I'd like to have them smaller, in a 3" size, for use in VR glasses. Most current VR headsets go up to 640x480, higher resolutions are horribly expensive.
A thief does not deserve "whatever is coming to him". He deserves swift punishment befitting the crime. Punish too little or too much too often, and the public will slowly lose its respect for those upholding the law, and even for the law itself. That's why it is better to pronounce rational sentences, rather than let pity or anger get in the way too much.
No, the primary concern of many (but not all) environmental groups is to further their own interests and increase their influence. Any simple solution to environmental problems will be rejected out of hand if it makes their cause obsolete.
Note: environmentalists are not alone in this behaviour; many large organisations shift from pursuing their ideals to self-serving behaviour.
Actually, they might... the key is what the word "friend" means on the social web, and what context surrounds the friendship relation.
When adding tags to your friends (already possible on Facebook using "friends lists"), you are providing that context. The search engine can use that to figure out which of your friends would have something relevant to say about whatever it is you are looking for.
Sure, you can ask your friends for their opinion directly. Your real friends. But on the social web (what's in a name?), you may not even know your online friends in real life. Especially in case of one-sided "friend" relationships such as bloggers or twitterers you might follow because they have useful knowledge of or opinions on subjects that interest you. That's the type of "friend" that is probably the most useful to refine search engine results.
Sadly, the politicians who are the ones in a position to do something about this silliness, have no clue whatsoever about software patents... all they know is "patents in general are good, and software patents are patents, so they must be good too".
We have almost no politicians with a technical background, or even a background in tech business, so few understand the issue or even understand that it is an issue. Still, the US seems to be in a worse bind with its politicians: they seem to be all ex-lawyers, who love this stuff.
It's not reliability they worry about, but liability... that, and going with the "safe" choice. Oh, and Microsoft is indeed the safe choice when things go south... because the manager responsible for selecting MS can divert the blame to them. Remember the old adage "nobody has ever been fired for choosing IBM"? Same thing. Conversely, if you pick a FOSS product and things go south, you are very likely to hear the phrase "what were you thinking?!".
As to liability, that is a real concern when you use FOSS, especially if you're a juicy fat corporate target. If Microsoft infringes on some patent or other, no big whoop, the patent holder will sue Microsoft and you as a customer will most likely not notice a thing. But if some FOSS product infringes on a patent, your company will be the target. At best you will be ordered to cease using the software, at worst you will be sued for damages. A client of mine actually had this happen to them (and they paid, too).
The good news is: both concerns can be addressed. To avoid blame for picking a dud falling on your manager's head, spread the blame. Get buy-in from as many stakeholders as you can, especially those high up in the food chain: the budget holder, company architect, service managers, project office manager, what have you... and when you approach one, make it clear that you will get (or already have) at least a tentative approval from the others. We've used this approach on one FOSS project, which in the end did get the green light.
To avoid legal exposure to IP infringements, find another company to take this risk off your hands by having them act as a "reseller". To my surprise there are actually quite a few companies offering FOSS solutions who are willing to take that risk, for a fee.
I can't exactly say I got statistics to back it up, but I don't know of many I'd consider stupid and very high on the corporate ladder. I think the biggest downside to being huge is that you spend a lot of time streamlining the process of what you are doing, which tends to cement the process to do exactly and only what you do today.
True, large corporations rarely are very nimble. The problem might be a different one though; I haven't come across a lot of truly stupid top managers in large corporations, but I did often find them very myopic when it came to making business decisions.
Many managers run their companies by the numbers... the numbers in the quarterlies, that is, and the pretty red, yellow and green "dashboard" spreadsheets that are sent up from the departments down below. These sheets rarely tell the whole story, but they do give the manager a false sense of being informed, and so they will make decisions instead of delegating the decision or asking for advice. And more importantly, once that decision has been made, it is set in stone. No matter how wrong it turns out to be later. In other words, many managers are actually very poor decision-makers.
In the case of Warhammer, perhaps it is just the simple mistake of blindly applying a tried-and-true project management tool to a project that was running late: timeboxing (or sticking to the deadline). It's often a good way to manage delayed projects and ensure you still get something within budget and on time, after which you can decide what to add in updates and at what cost. However in case of MMOs, having a feature-poor or buggy launch is an extremely dangerous thing to do in today's market with plenty of competitors, especially if you count on your customers to pay you each month for the privilege to play. Once you disappoint an MMO player with a buggy or boring game, it is extremely hard to win them back.
