AMD had a real good run in the early 2000's AMD actually was selling more PC's with its chips then Intel. Then Intel Core 2 Duo processors came out and AMD had to go back to catch up mode again.
I'm pretty sure they didn't and it was just a majority of the retail sales outside the big OEMs. I don't ever think AMD ever had the fab capacity to supply over 50% of the total market.
You're right, AMD only led in retail sales - that is, sales to people building their own computers. AMD probably didn't have the capacity to feed the OEM market, but they also didn't have the demand - this is the time period (for obvious reasons) when Intel went full evil and was basically forcing the OEMs to ship Intel and only Intel products. It didn't matter that the Athlon/Athlon XP/Athlon 64 were competitive with or superior to the Intel products - Intel basically told the OEMs that if they sold AMD systems, they could forget selling Intel systems. I believe the lawsuits were finally settled a year or two ago, but by then Intel had already succeeded - they crippled AMD's OEM sales during the only time that AMD was really beating Intel on the technology front, and Intel put that time to good use and came back with superior products. By the time AMD processors were widely available from OEMs they simply weren't competitive on the performance front any more, and were relegated to budget systems only. At least that's how it shook out in the consumer arena; the leverage of large customers to demand specific products in the corporate/server sector allowed AMD to gain and maintain a strong position there.
Haven't heard anyone mention RoboSport in a long time. I remember playing at a friend's house, taking turns carefully laying out our moves and then listening closely to his headphones as it processed the turn - it would play the sound effects for what was happening while processing the turn, but you couldn't actually watch until it was finished, which lead to great anticipation as you tried to figure out if that horrible death you just heard was your robot or your enemy's. I might have to check out Frozen Synapse to see how it stack's up - this kind of simultaneous turn-based game has seen precious little development over the years, and I found it quite enjoyable.
What the heck is a "Sandwich Planning Board Member"?
Well, obviously you can't just jump right in and make a sandwich. My God man, what if something goes wrong? You could have mayonnaise, pickles, and cold cuts everywhere! No, any responsible community will have a Sandwich Planning Board to ensure that sandwich preparation follows rigorous guidelines to avoid this kind of disaster. This Ms. Malloy probably represented to the Board that her clients were experienced in the proper production of PB&J sandwiches when in fact they had never successfully completed even a PB sandwich, never mind the added complexity introduced by the use of gelatinized fruit products.
There is a dense network of GPS satellites, especially over earthquake-prone areas like Japan,
Is GPS satellite distribution not uniform-on-average across the globe? Sombody can 'splains?
It isn't the density of GPS satellites that is the main issue, but the density of GPS ground stations. Japan has a very dense network of GPS ground stations for monitoring ground movements. The technique they are using integrates over the line of sight between a GPS ground station and the orbiting GPS satellite in order to determine the total electron content on that path. With only one ground station in a given area you would only have one LOS to each satellite, and a very sparse picture of any TEC (total electron content) anomaly (assuming you even have an LOS going through the appropriate area). More ground stations with criss-crossing LOS gives a much better picture of any anomaly (plus a more powerful statistical analysis).
“I think it’s worthwhile to document it like this, to see what will happen with the next event,” Kanamori says, “but I can’t be completely convinced.”
I can't seem to access the paper but can anyone tell me how long of a time range was surveyed and how many times the electron counts spiked when there wasn't a massive earthquake?
Only a few hours prior to the earthquake. The paper doesn't really discuss using this as a forecasting tool, only analyzing whether similar anomalies occurred immediately before other earthquakes. The point being that it is much too early to be looking at the effectiveness of this information for forecasting; the next step after observing the anomaly before/during this earthquake is to see if a similar anomaly occurred before/during other large earthquakes; if there were similar anomalies, then it might be worth expanding the analysis to see if it is usable as a warning/forecasting tool.
It appears that they found a small anomaly with the 2004 Sumatra quake (using GPS data from a station in Phuket) and the 2010 Chilean earthquake (using GPS data from stations in Argentina), but limited GPS station coverage doesn't allow a really rigorous comparison. They did not see evidence of a similar anomaly prior to earthquakes in the 7.0-8.0 range that occurred in the more-densely instrumented Japan.
The data actually makes a lot of sense: Windows 7 gave user's the ability to pin program icons to the taskbar even when they're not running. So now your most frequently used programs don't need to be in the start menu or on the desktop to quickly get to them. I would imagine start menu usage would fall dramatically once the programs you use 90% of the time are pinned to the task bar.
I find the new start screen to be an odd solution to this problem. For that matter, I find it odd to thing of the drop as a "problem".
