Do you honestly believe that the PC gaming companies aren't doing all of this too?
They don't have one time serial numbers? They don't have additional DLC and add-on costs? They don't have DRM that requires an always-on internet connection? They don't cost a fortune?
I'm pretty sure I've seen people complaining about all of these things in PC gaming.
At least on a console I don't have to worry about what other crap they're doing behind the scenes.
the second and third guy to do something is usually the successful one because historically the entrepreneur is stubborn and sticks to his narrow vision
Except that nowadays the first guy patents it, and demands shake-down money from everybody else because somehow the patent office granted a patent on either an idea, or something which reads as "something well known, but with a computer".
Why not graduate from consoles and move into PC gaming?
Because not everybody is interested in PC gaming?
It's just another machine to buy and keep up to date, and it is probably more effort than most people are willing to invest.
I don't play games often enough to want to do anything other than pop in the disk, play the game a while, and turn off the console.
I'd be willing to bet most people who play on consoles don't want to have a PC gaming rig, or they'd have done so. I for one have no interest in getting into the "which super awesome video card do I need now". A console is more like an appliance, plug it in and go, which is precisely what I want it to be.
A billion in hardware losses for them is a billion in hardware GAINS for the consumer!
What are you talking about?
That billion dollars is in unsold hardware. Nobody wants. Nobody is buying it. It is sitting around gathering dust and occupying space.
There were no 'gains' for the consumer. There's just boxes and boxes of phones nobody purchased.
Besides, you totally missed the point. With the BB platform, you can both encrypt all communication
I think the point you're missing is that if everybody is looking at RIM like it is about to tank or get sold, nobody wants to be the guy in the meeting saying "Hey, we should go with Blackberry".
You describe the historical reasons why people went with Blackberry/BES solutions. But in the current context, people don't necessarily believe they are a long-term viable option.
When you're hiring investment bankers to help you figure out how to split, sell, fold, spindle, or mutilate it tends to undermine customer confidence. I'm betting a lot of organizations wouldn't look at setting up a new BES right now.
And they suck hard in very large parts of the US. Digital Only distributions would make it so those parts of the US wouldn't consider buying the consoles.
And for a lot of people, the bandwidth is capped, with extra fees if you go over it.
Assuming a modern video game puts a big dent in the disks now, I can only imagine that digital-only distribution would make the cost of the game more expensive overall.
I wouldn't go to a digital download model. It's a video game console. I want to put in a disk an play games... I don't want it connected to the internet all the time. But, it seems increasingly, video game companies are insisting on an always-on internet connection.
If you let everyone vote on a web page, you're self selecting for technology literate, able to afford an internet connection, and politically engaged enough to care to vote.
If the same 10% or so vote on every issue, you might end up with skewed results.
And, as has been pointed out, you'd need to be sure the system was secure and had some validation in it -- otherwise you have no idea if you can trust the votes. Then of course, all of your voters are essentially on record for having voted for/against something.
It sounds like a good idea in theory, but the devil is always in the details.
Having worked in acadamia myself, it has been my experience that talent and competence diminishes severely the further up the management ladder you go.
Otherwise known as the Peter Principle -- sooner or later everybody gets promoted to their own level of incompetence.
Well, the *AAs won't pay for this... they'll get a law passed that says all internet connections need to be taxed to pay for this in order to keep the world safe from copyright infringement. Then they'll insist on a treaty to make every other country do the same thing or risk trade sanctions.
Their position is that society should be protecting and guaranteeing their income.
And, yes, obviously I know you were being sarcastic. But these guys really seem to think like this.
I want to see the MPAA and RIAA clamp down on everything we do online.
That's what ACTA is for.
Let them start taking down mere references to copyrighted works
Didn't someone already get extradited from the UK for exactly that?
little kids posting videos of themselves dancing or singing a popular song, takedowns of birthday party videos where a song happens to be playing on the radio in the background, videos with samples and soundbites, music and video reviews, and book reports
Them too.
bring an end to the abomination that is the modern state of copyright
Yeah, right. Sorry, but the US has hung its fortunes on IP, and their lobbyists pay the lawmakers far too much for that to happen. They're not going to give up the millions in 'contributions' this nets them.
I like explanations that are true. The article offered no actual evidence for a Taliban attack. Any conclusion that so neatly fits our prejudices should be subject to special skepticism.
Fair enough. So, from the Article, an Afghan spokesman said:
"The Afghan people know that the terrorists and the Taliban are doing these things to threaten girls and stop them going to school," Aseer said last week. "That's something we and the people believe. Now we are implementing democracy in Afghanistan and we want girls to be educated, but the government's enemies don't want this."
The Taliban has offered this explanation:
But earlier this week, the Taliban denied responsibility, instead blaming U.S. and NATO forces for the poisonings in an attempt to "defame" the insurgent group.
