Comparing inkjet printing to printing on a ketchup packet is a terrible analogy. If you spent $100,000 on a printing press designed to print on plastic, and wanted to print exactly the same thing a million times, with a run-up time of hours, your unit cost is going to be much cheaper than if you want to print one copy of unspecified content on a piece of unspecified paper, and have it done in 20 seconds.
I'm not defending HP, but before color printing ink carts were a lot cheaper and printers were a lot more expensive. Unfortunately, everyone decided they wanted color printers, but they didn't want to pay $300 for them like I did for my HP DeskJet 500 (which lasted about 8 years).
So, you pay $80 for a color printer, which I expect costs more to build than a B&W one, and make up the difference in expensive ink.
Steve probably wouldn't like the comparison of Apple to Mickey D's, and he wouldn't ever admit that Windows is a steak dinner compared to anything by Apple. But I think the comparison is very astute. If McDonald's tried to add a steak dinner and a wine list to their menu, it would go over like a lead balloon. They succeed by doing a very small set of things well (matter of opinion, I know). But no one wants to live in a world where McDonald's is the only restaurant... Not even the CEO of McD's.
I've play a lot of computer games over the past 25 years. Most games suck. Of the ones that don't suck, most are only kind of good, and can't hold the average player's interest for more than four hours because they get boring and repetitive.
Some really good games, like the Half-Life series, can keep you playing to the end. Some other good games, like Dragon Age, may keep you playing for quite awhile, but maybe not for 40-60 hours.
However, looking at the success of MMOs gives the lie to these statistics. Millions of people have spent hundreds of hours playing the same game, and paying a monthly fee to do so. I assume it's because they are still interested in whatever it offers them. But many other MMOs have failed than succeeded. Again, I assume because they weren't interesting enough to keep people playing.
I recently paid $5 for a little game called Trine. It gave me a good 5 hours of play, which I greatly enjoyed, and I was done. I feel good about that purchase, and I bet it didn't cost $40 million to produce. Honestly, I don't think I would have wanted to play it for 20 hours.
I'd love to see more really good, short games, as long as I don't have to pay $30-60 for them.
Maybe I'm missing something basic here, but why is the GPS system needed? The cameras aren't moving, so their position is already known, as is the distance between them. They aren't somehow hacking into your car's GPS system (if they were, the cameras wouldn't be needed).
If they can take a photo of your car's plate from one camera, and then take a photo of it from another camera, they can just measure the time using a normal clock at the central tracking site and calculate your speed easily.
They won't be successful if they cost $100 more for a "similar" model (similar in the public's mind). It's like when the iPod blew up and suddenly all these nice competitors came out at the same price and no one bought them. You can't beat Apple at the design and marketing game. You have to beat them on features AND price.
However, they just have basic cable and don't use a cable box, so this won't affect them. However, as Comcast is slowly switching even their basic service to low-level encryption, requiring decoding for all channels, it looks like they will finally be dragged into the DVR age along with the rest of us. This is why everyone hates Kabletown.
That is the stupidest analogy I've heard in awhile. It's actually akin to telling kids not to drive drunk, and then teaching them how to use a breathalyzer. His drinking analogy would be like telling kids not to have sex and then assigning them to read the Kama Sutra.
I used to be a big supporter of Ubisoft... I've purchased their games since the original Unreal all the way through the first three Splinter Cell titles. But once their DRM started getting burdomsome I stopped buying them. I will continue to not buy Ubisoft games because of their ridiculous choices in DRM enforcement. Luckily there are plenty of good games to buy from other companies that don't saddle me with such schemes.
I'm not sure how I'm supposedly consuming information for 12 hours a day not including my time at work. After I work for 8 hours and sleep for 8 hours, there are only 8 hours left in the day, and I'm not "consuming information" for about 100% of that remaining time. Is the average being pumped up by all the people who aren't working and are sitting at home watching daytime TV for 16 hours a day? I wouldn't consider that "information" anyway, but the study might.
at least in California. Hourly paid employees are paid by the hour, regardless of where they are or when the hour is. If you get a salary, you get a set paycheck regardless of the number of hours you work, including answering the phone in the middle of the night on a Saturday. It's very simple. If you don't like being on call, don't take the job.
