Hopefully more projects and coders will leave Sun before they get absorbed into Oracle, the industry's largest pool of promising, stagnating technology.
Hey, I like the awfulbar -- but I think I may have its only solid use case. When bored, I typically go through the alphabet with the location bar to find some site which I've visited before, but is not in my usual rotation, to see if there is something interesting and new posted there.
With the awfulbar, I get a much greater cross-section of weirdness with each letter. Just the letter C, for instance, could have Camera-related sites, Cinemark, and for no reason at all the Washington Post.
Two-letter combinations are even better. "GH" gives me Ghostbusters, and a random Mac vs Linux thread. "EW" gives me BBC News and a review of Ponyo. The wonders never cease.
SHOULD a major interface element behave in a random and bizarre fashion? Well, probably not.
Not really surprising... they used the same pattern with the PS2. Announce during the pre-release hype that there will be Linux, and you get a bunch of pundits and gullible geeks talking about how it's going to be taking over from the Real Computer. The actual possibilities with the Linux kit end up limited and forgotten, little more than a technical curiosity.
When the hardware gets updated later on, the Linux kit doesn't as it was only part of the pre-release marketing process. Expect the same thing with the PS4.
They've been known to go off if you leave them on the counter while you take a shower.
Being left on the counter during a shower has been known to cause failure of electronic components. If you leave your phone in the car on a 115-degree day, that can cause failure too. Check your manual for details on acceptable environmental conditions. Do not attempt to determine what is acceptable based on your own "common sense".
Well, in the case of Microsoft Word, the analogy is more like "because I live within walking distance to work, I don't need a steam-powered locomotive with a cracked boiler. At all. Ever."
Look, I'm usually a calm and rational sort of guy, but I hate that effin' program.
Their face to face CS is excellent, over the phone is pretty much the same as everyone else.
I think this bears repeating, and I've found that it's generally true across industries. Humans simply find face-to-face work more engaging and provide better service that way. Heck, you'll get better service at a fast-food place if you come inside to the counter instead of using the drive-thru. Add in the substantial practical benefit of having the device in the hands of the technician and you get a double win. I wish more of the big consumer electronics companies would copy the model.
Slashdot doesn't really have a mod for "uncivil discourse" though there is a pretty broad consensus that such antics should be modded down. So "Troll" tends to be used for disruptive comments in general. I think these are supposed to be hit as "Flamebait" but the difference between trolling and flame-baiting is not well understood. Honestly I don't think the "Flamebait" option gets used too much anymore.
"Godspeed" is a GREAT word, with a near-optimum combination of tone, rhythm, and history to convey the notion of hope for a successful journey. As an atheist, you will pry "Godspeed" out of my cold, dead, not-going-to-Heaven hands, along with "god dammit", Christmas and Bach.
"Game of chicken"? That seems like a somewhat sensational interpretation of a plan that basically says "if someone doesn't fund this project, it will end"
Well, with a "submarine" patent, the patent holder will typically wait until the "invention" is in common use, THEN sue for retroactive damages. Those sorts of awards can get very expensive.
Well, someone should bother, sure. Not Sony. Sony is, to understate things a little, kind of awful at producing software. We're way beyond the stage where hardware design is a really important aspect of making a high-end phone -- it's really a software game now. Sony's attempt would be spectacularly bad.
That's why it makes a sort of sense for Google to take a go at it. Or at least it would, if Google had any sort of visible corporate commitment or larger purpose behind the Android project.
The current airport security regime in the US is a creation of the federal government, not the airplane owners, so I'm not sure what relevance your comment that "planes are private property" has.
I don't know whether that's much of an excuse -- while it would indeed be impossible to get a reasonable image using flash photography, it's completely trivial to get a solid, representative image using regular old non-flash photography.
The problem would be, well, 100 lumens is really awful. So the room would look really dim if the projected image were to look good. Which is pretty much, well, the truth.
Well, you know what they say: sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Or a rigged demo. Or, as in this case, a VERY bad Photoshop job.
You forgot to subtract the amount of that debt which is owed to US citizens. In other words, our "average" citizen may owe $37,255 via the collective government obligation, but that "average" citizen also holds most of that liability in US government bonds, either individually or collectively via Social Security trust/etc.