But the megacorp that is EA is not alone in this; Age of Conan suffered from the same rushed release... when the game launched, the bank/auction NPC didn't even work! Funcom sold a million copies IIRC and the game got rave reviews, but they were forced to spend the subsequent 2-3 quarters fixing bugs instead of working on new content. By that time, many people had left due to frequent crashes, buggy quests, etc.
Oh, they call it something else ("huisbezoek", lit. "house call"), but in many cases people weren't given the opportunity to refuse entry. In some cases where the officials found the occupant absent a few times, they took a crowbar to the door. If such searches are sanctioned by the mayor, I say that he is issuing search warrants, no matter which flowery language they use to dress it up. It is just one of those many cases where the police or prosecutor's office use a method that is not strictly legal yet very, very convenient. Or they find a pretext, like a fire safety inspection, for which they are allowed to enter. But what kind of such inspection also has police, and tax/social security officials tagging along?
By the way... it's not judges either who issue search warrants in the Netherlands; that power has been taken from them some decades ago, and was given to the state prosecutor. Another example where annoying legal niceties and civil rights have been dopped by the wayside for the sake of convenience. And yes, I do maintain that this attitude is more prevalent in the Netherlands than in comparably civilised countries. It's not because our government can do what it likes to; it is because we cheerfully let them. Because "I have nothing to hide" seems to have become our national motto.
What about all the other places that provide some form of WIFI? Cafe's? Libraries? Surely a cafe owner doesn't have to go through the same messing about that an ISP would?
Maybe that is exactly what they are after. Proper ISPs are already required to retain a bunch of info and data about their clients so that internet wiretaps can be traced back to individual subscribers. But what use is that if any criminal can grab a netbook and wander into a hotel or bar to go online anonymously? My guess is that if this notion holds up in court, hotels will be required to hand out individual Wifi access keys rather than provide a single one to all of its guests. What other point would there be in requiring the hotel to retain internet traffic that is already retained at the hotel's ISP?
And what about bars, cafe... perhaps they will outlaw public WiFi at some point. I don't think they actually will go that far, but it would not surprise me in the least, and I am certain a proposal to that effect will comet to table in parliament at some point in the near future. Remember, this is the Netherlands, a country that does more wiretapping than the rest of Europe combined. A country that now allows city mayors to issue search warrants without aproval from a judge and even without any prior suspicion of criminal activity. A country that is slowly making sure that we are never anonymous anywhere.
Dutch people have a deep, deep trust in their government. Perhaps it is because that same government "allows" us more freedoms than most other countries enjoy. When the government then asks "Papieren bitte!", most people shrug and state "I have nothing to hide". But it takes a good many turns of the thumbscrews before you'll feel the clamps squeezing your thumbs, and a few more turns before it starts to hurt. But by then it's too late to pull your thumb out of the device.
Apple's electronics might be behind a bit, but their design isn't (even when counting cock-ups like the antenna death grip). The competition is catching up though... but I really wish manufacturers would learn from Apple and spend a few bucks extra on better materials. Case in point: the Samsung Galaxy looks rather nice but when you pick it up, it feels really cheap and plasticy. The HTC Desire does a lot better on that score; if I'd want to ditch my iPhone I would probably get something like that. STill doesn't beat the iPhone in my opinion though.
I feel the same way, though. I do not like Apple's policy of keeping things locked down and I hate how they got into bed with the phone companies (and they likely soon will with the content companies), but they do make very, very good devices and good software for them. I haven't come across anything comparable yet, although some Android stuff is getting close. The thing is, Apple's policy of locking stuff down doesn't really hurt the iPhone. It does to some degree on the iPad, but again, until something better comes along I am keeping mine.
The good news is that Apple is slowly relaxing its control, while Google is tightening theirs. Hopefully both will end up in the sweet spot, and we'll have ourselves some healthy competition.
Deal killer? I'm not sure. I think the idea is to make the Amazon store a "premium shop" featuring a small number of hand-picked apps of high quality. If Amazon set fair and realistic prices, this can be very attractive for a developer. Especially since you can always sell your app in the regular store if it doesn't pass muster at Amazon. And if it does pass, your app at least won't be rubbing shoulders with dozens of fart apps and hundreds of variations of air traffic/shipyard/train/whatever controller games.
It's hyper-censored in the sense that everything is checked before it's let loose on the general public. But it's not meant to be extremely restrictive.
