In rough times, you have to diversify and try to slide into new markets to keep making money. Let's face it, the dollar isn't getting any stronger anytime soon. HP's taking their cash reserves and investing it now instead of watching their net worth dwindle. HP's pushing themselves to be the new industry leader in all tech sectors, not just their traditional markets.
I think in the long run, companies like Dell will look back and wonder why they didn't do what HP's currently doing. Now's the time to buy and innovate, not be conservative and limit your market strategy.
I pay $45 a month for my cable modem Internet service. I believe the cheapest cable package offered is $20 a month, which basically gives you OTA channels and a few foreign language channels. After that, for any package with real "cable channels," the price jumps fairly dramatically. I believe the cheapest bundled service is $79.99 or $89.99, and that includes no cable box. The only HD content you receive at that price point are the OTA channels.
Needless to say, I pay for the Internet and and watch all my tv either OTA or streamed via Hulu, PlayOn, and my Xbox to my tv. I'm holding out for IPTV.
I've never seen a mandatory cable box. You can still get analog cable through your coax. The cable box is generally only for upper tier / pay channels, digital cable, and dvr service.
1) $60 is the suckers price. I saw a year subscription for $35 online yesterday. I usually make this expense back via Xbox Live Gold sales on games and DLC throughout the year, so at least I can justify the cost. 2) Laggy? It might be laggy compared to PC gaming, but it blows the PS3 network out of the water as far as lag and user numbers go. Many PS3 online games are ghost ships compared to user numbers on the Xbox, especially with older titles. 3) The hard drive is totally a rip off, although you can offload save games and data on memory sticks and USB hard drives now. It still sucks, but it's better than it was.
I own both systems and I honestly don't have allegiance to either POS company. I will say that my Xbox online experience has been worlds better than my PS3 experience. My Xbox is for online gaming and live arcade. My PS3 is for blu-ray and single player gaming. In a perfect world I'd have the PS3 hardware with the Xbox Live experience and GUI on it...unfortunately, that's not how it works...
Believe it or not, I got my copies of Saga and SFIII at Toys R Us on clearance for $20 a pop. There were multiple copies too which, in retrospect, make me cry. PDS was going for $250 on ebay at the apex of its collectability. SFIII could fetch around $90. Ahh well, hopefully they went to collectors.
The difference is that Snatcher was a fantastic game. When you think of the Sega CD, Night Trap is the first game that comes to mind...but that game sucked even back then. We're talking about good games for bad systems, right (even though I did go off topic and mention the Saturn, which was a fantastic console)?
I don't see anyone waxing nostalgic over many 32X or Sega Channel games:)
This is the game that put Hideo Kojima on the map, and rightfully so. It's all but forgotten now except in classic gaming circles, but that game was groundbreaking and did so many things right. It's a shame that very few people will experience it. It seems like Sega systems are riddled with games that fit into the "shame that very few people will experience it" category. I speak as one of the 25k or so owners of Panzer Dragoon Saga. It's a crime against the gaming community that more people can't experience, what amounts to me, as the most awe inspiring RPG ever created.
The thing is, most of these genetic causes for high cholesterol are due to diet. You could be eating a perfectly healthy diet...but what is healthy for you isn't necessarily healthy for the next person. We all come from different genetic backgrounds and the foods you eat work hand in hand with your genetics. This is why elimination diets that throw out foods that that contain possible intolerance (dairy, soy, wheat, nightshades (tomato, potato, eggplant, etc), certain nuts, etc) work so well. Take away everything your body could possibly have an issue with (all these foods are fairly well documented) and bring them back gradually to find your intolerance. You would be amazed what you'll learn about your body. You'll learn about irritations and intolerance your body has towards food that were hidden before, silently wrecking havoc on your body.
The human body is an amazing machine and will regulate itself if given the chance. There's always disease and there will always be a reason for research medicine and doctors because of this, but until insurance companies start paying for nutritionists we're stuck in a bit of a rut.
You're really citing Ben Goldacre? There's as much criticism of him as their are the studies he "picks apart." He's basically the medical equivalent of the modern day forum troll who adds nothing to the conversation but takes every chance he gets to point out the fact that someone didn't dot his i's or cross his t's. Granted, I think that scrutiny in the medical field is needed now more than ever, but we need people giving constructive criticism, not criticism alone.
