Vilage People, and The Spice Girls would never have existed!
Our eyes get all the input, but that means the rest of our senses are just sitting around, basically, which is a waste.
Its the same with aircraft controls, that have been debated for many years.
I get the point, but that probably wasn't the best example for this article...
"Hey Bob, how much fuel do we have left, could you check the gauge?" "Nah, that's too much trouble, just shake the plane back and forth a bit. Ok, hold on, sshh, I'm trying to listen - one more time. Great. Yep, sounds like the tanks are somewhere between 1/4 and 3/4 full." "So, what does that mean?" "It means we should land immediately and then go beat the designer of that sensor to a pulp."
There are lots of ways to prune the tree, though. Make ones where you are inconsistent just end up killing you or stranding you somewhere (in an obvious way), forcing you to go back to an earlier level (e.g. you make some "evil" choices, you make some "good" choices, both sides are now pissed at you and you die).
Ugh, that's a horrible solution. It makes things even MORE arbitrary than not giving you a choice at all. The whole point of providing choice is to let the player feel like the world is not all black and white, right and wrong. If you want to die every time you make the "wrong choice", go play Dragon's Lair...
Slashdot Mirror
I just got nailed with an interstitial ad when trying to go to this article!
/. reader for me.
/.! Please don't go that route...
Wow, maybe I have been lucky before but that's a first for me. Also possibly the beginning of the end as a
Bad, BAD
I bought a lifetime subscription to Tivo 6 years ago. Haven't paid anything since.
And true or not (I have no reason to think you know Apple's accounting structure) you have proved my point - Apple could have done the same thing with the iTouch as they did for the AppleTV, but (according to you) they CHOSE to use a different accounting method and hence CHOSE to charge the customer more over time for new features.
The amount of revenue that Apple sees from third-party software sales will translate into probably very little if any profit when you figure in the bandwidth and them eating the credit card fees
Why is this "informative"? Hello, Apple doesn't have to charge your credit card for every purchase - they already have a system in place to handle small transactions... have you heard of iTunes?
Also, the SOX excuse is bullshit. Look at Tivo - people have been receiving free MAJOR upgrades to the software for years. Hell, look at the AppleTV - they just did a major upgrade to that and didn't charge anything.
Apple is less about choice and more about giving them the best experience possible.
I'd say it's more about giving users the experience Apple thinks they should have. It's clear that many of the decisions are not based on giving the user the best experience.
I remember many claims that Apple was not allowing users to pick any MP3 on the iPhone as a ringtone because of "asthetic reasons" (ie "not another stupid ringtone!"). I could almost support that - but then their defaults are HORRIBLE, and as soon as was ready they started selling songs as ringtones at a ridiculously profitable price on iTunes.
Don't pretend that Apple is somehow more driven by pleasing the customer and not their bottom line than any other company... not that doing that correctly won't result in some great products people want to buy - I have an iPhone...
Are you talking at the server end or client end?
At the client end, as people have said... using H.264 means they can increase the resolution/quality with modest bandwidth increase.
At the server end... well, do you KNOW who owns YouTube now??
I'm sure it was an honest mistake. I don't think Samzenpus realized it was fake. Those Onion guys can be pretty darn tricky!
Are you KIDDING? Comcast is worth $60B. If you somehow managed to find people willing to buy over half of it (at which point it would inevitably be worth over $100B anyway, I'm sure...) Why would they then intentionally try to destroy their investment by working against the company's interest??
If you want to organize the masses and get the attention of Comcast, wouldn't just having people switch to a competing service (satellite TV, DSL Internet, etc) be the sensical way to send a message?
If you don't think so, then I have an amazing plan to destroy all the oil companies involving not buying gas on Tuesdays...
The technology that's being talked about is carbon mineralifcation - the technology to turn CO2 into graphite, or diamond, or soot. That's would be a huge help in fighting global warming.
Hah. ok, the obvious problem with this is that turning CO2 into coal is the opposite of what we have been doing for the past 200 years. How do you accomplish that? Put the energy back into the coal! But if we could do that, the first thing we'd do is use all of that energy to replace the energy we still obtain by burning coal (and other hydrocarbons) in the first place.
So, it seems like the only way to do that is to solve the "energy problem" that is putting so much CO2 into our atmosphere already. Once we fix that, then the surplus energy can be used to remove all the CO2 we have already put into the atmosphere...
I understand that's a total oversimplification, but the point is: cure the disease, not the symptoms!
That's what eBay is for! You can still find tons of old but working Laserdisc players for under $100 (often with an entire movie colletion thrown in for free...)
So you don't have to guess (though you were definitely in the ballpark...)
From http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/e-305.htm:
NROL-21 was launched into a 351 x 367 km orbit with a period of 92.9 minuntes and an inclination of 58.5 degrees.
Interesting fact: The same number of Old people eat FAR more than a football team.
Ok, this is getting way off topic, but... that's not a fact, it's an anecdote, and it's wrong anyway. Worst case if an "old person" ate their whole meal once a day that's still only 2000 calories. I knew football players in college who would eat more than 2000 calories at the *breakfast* training table (which of course they would immediately burn off in the next 2 hour practice).
I read that a 300lb lineman consumes 5000+ calories a day during the season and up to 10,000 during training camp. "Old people vs young people" is one thing. "Old people vs a pro football team" is ENTIRELY different.
