The problem is the average American doesn't care about what's going on in government, until it directly affects them. People don't attempt to understand the issues and how the party proposes to solve them. The government can only improve if the majority demands that they improve.
Unfortunately, both the democrats and republicans tend to shift their focus from the real issues (massive public deficit and the economy, the environment), to relatively trivial issues like violence in video games.
"It is quite high and very deep too, but that's something that the more hardcore AV enthusiast will rather like - it looks like they're getting a lot for their money."
Who the hell wants to pay a lot of money for something that's unnecessarily large, wasting people's space? This reviewer is an idiot if he thinks that enthusiasts want their brand new toys to be big and clunky. The last time I checked, people enjoy things that are slim and sleek.
"but at this price its only audience will be hardcore enthusiasts."
Who's enthusiastic about this?
This is no big deal. Just companies doing research into technology. It's not like hollywood is trying to push this to us now... until then, this should just be considered interesting research.
Actually, it did work with cigarettes, at least in Canada. The price of a pack of cigarettes is very high here, around $6 to $8, because of the new taxes introduced, and the number of smokers have started to decline.
Why you don't see a dramatic change with the huge increase in gas prices is due to the fact that gas has highly inelastic demand. Meaning the demand for gas is very insensitve to prices changes. However, over the long term, there is a higher sensitivity to price (higher elasticity), as new techonologies come in (like bio-fuels) to take advantages of higher prices.
The driver is part of the whole product. Comparing just pure hardware would be like comparing just the engine of two cars. It doesn't mean that the car with the bigger engine is faster. You have to take into account the transmission, total weight of the car, aerodynamics, etc...
Besides, the consumer wins when nVidia/ATI optimizes their drivers, even if their optimizations may be game specific, or is some sort of shortcut. In the end, the games run faster.
Well, if you opened the source, then you can see the tweaks and short-cuts that were made to make the video card run fast... the competition can use this against them... I'm sure ATI and nVidia both have their fair share of short-cuts in their drivers.
I was just speculating, I have no basis for my opinions. However, I do have a computer engineering degree, and my classmates and I have very little trouble finding work. I don't know what you're talking about. I also think it is a mistake to pick MIS over Computer Engineering. An engineering degree gives you much more versatility in the jobs you are able to get.
Have you thought of the possibility that Intel might be having a hard time finding the skilled workers they need for chip development in the US? I've interned for a tech company in Silicon Valley, and a large portion of the chip designers were immigrants. I'm sure any company would be happy to hire locallly, since they don't have to pay for all the immigration stuff.
This may be a failure of the American education system.
Television and radio are also being used for political purposes. Fox News is a good example of right-wing manipulation of television. It shouldn't be alarming or surprising that the Internet is being used for political purposes. It should be alarming that politicians are discrediting and projecting their oppponents as unfit, rather than debating an issue. The republican's blasting of John Kerry's military record is an example of this (which is horrible considering Bush's horrible military record).
What should be most alarming is the voters being swayed by these political tactics. Politicans that are getting in office are the ones that are able to discredit their opponents. Not the ones who come up with solutions to the country's problems.
Democracy in the US is seriously broken, and it's not the Internet's fault. It's the voter's fault. Unfortunately, things will have to get real bad before people start caring and voting for what's best for their country, instead of voting for whatever party is able to dish out the best BS.
Google, unlike other search engines, has figured out how to make money without annoying the users. Other search engines kept adding more and more ads and clutter. Google's clean interface, and relatively accurate searches have prevented me, and other people to switch to another engine. But I wish I knew a another good search engine, when my google seach turns up nothing.
There's no way i'm going to be installing anything made by Real Networks... The last time I installed it, it loaded itself on boot, and just ate up memory. And if I remember correctly, they also gave me some spyware too. Oh yeah, and not to mention that really shitty player... oh god..
Great. I guess I have no choice if I want to play games. It looks like they increased the price too. I wish games were developed for Linux/OpenGL. If that were the case, I can just install Ubuntu and be happy.
I'm sure this will be cracked before it even comes out. Why should I even switch to Vista? XP is stable (relatively) and runs fast enough. When I was running 98, upgrading to 2000/XP was a huge improvement in terms of stability, but I don't see any improvements that I'll find useful. Unless games start only running on Vista, I don't see myself changing over to Vista. I wish games ran on Linux natively. I would have switched a long time ago.
