According to their earnings report from July of this year, Netflix was improved but still earning less than %8. While that's not bad, that's below the earnout for a well-managed stock portfolio. That means investors would still be better suited by taking their money out of Neflix, and putting it elsewhere. And if Neflix can't get their profits up, that is exactly what will happen.
Greedy corporate bastards. Trying to stay in business, rather than developing for a platform that serves less than 1% of their users.
And since they don't redistribute Apache or the like, they're not actually obliged under OSS licences to contribute code back. You could take the negative viewpoint that they're contributing in order to not have to maintain separate branches and patches. But it is still a very positive corporate position to take, and they should be encouraged for it.
To be fair, Adobe does support Linux in various ways when it makes financial sense for them. They support (ish) Reader and Flash for standardized data reading. They shipped Flex Builder, but didn't see the demand. And they apparently have some business software that runs under Linux. I'm vaguely surprised there isn't a Premiere Pro renderfarm back-end for Linux, as that should fit their paradigm well, but the proprietary format plug-ins might make that a bit of a mess.
What I do have is a couple UNIX boxes that are completely capable of fetching data over a network and displaying it on screen. There's absolutely no reason I should have to buy another piece of hardware to do that.
And where is the love for us DOS/OLPC/Mailstation owners? They should support streaming to Chumby, QNX, Newton, Haiku, Menuette, and the Fossil Abacus. Those greedy, puppy-hating bastards.
BTW, what kind of UNIX are you running? System V? Linux? BSD? Solaris? Xenix? UnixWare? NeXT? Mach? What about underlying architecture? Remember, POSIX isn't going to get you as far as binary compatibility for graphical realtime video stream decompression with contractually required DRM.
Open Source != Linux. This is the kind of associative crap that stops corporate adoption of genuinely usable and useful open source software. There is probably more FOSS on Windows than Linux these days.
Also Netflix is tied into a Microsoft streaming media solution. I do not believe that Microsoft has a Linux solution for that. And the contractually-required layer of DRM is by definition impossible in open-source solutions. These are not the fault of Netflix.
Just because they're not releasing a Linux client doesn't mean they're preventing their customers from using their service on Linux. Netflix will run fine under virtualized XP.
When they quite literally have you by your life, they can charge whatever they want. It's the definition of unbalanced contracts and negotiating from a position of weakness.
I'm vaguely surprised that companies aren't held legally liable if their outsourcing companies don't adhere to certain security standards. It shouldn't be any different if a company you outsource to in India or a division of your company in Idaho leave your clients information unsecured.
These are simulating soldiers with such damage that we have to simulate their legs with robots. I'm guessing they're getting wheeled onto the first cargo flight home.
Or maybe, just maybe, war isn't something that can be so easily avoided.
We haven't exactly been going out of our way to prove this point recently. Unless your point is that idiots will inevitably get elected and wage war on other idiots.
Yes. It's a good thing that no e-mail address has been spammed before this happened. And a tragedy that our perfectly shiny inboxes will be lost forever to these hackers.
While you may be joking, I'm vaguely surprised there are still pilots on planes. The takeoff, landing, and flight can all pretty much be automated. A good pilot is only really needed for emergencies. You could have bunches of good pilots on standby in a warehouse, just waiting to remotely take over the controls from AIs in emergencies. Or maybe on-board. But why have the pilot as a potential point of failure?
Any system pretty much anywhere that people claim is 100% secure is a big red sign that they don't understand either security or the system. We have focused billions of dollars of effort on securing our airports, yet kids still sneak into the wheel wells of planes. Technical considerations aside, security means granting access to some people and not to others. And the moment you grant access to some people, you have at least one attack vector.
How exactly do you take Amazon's servers offline? Amazon is the people you cloud your servers to when you're out of capacity. Visa / Mastercard / Paypal... Sure. Plausible targets. DDosing Amazon is like trying to DDos Google, and only 1 hop away from ddosing 127.0.0.1.
Now, if they specifically targeted one part of Amazon's infrastructure... say, their payment validation server, they might be somewhere. But all of Amazon?
Why do you think it is $60 per year to buy a magazine at stands, or $20 per year to have it mailed to you? Most magazines make their real money on advertising, and for that they need to let advertisers know who you are.
I'm not surprised Apple doesn't realize this, considering the problems they've had with their advertising program recently.
I carry a pretty messy bag with me. I work a lot, and I have a lot of random supplies that gets thrown into my bag.
