It ain't just Steve Jobs/Apple, had the PC become owned by IBM, Atari, Commodore and god knows who else (japan had its own eco-structure and it becomes more and more obvious as the world gets smaller that back then every country had their own home computer brand), IT would have looked very different. ALL those companies were about owning the entire market, from the computers themselves (go buy a Commodore from Compaq) to the storage media, the joysticks EVERYTHING.
It is thanks to Compaq, MS and Intel (and the "failures" of the rest) that we got this accidentally remarkably open platform. Apple sold expensive PC's, thanks to Compaq creation of the IBM-compatible, we got cheap PC's and thanks to those who cloned Compaq's we got EVEN cheaper PC's. Some might point out the Apple Mini but Apple would NEVER have produced that IF they didn't have to because of cheap PC's. Proof? Apple didn't produce them when there weren't any cheap PC's. That is why Apple almost went bust the first time around.
Thanks to MS we got an OS that would work ACROSS cpu's... yes i know AMD and Intel both made X86 but if you think that makes them automatically fully compatible in all but their most base modes, you are a silly person. And this gave buyers, a CHOICE. Apple/Atari/IBM never gave you a choice. You buy what they choose to sell you. Intel thought 33mhz was enough for the 386(if I remember correctly) and AMD made a 40mhz version and people could choose. Could choose NOT to buy IBM or Dell or Compaq and roll their own.
It all happened by accident and thank god for it, wintel was/isn;t perfect but we narrowly avoided situations that would have been far far worse.
But that doesn't mean we are saved. The openess and freedom of the PC and internet might have come around by accident but that doesn't mean it can change.
Bootcamp, was that introduced because Apple wanted you to be able to use the OS of your choice or because they knew that if people couldn't run Windows on a Mac, they would sell fewer Mac's? I seen an amazing amount of Macbooks with the Aero design on the desktop.
Closed architectures are not just limited to niche attempts like Linux. If a mono-culture exists, control becomes easy. The US is rather famous for NOT having state censorship for TV such as England has. Instead, the TV broadcasters "choose" to censor themselves and no politician has to stand up and say"I want to limit free speech" but can "think of the children" thanks to self-censorship.
There have been countless stories of mega-stores in the US censoring products. Walmart censoring music CD's, App store refusing to carry apps. This doesn't matter, as long as a free alternative exist, the internet in general. But as AOL has shown and MS network and countless other attempts, there is a constant push to create walled gardens. And a walled garden isn't that bad, as long as you can get out with relative ease but nobody builds a walled garden with the idea that people should be able to get out easily.
When mega-stores are the only places to shop, their control becomes extremely risky to a free society. And with the app-store, Apple and Steve Jobs have given everyone who values real freedom a frightening look at how IT could have turned out if Jobs had sold cheaper PC's.
Jobs has the most depressing eulogy you could think off: "Thank god the man was a failure at the most critical time". And we can only pray that it remains true because if the app-store walled garden approach succeeds in W8 new app-store, the PC environment as we know it, is doomed.
It is free (I played it and did NOT feel ANY need to buy any more levels), it is extremely simple and it just plays.
I can't show of a console or pc game to friends at work and they can't install it right there and then on their devices.
Angry Birds is Garfield, it is the most read comic strip in the world but nobody would claim it is the best, it just is so easily available, so easily digestible, that the rest of the comics just can't really compete. First off, not all who read Garfield even want to read comics let alone ones that take effort and further the remaining comics are less all encompasing so they appeal to a smaller section of the general public. Some people like Nukee but it is hard to find, hard to read (you can't just jump in anywhere) and just not funny at all. You might not think Garfield is that funny anymore but at least it raises a smirk for normal people.
Angry Birds is indeed comparable to Solitaire, it is so easy to get, it doesn't have to overcome as much of human laziness.
This doesn't mean it is better then harder to get games, it just means more people seen it.
If Angry Birds was really as good as "proper" games, its owners could have bought Apple by now, they can't. Because people play the free version and that is it. If all who played it bought it, and if all who COULD play it, bought it, it would have ignited the makers bank account. It didn't.
Back to the michelin guide I use in another example, Angry Birds get 0 stars. That doesn't mean it is bad, it just ain't noteworthy while it still might get swamped by local customers.
Your local McD might have lines waiting to be served but it will NEVER be a 3 star restaurant, an experience worth the journey itself. Angry Birds is fast-food, it serves lots but nobody is going to make an hour long journey just to get it.
That people still put up with finicky PC's and expensive consoles just goes to proof how much people still want them.
Want to test Angry Birds appeal for real? Make its users go through a debug session to get it running. If they give up, then it obviously wasn't desirable enough.
If this wasn't slashdot, I could use the girl example. The amount of shit you put up from a girl is directly related to how attractive she is.
Angry Birds would be out the door if she said "hello".
Skyrim can kill your cat, fuck your best mates and pay them for it with your salary while telling everyone your pc is in reality a Dell.
This is just one of those "X is dead" stories where the author knows nothing about anything including market diversity.
It is obvious that McD attracts more customers then 3 star restaurants, therefor 3 star restaurants are dead...
Logic dictates this. But McD has been around for a long time and so is the whole Michelin guide thing, which has also been declared dead many times.
There are indeed people for who Angry Birds is enough and they can buy an iPad Mini for 329. And there are those for who mario is enough and they can buy a Wii U for 350. Wow! Look at that price difference!!! Anyway, for SOME, Angry Birds is NOT enough just as a dry patty on an even dryer piece of fluffed corn isn't good enough for some. And they will buy a PC, put in a video card and play real games.
And there are even some people, who one day buy a hamburger and the next day visit a 3 star restaurant. Amazing!
And some people never buy any pre-made food and cook at home!!! It is almost like there are kinds of different people out there with others catering to their needs!
Right now, in 2012 EA/Maxis is preparing Sim City for a 2013 launch and EVERYTHING looks like it will be a real Sim City again for real men on real PC's. And some gay guys on mac's. No more consolfication attempt, just a hard core sim game like we used to have. And it got just as many fanboys as Angry Birds has, except these fans can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Everytime someone declares something dead, it springs back on its feet. The world is a more complex place then you think and people have different needs and wants, often on the same day.
Al Qaeda is not operating as isolated as the Arab world would like, they have powerful sympathizers. And then 9/11 happened and OOPS, we funded the protesters but we did not expect them to succeed.
The same happened with the US and Cuba. Oops, we funded dissidents but they did WHAT? Invade? No way, no support. They were supposed to be a nuisance to our enemy, not trigger WW3. Same thing with assanition of Kennedy, it don't matter if the CIA/FBI did or did not do it, the real shocker (if the American public had a brain) should have been that there were any plans at all. And when the bullet has been fired it is to late to consider whether talks of firing that bullet were just talk or concrete plans.
The bay of pigs was a disaster as the Cubans cleaned them up and Al Qaeda is a shadow of its former self. Presumably those who had entertained plans to kill the president were also dealt with, just in case anyone would ever think that again.