I think software is so complicated that testing every single scenario is way too time consuming, thus unreliability is inevitable. Also, software developer often get requirements and specifications that aren't complete, but are expected to continue on with development anyway. This introduces a lot of usability issues and bad design decisions. Bad software isn't a result of ego-maniac software developers, but organizational and process issues that result in bad decisions being made.
Of course then there are those bugs which comes from the oversight of the developers themselves. Hey, no one's perfect.
If software sucks so much, he should just stop using software all together... I'm sure he'll have a lot of fun using his computer without any of that evil software.
I'm surprised that they haven't done this already. It's a logical thing to do. And, I also don't see a problem with analyzing articles coming from the US. Like the poster said, it's all public information. I would love to see them gather useful information from Fox news though...
I envisioned dual screens, where both screens are full-sized. This is hardly a new concept, having a smaller screen on the lid. A lot of flip phones sport "dual" screens. The extra screen also seems add a significant amount of thickness to the laptop. It would be nice to have a laptop with two full screens though...
I used Zune as an example of a product that might compete well against the iPod. So far, iPods have weak competition. But it's guaranteed that in the future, there will be other products that compete well against the iPod, and will most likely not play the DRM'ed content.
To tell you the truth, I have no idea what you're talking about. You can go into Apple stores and copy programs off their computers? I never thought of doing that, that's pretty funny.
What I'm saying is that people are used to buying CDs once, and using it in whatever way they like. With CD's, you don't re-buy the music, unless you're being careless and damage the CD. When they realize the artificial restrictions on DRM'ed files, I would hope that people will get angry and just stop buying DRM'ed products.
The only way is through economics.
on
The Day Against DRM
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· Score: 4, Insightful
People aren't going to care until it starts costing them money. Take iTunes for example. Right now, they have DRM that's loose enough that most people won't care that their songs are DRM'ed. People who buy iTunes songs will probably buy another iPod when their old one breaks, so they won't run into a DRM problem.
There is a very good possibility that in the near future, people will start changing their music players, like the new MS Zune. When this happens on a mass scale, and people have to re-buy their music, there will be a huge number of pissed off people, and people will finally realize why DRM is bad. Until something threatens people's wallets, no one's going to care.
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It's called water. If this works, this will be coca-cola's greated scam.
The problem is the average American doesn't care about what's going on in government, until it directly affects them. People don't attempt to understand the issues and how the party proposes to solve them. The government can only improve if the majority demands that they improve.
Unfortunately, both the democrats and republicans tend to shift their focus from the real issues (massive public deficit and the economy, the environment), to relatively trivial issues like violence in video games.
"It is quite high and very deep too, but that's something that the more hardcore AV enthusiast will rather like - it looks like they're getting a lot for their money."
Who the hell wants to pay a lot of money for something that's unnecessarily large, wasting people's space? This reviewer is an idiot if he thinks that enthusiasts want their brand new toys to be big and clunky. The last time I checked, people enjoy things that are slim and sleek.
"but at this price its only audience will be hardcore enthusiasts."
Who's enthusiastic about this?
This is no big deal. Just companies doing research into technology. It's not like hollywood is trying to push this to us now... until then, this should just be considered interesting research.
Actually, it did work with cigarettes, at least in Canada. The price of a pack of cigarettes is very high here, around $6 to $8, because of the new taxes introduced, and the number of smokers have started to decline.
Why you don't see a dramatic change with the huge increase in gas prices is due to the fact that gas has highly inelastic demand. Meaning the demand for gas is very insensitve to prices changes. However, over the long term, there is a higher sensitivity to price (higher elasticity), as new techonologies come in (like bio-fuels) to take advantages of higher prices.
The driver is part of the whole product. Comparing just pure hardware would be like comparing just the engine of two cars. It doesn't mean that the car with the bigger engine is faster. You have to take into account the transmission, total weight of the car, aerodynamics, etc...
Besides, the consumer wins when nVidia/ATI optimizes their drivers, even if their optimizations may be game specific, or is some sort of shortcut. In the end, the games run faster.
Well, if you opened the source, then you can see the tweaks and short-cuts that were made to make the video card run fast... the competition can use this against them... I'm sure ATI and nVidia both have their fair share of short-cuts in their drivers.
Make electricity more expensive, then people will make a huge effort save power... Take advantage of capitalism.
I can't wait for this. Now I can rent a DVD, watch it, then return it and complain that it won't play on my computer, and get my money back...
I was just speculating, I have no basis for my opinions. However, I do have a computer engineering degree, and my classmates and I have very little trouble finding work. I don't know what you're talking about. I also think it is a mistake to pick MIS over Computer Engineering. An engineering degree gives you much more versatility in the jobs you are able to get.
