Actually, 42 cents per play is pretty darned good. If I buy a CD for $10, I'll probably listen to it at least 10 times, and it probably has at least 10 songs on it. So that's a 100 plays for $10, or 10 cents per play. Plus, I don't think that any artist ever got to keep $10 from any album they every sold. The money ends up going to "The Man" and the artist get very little money from each album sold. The only real money in music is from doing concerts. And if the most people you can attract is enough to fill a bar, you probably won't make enough for it to be your only job.
Also, even little incremental improvements can end having a huge effect on the way things work. When Dunlop made the first pneumatic tire, it was just an incremental improvement, but it changed everything about wheels. They no longer had to be built as strong because bumps were being absorbed by all the air in the tire, and not just the material between the rim and the road. Wheels could be lighter, and provide a much smoother ride than the old solid rubber, or even worse the iron tires you used to find on old farm tractors.
I seem to recall a rumour that they got rid of the damage in the Need For Speed series because the can manufacturers didn't like seeing their cars dented up and performing poorly after a crash. I haven't played the games recently, but the last one I played and liked was NFS IV, because it had real damage, and you didn't have the computer cars sideswiping you to run you off the track, because their car would get damaged as well. It was really fun to play a racing game where you would almost garaunteed end up losing if you crashed.
Personally, I think people/companies should have to defend their patents or lose them. You should be able to come out out of the blue, years later and tell them that something that they've been doing for years is all of a sudden against your patent. Obviously there would have to be some leeway to determine when the patent holder should have known about the use of their invention, but in the case of slide-to-unlock which has been in existence on phones for years, there's no reason why this patent should just be coming to light now.
Up To? Sounds like something they put on a sign in front of a retail store to lure customers. As in "Up To 70% Off All Items", where there's only 1 or 2 items that nobody wants at 70% off, a bunch of items at 20% off, and most of the store is at regular, or above regular price.
What's the alternative though? Let everybody use android phones which can load whichever spyware infested apps they want? Not a great way to run your business. Or they could run iPhone/IOS and you'd be at Apple's mercy as far as which of apps are loaded onto your device. Also not great for your business. I've never used BES, but it's nice for businesses to at least have an option to control what does and doesn't happen on their phones. For personal phones, Android is great, but it's nice to see blackberry continue on with a serious option for businesses. There's still a need for that.
I think they will have a fighting chance as long as the Android compatibility works well. I'm skeptical of this because Android apps don't even work that consistently across different Android handsets. But I guess we'll have to wait and see. If the apps work, and they have quality hardware (good battery, good signal, good specs, doesn't break) at a competitive price, then I could see a lot of people going for a BlackBerry again.
I was going to say, why not just run GIMP. but then I actually re-read the summary and saw that the "Linux User" was actually running an Android Tablet and this is where his problem was coming from. If you're a Linux User and want to edit graphics, you can just use GIMP. I guess there's an open market for people wanting to do graphics work on their tablet, but I don't really know if tablets are really the kind of system I'd want to be using for anything more serious than cropping or resizing a picture.
Yeah, the problem with wireless is that all the speeds they give are theoretical maximum speeds where the actual speed is quite often way below the theoretical maximum. This is especially true once you start to move far away from the access point, and there walls between the router and the wireless card. Whereas with wires, you almost always get the advertised speed unless there's something wrong with your cable, or your computer isn't fast enough to keep up with the connection (if the data being sent is on a USB 2 drive, it won't be able to send at 1 gbps, max of USB2 is 480 mbps)
If you were talking about things like food, shelter and medicine, then you might have an argument. But things like cars and computers are completely unnecessary. I live without a car. And it's not even because I can't afford it. I know lots of people who live without computers just fine. I even know a lot of people who don't own TVs. Sure you can look at poverty relatively, but if someone can afford to meet their basic food, clothing and shelter expenses and still have some cash left over for spending, they shouldn't be said to be in poverty, but by many definitions, they are.