But you're right that LEGO should be careful. If a 7 year old kid in there is told "that spaceship looks too much like something naughty", or "we don't want you building LEGO crossbows" once too often, he'll be out of there.
Also, like all fashion markets, it is notoriously fickle and you could find it has run off to the next trend in a hurry. The business market is solid though.
RIM should be careful not to lose the business market as well. More and more businesses are working on getting private or corporate iPhones, Android devices or Windows phones into their IT ecosystem. And not just small nimble businesses with some enthusiasts IT guys and a geeky CIO; I'm talking megacorps with byzanthian IT organisations and conservative decision making. I have one of those as a client, and found to my surprise that a good many Blackberry users don't like their device a lot, even the non-geek manager types, and even the ones who do not already own an iPhone or Android. Very few of the people who got their private iPhone hooked up to the corporate email and calendar have looked back at their Blackberries.
Once Apple get their corporate provisioning workflow up to snuff, RIM will really have something to worry about.
Not to mention something that looks, feels and is as well-made as the iPad. The other day I messed with a few Android phones, and the newer ones appear to be a close match to the iPhone when it comes to quality of the screen, responsiveness, and usability. The illusion ends however when you pick one up and take a closer look... most have a cheap plasticy feel, often with too many buttons in all the wrong places.
I love my iPhone but if someone decides to make an Android phone with a focus on quality rather than cutting corners, I'll be all over it. Same with tablets, really...
I'd love to buy some ebooks, but I can't, period. That's right: many publishers will not sell me their ebooks because I do not live in the USA. Barnes & Noble for example are happy to ship dead trees to me overseas, but downloading is a no-no. And the selection in local stores is rather poor. Smells like DVD region hell, only much worse.
...the idea of expecting volunteers to always be plentiful and useful is a good way to cause yourself problems.
Software projects in business suffer from the same problem, actually. Oh, programmers are plentiful as long as you have budget to spare, but not all professional programmers are created equal, peer reviews / code inspections are slipshod or even omitted, and testing is haphazard. In fact sometimes there's a conscious decision to take shortcuts in those areas because of pressure on the timeline.
The potential to be bitten in the ass by substandard work that goes undetected is always there, in business as well as OSS projects.
... that they actually mention piracy as the reason to implement this. Here in the Netherlands, similar legislation is being prepared, which by the way will require no court order whatsoever to have a site shut down, the public prosecutor can decide on a whim. The reason? You guessed it, "saving the children", or shutting down kiddie porn sites. As the minister stated: "Not to worry, but this is just for kiddie porn. Oh, and for other illegal stuff (like online piracy). Oh, and that includes hate speech too. Probably certain elements of a particular party we don't like much as well. But we'll exercise proper care" No checks, balances or even limits placed on this awesome power given to the prosecutors office... already famous for exercising proper care in sending a 10-man police force to do a nighttime raid on the home of an apparently extremely dangerous cartoonist making "hate-instigating" (i.e. subversive) cartoons. Or allowing cities to do door-to-door searches of homes looking for indoor weed plantations... but sending along municipal guys to check you're not claiming unemployment benefits while living it large, or having a dog without paying the tax. Oh and these are proper searches: fail to be home when they drop by a few times, and they will take a crowbar to your door.
Do not ever give in to pleas to relax controls to make life for the prosecutor a little easier "to catch more criminals". It's never about criminals nor child-molesters. We let them do it here, and allowed the government to thoroughly politicise the prosecutors' office, then took away the judiciary branch' power to check and balance. The result is not pretty... All these so called inconvenient controls exist for a reason.
The purpose of an MBA course is not to make strong leaders... or at least it shouldn't aspire to be. Looking at the curriculum, most of what it does is teach business administration tools and skills. Leadership skills? Not really. The sad thing is that a lot of MBA graduates do precisely that: they go into middle and upper management, often with little or no real experience at leading.
Managers, not MBAs offers a good insight into the MBA program and into all the things wrong with it today. The thing is, the MBA is not a bad course to take in itself... except that it reinforces bad behaviour in some cases, like making uninformed snap decisions. One of the bigger problems, according to the author, is that most MBA courses focus on the "science" side (analysis), and more or less completely avoid the "art" (vision) and "craft" (experience) aspects. And isn't this exacly what we most often see when we look at all the lousy managers in our own places of work? Making snap decisions on a whim, lacking a coherent vision and instead always reading up on the latest management techniques. They are often very poor at managing people and teams, but oh, they are good with numbers and spreadsheets. And numbers and spreadsheets is what is driving many companies today, rather than vision and insight.
