They're guaranteed to be getting beta-test products for the highest price anyone will ever pay.
For that, they get something that's a bigger version of the phone they paid too much for a few months before.
And very, very few of them get any sort of compensatory social or business boost from the image bump of having the latest and greatest. The only thing they all get is the tiny endorphin rush of buying something cool.
The mercantile world has conditioned hundreds of thousands of people to keep pushing that button.
HP is one of the dumbest companies on the planet ever since Carly Fiorina stole the job. Her leaving just left the dopes who didn't quit when she got the gig.
Nope. Not a chance. Catmull worked out the math. He had no clue about 3-D hardware because until he'd shown the rendering in software nobody else knew what it should do.
Real-time, if it wasn't just dumping bits to a file for playback, you could probably see this thing drawing the wire frame line-by-line and filling each pixel.
Only if it involves Netflix caving to Starz and paying its asking price.
As you noticed, bits are fungible, and there are lots of online outlets.
Netflix effed up by raising its streaming prices. It's going to be jacked up by content providers, and it's going to lose customers as rebuffed content providers go elsewhere for their pipes.
But it wasn't decided that that right prevents discovery of our identity if we overstep our rights by committing legal offenses against others.
It was only decided that the offended party didn't say what the offense was, and didn't try to identify the offender themselves. If they had, and this case had come down simply to the right of anonymity, the courst would probably have ordered the identification, as anonymity is not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
It would have gone broke in the free market because of competition from oil. Thus proving nothing about the viabiltiy of the various forms of solar energy production. We spent half a billion dollars to, possibly, put oil out of business by developing something that could beat it on a sustaining basis. That is the point.
If you let the monster kill and eat your infants, you'll never find the infant that can grow up to kill the monster. You have to stand between the monster and the infants. You have to feed the infants until they can walk, talk, think, and fight on their own.
Republicans think that killing and eating infants is the "natural order". They don't realize that the monster doesn't care if they live or die, either. Nor do they much care, as long as the monster keeps putting Hummers in their corral to play with while it fattens them up for monster thanksgiving.
Nokia's smartphones were way smart before anyone else's. The Nokia 9000i, for instance. Which you couldn't even get in America. The US cell providers have fucked us from the beginning. iPhone brought back America's mojo, but was famously hampered by AT&T's shitty service. Can't imagine how much bigger it would have been if it had been open to all carriers...
he's right about handwriting, and keyboards, and email
but email wasn't the killer app
the phone was. when Apple skipped tablets and turned phones into computers (i mean, when it decided Palm's ideas could be slightly improved and packaged in boner-inducing ways), it dived right in.
and email started to decline and texting grew. because texting is just email you can tolerate to write at 2 cps, and was already on phones.
and, interestingly, phone calls have died as well. because the phone-computer idea wasn't about calling people, it was about having that whole package of computing and connectivity in one pocket instead of two or three.
then, once the small-form-factor touchscreen interface device got popular, it was a natural transform to pull on its edges to make it, simply, a bigger version of the same thing. hence we're back to tablets. which aren't notebooks without keyboards; they're smartphones with extra spatial extent.
and i doubt that jobs saw this coming in 2003. all he saw was that tabletized notebooks were bollocks. which they were.
In an economy where venture capitalists are interested in the sector, you'd be right.
But this particular sector is dominated by players who, because they're pumping oil right onto strippers' boobs, get all the attention.
The government is attempting to govern here. By supporting alternative energy, it is avoiding the massive shock we're going to get when the straw at the bottom of the world's oil supply begins to gurgle.
The VC's won't be in a position to help you get to work when that happens, and the government (of which we're all members here in America, btw) thinks this is cheaper than switching from gas pumps to rickshaws for the decades it takes to remember where we put the book on the photoelectric effect. Exxon-Mobil will be off in the Seychelles with the strippers and your money, having forgotten that you exist.
Actually, it succeeded in establishing itself. But it was outrun by its competition and there was no way to make it run faster. Rather than attempt to continue in a race it can't win, it abandoned.
The assets and goodwill will be sold, and the creditors, including the government, will get back a portion of their investment. Business as usual.
This company, at the time the government made the loan, was a leader. Now, after a couple of years of other companies being helped by government loans and other subsidies, it's no longer a leader.