But then you can't really compare animals to humans at all. Medicine and nutrition has gotten so good that we have basically doubled our lifespan over our ancestors. You could probably compare humans to some domesticated animals, but even that's not a good comparison. If a dog get's cancer, most people wouldn't pay for chemo, and would just put the dog down, whereas for certain cancers, the survival rate is getting pretty high. Think about all the other medical procedures that would prolong your life after any other animal would be left to die. Organ transplants, chemotherapy, angioplasty, and many other procedures are very seldom done on animals.
Not sure how a braille keyboard works but even if it required 2 or 3 keystrokes to do each braille character, it still wouldn't be that difficult to surpass the speed of a lot of people who can't be bothered to learn how to touch type properly. You could design such a system where pressing a key without the thumb depressed puts dots (controlled by the three middle fingers) in the first column of the letter, and with the thumb depressed puts the dots for the second character. Then use the little finger to advance to the next character. You could even auto-advance after typing in the dots for the second column.
What's changed is that what people think they need has changed. In the 60s nobody had a cell phone, internet, cable TV. It wasn't uncommon for people to go without a car at all It wasn't uncommon for the poor living in rural areas to not even have flush toilets. Many of the people I know who don't have a lot of money still find ways to pay for the Internet and cell phones and cars and designer clothing and premade food products while at the same time complaining that they don't have any money. I realize there are some people (and know a few of them) who are genuinely poor who do go without all those things. But there's a huge sense of entitlement where people think they have to have a lot of things they really don't need.
The again, the price of server class machines have been coming down quite a bit, so at some point it might just make more sense to have a server on your desk if you need some serious power. The advantage of using a server is that you get serious room for expansion. Many server models support int the hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, and you also have the ability to have multiple CPUs. Plus you get a real RAID controller, and things like redundant power supplies.
Which is why this whole thing is stupid. Switching to Linux+OpenOffice is more expensive than keeping with the status quo and updating nothing. However, eventually they will have to upgrade to a new version of Windows and a new version of Office. They probably wouldn't realize savings until 5-10 years down the road. But that's the way the world works. Almost nobody, in government or the private sector is interested in making long term savings. It's all about making yourself look good for the current political term or fiscal quarter.
You make the device cheaper by making the hardware cheaper. You make the hardware cheaper by giving it a slower CPU and less memory. However, taking the cheaper device and then running all the apps in HTML5+Javascript seems counter productive. The nice thing about the low end Nokia phones was that you could still get some pretty good performance out of the apps because the apps were all written in C. I guess that they could take HTML5+Javascript and compile that to something that could execute faster, but I doubt they are doing that.
Wrong. If the developer does not design/test the game on Linux, it won't run on Linux. Well, it might run on Linux but odds are it probably won't. You'd probably have better luck writing a game in C for Windows, and relying on WINE for people who want to run it in Linux.
There's nothing inherently special about Java that makes it able to run games on Windows/Linux any more than C/C++. If the programmers set out to make a program that will run on both, it will run on both. If they just assume it will work on Linux, or have no intention of it running on Linux, then it doesn't matter if it's written in Java, C or.Net, it won't run on Linux.
If they don't think it benefits them, they aren't being creative enough. What if the next XBox came with a hard drive that came with contained all the music from 1998 (14 years ago) and previously? That would be a pretty good thing to get with your XBox. Or they could sell tracks for 5-25 cents a piece, and it would be pure profit. Nobody to share royalties with. They could do the same with the back catalog of old games. There's a million ways to make money off old content. You can download 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for free but that doesn't stop retailers from selling paperback copies, or even a few people from selling versions of it on the Kindle store (or trying to, Amazon offers it for free).