The skills taught in an MBA can be very useful, and an MBA can offer a valuable additional set of skills to managers, consultants and even techies. But an MBA alone is insufficient to become a good manager, just like an engineering master's degree doesn't make one a good engineer.
3D can add immersion, which a great many viewers of Avatar will attest to. And increased immersion can make viewers more connected emotionally.
I don't know about biological limits, but there are technical ones. Normally, when your eyes lock on to something two things happen: your eyes turn inwards or outwards so that they are both centered on the subject, and the lenses are adjusted to bring the subject into focus. Your eyes are doing this all the time and it happens without thinking.
When you watch a regular movie, your eyes turn and focus on the screen, nothing special. But in a 3D movie, your eyes will have to be turned differently in order to see something in the foreground than they will to see into the background. That's the 3d effect. But the focal length of your eyes has to remain adjusted to the distance to the screen; a very unusual exercise for your eyes, and one that will give some people headaches. Conversely, if the movie is shot with the foreground in focus and our eyes adjust to look at something in the background, our brains expect the background to come into focus, which of course it won't since the filmmaker didn't shoot it that way. In Avatar this was highly annoying sometimes.
Perhaps it is possible to just shoot everything in focus, and have active glasses that apply a blurring effect to anything outside the range of distance out eyes are trained upon.
It does add value... Sometimes. 3D isn't going to improve movies like "the Shawshank redemption" or "Snatched", but it may add a lot to other movies that rely more on special effects, or are more demanding in suspension of disbelief. I say "may" because it's very hard to do well. And 3D doesn't work equally well on everyone's eyes.
Take "Avatar". Disregard for a moment the literary qualities of this "Pocahontas in space"... 3D did work exceptionally well in this movie, greatly increasing immersion into the make-believe world of Pandora. Not all movies need that, and many movies would be made worse by distracting 3D, but to movies like this, it certainly adds value. I'd pay extra to go see a movie like this in 3D again. Would I pay extra for 3D versions of Terminator 2, Dune, Blade Runner, Aliens, or Lord of the Rings? Yes I would. But I would not for 3D Titanic, the Big Lebowski, Shrek, and so on. And I would probably give a 3d-ified version of any 2d movie a miss. 3d is hard to get right, and I do kind of fear a push of just that: old movies with some poor 3d effects added on
You can read Amazon's books on the iPad; it's too bad that reading books on this device is a rather poor experience compared to proper e-ink. And I don't want a Kindle and its lock-in with Amazon (and a keyboard... seriously, on an e-reader???) That's why I too was disappointed about this announcement... Most publishers and distributors are still utterly clueless about e-books (some won't even sell them overseas, what's up with that?), and a few like B&N and Amazon are large enough to play the market on their own terms.
I only buy DRM-free e-books, or ePub/PDF with Adobe DRM, as long as the tool that lets me strip the DRM off continues to work. One of the publishers who do e-books well is O'Reilly; they offer a variety of DRM-free e-book formats. But so far I've been rather disappointed in the rest of them.
No. This will change the ISPs role from what it properly should be (a pipe into the internet) to being responsible for what actually passes through that pipe. Here is how it goes:
1) ISPs will charge customers for the "piracy fee".
2) ISPs will offer a "clean" subscription that blocks Torrent and other stuff, at a lower subscription rate
3) More and more ports and traffic types will be blocked as pirates and leechers try to route around the blocks in place.
4) The ISP will start opening up services again, for a small addition to your monthly fee which will go towards the IPSs piracy tax bill. Want torrents? $10. Using DropBox? That's $5. Access to usenet binaries? Another $7. And so on.
5) Meanwhile, some clever lawyer will use this precedent to sue ISPs, demanding taxes and damages for all manner of clients. The NYT will want a cut of the action for people who pirate their premium content. Apple and AT&T will demand money for distributing iPhone jailbreaks. Software companies will want in on the game as well...
There are far too many people out there who would nothing better than to be allowed to levy a blanket tax on the Internet. And be assured that in the end this will not serve the public. Distributors of content (somehow the actual creators do this far less) claim that piracy will ultimately ensure no works of quality are produced, but why produce quality content if your income comes from taxes and is based on quantity? Sounds a bit like the "railroad unification plan" from Atlas Shrugged...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it does all that, and it injects drugs. Sounds like a winner...