The leadership in Iran know damn well that there is a line between the US basically ignoring them and blowing them from the map. They have been shown enough examples. It ain't nice perhaps but that is the real world. Same with Russian support for Iran btw, Russians like Iran just as long as they are more a nuisance to US then they are to Russia. Iran starts to to openly interfere with Russian interests (look at russia's borders, religion in tjetnia and of high number of terrorist attacks in moskou itself) and that blocking vote will soon disappear. Same with China. It is a balance game. Annoy the US but don't piss them off and if Israel spanks your ass once again (It is widely believed Iran supported what is now north-sudan and Israel south-sudan. South-sudan won, suprise suprise and north-sudan lost all world support for being nasty people), we most certainly are not going to do anything except try to learn how they did it and snicker a bit.
You might note that will all the support Iran has given Hezbollah and Syria, it hasn't actually given either of these group any useful fighting capability? Missiles that don't hit shit and drones that get shot down with ease and never enough money to get the economy going.
This is not the cold war continued, it is still the same cold war. It never went away. And the cold war has the same rules, cause a hassle, cause trouble but do NOT start WW3. If Iran is smart, they know this. If not... they might invade a small nation and think that is going to be ignored like the killing of their own people was... (if you don't get the iraq reference, I feel sorry for you)
Because if they don't... Russia and China loose nothing by seeing some Muslims turned into so much glass and ashes, they both get their own Muslims populations that could do with a message and their are always other proxies through which to keep the their opponents occupied. Or do you think Russia/China really cares about how many civilians are killed in a drone strike in Afghanistan? Russia doesn't like the afghans at all and China just wants to know how they can do the same in Tibet and get away with it) It ain't just the west that wants WW3, the super powers all know that is in nobody elses interest, they just skirmish a bit with the third world nations to keep their reflexes sharp.
Cold war is a game of risk were the players know the only winning game is not to play but their fingers itch. And Iran is NOT a player, it is at best a play piece that might be about to make a very stupid attempt at Independence and find out what happens to play pieces that move on their own.
He bought some fake accounts and quoted another article. That is like me buying a joint and quoting someone I read about on the internet and calling it an inside look at the world of drugs.
You can buy fake accounts... that is the article and those fake accounts?!? They ain't real!!!
If this article amazes you with its starting information and deep insights... actually, considering mainstream news these days, it is pretty damn deep. Mind you compared with main stream media, the lakes on mars are deep too. AND I KNOW THERE IS NO WATER ON MARS and please don't quote that with a picture of the mars rover and call it an amazing insight into the geography of mars.
Next week: Gold sellers are active in MMO's. After the commercial: Cheaters cheat in games!
People often think that michelin stars are about getting 3 stars. Everyone knows that 3 is the best but then why would anyone ever bother with 1 and 2 star restaurants? You don't bother with the silver and bronze medal winners do you?
In reality, the order is this:
1 star: Excellent restaurant of its category, worth a visit (when you are in the same area.
2 star: Excellent restaurant regardless of category, worth a detour.
3 star: First class restaurant, worth the trip itself.
This goes for games. Some games are fun if can easily get them, tablet games.
Some are very good but not worth special hardware/high price
Some are the best and worth buying special hardware or even an entire console for.
And now prove me wrong on the following:
There is not a single tablet game worth buying a tablet for.
I think history has proven that for plenty of gamers, there are games worth buying a console for.
And you can have some fine eating if all you ever do is eat at 1 star restaurants. In fact, most people will never eat as well as you.
But I can afford 3 star restaurants and games. And I will enjoy them to the max.
At least we can both sneer at people eating hamburgers from McD and they can look down at people eating microwave hamburgers.
And I will never again eat the hamburgers my mother made and those were the best of all. And the best games ever were checkers at camp with my sisters.
Who needs electronics and highly reviewed expensive stuff again? I kinda forgot my point. Maybe after all what matters is if you have fun. Regardless of how much or how little it costs. That should teach me to drink and post at the same time.
They like other retailers have had reasons to publish recall notices for products which turn out to be faulty, this is a legal recuirement. They usually are black and white with no pictures and tiny logos if the logo is even present. The ones for HEMA are in color, with clear logo and product image also in full color. They don't need to, but they do because... well, they care for their customers? That at least is the image this gives people. The company has an EXCELLENT reputation with most Dutch people. They sell a LOT of their own branded stuff and while it isn't premium quality it is cheap and reliable and if you have a problem just return it and get a full refund with no hassle.
They respect their customers and deal with laws as adults, obeying not just the letter (print recall notice) but the spirit (try your best to notify the customers they might have a faulty product).
Compared to Apples reputation... lying about European warranties (2 years vs 1 year that apple gives), false advertising and now this kind of childish stunt. It means any adult sees Apple as just plain pathetic. Childish. Petty. Immature.
Grow up Apple. All you have done by this is given ammo to apple haters to ridicule your fanboys with.
Had they produced a mature ad, only the fanboys would have wimpered and everyone else would have said "oh well at least they aren't sore losers".
Now they are the laughing stock of the world for throwing a temper tantrum. Only yuppies respect this kind of stuff and the like of Romney who likes to fire people. The rest of us want to live in a mature world were people and companies act with a bit of dignity.
One tactic T-rex might have used is the same as the giant lizard (komodo dragon), it rushes the prey, takes one septic bite, then trails the enemy till it dies.
The hyena was considered a carrior eater but makes more kills then the lion who was considered a predator.
And considering build, the Hyena seems closer to the T-rex then a buzzard. Powerful jaw and neck muscles that can deliver a massive traumatic bite to anything living or dead.
Free speech is not what you like to hear or what you like to say. Free speech is hearing something that makes your blood boil, makes you see red in the front of your eyes, that EVERYONE agrees should be banned, and not banning it and defending its speaker right to say it.
Anything less, is not free speech. There is no free speech in this world. It doesn't matter whether you ban the pedo support group Martijn, give in to fears of protests from Islamic pupils and their parents in teaching about WW2 and/or homosexuality or create a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. All these cases are where a group decides another group should shut up because they are offended by their speech. And someone will ALWAYS somewhere be offended by someone's speech. Give in to one and the next will demand to get what offends them banned as well.
Would those some protesters you talk about STILL carry those posters on Facebooks "draw the prophet" day some while ago? If no... then they were not promoting free speech, they were merely promoting their speech. There is a difference.
One of the greatest western achievements, is it lack of culture. In the west, we have no culture. The US is the best example of this but Europe also has lots of no culture.
We instead got TONS of them often living in the same street and NO I am NOT talking about multi-culturism. I am talking about universities being just a short walk away from monestaries, people studying evolution and genesis dining in the same university hall together with the business students, doctors and lawyers while hippies are campaigning on the doorstep.
It used to be that if you wanted to study, you had to go through the church and you could be ensured that they didn't encourage free thinking. Quite great names had to deal with this, from the bans on anatomy to the line between chemistry and alchemy. Read up on Newton and Da Vinci and their skirting around the religious authorities if the day.