I think a major issue with most medical science is that it's built on years and years of bad information. We're used to treating symptoms and not underlying issues. As it stands now, there's probably as many "valid" ways of showing that fish oil has benefits as there are to show ways that fish oil doesn't. The same can be said of dozens of other supplements that we take in droves. But these studies are mostly focused on the side effects we notice and can measure, not what these supplements are actually doing to the body.
(A bit of an off topic rant, but...) I think the saddest thing is that the medical community and society hasn't embraced the use of food as a drug. You have high blood pressure? The doctor tells you to eat better and take fish oil and other supplements? Doesn't work? You get lipitor or a similar drug. If you give someone a prescription, they'll take it because there's a mystique behind drugs. They're miracles in a bottle that cure you. Yet, you tell people how they need to eat and they scoff at it. I honestly believe if you could get most people to eliminate/severely limit fried food from their diet, gave them a glass of vegetable juice (because you know they're not going to eat enough on their own), and tested them for food allergies/intolerances and let them know what to avoid, that's all we'd need to get society healthy again and avoid half of all doctors visits. It's a shame, my insurance will pay for all the drugs my doctor will prescribe me...yet I spend a fortune every year on vegetables and healthy foods so I don't HAVE to have my doctor prescribe me anything.
I think that the "deeper changes" are that AMD's prepping for their integrated CPU/GPU launch. It only makes sense. If they're gonna start merging chips, it would be awful awkward to have to brand names AND a product name attached to a chip.
I would image that better Linux drivers might come down the pipeline, though. These integrated approaches lend themselves nicely towards Linux workstations and they'd definitely loose out on a potential market if they completely ignored the issue.
From wikipedia: "In countries where patents on software algorithms are upheld, vendors and commercial users of products that use H.264/AVC are expected to pay patent licensing royalties for the patented technology[8] that their products use."
-and-
"On February 2, 2010 MPEG LA announced that H.264-encoded Internet Video that is free to end users would continue to be exempt from royalty fees until at least December 31, 2015.[11] However, other fees remain in place. The license terms are updated in 5-year blocks.[12]"
H.264 isn't exactly free to use. If it wasn't for the licensing issues surrounding it, it would be a great solution. But you've got to think long term solution, not something that's going to work until royalty fees start to kick in...
Fine, HTML 5. HTML 5 is great, we can all agree on that. Now which video codec? The one nice thing about Silverlight and Flash is that they're, more or less, all inclusive packages. HTML 5 relies on too many outside variables ATM to make it viable. The openness of HTML 5 is a blessing and a curse. We still need Silverlight and Flash for the time being for the 75% of the market who's never heard of a codec. The road to HTML 5 is going to be an ugly and bloody one...
Right, but not everyone needs that. I bought a GPS for about $50 and it works great.
I have a cell phone that will play music, games, video, and act as a gps...yet I have an mp3 player because it's a better solution for the task, a Nintendo DS because the games are more than brief distractions, and a GPS because I don't want to pay the carrier for the right to use the GPS chip on the phone. Video, don't really care about video, but I suppose I could do that with the mp3 player or DS if I had to. There's something to be said for single purpose (or focused purposed) items that know what they're supposed to do and do it flawlessly.
My dad came home with a C24 (yeah, 24...) in 84. I was 5 at the time. I asked where the games were, then he gave me the second part of the gift....a book full of programs. I cannot even guess how much time I spent hunting and pecking to type out programs on that thing, recording them on tapes, and hoping they worked so I didn't have to go through it line by line to see where I typo'd. Eventually I actually started to understand what the stuff meant and I'd change various things (cheat and change the timer, etc).
In middle school we had basic programming, a Mac lab class where we used hypercard to make mini applications, and technology lab where we created animations using vectors. This was in the early 90s. If middle schools have absolutely nothing like this going on now, that's kinda sad.