So, we have two possible answers... one is plausible because it's already happened and they've already taken credit for it... the other, well, who knows anymore?
I agree we can't claim either of them as factual. But given that this kind of thing has happened enough before... it's hard to discount it as a likely theory.
Hell, I find it fairly likely that someone who did this in the past with the Taliban just went ahead and did it on their own on the assumption that if it was a good thing to do then, it must still be.
Well, technically he said you only needed 4 to be unambiguous... for all I know there's a bunch of even older ones that aren't in common use anymore.:-P
A Chinese friend in Beijing said the "ma, ma, ma, ma" joke to me, and it was pretty clear which tone was which
But do you speak the language? Or just recognize it? My wife tells me that at the time, most of she and her classmates had grown up in small towns and had never heard other languages -- so for her it was a complete "ma, ma, ma, and ma" WTF thing.
I think when someone is explaining something slowly to me, I can follow the tones... but I wouldn't normally pick up on it.
Then again, when I was learning French, wrapping one's head around tenses which don't exist in English is always fun.:-P
Ummm, except this is hardly the first time school girls have been targeted with poison, or acid, or fire, or gunshots.
It's not like we need to come up with alternate explanations because poison is implausible here -- this is straight out of the Taliban playbook.
Are you asserting this or things like this haven't happened? I'm not sure why you're suggesting we need an alternative explanation which implies this didn't really happen.
You only need 4 tones to be unambiguous in Mandarin (5 would be better).
Hmmm... but how many are in the actual language? I had understood it to be more than 4 or 5.
I was told Vietnamese has something like 12, I assume Chinese is similar. At that point, I conceded the point that his English would always be superior to my Vietnamese.:-P (OK, well, that part was never truly in debate.)
I think you underestimate the incredible complexity of the language
No, I know mostly that; a Vietnamese friend tried to explain tonality once -- and as a Westerner, I just can't pick up on the subtleties.
That there are 12 ways pronounce the same things, and those vastly change the meaning baffles me, and isn't something I'm capable of hearing. My wife took a class in college which talked about it... and when the instructor was describing the difference between "ga, ga, ga and ga", most of the people in the class could only hear a single "ga" , not four distinct ones. Since English doesn't use this, most of us can't even identify it when we hear it.
And I know that's barely scratching the surface. There's more than just tonality.
But I'm not the one planning to parachute into China without speaking the language and hoping I can get a job. Unless they speak English already, that's going to be a huge liability.
The more I've listened to non-native speakers of English, the more forgiving I am about how you use it -- because trying to explain why some of these things are as they are can prove to be kind of pointless (unless you're actually a linguist). Because sometimes it's because the word is English, French, German, Latin... and other times it's largely "because we say so".
Increasingly, a lot of grammatical mistakes people who didn't grow up speaking English... well, those make perfect sense if English actually had consistent rules. But since it doesn't, it can be very hard to explain.
It would take years to learn Chinese... but if you want to work there, you need to find English speakers, or learn Chinese.
but the problem is I don't speak Mandarin or Cantonese. I am a native English speaker from Canada though
So, to turn this around, if someone came into your place of work looking for a job, didn't speak English, and wasn't yet in the country... would you be seriously considering this candidate?
At a certain point, if you don't speak the language, what are you offering them?
That's not to say you don't have stuff to offer, and if they have some English speakers you might not be someone who might be a good fit. But from a certain perspective, not having any language skills can be a huge liability in looking for work there.
That, and you might need to find out the legal stuff you might need to account for to work in China. The equivalent of a work visa. The teaching of English might be your only option for a while.
If you haven't already, I'd be trying to understand your legal position and what you'll be able to do when you're there as a visitor. You could find yourself unable to work, limited in what you can do (both legally and linguistically) and sitting around wishing you hadn't gone there in the first place.
I think the business market will largely skip Windows 8 like it did Vista.
I would tend to agree... but not because they're "avoiding" it (though that might be the case), but because people are really still in the middle of deploying Win 7.
Where I work, rolling out Win 7 has been in the planning stage for well over a year. We're going to start rolling it out fairly soon to users.
Which means at an enterprise level, Vista got skipped because people were waiting for it to get sorted out. Win 7 is ramping up, but not everybody has gotten there yet. And all of the organizations who are just in the middle of putting out Win 7 will end up skipping Win 8 because Win 9 (or whatever) will be out by the time they're ready to change anyway.
The reality is, corporate stuff happens on a *long* timeline, and it isn't something you can change direction mid-stream on.
Though, for my own personal machine (which is also due for an upgrade), I will likely opt for Win 7 because Win 8 is a fresh steaming release which I don't trust. (Actually, I don't thin it's fully out yet anyway.)