Slowly this changed to the point where you it is fairly common for even religious leaders themselves to say that the bible is just so much hogwash and shouldn't be taken literal.
But in places like Egypt and even China, they might have universisities, they might have bright students, but they are NOT anywhere close to becoming another Oxford or MIT. It isn't just about inventing a faster super conductor but about coming up with new ideas that totally blow humanities mind.
Darwin could ONLY do his work because the religious authority in his days, when he wrote the origin of th species, did not care. Nobody really did at first, it was in fact considered rather dull. People were in fact not a bit suprised about evolution, they knew that, what upset them most was that nature didn't care. They could see evolution in action, it made sense but that nature was cruel with each day a bitter struggle... that was a bit harsh. That man wasn't the prime result of a survival of the fittest but rather the end result of the monkey that outfucked all the others didn't entirely fit with the world view. But it didn't result in any major upset at the time. That happened later. Gosh where have we seen oddly delayed outrage recenctly?
Free speech means tolerating, accepting and not silencing speech that totally upsets your world view. And if you don't... you don't get the Darwins. You get students who know they should only think approved thoughts, those who don't disappear. See Malala/Walala. She thought girls should be allowed to go school, she was silenced and it is western, not Islamic medical care that saved her life. Once Islam lead the scientific world, what changed?
Some early Islamic rulers were remarkably open, allowed other cultures, tolerated different believes. Hollands golden age is contributed in all history books to it being open to all comers.
Free speech, it has huge benefits BUT if you start limitting it by not allowing people to say stuff that offends someone... then free speech dies. After all I can go to North Korea and say everything I want, as
I take it you never been around med-students. Art-students or indeed ANY first year student. It is the arrogance of youth not nerds and don't worry, life will soon beat it out of you and make you one of the broken ones who slug through life and pray for an early grave.
Valve, what do you think the future might be for Intel/AMD Gaming? Oh... hedging your bet and trying to cater for Windows/Mac/Linux so whatever happens, you continue to rake it in with your Steam platform and own games?
I see.
Once everybody gamed on a commodore... or atari (freaks) and laughed at the dos crowd.
including the inability to get non-stop flights for most routes: "So, the airline industry should have direct flights between all airports, oh well, at least they won't be able to oversell seats anymore, two problems solved with one brilliant solution"
having to pay to park in a lot that is still a 10 minute ride to the terminal: "Easily solved by making a 1000th story car park right next to the terminal and just charging a piffling 2000 bucks per hour to pay for it"
having small innocuous items in my pockets stolen by TSA: You know the list, empty pockets before travelling
risking having large innocuous items in my bags stolen by TSA: You know the list, don't pack things that aren't allowed
having to arrive 2 hours early to ensure getting thru security on time to board: If you didn't insist on packing knifes and guns, maybe it wouldn't take two hours to get through security
getting severely overcharged for food at airport terminals: Take a sandwhich from home, overpriced food at high traffic locations, what a shocker!!!
getting X-rayed by someone who is not my doctor or dentist: Your doctor or dentist doesn't do x-rays they got specialists and nurses for that
having to do mini-marathons thru airports to make connecting flights: Well you were the one who wanted your airport to have direct flights to ALL other airports in the world, they have to park those aircraft somewhere, anyway, you could do with the excersice.
getting my bags lost: Annoying, never happened to me but is annoying.
have all combined to cause me to decide to drive everywhere I go: with alcohol check NOT done by your doctor or dentist, speed checks done with radar, tracking of your license plate, having to park 10 minutes away for that meeting at the airport, overpriced food at rest-stops etc etc
Airtravel sucks, it is uncomfortable as hell but it gets you fast to distant locations. There are real nuisances and perhaps even illegal activities that we should not want but throw them in a rant list like this and you sound like a fool and make anyone with genuine complaints sound like a fool as well.
Martin Luther King's speech would have been a lot less impressive if it had been 1 minute in a ten minute rant about how the weather man never gives nice weather anymore.
Read the reviews more carefully, it is all just one step below "this is great" so it ends up as one long list of "meh" and that is NOT something you can do when you are dead last and people remember all your previous failures in the mobile market.
MS could have amazed, they didn't. Apple can afford a S update that doesn't really add much, they are the top dog. When you are at the bottom, you got to try harder.
It has a magnetic charger connection. It has a powerful magnet... BUT when it pulls the connector out of your fingers, it doesn't align properly and doesn't work. it has to be fiddled with. Like a worn out old fashioned round charger. It is ALMOST but NOT quite the apple charger experience. Almost but not quite.
It comes with MS Office... except if you like to actually use it, then you need to buy a seperate license. The ONE thing MS can use as a sales argument is that their stuff comes with full MS support and then they don't deliver unless you pay through the nose on an already expensive device. MS has in the past given Office for free to entire governments to keep customers, yet on their own device, they charge you for a non-cripple ware version.
The touchpad on the the covers is there, possibly because you sometimes don't want to touch the screen but it is hopelessly primitive version, barely more then a trackpad.
Resolution is what top end devices came with, last yet. Full HD is what new devices come with now. And people know it.
Windows RT is compatible with nothing, not even most MS software. Don't think of running Windows Games on your Windows tablet. Another potential massive selling point, not realized.
You have to remember that the previous MS phones, Zunes and Kins weren't that bad either, they just were one step behind the competition and failed to make use of being part of MS to sell people who already use Windows. The simple fact is that Apple sold countless devices despite not being Windows. And MS didn't sell any because they ultimately also weren't Windows.
Only MS would launch a tablet with such a heavy focus on text input with a cripple ware office suite while trying to court the serious tablet user. Just give it away for free already. Geez. Live a little.
I am once again stuck working with crap legacy code that is even crappier because all the installed versions for different clients are custom tailored (read: totally different meaning you are support 12 application instead of one where they all share the same bugs but can't be fixed with the same patch).
And I have started to notice something, and shot down a recruiters suggestion just a few minutes ago because of it. If a place only has seniors, it means the code is a mess. Trivial changes should be done by juniors if trivial changes can't be done by juniors, it means the code is a mess. Usually a mess created by making fantastic code that really showed off a coders skills but in the end is just spaghetti code were to much happens in one place for anybody to easily read the code and find the place that a fix should go.
If you played Transport Tycoon, you can see if you can write non-nightmare code. Did you create a interconnected network of trains where you tried to get the max number of trains to run on the least amount of track and dreamed of a sequel that would give you better router options?
Or did you just create nice simple separate routes with just 2 stations and at most a dual track to create a circular loop so your trains never got lost or stuck?
One is the code genius solution, the other creates code that is easily maintained. Go and play the game, create both type of networks, then alter a route. In the first, you will have to deal with countless problems as all your train routes collapse and first directly affected trains get lost and then become stuck creating troubles for your entire network. Just like in complex rail networks in real life like in Holland.
But on the kind of network you computer opponent builds with just 2 stations and trains running between them, you can easily dig up a route and redesign it and the rest of your trains continue to run their separate routes.
