Motivating children is everyone's job. It should be noted that in some countries they still post the test scores for the whole class sorted by score as a way to provide peer pressure for students to do better (or worse, if they're the anti-learning kind). I can't say how well it works for them because I didn't grow up in such a system and it's impossible to separate the effects of that from the culture at large, but these aren't countries with poor standardized test scores.
This was tried, it didn't work very well. The rewards were too disconnected from their day to day lives to really make that much impact on them. High School students aren't especially good at planning for the future either.
I did hear one somewhat compelling theory for the split. Netflix is essentially in the DVD rental business right now, which means they are governed by the same laws that govern Blockbuster and your Mom&Pop video rental store down the street. These consumer protections date back to the 80s and include nuggets like "You can't sell or give away a customer's rental history" (which protected people who rented adult films for instance). With the Qwikster split, they would take all of the regulatory baggage with them and Netflix would be free to sell your information for a little extra dough.
I guess they figured a million users would have made more money than selling that information.
At least now Netflix has a chance. As long as the DVD rental business is their primary source of income, the streaming can be a sideshow and it won't matter that much if the studios try to dick them over with licensing fees and selection. It's trying to survive only on streaming that was insane, because it gives total control of your business over to the studio execs who hate you with a fiery passion for killing off their DVD sales cash cow (even if you didn't really do it).
That's still a substantial customer base reduction in such a short period of time, and it doesn't even count the people who dropped one part of their service and/or downgraded their plans. Those people could be one step away from cancelling entirely.
Ditto. I'm considering upgrading my iPhone to the 4GS, but it is an original 2G model. One of the bigger drivers of this upgrade has been the increasing number of apps in the app store that are compiled against iOS 4, which my phone doesn't support. I guess it's about time to finally do the upgrade.
And then people complained that they were being used as identifiers and most places stopped. I don't think any state still uses it as your drivers license number, and every school and bank that I knew about when to their own numbers. The only major exception so far is credit reporting companies (Equifax, et all...) and obviously the Government.
Touchscreens that aren't totally worthless cost money. Not only do you have to have enough pixels to display text with modest clarity (not that hard these days), but you need a digitizer that isn't a nightmare to use.
There's a reason your signature always comes out so crappy on those supermarket signature pads. It's not because you can't write (well, maybe), but it's because the touchscreen is cheaply made and poorly calibrated. There's basically no chance of making your signature legible on one of those without serious practice in getting around the limitations of the device. Students are going to be frustrated at trying to interact with a device that has such poor input as well. They'll probably be largely ignored or used for passive slideshow type applications (Full Motion Video being probably too much for them).
They don't sell in the west because those phones are poorly designed pieces of crap that don't work properly, have terribly battery life, and break after a couple of months of gentle use.
Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to discover stuff like that in 3 days. It's hard to break mechanics when you barely understand how they work. That's why I hate ultra-short betas like this, it's almost impossible to give good feedback, especially since you're stuck doing the level 1 content that has been beta tested to death by the legions of other 3 days testers.
Face it, a 3 day beta is basically just a demo in disguise.
From what I can tell, they have not manufactured a single device with a camera on it. Until they're actually in use somewhere, I'm not going to get my panties in a bunch. For all you know the camera equipped model is for specific edge cases like maybe charging cabs more if they have an occupant or something and won't be used 99% of the time.
I think chances are good for a Linux version, but you will have to buy the windows version to get the asset files to use it. Id has generally been good about supplying a Linux version a few weeks/months after the initial release.
From what I've seen, people who are playing this on the console seem to hate the gunplay, and people who play on the PC love it. I think Id may not have put as much autoaim as most console shooters, making it exceptionally difficult/frustrating there. This is pure conjecture though, I have not played either.
Pretty much: They're offering to settle for less than it would cost a Lawyer to read through the letter they sent. Plus, patent fights tend to take years and are often won by the trolls anyway, making fighting them risky and trolling profitable. That's why there are so many of them popping up everywhere, it's fairly low risk and generally decent return on investment. You can bet that if someone were foolish enough to actually fight the case one of two things would happen, either Innovatio would drop the case (too much effort, they're looking for a quick payout), or they would file in East Texas and make sure to tack their lawyers fees on top of the judgement.
Bitcoin is a big scheme to part suckers from their money, nothing more. The bullcrap about totally non-governmental private currency is just a ruse to lure in the Ayn Rand libertarians in the hopes that they'll use real money to buy bitcoins. They are the ones that are going to be left holding the bag in the end.