Hulu's legal structure is irrelevant. Bottom line is that the entity is owned primarily by NBC, ABC, and Fox. Unsurprisingly, the CEO of Hulu is more concerned with what his bosses -- the networks -- think of Hulu's effect on their business than he is with the Hulu profit margin. If his owner-suppliers like him, they can always decrease the license fee to increase the "profits". Since the networks are the owners, they get the money back anyway.
If the networks agreed to create Hulu to prevent competition from other providers (as they did), there could be an issue under antitrust law. But hey, I'm not an antitrust lawyer. My point is that when an entity's owners and its suppliers are the same, it's inherently a captive entity with none of its own objectives.
Inherent transaction costs outweigh the value delivered.
This problem cannot be solved by technology. Sure, you can make a system that reduces the seller's transaction costs to near zero, but all this work has completely ignored the buyer's transaction costs. With micropayments, you're asking your customers to spend more time managing their micro-account than the product you're selling is worth.
Suppose I have a micropayment account which charges to my credit card each month. I read all the articles I want because, hey, it's only a few cents. One of these days I'm going to look at my statement and the total for that month will be over $100 -- more than I intended to spend.
On that day I'm going to have to dig into all my 5-cent charges to figure out what I did wrong. I'll have to figure out how to manage my charges, how to control my use of this content. This is not my job! The day's news is supposed to be bundled up for me, in a good mix with about the right amount of stuff, for a reasonable price that I can understand. I have a brain in my head, not a calculator; I'm not equipped to add up nickels into dollars.
Micropayments are not good for the customers, and unsurprisingly, people have not been willing to pay them.
Slashdot Mirror
Working fine for me -- have you checked your Internet connection?
Hopefully more projects and coders will leave Sun before they get absorbed into Oracle, the industry's largest pool of promising, stagnating technology.
Hey, I like the awfulbar -- but I think I may have its only solid use case. When bored, I typically go through the alphabet with the location bar to find some site which I've visited before, but is not in my usual rotation, to see if there is something interesting and new posted there.
With the awfulbar, I get a much greater cross-section of weirdness with each letter. Just the letter C, for instance, could have Camera-related sites, Cinemark, and for no reason at all the Washington Post.
Two-letter combinations are even better. "GH" gives me Ghostbusters, and a random Mac vs Linux thread. "EW" gives me BBC News and a review of Ponyo. The wonders never cease.
SHOULD a major interface element behave in a random and bizarre fashion? Well, probably not.
Not really surprising... they used the same pattern with the PS2. Announce during the pre-release hype that there will be Linux, and you get a bunch of pundits and gullible geeks talking about how it's going to be taking over from the Real Computer. The actual possibilities with the Linux kit end up limited and forgotten, little more than a technical curiosity.
When the hardware gets updated later on, the Linux kit doesn't as it was only part of the pre-release marketing process. Expect the same thing with the PS4.
I'm not sure whether to take this straight or as satire. Does the "performance crown" in PC games really mean the game that runs the slowest?
They've been known to go off if you leave them on the counter while you take a shower.
Being left on the counter during a shower has been known to cause failure of electronic components. If you leave your phone in the car on a 115-degree day, that can cause failure too. Check your manual for details on acceptable environmental conditions. Do not attempt to determine what is acceptable based on your own "common sense".
Well, in the case of Microsoft Word, the analogy is more like "because I live within walking distance to work, I don't need a steam-powered locomotive with a cracked boiler. At all. Ever."
Look, I'm usually a calm and rational sort of guy, but I hate that effin' program.
Their face to face CS is excellent, over the phone is pretty much the same as everyone else.
I think this bears repeating, and I've found that it's generally true across industries. Humans simply find face-to-face work more engaging and provide better service that way. Heck, you'll get better service at a fast-food place if you come inside to the counter instead of using the drive-thru. Add in the substantial practical benefit of having the device in the hands of the technician and you get a double win. I wish more of the big consumer electronics companies would copy the model.