I think the is the basic idea, which is why the whole idea won't work. Basically, they are sawing the motherboard in 2, where the CPU and memory are on the daugterboard, and the rest of the components (SATA,USB3, PCIe slots, sound, video outputs) are all that remain on the motherboard. I think it might provide for some interesting ideas where you could have a CPU board that accepted a new chip without having to go out and re-buy the part that the peripheral plug into. Or you might be able to get a motherboard that has lots of space for RAM, but that only has a single PCIe slot (or none at all) for space savings. Most boards seem to have both few PCIeslots and view RAM slots, or many of bother but you don't see many with a combination of the two.
I agree. I bought Windows 8 specifically because it was only $40. That's a pretty good price if you ask me. This is how much the upgrade should cost. The only reason I can think of that they would have upped the price is because PC manufacturers were complaining that too many people were just upgrading their current computer instead of buying new ones. If you have to spend $200 just for the OS, you're more likely to just go out and buy a new machine for $400 which already has the new OS it. Not sure if it actually happened, but it's the only thing that makes sense to me.
Games is one of the serious reasons why people won't upgrade their OS though. Because you never know which games are going to stop working when you upgrade your operating system. A lot of games stopped working when you went from DOS to Win95, from Win98 to Win XP/2K and From XP to Vista/7. Games tend to use all kinds of tricks to run at the highest speed possible, as well as for DRM, and often those tricks don't work on the next version of the operating system. Removing games from Windows actually gives people a lot more freedom to upgrade their system when a new OS comes out.
This is why we should go back to the original copyright term of 14 years. After that long of a time most works that will make money for the creators will have done so. Any longer than that, and you risk losing the works forever because they become destroyed/forgotten. Also, creators would have to actually create more than 1 good work in their entire lifetime if they wished to continue earning income. As it stands, there's so incentive for artists to create new works as long as their old one keeps selling.
I usually do something simiar. Generate a key with PasswordSafe, and then paste it into the password box. I do this with all services regardless of whether or not there is a single, or multiple password boxes. For many accounts, I have absolutely no idea what my password is, because it's store in my password safe.
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Actually, 42 cents per play is pretty darned good. If I buy a CD for $10, I'll probably listen to it at least 10 times, and it probably has at least 10 songs on it. So that's a 100 plays for $10, or 10 cents per play. Plus, I don't think that any artist ever got to keep $10 from any album they every sold. The money ends up going to "The Man" and the artist get very little money from each album sold. The only real money in music is from doing concerts. And if the most people you can attract is enough to fill a bar, you probably won't make enough for it to be your only job.
Also, even little incremental improvements can end having a huge effect on the way things work. When Dunlop made the first pneumatic tire, it was just an incremental improvement, but it changed everything about wheels. They no longer had to be built as strong because bumps were being absorbed by all the air in the tire, and not just the material between the rim and the road. Wheels could be lighter, and provide a much smoother ride than the old solid rubber, or even worse the iron tires you used to find on old farm tractors.
I seem to recall a rumour that they got rid of the damage in the Need For Speed series because the can manufacturers didn't like seeing their cars dented up and performing poorly after a crash. I haven't played the games recently, but the last one I played and liked was NFS IV, because it had real damage, and you didn't have the computer cars sideswiping you to run you off the track, because their car would get damaged as well. It was really fun to play a racing game where you would almost garaunteed end up losing if you crashed.
Personally, I think people/companies should have to defend their patents or lose them. You should be able to come out out of the blue, years later and tell them that something that they've been doing for years is all of a sudden against your patent. Obviously there would have to be some leeway to determine when the patent holder should have known about the use of their invention, but in the case of slide-to-unlock which has been in existence on phones for years, there's no reason why this patent should just be coming to light now.
Up To? Sounds like something they put on a sign in front of a retail store to lure customers. As in "Up To 70% Off All Items", where there's only 1 or 2 items that nobody wants at 70% off, a bunch of items at 20% off, and most of the store is at regular, or above regular price.
