it really peeves me that apple dropped the price to $99 AND introduced a new phone that has twice the capacity for the same price as the phone that I bought. it would be different if they said, "in 1 year, there will be this blah blah blah phone for $199" because that would have given the consumers a chance to decide if they want to go ahead with the massive $199 purchase or wait to get something that is better for the same price.
On one hand, it makes sense for them from 2 standpoints. If in February they announced "Umm guys, FYI we're probably releasing a new iPhone on June 19th" they run into 2 main problems.
1 - Only 1 model means massive sales dip Potential customers would wait until June, unless they NEEDED a replacement due to a broken Sony/Nokia/etc. Sales would drop, they couldn't get rid of their old models, etc. It's not like they're Nokia and have several models with different feature sets, where users would still focus on those instead of the new iPhone. They just have the 1 unit. At least Nokia's flip phones will be selling like hot-cakes while the rest the SmartPhone users await the new shiney.
2 - No public deadline means no public failure. Face it, if they announce it back in February and then run into a major issue like fabrication, bug, etc then they get egg on their face and their stock price goes down. Keep it secret, and maybe that June announcement can pushed back to their next big show in the Fall/Winter/etc.
Or just learn how to read a map and call off your coordinates over the radio. It's not hard* and saves taxpayers money.
*Disclaimer: I used to teach mapping in the Marine Corps. YMMV. If you have trouble counting or following bold straight lines on a map, this may be extremely difficult.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but no matter how well you read the map... isn't lazing the target is more precise.
It could mean the difference between hitting the target head-on vs striking next to it. Or hitting/entering the entrance vs striking the wall of the cave/bunker/warehouse. Plus, doesn't it also allow for the following of slow-moving targets?
Depending on the ordinance vs the armor, it might make the difference.
Eh, all phones are like that. I was recently in the city in a large building. I guess they had repeaters or amplifiers because I had full (or nearly full) bars on my phone. Yet my calls from my Samsung mobile to the landlines back home were horrid; I was losing a lot of the conversation even while stationary. It was quite curious.
On one hand, I just want a good solid phone that maintains good reception. I don't have MUCH use for all of the bells/whistles like playing MP3s. The camera is fine for the rare occasion when I need to take some snapshots, like if I was just in an accident and want to take pictures of the damage/scene for insurance purposes, but it's pixel-count isn't a selling point for me.
On the other hand I'd like a solid smart phone with a nice screen / interface that syncs well with my laptop for calendar entries, address books, notes, etc. A large library of apps to choose from is also tempting so long as they're useful to me. And if it had WiFi for when I needed to browse (and didn't want to pay for the data) then all-the-better.
I've had my GPS since 2006. Since then, on 2 occasions it has glitched, thinking I was 1/4 or 1/2 a mile South from where I actually was. The GPS Info said I was connected to 3 or 4 satellites so I still don't know what that's about.
Anyway, during those times, it would think I was on a parallel road (I guess it was estimating), always a smaller/slower road because I'd be driving on the only main road nearby.
I don't know what caused it, and it's only happened twice that I know if, but what's to say it couldn't happen to someone else with a governor in their car?
In my case, I was driving on a 40MpH road but it thought I was on a 25MpH road.
Your brakes are usually about four times stronger than your engine. If you need to change your speed very quickly, the brakes are much better at doing it. Instead of thinking that you can rely on engine power to get you out of trouble, learn watching the traffic, and reading other people's behavior. If the guy in the next line spins out, then most likely you should have noticed suspicious behavior before, and acted accordingly, like giving him space.
I don't like to consider myself old (yet), but I've been driving for a while now.
There have been a couple of times (ie, 3 or 4) where I have needed to slam on the accelerator to avoid an accident. In those cases hitting the break would have simply caused me to get T-Boned by some jerk running a red.
On the other hand, I have to rely on my breaks in emergency situations a couple of times per week or month (depending on where I am).
That's not to say that "gunning it" is never required.
99.9% of the time, using the brakes and keeping an eye out for potential issues and bad drivers on the road will keep you safe. Leave enough room between you and the other cars, keep an eye out for poor drivers and somehow distance yourself from them (they use no blinkers, weave in and out of traffic, tailgate, are ON THE CELLPHONE, etc).
