That would suggest that MS thinks people move from PCs to tablets because of the OS (or the UI/UX). Personally I see two great advantages in tablets in certain situations: the smaller form factor (use it where you need it), and the fact that they are available instantly when switched on. People do not seem to be turned off by the fact that their Windows 7 machine has a UI that is rather different from their tablet's, but I haven't met anyone who isn't pissed off by the crappy Windows 8 (and 8.1) experience on the desktop.
Windows 8 is not a tablet OS but a full-fledged and pretty decent OS for desktop PCs, into which they have tried to shoehorn a tablet UI, then found that it didn't really work that well on the desktop, ending up with 2 UIs, neither of which work very well. I think the Windows 8 designers would have been happy enough to put back the start button and menu, and might even have wanted to provide that option from the get go. However I think this is a classic case of Ballmer thinking he's Jobs, making a strategic decision by boldly stating "The desktop and the tablet are converging. Our new OS must, MUST reflect that".
By the way, isn't the past tense of "forecast" also "forecast"?
The central banks controlling real currencies can to some degree manage the value of that currency, for example by adjusting interest rates or the money supply. On top of that there is a massive number of people who use the currency on a daily basis to buy and sell stuff, which lends stability to the value as well. The problem with Bitcoin is that it's all speculation now; the people who use the currency for other purposes is negligible. Once the ratio of use vs. speculation improves, and the demand is somewhat predictable (supply is already fixed), I expect the value to stabilize.
By the way, gold backing isn't all it's made out to be; if anything it puts a limit on how far a government can manipulate its currency. But in the end, if you can exchange your cash for gold, the gold will be worth what exactly? The value of gold (in terms of how many reindeer you can buy with an ounce) is hardly fixed.
Real "consequences" like more people getting sick after banning or taxing disposable bags, or like researchers finding certain bacteria in reusable bags (which doesn't necessarily mean anyone actually getting sick from them), or simply newspapers seizing an opportunity to print fat, scary headlines?
The biggest risk is in raw vegetables; they do not come wrapped in plastic, and besides your nasty gunky reusable bag they will come in contact with all manner of dirtiness: packing crates, sweaty shoppers' hands, your grimy kitchen counter, etc. Regardless of what bag you transport them in, you'll want to wash and clean them thoroughly if you're going to eat them raw.
You will profit. From a salary that's still quite healthy under this new regimen, but mostly from you ownership of a company that'll be worth a lot if you're successful.
By the way, I am not a big fan of government dictating how much we can earn. Here in NL, earning over €65k makes you a fat cat and puts you in the top tax bracket (which is 52%). God help us if they start capping wages too. But I am also not a big fan of CEO's earning as much as they do. In principle, the stockholders should dictate what they earn, but the stockholders are either guys like them, or big institutional investors like pension funds, also run by guys like them. I've seen how it works: the CEO of one firm is on the exec renumeration board of another firm and vice versa, and they can pretty much vote themselves as much salary as the company coffers will bear. The system is broken, but I'm not sure how it could be fixed.
This. This is what I loved about Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies: the ability to stake your claim, build a home, run a shop or whatever, and become famous for something other than being at the top of the PvP ladder. I played SWG a little with a friend of mine, who did little else but craft, design outfits, and run a (well known) shop. By the way, the NGE wiped out her complete skill tree since all crafting stuff was classed as secondary, and she left the game the day it went live. Shame to see something similar happening in Lotro, which I enjoyed for a good while.
EQNext looks interesting, but my next game will probably be The Elder Scrolls Online. Besides looking for a sandboxy game, I do want something that is conducive to role playing. Up till recently, Age of Conan fit that bill nicely and it is still a very good game. For someone who wants to get stuck in with a good free(ish) to play MMO until the right game comes along, I can recommend AoC as a nice game. Easy to get started with, looks great, and has one of the more interesting combat systems.
Problem is that when it comes to businesses based on eyeballs, things can take a nosedive fast. If interest in SnapChat dwindles slowly, they may still be able to grab a few 100 million. But in the case where there's a competing service crowding them out (a very real risk), it's rather likely that no significant offer will be forthcoming at all.