What's the alternative though? Let everybody use android phones which can load whichever spyware infested apps they want? Not a great way to run your business. Or they could run iPhone/IOS and you'd be at Apple's mercy as far as which of apps are loaded onto your device. Also not great for your business. I've never used BES, but it's nice for businesses to at least have an option to control what does and doesn't happen on their phones. For personal phones, Android is great, but it's nice to see blackberry continue on with a serious option for businesses. There's still a need for that.
I think they will have a fighting chance as long as the Android compatibility works well. I'm skeptical of this because Android apps don't even work that consistently across different Android handsets. But I guess we'll have to wait and see. If the apps work, and they have quality hardware (good battery, good signal, good specs, doesn't break) at a competitive price, then I could see a lot of people going for a BlackBerry again.
I was going to say, why not just run GIMP. but then I actually re-read the summary and saw that the "Linux User" was actually running an Android Tablet and this is where his problem was coming from. If you're a Linux User and want to edit graphics, you can just use GIMP. I guess there's an open market for people wanting to do graphics work on their tablet, but I don't really know if tablets are really the kind of system I'd want to be using for anything more serious than cropping or resizing a picture.
Yeah, the problem with wireless is that all the speeds they give are theoretical maximum speeds where the actual speed is quite often way below the theoretical maximum. This is especially true once you start to move far away from the access point, and there walls between the router and the wireless card. Whereas with wires, you almost always get the advertised speed unless there's something wrong with your cable, or your computer isn't fast enough to keep up with the connection (if the data being sent is on a USB 2 drive, it won't be able to send at 1 gbps, max of USB2 is 480 mbps)
If you were talking about things like food, shelter and medicine, then you might have an argument. But things like cars and computers are completely unnecessary. I live without a car. And it's not even because I can't afford it. I know lots of people who live without computers just fine. I even know a lot of people who don't own TVs. Sure you can look at poverty relatively, but if someone can afford to meet their basic food, clothing and shelter expenses and still have some cash left over for spending, they shouldn't be said to be in poverty, but by many definitions, they are.
But then you can't really compare animals to humans at all. Medicine and nutrition has gotten so good that we have basically doubled our lifespan over our ancestors. You could probably compare humans to some domesticated animals, but even that's not a good comparison. If a dog get's cancer, most people wouldn't pay for chemo, and would just put the dog down, whereas for certain cancers, the survival rate is getting pretty high. Think about all the other medical procedures that would prolong your life after any other animal would be left to die. Organ transplants, chemotherapy, angioplasty, and many other procedures are very seldom done on animals.
Not sure how a braille keyboard works but even if it required 2 or 3 keystrokes to do each braille character, it still wouldn't be that difficult to surpass the speed of a lot of people who can't be bothered to learn how to touch type properly. You could design such a system where pressing a key without the thumb depressed puts dots (controlled by the three middle fingers) in the first column of the letter, and with the thumb depressed puts the dots for the second character. Then use the little finger to advance to the next character. You could even auto-advance after typing in the dots for the second column.
What's changed is that what people think they need has changed. In the 60s nobody had a cell phone, internet, cable TV. It wasn't uncommon for people to go without a car at all It wasn't uncommon for the poor living in rural areas to not even have flush toilets. Many of the people I know who don't have a lot of money still find ways to pay for the Internet and cell phones and cars and designer clothing and premade food products while at the same time complaining that they don't have any money. I realize there are some people (and know a few of them) who are genuinely poor who do go without all those things. But there's a huge sense of entitlement where people think they have to have a lot of things they really don't need.
The again, the price of server class machines have been coming down quite a bit, so at some point it might just make more sense to have a server on your desk if you need some serious power. The advantage of using a server is that you get serious room for expansion. Many server models support int the hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, and you also have the ability to have multiple CPUs. Plus you get a real RAID controller, and things like redundant power supplies.