But you never know. One day you'll be coasting through an intersection at a Green (not yellow/red) and some jerk will have rounded the corner and run the red light. Stopping means they plow into the side of your car, while accelerating means a near-miss.
They're definitely expensive, and even the small day-to-day costs add up over a year. But I'd imagine that a large percentage of the US population needs access to a car.
If we could wave a magic wand and grant the every town in the US decent mass transit options then I'd use it, but as a suburbanite I'd still need a car.
Sure if you live in NY City you (or somewhere similar like Boston) you can rely on subways and cabs for 99% of what you need. I doubt the majority of NYC residents own a car or know many that do.
The problem is that most people don't live in NYC, Boston, DC, etc so they need access to a car. Even if you started putting rail lines and bus stops in every city and town, the suburbanites would still need a car for their day-to-day activities.
For example: your kid has a karate class 1-2 towns over and there's either no mass-transit option or the option is severely lacking. Or you kid has a community soccer game 20 miles away at a field not near any major infrastructure.
It depends on geography; for example New Jersey has fairly high Insurance rates compared to the rest of the country. That's even ignoring things like the level of coverage, theft, etc.
On the plus side our gas if fairly cheap though it doesn't offset the fact that our insurance is high.
Why does anyone sell hard drives second hand, anyways? Most organizations and people buy them, and keep using the old disk until it either dies or becomes so obsolete that it's no longer worth using. How much value does some old 60 gig hard drive have on ebay, anyways? New 1 terrabyte drives are a mere $70 at newegg!
I can imagine that the drives might come from retired PCs. Many companies replace their PCs every X years for various reasons: their lease ran out, the PCs are too underpowered for current software, or upgrading/maintaining the old machines becomes too much of a hastle.
After disposal/donation/selling those PCs have to go somewhere, so I'd imagine they get broken up into their main components and sold off. Selling a PII-266 might be a tall order but someone might want that 60GB HD.
The possibilities for hacking other people's tattoos are frightening. You can hardly go around keeping a continuous watch on them, especially on your back. Imagine going to work at school labelled "Crack $5/bag".
This reminds me of a book: The Diamond Age
In it, a character describes how some people get their eyes cyber-ized so they can have HUDs and such for information, aiming etc.
However one guy he knew had his HUD hacked so that it would always show him catfood commercials, even when his eyes were closed while he tried to sleep, and he couldn't get anyone to remove the code. It eventually drove him to suicide.
This is the reason why the character used older-model goggles.
If the operating system was as safe as the crazy fanboys claim, it wouldnt have been able to install malware in the first place.
I'm no apologist, but that's by far the silliest thing I've ever heard today.
Malware can be anything, and if it's installed by the user then doubly-so.
If you can install software, then you can install Malware. Perhaps the Malware trojan is an application that lets you view images, but in the background seeks out Excel files and changes random data.
In that case how is it the Operating System's fault? The user installed the bad software, and the software was doing something that, as far as the OS knows, should be doing.
OS X isn't perfect nor is it immune. It's merely too small of a market to bother with. But generalities like that are just silly.
"limited mass production" Seems a bit of an oxymoron.
And I want one. With lascannons.
It's not really an oxymoron. It could imply that they will be producing them via mass-production means but aren't going to be pumping them out by the 10's of thousands.
This is opposed to them being built by hand by a small crew in their parent's garage. Investors and such would probably look more favorably on a company that has (or claims to have) access to mass production facilities.
Well, I'm an IT guy and I like facts. I'd personally like to know that I can get "between 45 minutes to 2 hours of battery life, depending on usage," particularly if it's a fairly accurate number.
After all, then I'd know that reading a PDF and/or listening to MP3s might give me around 2.5 and doing heaving dev work w/ an installed Oracle DB and using wireless networking might give me the 45 minutes.
That being said, an average isn't that bad for Joe Sixpack so long as they realize it's an estimate and that what they do will reflect the time. After all, I'd imagine the basic user is not in the far-ends of the spectrum unless they are playing games of watching DVDs. The average user probably taxes the system in phases that almost make an average.
The only time I saw Verizon move in my area to provide better service the last 10 years (Fios) was when comcast started offering voip phone service (they already have a strong cable internet following).