Wow... iPhone vs Rpi, this ought to be good. Fight!
I've built an older iPhone into a wall to serve as a control panel for my home automation system. Works great and a bargain at the 2nd hand price I paid, but I've picked up a Pi as well as an Arduino to try and create more of these wall mounted controllers. The reason to switch to these platforms? More control over the form factor, easier to program, easier to interface with other hardware (like dimmers), ability to use tactile keys rather than a touchscreen, etc. I haven't decided yet between Arduino and the Pi.
Only if you actually made exchanges at those rate, and the real trick is getting out on time. The vast majority of people might have bought a couple at, say, $1, then sold them when they hit $50 for some beer money. You buy $1000 worth at $1, do you get out when they hit $5? $25? $100? Many early investors took their money and ran, those still holding coins got in at a higher floor. There are exceptions, like that Danish student who bought a few bucks worth when BTC just got started, forgot about them, and found the other day that they are now worth over $600k.
ALL of these social whatevers start out by offering a free service. Once you are popular, you start adding ads, mine and sell user data, or sell the whole thing lock stock & barrel to a whale like FB.
I doubt that SnapChat will gain significantly more value in the future, FB (or other already-popular networks) can simply roll out a similar service and crush them. And the success of social apps like these is not due to any brilliant little invention, the founder's marketing savvy, or flawless execution. These are factors, but the biggest factors a luck and timing (which also involves a great deal of luck). I don't think Zuckerberg would have stumbled on a new grand success if he had sold out FB early on, and I doubt Spiegel will have another success despite the experience he's gained from this. At best he'll attach himself to some up-and-comer; his media exposure may add some value there.
This thing doesn't use a single beam; this is not at all like building an image with a laser at very high intensity to compensate for scanning over a large area. This is like a DLP projector, using many beams that are either on or off. So: the light source will be of relatively low intensity, and it's not like a malfunction (or even a hack) is going to steer all beams onto the same spot in your eye, burning a hole.
most of the computer devices you look at do not have 'screens' but DIRECT light sources, no different in concept from this Avegant HMD.
The difference is that on regular screens, each pixel is an individual, diffuse light source, with that light coming from a LED belonging to that pixel. This thing steers a number of beams reflected from a single light source directly into your eye, forming the image on your retina instead of on something in front of your eye. The end result ought to be similar to what other head mounted displays do, but the optics involved are very different. One advantage is that as far as I can see there's no need for large lenses or (worse) Fresnell lenses, which often cause visible distortions to the image.
They do still have to solve some of the other issues you mention (brightness is hardly an issue in modern kits). But there's more to this tech than buzzwords; doing things this way could make for a decidedly smaller headset and produce higher quality images.
Nothing, until there's many so people dumping power into the grid that buying it from you at the fixed market rates becomes economically unsustainable. That's what is happening in Germany right now; utilities are complaining at having to buy this power and having no place to send it (we in NL have been buying it on the cheap, not that the consumer will notice this on their bill, but still). Since the utilities also have to run regular power plants for peak loads, their costs have soared. Electricity in Germany is expensive these days.
Unless they come up with a viable storage option, either in the home or in the neighbourhood, I expect the price of the power you sell back to the grid to drop sharply in the coming years.
I find it rather hard as well. Imagine how well color-blind people will do at this test. Or people from other cultures / countries. People for whom English is a second language.
Not to mention the fact that if I'd find something this convoluted on an account creation page, I'd most likely leave and never come back. CAPTCHAs are already bad enough.
More "effective" advertisement does not magically create new revenue in the economy. Companies may increase their marketing budget to some extend if they see that advertisement now works better, but if some types of ads get more effective and others don't, then in reality what happens mostly is that the marketing budget is shifted from the least to the most effective medium. The lesser effective media may change the price for ads as a result.