Report them to the BSA at https://reporting.bsa.org/usa/home.aspx and make a boatload of reward money. Then start looking for another job as you wait a couple years for your check while they sort it all out.
It's not exactly the same, but the phone comes with an expansion port built in and a keyboard you attach to it. They plan to release other hardware expansion devices for it over time.
I suspect this won't affect most people because I almost never get anywhere near the supposed 12Mb speeds Comcast promises, and neither does anyone else I know. If I got 9Mb speeds for 15 minutes straight I'd probably drop dead of shock.
Are we concerned that someone with a mental illness will see the blots online and then later will not be cured because this one diagnostic tool isn't useful? You'd run the same risk with anyone who's seen more than one psychiatrist in their life. Perhaps if the psychiatrist simply asks each patient "have you seen these before?". If a modern doctor considers these inkblots their only tool, perhaps they should retire.
It's a test... I think publishing it online would be the same as publishing any other test online. If it's still generally or widely used, then the ethical implications should be the same as, for example, publishing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator online (trademark issues aside).
The MBTI Foundation's website lists what they consider to be ethical use. But this is opinion, and others might say there are no real ethical issues because it's simply a list of questions people can ask themselves.
I think it's pretty obvious that they are looking for employees that don't waste their time on the internet logging into chat rooms and social networking sites.
Or liars. Maybe they are looking for lots and lots of liars. It is the government, after all.
If the average consumer of Disney stuff online had a choice between multiple comparable ISPs, then their gambit might make sense. But most Americans don't have such a choice.
For example, if Comcast refuses to pay, subscribers aren't going to switch in droves to something else, because for many Comcast subscribers, there effectively isn't anyone else.
Disney will lose far more business with this move than any ISP will. It's not like there is a shortage of sources for Disney content. People will just keep getting it elsewhere.
Nintendo could have easily made the Wii far more powerful, CPU, RAM, and graphics-wise. But then it would have cost far more, and would have lost one of the main reasons it sits in so many homes now. A lot of families bought the Wii for their kids for three main reasons: Price, N's kid-friendly reputation, and ease-of-use. Only the first factor would have changed with better hardware, but it would have made the decision a lot harder if it had debuted at $350+.
To be honest, most Wii games are crap. The Wii has fewer highly rated games than either of the other systems because while good developers are still figuring out how to make good games, the shelves are filling up with junk pushed out by opportunistic hacks with every kid-friendly IP license they can get their hands on.
But I bet if the Wii had the power of the X360, the main result would have been way more ports of standard games like PoP, and instead of complaining about RAM limitations, devs would be complaining about having to develop a new control scheme. At least this way they are forced to come up with new ideas instead of just rehashing all the same ones that are on the other two systems.
It's a pet peeve of mine when people use the term "unmanned drone" when referring to remote-piloted drones. Unless I'm mistaken, every Reaper, Predator, or other drone firing live ammunition is still has a real person pulling the trigger (and usually controlling flight). Most planes are now "fly-by-wire", which is just local "remote control". The pilot may be in the craft, but they aren't connected mechanically to the ailerons any more than someone sitting at a joystick in a trailer on the ground.
Saying that people are already being killed by unmanned drones elicits thoughts of autonomous killing machines. We aren't quite there yet, so let's be accurate and avoid the FUD.
I don't know who is being forced to get IE8 without windows "asking", but it asked me this week, and I declined with no problems.
I have automatic updates (critical only) turned on, and it didn't download automatically. I ran a manual "Windows Update" two days ago to see if there were any optional driver updates for me and it listed IE8 in the "critical" section, but I was able to untick the check box right there. It simply warned me that I might be at risk if I don't download critical updates, but went ahead and skipped it with no other complaints.
"Each needs to be secured, antivirused, firewalled and patched"
I think this comment demonstrates a lack of understanding of how this sort of virtualization would work in the real world. Any company that upgrades to Win 7 is going to have the bulk of their apps ready to run on it, or there would be no reason to upgrade. No one is going to install W7 and then run all their apps virtualized in XP.
