I love how they quote figures for "losses to online publishers" with a confidence interval of 100%, while completely failing to address how GDMF ANNOYING the modern web is if you don't block ads. If I couldn't block ads on sites I otherwise like that choose to run super annoying ads, then I would simply block the entire site and not visit any of the "content" there. Hey online advertisers: Here's How To Keep People From Blocking Your Stuff With This One Weird, Old Trick! All you have to do is stop being so annoying. Really, that's it.
The whole saga was intended as a pulpy, schlocky pastiche of Flash Gordon serials. It succeeds at this. There is no "former glory" for it to attain. You're thirty years older and you think it's cool to bag on the prequels, but you haven't watched Return of the Jedi (any version) lately.
Ever wonder why none of the Star Wars movies won any awards other than for effects and music? There's your answer.
I'm agreeing with this so hard you would be a little alarmed. Roberts (of "RSI" - terrible acronym) talks down mobile and console, even though that would be the perfect medium for a return to FUN Wing Commander space opera. I would love a cartoony, gyro/touch control space shooter with "Surviving High School" type melodramatic choose-your-path role playing. The hyper realism of Star Citizen is a big turnoff for me, as it looks to be as dull as existing "serious" games like Eve Online. I already have a job and a life, I just want some casual space-based diversion. When Roberts gets ambitious, he starts to stink things up.
Is that 'failed' as in 'didn't come to pass', or 'failed' as in 'they tried and did not succeed'.
I think it's more like 'failed' as in 'they didn't bother trying to go mainstream, all their buyers are importers and enthusiasts.' I wouldn't consider that a "failure," personally.
I know I'm in the minority, but I'd rather simply NOT PLAY a game than have it whirr and load and run down my battery. The UMD drive is a much worse decision than the Go, in my opinion.
The PSP was pretty amazing when it launched in early 2005. It's still a neat system. There is a large, diverse library of games for the machine. They've sold millions of units. The only thing they've done "wrong" is to be in 2nd place.
Maybe they're trying to build their future audience. I suspect a lot of Nintendo's appeal to "older" gamers is rooted in goodwill from the past and nostalgia. Besides, if Sony's "core" audience has already abandoned them for DS and iOS, would it not be irrational to continue to chase them with an unwanted product?
Then again, what do I know. The nerd blogs were all in a pantybunch over the PSP Go not having UMDs or dual analog sticks. I thought that refresh was pretty cool, and I happily ditched all my old UMD games to get one. It's almost as neat as my iPhone.
Average data use is a meaningless statistic, and I'm sick of seeing people trot out those numbers to justify tiered pricing plans that punish people who use their smartphones for their intended purpose. I think the point of the article, as stated in the title, is that smartphones are here to stay and their usage is only going to grow. A few years ago, few people were interested in browsing the web over an EDGE connection. Now there are zillions of ways to be connected and entertained. Even non-geeks. Wireless carriers should facilitate this.
When AT&T dropped their unlimited data plan and introduced tiered pricing, it dropped prices for the light users and added modest costs to heavy users. There's nothing wrong with that, but please let's not imply that using less than 150MB per month is "average," or "normal," or in any other way desirable. If every iPhone user in my region were on Waze, our traffic would be vastly improved. And if they were listening to Pandora or Last.fm they'd all be happier.
At least that's where the vast majority of my 2.1GB per month of iPhone data is going. I can't say for sure, because all I get is the metered bill. It would be neat to see it broken down by traffic type.
Let me guess -- great reviews, but bad Nielsen #s?
on
F-22 Raptor Cancelled
·
· Score: 2, Funny
First "My Name is Earl," now this. They cancel everything I like.
How many of the books in your library are actually still under copyright? You might be surprised at the quality and quantity of things to read on Project Gutenberg or Feedbooks, and the latter can be directly downloaded to a Kindle over the free wireless network. I was delighted to find the Harvard Classics (the six-foot shelf of books that an educated person is expected to read in his/her lifetime) in well-formatted text form on both sites. If I had any self-discipline whatsoever, that would be enough reading for me for a very long time.
This article misses the point of the Kindle. It doesn't exist to save the consumer's money -- not in this version and likely not in the next, either. The early adopter pays for the getting to use technology first, and that comes at a price. A technology writer should know this.
With a Kindle, I can buy a book or newspaper for free in moments and start reading right away, without visiting a bookstore or waiting for a physical shipment. That's worth something to me. How much is your time worth?
A Kindle also gives you the convenience of having hundreds of texts in one place, with a device that lasts a long time without needing a charge. That, too, is worth something to me. How much is it worth it to you not to have to lug around bulky, heavy books?
