They aren't dying solely because of factors outside of their control, they are dying because they feel entitled to margins that the more successful players in the industry have known to be unreasonable for a long while.
Well, I think more accurately what happens is what you're describing is factors outside of their control.
I don't think they need those margins because they feel 'entitled' to them, so much as Amazon has been able to rely on its sheet size to work on smaller margins. B&N is now simply being squeezed out so badly, they they can't compete.
For them to sell at the same price as Amazon, they'd likely have to do it at an even greater loss -- which will squeeze them dry even faster.
Amazon has truly been able to exploit Economies of scale, and B&N has not. With fewer people buying books overall, and Amazon being able to sell a much larger volume at a lower price, B&N has been squeezed from both ends.
If the eye strain I got from Avatar is any indication, I'll pass on the whole 3D thing. It was cool, but the lingering effects weren't what I'd call pleasant.
That's what I said when they wanted to add sound to pictures! Heresy, I say, heresy!
Well, that's funny and all... but when I came out of Avatar, I had blurry vision and a mild headache for the next two hours.
I won't be spending my movie-going dollars on 3D, and I sure as hell won't be buying a 3D TV. I'm certainly not willing to pay the extra $$ for the movie if it's not actually going to be significantly enhanced by 3D.
Didn't the OpenSolaris effort have problems because they were always waiting on Sun to compile certain libc binaries for them?
Is this resolved in Illumos or is there still a binary blob issue?
Apparently, it isn't. From TFA...
The biggest problem is that an important minority of the code distributed with OpenSolaris is closed source, something that has annoyed the OpenSolaris community for five years. Sun didn't allocate resources to fix this and neither has Oracle.
D'Amore says that a significant percentage of the libc C library (libc_i18n to be precise) is closed, as is the NFS lock manager, portions of the kernel's cryptographic framework and functions, and a bunch of important drives.
So, no, the closed stuff still needs to be written and they don't have it.
I think it's reasonably common for early CD-ROM releases have random stuff to fill the massive 650MB of space that CD-ROMs gave them.
Well, yeah, because back then you could do the software, have room for the complete works of Shakespeare, and then possibly a Library of Congress left over.:-P
Heck, at the time, 650MB seemed like a ridiculous amount of space because all of our files were text files, and barely took any space.
Nowadays, I can buy a 2GB SD card in the lineup at the cashier in the impulse things for $3.99. (Maybe not literally, but it's awfully close.)
So uh, what exactly is their legal standing for keeping it up there? There must be more to it, but I can see how the FBI could read this and decide to sue them.:)
I broadly hinted that ejusdem generis, a standard accepted canon of statutory construction, demonstrates that this statute is inapposite to the use of an image of the seal on an encyclopedia.
If you're making a factual statement like "This is the FBI seal", you're not exactly saying "I'm the FBI, fear me". Basically the lawyer thinks the FBI are willfully misreading/misrepresenting a statute to try to get wikipedia to pull something down which they are using as purely a reporting of facts.
He also points out that they're selectively ignoring the words in the statute that circumscribe the applicability of the statute as cited by the FBI.
But, IKAROS is a technology demonstrator. As far as I can tell, the solar sail is the payload, and it's performance requirements are based around testing the solar sail.
Well, if it's got a working solar sail, and using LCD technology to generate torque... wow, what a hell of a demonstrator.
But, yes, I see your point. Of course, now that they've shown both of those technologies, I'm sure someone will see what practical use they can put it to.
Why are all the old jokes about IBM marketing flooding into my mind?
Well, I don't know about IBM, but this reminds me why I've been treating all forms of HD as "in a constant state of change" since about 1999.
The fact of the matter is, it seems like every two years something comes along which becomes incompatible with all previous incarnations of HD.
Hell, as far as I recall, HDMI was the one that locked down everything with DRM and would no longer work with older devices.
The technologies are changing so fast as to make it a pointless (and expensive) exercise to invest in any of this stuff. I'm glad I'm still running the same amp and TV I've had for almost a decade and never invested in any of this stuff. It's a friggin' moving target.
Why do you imagine that everyone wants to be secretive?
Date of birth? Address? Phone number?