Juniors often lack the ability to deal with code where a tiny change here might cause something to break there. That is what seniors are supposed to be good at.
Consequently, if a company only employees seniors, they got spaghetti code.
I have been working on a wiki page to get my brainfart that MS original trouble with getting MS Office out the door, called development hell, has bastard brother in maintenance hell, where you are stuck repainting the preverbial bridge but the previous painters left such a mess AND are still doing it you never even get to painting but once you cleared the bridge of the mess the previous painters left behind, they started leaving a mess at the other end again. And if the bridge never even gets started painting, you can forget about structural maintenance.
At one company, disastrous code had been upgraded to a condition described by the developers as "stable". Stable as in how doctors use it to describe a patient in emergency care which really means "patient can now be moved for serious surgery without it killing with absolute certainty". Management thought stable meant "perfect health". It wasn't. Management planned a host of new features, we were to busy trying to keep it from falling apart on the spot.
Maintenance hell is real and it happens when your code has become so bad, that SCRUM is impossible because SCRUM MANDATES that you have your bugs under control. How can you after all estimate a project when any chance you make is going to open most certainly a can of worms but you have no idea how big or just how lethal the worms are. Maintenance hell is when only the developers who made the dev in the first place can not quite maintain it and then they leave and any new developers you hire burn out in six months and you start to accept that people only will become productive after six months studying the code.
So, questions to ask: Spread of Junior/Medior/Senior developers and... why are their existing developers leaving. Usually you can already get pretty good idea of the company by going into the history on job boards. Every 6 months they are looking to hire a senior (In holland it is standard to start with a 6 month contract)... maintenance hell, they are replacing their burned out sucker eh, developer.
XCom: Enemy Unknown has a 3D main interface where you can go to the seperate areas, with a fly animation zooming in on the sub sections of your base.
Nice the first time, meh the second, the 1000th time you scream and rage at your monitor and hurl the cat out the window.
Newbie friendly is a great market because you never run out of newbies but the moment a newbie has grown beyond the need for a newbie interface, you lost him forever.
There isn't much repeat business in the training wheel market.
W8 is MS Bob all over again. For older people like me, the desktop is like my toes, haven't seen it in decades. I startup the applications I need automatically and never even minimize them, the desktop could display my golden ticket to nirvana and I will never ever see it.
W8 to me adds just cruft I don't need or want and that increasingly seems to desire to get in the way. I don't use active desktop, widgets or gadgets (98, Vista and W7). The desktop has one use, to stop my applications from falling into the monitor.
I need a start menu to groups application, a taskbar to switch and that is it. End of fucking story.
And trying to sell me on something new because a 3yr old likes it... 3yr olds also like teletubbies, boogers and the word poop. poop... POOP! eheh POOP!!!
When you lie for your bosses, save the evidence to make sure they fall with you, because bosses have no loyalty and they LOVE to send you to face the music.
The "scientists" in question seem to have massaged the figures, they weren't lying, they just weren't telling the absolute truth, someone hinted that someone would be pleased if their report said X, they said X and then Y happened and gosh, their bosses dropped them like the flunkies they were.
Life isn't a movie, if it was, this would have been a disaster movie and the boss would have died in some horrible way just seconds after claiming that what is obviously happening isn't happening.
But in real life, the underling takes the blame and the boss gets a promotion for finding the culprit and seeing that justice is done. r.
IF you translate between Japanese and English it would be FAR FAR FAR easier to do it with text first. Have you seen some of the translations google comes up with? Often it ain't even good enough to get the gist of the original message, let alone be good enough to carry a conversation.
With speech to speech translation, you got to first have proper voice regonization, a far from perfect technology, then have good translation, which doesn't yet exist especially for such totally different languages as japanese/english. And then you got have good text to speech. Which ALSO still isn't anything to write home about or computer game would use it to be able to forgo voice acting and have far more flexible scripts including usage of player chosen names.
Combine all three and engrish.com better get some extra hosting to store all the hilarious screwups.
The reason Japanese/English is so hard to translate is that the languages are completely different in which the way you say something and what information is included/excluded is totally different. And then people make it worse by leaving things out they expect someone from their own circle to know but that someone from another culture needs to make things clear. How would you translate 'dude'. And yes I know that is a lousy example of hip and happening street talk but I am a nerd, what do I know of being hip. But the translating engine better knows or you are going to get a tower of babel.
If this new solution magically improve all three fields needed to an as yet unheard of standard, it would be amazing. I doubt it, but it would be amazing.
Now just convince the japanese to stop putting all the text on their webpages in images and we might actually be able to make the world a bit smaller. Oh and get companies to make deal with global payment services so anyone can use their local payment system to pay anywhere in the world.
Whether you deserve mockery depends on which Star Trek you like:
Star Trek: The Original Series. My man!
Star Trek: The Next Generation. My gay man!
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. My girl, very inclusive of them to make a Star Trek for the soap opera crowd.
Star Trek: Voyager. Go away kid
Enterprise DIE!
Star Trek: The rape movie Your death will be a public holiday.
Same with old phones, the first people to use a real useful smartphone were the Nokia communicator users. Then for the people who found that to hard to use, the blackberry was invented.
Then the iPhone came along for those who didn't have any real use for them apart from playing flavor of the day games. How many slicing games does a platform need anyway?
But at least your not a windows phone user.
There is always a pecking order and always someone at the bottom. Windows phone users and Enterprise watchers are the equivalent of the dead half cannibalized chicken at your local factory farm. McNuggets.
Queue this post being modded down by a future McNugget.
Show me a 3d printer that can create anything remote useful at the press of a button.
And at the end, you had near robotic sewing machines, capable of being programmed to do all kinds of stuff.
If you didn't look down on "women's work", you could see some amazing similarities between the idea of 3d printing and making clothes from scratch. But that would mean acknowledging that its appeal is limited. And designer clothes are expensive, an egg holder cup isn't.
Outside prototyping and repear, I can't see a future for 3d printing. I can't see anything worth more then a few cents that isn't make out of more then just plastic and screws where just buying it isn't far far easier. But hey, keep dreaming, maybe you can come up with a reason every household should own a 3d printer.
Welcome to the past, can I introduce you to a machine that allows you to manufacture at home at a greatly reduced price items we all need everyday (expect perverts)? Yes, it is the SOWING MACHINE!!! Tada!
No more reliance on the clothing industry and their child labour practices and outrageous markups, you design your own pattern or use one of the countless free ones available, experiment as much as you want and have your own clothes as you want them, when you want them for a fraction of the price.
And this AMAZING tech is SO amazing, that it is slowly dying out as the general population says "what, make my own and spend all that time when I can just spend 10 times as much and get crappy made clothes that everyone else has?".
3d printing seems to have it uses but those looking for a revolution better ask themselves, "do I make my own clothes"?
no? Then why would you make your own... stuff that is entirely made out of plastic or easily available tiny parts?
Did you know there used to be stores that sold nothing buttons?
An industry catering to makers did once exist. And it is dying out or dead already.