On my Kindle, I can also search, annotate, and change the text size to accommodate my vision needs, without putting on reading glasses or buying a large-format version. That's worth something to me. How much... do you get the picture?
I use OSX and Entourage to hit our Exchange servers. Yes, it's still Microsoft, but it's much faster than Outlook and almost as full-featured.
It points straight to the same servers that Outlook Web Access serves up, so I suspect it's working in a similar way as the Evolution + OWA setup.
If I were the king of the forest, I'd change this junk out and replace it with Google Mail for Domains.
On my last trip to Vegas, I stayed at the fugly Stardust Hotel, which was imploded shortly after our departure (a coincidence, I'm told). There are links to pics and movies at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardust_Resort_&_Casino
It would be amazing if the Star Trek sets got the same treatment instead of the much more likely outcome of being parted out and sold on Ebay.
I enjoyed the "Star Trek Experience" but like the TV shows, it hasn't aged well and the stylized paramilitary "culture" shown in this world really grates on my nerves.
Blow it up!!!
I don't think it will ever move past DVD, at least before someone else comes up with another format.
You could definitely see some logic to why DVD beat VHS:
1. Better quality.
2. More resilient format.
3. The inclusion of extra content.
4. Easy use of indexing and chaptering.
Blu-Ray only brings 1. as an improvement to DVD, and even then you're only going to notice a difference with the best quality TV and equipment. This puts Blu-Ray in league with proper hi-fi - it will be a minority for the real enthusiasts only.
Actually, Blu-Ray brings more than that.
1. Better quality -- this is a given, and the resolution is significantly higher. Anyone with a new HDTV will notice how blurry standard DVDs look now.
2. Blu-Ray discs are coated with a hard anti-scratch coating that is really really difficult to damage.
3. 2x to 5x the content isn't significant? Blu-Ray discs hold a lot of data. HD video is big, but you can fit a lot of SD on a BD. Also, see #4...
4. Seamless branching is a lot more sophisticated on the Blu-Ray format. Check out the new Blade Runner collection for an example -- one disc contains HD versions of 3 different cuts of the film. If we ever get a "definitive" version of the Star Wars movies, it would play best on BD so we could choose whether Greedo shoots first *and* have the cleaned up space battles.
Politics and legalities aside, I also suspect this is a little show. The authorities in the USA did a similar thing with the Nextel "push-to-talk" technology. For a while, it was true that they couldn't intercept and listen to these types of calls. The "bad guys" caught on to this and exploited it. Before long, law enforcement WAS able to listen in and those using Nextel PTT with a false sense of security got careless. I suspect that if the police are openly talking to the media about Skype this way, it's a similar situation.
Ahhh... there's a difference. Verizon FIOS's On Demand isn't in HD -- so as a result, torrents off the internet have better picture quality than their video tap. Maybe that will change someday, but I guess I won't see it because I'll be using my Tivo.:-)
That's quite a list of demands -- remember there's a company on the other end that would like to turn a profit on their venture.
Funny, since I had a similar list of demands, and since Tivo met all of them, I've happily upgraded.
I bought a Series 3 HD Tivo for $399 (after $200 rebate) recently. That's 60% of the original list price, and 50% off the standard current price.
Since I had a Series 2 Tivo with a lifetime subscription (which I gave to my grateful parents), the monthly fee was only $6.95, or 50% of the original list.
Tivo neither supports nor discourages you from adding more storage capacity to their equipment. The Series 3 has an external SATA port that will accept just about any external hard disk for additional storage capacity. Personally, I use my Tivo as a buffer, not a vault, so the default capacity (30 hours HD, 100+ hours SD) is plenty for me. The capacity is WAY better than that of the non-upgradeable Motorola-based POS offered by my cable company.
It's cheap enough, the storage is good enough -- the "problem" is that everyone wants huge amounts of storage, with good service, for free. You can't have it all.
> Unless the FIOS DVR sucks, how the hell is TiVo going to compete with $2 a month?
You answered your own question. The FIOS DVR sucks. It sucks out loud. In THX Surround Sound. Except it only has RCA audio outputs, so you can't hear the full magnitude of its suckitude.
It's not cost-effective to transfer your lifetime subscription from a Series 2 to a Series 3. If you have multiple Tivo boxes (and you do if you have a "lifetime" S2 and a new S3), the monthly rate for the 2nd subscription is only $6.95 a month. It would take over two years to make that deal pay off, and you would lose the lifetime subscription on the S2 after a year, rendering it useless.