I don't think I've used this feature... is it any different than sticking shortcuts on the quick launch bar (you know, the part of the taskbar in XP that is specifically intended for this purpose)? Because that's where I stick my four or five most commonly used programs in XP (and 7).
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Refrigerator. Duh, I learned that from a high-quality, well-written documentary recently.
Yep. The thing is over now, so here is the sum total of the announcement:
1. New camera. Has more megapixels. White balance may no longer suck. (That's the tweak.) 2. You can now take pictures using the volume up button. (Really? Not with a camera button? Really: double tap the home button, press the "camera" icon, press the "volume up" button. That's "ease of use," apparently.) 3. Remember how Android has a voice activation feature? iPhone is getting that now. Unlike the old "voice command" this one can now be used to search the web and enter text into text fields. Wasn't this available in Android 1? And as an app for iPhone? 4. "New" processor (it's the iPad 2's) 5. "Better than console game graphics." No, really. Seriously! They said that! 6. Remember how the iPhone tracked your location, and everyone got upset about it? The new one uploads the location to iCloud and this is, somehow, a feature. So you can locate your phone through the cloud. (It's in your house! Thanks, GPS!) 7. Antenna was redesigned. So you might be able to make calls and browse the web while holding the phone. 8. Now supports Sprint.
And that's it. That's everything.
So you're saying that Steve left because he was too ashamed to be part of this announcement, and that whole sickness thing was just a coverup?
Though really I'm not sure what people expected. You know, other than an iPhone 5 instead of 4S. Do you think Apple's marketing department was crapping themselves with all the talk and excitement on the web for iPhone 5, knowing that there would be massive disappointment when they revealed... iPhone 4.1?
Some may fear the barista at the B&N Starbucks will now know the consumer was "cheating" on her with the barista of the Border's... coffee spot place... and that now she will never give them her phone number and miss any chance of dating her!:P
The Borders coffee place was Seattle's Best, at least at my local Borders... which, of course, is owned by Starbucks. So you were basically cheating on her with her sister. Well, maybe half sister.
You want people pissing away money like this during a [dep/rec]ession.
Not really. According to several sources, Amazon is taking a loss on these. They are assembled in China from parts made in China. Buying one, you are just transferring your money to China. Since this is Amazon we're talking about, your purchase won't even be generating any tax revenue.
Though in general what you say is true - during a recession you want to encourage the people that have money to spend some of it - this appears to me to be an extraordinarily bad place to be doing that. Yes, eventually Amazon hopes to be making money from the media you purchase for the device (and that likely would be a good place to put money in terms of fighting the recession), but if you are looking to help kick start the economy this is probably about the last device you would want to buy.
Of course, if you spend the extra on an iPad instead then Apple will just sit on the excess profit and it won't be all that helpful to the wider economy either - but at least you'd be contributing to the tax base.
Do they think that they'll end up paying what the cable company pays per channel? It doesn't work like that. They charge the price that will maximise profits.
Ideally they want to charge the value of each channel to each customer. they can't do that though. They need fixed pricing. If the price is too high, people will stop subscribing, too low and the profits no longer make the channel viable. But different people assign different values to different channels. They can actually charge the average amount for each channel. Many of the customers who aren't willing to pay the average price for channel A are willing to pay above average for channel B so they subscribe.
People weren't exactly happy when netflix unbundled their services. why do they think cable companies would be any different?
People like me want a la carte because out of the 200+ channels (plus hundreds of music channels) available to me, I actually only watch about 5. While I'm sure I would be paying more than what the cable company pays for each channel (well, no shit - they do have to make money somewhere), it seems highly unlikely that it would cost more to get those five channels than the $60 per month I pay now.
So far, yes, I have been willing to pay it because I can afford it without any trouble. But my willingness to continue paying for large amounts of media I have absolutely no interest in is waning as other, more efficient (for my dollar) options become available.
And so what if a channel doesn't have enough interest to be sustainable in an a la carte market? If that's the case, the channel should fold. No reason for everyone to be subsidizing channels that only a relative handful of people are interested in. That might mean the death of a few channels I like, but so be it. Most of the niche channels I once liked have whored themselves out to such an extent that I don't watch anymore anyway (History, TLC, Discovery to name a few).
All the prices I have seen are taking into account the lower priced versions with the on screen advertizing. Is that new to the kindle?
Actually $40 off w/ advertising for the Touch and Keyboard - $99 vs. $139. I wonder why the (new) basic Kindle doesn't get as much of a discount for enabling advertising?