Slashdot doesn't really have a mod for "uncivil discourse" though there is a pretty broad consensus that such antics should be modded down. So "Troll" tends to be used for disruptive comments in general. I think these are supposed to be hit as "Flamebait" but the difference between trolling and flame-baiting is not well understood. Honestly I don't think the "Flamebait" option gets used too much anymore.
I'm pretty sure that everyone on Slashdot is well aware of Tesla. Next you can discover Alan Turing for us.
"Godspeed" is a GREAT word, with a near-optimum combination of tone, rhythm, and history to convey the notion of hope for a successful journey. As an atheist, you will pry "Godspeed" out of my cold, dead, not-going-to-Heaven hands, along with "god dammit", Christmas and Bach.
"Game of chicken"? That seems like a somewhat sensational interpretation of a plan that basically says "if someone doesn't fund this project, it will end"
You should Google for "GWT". But it's more Java source cross-compiled to JavaScript.
Well, with a "submarine" patent, the patent holder will typically wait until the "invention" is in common use, THEN sue for retroactive damages. Those sorts of awards can get very expensive.
Well, someone should bother, sure. Not Sony. Sony is, to understate things a little, kind of awful at producing software. We're way beyond the stage where hardware design is a really important aspect of making a high-end phone -- it's really a software game now. Sony's attempt would be spectacularly bad.
That's why it makes a sort of sense for Google to take a go at it. Or at least it would, if Google had any sort of visible corporate commitment or larger purpose behind the Android project.
the time it would take still ends up being cheaper than screwing with xorg.conf - if your time is worth $25 an hour
If your time is really worth $25 an hour, I would hope you'd at least have the sense to use Ubuntu.
Well, I guess if you're satisfied with your current setup (which does sound sweet) then you get to not upgrade for free.
I'm also interested to know what your point is -- do we have to correctly guess before you'll make it? This could take a while...
The current airport security regime in the US is a creation of the federal government, not the airplane owners, so I'm not sure what relevance your comment that "planes are private property" has.
I don't know whether that's much of an excuse -- while it would indeed be impossible to get a reasonable image using flash photography, it's completely trivial to get a solid, representative image using regular old non-flash photography.
The problem would be, well, 100 lumens is really awful. So the room would look really dim if the projected image were to look good. Which is pretty much, well, the truth.
Well, you know what they say: sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Or a rigged demo. Or, as in this case, a VERY bad Photoshop job.
Sorry, we each have our grammar-nazi burdens to bear. I just bared mine.
I hate you.
You forgot to subtract the amount of that debt which is owed to US citizens. In other words, our "average" citizen may owe $37,255 via the collective government obligation, but that "average" citizen also holds most of that liability in US government bonds, either individually or collectively via Social Security trust/etc.
Hulu's legal structure is irrelevant. Bottom line is that the entity is owned primarily by NBC, ABC, and Fox. Unsurprisingly, the CEO of Hulu is more concerned with what his bosses -- the networks -- think of Hulu's effect on their business than he is with the Hulu profit margin. If his owner-suppliers like him, they can always decrease the license fee to increase the "profits". Since the networks are the owners, they get the money back anyway.
If the networks agreed to create Hulu to prevent competition from other providers (as they did), there could be an issue under antitrust law. But hey, I'm not an antitrust lawyer. My point is that when an entity's owners and its suppliers are the same, it's inherently a captive entity with none of its own objectives.
Inherent transaction costs outweigh the value delivered.
This problem cannot be solved by technology. Sure, you can make a system that reduces the seller's transaction costs to near zero, but all this work has completely ignored the buyer's transaction costs. With micropayments, you're asking your customers to spend more time managing their micro-account than the product you're selling is worth.
Suppose I have a micropayment account which charges to my credit card each month. I read all the articles I want because, hey, it's only a few cents. One of these days I'm going to look at my statement and the total for that month will be over $100 -- more than I intended to spend.
On that day I'm going to have to dig into all my 5-cent charges to figure out what I did wrong. I'll have to figure out how to manage my charges, how to control my use of this content. This is not my job! The day's news is supposed to be bundled up for me, in a good mix with about the right amount of stuff, for a reasonable price that I can understand. I have a brain in my head, not a calculator; I'm not equipped to add up nickels into dollars.
Micropayments are not good for the customers, and unsurprisingly, people have not been willing to pay them.