Why?
Sowing machines are now used for prototyping and repairs. Gosh, could this be the market for 3d printing as well? Nah, surely people ain't that lazy! Nothing like coming home at the end of the day, noticing you ran out of sporks and printing out a new batch. How much stuff do you own that can actually be printed completely from scratch where color or type of plastic don't matter and time between need and finished printing is acceptable?
even this plane shows the weakness, I seen people make model boats completely from scratch by hand do it faster.And that includes the metal and rope work. Yes, I know some sad people. I am one of them.
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It ain't just Steve Jobs/Apple, had the PC become owned by IBM, Atari, Commodore and god knows who else (japan had its own eco-structure and it becomes more and more obvious as the world gets smaller that back then every country had their own home computer brand), IT would have looked very different. ALL those companies were about owning the entire market, from the computers themselves (go buy a Commodore from Compaq) to the storage media, the joysticks EVERYTHING.
It is thanks to Compaq, MS and Intel (and the "failures" of the rest) that we got this accidentally remarkably open platform. Apple sold expensive PC's, thanks to Compaq creation of the IBM-compatible, we got cheap PC's and thanks to those who cloned Compaq's we got EVEN cheaper PC's. Some might point out the Apple Mini but Apple would NEVER have produced that IF they didn't have to because of cheap PC's. Proof? Apple didn't produce them when there weren't any cheap PC's. That is why Apple almost went bust the first time around.
Thanks to MS we got an OS that would work ACROSS cpu's... yes i know AMD and Intel both made X86 but if you think that makes them automatically fully compatible in all but their most base modes, you are a silly person. And this gave buyers, a CHOICE. Apple/Atari/IBM never gave you a choice. You buy what they choose to sell you. Intel thought 33mhz was enough for the 386(if I remember correctly) and AMD made a 40mhz version and people could choose. Could choose NOT to buy IBM or Dell or Compaq and roll their own.
It all happened by accident and thank god for it, wintel was/isn;t perfect but we narrowly avoided situations that would have been far far worse.
But that doesn't mean we are saved. The openess and freedom of the PC and internet might have come around by accident but that doesn't mean it can change.
Bootcamp, was that introduced because Apple wanted you to be able to use the OS of your choice or because they knew that if people couldn't run Windows on a Mac, they would sell fewer Mac's? I seen an amazing amount of Macbooks with the Aero design on the desktop.
Closed architectures are not just limited to niche attempts like Linux. If a mono-culture exists, control becomes easy. The US is rather famous for NOT having state censorship for TV such as England has. Instead, the TV broadcasters "choose" to censor themselves and no politician has to stand up and say"I want to limit free speech" but can "think of the children" thanks to self-censorship.
There have been countless stories of mega-stores in the US censoring products. Walmart censoring music CD's, App store refusing to carry apps. This doesn't matter, as long as a free alternative exist, the internet in general. But as AOL has shown and MS network and countless other attempts, there is a constant push to create walled gardens. And a walled garden isn't that bad, as long as you can get out with relative ease but nobody builds a walled garden with the idea that people should be able to get out easily.
When mega-stores are the only places to shop, their control becomes extremely risky to a free society. And with the app-store, Apple and Steve Jobs have given everyone who values real freedom a frightening look at how IT could have turned out if Jobs had sold cheaper PC's.
Jobs has the most depressing eulogy you could think off: "Thank god the man was a failure at the most critical time". And we can only pray that it remains true because if the app-store walled garden approach succeeds in W8 new app-store, the PC environment as we know it, is doomed.
It is free (I played it and did NOT feel ANY need to buy any more levels), it is extremely simple and it just plays.
I can't show of a console or pc game to friends at work and they can't install it right there and then on their devices.
Angry Birds is Garfield, it is the most read comic strip in the world but nobody would claim it is the best, it just is so easily available, so easily digestible, that the rest of the comics just can't really compete. First off, not all who read Garfield even want to read comics let alone ones that take effort and further the remaining comics are less all encompasing so they appeal to a smaller section of the general public. Some people like Nukee but it is hard to find, hard to read (you can't just jump in anywhere) and just not funny at all. You might not think Garfield is that funny anymore but at least it raises a smirk for normal people.
Angry Birds is indeed comparable to Solitaire, it is so easy to get, it doesn't have to overcome as much of human laziness.
This doesn't mean it is better then harder to get games, it just means more people seen it.
If Angry Birds was really as good as "proper" games, its owners could have bought Apple by now, they can't. Because people play the free version and that is it. If all who played it bought it, and if all who COULD play it, bought it, it would have ignited the makers bank account. It didn't.
Back to the michelin guide I use in another example, Angry Birds get 0 stars. That doesn't mean it is bad, it just ain't noteworthy while it still might get swamped by local customers.
Your local McD might have lines waiting to be served but it will NEVER be a 3 star restaurant, an experience worth the journey itself. Angry Birds is fast-food, it serves lots but nobody is going to make an hour long journey just to get it.
That people still put up with finicky PC's and expensive consoles just goes to proof how much people still want them.
Want to test Angry Birds appeal for real? Make its users go through a debug session to get it running. If they give up, then it obviously wasn't desirable enough.
If this wasn't slashdot, I could use the girl example. The amount of shit you put up from a girl is directly related to how attractive she is.
Angry Birds would be out the door if she said "hello".
Skyrim can kill your cat, fuck your best mates and pay them for it with your salary while telling everyone your pc is in reality a Dell.
This is just one of those "X is dead" stories where the author knows nothing about anything including market diversity.
It is obvious that McD attracts more customers then 3 star restaurants, therefor 3 star restaurants are dead...
Logic dictates this. But McD has been around for a long time and so is the whole Michelin guide thing, which has also been declared dead many times.
There are indeed people for who Angry Birds is enough and they can buy an iPad Mini for 329. And there are those for who mario is enough and they can buy a Wii U for 350. Wow! Look at that price difference!!! Anyway, for SOME, Angry Birds is NOT enough just as a dry patty on an even dryer piece of fluffed corn isn't good enough for some. And they will buy a PC, put in a video card and play real games.
And there are even some people, who one day buy a hamburger and the next day visit a 3 star restaurant. Amazing!
And some people never buy any pre-made food and cook at home!!! It is almost like there are kinds of different people out there with others catering to their needs!
Right now, in 2012 EA/Maxis is preparing Sim City for a 2013 launch and EVERYTHING looks like it will be a real Sim City again for real men on real PC's. And some gay guys on mac's. No more consolfication attempt, just a hard core sim game like we used to have. And it got just as many fanboys as Angry Birds has, except these fans can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Everytime someone declares something dead, it springs back on its feet. The world is a more complex place then you think and people have different needs and wants, often on the same day.
Al Qaeda is not operating as isolated as the Arab world would like, they have powerful sympathizers. And then 9/11 happened and OOPS, we funded the protesters but we did not expect them to succeed.