Tell you what: the "cloud" hype will come crashing down the minute some big company that invested massively in off-site services and storage loses internet connection for a few hours...
In fairness, people said the exact same thing about outsourcing of things like your IT infrastructure.
There's loads of companies that farm out their storage and a few other things like that.
That doom and gloom didn't come true either.
Companies are more interested in saving money than incurring a small amount of downtime (depending on what the systems are)... so in the same way that IT outsourcing is still around, I can 't see "the cloud" suddenly toppling over in one go.
Slashdot Mirror
This translates to "we have far cooler spy stuff now".
But, and here I demonstrate how little I know about satellites, would something designed for looking down at Earth be easily adapted to astronomy?
You'd think the optics/instruments would be optimized for a different problem set.
Do you honestly believe that the PC gaming companies aren't doing all of this too?
They don't have one time serial numbers? They don't have additional DLC and add-on costs? They don't have DRM that requires an always-on internet connection? They don't cost a fortune?
I'm pretty sure I've seen people complaining about all of these things in PC gaming.
At least on a console I don't have to worry about what other crap they're doing behind the scenes.
Except that nowadays the first guy patents it, and demands shake-down money from everybody else because somehow the patent office granted a patent on either an idea, or something which reads as "something well known, but with a computer".
Somehow, we call this innovation.
Because not everybody is interested in PC gaming?
It's just another machine to buy and keep up to date, and it is probably more effort than most people are willing to invest.
I don't play games often enough to want to do anything other than pop in the disk, play the game a while, and turn off the console.
I'd be willing to bet most people who play on consoles don't want to have a PC gaming rig, or they'd have done so. I for one have no interest in getting into the "which super awesome video card do I need now". A console is more like an appliance, plug it in and go, which is precisely what I want it to be.
A TV show about a boy genius doctor from 1989-1993.
Now, please get off the damned lawn. ;-)
Mostly it feels like Microsoft is thrusting us. ;-)
I read that as "hopes". There's nothing to guarantee people will actually buy them.
At which point, they may well get stuck with these phones.
What are you talking about?
That billion dollars is in unsold hardware. Nobody wants. Nobody is buying it. It is sitting around gathering dust and occupying space.
There were no 'gains' for the consumer. There's just boxes and boxes of phones nobody purchased.
I think the point you're missing is that if everybody is looking at RIM like it is about to tank or get sold, nobody wants to be the guy in the meeting saying "Hey, we should go with Blackberry".
You describe the historical reasons why people went with Blackberry/BES solutions. But in the current context, people don't necessarily believe they are a long-term viable option.
When you're hiring investment bankers to help you figure out how to split, sell, fold, spindle, or mutilate it tends to undermine customer confidence. I'm betting a lot of organizations wouldn't look at setting up a new BES right now.
And for a lot of people, the bandwidth is capped, with extra fees if you go over it.
Assuming a modern video game puts a big dent in the disks now, I can only imagine that digital-only distribution would make the cost of the game more expensive overall.
I wouldn't go to a digital download model. It's a video game console. I want to put in a disk an play games ... I don't want it connected to the internet all the time. But, it seems increasingly, video game companies are insisting on an always-on internet connection.
How do you ensure the poll is representative?
If you let everyone vote on a web page, you're self selecting for technology literate, able to afford an internet connection, and politically engaged enough to care to vote.
If the same 10% or so vote on every issue, you might end up with skewed results.
And, as has been pointed out, you'd need to be sure the system was secure and had some validation in it -- otherwise you have no idea if you can trust the votes. Then of course, all of your voters are essentially on record for having voted for/against something.
It sounds like a good idea in theory, but the devil is always in the details.
Otherwise known as the Peter Principle -- sooner or later everybody gets promoted to their own level of incompetence.
Except, of course, I don't actually have a $ in my name.
Hopefully you can get through the paywall ... here. Failing that, google for "AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion".
SCOTUS ruled on this last year.
How about people with numbers in their name? Or are you somehow exempt?
I thought the courts already ruled in favor of allowing this?
I agree it shouldn't be legal, but I'm pretty sure it's too late.
Well, the *AAs won't pay for this ... they'll get a law passed that says all internet connections need to be taxed to pay for this in order to keep the world safe from copyright infringement. Then they'll insist on a treaty to make every other country do the same thing or risk trade sanctions.
Their position is that society should be protecting and guaranteeing their income.
And, yes, obviously I know you were being sarcastic. But these guys really seem to think like this.
That's what ACTA is for.
Didn't someone already get extradited from the UK for exactly that?
Them too.
Yeah, right. Sorry, but the US has hung its fortunes on IP, and their lobbyists pay the lawmakers far too much for that to happen. They're not going to give up the millions in 'contributions' this nets them.