The result is a race to the bottom, as we have already seen on TV: more people see ads aired in breaks during shows instead of in between shows, and since both are now available, advertisers are much less willing to pay for ads in between shows. At least over here, commercial breaks between shows have all but disappeared on commercial stations, and breaks during shows are on the rise, getting both more frequent and longer. We're now seeing pop-overs during the shows, at the moment only for upcoming shows but it's only a matter of time before others will be able to pay for their ad up there.
The same happens on the web. For a while things where good when Google set the standard with small, unobtrusive ads. Now we are once again returning to the bad old days with interstitials, ads that play sound on mouseovers, animated CPU-hogging ads, etc. Advertisers will not pay for a banner if they can have a video. They will not pay for a video if they can have an interstitial. They will not pay for an interstitial if they can have a targetted ad (with soul-sucking and privacy violating 3rd party cookie tracking). And they will not pay for that if they could somehow have my computer screen permanently etch their ad onto my eyeballs.
If we get 3rd party tracking disabled by default and make it unlawful to track users across sites by other means, then at least we're drawing a line somewhere.
How often do undercover agents actually provoke action from protesters? Over here (NL), it is usually the Autonomen, a group of hard core "professional" protesters, who join otherwise peaceful protests with the specific intent to stir up trouble. These groups have also been used by mayors as a convenient excuse to ban certain protests (usually far right wing marches); they issue the permit for the march, wait for radical leftists to announce a counter-demo (sometimes even helpfully calling them to let them know something's up), and then cancel the permit on grounds of public safety concerns. It's highly likely that these radical groups have been infultrated with government agents, and while I do not think it's these agents who get legitimate protests cancelled, it would not surprise me either if it turns out they are.
Just wondering: what exactly are the legalities of the use of agents provocateur? At the very least the agents themselves could be charged with inciting riots, but someone is giving them orders, and that someone is following someone else's policy or "polite request", it seems to me that some very serious charges could be levelled at the people up the command chain. That is, if anything ever came of inquiries into such matters.
They'll make money the same way all of their predecessors did.
1) Start "free" social-something service.
2) Become popular.
3) IPO, or get bought by some company who did exactly the same thing as you're doing now.
4) Stick ads everywhere, and sell whatever data you can glean from your users and content to whoever will pay for it.
5) Profit!
I'm no hippie, but I think it's kind of sad (and insulting) that everything seems to revolve around advertisement and consumer data nowadays.
Generally, you should build within your core competency, and buy generic systems for generic tasks.
A sensible suggestion, unless you find that the generic systems suck or don't even exist. In my line of work that happens more often than I expected. If that is the case, then you could consider rolling your own solution if you are set up to develop and support software outside your core competency. You'll probably want to hire some people who are competent in the area you're building software for. (Payroll seems easy at first glance but it really isn't)
A nice example from the past: the Lyons company built the first ever business computer (the LEO); they preceived the need but no suitable computer was available so they rolled their own.
I think many companies (talking large multinationals here) are mistaken about what they actually need. And SAP has its own issues when it comes to operational inefficiencies, like the sometimes Byzantine user interface, and weird ways in which stuff taht is supposed to be integrated and tied together neatly really isn't.
Not saying that rolling your own is necessarily a good idea, not all corporations (even large ones) are set up for that. But I think the market is ready for more nimble products that do one thing really well, and are open enough to integrate sufficiently well with other stuff through APIs or services.
Actually, he's right. Except about SAP being great when you run your business like everyone else does. Even then, it often turns out to be a very costly and inflexible boondoggle. Medium to large companies are so hung up about "needing" SAP, but I've seen a few cases where management actually considered doing without, doing a quick study at what it would take to replace the more useful bits of SAP, and being flabbergasted at the savings in license and consultancy fees while having to lose little of actual value. They also find their organisation much more agile after moving away from SAP.
I suppose it depends on how you define capitalism and the scaling back thereof. "Capitalism" is too broad a term to be named root cause for these political issues. "Scaling back capitalism" can mean any and all of thousands of things. What exactly are you proposing?