I'd like to have them smaller, in a 3" size, for use in VR glasses. Most current VR headsets go up to 640x480, higher resolutions are horribly expensive.
A thief does not deserve "whatever is coming to him". He deserves swift punishment befitting the crime. Punish too little or too much too often, and the public will slowly lose its respect for those upholding the law, and even for the law itself. That's why it is better to pronounce rational sentences, rather than let pity or anger get in the way too much.
No, the primary concern of many (but not all) environmental groups is to further their own interests and increase their influence. Any simple solution to environmental problems will be rejected out of hand if it makes their cause obsolete.
Note: environmentalists are not alone in this behaviour; many large organisations shift from pursuing their ideals to self-serving behaviour.
Actually, they might... the key is what the word "friend" means on the social web, and what context surrounds the friendship relation.
When adding tags to your friends (already possible on Facebook using "friends lists"), you are providing that context. The search engine can use that to figure out which of your friends would have something relevant to say about whatever it is you are looking for.
Sure, you can ask your friends for their opinion directly. Your real friends. But on the social web (what's in a name?), you may not even know your online friends in real life. Especially in case of one-sided "friend" relationships such as bloggers or twitterers you might follow because they have useful knowledge of or opinions on subjects that interest you. That's the type of "friend" that is probably the most useful to refine search engine results.
Sadly, the politicians who are the ones in a position to do something about this silliness, have no clue whatsoever about software patents... all they know is "patents in general are good, and software patents are patents, so they must be good too".
We have almost no politicians with a technical background, or even a background in tech business, so few understand the issue or even understand that it is an issue. Still, the US seems to be in a worse bind with its politicians: they seem to be all ex-lawyers, who love this stuff.
It's not reliability they worry about, but liability... that, and going with the "safe" choice. Oh, and Microsoft is indeed the safe choice when things go south... because the manager responsible for selecting MS can divert the blame to them. Remember the old adage "nobody has ever been fired for choosing IBM"? Same thing. Conversely, if you pick a FOSS product and things go south, you are very likely to hear the phrase "what were you thinking?!".
As to liability, that is a real concern when you use FOSS, especially if you're a juicy fat corporate target. If Microsoft infringes on some patent or other, no big whoop, the patent holder will sue Microsoft and you as a customer will most likely not notice a thing. But if some FOSS product infringes on a patent, your company will be the target. At best you will be ordered to cease using the software, at worst you will be sued for damages. A client of mine actually had this happen to them (and they paid, too).
The good news is: both concerns can be addressed. To avoid blame for picking a dud falling on your manager's head, spread the blame. Get buy-in from as many stakeholders as you can, especially those high up in the food chain: the budget holder, company architect, service managers, project office manager, what have you... and when you approach one, make it clear that you will get (or already have) at least a tentative approval from the others. We've used this approach on one FOSS project, which in the end did get the green light.
To avoid legal exposure to IP infringements, find another company to take this risk off your hands by having them act as a "reseller". To my surprise there are actually quite a few companies offering FOSS solutions who are willing to take that risk, for a fee.
I can't exactly say I got statistics to back it up, but I don't know of many I'd consider stupid and very high on the corporate ladder. I think the biggest downside to being huge is that you spend a lot of time streamlining the process of what you are doing, which tends to cement the process to do exactly and only what you do today.
True, large corporations rarely are very nimble. The problem might be a different one though; I haven't come across a lot of truly stupid top managers in large corporations, but I did often find them very myopic when it came to making business decisions.
Many managers run their companies by the numbers... the numbers in the quarterlies, that is, and the pretty red, yellow and green "dashboard" spreadsheets that are sent up from the departments down below. These sheets rarely tell the whole story, but they do give the manager a false sense of being informed, and so they will make decisions instead of delegating the decision or asking for advice. And more importantly, once that decision has been made, it is set in stone. No matter how wrong it turns out to be later. In other words, many managers are actually very poor decision-makers.
In the case of Warhammer, perhaps it is just the simple mistake of blindly applying a tried-and-true project management tool to a project that was running late: timeboxing (or sticking to the deadline). It's often a good way to manage delayed projects and ensure you still get something within budget and on time, after which you can decide what to add in updates and at what cost. However in case of MMOs, having a feature-poor or buggy launch is an extremely dangerous thing to do in today's market with plenty of competitors, especially if you count on your customers to pay you each month for the privilege to play. Once you disappoint an MMO player with a buggy or boring game, it is extremely hard to win them back.