Some of that stuff gets up into the easy identity theft range.
It is possible that some people specifically wanted to give this information away, but it seems to fall more into the category of not being an informed decision.
Actually, that's a pretty good description of lunch with physicists. Except, first we'd have to write down the physical constants of the rubber band, derive the dynamic equations of motion for the rubber band, find the expected behavior, and then run off to the lab to see if our results were correct with the last half of our lunchtime.
So, what, physicists only do physics during lunch?
19,000 is a lot but this is space we're talking about, it seems like it would be rather easy to avoid.
Well, the damage from any of these objects is potentially catastrophic. It's not like getting a flat tire... the relative speeds here are enough to cause major damage. The pieces also look like they're fairly well spread out in orbit.
From the linked article, that Chinese satellite that got shot down has created some 2841 pieces -- imagine something the size of a pea striking your orbiter at, what, 10000 mph? That's a lot of kinetic energy.
I do the same thing, too. And it pisses me off when I find sites which "helpfully" pop up something when you click on a non-link. Like certain newspaper sites which will pop up a definition when you click on any random word in the text. Yes, your web monkey is very clever, but I already know what "the" means. Go away.
I don't run into that one very often.
When I find a website that tries to disable my right mouse button, I want to shoot someone ("sorry, this website does not support that function").
I mean, I'm using the RMB for the back button, so stop fscking with my application.
"We think users want to be seen". He is probably right, but there are way more people out there who are clueless about their privacy and mistakenly disclose tons of information than those who are well informed and intentionally disclose tons of information.
Oh, I think it entirely unlikely that 100 million people chose to disclose that much information.
I blame Facebook constantly changing things, and user apathy/lack of understanding in this case.
This is just one more example of why I don't use Facebook. But, the guy who scraped it was doing something in a gray area, but neither illegal nor against the ToS. Because Facebook themselves made this data public and left it up to the user to lock it down.
...which included a range of opinions both pro and anti. Of those pro/anti camps, some clearly identifiable character types were extracted.
[snip]
Besides which, facebook has HALF A BILLION users. Thats a reasonable section of the population. Not exactly a narrow clique.
Except, if you look at the actual article, they had 20,000 users respond. Which is a tiny subset of the total facebook population.
Of those 20,000 -- only 1% of respondents had bought one, 2% plan to buy one, and a whopping "54% that simply aren’t interested in the iPad".
Like I said, the sample is overwhelmingly people who don't even own one. So, it's a public opinion poll, with data that doesn't seem representative, and they don't have enough actual iPad users to make any intelligent projections about people who own iPads.
I mean, really, if "18% of selfish elites are iPad owners", and they have two hundred iPad owners in their sample size -- the whole article is meaningless drivel. It means they had a couple of asshats who own iPads, but they have no basis to make any statement about iPad owners in general. I mean, is the number of iPad owners in the study even within the margin of error? The 4% of the population which are selfish elites and are iPad critics is actually a larger number than the total number of iPad owner respondents.
The sampling is overwhelmingly tipped to people who don't even own one -- with 6x more people not even knowing what it is than owning one.
In this case, the sample is "those subset of facebook users who chose to do this survey". There is a self selection bias going on here. In no way is this a representative sample of anything, and I seriously doubt that his numbers would pass any threshold of "good".
The total size of Facebook users is not represented in any way by this sample size, so saying Facebook has a lot of users doesn't mean that this survey with 20,000 respondents is meaningful.
I'll bet there are about 100 million people who would like to test the security of Ron Bowes' nuts against a swift kick.
Purely playing Devil's advocate here....
So, Facebook made this stuff public by default. The individual users didn't change their settings to make it private (either they didn't know, or didn't care). This guy collects all of the information which is open to him, and publishes it.
I'm not saying I agree with scraping all of this information, but I place much more of the blame on Facebook for their shitty privacy policies and making a change to the data which made it public by default.
This is a logical conclusion of having that much information public by default. It's scary to get that information on 170 million people, but, as TFA points out, this is hardly illegal.
I'm sure Facebook will say this is a good thing, and that those users wanted that information made available since that seems to be their default position on security and privacy.