Unfortunately, that's anecdotal evidence. Mine refutes that, but it's just as invalid as it's anecdotal as well
On my side of things, I live in a small suburb. We're somewhat near a Verizon office (not in town, but not too far away). Yet Verizon was pretty quick to wire us for DSL and later Fios; and DSL was WAY before VoiP was big (or perhaps even an option).
We weren't among the first neighborhoods to receive either, nor in the absolute first batch. I recall getting annoyed hearing that some nearby towns were getting it while we didn't. But we still got it comparatively early.
Now, the old argument is population density one, but I feel that is a dead horse in many ways, with communities in Europe (Sweden) with comparable or lower density getting top notch speeds.
I wouldn't call it dead, it still has validity but isn't the overall answer unless we actually compare.
We have large stretches of rural countryside that probably weigh in with the size of some European countries in-total. We're not the biggest, Canada, Russia, and China out-class us but we're still big.
So a good indicator is, how well do those 3 countries handle their Cell + Internet coverage in the rural areas which are probably larger than ours? If their rural coverage puts ours to shame, then we should feel bad. If we're about equal, then we shouldn't
Overall size can mean more than overall percentage. Think about comparing the lawn care of 2 homes, specifically pulling weeds. Do you really care that Client 1 has a smaller percentage of weeds in their garden than Client 2, if Client 1 still manages to have more weeks since their property is a lot larger?
Unfortunately, I don't know any hard numbers. I'd say if Canada beats us in their "middle-of-nowhere" coverage then it's game over.
I'm not a fan of Halo... I HATED that whole Flood part, it's one of my most hated game scenarios. You go from fighting one kind of enemy, which look alright, to a grotesque ogranic thing with either worse AI.
All-in-all, it is over-hyped.
That being said, the storyline isn't that much gibberish.
- Aliens are attacking Earth's colonies, fortunately they don't know the location of Earth. - Aliens are VERY religious, to the point of being zealous. They believe in ancient gods that left on a great journey, that they are chosen, etc. - While escaping, MC and company come across a large ring-like world with its own ecosystem. - We come to learn the Ring is actually a weapon. Several are spread across the galaxy and when activated release an energy way that destroys all biological matter. - It was activated once before, when the rings' creators couldn't stop a parasitic organism called "The Flood" from absorbing all life in the galaxy. - For SOME reason, samples of the flood survived on at least one of the rings and are unleashed by the humans/aliens when they explore the ring. - Now humanity is fighting aliens that hate them, and aliens that just want to absorb them.
There was at least 1 episode a few years back on Law and Order... my guess is either SVU or CI.
In any case, they traced the paper down to the office it was printed on because of marks left by the printer by testing all of the printers within a certain building that employed a number of "persons of interest."
I don't recall if that episode focused on the spots left on purpose, or if it was dirty roller in the printer. But there may have been more episodes that focused on either that I didn't see.
I knew who they were owned by, but I was surprised to see a SB ad for it, especially when it the slot could have gone to someone like Sony/Nike/GE/etc.
But don't publishers try to sell "new editions" to the districts every six months, or is that only a college problem?
My experience in the US was that this is more of a college problem.
It wasn't THAT long ago that I was in High School, and it was in a decent area. Heck at the time we were ranked as one of the top public schools in the state.
In any case, most of our textbooks were a couple of years old. Depending on the subject, some were quite old and worn while others maybe only a couple. I think Math and foreign languages were usually old while our "Social Studies" books were refreshed more often because they would sometimes mention more contemporary material/events in their sub-sections.
I think for some of the subjects, they would only replace them once too many of the books (and the spares) became too worn to last the year.
...you are guessing that iTunes is Windows-only? Just to be clear, we're talking about the iTunes from Apple, not some other iTunes?;)
Netflix is not Windows-only either, btw. I don't know about Hulu.
Being US-only is a concern though.
Hulu is definitely not Windows-only. It's more available than Netflix's "Watch Now" as far as tech goes (I think it's just a Flash player), but I believe they restrict access to only some countries (like the US).
It's a decent site, and I was shocked when they pimped it during the SuperBowl. Free and legal streaming of a lot of TV and a some movies.