Slashdot Mirror
That would suggest that MS thinks people move from PCs to tablets because of the OS (or the UI/UX). Personally I see two great advantages in tablets in certain situations: the smaller form factor (use it where you need it), and the fact that they are available instantly when switched on. People do not seem to be turned off by the fact that their Windows 7 machine has a UI that is rather different from their tablet's, but I haven't met anyone who isn't pissed off by the crappy Windows 8 (and 8.1) experience on the desktop.
Windows 8 is not a tablet OS but a full-fledged and pretty decent OS for desktop PCs, into which they have tried to shoehorn a tablet UI, then found that it didn't really work that well on the desktop, ending up with 2 UIs, neither of which work very well. I think the Windows 8 designers would have been happy enough to put back the start button and menu, and might even have wanted to provide that option from the get go. However I think this is a classic case of Ballmer thinking he's Jobs, making a strategic decision by boldly stating "The desktop and the tablet are converging. Our new OS must, MUST reflect that".
By the way, isn't the past tense of "forecast" also "forecast"?
The central banks controlling real currencies can to some degree manage the value of that currency, for example by adjusting interest rates or the money supply. On top of that there is a massive number of people who use the currency on a daily basis to buy and sell stuff, which lends stability to the value as well. The problem with Bitcoin is that it's all speculation now; the people who use the currency for other purposes is negligible. Once the ratio of use vs. speculation improves, and the demand is somewhat predictable (supply is already fixed), I expect the value to stabilize.
By the way, gold backing isn't all it's made out to be; if anything it puts a limit on how far a government can manipulate its currency. But in the end, if you can exchange your cash for gold, the gold will be worth what exactly? The value of gold (in terms of how many reindeer you can buy with an ounce) is hardly fixed.
Real "consequences" like more people getting sick after banning or taxing disposable bags, or like researchers finding certain bacteria in reusable bags (which doesn't necessarily mean anyone actually getting sick from them), or simply newspapers seizing an opportunity to print fat, scary headlines?
The biggest risk is in raw vegetables; they do not come wrapped in plastic, and besides your nasty gunky reusable bag they will come in contact with all manner of dirtiness: packing crates, sweaty shoppers' hands, your grimy kitchen counter, etc. Regardless of what bag you transport them in, you'll want to wash and clean them thoroughly if you're going to eat them raw.
You will profit. From a salary that's still quite healthy under this new regimen, but mostly from you ownership of a company that'll be worth a lot if you're successful.
By the way, I am not a big fan of government dictating how much we can earn. Here in NL, earning over €65k makes you a fat cat and puts you in the top tax bracket (which is 52%). God help us if they start capping wages too. But I am also not a big fan of CEO's earning as much as they do. In principle, the stockholders should dictate what they earn, but the stockholders are either guys like them, or big institutional investors like pension funds, also run by guys like them. I've seen how it works: the CEO of one firm is on the exec renumeration board of another firm and vice versa, and they can pretty much vote themselves as much salary as the company coffers will bear. The system is broken, but I'm not sure how it could be fixed.
This. This is what I loved about Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies: the ability to stake your claim, build a home, run a shop or whatever, and become famous for something other than being at the top of the PvP ladder. I played SWG a little with a friend of mine, who did little else but craft, design outfits, and run a (well known) shop. By the way, the NGE wiped out her complete skill tree since all crafting stuff was classed as secondary, and she left the game the day it went live. Shame to see something similar happening in Lotro, which I enjoyed for a good while.
EQNext looks interesting, but my next game will probably be The Elder Scrolls Online. Besides looking for a sandboxy game, I do want something that is conducive to role playing. Up till recently, Age of Conan fit that bill nicely and it is still a very good game. For someone who wants to get stuck in with a good free(ish) to play MMO until the right game comes along, I can recommend AoC as a nice game. Easy to get started with, looks great, and has one of the more interesting combat systems.
Problem is that when it comes to businesses based on eyeballs, things can take a nosedive fast. If interest in SnapChat dwindles slowly, they may still be able to grab a few 100 million. But in the case where there's a competing service crowding them out (a very real risk), it's rather likely that no significant offer will be forthcoming at all.
Or something that is liable to get you sued 6 ways from Sunday by any megacorp or patent troll who "invented" something similar.
