This is the biggest problem with buying digital music in the first place. The other day I decided to browse iTunes to see what was available. The was an upcoming new release by Avril Lavigne. Now I wasn't going to buy it, but what threw me was the price. It was $14.99. For a digital album. The exact same album was $13.99 at Best Buy. There is no way that an item with no manufacturing cost, no shipping charge, and no losses due to breakage and theft (despite what the labels might think), should cost more than the actual physical album. Start charging $0.25 a song and $5 an album (or less) and then we can start talking.
They've been headed this way for the last 15 years anyway. My local library in a small town had internet 15 years ago. My local library now in the big city has free wifi. There's no reason why you couldn't use it as a web cafe.
That's because the HDMI Cable carries uncompressed video + audio data. If you compress the data using H.264 to send it between the cloud and the client PC. If what you say is correct, then I wouldn't be able to play HD Netflix content on my home connection. Nor would I be able to play HD Youtube content. And I clearly can. Because they are sending over encoded video. They aren't sending raw frames. The TV in your living room is a dumb box and can only interpret raw video/audio data, which is why it requires an HDMI cable with such a high bandwidth.
Not sure what the problem is here, but you can stream 1080p video over a 10 mbit internet connection. Basically, you are just constructing a video, and playing the video back to the person. Properly compress the video with H.264, and there is not problem. Maybe you live in a part of the US where everybody has 1.5-3 mbps connections, but where I live (canada) 3 mbps is actually the lowest anyone sells. And you can get 15 mbps for pretty cheap.
Obligatory XKCD. More seriously, maybe he has exhausted his audience and he will make no more sales for the rest of they year. Maybe this slashvertisement will grant him $1 million in sales. Overall it's hard to say.
What if the human used a random number generator to guide their moves? What would the outcome be? You would expect that it would be 50/50, over enough trials, but maybe being truly random would throw the computer off it's game, and cause it to lose more than 50% of the time.
My boss did this the other day on his laptop, not because he dosn't know where it goes, but more because he was in a rush, and it just fit. He realized the mistake when the mouse didn't come up. That doesn't really give any excuse to these people, but a USB cable does fit perfectly fine in a network port. At least width wise. Give it a try.
Most people get their computers fixed for free by their geek friends, so it just gives us a lot of free time. That or they go out and buy a new one. Most computer shops charge around $80 an hour for PC repair. At that price, you'd be crazy not to go out and buy a new one. Unless you have a really expensive PC. Geek squad charges $40 to install Windows 7. Which has to be the easiest windows to install in all of history.
The iPhone didn't have copy and paste upon launch either. It's kind of odd that MS didn't have copy/paste either after the flack that Apple received for that move. Windows mobile 6 kind of had copy paste, but it really depended on what application you are using as to whether it was available, leading me to believe it wasn't actually built into the core system. There seems to be quite a history of mobile devices not having copy and paste, for whatever reason. Anyway, I wouldn't hold that against them too much. MS probably wasn't planning to have a major release of windows after Vista, but with the failure of it, they had to do another release. I could very much see the same happening with windows phone.
Do they seriously charge you to receive an SMS? that's completely stupid, as your phone automatically receives it whether or not you want it to. Do they also charge you for calls that make your phone ring, but that you don't pick up? What of somebody on an unlimited texting plan sent you 1000 messages in a month? Would you automatically get billed $250 just because somebody decided to send you a bunch of messages, even though you didn't want to receive them?
With a 10 Mbit connection, which is readily available where I live, (50 Mbit is actually available, for the record i'm in Canada) you can watch HD streams from Netflix, and you only have to wait 30 seconds for it to buffer. Even on my paltry 3Mbit connection, i can watch SD content on netflix without waiting long for it to buffer. The only thing holding me back from dropping cable and PVR altogether is the lack of content services like Netflix and others. My internet connection is already there. All the pieces are already in place. I am just missing a place to get the content from. And it seems like every day I'm closer to having that content source available.
Actually I would have to say he "collected an anecdote". He only has a sample size of 1. Because of the actual recordings, he has better ability to recall what actually happened, but it's still not much better than me offering information based on my experiences with my 3 kids. If he had done the same with a group of 50 kids, or even more kids, I would think the data might be different, or if it wasn't different, I would at least think it was more valid.
But in the future it could seriously be the norm to just download on demand all that back content you didn't watch. In recent years, I've been using my PVR less and less because of the ability to watch something after the fact either on the network's website, on demand via digital cable, or for older content on services like Netflix that would also have TV shows. In an ideal situation, PVRs wouldn't exist because you could just download everything when you wanted to watch it. And you wouldn't have to remember to record something, you could always go back and watch something, even if you didn't know you wanted to watch it ahead of time. Which I think is half the reason you have such a large backlog of stuff to watch on your PVR. You have to record it just in case you maybe want to watch it later. In reality you are probably only going to watch 10% of the stuff you record, but you record it anyway, just incase.