...until the day MS, Sony and/or Nintendo decides it's time to cut out the middle man and release a network-only console with massive local storage (say, 1TB hard disk - not unfeasible even today, let alone in a few years)
I'd say that is still a long while away. They'd lose too much market as not everyone has broadband (or sufficiently "fast" broadband). They'd lose too many customers to justify the increase in profit margin.
For example, take the US. I'm not saying the US is the center of the world but we play a big part as gaming customers. Our broadband penetration hs a very low percentage, and that's counting 1.5-3MBit DSL connections where downloading DVD-sized files can be a pain.
I doubt the big companies will go that route until a vast majority of the population has high speed broadband.
Right now almost anyone can buy a system and play. While I'm sure a good percentage of their target audience have access to high speed broadband, it's probably not enough to warrant dropping the rest of the audience for a bigger profit margin.
You can see this already with PC gaming. Digital distributors like Steam have pretty much demolished the brick and mortar stores. My local GameStop barely has a PC game section anymore and it's not because the PC market is shrinking. In fact, it's growing.
Gamestop and EBGames started doing this well before Steam and some other distribution sites came out, and well before the "big" ones became popular.
Gamestop and EBGames want to focus their shelf-space on Console games because they can handle used games... the chain has become a little more than a pawn shop for games. The profit they make on reselling used console games is quite high and whenever I go they push the used games on me at the counter pretty hard.
Now if you want to complain about different chains like BestBuy, then I can see your point. Then again the 2 BestBuys closest to me never really had a HUGE PC game section and the 2 stores still have the same number of shelves dedicated to PC games now as they did years back. But that's just anecdotal evidence.
Last I saw Apple is a tech company... they just released a ton of new products. How is this not applicable? I guess when Google released their single cellphone, or Microsoft releases a new line of Zune's, that would also not be worthy for technical people?
If you don't like stories on Apple, you can, you know, set your preferences to block it.
Eh, you can easily look at this from both sides.
On one hand, this was a product refresh (not really a brand-new product). Other companies refresh their products all of the time: Dell, Nokia, Samsung, etc. Yet we don't hear about them, nor do we really care. Some companies do this every month, yet nobody really considers it news worty.
On the other hand, Apple refreshes their products quite slowly... hence why some people find it to be news. Dell might quietly up the CPU or RAM offered in their machines every few weeks and/or drop their prices as the hardware ages, but Apple typically takes forever to do either.
In my opinion, this hurts Apple. Sure, when Apple has a refresh the prices usually aren't too bad. But then those same products (with the same specs) sit on the shelves for months without much of a price break. Meanwhile Dell has either released something faster or dropped their prices since they aren't as "shiny" anymore.
The parent's point is that if Apple wants to sell their OS without the hardware, they should not be allowed to put in the license for that software that you can only use it on Apple hardware. Their remedy, if they don't want their OS being used on non-Apple hardware, is to not sell OS X separately from the hardware.
When you buy a DVD or Blu-Ray from Sony, do you have to agree to a license that says you can only play it back on a Sony player on a Sony television? Why should it be any different with Apple?
A more apt analogy would be...
When you buy a PS3 game you can only legally play it on a PS3. When you buy an XBox 360 game I can only play it on an XBox 360.
Now we're closer to comparing apples to apples. Maybe red apples to golden-delicious. Here are are comparing a piece of software written for a specific piece/brand of hardware. You want the game/software? Then you have to get the unit.
car companies will issue a study saying that people mostly use the first four gear and that they'll change extra for fifth gear.
They already do this on some models: 5-speed transmission is an 'option'.
I haven't seen a standard/manual transmission with only 4 gears on a new car in years.
Automatics, on the other hand, still come with 4 from some manufacturers. Just the other day I noticed a new Subaru Impreza came with only 4 on the automatic. I think manufacturers only started having 5-speed automatics as their standard automatic options a few years ago.
As an opt-in feature by all parties, it has its uses so long as you don't mind the loss of privacy among your friends (and only them).
Maybe I want to hang out with some pals, perhaps to go bowling or see a film in a couple of hours.
I hop on and see which of my friends are home or at least in the general area before calling; if it looks like someone's too far to make it (like the next state over) then they're obviously not worth calling.
Then again, even with opt-in there are a lot of negatives; almost too many to count. It gets a little creepy that I can just decide to find you while you're shopping or know where you are at varying points of the day. Hmm it looks like Bob's at one of THOSE bars, I wonder what he's not telling us.