But the megacorp that is EA is not alone in this; Age of Conan suffered from the same rushed release... when the game launched, the bank/auction NPC didn't even work! Funcom sold a million copies IIRC and the game got rave reviews, but they were forced to spend the subsequent 2-3 quarters fixing bugs instead of working on new content. By that time, many people had left due to frequent crashes, buggy quests, etc.
Oh, they call it something else ("huisbezoek", lit. "house call"), but in many cases people weren't given the opportunity to refuse entry. In some cases where the officials found the occupant absent a few times, they took a crowbar to the door. If such searches are sanctioned by the mayor, I say that he is issuing search warrants, no matter which flowery language they use to dress it up. It is just one of those many cases where the police or prosecutor's office use a method that is not strictly legal yet very, very convenient. Or they find a pretext, like a fire safety inspection, for which they are allowed to enter. But what kind of such inspection also has police, and tax/social security officials tagging along?
By the way... it's not judges either who issue search warrants in the Netherlands; that power has been taken from them some decades ago, and was given to the state prosecutor. Another example where annoying legal niceties and civil rights have been dopped by the wayside for the sake of convenience. And yes, I do maintain that this attitude is more prevalent in the Netherlands than in comparably civilised countries. It's not because our government can do what it likes to; it is because we cheerfully let them. Because "I have nothing to hide" seems to have become our national motto.
Maybe that is exactly what they are after. Proper ISPs are already required to retain a bunch of info and data about their clients so that internet wiretaps can be traced back to individual subscribers. But what use is that if any criminal can grab a netbook and wander into a hotel or bar to go online anonymously? My guess is that if this notion holds up in court, hotels will be required to hand out individual Wifi access keys rather than provide a single one to all of its guests. What other point would there be in requiring the hotel to retain internet traffic that is already retained at the hotel's ISP?
And what about bars, cafe... perhaps they will outlaw public WiFi at some point. I don't think they actually will go that far, but it would not surprise me in the least, and I am certain a proposal to that effect will comet to table in parliament at some point in the near future. Remember, this is the Netherlands, a country that does more wiretapping than the rest of Europe combined. A country that now allows city mayors to issue search warrants without aproval from a judge and even without any prior suspicion of criminal activity. A country that is slowly making sure that we are never anonymous anywhere.
Dutch people have a deep, deep trust in their government. Perhaps it is because that same government "allows" us more freedoms than most other countries enjoy. When the government then asks "Papieren bitte!", most people shrug and state "I have nothing to hide". But it takes a good many turns of the thumbscrews before you'll feel the clamps squeezing your thumbs, and a few more turns before it starts to hurt. But by then it's too late to pull your thumb out of the device.
Apple's electronics might be behind a bit, but their design isn't (even when counting cock-ups like the antenna death grip). The competition is catching up though... but I really wish manufacturers would learn from Apple and spend a few bucks extra on better materials. Case in point: the Samsung Galaxy looks rather nice but when you pick it up, it feels really cheap and plasticy. The HTC Desire does a lot better on that score; if I'd want to ditch my iPhone I would probably get something like that. STill doesn't beat the iPhone in my opinion though.
I feel the same way, though. I do not like Apple's policy of keeping things locked down and I hate how they got into bed with the phone companies (and they likely soon will with the content companies), but they do make very, very good devices and good software for them. I haven't come across anything comparable yet, although some Android stuff is getting close. The thing is, Apple's policy of locking stuff down doesn't really hurt the iPhone. It does to some degree on the iPad, but again, until something better comes along I am keeping mine.
The good news is that Apple is slowly relaxing its control, while Google is tightening theirs. Hopefully both will end up in the sweet spot, and we'll have ourselves some healthy competition.
Mom already thought of this. Works fine (in fact, it works better than infosquitos) until... "power up the twit"-worm!
Deal killer? I'm not sure. I think the idea is to make the Amazon store a "premium shop" featuring a small number of hand-picked apps of high quality. If Amazon set fair and realistic prices, this can be very attractive for a developer. Especially since you can always sell your app in the regular store if it doesn't pass muster at Amazon. And if it does pass, your app at least won't be rubbing shoulders with dozens of fart apps and hundreds of variations of air traffic/shipyard/train/whatever controller games.