Bitcoins are insidious because the scheme is set up to make it look like hoarding the coins is the way to "win", which discourages people from trying to cash out too early. In the meantime, the people who set it up slowly but continually sell off coins for as long as there are still suckers buying them. Eventually the incoming suckers dry up (because the "market price" for coins drops too low) and they get to walk away with the money. It's a very well designed scam, but I can't help but to think that at least some of those guys are going to appear in front of a judge at some point and be made to answer for their actions.
Long term investment in bitcoins? I know there is a sucker born every minute, but seriously, there are zero people with any sense who consider bitcoin a good long term investment. Literally the only people who should be interested in it are short term speculators looking for bigger suckers to give them their money before the whole thing goes up in flames, and the smoke is already getting thick.
The timing is slightly off on that comic. In 1995 you could get a Pentium (with floating point bug!) and 16MB of memory for reasonable (at the time) prices. That Pentium might even have triple digit Mhz! You would also get a double or maybe quad speed CD-ROM and maybe a whole gigabyte of Hard Drive.
The utterly braindamaged DOS memory model was still a problem though. Luckily, that year also saw the release of Windows 95 and the beginning of the end of segmented memory.
At this point it is hard to imagine that you're even recovering the cost of power with Bitcoin mining. Isn't it down in the low single digits vs. the US$ on the Magic the Gathering exchange? And the complexity is so high that you just get a dribble of coins out of even a high end farm anymore. The only time mining made sense was a couple of years ago when there were still suckers buying the damn things and driving the price up.
So Dreamworks has produced a little over 100 titles, so that would be a 3 billion dollar deal to get a tiny sliver of the movies they're about to lose with the Stars deal back. That is not sustainable by any measure. For comparison, with the DVD rental business the Disks would have cost somewhere on the order of $2 million. Back when the Streaming was just a sideshow for the disk rental business this didn't matter, but now that the company is split in two it's clear just how badly Netflix is screwed. The studios don't like it, and they ultimately have control over the business thanks to the fact that internet streaming to one household is considered "broadcasting".
It doesn't even matter if this is the future of movie rentals. Studios have shown time and time again that they'll prefer to kill off any new and disruptive technologies instead of trying to profit off of them. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming by court rulings into the VHS and DVD era, and they're not going to go quietly into the streaming era either. Not that they'll have to anyway. They learned their lesson the first time and bought all of the congressmen and FCC executives they need to prevent them from ever having to face inevitable change anyway. Can you imagine legislation that would reclassify streaming in a sane manner from this congress or FCC? The thought is ludicrous.
It doesn't help that licensing disputes and general cattiness in the industry have led to weird situations in the past couple of years. For instance, I bought my wife a white MacBook with a Core2Duo clocked at 2.4 Ghz four years ago. A few months ago we needed a second laptop, so I ended up buying a 13" Macbook Pro that had pretty much the same Core2Duo at 2.4 Ghz. Is this because we hit a wall with Moore's Law? No, it's thanks to a stupid licensing dispute between nVidia and Intel that caused Apple to stick with the older slower chips just to avoid Intel's crappy integrated graphics.
The worst part? It's pretty much the same 2.4 Ghz Core2Duo that's in my gaming machine I built 5 years ago, and it's thus far not been in danger of feeling obsolete. I can still run all of the latest games at good speed. That's probably due partially to the (at the time) grossly overpowered 8800GTX I stuck in there though. Driver support for that card is probably going to disappear before it's really obsolete.
It's not easy to use all of the power in a modern CPU. We're well past the point where you need more power just to keep the interface snappy, and many previously CPU hungry tasks are now pretty trivial (media encoding for instance). That's not to say there won't be uses for even more powerful CPUs in the future, but it's going to have to be something a bit different than what we have today. Maybe more "AI" type systems?
One of the problems with this strategy on failing companies is that the smart people realize early that the company is going down and get out. This accelerates the death spiral as only the deadweight remains, but also makes it difficult for someone internally to step up and save the company since anybody who could have done that left already. This is why failing companies need people from the outside to save them.
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Motivating children is everyone's job. It should be noted that in some countries they still post the test scores for the whole class sorted by score as a way to provide peer pressure for students to do better (or worse, if they're the anti-learning kind). I can't say how well it works for them because I didn't grow up in such a system and it's impossible to separate the effects of that from the culture at large, but these aren't countries with poor standardized test scores.