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it really peeves me that apple dropped the price to $99 AND introduced a new phone that has twice the capacity for the same price as the phone that I bought. it would be different if they said, "in 1 year, there will be this blah blah blah phone for $199" because that would have given the consumers a chance to decide if they want to go ahead with the massive $199 purchase or wait to get something that is better for the same price.
On one hand, it makes sense for them from 2 standpoints. If in February they announced "Umm guys, FYI we're probably releasing a new iPhone on June 19th" they run into 2 main problems.
1 - Only 1 model means massive sales dip
Potential customers would wait until June, unless they NEEDED a replacement due to a broken Sony/Nokia/etc. Sales would drop, they couldn't get rid of their old models, etc.
It's not like they're Nokia and have several models with different feature sets, where users would still focus on those instead of the new iPhone. They just have the 1 unit. At least Nokia's flip phones will be selling like hot-cakes while the rest the SmartPhone users await the new shiney.
2 - No public deadline means no public failure.
Face it, if they announce it back in February and then run into a major issue like fabrication, bug, etc then they get egg on their face and their stock price goes down. Keep it secret, and maybe that June announcement can pushed back to their next big show in the Fall/Winter/etc.
Or just learn how to read a map and call off your coordinates over the radio. It's not hard* and saves taxpayers money.
*Disclaimer: I used to teach mapping in the Marine Corps. YMMV. If you have trouble counting or following bold straight lines on a map, this may be extremely difficult.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but no matter how well you read the map... isn't lazing the target is more precise.
It could mean the difference between hitting the target head-on vs striking next to it. Or hitting/entering the entrance vs striking the wall of the cave/bunker/warehouse. Plus, doesn't it also allow for the following of slow-moving targets?
Depending on the ordinance vs the armor, it might make the difference.
Eh, all phones are like that. I was recently in the city in a large building. I guess they had repeaters or amplifiers because I had full (or nearly full) bars on my phone. Yet my calls from my Samsung mobile to the landlines back home were horrid; I was losing a lot of the conversation even while stationary. It was quite curious.
On one hand, I just want a good solid phone that maintains good reception. I don't have MUCH use for all of the bells/whistles like playing MP3s. The camera is fine for the rare occasion when I need to take some snapshots, like if I was just in an accident and want to take pictures of the damage/scene for insurance purposes, but it's pixel-count isn't a selling point for me.
On the other hand I'd like a solid smart phone with a nice screen / interface that syncs well with my laptop for calendar entries, address books, notes, etc. A large library of apps to choose from is also tempting so long as they're useful to me. And if it had WiFi for when I needed to browse (and didn't want to pay for the data) then all-the-better.
I've had my GPS since 2006. Since then, on 2 occasions it has glitched, thinking I was 1/4 or 1/2 a mile South from where I actually was. The GPS Info said I was connected to 3 or 4 satellites so I still don't know what that's about.
Anyway, during those times, it would think I was on a parallel road (I guess it was estimating), always a smaller/slower road because I'd be driving on the only main road nearby.
I don't know what caused it, and it's only happened twice that I know if, but what's to say it couldn't happen to someone else with a governor in their car?
In my case, I was driving on a 40MpH road but it thought I was on a 25MpH road.
Your brakes are usually about four times stronger than your engine. If you need to change your speed very quickly, the brakes are much better at doing it. Instead of thinking that you can rely on engine power to get you out of trouble, learn watching the traffic, and reading other people's behavior. If the guy in the next line spins out, then most likely you should have noticed suspicious behavior before, and acted accordingly, like giving him space.
I don't like to consider myself old (yet), but I've been driving for a while now.
There have been a couple of times (ie, 3 or 4) where I have needed to slam on the accelerator to avoid an accident. In those cases hitting the break would have simply caused me to get T-Boned by some jerk running a red.
On the other hand, I have to rely on my breaks in emergency situations a couple of times per week or month (depending on where I am).
That's not to say that "gunning it" is never required.
99.9% of the time, using the brakes and keeping an eye out for potential issues and bad drivers on the road will keep you safe. Leave enough room between you and the other cars, keep an eye out for poor drivers and somehow distance yourself from them (they use no blinkers, weave in and out of traffic, tailgate, are ON THE CELLPHONE, etc).