Replace it, probably. Or replace the battery; this is a 3GS model where replacing the battery should be simple.
Wow... iPhone vs Rpi, this ought to be good. Fight!
I've built an older iPhone into a wall to serve as a control panel for my home automation system. Works great and a bargain at the 2nd hand price I paid, but I've picked up a Pi as well as an Arduino to try and create more of these wall mounted controllers. The reason to switch to these platforms? More control over the form factor, easier to program, easier to interface with other hardware (like dimmers), ability to use tactile keys rather than a touchscreen, etc. I haven't decided yet between Arduino and the Pi.
Only if you actually made exchanges at those rate, and the real trick is getting out on time. The vast majority of people might have bought a couple at, say, $1, then sold them when they hit $50 for some beer money. You buy $1000 worth at $1, do you get out when they hit $5? $25? $100? Many early investors took their money and ran, those still holding coins got in at a higher floor. There are exceptions, like that Danish student who bought a few bucks worth when BTC just got started, forgot about them, and found the other day that they are now worth over $600k.
ALL of these social whatevers start out by offering a free service. Once you are popular, you start adding ads, mine and sell user data, or sell the whole thing lock stock & barrel to a whale like FB.
I doubt that SnapChat will gain significantly more value in the future, FB (or other already-popular networks) can simply roll out a similar service and crush them. And the success of social apps like these is not due to any brilliant little invention, the founder's marketing savvy, or flawless execution. These are factors, but the biggest factors a luck and timing (which also involves a great deal of luck). I don't think Zuckerberg would have stumbled on a new grand success if he had sold out FB early on, and I doubt Spiegel will have another success despite the experience he's gained from this. At best he'll attach himself to some up-and-comer; his media exposure may add some value there.
This thing doesn't use a single beam; this is not at all like building an image with a laser at very high intensity to compensate for scanning over a large area. This is like a DLP projector, using many beams that are either on or off. So: the light source will be of relatively low intensity, and it's not like a malfunction (or even a hack) is going to steer all beams onto the same spot in your eye, burning a hole.
most of the computer devices you look at do not have 'screens' but DIRECT light sources, no different in concept from this Avegant HMD.
The difference is that on regular screens, each pixel is an individual, diffuse light source, with that light coming from a LED belonging to that pixel. This thing steers a number of beams reflected from a single light source directly into your eye, forming the image on your retina instead of on something in front of your eye. The end result ought to be similar to what other head mounted displays do, but the optics involved are very different. One advantage is that as far as I can see there's no need for large lenses or (worse) Fresnell lenses, which often cause visible distortions to the image.
They do still have to solve some of the other issues you mention (brightness is hardly an issue in modern kits). But there's more to this tech than buzzwords; doing things this way could make for a decidedly smaller headset and produce higher quality images.
Nothing, until there's many so people dumping power into the grid that buying it from you at the fixed market rates becomes economically unsustainable. That's what is happening in Germany right now; utilities are complaining at having to buy this power and having no place to send it (we in NL have been buying it on the cheap, not that the consumer will notice this on their bill, but still). Since the utilities also have to run regular power plants for peak loads, their costs have soared. Electricity in Germany is expensive these days.
Unless they come up with a viable storage option, either in the home or in the neighbourhood, I expect the price of the power you sell back to the grid to drop sharply in the coming years.
"Woman with large breasts, woman with medium breasts, woman with small breasts, this one looks like you... with breasts."
I find it rather hard as well. Imagine how well color-blind people will do at this test. Or people from other cultures / countries. People for whom English is a second language.
Not to mention the fact that if I'd find something this convoluted on an account creation page, I'd most likely leave and never come back. CAPTCHAs are already bad enough.
More "effective" advertisement does not magically create new revenue in the economy. Companies may increase their marketing budget to some extend if they see that advertisement now works better, but if some types of ads get more effective and others don't, then in reality what happens mostly is that the marketing budget is shifted from the least to the most effective medium. The lesser effective media may change the price for ads as a result.