It's hyper-censored in the sense that everything is checked before it's let loose on the general public. But it's not meant to be extremely restrictive.
But you're right that LEGO should be careful. If a 7 year old kid in there is told "that spaceship looks too much like something naughty", or "we don't want you building LEGO crossbows" once too often, he'll be out of there.
RIM should be careful not to lose the business market as well. More and more businesses are working on getting private or corporate iPhones, Android devices or Windows phones into their IT ecosystem. And not just small nimble businesses with some enthusiasts IT guys and a geeky CIO; I'm talking megacorps with byzanthian IT organisations and conservative decision making. I have one of those as a client, and found to my surprise that a good many Blackberry users don't like their device a lot, even the non-geek manager types, and even the ones who do not already own an iPhone or Android. Very few of the people who got their private iPhone hooked up to the corporate email and calendar have looked back at their Blackberries.
Once Apple get their corporate provisioning workflow up to snuff, RIM will really have something to worry about.
Not to mention something that looks, feels and is as well-made as the iPad. The other day I messed with a few Android phones, and the newer ones appear to be a close match to the iPhone when it comes to quality of the screen, responsiveness, and usability. The illusion ends however when you pick one up and take a closer look... most have a cheap plasticy feel, often with too many buttons in all the wrong places.
I love my iPhone but if someone decides to make an Android phone with a focus on quality rather than cutting corners, I'll be all over it. Same with tablets, really...
I'd love to buy some ebooks, but I can't, period. That's right: many publishers will not sell me their ebooks because I do not live in the USA. Barnes & Noble for example are happy to ship dead trees to me overseas, but downloading is a no-no. And the selection in local stores is rather poor. Smells like DVD region hell, only much worse.
...the idea of expecting volunteers to always be plentiful and useful is a good way to cause yourself problems.
Software projects in business suffer from the same problem, actually. Oh, programmers are plentiful as long as you have budget to spare, but not all professional programmers are created equal, peer reviews / code inspections are slipshod or even omitted, and testing is haphazard. In fact sometimes there's a conscious decision to take shortcuts in those areas because of pressure on the timeline.
The potential to be bitten in the ass by substandard work that goes undetected is always there, in business as well as OSS projects.
... that they actually mention piracy as the reason to implement this. Here in the Netherlands, similar legislation is being prepared, which by the way will require no court order whatsoever to have a site shut down, the public prosecutor can decide on a whim. The reason? You guessed it, "saving the children", or shutting down kiddie porn sites. As the minister stated: "Not to worry, but this is just for kiddie porn. Oh, and for other illegal stuff (like online piracy). Oh, and that includes hate speech too. Probably certain elements of a particular party we don't like much as well. But we'll exercise proper care" No checks, balances or even limits placed on this awesome power given to the prosecutors office... already famous for exercising proper care in sending a 10-man police force to do a nighttime raid on the home of an apparently extremely dangerous cartoonist making "hate-instigating" (i.e. subversive) cartoons. Or allowing cities to do door-to-door searches of homes looking for indoor weed plantations... but sending along municipal guys to check you're not claiming unemployment benefits while living it large, or having a dog without paying the tax. Oh and these are proper searches: fail to be home when they drop by a few times, and they will take a crowbar to your door.
Do not ever give in to pleas to relax controls to make life for the prosecutor a little easier "to catch more criminals". It's never about criminals nor child-molesters. We let them do it here, and allowed the government to thoroughly politicise the prosecutors' office, then took away the judiciary branch' power to check and balance. The result is not pretty... All these so called inconvenient controls exist for a reason.
The purpose of an MBA course is not to make strong leaders... or at least it shouldn't aspire to be. Looking at the curriculum, most of what it does is teach business administration tools and skills. Leadership skills? Not really. The sad thing is that a lot of MBA graduates do precisely that: they go into middle and upper management, often with little or no real experience at leading.
Managers, not MBAs offers a good insight into the MBA program and into all the things wrong with it today. The thing is, the MBA is not a bad course to take in itself... except that it reinforces bad behaviour in some cases, like making uninformed snap decisions. One of the bigger problems, according to the author, is that most MBA courses focus on the "science" side (analysis), and more or less completely avoid the "art" (vision) and "craft" (experience) aspects. And isn't this exacly what we most often see when we look at all the lousy managers in our own places of work? Making snap decisions on a whim, lacking a coherent vision and instead always reading up on the latest management techniques. They are often very poor at managing people and teams, but oh, they are good with numbers and spreadsheets. And numbers and spreadsheets is what is driving many companies today, rather than vision and insight.