Private investment wasn't going anywhere near solar back then. All the money was being dumped into oil companies, which is where the profits are.
Because of government investment in multiple facets of solar technology, this one type of solar technology was found not to be the best. The others are doing better.
>What we saw here was corporate welfare, not a research grant.
So you'll be calling your representatives and telling them to end tax breaks for rich people and corporations, and subsidies for agribusiness?
Without the government's help, this company would have died two years ago, possibly taking a viable technology with it. With the government's help, it had a chance to make enough money to pay back the loan and start paying dividends to its other investors.
But other technologies have improved faster, and this one has proved to be non-improvable.
That's part of the point of the government's help. To get these answers without all of the other risks that business brings causing the answers never to be found.
If we don't investigate all of the alternatives now, and determine that Solar really never will be better than Nuclear, then we won't know which really is the better choice.
And Nuclear, at least fission, isn't as unlimited as it seems. And comes with high environmental risks and political dogma.
The only problem with Solar is that it's not a magical panacaea with a 99% conversion efficiency. But it will be all we have left in the 35th Century, unless we learn how to make fusion reactors that turn garbage and feces into energy.
Apple's choice to use an outsourced company to make its products is a convenience to Apple, not a get-out-of-jail-free card for whatever enviornmental havoc its outsourced employees produce.
Slashdot Mirror
>It's obviously calling early adopters idiots.
In a way, they are.
They're guaranteed to be getting beta-test products for the highest price anyone will ever pay.
For that, they get something that's a bigger version of the phone they paid too much for a few months before.
And very, very few of them get any sort of compensatory social or business boost from the image bump of having the latest and greatest. The only thing they all get is the tiny endorphin rush of buying something cool.
The mercantile world has conditioned hundreds of thousands of people to keep pushing that button.
HP is one of the dumbest companies on the planet ever since Carly Fiorina stole the job. Her leaving just left the dopes who didn't quit when she got the gig.
It's been careening downhill ever since.
But these run Android natively. No need to get Cyanogen to deal on it for you.
Consumer goods are a niche product.
Ever buy anything from Agilent?
No?
They sell a $7 billion a year in "niche" products.
Lots of consumer companies would love that sort of revenue.
Nope. Not a chance. Catmull worked out the math. He had no clue about 3-D hardware because until he'd shown the rendering in software nobody else knew what it should do.
Real-time, if it wasn't just dumping bits to a file for playback, you could probably see this thing drawing the wire frame line-by-line and filling each pixel.
iPhone says, Huh? No, I'm cool. I must just be holding myself wrong.
Wait.
You read TFA?
Apple buys tickets to the Policemen's ball.
I have a couple of small insertions.
3a. Get investigated by SFPD for impersonating police.
6a. Spend your profit on lawyers.
No, it actually makes it look like incompetent management.
They're giving their secrets out to people and clearly not impressing all of the people with the need to keep the secrets in their possession.
Leaving your secret on a bar is not exactly maintaining secrecy.
Someone in product testing lacks leadership skills.
Yes. You are, for not cancelling your Netflix subscription when they announced their own cash-grab.
as Feb 28 approaches, some deal will reached.
Only if it involves Netflix caving to Starz and paying its asking price.
As you noticed, bits are fungible, and there are lots of online outlets.
Netflix effed up by raising its streaming prices. It's going to be jacked up by content providers, and it's going to lose customers as rebuffed content providers go elsewhere for their pipes.
Yes, we all have a right to anonymity.
But it wasn't decided that that right prevents discovery of our identity if we overstep our rights by committing legal offenses against others.
It was only decided that the offended party didn't say what the offense was, and didn't try to identify the offender themselves. If they had, and this case had come down simply to the right of anonymity, the courst would probably have ordered the identification, as anonymity is not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
It would have gone broke in the free market because of competition from oil. Thus proving nothing about the viabiltiy of the various forms of solar energy production. We spent half a billion dollars to, possibly, put oil out of business by developing something that could beat it on a sustaining basis. That is the point.
If you let the monster kill and eat your infants, you'll never find the infant that can grow up to kill the monster. You have to stand between the monster and the infants. You have to feed the infants until they can walk, talk, think, and fight on their own.