By exposing how one has acted and reacted in the past, it makes it easier for one to predict how one will act and react in the future. Also, it may be transparent to one who is not in the middle of the conflict as to how certain information can expose tactics, capabilities, and sensitive information. You ask for a specific example. I'd love to give you a specific example, but I think it's enough to state that the kind of information that wikileaks is getting a hold of is the kind of documentation spys were trying to obtain in the past. It might help, it might not help, but any information is information. Also, who's to say could be leaked further than wikileaks that is sensitive. Julian Assange talks about his "organization," but we don't necessarily know who he is dealing with.
I'm all for the world knowing what's actually happening and I think there should be a witch trial to root out the people who are classifying information based on political leanings and to open up our library of information. That being said, I think the proper precautions need to be taken for the correct people to go about declassifying the documentation. I think the best thing we can hope for from wikileaks is a grassroots movement to speed up the declassification of documents and to loosen the restrictions of information dissemination, but it's going to take a hell of a grassroots movement to get the ball rolling on this one.
This is definitely an interesting situation and brings up a lot of good discussion that we, as a society, need to be having about access to information. Hopefully this leads to open floor debate amongst our leaders. Hopefully this becomes an issue during our next presidential election.
One way they could address about half of the issue would be to allow users to assign a secondary administrator (basically a "power of attorney") that had has the right to delete (not modify) the account after the account goes inactive for so many days. It's morbid, but so are living wills and we deal with those on a daily basis.
Of course, this would do nothing for the younger crowd who tend to die unexpectedly and aren't thinking ahead like this, but it would definitely put a dent in issue with ghost accounts and avoid a lot of the red tape that goes into handling these situations.
Really? We're using a site called "GamePron" as a source for a story? Especially with grammar that bad? Ugh. I'll just sit here for the IT police to arrest me after going to a site with "pron" in the title. I'm sure that one red flagged my account.
Slashdot Mirror
I know, really? I thought that's why we all had smart phones now.
In rough times, you have to diversify and try to slide into new markets to keep making money. Let's face it, the dollar isn't getting any stronger anytime soon. HP's taking their cash reserves and investing it now instead of watching their net worth dwindle. HP's pushing themselves to be the new industry leader in all tech sectors, not just their traditional markets.
I think in the long run, companies like Dell will look back and wonder why they didn't do what HP's currently doing. Now's the time to buy and innovate, not be conservative and limit your market strategy.
i loled and wished I had mod points...
I pay $45 a month for my cable modem Internet service. I believe the cheapest cable package offered is $20 a month, which basically gives you OTA channels and a few foreign language channels. After that, for any package with real "cable channels," the price jumps fairly dramatically. I believe the cheapest bundled service is $79.99 or $89.99, and that includes no cable box. The only HD content you receive at that price point are the OTA channels.
Needless to say, I pay for the Internet and and watch all my tv either OTA or streamed via Hulu, PlayOn, and my Xbox to my tv. I'm holding out for IPTV.
I've never seen a mandatory cable box. You can still get analog cable through your coax. The cable box is generally only for upper tier / pay channels, digital cable, and dvr service.
I subscribe to cable modem service, but my provider puts a filter on the line that prevents basic cable reception. So, there ya go!
1) $60 is the suckers price. I saw a year subscription for $35 online yesterday. I usually make this expense back via Xbox Live Gold sales on games and DLC throughout the year, so at least I can justify the cost.
2) Laggy? It might be laggy compared to PC gaming, but it blows the PS3 network out of the water as far as lag and user numbers go. Many PS3 online games are ghost ships compared to user numbers on the Xbox, especially with older titles.
3) The hard drive is totally a rip off, although you can offload save games and data on memory sticks and USB hard drives now. It still sucks, but it's better than it was.
I own both systems and I honestly don't have allegiance to either POS company. I will say that my Xbox online experience has been worlds better than my PS3 experience. My Xbox is for online gaming and live arcade. My PS3 is for blu-ray and single player gaming. In a perfect world I'd have the PS3 hardware with the Xbox Live experience and GUI on it...unfortunately, that's not how it works...
Believe it or not, I got my copies of Saga and SFIII at Toys R Us on clearance for $20 a pop. There were multiple copies too which, in retrospect, make me cry. PDS was going for $250 on ebay at the apex of its collectability. SFIII could fetch around $90. Ahh well, hopefully they went to collectors.