It's just a shame there's not a USB slot in it to make it *EASY* to copy things to and from it via a memory card or external hard disk.
Well, I have dropbox.com installed on it and several other machines. If I really need to copy files to it, I can do it that way. Dragging a file to a folder is about as easy as it gets, and I can do it from a web client if I haven't installed dropbox on a given machine. The service and the app are both free.
It also lacks wi-fi tethering.
You're gonna have to explain that one. The one I have doesn't have 3G -- it finds the wireless networks it knows about and signs in automatically. I would assume the 3G one (which also supports wifi) does this as well. Am I missing something? Does the 3G model still use data when a perfectly good wifi is present?
Oh, and you cannot get more applications than all the Open Source stuff that is already out there that
In terms of sheer number? No. But, there's an infinite amount of open source out there, and I really don't want to sift through all of it to see what I want. When I look for apps, I have some niches to fill, which I mostly have, but I'm looking for new kinds of apps that take advantage of the form factor.
I don't want to find 'familiar' software on a new kind of device. I want something built for this format, with an interface that's been changed to match.
Plus MP3s are not synonymous with iTunes.
They're 'not not' synonymous with iTunes either. You can tell iTunes to rip into MP3 format, and it will do that. You can import MP3s into iTunes. I've never bought a track from the iTunes Music Store, but iTunes itself was happy to mount MP3s on a FreeBSD samba share that were ripped using dagrab.
Why everyone insists that iTunes doesn't do MP3, I will never know. The actual app does them just fine, and since I am one of the rare people who actually buys CDs (apparently), I've ripped a lot of CDs with iTunes (400+ or so).
were the iPad an open platform, you could download and compile onto it to your heart's content.
*laugh* OK, here's where you and I differ. I've put over 15 years of my life into being a software developer. I don't have any interest at all in compiling to my heart's content, I just want it to go.
Compiling and configuring is just not something I find 'fun' anymore. It's work, and I just want to press the pretty buttons when I'm using the iPad -- it's specifically a rebellion away from a computer to something which is more of an appliance.
That's why I like Ubuntu, because it's got a nice package manager that I just click the magic button that says "make wikimedia go now", and in some period of time it appears. The same is true of the FreeBSD package manager. And, the same damned thing is true about the app store. "I need an app that is kinda like a mindmap", find one in the store and install it.
Look, I'm a fan of open source. I installed Slackware from a mammoth pile of floppies in '92 or '93 onto a 486 and ran X Windows at home. I'm first and foremost a UNIX geek, and spent a lot of years coding in C. I think I at least have some degree of credibility as a geek.
But, there's something I find extremely sexy about the iPad, and for me, it's a really worthwhile purchase that I'm happy about. I like to cuddle up with it and surf the web in way that I've never been able to do. It's my current "geek teddy bear" in terms of being shiny and cool.
Every time I hear people slagging it, I find myself thinking "either you're really obsessed with compiling your own software, or you just don't get it" -- which is cool and all, and I respect that.
But all of the things people say are 'limitations' of the device, I find myself thinking that I wouldn't want to do that anyway.
But the fact remains, you carry that iPad around, but likely carry your iPhone or MacBook or iMac or iPod for the same things (heck you likely have a nice Swissgear backpack, so it will all fit). Then you have the battery packs, the iDocks/stands, all just to access iTunes or mobile Me. It supports the distributed lifestyle, BUT you need all those devices to give you the option of play one music file or view one book anywhere and you always needs to sync with iTunes.
Not really. My iPad is primarily used at home or in the backyard. I occasionally take it to the office, but only because there's a few tasks I prefer it for. Generally speaking, it's not a "work" machine.
Yes, the work backpack contains my (Dell) laptop and all of the associated stuff with that. But, I have to carry that stuff wherever I go for work anyway. My cell phone (not smartphone) lives in another messenger bag that I carry the daily stuff in, so it always travels anyway.