I was also interested to see that while the Touch and Keyboard are advertised as having the same amount of memory (4 GB), they claim about 15% less capacity for the Touch in terms of number of books. Seems a little bloated for the Touch software to take up an extra 600 megabytes.
Am I the only one who actually *liked* the physical keyboard and buttons on the old Kindle? I don't want my greasy fingerprints all over my screen and I like the tactile feel of a physical keyboard. And the Kindle's physical keyboard was a pretty good one too.
According to Amazon.com the old version - now referred to as the "Kindle Keyboard/Keyboard 3G" is still available, at the same price as the Touch.
No. Newegg doesn't have anything to fear from this Post-PC hype.
The real threat to them are competitors like Amazon that sell the same thing for less, offer free shipping, and have better search features.
I tend to agree, though I still hugely favor shopping at Newegg for computer parts. Amazon has no practical way to compare products, has hardly any product information for the vast majority of items, and unless you know the exact part you are looking for it is difficult to locate them - the organization is abysmal. Their system works great for things like books and movies, where you just search by the title or author, but it is really bad for trying to compare different, but similar, products.
For example, I've been looking at getting a new printer. On Newegg, you can narrow it down by function, price, brand, etc - and then compare multiple items feature-for-feature. On Amazon, you are pretty much limited to looking up individual items and reading the very brief blurb on them. So, if I know I want a Brother MFC-9320CW, great - but if I don't know which printer has all of the features I want, Amazon is the last place to look.
But, yeah - whereas I used to buy pretty much all of my computer stuff from Newegg, now it gets split pretty evenly between Newegg and Amazon. "Free", fast shipping is often too tempting to pass up ("free" because I forgot to cancel my Amazon Prime trial and now I'm hooked).
Wonder if the Chinese subcontractors cut some corners ro quality to make a little more money? or the other foreign subcontractors who make up 30% of the craft?
30% foreign subcontracting? Japan alone accounts for 35%,although I'm not sure if that is measured by value, weight, or what. When you fly in a 787, you will be flying on Japanese wings (made by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, no less - no need for self-sealing fuel tanks on a civilian airliner, thank goodness).
Boeing seems to be working hard at becoming an aircraft assembler more than an aircraft builder. Probably necessary in order to compete in the future with other manufacturers, really , but a hard pill to swallow for Boeing aficionados (and unions). A large part of the delays to the 787 project have had as much to do with completely rearranging their business model as with difficulties in design.
it goes smoother than the delivery of the 747-8 a week or two ago. Sort of embarrassing to have your first delivery customer refuse delivery. I'm sure that won't be the case, though, as Cargolux seems to have been acting at the behest of the new parent company in an effort to get further reduced rates on the 787; Japan has too much invested in the 787 project for ANA to play games like that.
I know lots of people in federal IT contracting. NOBODY makes that kind of money. I call B.S. on this whole article.
And the gov't employees make more, work less, and walk away with a pension.
Lol. I used to work in private consulting. My "list" hourly rate was $122 per hour (most clients got an automatic 10% off; some were as much as 20%-30% off; a few unfortunates paid full price), which comes out to $244k per year assuming 100% billable. Do you think I actually made that? Hell, no! I was probably getting paid 1/4th that - including benefits - max. But that was the cost to a client to hire me. That's how consulting companies make money - the junior staff get billed out at insanely high rates for their experience level, and the difference goes to paying for everything else and providing profits. Sure, the most senior people might have been billing out at $200+ per hour, but a) they actually got paid a good portion of that, and b) clients rarely want to pay for much of their time.
If a client actually had enough work to keep someone like me busy year after year then it would probably be cheaper to just hire their own staff person. Of course to get the expertise that comes with hiring a consulting company, just hiring the junior-level person who would be doing most of the work isn't really going to be a replacement - you would need to have enough work to justify an entire group, from junior level up to seniors and even management.
Probably the best solution in terms of bang-for-the-buck for the government would be to establish a sort of in-house consultancy and hire them out to various divisions - but the way budgets are set up (and the way hiring is done) that really isn't feasible most of the time. It is politically and bureaucratically easier just to hire a private consultant for each project that doesn't fit neatly into what a division was set up to do.
So, yes - hiring outside contractors is actually more expensive than hiring your own workers, but there is a lot more that goes into it. And while I'm positive (from first-hand experience) that a lot of the extra going to those private contractors is really wasted money (going to corporate profits rather than paying for work), I'm not sure there is a better way short of completely throwing out the bureaucracy and starting over with a more flexible design. The best option is probably to have a few auditors making sure that A) work that is being contracted out isn't work that could just as easily be done by the people you've already got, and, of course B) making sure that contracts are written in such a way to minimize the costs to the government (in my view the largest source of government waste currently is the failure to do B - contracts are often horribly one-sided, with the government getting the shit end of the stick).