The point is that many companies will be stuck with a couple aging apps that aren't upgradeable for whatever reason but are vital to their workflow. These few legacy apps will be run in a virtual XP image that is running inside W7. All traffic from the old app to the hardware and the internet will be going through W7's firewalls and A/V already. No need to run Norton in the XP instance also.
And since these old apps will already be well configured, the virtual image will be a steady-state, not requiring patching. In the worst case scenario, someone gets a virus in their virtual machine. So, you close the application and boom, the virus is inactive. Then you re-install the VM on that user's PC and the virus is gone.
I think this statement undermines most of your argument. You are not being forced to do anything. You are being offered a service/product that you can choose to accept or not. It is up to you to decide if what's offered is worth what is asked in return.
Feel free to decline and then complain that the offer isn't to your liking. But don't talk about being forced into anything. Your argument would gain as much credibility by invoking fascism.
From the original story it sounds like you'd still need to be logged into a steam account to play. Perhaps the difference being that since the account data is encoded into the game, you won't need to be running the Steam client logged into your account, but instead the game will be logged into your account as "mysteamID / TF2". And at the same time, your other computer could have a game logged in as "mysteamID / LF4". That would be pretty great and would more closely mimic how physical installs of a game work.
When I buy a game through Steam and install it, I can only play when I'm logged into my Steam account. I can re-download the game onto multiple computers and hop between them at will, logging into steam on each system to play. I already do this between my main PC, my work PC, my wife's laptop, and my in-laws PC in another city.
My parents live in a rural area in the Sacramento Valley. Their only other option was satellite, and the WISP ended up being significantly cheaper. They had to pay for installation, but the WISP maintains ownership of the equipment, so there was no huge up-front cost. The monthly bill is like $30, which is half what I pay for Comcast in Sacramento.
Speeds aren't amazing, but it's so much faster then their old 28.8k dial-up that my mom actually started using the internet again after giving up on it in frustration.
Slashdot Mirror
Comparing inkjet printing to printing on a ketchup packet is a terrible analogy. If you spent $100,000 on a printing press designed to print on plastic, and wanted to print exactly the same thing a million times, with a run-up time of hours, your unit cost is going to be much cheaper than if you want to print one copy of unspecified content on a piece of unspecified paper, and have it done in 20 seconds.
I'm not defending HP, but before color printing ink carts were a lot cheaper and printers were a lot more expensive. Unfortunately, everyone decided they wanted color printers, but they didn't want to pay $300 for them like I did for my HP DeskJet 500 (which lasted about 8 years).
So, you pay $80 for a color printer, which I expect costs more to build than a B&W one, and make up the difference in expensive ink.
Steve probably wouldn't like the comparison of Apple to Mickey D's, and he wouldn't ever admit that Windows is a steak dinner compared to anything by Apple. But I think the comparison is very astute. If McDonald's tried to add a steak dinner and a wine list to their menu, it would go over like a lead balloon. They succeed by doing a very small set of things well (matter of opinion, I know). But no one wants to live in a world where McDonald's is the only restaurant... Not even the CEO of McD's.
I've play a lot of computer games over the past 25 years. Most games suck. Of the ones that don't suck, most are only kind of good, and can't hold the average player's interest for more than four hours because they get boring and repetitive.
Some really good games, like the Half-Life series, can keep you playing to the end. Some other good games, like Dragon Age, may keep you playing for quite awhile, but maybe not for 40-60 hours.
However, looking at the success of MMOs gives the lie to these statistics. Millions of people have spent hundreds of hours playing the same game, and paying a monthly fee to do so. I assume it's because they are still interested in whatever it offers them. But many other MMOs have failed than succeeded. Again, I assume because they weren't interesting enough to keep people playing.
I recently paid $5 for a little game called Trine. It gave me a good 5 hours of play, which I greatly enjoyed, and I was done. I feel good about that purchase, and I bet it didn't cost $40 million to produce. Honestly, I don't think I would have wanted to play it for 20 hours.
I'd love to see more really good, short games, as long as I don't have to pay $30-60 for them.
Maybe I'm missing something basic here, but why is the GPS system needed? The cameras aren't moving, so their position is already known, as is the distance between them. They aren't somehow hacking into your car's GPS system (if they were, the cameras wouldn't be needed).