I have never once had a TSA screener stop me for the swiss army knife I keep forgetting to pull out, or the leatherman with built-in knife that keeps making it through. Talking to friends, this is pretty common.
What did the 9/11 attackers use to take over the planes? Just little Exacto knives. Apparently for our billion dollar scanners, we can't even keep those off of planes.
According to the US bureau of transportation, there are some 735 million passengers flying in the US each year. If each of those people loses just one hour to security screening, that's about 84 thousand years worth of lifetime lost, per year, in the US alone. With a 78 year life expectancy, that's 1,078 lives lost each year just to time it takes for security screenings. That doesn't include the lives of the TSA screeners, of course. If you presume that all 43 thousand of them work 40 hour weeks, that's another 150 lifetimes lost each year there.
Even on a raw numbers basis, I'm not convinced the current level of security screening isn't costing us more lives than it saves.
ANY costs assigned to the cell carriers will be directly (or even inflatedly) passed onto the consumer. Period.
That's not really how markets work. Cell carriers will charge whatever they think will get them maximum profits. Input costs... the cost of doing business... only have an indirect effect upon output charges.
They charge as much as they think they can get away with. If their price structure is flexible enough to "pass the costs on," then they weren't charging enough to begin with.
And of course cell carriers will tell you that they will pass charges onto the consumer. They want the consumer thinking that anything which lowers their input costs are going to lower the cost to the consumer. That's only indirectly true, and if history has taught us anything it's the net effect is more profitable companies.
Not that there is anything wrong with profitable companies. That's the goal, after all. But we don't need to subsidize them.
Certain agreements are maintained because while you have ownership over a physical thing, you still don't have copyright. And to run, certain things require copying. Software has to be copied to disk, videos have to be copied to RAM, etc.
Really, the whole idea of copyright needs to fall by the wayside to DISTRIBUTION rights. You own a thing, you can copy it as many times as you need to for your own use. You just can't give those copies to anyone, and you can't retain those copies if you sell the original. At minimum, everything digital requires copying to function internally anyway. This would cut out a lot of the BS.
A: He trained in a simulator more extensively than probably anyone else around, so he has the theory. B: He drives a normal car, so he has the physical side of things. C: He did these 15 laps at a training facility, with training, under professional supervision anyway. They thought he was good to go. They're not going to risk a million-dollar vehicle on a lark.
A potato cannon isn't going to maim anyone other than the operator, unless you point the damned thing at someone. Then it is basically a thrown rock. An electric vehicle doesn't need to be 1 tonne. The electric vehicle I built weighs about 50 pounds, has an 8 mile range, and isn't any more dangerous on a road than a cyclist.
And EVERYONE should understand mains electricity. The worst you're likely to do is short out your own building, as those things are pretty well insulated from eachother. You could also set fire to something, but you're standing right there, hopefully with an extinguisher handy. Also, you could theoretically bridge across your heart, though with 110 in the US that's not all that common, or you could leave underprotected wiring and rot out your wall plates. But electrical rot generally comes from not knowing about your electrical system, rather than doing your own work. And ignorance of electricity is going to cause you far more problems down the road. A relative refuses to allow me to fix one of her lamps, as she's afraid that the electricity mains boogyman is going to eat me. Yet she has put off getting a professional electrician in for so long that the roof support beam it is built into is basically hollow.
I was a bit shocked the first time I realized that the local archery club allowed anyone to come in off the street and just fire bows at a wall without professional training. But what are you going to do, backfire? The same thing is true of the local gun range. They have rules around safe handling that anyone can understand, but you don't need to be certified to just go in and try things out.
Do you *need* safety training to use, say, a light electric RC plane? No, though you'll probably accidentally destroy 1/2 dozen of the things while learning. And you'll be responsible for anything destroyed in the process.
It just seems like there is a pervasive professionalization of private life these days. "Don't do X! Let a professional handle it!" There are some areas where this is valuable advice. But not all, and probably not most. If you're going to be a full, rounded human being, you've got to be one of the people who leads in the creation of new things. That means understanding how things work, and that means not allowing irrational fears to overtake learning.
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According to their earnings report from July of this year, Netflix was improved but still earning less than %8. While that's not bad, that's below the earnout for a well-managed stock portfolio. That means investors would still be better suited by taking their money out of Neflix, and putting it elsewhere. And if Neflix can't get their profits up, that is exactly what will happen.
Greedy corporate bastards. Trying to stay in business, rather than developing for a platform that serves less than 1% of their users.