A good article for an intro to computers course, but I was hoping for some "how it actually works" details.
Not even good for an intro class, as it seems to be self-contradictory. It is the replacement for BIOS, except that it is also built on top of BIOS - so the BIOS is still there? From the article it sounds like a middleman, interfacing between the BIOS and the OS - which just makes me wonder what the point is. Totally useless article, as the author either doesn't really know what UEFI is or is just incapable of formulating a clear explanation of what it is and how it is different from BIOS.
Seriously, a low-performance core doing administrivia type work sounds great, but won't this require OS support? I can't imagine this detail is completely abstracted from the kernel.
Anandtech also has an article up on this. From the sound of it this isn't really different from other multi-core processors that are able to power down or turn off individual cores. At low system demand, the CPU switches to the companion core and reports a single core available for task scheduling; if system demand is too high for the companion cube, er, core to handle the CPU switches to the main core(s). Sounds like a slight delay going from the companion to main (Anandtech quotes it at 2 ms), but as far as the OS is concerned it is no different than the situation we have now where one or more cores can be turned off independently.
And it shows just how flawed the idea of the Metaverse is. Hey, let's take all the advantages of a digital world - near instant access to anything anywhere - and throw them all out by modeling the limitations of the physical universe. There's a great idea!
Efficiency triumphs over the integrated experience of something like the Metaverse. The only place such a construct makes any sense is in a game setting - where, by definition, you are "wasting time", and where arbitrary rules have some chance of being obeyed. For everything else, having to navigate some kind of 3D digital world just to access information or communicate with others is doomed to fail, because it is simply unnecessary.
Sure, there's a place for things like Second Life and WoW - but it is entirely social/gaming as opposed to being of any real use.
The editors are too busy telling us that this is the first article from the submitter to be accepted; you can't expect them to perform that important function and actually glance at the article, now can you?
Again to use the Deus Ex example I saw a number of people online just slam it for having shitty graphics on the PC. That was odd, since supposedly they worked on making the PC version higher end, but then maybe that was all marketing. Then I get the game. No, it is just people being assholes. The game is beautiful. Not the best graphics EVAR or anything but very visually appealing, better than many games. I can't see how it would ruin the experience for anyone, at least to the point of being all pissed off about it.
What gamers need to do is offer suggestions for improvement, not cry that everything isn't perfect.
I have to jump in to the Deus Ex thing here. I just got it two days ago, and have managed about 4 hours so far. Having read reviews saying that it is an awesome game and that the PC version is the best, I guess my expectations were a little high. The graphics are... meh. Not impressive, but not really bad either. The thing that has bothered me the most so far is the animation. Character animation seems to have taken a giant leap backwards compared to other games I've played over the last five years. Not a huge issue, but every time there is an in-engine cut scene I am constantly distracted by the spastic motion and unnatural poses exhibited by the characters.
That said, I am still enjoying the game. It is clearly a console-based game, but the controls work adequately on PC. The story so far seems okay, but I really haven't gotten very far into it. The silly "cover"-based action makes it hard to suspend disbelief (not to mention some of the exact same stupid AI behavior exhibited in the original - like taking out a room full of baddies by sitting in a duct; they just run right up next to it so that they can't shoot at you but you can shoot them). I preferred the old model - you want to take cover behind something, then you sit your ass down behind it, not push a button that gives you an unrealistic 3rd-person view around obstacles. It takes a lot of the tension out of things when you can see exactly where that guard coming down the hall is; the original Deus Ex was much better in that respect, as you sit there hiding around a corner listening to the approaching steps and wondering exactly where he is... and if you should risk being spotted in order to pop your head around the corner to take a look.
But this article is supposed to be about whether we should complain about games. I don't think that complaining, per se, is useful - but it is absolutely useful/necessary to critique games. I also tend to think that efforts in this regard tend to fall far short of where they should - most sites focus on reviewing titles, which is basically boiled down to buy or don't buy. In order to really be useful and advance the art form, I'd like to see more critique - this worked, this didn't, and here's why. But yeah, just saying, "the graphics SUCK, man!" is not useful.
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AMD had a real good run in the early 2000's AMD actually was selling more PC's with its chips then Intel. Then Intel Core 2 Duo processors came out and AMD had to go back to catch up mode again.