But you never know. One day you'll be coasting through an intersection at a Green (not yellow/red) and some jerk will have rounded the corner and run the red light. Stopping means they plow into the side of your car, while accelerating means a near-miss.
They're definitely expensive, and even the small day-to-day costs add up over a year. But I'd imagine that a large percentage of the US population needs access to a car.
If we could wave a magic wand and grant the every town in the US decent mass transit options then I'd use it, but as a suburbanite I'd still need a car.
Sure if you live in NY City you (or somewhere similar like Boston) you can rely on subways and cabs for 99% of what you need. I doubt the majority of NYC residents own a car or know many that do.
The problem is that most people don't live in NYC, Boston, DC, etc so they need access to a car. Even if you started putting rail lines and bus stops in every city and town, the suburbanites would still need a car for their day-to-day activities.
For example: your kid has a karate class 1-2 towns over and there's either no mass-transit option or the option is severely lacking. Or you kid has a community soccer game 20 miles away at a field not near any major infrastructure.
It depends on geography; for example New Jersey has fairly high Insurance rates compared to the rest of the country. That's even ignoring things like the level of coverage, theft, etc.
On the plus side our gas if fairly cheap though it doesn't offset the fact that our insurance is high.
Why does anyone sell hard drives second hand, anyways? Most organizations and people buy them, and keep using the old disk until it either dies or becomes so obsolete that it's no longer worth using. How much value does some old 60 gig hard drive have on ebay, anyways? New 1 terrabyte drives are a mere $70 at newegg!
I can imagine that the drives might come from retired PCs. Many companies replace their PCs every X years for various reasons: their lease ran out, the PCs are too underpowered for current software, or upgrading/maintaining the old machines becomes too much of a hastle.
After disposal/donation/selling those PCs have to go somewhere, so I'd imagine they get broken up into their main components and sold off. Selling a PII-266 might be a tall order but someone might want that 60GB HD.
The question is, will this delay Half-Life 2?
Oh wait, wrong excuse.
The possibilities for hacking other people's tattoos are frightening. You can hardly go around keeping a continuous watch on them, especially on your back. Imagine going to work at school labelled "Crack $5/bag".
This reminds me of a book: The Diamond Age
In it, a character describes how some people get their eyes cyber-ized so they can have HUDs and such for information, aiming etc.
However one guy he knew had his HUD hacked so that it would always show him catfood commercials, even when his eyes were closed while he tried to sleep, and he couldn't get anyone to remove the code. It eventually drove him to suicide.
This is the reason why the character used older-model goggles.
If the operating system was as safe as the crazy fanboys claim, it wouldnt have been able to install malware in the first place.
I'm no apologist, but that's by far the silliest thing I've ever heard today.
Malware can be anything, and if it's installed by the user then doubly-so.
If you can install software, then you can install Malware. Perhaps the Malware trojan is an application that lets you view images, but in the background seeks out Excel files and changes random data.
In that case how is it the Operating System's fault? The user installed the bad software, and the software was doing something that, as far as the OS knows, should be doing.
OS X isn't perfect nor is it immune. It's merely too small of a market to bother with. But generalities like that are just silly.
"limited mass production" Seems a bit of an oxymoron.
And I want one. With lascannons.
It's not really an oxymoron. It could imply that they will be producing them via mass-production means but aren't going to be pumping them out by the 10's of thousands.
This is opposed to them being built by hand by a small crew in their parent's garage. Investors and such would probably look more favorably on a company that has (or claims to have) access to mass production facilities.
However I am skeptical about this whole thing.
Well, I'm an IT guy and I like facts. I'd personally like to know that I can get "between 45 minutes to 2 hours of battery life, depending on usage," particularly if it's a fairly accurate number.
After all, then I'd know that reading a PDF and/or listening to MP3s might give me around 2.5 and doing heaving dev work w/ an installed Oracle DB and using wireless networking might give me the 45 minutes.
That being said, an average isn't that bad for Joe Sixpack so long as they realize it's an estimate and that what they do will reflect the time. After all, I'd imagine the basic user is not in the far-ends of the spectrum unless they are playing games of watching DVDs. The average user probably taxes the system in phases that almost make an average.