The same happened with the US and Cuba. Oops, we funded dissidents but they did WHAT? Invade? No way, no support. They were supposed to be a nuisance to our enemy, not trigger WW3. Same thing with assanition of Kennedy, it don't matter if the CIA/FBI did or did not do it, the real shocker (if the American public had a brain) should have been that there were any plans at all. And when the bullet has been fired it is to late to consider whether talks of firing that bullet were just talk or concrete plans.
The bay of pigs was a disaster as the Cubans cleaned them up and Al Qaeda is a shadow of its former self. Presumably those who had entertained plans to kill the president were also dealt with, just in case anyone would ever think that again.
The leadership in Iran know damn well that there is a line between the US basically ignoring them and blowing them from the map. They have been shown enough examples. It ain't nice perhaps but that is the real world. Same with Russian support for Iran btw, Russians like Iran just as long as they are more a nuisance to US then they are to Russia. Iran starts to to openly interfere with Russian interests (look at russia's borders, religion in tjetnia and of high number of terrorist attacks in moskou itself) and that blocking vote will soon disappear. Same with China. It is a balance game. Annoy the US but don't piss them off and if Israel spanks your ass once again (It is widely believed Iran supported what is now north-sudan and Israel south-sudan. South-sudan won, suprise suprise and north-sudan lost all world support for being nasty people), we most certainly are not going to do anything except try to learn how they did it and snicker a bit.
You might note that will all the support Iran has given Hezbollah and Syria, it hasn't actually given either of these group any useful fighting capability? Missiles that don't hit shit and drones that get shot down with ease and never enough money to get the economy going.
This is not the cold war continued, it is still the same cold war. It never went away. And the cold war has the same rules, cause a hassle, cause trouble but do NOT start WW3. If Iran is smart, they know this. If not... they might invade a small nation and think that is going to be ignored like the killing of their own people was... (if you don't get the iraq reference, I feel sorry for you)
Because if they don't... Russia and China loose nothing by seeing some Muslims turned into so much glass and ashes, they both get their own Muslims populations that could do with a message and their are always other proxies through which to keep the their opponents occupied. Or do you think Russia/China really cares about how many civilians are killed in a drone strike in Afghanistan? Russia doesn't like the afghans at all and China just wants to know how they can do the same in Tibet and get away with it) It ain't just the west that wants WW3, the super powers all know that is in nobody elses interest, they just skirmish a bit with the third world nations to keep their reflexes sharp.
Cold war is a game of risk were the players know the only winning game is not to play but their fingers itch. And Iran is NOT a player, it is at best a play piece that might be about to make a very stupid attempt at Independence and find out what happens to play pieces that move on their own.
He bought some fake accounts and quoted another article. That is like me buying a joint and quoting someone I read about on the internet and calling it an inside look at the world of drugs.
You can buy fake accounts... that is the article and those fake accounts?!? They ain't real!!!
If this article amazes you with its starting information and deep insights... actually, considering mainstream news these days, it is pretty damn deep. Mind you compared with main stream media, the lakes on mars are deep too. AND I KNOW THERE IS NO WATER ON MARS and please don't quote that with a picture of the mars rover and call it an amazing insight into the geography of mars.
Next week: Gold sellers are active in MMO's. After the commercial: Cheaters cheat in games!
People often think that michelin stars are about getting 3 stars. Everyone knows that 3 is the best but then why would anyone ever bother with 1 and 2 star restaurants? You don't bother with the silver and bronze medal winners do you?
In reality, the order is this:
1 star: Excellent restaurant of its category, worth a visit (when you are in the same area.
2 star: Excellent restaurant regardless of category, worth a detour.
3 star: First class restaurant, worth the trip itself.
This goes for games. Some games are fun if can easily get them, tablet games.
Some are very good but not worth special hardware/high price
Some are the best and worth buying special hardware or even an entire console for.
And now prove me wrong on the following:
There is not a single tablet game worth buying a tablet for.
I think history has proven that for plenty of gamers, there are games worth buying a console for.
And you can have some fine eating if all you ever do is eat at 1 star restaurants. In fact, most people will never eat as well as you.
But I can afford 3 star restaurants and games. And I will enjoy them to the max.
At least we can both sneer at people eating hamburgers from McD and they can look down at people eating microwave hamburgers.
And I will never again eat the hamburgers my mother made and those were the best of all. And the best games ever were checkers at camp with my sisters.
Who needs electronics and highly reviewed expensive stuff again? I kinda forgot my point. Maybe after all what matters is if you have fun. Regardless of how much or how little it costs. That should teach me to drink and post at the same time.
HEMA is a dutch retailer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEMA_(store)
They like other retailers have had reasons to publish recall notices for products which turn out to be faulty, this is a legal recuirement. They usually are black and white with no pictures and tiny logos if the logo is even present. The ones for HEMA are in color, with clear logo and product image also in full color. They don't need to, but they do because... well, they care for their customers? That at least is the image this gives people. The company has an EXCELLENT reputation with most Dutch people. They sell a LOT of their own branded stuff and while it isn't premium quality it is cheap and reliable and if you have a problem just return it and get a full refund with no hassle.
They respect their customers and deal with laws as adults, obeying not just the letter (print recall notice) but the spirit (try your best to notify the customers they might have a faulty product).
Compared to Apples reputation... lying about European warranties (2 years vs 1 year that apple gives), false advertising and now this kind of childish stunt. It means any adult sees Apple as just plain pathetic. Childish. Petty. Immature.
Grow up Apple. All you have done by this is given ammo to apple haters to ridicule your fanboys with.
Had they produced a mature ad, only the fanboys would have wimpered and everyone else would have said "oh well at least they aren't sore losers".
Now they are the laughing stock of the world for throwing a temper tantrum. Only yuppies respect this kind of stuff and the like of Romney who likes to fire people. The rest of us want to live in a mature world were people and companies act with a bit of dignity.
Bad Apple now go to bed, no desert for you.
One tactic T-rex might have used is the same as the giant lizard (komodo dragon), it rushes the prey, takes one septic bite, then trails the enemy till it dies.
The hyena was considered a carrior eater but makes more kills then the lion who was considered a predator.
And considering build, the Hyena seems closer to the T-rex then a buzzard. Powerful jaw and neck muscles that can deliver a massive traumatic bite to anything living or dead.
Free speech is not what you like to hear or what you like to say. Free speech is hearing something that makes your blood boil, makes you see red in the front of your eyes, that EVERYONE agrees should be banned, and not banning it and defending its speaker right to say it.
Anything less, is not free speech. There is no free speech in this world. It doesn't matter whether you ban the pedo support group Martijn, give in to fears of protests from Islamic pupils and their parents in teaching about WW2 and/or homosexuality or create a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. All these cases are where a group decides another group should shut up because they are offended by their speech. And someone will ALWAYS somewhere be offended by someone's speech. Give in to one and the next will demand to get what offends them banned as well.
Would those some protesters you talk about STILL carry those posters on Facebooks "draw the prophet" day some while ago? If no... then they were not promoting free speech, they were merely promoting their speech. There is a difference.