The difference is that Snatcher was a fantastic game. When you think of the Sega CD, Night Trap is the first game that comes to mind...but that game sucked even back then. We're talking about good games for bad systems, right (even though I did go off topic and mention the Saturn, which was a fantastic console)?
I don't see anyone waxing nostalgic over many 32X or Sega Channel games :)
You got this backwards. We're looking for good games on bad consoles, not bad games on good consoles.
This is the game that put Hideo Kojima on the map, and rightfully so. It's all but forgotten now except in classic gaming circles, but that game was groundbreaking and did so many things right. It's a shame that very few people will experience it. It seems like Sega systems are riddled with games that fit into the "shame that very few people will experience it" category. I speak as one of the 25k or so owners of Panzer Dragoon Saga. It's a crime against the gaming community that more people can't experience, what amounts to me, as the most awe inspiring RPG ever created.
The thing is, most of these genetic causes for high cholesterol are due to diet. You could be eating a perfectly healthy diet...but what is healthy for you isn't necessarily healthy for the next person. We all come from different genetic backgrounds and the foods you eat work hand in hand with your genetics. This is why elimination diets that throw out foods that that contain possible intolerance (dairy, soy, wheat, nightshades (tomato, potato, eggplant, etc), certain nuts, etc) work so well. Take away everything your body could possibly have an issue with (all these foods are fairly well documented) and bring them back gradually to find your intolerance. You would be amazed what you'll learn about your body. You'll learn about irritations and intolerance your body has towards food that were hidden before, silently wrecking havoc on your body.
The human body is an amazing machine and will regulate itself if given the chance. There's always disease and there will always be a reason for research medicine and doctors because of this, but until insurance companies start paying for nutritionists we're stuck in a bit of a rut.
You're really citing Ben Goldacre? There's as much criticism of him as their are the studies he "picks apart." He's basically the medical equivalent of the modern day forum troll who adds nothing to the conversation but takes every chance he gets to point out the fact that someone didn't dot his i's or cross his t's. Granted, I think that scrutiny in the medical field is needed now more than ever, but we need people giving constructive criticism, not criticism alone.
I think a major issue with most medical science is that it's built on years and years of bad information. We're used to treating symptoms and not underlying issues. As it stands now, there's probably as many "valid" ways of showing that fish oil has benefits as there are to show ways that fish oil doesn't. The same can be said of dozens of other supplements that we take in droves. But these studies are mostly focused on the side effects we notice and can measure, not what these supplements are actually doing to the body.
(A bit of an off topic rant, but...) I think the saddest thing is that the medical community and society hasn't embraced the use of food as a drug. You have high blood pressure? The doctor tells you to eat better and take fish oil and other supplements? Doesn't work? You get lipitor or a similar drug. If you give someone a prescription, they'll take it because there's a mystique behind drugs. They're miracles in a bottle that cure you. Yet, you tell people how they need to eat and they scoff at it. I honestly believe if you could get most people to eliminate/severely limit fried food from their diet, gave them a glass of vegetable juice (because you know they're not going to eat enough on their own), and tested them for food allergies/intolerances and let them know what to avoid, that's all we'd need to get society healthy again and avoid half of all doctors visits. It's a shame, my insurance will pay for all the drugs my doctor will prescribe me...yet I spend a fortune every year on vegetables and healthy foods so I don't HAVE to have my doctor prescribe me anything.
I think that the "deeper changes" are that AMD's prepping for their integrated CPU/GPU launch. It only makes sense. If they're gonna start merging chips, it would be awful awkward to have to brand names AND a product name attached to a chip.
I would image that better Linux drivers might come down the pipeline, though. These integrated approaches lend themselves nicely towards Linux workstations and they'd definitely loose out on a potential market if they completely ignored the issue.
Right, which means HTML 5 is still out of reach until we can figure this one out...
But here's the issue...
From wikipedia: "In countries where patents on software algorithms are upheld, vendors and commercial users of products that use H.264/AVC are expected to pay patent licensing royalties for the patented technology[8] that their products use."