I'm pretty sure they didn't and it was just a majority of the retail sales outside the big OEMs. I don't ever think AMD ever had the fab capacity to supply over 50% of the total market.
You're right, AMD only led in retail sales - that is, sales to people building their own computers. AMD probably didn't have the capacity to feed the OEM market, but they also didn't have the demand - this is the time period (for obvious reasons) when Intel went full evil and was basically forcing the OEMs to ship Intel and only Intel products. It didn't matter that the Athlon/Athlon XP/Athlon 64 were competitive with or superior to the Intel products - Intel basically told the OEMs that if they sold AMD systems, they could forget selling Intel systems. I believe the lawsuits were finally settled a year or two ago, but by then Intel had already succeeded - they crippled AMD's OEM sales during the only time that AMD was really beating Intel on the technology front, and Intel put that time to good use and came back with superior products. By the time AMD processors were widely available from OEMs they simply weren't competitive on the performance front any more, and were relegated to budget systems only. At least that's how it shook out in the consumer arena; the leverage of large customers to demand specific products in the corporate/server sector allowed AMD to gain and maintain a strong position there.
Haven't heard anyone mention RoboSport in a long time. I remember playing at a friend's house, taking turns carefully laying out our moves and then listening closely to his headphones as it processed the turn - it would play the sound effects for what was happening while processing the turn, but you couldn't actually watch until it was finished, which lead to great anticipation as you tried to figure out if that horrible death you just heard was your robot or your enemy's. I might have to check out Frozen Synapse to see how it stack's up - this kind of simultaneous turn-based game has seen precious little development over the years, and I found it quite enjoyable.
What the heck is a "Sandwich Planning Board Member"?
Well, obviously you can't just jump right in and make a sandwich. My God man, what if something goes wrong? You could have mayonnaise, pickles, and cold cuts everywhere! No, any responsible community will have a Sandwich Planning Board to ensure that sandwich preparation follows rigorous guidelines to avoid this kind of disaster. This Ms. Malloy probably represented to the Board that her clients were experienced in the proper production of PB&J sandwiches when in fact they had never successfully completed even a PB sandwich, never mind the added complexity introduced by the use of gelatinized fruit products.
Sounds like a Disaster Area waiting to happen.
TFA says:
Is GPS satellite distribution not uniform-on-average across the globe? Sombody can 'splains?
It isn't the density of GPS satellites that is the main issue, but the density of GPS ground stations. Japan has a very dense network of GPS ground stations for monitoring ground movements. The technique they are using integrates over the line of sight between a GPS ground station and the orbiting GPS satellite in order to determine the total electron content on that path. With only one ground station in a given area you would only have one LOS to each satellite, and a very sparse picture of any TEC (total electron content) anomaly (assuming you even have an LOS going through the appropriate area). More ground stations with criss-crossing LOS gives a much better picture of any anomaly (plus a more powerful statistical analysis).
“I think it’s worthwhile to document it like this, to see what will happen with the next event,” Kanamori says, “but I can’t be completely convinced.”
I can't seem to access the paper but can anyone tell me how long of a time range was surveyed and how many times the electron counts spiked when there wasn't a massive earthquake?
Only a few hours prior to the earthquake. The paper doesn't really discuss using this as a forecasting tool, only analyzing whether similar anomalies occurred immediately before other earthquakes. The point being that it is much too early to be looking at the effectiveness of this information for forecasting; the next step after observing the anomaly before/during this earthquake is to see if a similar anomaly occurred before/during other large earthquakes; if there were similar anomalies, then it might be worth expanding the analysis to see if it is usable as a warning/forecasting tool.
It appears that they found a small anomaly with the 2004 Sumatra quake (using GPS data from a station in Phuket) and the 2010 Chilean earthquake (using GPS data from stations in Argentina), but limited GPS station coverage doesn't allow a really rigorous comparison. They did not see evidence of a similar anomaly prior to earthquakes in the 7.0-8.0 range that occurred in the more-densely instrumented Japan.
The data actually makes a lot of sense: Windows 7 gave user's the ability to pin program icons to the taskbar even when they're not running. So now your most frequently used programs don't need to be in the start menu or on the desktop to quickly get to them. I would imagine start menu usage would fall dramatically once the programs you use 90% of the time are pinned to the task bar.
I find the new start screen to be an odd solution to this problem. For that matter, I find it odd to thing of the drop as a "problem".
I don't think I've used this feature... is it any different than sticking shortcuts on the quick launch bar (you know, the part of the taskbar in XP that is specifically intended for this purpose)? Because that's where I stick my four or five most commonly used programs in XP (and 7).