That's really hard to judge. My biggest hard drive is on my laptop. It's 320 GB. It's nowhere close to full. I'm probably using about 100 GB. A significant chunk of that is OS, Installed Programs, and Paging file. I only use about 20 GB for data, including audio and video. I used to save a lot more stuff on my drive. But with the way internet is going lately, I find it easier to just download something again than to bother keeping it around on my computer, or even burning it to DVD. I could forsee a point in the near future (5-10 years), where there's a service like netflix, but with all the movies, and others similar services for books, music, and other media, where I could just download everything i needed on demand, and I would have no need to bother with locally storing most of the data that currently takes up so much of people's hard drives.
We also have demonstrably fast people of all races, but that doesn't mean that in general that one race isn't faster. Also, I really don't think you could ever disconnect "socio-economic" status from cognitive ability. If somebody has very little cognitive ability they will most likely end up in a lower socio-economic position. However, all the statistics seem to assume that people in lower socio-economic status have the same cognitive ability as everyone else, and that it's simple their lower status that is keeping them in that low status. While I would agree that someone's racial background isn't the deciding factor in cognitive ability, and I wouldn't use it to judge the abilities of any individual, just like I wouldn't use a single person's BMI to judge their health, wouldn't it be safe to assume that it does there is a variation of cognitive ability across different groups of people who for much of human history evolved in completely different environments with different stresses determining what was important?
For me it's more along the lines of "why pay 3 times more for something with only 20% more performance?" Also, with the price of these chips, it would probably be cheaper to just get a dual socket motherboard, and 2 quad core CPUs. You might even end up with better performance What's better 6x3.73 GHz or 8x3.0 GHz. Simple math shows us the 8 core setup would have better performance. Plush those 2 socket motherboards usually let you plug in quite a bit more RAM.
Here's a question. Why is it completely acceptable to admit that people of African descent are better runners, with plenty of data to back it up (just look at the olympics), but it is not ok to say that other races, caucasians for instance, may have increase mental capacity? I'm not either of the above statements are true saying the above is true. My question is, why does nobody bat an eyelash when some race is better at something athletic, but when somebody suggests that one race may have more more mental capacity, even relating to very specific jobs such as software development for instance, it's assumed to be incorrect, and that anybody making the suggestion must be racist?
I'm much more excited on speeds from products such as PCI-E Based SSDs. That one has 740 MB/s, with sustained write speeds of around 600 MB/s. I don't own one, and i'm not in the market for an SSD, but if I got one, I would definitely be going this route.
Which is why I said " but it just isn't there yet". They are touting these things as a possible replacement for your computer. But at the current price, you might as well just buy a full on computer and use that, and get a better experience. Sure if you can afford both devices, go ahead and buy both, you'll probably have a lot of fun with them. However I don't have the money to buy both devices, so I have to choose one. Disclaimer. I "could" buy both, but there's a lot other stuff I'd rather buy. The amount of use I would get out of it wouldn't make logical sense for the price they are charging.
The problem is, is that until a few years ago there was no "content consumption device" that wasn't a gaming systems. The only way to browse the internet, and do a little light computing work (type up a letter, etc.) was to buy a full fledged general purpose computer. So while most people didn't want general purpose computers, it was the only device they could buy that would (poorly) enable them to do what they want to do. Now that these items are available, it's not any wonder why they are being adopted so fast. It's what people have been waiting for all along.
This just goes to prove that most users aren't sophisticated enough to do computing outside of a "walled garden". Sorry to say, but that's just the way it is. Sure many of us geeks on slashdot can handle it, but most users generally cannot. Which is why the general public love their video game consoles, iPhones, iPads, and other walled garden computing devices. Because it lets them use computers without having to think, and without having to worry about what applications might do hard to their computer.
The term "Window" when referring the an operating system user interfaced is at least as old as 1980 before windows 1.0 was even released. Microsoft didn't invent the use of the word Windows for describing the type of interface they were using. That term was already in wide use in the computer world before MS even started developing Windows (TM).
Maybe they could release a toned down version for Australia, and then release a method of putting the blood back in on TPB, complete with instructions on how to install it. When the Aussie government comes calling, disavow all knowledge. If they don't release it at all, people will just pirate the US version, as they will have no other way to play. Can't you just order it from an American retailer? Or a New Zealand one? I could see a big market for people selling games to Aussies, and putting something else on the packaging, perhaps even using a different case on the game if the authorities happened to open the packaging. Maybe even a different label on the disk.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the biggest problem with buying digital music in the first place. The other day I decided to browse iTunes to see what was available. The was an upcoming new release by Avril Lavigne. Now I wasn't going to buy it, but what threw me was the price. It was $14.99. For a digital album. The exact same album was $13.99 at Best Buy. There is no way that an item with no manufacturing cost, no shipping charge, and no losses due to breakage and theft (despite what the labels might think), should cost more than the actual physical album. Start charging $0.25 a song and $5 an album (or less) and then we can start talking.