-and-
"On February 2, 2010 MPEG LA announced that H.264-encoded Internet Video that is free to end users would continue to be exempt from royalty fees until at least December 31, 2015.[11] However, other fees remain in place. The license terms are updated in 5-year blocks.[12]"
H.264 isn't exactly free to use. If it wasn't for the licensing issues surrounding it, it would be a great solution. But you've got to think long term solution, not something that's going to work until royalty fees start to kick in...
Fine, HTML 5. HTML 5 is great, we can all agree on that. Now which video codec? The one nice thing about Silverlight and Flash is that they're, more or less, all inclusive packages. HTML 5 relies on too many outside variables ATM to make it viable. The openness of HTML 5 is a blessing and a curse. We still need Silverlight and Flash for the time being for the 75% of the market who's never heard of a codec. The road to HTML 5 is going to be an ugly and bloody one...
Not as long as #Twitter is still around.
Basically a tabloid. Traditional tabloids are a medium for yellow journalism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
Right, but not everyone needs that. I bought a GPS for about $50 and it works great.
I have a cell phone that will play music, games, video, and act as a gps...yet I have an mp3 player because it's a better solution for the task, a Nintendo DS because the games are more than brief distractions, and a GPS because I don't want to pay the carrier for the right to use the GPS chip on the phone. Video, don't really care about video, but I suppose I could do that with the mp3 player or DS if I had to. There's something to be said for single purpose (or focused purposed) items that know what they're supposed to do and do it flawlessly.
My dad came home with a C24 (yeah, 24...) in 84. I was 5 at the time. I asked where the games were, then he gave me the second part of the gift....a book full of programs. I cannot even guess how much time I spent hunting and pecking to type out programs on that thing, recording them on tapes, and hoping they worked so I didn't have to go through it line by line to see where I typo'd. Eventually I actually started to understand what the stuff meant and I'd change various things (cheat and change the timer, etc).
In middle school we had basic programming, a Mac lab class where we used hypercard to make mini applications, and technology lab where we created animations using vectors. This was in the early 90s. If middle schools have absolutely nothing like this going on now, that's kinda sad.
By exposing how one has acted and reacted in the past, it makes it easier for one to predict how one will act and react in the future. Also, it may be transparent to one who is not in the middle of the conflict as to how certain information can expose tactics, capabilities, and sensitive information. You ask for a specific example. I'd love to give you a specific example, but I think it's enough to state that the kind of information that wikileaks is getting a hold of is the kind of documentation spys were trying to obtain in the past. It might help, it might not help, but any information is information. Also, who's to say could be leaked further than wikileaks that is sensitive. Julian Assange talks about his "organization," but we don't necessarily know who he is dealing with.
I'm all for the world knowing what's actually happening and I think there should be a witch trial to root out the people who are classifying information based on political leanings and to open up our library of information. That being said, I think the proper precautions need to be taken for the correct people to go about declassifying the documentation. I think the best thing we can hope for from wikileaks is a grassroots movement to speed up the declassification of documents and to loosen the restrictions of information dissemination, but it's going to take a hell of a grassroots movement to get the ball rolling on this one.
This is definitely an interesting situation and brings up a lot of good discussion that we, as a society, need to be having about access to information. Hopefully this leads to open floor debate amongst our leaders. Hopefully this becomes an issue during our next presidential election.
Even before that, I'd say Palm Pre. It's sold by 3 out of 4 carriers and Palm intentionally leaves in a backdoor for OS modifications and homebrew.
One way they could address about half of the issue would be to allow users to assign a secondary administrator (basically a "power of attorney") that had has the right to delete (not modify) the account after the account goes inactive for so many days. It's morbid, but so are living wills and we deal with those on a daily basis.
Of course, this would do nothing for the younger crowd who tend to die unexpectedly and aren't thinking ahead like this, but it would definitely put a dent in issue with ghost accounts and avoid a lot of the red tape that goes into handling these situations.
Really? We're using a site called "GamePron" as a source for a story? Especially with grammar that bad? Ugh. I'll just sit here for the IT police to arrest me after going to a site with "pron" in the title. I'm sure that one red flagged my account.