One of the greatest western achievements, is it lack of culture. In the west, we have no culture. The US is the best example of this but Europe also has lots of no culture.
We instead got TONS of them often living in the same street and NO I am NOT talking about multi-culturism. I am talking about universities being just a short walk away from monestaries, people studying evolution and genesis dining in the same university hall together with the business students, doctors and lawyers while hippies are campaigning on the doorstep.
It used to be that if you wanted to study, you had to go through the church and you could be ensured that they didn't encourage free thinking. Quite great names had to deal with this, from the bans on anatomy to the line between chemistry and alchemy. Read up on Newton and Da Vinci and their skirting around the religious authorities if the day.
Slowly this changed to the point where you it is fairly common for even religious leaders themselves to say that the bible is just so much hogwash and shouldn't be taken literal.
But in places like Egypt and even China, they might have universisities, they might have bright students, but they are NOT anywhere close to becoming another Oxford or MIT. It isn't just about inventing a faster super conductor but about coming up with new ideas that totally blow humanities mind.
Darwin could ONLY do his work because the religious authority in his days, when he wrote the origin of th species, did not care. Nobody really did at first, it was in fact considered rather dull. People were in fact not a bit suprised about evolution, they knew that, what upset them most was that nature didn't care. They could see evolution in action, it made sense but that nature was cruel with each day a bitter struggle... that was a bit harsh. That man wasn't the prime result of a survival of the fittest but rather the end result of the monkey that outfucked all the others didn't entirely fit with the world view. But it didn't result in any major upset at the time. That happened later. Gosh where have we seen oddly delayed outrage recenctly?
Free speech means tolerating, accepting and not silencing speech that totally upsets your world view. And if you don't... you don't get the Darwins. You get students who know they should only think approved thoughts, those who don't disappear. See Malala/Walala. She thought girls should be allowed to go school, she was silenced and it is western, not Islamic medical care that saved her life. Once Islam lead the scientific world, what changed?
Some early Islamic rulers were remarkably open, allowed other cultures, tolerated different believes. Hollands golden age is contributed in all history books to it being open to all comers.
Free speech, it has huge benefits BUT if you start limitting it by not allowing people to say stuff that offends someone... then free speech dies. After all I can go to North Korea and say everything I want, as
God is just a civil engineer, after all, who else would put the entertainment center and the sewage works next door to each other.
Or put another way:
The difference between an atheist and a believer is only in how many gods they don't believe in.
I take it you never been around med-students. Art-students or indeed ANY first year student. It is the arrogance of youth not nerds and don't worry, life will soon beat it out of you and make you one of the broken ones who slug through life and pray for an early grave.
And stop buying word of the day calendars.
Valve, what do you think the future might be for Intel/AMD Gaming? Oh... hedging your bet and trying to cater for Windows/Mac/Linux so whatever happens, you continue to rake it in with your Steam platform and own games?
I see.
Once everybody gamed on a commodore... or atari (freaks) and laughed at the dos crowd.
Things change.
Airtravel sucks, it is uncomfortable as hell but it gets you fast to distant locations. There are real nuisances and perhaps even illegal activities that we should not want but throw them in a rant list like this and you sound like a fool and make anyone with genuine complaints sound like a fool as well.
Martin Luther King's speech would have been a lot less impressive if it had been 1 minute in a ten minute rant about how the weather man never gives nice weather anymore.
Read the reviews more carefully, it is all just one step below "this is great" so it ends up as one long list of "meh" and that is NOT something you can do when you are dead last and people remember all your previous failures in the mobile market.
MS could have amazed, they didn't. Apple can afford a S update that doesn't really add much, they are the top dog. When you are at the bottom, you got to try harder.
It has a magnetic charger connection. It has a powerful magnet... BUT when it pulls the connector out of your fingers, it doesn't align properly and doesn't work. it has to be fiddled with. Like a worn out old fashioned round charger. It is ALMOST but NOT quite the apple charger experience. Almost but not quite.
It comes with MS Office... except if you like to actually use it, then you need to buy a seperate license. The ONE thing MS can use as a sales argument is that their stuff comes with full MS support and then they don't deliver unless you pay through the nose on an already expensive device. MS has in the past given Office for free to entire governments to keep customers, yet on their own device, they charge you for a non-cripple ware version.
The touchpad on the the covers is there, possibly because you sometimes don't want to touch the screen but it is hopelessly primitive version, barely more then a trackpad.
Resolution is what top end devices came with, last yet. Full HD is what new devices come with now. And people know it.
Windows RT is compatible with nothing, not even most MS software. Don't think of running Windows Games on your Windows tablet. Another potential massive selling point, not realized.
You have to remember that the previous MS phones, Zunes and Kins weren't that bad either, they just were one step behind the competition and failed to make use of being part of MS to sell people who already use Windows. The simple fact is that Apple sold countless devices despite not being Windows. And MS didn't sell any because they ultimately also weren't Windows.
Only MS would launch a tablet with such a heavy focus on text input with a cripple ware office suite while trying to court the serious tablet user. Just give it away for free already. Geez. Live a little.
The Ars Technica review mention this several times, if you plan to use Office in a commercial setting, you need an extra license key.
So it comes with Office, as long as you don't use it for real.
Cripple ware.
I am once again stuck working with crap legacy code that is even crappier because all the installed versions for different clients are custom tailored (read: totally different meaning you are support 12 application instead of one where they all share the same bugs but can't be fixed with the same patch).
And I have started to notice something, and shot down a recruiters suggestion just a few minutes ago because of it. If a place only has seniors, it means the code is a mess. Trivial changes should be done by juniors if trivial changes can't be done by juniors, it means the code is a mess. Usually a mess created by making fantastic code that really showed off a coders skills but in the end is just spaghetti code were to much happens in one place for anybody to easily read the code and find the place that a fix should go.
If you played Transport Tycoon, you can see if you can write non-nightmare code. Did you create a interconnected network of trains where you tried to get the max number of trains to run on the least amount of track and dreamed of a sequel that would give you better router options?
Or did you just create nice simple separate routes with just 2 stations and at most a dual track to create a circular loop so your trains never got lost or stuck?
One is the code genius solution, the other creates code that is easily maintained. Go and play the game, create both type of networks, then alter a route. In the first, you will have to deal with countless problems as all your train routes collapse and first directly affected trains get lost and then become stuck creating troubles for your entire network. Just like in complex rail networks in real life like in Holland.
But on the kind of network you computer opponent builds with just 2 stations and trains running between them, you can easily dig up a route and redesign it and the rest of your trains continue to run their separate routes.
Juniors often lack the ability to deal with code where a tiny change here might cause something to break there. That is what seniors are supposed to be good at.
Consequently, if a company only employees seniors, they got spaghetti code.
I have been working on a wiki page to get my brainfart that MS original trouble with getting MS Office out the door, called development hell, has bastard brother in maintenance hell, where you are stuck repainting the preverbial bridge but the previous painters left such a mess AND are still doing it you never even get to painting but once you cleared the bridge of the mess the previous painters left behind, they started leaving a mess at the other end again. And if the bridge never even gets started painting, you can forget about structural maintenance.