And since they don't redistribute Apache or the like, they're not actually obliged under OSS licences to contribute code back. You could take the negative viewpoint that they're contributing in order to not have to maintain separate branches and patches. But it is still a very positive corporate position to take, and they should be encouraged for it.
To be fair, Adobe does support Linux in various ways when it makes financial sense for them. They support (ish) Reader and Flash for standardized data reading. They shipped Flex Builder, but didn't see the demand. And they apparently have some business software that runs under Linux. I'm vaguely surprised there isn't a Premiere Pro renderfarm back-end for Linux, as that should fit their paradigm well, but the proprietary format plug-ins might make that a bit of a mess.
What I do have is a couple UNIX boxes that are completely capable of fetching data over a network and displaying it on screen. There's absolutely no reason I should have to buy another piece of hardware to do that.
And where is the love for us DOS/OLPC/Mailstation owners? They should support streaming to Chumby, QNX, Newton, Haiku, Menuette, and the Fossil Abacus. Those greedy, puppy-hating bastards.
BTW, what kind of UNIX are you running? System V? Linux? BSD? Solaris? Xenix? UnixWare? NeXT? Mach? What about underlying architecture? Remember, POSIX isn't going to get you as far as binary compatibility for graphical realtime video stream decompression with contractually required DRM.
Open Source != Linux. This is the kind of associative crap that stops corporate adoption of genuinely usable and useful open source software. There is probably more FOSS on Windows than Linux these days.
Also Netflix is tied into a Microsoft streaming media solution. I do not believe that Microsoft has a Linux solution for that. And the contractually-required layer of DRM is by definition impossible in open-source solutions. These are not the fault of Netflix.
Just because they're not releasing a Linux client doesn't mean they're preventing their customers from using their service on Linux. Netflix will run fine under virtualized XP.
The iPhone in my pocket has a higher bandwidth for a single connection than an entire Iridium satellite!
In your pocket, yes. But what happens when you attempt to hold it?
At that point, why not have a hybrid WiFi / 3G / GSM / Satellite phone? Ultimately existing cellular infrastructure will be cheaper than satellite.
When they quite literally have you by your life, they can charge whatever they want. It's the definition of unbalanced contracts and negotiating from a position of weakness.
I'm vaguely surprised that companies aren't held legally liable if their outsourcing companies don't adhere to certain security standards. It shouldn't be any different if a company you outsource to in India or a division of your company in Idaho leave your clients information unsecured.
These are simulating soldiers with such damage that we have to simulate their legs with robots. I'm guessing they're getting wheeled onto the first cargo flight home.
It's CNN. Be thankful they didn't refer to it as filled with an information superhighway.
Or maybe, just maybe, war isn't something that can be so easily avoided.
We haven't exactly been going out of our way to prove this point recently. Unless your point is that idiots will inevitably get elected and wage war on other idiots.
Yes. It's a good thing that no e-mail address has been spammed before this happened. And a tragedy that our perfectly shiny inboxes will be lost forever to these hackers.
While you may be joking, I'm vaguely surprised there are still pilots on planes. The takeoff, landing, and flight can all pretty much be automated. A good pilot is only really needed for emergencies. You could have bunches of good pilots on standby in a warehouse, just waiting to remotely take over the controls from AIs in emergencies. Or maybe on-board. But why have the pilot as a potential point of failure?
Any system pretty much anywhere that people claim is 100% secure is a big red sign that they don't understand either security or the system. We have focused billions of dollars of effort on securing our airports, yet kids still sneak into the wheel wells of planes. Technical considerations aside, security means granting access to some people and not to others. And the moment you grant access to some people, you have at least one attack vector.
Not the same, but related.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZM4Bpt3xZU
Clearly you kids never have worked with and Apple ADB keyboard. You and your fancy 3rd key.
How exactly do you take Amazon's servers offline? Amazon is the people you cloud your servers to when you're out of capacity. Visa / Mastercard / Paypal... Sure. Plausible targets. DDosing Amazon is like trying to DDos Google, and only 1 hop away from ddosing 127.0.0.1.
Now, if they specifically targeted one part of Amazon's infrastructure... say, their payment validation server, they might be somewhere. But all of Amazon?
Why do you think it is $60 per year to buy a magazine at stands, or $20 per year to have it mailed to you? Most magazines make their real money on advertising, and for that they need to let advertisers know who you are.