Your problem is that you are somehow tied to the ideal of a "party" (which is of course the norm in US politics) when the reality is that the current major issues are for the most part not relevant to traditional Democratic/Republican party lines (or where they are, things are becoming so blurred it doesn't matter).
Vote with your head, not with your dogma.
Are you kidding? Tivo is pretty much screwed at this point because most people are content (happy is too strong a word - have you SEEN an Explorer 8300!?) with the crappy DVRs their cable/satellite providers now give them.
They NEVER "got plenty of money" - I don't believe they have had more than a couple profitable quarters in 10 years (and those were probably due to lawsuits!)
Their only hope of survival at this point is to protect their patents (that probably still have a good 7-8 years left). Patents that seem to be violated by most of the other DVRs. They are just going after Dish because DirecTV still has Tivo DVRs in service, they made a deal with Comcast (which uses Motorola), and Time Warner uses Scientific Atlanta which is a stretch to call it a DVR ("piece of crap" is a better term).
The idea is not that no one else can make DVRs - it's that Tivo gets more money from Echostar. They only have to stop selling DVRs if they are not willing to come to an agreement. Though Echostar is the kind of company that is happy to screw over it's customers and blame someone else just to be cheap.
Eventually, certain players have an absurd amount of money, and nothing to spend it on -- but for the rest of us, the economy seems relatively stable.
The scary thing is that real life works about the same way...
But you see, every cell in your body is replaced every seven years, so you aren't that exact set of cells.
Poetic, but inaccurate. With a few exceptions, almost all nerve cells do not get replaced over your entire lifespan. And in the end, those are the cells that define your personality, which is what you would call an "identity".
I actually agree with the idea that if one could replicate the exact quantum state of every particle in your body, then there is no difference from the original. But everything you said to get to that point is fairly ridiculous, and sounds more like a Star Trek episode than science...
like the e in Good Day, eh
Now you are bastardizing the *correct* pronunciation of the word "eh" from its proper Canadian! It's pronounced "ay" just like saying letter "A" - as in "take off, eh!" If you need to hear the pronunciation... watch Strange Brew.
Hoser.
Universities have patent licensing programs for this, and often support their facultry or students in founding companies based on their research.
I'm sure Stanford has made a killing by licensing to or investing in companies. Here's a list of their startup investments - not necessarily patent related, but I'm sure many were founded by Stanford professors or alumni with patents licensed back from the university...
http://otl.stanford.edu/about/resources/equity.html
They probably made over a billion on Google alone...
Several grandmothers, who are unlikely to even know what P2P is.
/. posters would have to actually have kids (implying they actually had sex with a real, live woman) for their moms to become grandmothers...
I don't understand why being a "grandmother" (defined as having a child who has a child) automatically makes you a complete luddite around here. Probably because most
My mother - who also happens to be a grandmother - understands P2P perfectly well. *My* grandmother on the other hand - who is 87 - probably does not.
Sorry, wrong. Math and maths are both colloquialisms, and neither is more valid than the other. Just Britith vs American english tendencies, mostly.
http://www.answers.com/maths&r=67
Thanks fo the rant, though.
Well, I see it as the original article poster plagarizing a review from 11 years ago.
http://sites.inka.de/mips/reviews/TheKillingStar.html
"The Killing Star is one of the most terrifying books I have read in a long time. It paints a frightening picture of civilizations exterminating their interstellar neighbors, not from malice, but simply because it is the most logical action. A universe, where successful genocide is the norm, the "right" way. The novel illustrates its premise in frightening ways."
That's the first result I found searching for "The Killing Star". Is this guy so stupid he doesn't think people know how to use the same search engine he used?
Right, I'm sure all those churches, schools, etc that agreed (with compensation, of course) to put a cleverly inconspicuous cell tower in their steeples and flag poles are going to love 1000 sq feet of solar panels, or a giant wind turbine in the middle of town.
Though as the article mentions, it's not like they are going to allow a big generator and battery, either...
To package, promote, and distribute the end product
Don't underestimate this. Packaging and promoting the "artist" is probably a bigger job for the labels than promoting their music.
Just think - without these big labels, all of the amazing manufactured acts like NSync, The Vilage People, and The Spice Girls would never have existed!
Wait a second... damn you, evil record labels!!
Our eyes get all the input, but that means the rest of our senses are just sitting around, basically, which is a waste.
Its the same with aircraft controls, that have been debated for many years.
I get the point, but that probably wasn't the best example for this article...
"Hey Bob, how much fuel do we have left, could you check the gauge?"
"Nah, that's too much trouble, just shake the plane back and forth a bit. Ok, hold on, sshh, I'm trying to listen - one more time. Great. Yep, sounds like the tanks are somewhere between 1/4 and 3/4 full."
"So, what does that mean?"
"It means we should land immediately and then go beat the designer of that sensor to a pulp."
Refiners will find a way to sell it.
Or dump it in the San Francisco Bay if they can't...
Then again, I'm not sure getting a kite the size of a football field tangled in the Bay Bridge would have been much prettier.
There are lots of ways to prune the tree, though. Make ones where you are inconsistent just end up killing you or stranding you somewhere (in an obvious way), forcing you to go back to an earlier level (e.g. you make some "evil" choices, you make some "good" choices, both sides are now pissed at you and you die).
Ugh, that's a horrible solution. It makes things even MORE arbitrary than not giving you a choice at all. The whole point of providing choice is to let the player feel like the world is not all black and white, right and wrong. If you want to die every time you make the "wrong choice", go play Dragon's Lair...