Unfortunately, that's anecdotal evidence. Mine refutes that, but it's just as invalid as it's anecdotal as well
On my side of things, I live in a small suburb. We're somewhat near a Verizon office (not in town, but not too far away). Yet Verizon was pretty quick to wire us for DSL and later Fios; and DSL was WAY before VoiP was big (or perhaps even an option).
We weren't among the first neighborhoods to receive either, nor in the absolute first batch. I recall getting annoyed hearing that some nearby towns were getting it while we didn't. But we still got it comparatively early.
I wouldn't call it dead, it still has validity but isn't the overall answer unless we actually compare.
We have large stretches of rural countryside that probably weigh in with the size of some European countries in-total. We're not the biggest, Canada, Russia, and China out-class us but we're still big.
So a good indicator is, how well do those 3 countries handle their Cell + Internet coverage in the rural areas which are probably larger than ours? If their rural coverage puts ours to shame, then we should feel bad. If we're about equal, then we shouldn't
Overall size can mean more than overall percentage. Think about comparing the lawn care of 2 homes, specifically pulling weeds. Do you really care that Client 1 has a smaller percentage of weeds in their garden than Client 2, if Client 1 still manages to have more weeks since their property is a lot larger?
Unfortunately, I don't know any hard numbers. I'd say if Canada beats us in their "middle-of-nowhere" coverage then it's game over.
I'm not a fan of Halo... I HATED that whole Flood part, it's one of my most hated game scenarios. You go from fighting one kind of enemy, which look alright, to a grotesque ogranic thing with either worse AI.
All-in-all, it is over-hyped.
That being said, the storyline isn't that much gibberish.
- Aliens are attacking Earth's colonies, fortunately they don't know the location of Earth.
- Aliens are VERY religious, to the point of being zealous. They believe in ancient gods that left on a great journey, that they are chosen, etc.
- While escaping, MC and company come across a large ring-like world with its own ecosystem.
- We come to learn the Ring is actually a weapon. Several are spread across the galaxy and when activated release an energy way that destroys all biological matter.
- It was activated once before, when the rings' creators couldn't stop a parasitic organism called "The Flood" from absorbing all life in the galaxy.
- For SOME reason, samples of the flood survived on at least one of the rings and are unleashed by the humans/aliens when they explore the ring.
- Now humanity is fighting aliens that hate them, and aliens that just want to absorb them.
There was at least 1 episode a few years back on Law and Order... my guess is either SVU or CI.
In any case, they traced the paper down to the office it was printed on because of marks left by the printer by testing all of the printers within a certain building that employed a number of "persons of interest."
I don't recall if that episode focused on the spots left on purpose, or if it was dirty roller in the printer. But there may have been more episodes that focused on either that I didn't see.
I knew who they were owned by, but I was surprised to see a SB ad for it, especially when it the slot could have gone to someone like Sony/Nike/GE/etc.
But don't publishers try to sell "new editions" to the districts every six months, or is that only a college problem?
My experience in the US was that this is more of a college problem.
It wasn't THAT long ago that I was in High School, and it was in a decent area. Heck at the time we were ranked as one of the top public schools in the state.
In any case, most of our textbooks were a couple of years old. Depending on the subject, some were quite old and worn while others maybe only a couple. I think Math and foreign languages were usually old while our "Social Studies" books were refreshed more often because they would sometimes mention more contemporary material/events in their sub-sections.
I think for some of the subjects, they would only replace them once too many of the books (and the spares) became too worn to last the year.
...you are guessing that iTunes is Windows-only? Just to be clear, we're talking about the iTunes from Apple, not some other iTunes? ;)
Netflix is not Windows-only either, btw. I don't know about Hulu.
Being US-only is a concern though.
Hulu is definitely not Windows-only. It's more available than Netflix's "Watch Now" as far as tech goes (I think it's just a Flash player), but I believe they restrict access to only some countries (like the US).
It's a decent site, and I was shocked when they pimped it during the SuperBowl. Free and legal streaming of a lot of TV and a some movies.
...until the day MS, Sony and/or Nintendo decides it's time to cut out the middle man and release a network-only console with massive local storage (say, 1TB hard disk - not unfeasible even today, let alone in a few years)
I'd say that is still a long while away. They'd lose too much market as not everyone has broadband (or sufficiently "fast" broadband). They'd lose too many customers to justify the increase in profit margin.