I'm not surprised Apple doesn't realize this, considering the problems they've had with their advertising program recently.
I carry a pretty messy bag with me. I work a lot, and I have a lot of random supplies that gets thrown into my bag.
I have never once had a TSA screener stop me for the swiss army knife I keep forgetting to pull out, or the leatherman with built-in knife that keeps making it through. Talking to friends, this is pretty common.
What did the 9/11 attackers use to take over the planes? Just little Exacto knives. Apparently for our billion dollar scanners, we can't even keep those off of planes.
According to the US bureau of transportation, there are some 735 million passengers flying in the US each year. If each of those people loses just one hour to security screening, that's about 84 thousand years worth of lifetime lost, per year, in the US alone. With a 78 year life expectancy, that's 1,078 lives lost each year just to time it takes for security screenings. That doesn't include the lives of the TSA screeners, of course. If you presume that all 43 thousand of them work 40 hour weeks, that's another 150 lifetimes lost each year there.
Even on a raw numbers basis, I'm not convinced the current level of security screening isn't costing us more lives than it saves.
ANY costs assigned to the cell carriers will be directly (or even inflatedly) passed onto the consumer. Period.
That's not really how markets work. Cell carriers will charge whatever they think will get them maximum profits. Input costs... the cost of doing business... only have an indirect effect upon output charges.
They charge as much as they think they can get away with. If their price structure is flexible enough to "pass the costs on," then they weren't charging enough to begin with.
And of course cell carriers will tell you that they will pass charges onto the consumer. They want the consumer thinking that anything which lowers their input costs are going to lower the cost to the consumer. That's only indirectly true, and if history has taught us anything it's the net effect is more profitable companies.
Not that there is anything wrong with profitable companies. That's the goal, after all. But we don't need to subsidize them.
Certain agreements are maintained because while you have ownership over a physical thing, you still don't have copyright. And to run, certain things require copying. Software has to be copied to disk, videos have to be copied to RAM, etc.
Really, the whole idea of copyright needs to fall by the wayside to DISTRIBUTION rights. You own a thing, you can copy it as many times as you need to for your own use. You just can't give those copies to anyone, and you can't retain those copies if you sell the original. At minimum, everything digital requires copying to function internally anyway. This would cut out a lot of the BS.
A: He trained in a simulator more extensively than probably anyone else around, so he has the theory.
B: He drives a normal car, so he has the physical side of things.
C: He did these 15 laps at a training facility, with training, under professional supervision anyway. They thought he was good to go. They're not going to risk a million-dollar vehicle on a lark.
A potato cannon isn't going to maim anyone other than the operator, unless you point the damned thing at someone. Then it is basically a thrown rock. An electric vehicle doesn't need to be 1 tonne. The electric vehicle I built weighs about 50 pounds, has an 8 mile range, and isn't any more dangerous on a road than a cyclist.
And EVERYONE should understand mains electricity. The worst you're likely to do is short out your own building, as those things are pretty well insulated from eachother. You could also set fire to something, but you're standing right there, hopefully with an extinguisher handy. Also, you could theoretically bridge across your heart, though with 110 in the US that's not all that common, or you could leave underprotected wiring and rot out your wall plates. But electrical rot generally comes from not knowing about your electrical system, rather than doing your own work. And ignorance of electricity is going to cause you far more problems down the road. A relative refuses to allow me to fix one of her lamps, as she's afraid that the electricity mains boogyman is going to eat me. Yet she has put off getting a professional electrician in for so long that the roof support beam it is built into is basically hollow.
I was a bit shocked the first time I realized that the local archery club allowed anyone to come in off the street and just fire bows at a wall without professional training. But what are you going to do, backfire? The same thing is true of the local gun range. They have rules around safe handling that anyone can understand, but you don't need to be certified to just go in and try things out.
Do you *need* safety training to use, say, a light electric RC plane? No, though you'll probably accidentally destroy 1/2 dozen of the things while learning. And you'll be responsible for anything destroyed in the process.
It just seems like there is a pervasive professionalization of private life these days. "Don't do X! Let a professional handle it!" There are some areas where this is valuable advice. But not all, and probably not most. If you're going to be a full, rounded human being, you've got to be one of the people who leads in the creation of new things. That means understanding how things work, and that means not allowing irrational fears to overtake learning.
I honestly thought someone Photoshopped Dick Chaney's head into a race car.
That having been said, that's one lucky dude. Getting a chance to race around a real track in one of those? Well done, white man, well done.