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Refrigerator. Duh, I learned that from a high-quality, well-written documentary recently.
Yep. The thing is over now, so here is the sum total of the announcement:
1. New camera. Has more megapixels. White balance may no longer suck. (That's the tweak.)
2. You can now take pictures using the volume up button. (Really? Not with a camera button? Really: double tap the home button, press the "camera" icon, press the "volume up" button. That's "ease of use," apparently.)
3. Remember how Android has a voice activation feature? iPhone is getting that now. Unlike the old "voice command" this one can now be used to search the web and enter text into text fields. Wasn't this available in Android 1? And as an app for iPhone?
4. "New" processor (it's the iPad 2's)
5. "Better than console game graphics." No, really. Seriously! They said that!
6. Remember how the iPhone tracked your location, and everyone got upset about it? The new one uploads the location to iCloud and this is, somehow, a feature. So you can locate your phone through the cloud. (It's in your house! Thanks, GPS!)
7. Antenna was redesigned. So you might be able to make calls and browse the web while holding the phone.
8. Now supports Sprint.
And that's it. That's everything.
So you're saying that Steve left because he was too ashamed to be part of this announcement, and that whole sickness thing was just a coverup?
Though really I'm not sure what people expected. You know, other than an iPhone 5 instead of 4S. Do you think Apple's marketing department was crapping themselves with all the talk and excitement on the web for iPhone 5, knowing that there would be massive disappointment when they revealed... iPhone 4.1?
Some may fear the barista at the B&N Starbucks will now know the consumer was "cheating" on her with the barista of the Border's... coffee spot place... and that now she will never give them her phone number and miss any chance of dating her! :P
The Borders coffee place was Seattle's Best, at least at my local Borders... which, of course, is owned by Starbucks. So you were basically cheating on her with her sister. Well, maybe half sister.
Hot, like coffee.
You want people pissing away money like this during a [dep/rec]ession.
Not really. According to several sources, Amazon is taking a loss on these. They are assembled in China from parts made in China. Buying one, you are just transferring your money to China. Since this is Amazon we're talking about, your purchase won't even be generating any tax revenue.
Though in general what you say is true - during a recession you want to encourage the people that have money to spend some of it - this appears to me to be an extraordinarily bad place to be doing that. Yes, eventually Amazon hopes to be making money from the media you purchase for the device (and that likely would be a good place to put money in terms of fighting the recession), but if you are looking to help kick start the economy this is probably about the last device you would want to buy.
Of course, if you spend the extra on an iPad instead then Apple will just sit on the excess profit and it won't be all that helpful to the wider economy either - but at least you'd be contributing to the tax base.
Do they think that they'll end up paying what the cable company pays per channel? It doesn't work like that. They charge the price that will maximise profits.
Ideally they want to charge the value of each channel to each customer. they can't do that though. They need fixed pricing. If the price is too high, people will stop subscribing, too low and the profits no longer make the channel viable. But different people assign different values to different channels. They can actually charge the average amount for each channel. Many of the customers who aren't willing to pay the average price for channel A are willing to pay above average for channel B so they subscribe.
People weren't exactly happy when netflix unbundled their services. why do they think cable companies would be any different?
People like me want a la carte because out of the 200+ channels (plus hundreds of music channels) available to me, I actually only watch about 5. While I'm sure I would be paying more than what the cable company pays for each channel (well, no shit - they do have to make money somewhere), it seems highly unlikely that it would cost more to get those five channels than the $60 per month I pay now.
So far, yes, I have been willing to pay it because I can afford it without any trouble. But my willingness to continue paying for large amounts of media I have absolutely no interest in is waning as other, more efficient (for my dollar) options become available.
And so what if a channel doesn't have enough interest to be sustainable in an a la carte market? If that's the case, the channel should fold. No reason for everyone to be subsidizing channels that only a relative handful of people are interested in. That might mean the death of a few channels I like, but so be it. Most of the niche channels I once liked have whored themselves out to such an extent that I don't watch anymore anyway (History, TLC, Discovery to name a few).
All the prices I have seen are taking into account the lower priced versions with the on screen advertizing. Is that new to the kindle?
Actually $40 off w/ advertising for the Touch and Keyboard - $99 vs. $139. I wonder why the (new) basic Kindle doesn't get as much of a discount for enabling advertising?
I was also interested to see that while the Touch and Keyboard are advertised as having the same amount of memory (4 GB), they claim about 15% less capacity for the Touch in terms of number of books. Seems a little bloated for the Touch software to take up an extra 600 megabytes.