For example, take the US. I'm not saying the US is the center of the world but we play a big part as gaming customers. Our broadband penetration hs a very low percentage, and that's counting 1.5-3MBit DSL connections where downloading DVD-sized files can be a pain.
I doubt the big companies will go that route until a vast majority of the population has high speed broadband.
Right now almost anyone can buy a system and play. While I'm sure a good percentage of their target audience have access to high speed broadband, it's probably not enough to warrant dropping the rest of the audience for a bigger profit margin.
You can see this already with PC gaming. Digital distributors like Steam have pretty much demolished the brick and mortar stores. My local GameStop barely has a PC game section anymore and it's not because the PC market is shrinking. In fact, it's growing.
Gamestop and EBGames started doing this well before Steam and some other distribution sites came out, and well before the "big" ones became popular.
Gamestop and EBGames want to focus their shelf-space on Console games because they can handle used games... the chain has become a little more than a pawn shop for games. The profit they make on reselling used console games is quite high and whenever I go they push the used games on me at the counter pretty hard.
Now if you want to complain about different chains like BestBuy, then I can see your point. Then again the 2 BestBuys closest to me never really had a HUGE PC game section and the 2 stores still have the same number of shelves dedicated to PC games now as they did years back. But that's just anecdotal evidence.
Last I saw Apple is a tech company... they just released a ton of new products. How is this not applicable? I guess when Google released their single cellphone, or Microsoft releases a new line of Zune's, that would also not be worthy for technical people?
If you don't like stories on Apple, you can, you know, set your preferences to block it.
Eh, you can easily look at this from both sides.
On one hand, this was a product refresh (not really a brand-new product). Other companies refresh their products all of the time: Dell, Nokia, Samsung, etc. Yet we don't hear about them, nor do we really care. Some companies do this every month, yet nobody really considers it news worty.
On the other hand, Apple refreshes their products quite slowly... hence why some people find it to be news. Dell might quietly up the CPU or RAM offered in their machines every few weeks and/or drop their prices as the hardware ages, but Apple typically takes forever to do either.
In my opinion, this hurts Apple. Sure, when Apple has a refresh the prices usually aren't too bad. But then those same products (with the same specs) sit on the shelves for months without much of a price break. Meanwhile Dell has either released something faster or dropped their prices since they aren't as "shiny" anymore.
The parent's point is that if Apple wants to sell their OS without the hardware, they should not be allowed to put in the license for that software that you can only use it on Apple hardware. Their remedy, if they don't want their OS being used on non-Apple hardware, is to not sell OS X separately from the hardware.
When you buy a DVD or Blu-Ray from Sony, do you have to agree to a license that says you can only play it back on a Sony player on a Sony television? Why should it be any different with Apple?
A more apt analogy would be...
When you buy a PS3 game you can only legally play it on a PS3. When you buy an XBox 360 game I can only play it on an XBox 360.
Now we're closer to comparing apples to apples. Maybe red apples to golden-delicious. Here are are comparing a piece of software written for a specific piece/brand of hardware. You want the game/software? Then you have to get the unit.
car companies will issue a study saying that people mostly use the first four gear and that they'll change extra for fifth gear.
They already do this on some models: 5-speed transmission is an 'option'.
I haven't seen a standard/manual transmission with only 4 gears on a new car in years.
Automatics, on the other hand, still come with 4 from some manufacturers. Just the other day I noticed a new Subaru Impreza came with only 4 on the automatic. I think manufacturers only started having 5-speed automatics as their standard automatic options a few years ago.
As an opt-in feature by all parties, it has its uses so long as you don't mind the loss of privacy among your friends (and only them).
Maybe I want to hang out with some pals, perhaps to go bowling or see a film in a couple of hours.
I hop on and see which of my friends are home or at least in the general area before calling; if it looks like someone's too far to make it (like the next state over) then they're obviously not worth calling.
Then again, even with opt-in there are a lot of negatives; almost too many to count. It gets a little creepy that I can just decide to find you while you're shopping or know where you are at varying points of the day. Hmm it looks like Bob's at one of THOSE bars, I wonder what he's not telling us.