I need to sync with iTunes surprisingly little for my iPad, and I pull most stuff via wifi. I've got about 16GB of music on it, which is more than I can realistically listen to in a couple of weeks -- I can bring an iPod if I think I'll need a separate, dedicated music source. I've got (literally) dozens of ebooks and the like on it, as well as about a dozen movies and quite a few games that don't require any connection. Except for charging it, I could go several weeks or more with the iPad disconnected from the mother ship. I've got a lot of off-line content, so I don't even really need an internet connection. I don't know why you think I'd need to constantly sync with iTunes.
I can actually travel with just the iPad and the charger for 'lite' connectivity and reading books and keeping up with mail if I'll have wifi. I'd hardly call that shackled.
Heck, when I travel on vacation I have far more camera related stuff than my iPad will add -- by weight or volume. The cables, chargers, and everything else to bring A DSLR with 3 lenses and another point-and-shoot camera is actually quite a bit of stuff (about 15 pounds I think). The iPad and charger barely take up any space in comparison.
Well, I think I can guess what's entertaining the non-mouse hand.
*laugh* You know, as I typed that I pretty much knew someone would say something along those lines. Thanks for not disappointing.:-P
No, actually the left hand is sitting on the home row where it belongs. The right hand has become accustomed to being on the mouse a good chunk of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I think more accurately what happens is what you're describing is factors outside of their control.
I don't think they need those margins because they feel 'entitled' to them, so much as Amazon has been able to rely on its sheet size to work on smaller margins. B&N is now simply being squeezed out so badly, they they can't compete.
For them to sell at the same price as Amazon, they'd likely have to do it at an even greater loss -- which will squeeze them dry even faster.
Amazon has truly been able to exploit Economies of scale, and B&N has not. With fewer people buying books overall, and Amazon being able to sell a much larger volume at a lower price, B&N has been squeezed from both ends.
This isn't about entitlement.
If the eye strain I got from Avatar is any indication, I'll pass on the whole 3D thing. It was cool, but the lingering effects weren't what I'd call pleasant.
My eyes just aren't happy with the 3D experience.
Well, that's funny and all ... but when I came out of Avatar, I had blurry vision and a mild headache for the next two hours.
I won't be spending my movie-going dollars on 3D, and I sure as hell won't be buying a 3D TV. I'm certainly not willing to pay the extra $$ for the movie if it's not actually going to be significantly enhanced by 3D.
Well, then obviously I will defer to someone who actually knows about this. I only had TFA to go by. :-P
Cheers
Apparently, it isn't. From TFA ...
So, no, the closed stuff still needs to be written and they don't have it.
Well, yeah, because back then you could do the software, have room for the complete works of Shakespeare, and then possibly a Library of Congress left over. :-P
Heck, at the time, 650MB seemed like a ridiculous amount of space because all of our files were text files, and barely took any space.
Nowadays, I can buy a 2GB SD card in the lineup at the cashier in the impulse things for $3.99. (Maybe not literally, but it's awfully close.)
I'm betting it costs a lot less to lay rails than to actually build an el and all of that infrastructure.
I'm not sure this is entirely feasible, but it's interesting.
What basis for Wikipedia to keep it up? Really?
As the lawyer for Wikipedia points out in his reply to the FBI:
If you're making a factual statement like "This is the FBI seal", you're not exactly saying "I'm the FBI, fear me". Basically the lawyer thinks the FBI are willfully misreading/misrepresenting a statute to try to get wikipedia to pull something down which they are using as purely a reporting of facts.
He also points out that they're selectively ignoring the words in the statute that circumscribe the applicability of the statute as cited by the FBI.
If that were the case /. would be full of retards
Umm, have you been reading it lately? ;-P
OK, fine. I got two acronyms mixed up, and I was incorrect.
Now ... please fuck off and go away.
I don't fault him, but as soon as one of them lies to me out of either ignorance or greed, that is when I tell them to leave me alone.
If you know it's a lie, get away from me. If you don't know it's a lie, you're not qualified to help me shop for it.
If you insist I buy the cables that give you the extra commission, I'll cancel the whole damned sale.
Well, if it's got a working solar sail, and using LCD technology to generate torque ... wow, what a hell of a demonstrator.
But, yes, I see your point. Of course, now that they've shown both of those technologies, I'm sure someone will see what practical use they can put it to.
Well, I don't know about IBM, but this reminds me why I've been treating all forms of HD as "in a constant state of change" since about 1999.