If they can take a photo of your car's plate from one camera, and then take a photo of it from another camera, they can just measure the time using a normal clock at the central tracking site and calculate your speed easily.
What exactly is the GPS system telling them?
They won't be successful if they cost $100 more for a "similar" model (similar in the public's mind). It's like when the iPod blew up and suddenly all these nice competitors came out at the same price and no one bought them. You can't beat Apple at the design and marketing game. You have to beat them on features AND price.
However, they just have basic cable and don't use a cable box, so this won't affect them. However, as Comcast is slowly switching even their basic service to low-level encryption, requiring decoding for all channels, it looks like they will finally be dragged into the DVR age along with the rest of us. This is why everyone hates Kabletown.
That is the stupidest analogy I've heard in awhile. It's actually akin to telling kids not to drive drunk, and then teaching them how to use a breathalyzer. His drinking analogy would be like telling kids not to have sex and then assigning them to read the Kama Sutra.
I used to be a big supporter of Ubisoft... I've purchased their games since the original Unreal all the way through the first three Splinter Cell titles. But once their DRM started getting burdomsome I stopped buying them. I will continue to not buy Ubisoft games because of their ridiculous choices in DRM enforcement. Luckily there are plenty of good games to buy from other companies that don't saddle me with such schemes.
I'm not sure how I'm supposedly consuming information for 12 hours a day not including my time at work. After I work for 8 hours and sleep for 8 hours, there are only 8 hours left in the day, and I'm not "consuming information" for about 100% of that remaining time. Is the average being pumped up by all the people who aren't working and are sitting at home watching daytime TV for 16 hours a day? I wouldn't consider that "information" anyway, but the study might.
at least in California. Hourly paid employees are paid by the hour, regardless of where they are or when the hour is. If you get a salary, you get a set paycheck regardless of the number of hours you work, including answering the phone in the middle of the night on a Saturday. It's very simple. If you don't like being on call, don't take the job.
Report them to the BSA at https://reporting.bsa.org/usa/home.aspx and make a boatload of reward money. Then start looking for another job as you wait a couple years for your check while they sort it all out.
It's not exactly the same, but the phone comes with an expansion port built in and a keyboard you attach to it. They plan to release other hardware expansion devices for it over time.
http://reviews.cnet.com/cell-phones/lg-versa-verizon-wireless/4505-6454_7-33530742.html?tag=mncol;lst
I suspect this won't affect most people because I almost never get anywhere near the supposed 12Mb speeds Comcast promises, and neither does anyone else I know. If I got 9Mb speeds for 15 minutes straight I'd probably drop dead of shock.
Are we concerned that someone with a mental illness will see the blots online and then later will not be cured because this one diagnostic tool isn't useful? You'd run the same risk with anyone who's seen more than one psychiatrist in their life. Perhaps if the psychiatrist simply asks each patient "have you seen these before?". If a modern doctor considers these inkblots their only tool, perhaps they should retire.
It's a test... I think publishing it online would be the same as publishing any other test online. If it's still generally or widely used, then the ethical implications should be the same as, for example, publishing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator online (trademark issues aside).
The MBTI Foundation's website lists what they consider to be ethical use. But this is opinion, and others might say there are no real ethical issues because it's simply a list of questions people can ask themselves.
I think it's pretty obvious that they are looking for employees that don't waste their time on the internet logging into chat rooms and social networking sites.
Or liars. Maybe they are looking for lots and lots of liars. It is the government, after all.
If the average consumer of Disney stuff online had a choice between multiple comparable ISPs, then their gambit might make sense. But most Americans don't have such a choice.
For example, if Comcast refuses to pay, subscribers aren't going to switch in droves to something else, because for many Comcast subscribers, there effectively isn't anyone else.
Disney will lose far more business with this move than any ISP will. It's not like there is a shortage of sources for Disney content. People will just keep getting it elsewhere.