The result is a race to the bottom, as we have already seen on TV: more people see ads aired in breaks during shows instead of in between shows, and since both are now available, advertisers are much less willing to pay for ads in between shows. At least over here, commercial breaks between shows have all but disappeared on commercial stations, and breaks during shows are on the rise, getting both more frequent and longer. We're now seeing pop-overs during the shows, at the moment only for upcoming shows but it's only a matter of time before others will be able to pay for their ad up there.
The same happens on the web. For a while things where good when Google set the standard with small, unobtrusive ads. Now we are once again returning to the bad old days with interstitials, ads that play sound on mouseovers, animated CPU-hogging ads, etc. Advertisers will not pay for a banner if they can have a video. They will not pay for a video if they can have an interstitial. They will not pay for an interstitial if they can have a targetted ad (with soul-sucking and privacy violating 3rd party cookie tracking). And they will not pay for that if they could somehow have my computer screen permanently etch their ad onto my eyeballs.
If we get 3rd party tracking disabled by default and make it unlawful to track users across sites by other means, then at least we're drawing a line somewhere.
How often do undercover agents actually provoke action from protesters? Over here (NL), it is usually the Autonomen, a group of hard core "professional" protesters, who join otherwise peaceful protests with the specific intent to stir up trouble. These groups have also been used by mayors as a convenient excuse to ban certain protests (usually far right wing marches); they issue the permit for the march, wait for radical leftists to announce a counter-demo (sometimes even helpfully calling them to let them know something's up), and then cancel the permit on grounds of public safety concerns. It's highly likely that these radical groups have been infultrated with government agents, and while I do not think it's these agents who get legitimate protests cancelled, it would not surprise me either if it turns out they are.
Just wondering: what exactly are the legalities of the use of agents provocateur? At the very least the agents themselves could be charged with inciting riots, but someone is giving them orders, and that someone is following someone else's policy or "polite request", it seems to me that some very serious charges could be levelled at the people up the command chain. That is, if anything ever came of inquiries into such matters.
It's Java, west of Krakatoa.
They'll make money the same way all of their predecessors did.
1) Start "free" social-something service.
2) Become popular.
3) IPO, or get bought by some company who did exactly the same thing as you're doing now.
4) Stick ads everywhere, and sell whatever data you can glean from your users and content to whoever will pay for it.
5) Profit!
I'm no hippie, but I think it's kind of sad (and insulting) that everything seems to revolve around advertisement and consumer data nowadays.
Generally, you should build within your core competency, and buy generic systems for generic tasks.
A sensible suggestion, unless you find that the generic systems suck or don't even exist. In my line of work that happens more often than I expected. If that is the case, then you could consider rolling your own solution if you are set up to develop and support software outside your core competency. You'll probably want to hire some people who are competent in the area you're building software for. (Payroll seems easy at first glance but it really isn't)
A nice example from the past: the Lyons company built the first ever business computer (the LEO); they preceived the need but no suitable computer was available so they rolled their own.
I think many companies (talking large multinationals here) are mistaken about what they actually need. And SAP has its own issues when it comes to operational inefficiencies, like the sometimes Byzantine user interface, and weird ways in which stuff taht is supposed to be integrated and tied together neatly really isn't.
Not saying that rolling your own is necessarily a good idea, not all corporations (even large ones) are set up for that. But I think the market is ready for more nimble products that do one thing really well, and are open enough to integrate sufficiently well with other stuff through APIs or services.
Actually, he's right. Except about SAP being great when you run your business like everyone else does. Even then, it often turns out to be a very costly and inflexible boondoggle. Medium to large companies are so hung up about "needing" SAP, but I've seen a few cases where management actually considered doing without, doing a quick study at what it would take to replace the more useful bits of SAP, and being flabbergasted at the savings in license and consultancy fees while having to lose little of actual value. They also find their organisation much more agile after moving away from SAP.
I suppose it depends on how you define capitalism and the scaling back thereof. "Capitalism" is too broad a term to be named root cause for these political issues. "Scaling back capitalism" can mean any and all of thousands of things. What exactly are you proposing?