The fact of the matter is, it seems like every two years something comes along which becomes incompatible with all previous incarnations of HD.
Hell, as far as I recall, HDMI was the one that locked down everything with DRM and would no longer work with older devices.
The technologies are changing so fast as to make it a pointless (and expensive) exercise to invest in any of this stuff. I'm glad I'm still running the same amp and TV I've had for almost a decade and never invested in any of this stuff. It's a friggin' moving target.
What, exactly, do you mean by a 'real spacecraft'.
IKAROS is real. It's in space. It's actually using this.
Have I missed something? From what I can tell, this is about as real as you can get.
Date of birth? Address? Phone number?
Some of that stuff gets up into the easy identity theft range.
It is possible that some people specifically wanted to give this information away, but it seems to fall more into the category of not being an informed decision.
So, what, physicists only do physics during lunch?
The rest is all paperwork? How lame. :-P
Well, the damage from any of these objects is potentially catastrophic. It's not like getting a flat tire ... the relative speeds here are enough to cause major damage. The pieces also look like they're fairly well spread out in orbit.
From the linked article, that Chinese satellite that got shot down has created some 2841 pieces -- imagine something the size of a pea striking your orbiter at, what, 10000 mph? That's a lot of kinetic energy.
if someone wants the non-logo version, they have to contact you directly and demonstrate that they've read the license.
Well, then they'd just rip off someone else's stuff.
I don't run into that one very often.
When I find a website that tries to disable my right mouse button, I want to shoot someone ("sorry, this website does not support that function").
I mean, I'm using the RMB for the back button, so stop fscking with my application.
Oh, I think it entirely unlikely that 100 million people chose to disclose that much information.
I blame Facebook constantly changing things, and user apathy/lack of understanding in this case.
This is just one more example of why I don't use Facebook. But, the guy who scraped it was doing something in a gray area, but neither illegal nor against the ToS. Because Facebook themselves made this data public and left it up to the user to lock it down.
Except, if you look at the actual article, they had 20,000 users respond. Which is a tiny subset of the total facebook population.
Of those 20,000 -- only 1% of respondents had bought one, 2% plan to buy one, and a whopping "54% that simply aren’t interested in the iPad".
Like I said, the sample is overwhelmingly people who don't even own one. So, it's a public opinion poll, with data that doesn't seem representative, and they don't have enough actual iPad users to make any intelligent projections about people who own iPads.
I mean, really, if "18% of selfish elites are iPad owners", and they have two hundred iPad owners in their sample size -- the whole article is meaningless drivel. It means they had a couple of asshats who own iPads, but they have no basis to make any statement about iPad owners in general. I mean, is the number of iPad owners in the study even within the margin of error? The 4% of the population which are selfish elites and are iPad critics is actually a larger number than the total number of iPad owner respondents.
The sampling is overwhelmingly tipped to people who don't even own one -- with 6x more people not even knowing what it is than owning one.
In this case, the sample is "those subset of facebook users who chose to do this survey". There is a self selection bias going on here. In no way is this a representative sample of anything, and I seriously doubt that his numbers would pass any threshold of "good".
The total size of Facebook users is not represented in any way by this sample size, so saying Facebook has a lot of users doesn't mean that this survey with 20,000 respondents is meaningful.
Purely playing Devil's advocate here ....
So, Facebook made this stuff public by default. The individual users didn't change their settings to make it private (either they didn't know, or didn't care). This guy collects all of the information which is open to him, and publishes it.
I'm not saying I agree with scraping all of this information, but I place much more of the blame on Facebook for their shitty privacy policies and making a change to the data which made it public by default.
This is a logical conclusion of having that much information public by default. It's scary to get that information on 170 million people, but, as TFA points out, this is hardly illegal.
I'm sure Facebook will say this is a good thing, and that those users wanted that information made available since that seems to be their default position on security and privacy.
Well, I have dropbox.com installed on it and several other machines. If I really need to copy files to it, I can do it that way. Dragging a file to a folder is about as easy as it gets, and I can do it from a web client if I haven't installed dropbox on a given machine. The service and the app are both free.