The skills taught in an MBA can be very useful, and an MBA can offer a valuable additional set of skills to managers, consultants and even techies. But an MBA alone is insufficient to become a good manager, just like an engineering master's degree doesn't make one a good engineer.
3D can add immersion, which a great many viewers of Avatar will attest to. And increased immersion can make viewers more connected emotionally.
I don't know about biological limits, but there are technical ones. Normally, when your eyes lock on to something two things happen: your eyes turn inwards or outwards so that they are both centered on the subject, and the lenses are adjusted to bring the subject into focus. Your eyes are doing this all the time and it happens without thinking.
When you watch a regular movie, your eyes turn and focus on the screen, nothing special. But in a 3D movie, your eyes will have to be turned differently in order to see something in the foreground than they will to see into the background. That's the 3d effect. But the focal length of your eyes has to remain adjusted to the distance to the screen; a very unusual exercise for your eyes, and one that will give some people headaches. Conversely, if the movie is shot with the foreground in focus and our eyes adjust to look at something in the background, our brains expect the background to come into focus, which of course it won't since the filmmaker didn't shoot it that way. In Avatar this was highly annoying sometimes.
Perhaps it is possible to just shoot everything in focus, and have active glasses that apply a blurring effect to anything outside the range of distance out eyes are trained upon.
It does add value... Sometimes. 3D isn't going to improve movies like "the Shawshank redemption" or "Snatched", but it may add a lot to other movies that rely more on special effects, or are more demanding in suspension of disbelief. I say "may" because it's very hard to do well. And 3D doesn't work equally well on everyone's eyes.
Take "Avatar". Disregard for a moment the literary qualities of this "Pocahontas in space"... 3D did work exceptionally well in this movie, greatly increasing immersion into the make-believe world of Pandora. Not all movies need that, and many movies would be made worse by distracting 3D, but to movies like this, it certainly adds value. I'd pay extra to go see a movie like this in 3D again. Would I pay extra for 3D versions of Terminator 2, Dune, Blade Runner, Aliens, or Lord of the Rings? Yes I would. But I would not for 3D Titanic, the Big Lebowski, Shrek, and so on. And I would probably give a 3d-ified version of any 2d movie a miss. 3d is hard to get right, and I do kind of fear a push of just that: old movies with some poor 3d effects added on
You can read Amazon's books on the iPad; it's too bad that reading books on this device is a rather poor experience compared to proper e-ink. And I don't want a Kindle and its lock-in with Amazon (and a keyboard... seriously, on an e-reader???) That's why I too was disappointed about this announcement... Most publishers and distributors are still utterly clueless about e-books (some won't even sell them overseas, what's up with that?), and a few like B&N and Amazon are large enough to play the market on their own terms.
I only buy DRM-free e-books, or ePub/PDF with Adobe DRM, as long as the tool that lets me strip the DRM off continues to work. One of the publishers who do e-books well is O'Reilly; they offer a variety of DRM-free e-book formats. But so far I've been rather disappointed in the rest of them.
No. This will change the ISPs role from what it properly should be (a pipe into the internet) to being responsible for what actually passes through that pipe. Here is how it goes:
1) ISPs will charge customers for the "piracy fee".
2) ISPs will offer a "clean" subscription that blocks Torrent and other stuff, at a lower subscription rate
3) More and more ports and traffic types will be blocked as pirates and leechers try to route around the blocks in place.
4) The ISP will start opening up services again, for a small addition to your monthly fee which will go towards the IPSs piracy tax bill. Want torrents? $10. Using DropBox? That's $5. Access to usenet binaries? Another $7. And so on.
5) Meanwhile, some clever lawyer will use this precedent to sue ISPs, demanding taxes and damages for all manner of clients. The NYT will want a cut of the action for people who pirate their premium content. Apple and AT&T will demand money for distributing iPhone jailbreaks. Software companies will want in on the game as well...
There are far too many people out there who would nothing better than to be allowed to levy a blanket tax on the Internet. And be assured that in the end this will not serve the public. Distributors of content (somehow the actual creators do this far less) claim that piracy will ultimately ensure no works of quality are produced, but why produce quality content if your income comes from taxes and is based on quantity? Sounds a bit like the "railroad unification plan" from Atlas Shrugged...