Republicans think that killing and eating infants is the "natural order". They don't realize that the monster doesn't care if they live or die, either. Nor do they much care, as long as the monster keeps putting Hummers in their corral to play with while it fattens them up for monster thanksgiving.
Nokia's smartphones were way smart before anyone else's. The Nokia 9000i, for instance. Which you couldn't even get in America. The US cell providers have fucked us from the beginning. iPhone brought back America's mojo, but was famously hampered by AT&T's shitty service. Can't imagine how much bigger it would have been if it had been open to all carriers...
he's right about handwriting, and keyboards, and email
but email wasn't the killer app
the phone was. when Apple skipped tablets and turned phones into computers (i mean, when it decided Palm's ideas could be slightly improved and packaged in boner-inducing ways), it dived right in.
and email started to decline and texting grew. because texting is just email you can tolerate to write at 2 cps, and was already on phones.
and, interestingly, phone calls have died as well. because the phone-computer idea wasn't about calling people, it was about having that whole package of computing and connectivity in one pocket instead of two or three.
then, once the small-form-factor touchscreen interface device got popular, it was a natural transform to pull on its edges to make it, simply, a bigger version of the same thing. hence we're back to tablets. which aren't notebooks without keyboards; they're smartphones with extra spatial extent.
and i doubt that jobs saw this coming in 2003. all he saw was that tabletized notebooks were bollocks. which they were.
Ever seen anyone do it?
Isn't this just disabling the auto-load of explorer.exe
No. Explorer.exe is a lot more integrated into the OS.
This is more like giving you a phone OS in which the desktop OS is an app.
Interesting concept, since on most phones you have to jailbreak to get to something that acts like a computer instead of a PDA.
In an economy where venture capitalists are interested in the sector, you'd be right.
But this particular sector is dominated by players who, because they're pumping oil right onto strippers' boobs, get all the attention.
The government is attempting to govern here. By supporting alternative energy, it is avoiding the massive shock we're going to get when the straw at the bottom of the world's oil supply begins to gurgle.
The VC's won't be in a position to help you get to work when that happens, and the government (of which we're all members here in America, btw) thinks this is cheaper than switching from gas pumps to rickshaws for the decades it takes to remember where we put the book on the photoelectric effect. Exxon-Mobil will be off in the Seychelles with the strippers and your money, having forgotten that you exist.
Actually, it succeeded in establishing itself. But it was outrun by its competition and there was no way to make it run faster. Rather than attempt to continue in a race it can't win, it abandoned.
The assets and goodwill will be sold, and the creditors, including the government, will get back a portion of their investment. Business as usual.
How's that hole in your foot? Painful?
This company, at the time the government made the loan, was a leader. Now, after a couple of years of other companies being helped by government loans and other subsidies, it's no longer a leader.
Private investment wasn't going anywhere near solar back then. All the money was being dumped into oil companies, which is where the profits are.
Because of government investment in multiple facets of solar technology, this one type of solar technology was found not to be the best. The others are doing better.
>What we saw here was corporate welfare, not a research grant.
So you'll be calling your representatives and telling them to end tax breaks for rich people and corporations, and subsidies for agribusiness?
Go for it.
Without the government's help, this company would have died two years ago, possibly taking a viable technology with it. With the government's help, it had a chance to make enough money to pay back the loan and start paying dividends to its other investors.
But other technologies have improved faster, and this one has proved to be non-improvable.
That's part of the point of the government's help. To get these answers without all of the other risks that business brings causing the answers never to be found.
If we don't investigate all of the alternatives now, and determine that Solar really never will be better than Nuclear, then we won't know which really is the better choice.
And Nuclear, at least fission, isn't as unlimited as it seems. And comes with high environmental risks and political dogma.
The only problem with Solar is that it's not a magical panacaea with a 99% conversion efficiency. But it will be all we have left in the 35th Century, unless we learn how to make fusion reactors that turn garbage and feces into energy.
Canard.
When you invest, you diversify, because no matter what, some of your investments will turn out to be failures.
The government is also invested in the companies that put this one out of business.
It's hilarious to see Republicans pretending they don't understand how business works.
Apple's choice to use an outsourced company to make its products is a convenience to Apple, not a get-out-of-jail-free card for whatever enviornmental havoc its outsourced employees produce.