You're gonna have to explain that one. The one I have doesn't have 3G -- it finds the wireless networks it knows about and signs in automatically. I would assume the 3G one (which also supports wifi) does this as well. Am I missing something? Does the 3G model still use data when a perfectly good wifi is present?
In terms of sheer number? No. But, there's an infinite amount of open source out there, and I really don't want to sift through all of it to see what I want. When I look for apps, I have some niches to fill, which I mostly have, but I'm looking for new kinds of apps that take advantage of the form factor.
I don't want to find 'familiar' software on a new kind of device. I want something built for this format, with an interface that's been changed to match.
They're 'not not' synonymous with iTunes either. You can tell iTunes to rip into MP3 format, and it will do that. You can import MP3s into iTunes. I've never bought a track from the iTunes Music Store, but iTunes itself was happy to mount MP3s on a FreeBSD samba share that were ripped using dagrab.
Why everyone insists that iTunes doesn't do MP3, I will never know. The actual app does them just fine, and since I am one of the rare people who actually buys CDs (apparently), I've ripped a lot of CDs with iTunes (400+ or so).
*laugh* OK, here's where you and I differ. I've put over 15 years of my life into being a software developer. I don't have any interest at all in compiling to my heart's content, I just want it to go.
Compiling and configuring is just not something I find 'fun' anymore. It's work, and I just want to press the pretty buttons when I'm using the iPad -- it's specifically a rebellion away from a computer to something which is more of an appliance.
That's why I like Ubuntu, because it's got a nice package manager that I just click the magic button that says "make wikimedia go now", and in some period of time it appears. The same is true of the FreeBSD package manager. And, the same damned thing is true about the app store. "I need an app that is kinda like a mindmap", find one in the store and install it.
Look, I'm a fan of open source. I installed Slackware from a mammoth pile of floppies in '92 or '93 onto a 486 and ran X Windows at home. I'm first and foremost a UNIX geek, and spent a lot of years coding in C. I think I at least have some degree of credibility as a geek.
But, there's something I find extremely sexy about the iPad, and for me, it's a really worthwhile purchase that I'm happy about. I like to cuddle up with it and surf the web in way that I've never been able to do. It's my current "geek teddy bear" in terms of being shiny and cool.
Every time I hear people slagging it, I find myself thinking "either you're really obsessed with compiling your own software, or you just don't get it" -- which is cool and all, and I respect that.
But all of the things people say are 'limitations' of the device, I find myself thinking that I wouldn't want to do that anyway.
But so many people
Not really. My iPad is primarily used at home or in the backyard. I occasionally take it to the office, but only because there's a few tasks I prefer it for. Generally speaking, it's not a "work" machine.
Yes, the work backpack contains my (Dell) laptop and all of the associated stuff with that. But, I have to carry that stuff wherever I go for work anyway. My cell phone (not smartphone) lives in another messenger bag that I carry the daily stuff in, so it always travels anyway.
I need to sync with iTunes surprisingly little for my iPad, and I pull most stuff via wifi. I've got about 16GB of music on it, which is more than I can realistically listen to in a couple of weeks -- I can bring an iPod if I think I'll need a separate, dedicated music source. I've got (literally) dozens of ebooks and the like on it, as well as about a dozen movies and quite a few games that don't require any connection. Except for charging it, I could go several weeks or more with the iPad disconnected from the mother ship. I've got a lot of off-line content, so I don't even really need an internet connection. I don't know why you think I'd need to constantly sync with iTunes.
I can actually travel with just the iPad and the charger for 'lite' connectivity and reading books and keeping up with mail if I'll have wifi. I'd hardly call that shackled.
Heck, when I travel on vacation I have far more camera related stuff than my iPad will add -- by weight or volume. The cables, chargers, and everything else to bring A DSLR with 3 lenses and another point-and-shoot camera is actually quite a bit of stuff (about 15 pounds I think). The iPad and charger barely take up any space in comparison.
*laugh* You know, as I typed that I pretty much knew someone would say something along those lines. Thanks for not disappointing. :-P
No, actually the left hand is sitting on the home row where it belongs. The right hand has become accustomed to being on the mouse a good chunk of the time.