They've been headed this way for the last 15 years anyway. My local library in a small town had internet 15 years ago. My local library now in the big city has free wifi. There's no reason why you couldn't use it as a web cafe.
Homestar is pretty much the only type of content that you really need flash for. For everything else, it should be completely avoided.
That's because the HDMI Cable carries uncompressed video + audio data. If you compress the data using H.264 to send it between the cloud and the client PC. If what you say is correct, then I wouldn't be able to play HD Netflix content on my home connection. Nor would I be able to play HD Youtube content. And I clearly can. Because they are sending over encoded video. They aren't sending raw frames. The TV in your living room is a dumb box and can only interpret raw video/audio data, which is why it requires an HDMI cable with such a high bandwidth.
Not sure what the problem is here, but you can stream 1080p video over a 10 mbit internet connection. Basically, you are just constructing a video, and playing the video back to the person. Properly compress the video with H.264, and there is not problem. Maybe you live in a part of the US where everybody has 1.5-3 mbps connections, but where I live (canada) 3 mbps is actually the lowest anyone sells. And you can get 15 mbps for pretty cheap.
No, but raytracing the entire scene at framerates fast enough to play a game is something that is new.
Obligatory XKCD. More seriously, maybe he has exhausted his audience and he will make no more sales for the rest of they year. Maybe this slashvertisement will grant him $1 million in sales. Overall it's hard to say.
What if the human used a random number generator to guide their moves? What would the outcome be? You would expect that it would be 50/50, over enough trials, but maybe being truly random would throw the computer off it's game, and cause it to lose more than 50% of the time.
My boss did this the other day on his laptop, not because he dosn't know where it goes, but more because he was in a rush, and it just fit. He realized the mistake when the mouse didn't come up. That doesn't really give any excuse to these people, but a USB cable does fit perfectly fine in a network port. At least width wise. Give it a try.
Most people get their computers fixed for free by their geek friends, so it just gives us a lot of free time. That or they go out and buy a new one. Most computer shops charge around $80 an hour for PC repair. At that price, you'd be crazy not to go out and buy a new one. Unless you have a really expensive PC. Geek squad charges $40 to install Windows 7. Which has to be the easiest windows to install in all of history.
The iPhone didn't have copy and paste upon launch either. It's kind of odd that MS didn't have copy/paste either after the flack that Apple received for that move. Windows mobile 6 kind of had copy paste, but it really depended on what application you are using as to whether it was available, leading me to believe it wasn't actually built into the core system. There seems to be quite a history of mobile devices not having copy and paste, for whatever reason. Anyway, I wouldn't hold that against them too much. MS probably wasn't planning to have a major release of windows after Vista, but with the failure of it, they had to do another release. I could very much see the same happening with windows phone.
Do they seriously charge you to receive an SMS? that's completely stupid, as your phone automatically receives it whether or not you want it to. Do they also charge you for calls that make your phone ring, but that you don't pick up? What of somebody on an unlimited texting plan sent you 1000 messages in a month? Would you automatically get billed $250 just because somebody decided to send you a bunch of messages, even though you didn't want to receive them?
With a 10 Mbit connection, which is readily available where I live, (50 Mbit is actually available, for the record i'm in Canada) you can watch HD streams from Netflix, and you only have to wait 30 seconds for it to buffer. Even on my paltry 3Mbit connection, i can watch SD content on netflix without waiting long for it to buffer. The only thing holding me back from dropping cable and PVR altogether is the lack of content services like Netflix and others. My internet connection is already there. All the pieces are already in place. I am just missing a place to get the content from. And it seems like every day I'm closer to having that content source available.
Actually I would have to say he "collected an anecdote". He only has a sample size of 1. Because of the actual recordings, he has better ability to recall what actually happened, but it's still not much better than me offering information based on my experiences with my 3 kids. If he had done the same with a group of 50 kids, or even more kids, I would think the data might be different, or if it wasn't different, I would at least think it was more valid.
But in the future it could seriously be the norm to just download on demand all that back content you didn't watch. In recent years, I've been using my PVR less and less because of the ability to watch something after the fact either on the network's website, on demand via digital cable, or for older content on services like Netflix that would also have TV shows. In an ideal situation, PVRs wouldn't exist because you could just download everything when you wanted to watch it. And you wouldn't have to remember to record something, you could always go back and watch something, even if you didn't know you wanted to watch it ahead of time. Which I think is half the reason you have such a large backlog of stuff to watch on your PVR. You have to record it just in case you maybe want to watch it later. In reality you are probably only going to watch 10% of the stuff you record, but you record it anyway, just incase.