This was tried, it didn't work very well. The rewards were too disconnected from their day to day lives to really make that much impact on them. High School students aren't especially good at planning for the future either.
I did hear one somewhat compelling theory for the split. Netflix is essentially in the DVD rental business right now, which means they are governed by the same laws that govern Blockbuster and your Mom&Pop video rental store down the street. These consumer protections date back to the 80s and include nuggets like "You can't sell or give away a customer's rental history" (which protected people who rented adult films for instance). With the Qwikster split, they would take all of the regulatory baggage with them and Netflix would be free to sell your information for a little extra dough.
I guess they figured a million users would have made more money than selling that information.
At least now Netflix has a chance. As long as the DVD rental business is their primary source of income, the streaming can be a sideshow and it won't matter that much if the studios try to dick them over with licensing fees and selection. It's trying to survive only on streaming that was insane, because it gives total control of your business over to the studio execs who hate you with a fiery passion for killing off their DVD sales cash cow (even if you didn't really do it).
That's still a substantial customer base reduction in such a short period of time, and it doesn't even count the people who dropped one part of their service and/or downgraded their plans. Those people could be one step away from cancelling entirely.
Qwikster was such a stupid name anyway.
Ditto. I'm considering upgrading my iPhone to the 4GS, but it is an original 2G model. One of the bigger drivers of this upgrade has been the increasing number of apps in the app store that are compiled against iOS 4, which my phone doesn't support. I guess it's about time to finally do the upgrade.
Correct.
And then people complained that they were being used as identifiers and most places stopped. I don't think any state still uses it as your drivers license number, and every school and bank that I knew about when to their own numbers. The only major exception so far is credit reporting companies (Equifax, et all...) and obviously the Government.
Touchscreens that aren't totally worthless cost money. Not only do you have to have enough pixels to display text with modest clarity (not that hard these days), but you need a digitizer that isn't a nightmare to use.
There's a reason your signature always comes out so crappy on those supermarket signature pads. It's not because you can't write (well, maybe), but it's because the touchscreen is cheaply made and poorly calibrated. There's basically no chance of making your signature legible on one of those without serious practice in getting around the limitations of the device. Students are going to be frustrated at trying to interact with a device that has such poor input as well. They'll probably be largely ignored or used for passive slideshow type applications (Full Motion Video being probably too much for them).
They don't sell in the west because those phones are poorly designed pieces of crap that don't work properly, have terribly battery life, and break after a couple of months of gentle use.
Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to discover stuff like that in 3 days. It's hard to break mechanics when you barely understand how they work. That's why I hate ultra-short betas like this, it's almost impossible to give good feedback, especially since you're stuck doing the level 1 content that has been beta tested to death by the legions of other 3 days testers.
Face it, a 3 day beta is basically just a demo in disguise.
If Star Trek Online is better than this, than they're in serious trouble. Star Trek Online is crap.
From what I can tell, they have not manufactured a single device with a camera on it. Until they're actually in use somewhere, I'm not going to get my panties in a bunch. For all you know the camera equipped model is for specific edge cases like maybe charging cabs more if they have an occupant or something and won't be used 99% of the time.
I think chances are good for a Linux version, but you will have to buy the windows version to get the asset files to use it. Id has generally been good about supplying a Linux version a few weeks/months after the initial release.
From what I've seen, people who are playing this on the console seem to hate the gunplay, and people who play on the PC love it. I think Id may not have put as much autoaim as most console shooters, making it exceptionally difficult/frustrating there. This is pure conjecture though, I have not played either.
Pretty much: They're offering to settle for less than it would cost a Lawyer to read through the letter they sent. Plus, patent fights tend to take years and are often won by the trolls anyway, making fighting them risky and trolling profitable. That's why there are so many of them popping up everywhere, it's fairly low risk and generally decent return on investment. You can bet that if someone were foolish enough to actually fight the case one of two things would happen, either Innovatio would drop the case (too much effort, they're looking for a quick payout), or they would file in East Texas and make sure to tack their lawyers fees on top of the judgement.
Court fees mostly I think.
Bitcoin is a big scheme to part suckers from their money, nothing more. The bullcrap about totally non-governmental private currency is just a ruse to lure in the Ayn Rand libertarians in the hopes that they'll use real money to buy bitcoins. They are the ones that are going to be left holding the bag in the end.