Am I the only one who actually *liked* the physical keyboard and buttons on the old Kindle? I don't want my greasy fingerprints all over my screen and I like the tactile feel of a physical keyboard. And the Kindle's physical keyboard was a pretty good one too.
According to Amazon.com the old version - now referred to as the "Kindle Keyboard/Keyboard 3G" is still available, at the same price as the Touch.
No. Newegg doesn't have anything to fear from this Post-PC hype.
The real threat to them are competitors like Amazon that sell the same thing for less, offer free shipping, and have better search features.
I tend to agree, though I still hugely favor shopping at Newegg for computer parts. Amazon has no practical way to compare products, has hardly any product information for the vast majority of items, and unless you know the exact part you are looking for it is difficult to locate them - the organization is abysmal. Their system works great for things like books and movies, where you just search by the title or author, but it is really bad for trying to compare different, but similar, products.
For example, I've been looking at getting a new printer. On Newegg, you can narrow it down by function, price, brand, etc - and then compare multiple items feature-for-feature. On Amazon, you are pretty much limited to looking up individual items and reading the very brief blurb on them. So, if I know I want a Brother MFC-9320CW, great - but if I don't know which printer has all of the features I want, Amazon is the last place to look.
But, yeah - whereas I used to buy pretty much all of my computer stuff from Newegg, now it gets split pretty evenly between Newegg and Amazon. "Free", fast shipping is often too tempting to pass up ("free" because I forgot to cancel my Amazon Prime trial and now I'm hooked).
Wonder if the Chinese subcontractors cut some corners ro quality to make a little more money? or the other foreign subcontractors who make up 30% of the craft?
30% foreign subcontracting? Japan alone accounts for 35%,although I'm not sure if that is measured by value, weight, or what. When you fly in a 787, you will be flying on Japanese wings (made by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, no less - no need for self-sealing fuel tanks on a civilian airliner, thank goodness).
Boeing seems to be working hard at becoming an aircraft assembler more than an aircraft builder. Probably necessary in order to compete in the future with other manufacturers, really , but a hard pill to swallow for Boeing aficionados (and unions). A large part of the delays to the 787 project have had as much to do with completely rearranging their business model as with difficulties in design.
it goes smoother than the delivery of the 747-8 a week or two ago. Sort of embarrassing to have your first delivery customer refuse delivery.
I'm sure that won't be the case, though, as Cargolux seems to have been acting at the behest of the new parent company in an effort to get further reduced rates on the 787; Japan has too much invested in the 787 project for ANA to play games like that.
I know lots of people in federal IT contracting. NOBODY makes that kind of money. I call B.S. on this whole article.
And the gov't employees make more, work less, and walk away with a pension.
Lol. I used to work in private consulting. My "list" hourly rate was $122 per hour (most clients got an automatic 10% off; some were as much as 20%-30% off; a few unfortunates paid full price), which comes out to $244k per year assuming 100% billable. Do you think I actually made that? Hell, no! I was probably getting paid 1/4th that - including benefits - max. But that was the cost to a client to hire me. That's how consulting companies make money - the junior staff get billed out at insanely high rates for their experience level, and the difference goes to paying for everything else and providing profits. Sure, the most senior people might have been billing out at $200+ per hour, but a) they actually got paid a good portion of that, and b) clients rarely want to pay for much of their time.
If a client actually had enough work to keep someone like me busy year after year then it would probably be cheaper to just hire their own staff person. Of course to get the expertise that comes with hiring a consulting company, just hiring the junior-level person who would be doing most of the work isn't really going to be a replacement - you would need to have enough work to justify an entire group, from junior level up to seniors and even management.
Probably the best solution in terms of bang-for-the-buck for the government would be to establish a sort of in-house consultancy and hire them out to various divisions - but the way budgets are set up (and the way hiring is done) that really isn't feasible most of the time. It is politically and bureaucratically easier just to hire a private consultant for each project that doesn't fit neatly into what a division was set up to do.
So, yes - hiring outside contractors is actually more expensive than hiring your own workers, but there is a lot more that goes into it. And while I'm positive (from first-hand experience) that a lot of the extra going to those private contractors is really wasted money (going to corporate profits rather than paying for work), I'm not sure there is a better way short of completely throwing out the bureaucracy and starting over with a more flexible design. The best option is probably to have a few auditors making sure that A) work that is being contracted out isn't work that could just as easily be done by the people you've already got, and, of course B) making sure that contracts are written in such a way to minimize the costs to the government (in my view the largest source of government waste currently is the failure to do B - contracts are often horribly one-sided, with the government getting the shit end of the stick).