Nintendo could have easily made the Wii far more powerful, CPU, RAM, and graphics-wise. But then it would have cost far more, and would have lost one of the main reasons it sits in so many homes now. A lot of families bought the Wii for their kids for three main reasons: Price, N's kid-friendly reputation, and ease-of-use. Only the first factor would have changed with better hardware, but it would have made the decision a lot harder if it had debuted at $350+.
To be honest, most Wii games are crap. The Wii has fewer highly rated games than either of the other systems because while good developers are still figuring out how to make good games, the shelves are filling up with junk pushed out by opportunistic hacks with every kid-friendly IP license they can get their hands on.
But I bet if the Wii had the power of the X360, the main result would have been way more ports of standard games like PoP, and instead of complaining about RAM limitations, devs would be complaining about having to develop a new control scheme. At least this way they are forced to come up with new ideas instead of just rehashing all the same ones that are on the other two systems.
I'm on Comcast in central California. Random character URLs and typos are all resolving via correctly OpenDNS, which is configured on my router.
It's a pet peeve of mine when people use the term "unmanned drone" when referring to remote-piloted drones. Unless I'm mistaken, every Reaper, Predator, or other drone firing live ammunition is still has a real person pulling the trigger (and usually controlling flight). Most planes are now "fly-by-wire", which is just local "remote control". The pilot may be in the craft, but they aren't connected mechanically to the ailerons any more than someone sitting at a joystick in a trailer on the ground.
Saying that people are already being killed by unmanned drones elicits thoughts of autonomous killing machines. We aren't quite there yet, so let's be accurate and avoid the FUD.
I don't know who is being forced to get IE8 without windows "asking", but it asked me this week, and I declined with no problems.
I have automatic updates (critical only) turned on, and it didn't download automatically. I ran a manual "Windows Update" two days ago to see if there were any optional driver updates for me and it listed IE8 in the "critical" section, but I was able to untick the check box right there. It simply warned me that I might be at risk if I don't download critical updates, but went ahead and skipped it with no other complaints.
"Each needs to be secured, antivirused, firewalled and patched"
I think this comment demonstrates a lack of understanding of how this sort of virtualization would work in the real world.
Any company that upgrades to Win 7 is going to have the bulk of their apps ready to run on it, or there would be no reason to upgrade. No one is going to install W7 and then run all their apps virtualized in XP.
The point is that many companies will be stuck with a couple aging apps that aren't upgradeable for whatever reason but are vital to their workflow. These few legacy apps will be run in a virtual XP image that is running inside W7. All traffic from the old app to the hardware and the internet will be going through W7's firewalls and A/V already. No need to run Norton in the XP instance also.
And since these old apps will already be well configured, the virtual image will be a steady-state, not requiring patching. In the worst case scenario, someone gets a virus in their virtual machine. So, you close the application and boom, the virus is inactive. Then you re-install the VM on that user's PC and the virus is gone.
"so I'm being forced to pay ..."
I think this statement undermines most of your argument. You are not being forced to do anything. You are being offered a service/product that you can choose to accept or not. It is up to you to decide if what's offered is worth what is asked in return.
Feel free to decline and then complain that the offer isn't to your liking. But don't talk about being forced into anything. Your argument would gain as much credibility by invoking fascism.
From the original story it sounds like you'd still need to be logged into a steam account to play. Perhaps the difference being that since the account data is encoded into the game, you won't need to be running the Steam client logged into your account, but instead the game will be logged into your account as "mysteamID / TF2". And at the same time, your other computer could have a game logged in as "mysteamID / LF4". That would be pretty great and would more closely mimic how physical installs of a game work.
When I buy a game through Steam and install it, I can only play when I'm logged into my Steam account. I can re-download the game onto multiple computers and hop between them at will, logging into steam on each system to play. I already do this between my main PC, my work PC, my wife's laptop, and my in-laws PC in another city.
What is different here?
My parents live in a rural area in the Sacramento Valley. Their only other option was satellite, and the WISP ended up being significantly cheaper. They had to pay for installation, but the WISP maintains ownership of the equipment, so there was no huge up-front cost. The monthly bill is like $30, which is half what I pay for Comcast in Sacramento.
Speeds aren't amazing, but it's so much faster then their old 28.8k dial-up that my mom actually started using the internet again after giving up on it in frustration.