At one company, disastrous code had been upgraded to a condition described by the developers as "stable". Stable as in how doctors use it to describe a patient in emergency care which really means "patient can now be moved for serious surgery without it killing with absolute certainty". Management thought stable meant "perfect health". It wasn't. Management planned a host of new features, we were to busy trying to keep it from falling apart on the spot.
Maintenance hell is real and it happens when your code has become so bad, that SCRUM is impossible because SCRUM MANDATES that you have your bugs under control. How can you after all estimate a project when any chance you make is going to open most certainly a can of worms but you have no idea how big or just how lethal the worms are. Maintenance hell is when only the developers who made the dev in the first place can not quite maintain it and then they leave and any new developers you hire burn out in six months and you start to accept that people only will become productive after six months studying the code.
So, questions to ask: Spread of Junior/Medior/Senior developers and... why are their existing developers leaving. Usually you can already get pretty good idea of the company by going into the history on job boards. Every 6 months they are looking to hire a senior (In holland it is standard to start with a 6 month contract)... maintenance hell, they are replacing their burned out sucker eh, developer.
XCom: Enemy Unknown has a 3D main interface where you can go to the seperate areas, with a fly animation zooming in on the sub sections of your base.
Nice the first time, meh the second, the 1000th time you scream and rage at your monitor and hurl the cat out the window.
Newbie friendly is a great market because you never run out of newbies but the moment a newbie has grown beyond the need for a newbie interface, you lost him forever.
There isn't much repeat business in the training wheel market.
W8 is MS Bob all over again. For older people like me, the desktop is like my toes, haven't seen it in decades. I startup the applications I need automatically and never even minimize them, the desktop could display my golden ticket to nirvana and I will never ever see it.
W8 to me adds just cruft I don't need or want and that increasingly seems to desire to get in the way. I don't use active desktop, widgets or gadgets (98, Vista and W7). The desktop has one use, to stop my applications from falling into the monitor.
I need a start menu to groups application, a taskbar to switch and that is it. End of fucking story.
And trying to sell me on something new because a 3yr old likes it... 3yr olds also like teletubbies, boogers and the word poop. poop... POOP! eheh POOP!!!
This is Slashdot 2012, home of console gamers and modding everything as troll and flamebait that people don't agree with.
The real hackers moved on. They didn't tell me where. Hackers and my parents... is it so hard to leave a forwarding address?
When you lie for your bosses, save the evidence to make sure they fall with you, because bosses have no loyalty and they LOVE to send you to face the music.
The "scientists" in question seem to have massaged the figures, they weren't lying, they just weren't telling the absolute truth, someone hinted that someone would be pleased if their report said X, they said X and then Y happened and gosh, their bosses dropped them like the flunkies they were.
Life isn't a movie, if it was, this would have been a disaster movie and the boss would have died in some horrible way just seconds after claiming that what is obviously happening isn't happening.
But in real life, the underling takes the blame and the boss gets a promotion for finding the culprit and seeing that justice is done.
r.
IF you translate between Japanese and English it would be FAR FAR FAR easier to do it with text first. Have you seen some of the translations google comes up with? Often it ain't even good enough to get the gist of the original message, let alone be good enough to carry a conversation.
With speech to speech translation, you got to first have proper voice regonization, a far from perfect technology, then have good translation, which doesn't yet exist especially for such totally different languages as japanese/english. And then you got have good text to speech. Which ALSO still isn't anything to write home about or computer game would use it to be able to forgo voice acting and have far more flexible scripts including usage of player chosen names.
Combine all three and engrish.com better get some extra hosting to store all the hilarious screwups.
The reason Japanese/English is so hard to translate is that the languages are completely different in which the way you say something and what information is included/excluded is totally different. And then people make it worse by leaving things out they expect someone from their own circle to know but that someone from another culture needs to make things clear. How would you translate 'dude'. And yes I know that is a lousy example of hip and happening street talk but I am a nerd, what do I know of being hip. But the translating engine better knows or you are going to get a tower of babel.
If this new solution magically improve all three fields needed to an as yet unheard of standard, it would be amazing. I doubt it, but it would be amazing.
Now just convince the japanese to stop putting all the text on their webpages in images and we might actually be able to make the world a bit smaller. Oh and get companies to make deal with global payment services so anyone can use their local payment system to pay anywhere in the world.
Whether you deserve mockery depends on which Star Trek you like:
Same with old phones, the first people to use a real useful smartphone were the Nokia communicator users. Then for the people who found that to hard to use, the blackberry was invented.
Then the iPhone came along for those who didn't have any real use for them apart from playing flavor of the day games. How many slicing games does a platform need anyway?
But at least your not a windows phone user.
There is always a pecking order and always someone at the bottom. Windows phone users and Enterprise watchers are the equivalent of the dead half cannibalized chicken at your local factory farm. McNuggets.
Queue this post being modded down by a future McNugget.
Show me a 3d printer that can create anything remote useful at the press of a button.
And at the end, you had near robotic sewing machines, capable of being programmed to do all kinds of stuff.
If you didn't look down on "women's work", you could see some amazing similarities between the idea of 3d printing and making clothes from scratch. But that would mean acknowledging that its appeal is limited. And designer clothes are expensive, an egg holder cup isn't.
Outside prototyping and repear, I can't see a future for 3d printing. I can't see anything worth more then a few cents that isn't make out of more then just plastic and screws where just buying it isn't far far easier. But hey, keep dreaming, maybe you can come up with a reason every household should own a 3d printer.
Welcome to the past, can I introduce you to a machine that allows you to manufacture at home at a greatly reduced price items we all need everyday (expect perverts)? Yes, it is the SOWING MACHINE!!! Tada!
No more reliance on the clothing industry and their child labour practices and outrageous markups, you design your own pattern or use one of the countless free ones available, experiment as much as you want and have your own clothes as you want them, when you want them for a fraction of the price.
And this AMAZING tech is SO amazing, that it is slowly dying out as the general population says "what, make my own and spend all that time when I can just spend 10 times as much and get crappy made clothes that everyone else has?".
3d printing seems to have it uses but those looking for a revolution better ask themselves, "do I make my own clothes"?
no? Then why would you make your own... stuff that is entirely made out of plastic or easily available tiny parts?
Did you know there used to be stores that sold nothing buttons?
An industry catering to makers did once exist. And it is dying out or dead already.
Why?
Sowing machines are now used for prototyping and repairs. Gosh, could this be the market for 3d printing as well? Nah, surely people ain't that lazy! Nothing like coming home at the end of the day, noticing you ran out of sporks and printing out a new batch. How much stuff do you own that can actually be printed completely from scratch where color or type of plastic don't matter and time between need and finished printing is acceptable?
even this plane shows the weakness, I seen people make model boats completely from scratch by hand do it faster.And that includes the metal and rope work. Yes, I know some sad people. I am one of them.