My thought exactly.
A good article for an intro to computers course, but I was hoping for some "how it actually works" details.
Not even good for an intro class, as it seems to be self-contradictory. It is the replacement for BIOS, except that it is also built on top of BIOS - so the BIOS is still there? From the article it sounds like a middleman, interfacing between the BIOS and the OS - which just makes me wonder what the point is. Totally useless article, as the author either doesn't really know what UEFI is or is just incapable of formulating a clear explanation of what it is and how it is different from BIOS.
Obligatory:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades,11056/
Seriously, a low-performance core doing administrivia type work sounds great, but won't this require OS support? I can't imagine this detail is completely abstracted from the kernel.
Anandtech also has an article up on this. From the sound of it this isn't really different from other multi-core processors that are able to power down or turn off individual cores. At low system demand, the CPU switches to the companion core and reports a single core available for task scheduling; if system demand is too high for the companion cube, er, core to handle the CPU switches to the main core(s). Sounds like a slight delay going from the companion to main (Anandtech quotes it at 2 ms), but as far as the OS is concerned it is no different than the situation we have now where one or more cores can be turned off independently.
Second Life is kind of close to the Metaverse.
And it shows just how flawed the idea of the Metaverse is. Hey, let's take all the advantages of a digital world - near instant access to anything anywhere - and throw them all out by modeling the limitations of the physical universe. There's a great idea!
Efficiency triumphs over the integrated experience of something like the Metaverse. The only place such a construct makes any sense is in a game setting - where, by definition, you are "wasting time", and where arbitrary rules have some chance of being obeyed. For everything else, having to navigate some kind of 3D digital world just to access information or communicate with others is doomed to fail, because it is simply unnecessary.
Sure, there's a place for things like Second Life and WoW - but it is entirely social/gaming as opposed to being of any real use.
Or something about elephants...
Yea, to the Slashdot editors:
Note that this only affects SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0
The editors are too busy telling us that this is the first article from the submitter to be accepted; you can't expect them to perform that important function and actually glance at the article, now can you?
It is a common belief in Africa (as it was in England in the 1800s) that fucking a virgin will cure STDs.
But I have it on good authority that if you try to have sex with a lion, you will not die of AIDS.
Oh how wrong you are; and trust me, Acquired Intense Disembowelment Syndrome is not a fun way to go.
Again to use the Deus Ex example I saw a number of people online just slam it for having shitty graphics on the PC. That was odd, since supposedly they worked on making the PC version higher end, but then maybe that was all marketing. Then I get the game. No, it is just people being assholes. The game is beautiful. Not the best graphics EVAR or anything but very visually appealing, better than many games. I can't see how it would ruin the experience for anyone, at least to the point of being all pissed off about it.
What gamers need to do is offer suggestions for improvement, not cry that everything isn't perfect.
I have to jump in to the Deus Ex thing here. I just got it two days ago, and have managed about 4 hours so far. Having read reviews saying that it is an awesome game and that the PC version is the best, I guess my expectations were a little high. The graphics are... meh. Not impressive, but not really bad either. The thing that has bothered me the most so far is the animation. Character animation seems to have taken a giant leap backwards compared to other games I've played over the last five years. Not a huge issue, but every time there is an in-engine cut scene I am constantly distracted by the spastic motion and unnatural poses exhibited by the characters.
That said, I am still enjoying the game. It is clearly a console-based game, but the controls work adequately on PC. The story so far seems okay, but I really haven't gotten very far into it. The silly "cover"-based action makes it hard to suspend disbelief (not to mention some of the exact same stupid AI behavior exhibited in the original - like taking out a room full of baddies by sitting in a duct; they just run right up next to it so that they can't shoot at you but you can shoot them). I preferred the old model - you want to take cover behind something, then you sit your ass down behind it, not push a button that gives you an unrealistic 3rd-person view around obstacles. It takes a lot of the tension out of things when you can see exactly where that guard coming down the hall is; the original Deus Ex was much better in that respect, as you sit there hiding around a corner listening to the approaching steps and wondering exactly where he is... and if you should risk being spotted in order to pop your head around the corner to take a look.
But this article is supposed to be about whether we should complain about games. I don't think that complaining, per se, is useful - but it is absolutely useful/necessary to critique games. I also tend to think that efforts in this regard tend to fall far short of where they should - most sites focus on reviewing titles, which is basically boiled down to buy or don't buy. In order to really be useful and advance the art form, I'd like to see more critique - this worked, this didn't, and here's why. But yeah, just saying, "the graphics SUCK, man!" is not useful.