Which is why this whole thing is stupid. Switching to Linux+OpenOffice is more expensive than keeping with the status quo and updating nothing. However, eventually they will have to upgrade to a new version of Windows and a new version of Office. They probably wouldn't realize savings until 5-10 years down the road. But that's the way the world works. Almost nobody, in government or the private sector is interested in making long term savings. It's all about making yourself look good for the current political term or fiscal quarter.
You make the device cheaper by making the hardware cheaper. You make the hardware cheaper by giving it a slower CPU and less memory. However, taking the cheaper device and then running all the apps in HTML5+Javascript seems counter productive. The nice thing about the low end Nokia phones was that you could still get some pretty good performance out of the apps because the apps were all written in C. I guess that they could take HTML5+Javascript and compile that to something that could execute faster, but I doubt they are doing that.
Yeah, I could see the apps running in HTML5+Javascript, but I couldn't see the actual OS being writtent in HTML5.
Wrong. If the developer does not design/test the game on Linux, it won't run on Linux. Well, it might run on Linux but odds are it probably won't. You'd probably have better luck writing a game in C for Windows, and relying on WINE for people who want to run it in Linux.
There's nothing inherently special about Java that makes it able to run games on Windows/Linux any more than C/C++. If the programmers set out to make a program that will run on both, it will run on both. If they just assume it will work on Linux, or have no intention of it running on Linux, then it doesn't matter if it's written in Java, C or .Net, it won't run on Linux.
If they don't think it benefits them, they aren't being creative enough. What if the next XBox came with a hard drive that came with contained all the music from 1998 (14 years ago) and previously? That would be a pretty good thing to get with your XBox. Or they could sell tracks for 5-25 cents a piece, and it would be pure profit. Nobody to share royalties with. They could do the same with the back catalog of old games. There's a million ways to make money off old content. You can download 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for free but that doesn't stop retailers from selling paperback copies, or even a few people from selling versions of it on the Kindle store (or trying to, Amazon offers it for free).
I think the is the basic idea, which is why the whole idea won't work. Basically, they are sawing the motherboard in 2, where the CPU and memory are on the daugterboard, and the rest of the components (SATA,USB3, PCIe slots, sound, video outputs) are all that remain on the motherboard. I think it might provide for some interesting ideas where you could have a CPU board that accepted a new chip without having to go out and re-buy the part that the peripheral plug into. Or you might be able to get a motherboard that has lots of space for RAM, but that only has a single PCIe slot (or none at all) for space savings. Most boards seem to have both few PCIeslots and view RAM slots, or many of bother but you don't see many with a combination of the two.
I agree. I bought Windows 8 specifically because it was only $40. That's a pretty good price if you ask me. This is how much the upgrade should cost. The only reason I can think of that they would have upped the price is because PC manufacturers were complaining that too many people were just upgrading their current computer instead of buying new ones. If you have to spend $200 just for the OS, you're more likely to just go out and buy a new machine for $400 which already has the new OS it. Not sure if it actually happened, but it's the only thing that makes sense to me.
Games is one of the serious reasons why people won't upgrade their OS though. Because you never know which games are going to stop working when you upgrade your operating system. A lot of games stopped working when you went from DOS to Win95, from Win98 to Win XP/2K and From XP to Vista/7. Games tend to use all kinds of tricks to run at the highest speed possible, as well as for DRM, and often those tricks don't work on the next version of the operating system. Removing games from Windows actually gives people a lot more freedom to upgrade their system when a new OS comes out.
This is why we should go back to the original copyright term of 14 years. After that long of a time most works that will make money for the creators will have done so. Any longer than that, and you risk losing the works forever because they become destroyed/forgotten. Also, creators would have to actually create more than 1 good work in their entire lifetime if they wished to continue earning income. As it stands, there's so incentive for artists to create new works as long as their old one keeps selling.
I usually do something simiar. Generate a key with PasswordSafe, and then paste it into the password box. I do this with all services regardless of whether or not there is a single, or multiple password boxes. For many accounts, I have absolutely no idea what my password is, because it's store in my password safe.