Bitcoins are insidious because the scheme is set up to make it look like hoarding the coins is the way to "win", which discourages people from trying to cash out too early. In the meantime, the people who set it up slowly but continually sell off coins for as long as there are still suckers buying them. Eventually the incoming suckers dry up (because the "market price" for coins drops too low) and they get to walk away with the money. It's a very well designed scam, but I can't help but to think that at least some of those guys are going to appear in front of a judge at some point and be made to answer for their actions.
Long term investment in bitcoins? I know there is a sucker born every minute, but seriously, there are zero people with any sense who consider bitcoin a good long term investment. Literally the only people who should be interested in it are short term speculators looking for bigger suckers to give them their money before the whole thing goes up in flames, and the smoke is already getting thick.
The timing is slightly off on that comic. In 1995 you could get a Pentium (with floating point bug!) and 16MB of memory for reasonable (at the time) prices. That Pentium might even have triple digit Mhz! You would also get a double or maybe quad speed CD-ROM and maybe a whole gigabyte of Hard Drive.
The utterly braindamaged DOS memory model was still a problem though. Luckily, that year also saw the release of Windows 95 and the beginning of the end of segmented memory.
At this point it is hard to imagine that you're even recovering the cost of power with Bitcoin mining. Isn't it down in the low single digits vs. the US$ on the Magic the Gathering exchange? And the complexity is so high that you just get a dribble of coins out of even a high end farm anymore. The only time mining made sense was a couple of years ago when there were still suckers buying the damn things and driving the price up.
The summary makes it sound like super miniaturized core memory. I'm sure it's more complex than that, but it's still pretty cool.
And as an added bonus, it's still a fossil fuel then, so it adds to the net CO2 in the atmosphere!
So Dreamworks has produced a little over 100 titles, so that would be a 3 billion dollar deal to get a tiny sliver of the movies they're about to lose with the Stars deal back. That is not sustainable by any measure. For comparison, with the DVD rental business the Disks would have cost somewhere on the order of $2 million. Back when the Streaming was just a sideshow for the disk rental business this didn't matter, but now that the company is split in two it's clear just how badly Netflix is screwed. The studios don't like it, and they ultimately have control over the business thanks to the fact that internet streaming to one household is considered "broadcasting".
It doesn't even matter if this is the future of movie rentals. Studios have shown time and time again that they'll prefer to kill off any new and disruptive technologies instead of trying to profit off of them. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming by court rulings into the VHS and DVD era, and they're not going to go quietly into the streaming era either. Not that they'll have to anyway. They learned their lesson the first time and bought all of the congressmen and FCC executives they need to prevent them from ever having to face inevitable change anyway. Can you imagine legislation that would reclassify streaming in a sane manner from this congress or FCC? The thought is ludicrous.
It doesn't help that licensing disputes and general cattiness in the industry have led to weird situations in the past couple of years. For instance, I bought my wife a white MacBook with a Core2Duo clocked at 2.4 Ghz four years ago. A few months ago we needed a second laptop, so I ended up buying a 13" Macbook Pro that had pretty much the same Core2Duo at 2.4 Ghz. Is this because we hit a wall with Moore's Law? No, it's thanks to a stupid licensing dispute between nVidia and Intel that caused Apple to stick with the older slower chips just to avoid Intel's crappy integrated graphics.
The worst part? It's pretty much the same 2.4 Ghz Core2Duo that's in my gaming machine I built 5 years ago, and it's thus far not been in danger of feeling obsolete. I can still run all of the latest games at good speed. That's probably due partially to the (at the time) grossly overpowered 8800GTX I stuck in there though. Driver support for that card is probably going to disappear before it's really obsolete.
It's not easy to use all of the power in a modern CPU. We're well past the point where you need more power just to keep the interface snappy, and many previously CPU hungry tasks are now pretty trivial (media encoding for instance). That's not to say there won't be uses for even more powerful CPUs in the future, but it's going to have to be something a bit different than what we have today. Maybe more "AI" type systems?
One of the problems with this strategy on failing companies is that the smart people realize early that the company is going down and get out. This accelerates the death spiral as only the deadweight remains, but also makes it difficult for someone internally to step up and save the company since anybody who could have done that left already. This is why failing companies need people from the outside to save them.