Have you thought of the possibility that Intel might be having a hard time finding the skilled workers they need for chip development in the US? I've interned for a tech company in Silicon Valley, and a large portion of the chip designers were immigrants. I'm sure any company would be happy to hire locallly, since they don't have to pay for all the immigration stuff.
This may be a failure of the American education system.
Television and radio are also being used for political purposes. Fox News is a good example of right-wing manipulation of television. It shouldn't be alarming or surprising that the Internet is being used for political purposes. It should be alarming that politicians are discrediting and projecting their oppponents as unfit, rather than debating an issue. The republican's blasting of John Kerry's military record is an example of this (which is horrible considering Bush's horrible military record).
What should be most alarming is the voters being swayed by these political tactics. Politicans that are getting in office are the ones that are able to discredit their opponents. Not the ones who come up with solutions to the country's problems.
Democracy in the US is seriously broken, and it's not the Internet's fault. It's the voter's fault. Unfortunately, things will have to get real bad before people start caring and voting for what's best for their country, instead of voting for whatever party is able to dish out the best BS.
Google, unlike other search engines, has figured out how to make money without annoying the users. Other search engines kept adding more and more ads and clutter. Google's clean interface, and relatively accurate searches have prevented me, and other people to switch to another engine. But I wish I knew a another good search engine, when my google seach turns up nothing.
Their guns are pointed right at their own feet. It'll be fun to see what happens when they shoot :)
There's no way i'm going to be installing anything made by Real Networks... The last time I installed it, it loaded itself on boot, and just ate up memory. And if I remember correctly, they also gave me some spyware too. Oh yeah, and not to mention that really shitty player... oh god..
Yes there are, but major games like Half-Life 2 and CounterStrike:Source are all windows only.
Great. I guess I have no choice if I want to play games. It looks like they increased the price too. I wish games were developed for Linux/OpenGL. If that were the case, I can just install Ubuntu and be happy.
I'm sure this will be cracked before it even comes out. Why should I even switch to Vista? XP is stable (relatively) and runs fast enough. When I was running 98, upgrading to 2000/XP was a huge improvement in terms of stability, but I don't see any improvements that I'll find useful. Unless games start only running on Vista, I don't see myself changing over to Vista. I wish games ran on Linux natively. I would have switched a long time ago.
I think software is so complicated that testing every single scenario is way too time consuming, thus unreliability is inevitable. Also, software developer often get requirements and specifications that aren't complete, but are expected to continue on with development anyway. This introduces a lot of usability issues and bad design decisions. Bad software isn't a result of ego-maniac software developers, but organizational and process issues that result in bad decisions being made.
Of course then there are those bugs which comes from the oversight of the developers themselves. Hey, no one's perfect.
If software sucks so much, he should just stop using software all together... I'm sure he'll have a lot of fun using his computer without any of that evil software.
I'm surprised that they haven't done this already. It's a logical thing to do. And, I also don't see a problem with analyzing articles coming from the US. Like the poster said, it's all public information. I would love to see them gather useful information from Fox news though...
I envisioned dual screens, where both screens are full-sized. This is hardly a new concept, having a smaller screen on the lid. A lot of flip phones sport "dual" screens. The extra screen also seems add a significant amount of thickness to the laptop. It would be nice to have a laptop with two full screens though...
I used Zune as an example of a product that might compete well against the iPod. So far, iPods have weak competition. But it's guaranteed that in the future, there will be other products that compete well against the iPod, and will most likely not play the DRM'ed content.
To tell you the truth, I have no idea what you're talking about. You can go into Apple stores and copy programs off their computers? I never thought of doing that, that's pretty funny.
What I'm saying is that people are used to buying CDs once, and using it in whatever way they like. With CD's, you don't re-buy the music, unless you're being careless and damage the CD. When they realize the artificial restrictions on DRM'ed files, I would hope that people will get angry and just stop buying DRM'ed products.
People aren't going to care until it starts costing them money. Take iTunes for example. Right now, they have DRM that's loose enough that most people won't care that their songs are DRM'ed. People who buy iTunes songs will probably buy another iPod when their old one breaks, so they won't run into a DRM problem.
There is a very good possibility that in the near future, people will start changing their music players, like the new MS Zune. When this happens on a mass scale, and people have to re-buy their music, there will be a huge number of pissed off people, and people will finally realize why DRM is bad. Until something threatens people's wallets, no one's going to care.