That's really hard to judge. My biggest hard drive is on my laptop. It's 320 GB. It's nowhere close to full. I'm probably using about 100 GB. A significant chunk of that is OS, Installed Programs, and Paging file. I only use about 20 GB for data, including audio and video. I used to save a lot more stuff on my drive. But with the way internet is going lately, I find it easier to just download something again than to bother keeping it around on my computer, or even burning it to DVD. I could forsee a point in the near future (5-10 years), where there's a service like netflix, but with all the movies, and others similar services for books, music, and other media, where I could just download everything i needed on demand, and I would have no need to bother with locally storing most of the data that currently takes up so much of people's hard drives.
We also have demonstrably fast people of all races, but that doesn't mean that in general that one race isn't faster. Also, I really don't think you could ever disconnect "socio-economic" status from cognitive ability. If somebody has very little cognitive ability they will most likely end up in a lower socio-economic position. However, all the statistics seem to assume that people in lower socio-economic status have the same cognitive ability as everyone else, and that it's simple their lower status that is keeping them in that low status. While I would agree that someone's racial background isn't the deciding factor in cognitive ability, and I wouldn't use it to judge the abilities of any individual, just like I wouldn't use a single person's BMI to judge their health, wouldn't it be safe to assume that it does there is a variation of cognitive ability across different groups of people who for much of human history evolved in completely different environments with different stresses determining what was important?
For me it's more along the lines of "why pay 3 times more for something with only 20% more performance?" Also, with the price of these chips, it would probably be cheaper to just get a dual socket motherboard, and 2 quad core CPUs. You might even end up with better performance What's better 6x3.73 GHz or 8x3.0 GHz. Simple math shows us the 8 core setup would have better performance. Plush those 2 socket motherboards usually let you plug in quite a bit more RAM.
Here's a question. Why is it completely acceptable to admit that people of African descent are better runners, with plenty of data to back it up (just look at the olympics), but it is not ok to say that other races, caucasians for instance, may have increase mental capacity? I'm not either of the above statements are true saying the above is true. My question is, why does nobody bat an eyelash when some race is better at something athletic, but when somebody suggests that one race may have more more mental capacity, even relating to very specific jobs such as software development for instance, it's assumed to be incorrect, and that anybody making the suggestion must be racist?
I'm much more excited on speeds from products such as PCI-E Based SSDs. That one has 740 MB/s, with sustained write speeds of around 600 MB/s. I don't own one, and i'm not in the market for an SSD, but if I got one, I would definitely be going this route.
Which is why I said " but it just isn't there yet". They are touting these things as a possible replacement for your computer. But at the current price, you might as well just buy a full on computer and use that, and get a better experience. Sure if you can afford both devices, go ahead and buy both, you'll probably have a lot of fun with them. However I don't have the money to buy both devices, so I have to choose one. Disclaimer. I "could" buy both, but there's a lot other stuff I'd rather buy. The amount of use I would get out of it wouldn't make logical sense for the price they are charging.
The problem is, is that until a few years ago there was no "content consumption device" that wasn't a gaming systems. The only way to browse the internet, and do a little light computing work (type up a letter, etc.) was to buy a full fledged general purpose computer. So while most people didn't want general purpose computers, it was the only device they could buy that would (poorly) enable them to do what they want to do. Now that these items are available, it's not any wonder why they are being adopted so fast. It's what people have been waiting for all along.
This just goes to prove that most users aren't sophisticated enough to do computing outside of a "walled garden". Sorry to say, but that's just the way it is. Sure many of us geeks on slashdot can handle it, but most users generally cannot. Which is why the general public love their video game consoles, iPhones, iPads, and other walled garden computing devices. Because it lets them use computers without having to think, and without having to worry about what applications might do hard to their computer.
The term "Window" when referring the an operating system user interfaced is at least as old as 1980 before windows 1.0 was even released. Microsoft didn't invent the use of the word Windows for describing the type of interface they were using. That term was already in wide use in the computer world before MS even started developing Windows (TM).
Maybe they could release a toned down version for Australia, and then release a method of putting the blood back in on TPB, complete with instructions on how to install it. When the Aussie government comes calling, disavow all knowledge. If they don't release it at all, people will just pirate the US version, as they will have no other way to play. Can't you just order it from an American retailer? Or a New Zealand one? I could see a big market for people selling games to Aussies, and putting something else on the packaging, perhaps even using a different case on the game if the authorities happened to open the packaging. Maybe even a different label on the disk.