Fair enough. So, from the Article, an Afghan spokesman said:
The Taliban has offered this explanation:
So, we have two possible answers ... one is plausible because it's already happened and they've already taken credit for it ... the other, well, who knows anymore?
I agree we can't claim either of them as factual. But given that this kind of thing has happened enough before ... it's hard to discount it as a likely theory.
Hell, I find it fairly likely that someone who did this in the past with the Taliban just went ahead and did it on their own on the assumption that if it was a good thing to do then, it must still be.
Well, technically he said you only needed 4 to be unambiguous ... for all I know there's a bunch of even older ones that aren't in common use anymore. :-P
But do you speak the language? Or just recognize it? My wife tells me that at the time, most of she and her classmates had grown up in small towns and had never heard other languages -- so for her it was a complete "ma, ma, ma, and ma" WTF thing.
I think when someone is explaining something slowly to me, I can follow the tones ... but I wouldn't normally pick up on it.
Then again, when I was learning French, wrapping one's head around tenses which don't exist in English is always fun. :-P
Ummm, except this is hardly the first time school girls have been targeted with poison, or acid, or fire, or gunshots.
It's not like we need to come up with alternate explanations because poison is implausible here -- this is straight out of the Taliban playbook.
Are you asserting this or things like this haven't happened? I'm not sure why you're suggesting we need an alternative explanation which implies this didn't really happen.
Hmmm ... but how many are in the actual language? I had understood it to be more than 4 or 5.
I was told Vietnamese has something like 12, I assume Chinese is similar. At that point, I conceded the point that his English would always be superior to my Vietnamese. :-P (OK, well, that part was never truly in debate.)
No, I know mostly that; a Vietnamese friend tried to explain tonality once -- and as a Westerner, I just can't pick up on the subtleties.
That there are 12 ways pronounce the same things, and those vastly change the meaning baffles me, and isn't something I'm capable of hearing. My wife took a class in college which talked about it ... and when the instructor was describing the difference between "ga, ga, ga and ga", most of the people in the class could only hear a single "ga" , not four distinct ones. Since English doesn't use this, most of us can't even identify it when we hear it.
And I know that's barely scratching the surface. There's more than just tonality.
But I'm not the one planning to parachute into China without speaking the language and hoping I can get a job. Unless they speak English already, that's going to be a huge liability.
The more I've listened to non-native speakers of English, the more forgiving I am about how you use it -- because trying to explain why some of these things are as they are can prove to be kind of pointless (unless you're actually a linguist). Because sometimes it's because the word is English, French, German, Latin ... and other times it's largely "because we say so".
Increasingly, a lot of grammatical mistakes people who didn't grow up speaking English ... well, those make perfect sense if English actually had consistent rules. But since it doesn't, it can be very hard to explain.
It would take years to learn Chinese ... but if you want to work there, you need to find English speakers, or learn Chinese.
So, to turn this around, if someone came into your place of work looking for a job, didn't speak English, and wasn't yet in the country ... would you be seriously considering this candidate?
At a certain point, if you don't speak the language, what are you offering them?
That's not to say you don't have stuff to offer, and if they have some English speakers you might not be someone who might be a good fit. But from a certain perspective, not having any language skills can be a huge liability in looking for work there.
That, and you might need to find out the legal stuff you might need to account for to work in China. The equivalent of a work visa. The teaching of English might be your only option for a while.
If you haven't already, I'd be trying to understand your legal position and what you'll be able to do when you're there as a visitor. You could find yourself unable to work, limited in what you can do (both legally and linguistically) and sitting around wishing you hadn't gone there in the first place.
I would tend to agree ... but not because they're "avoiding" it (though that might be the case), but because people are really still in the middle of deploying Win 7.
Where I work, rolling out Win 7 has been in the planning stage for well over a year. We're going to start rolling it out fairly soon to users.
Which means at an enterprise level, Vista got skipped because people were waiting for it to get sorted out. Win 7 is ramping up, but not everybody has gotten there yet. And all of the organizations who are just in the middle of putting out Win 7 will end up skipping Win 8 because Win 9 (or whatever) will be out by the time they're ready to change anyway.
The reality is, corporate stuff happens on a *long* timeline, and it isn't something you can change direction mid-stream on.
Though, for my own personal machine (which is also due for an upgrade), I will likely opt for Win 7 because Win 8 is a fresh steaming release which I don't trust. (Actually, I don't thin it's fully out yet anyway.)
In fairness, people said the exact same thing about outsourcing of things like your IT infrastructure.
There's loads of companies that farm out their storage and a few other things like that.
That doom and gloom didn't come true either.
Companies are more interested in saving money than incurring a small amount of downtime (depending on what the systems are) ... so in the same way that IT outsourcing is still around, I can 't see "the cloud" suddenly toppling over in one go.