By the time the transfer fee was paid off, some other shiny new object will catch your eye. If not, what's $7/month for something you use and like (especially compared to cable programming fees)?
I did the math and found a better purpose for my lifetime Series 2 Tivo with an additional internal disk for more storage (easy as pie if you can work a screwdriver and burn a Knoppix CD). My parents have it now, and they're THRILLED with its ease of use. That's worth a hell of a lot more than $200 to us.
All fair points, but have you really looked at On Demand programming? When I got FIOS TV, I thought this would be a great feature, to the point of removing my lovely Linux-based router and putting a clunky, limited Actiontec router in its place. The reality was not nearly as compelling as the fantasy: On Demand sucks. The picture quality, the selection, and the overall noise of the offerings -- covered in advertising -- is gone from my house now. I have a clean Series 3 Tivo, a pair of cable cards, and a SINGLE REMOTE that my wife can use. Life is better with Tivo, and for me, it's worth a few extra bucks a month.
This isn't a cowpox vaccine -- it does not contain any living or dead viral material. Read the article, please. You won't get HIV or AIDS from a synthetic protein.
Slashdot Mirror
I love how they quote figures for "losses to online publishers" with a confidence interval of 100%, while completely failing to address how GDMF ANNOYING the modern web is if you don't block ads. If I couldn't block ads on sites I otherwise like that choose to run super annoying ads, then I would simply block the entire site and not visit any of the "content" there. Hey online advertisers: Here's How To Keep People From Blocking Your Stuff With This One Weird, Old Trick! All you have to do is stop being so annoying. Really, that's it.
The whole saga was intended as a pulpy, schlocky pastiche of Flash Gordon serials. It succeeds at this. There is no "former glory" for it to attain. You're thirty years older and you think it's cool to bag on the prequels, but you haven't watched Return of the Jedi (any version) lately. Ever wonder why none of the Star Wars movies won any awards other than for effects and music? There's your answer.
I'm agreeing with this so hard you would be a little alarmed. Roberts (of "RSI" - terrible acronym) talks down mobile and console, even though that would be the perfect medium for a return to FUN Wing Commander space opera. I would love a cartoony, gyro/touch control space shooter with "Surviving High School" type melodramatic choose-your-path role playing. The hyper realism of Star Citizen is a big turnoff for me, as it looks to be as dull as existing "serious" games like Eve Online. I already have a job and a life, I just want some casual space-based diversion. When Roberts gets ambitious, he starts to stink things up.
I leave it on so I don't have to worry about turning it off to get iCloud backups of my apps and photos. It's not a big power drain on iOS.
Is that 'failed' as in 'didn't come to pass', or 'failed' as in 'they tried and did not succeed'.
I think it's more like 'failed' as in 'they didn't bother trying to go mainstream, all their buyers are importers and enthusiasts.' I wouldn't consider that a "failure," personally.
I know I'm in the minority, but I'd rather simply NOT PLAY a game than have it whirr and load and run down my battery. The UMD drive is a much worse decision than the Go, in my opinion.
The PSP was pretty amazing when it launched in early 2005. It's still a neat system. There is a large, diverse library of games for the machine. They've sold millions of units. The only thing they've done "wrong" is to be in 2nd place.
Maybe they're trying to build their future audience. I suspect a lot of Nintendo's appeal to "older" gamers is rooted in goodwill from the past and nostalgia. Besides, if Sony's "core" audience has already abandoned them for DS and iOS, would it not be irrational to continue to chase them with an unwanted product? Then again, what do I know. The nerd blogs were all in a pantybunch over the PSP Go not having UMDs or dual analog sticks. I thought that refresh was pretty cool, and I happily ditched all my old UMD games to get one. It's almost as neat as my iPhone.
You make it sound as if talking on the phone for an average 70 minutes per day is a lot. Is that what you meant?
Average data use is a meaningless statistic, and I'm sick of seeing people trot out those numbers to justify tiered pricing plans that punish people who use their smartphones for their intended purpose. I think the point of the article, as stated in the title, is that smartphones are here to stay and their usage is only going to grow. A few years ago, few people were interested in browsing the web over an EDGE connection. Now there are zillions of ways to be connected and entertained. Even non-geeks. Wireless carriers should facilitate this. When AT&T dropped their unlimited data plan and introduced tiered pricing, it dropped prices for the light users and added modest costs to heavy users. There's nothing wrong with that, but please let's not imply that using less than 150MB per month is "average," or "normal," or in any other way desirable. If every iPhone user in my region were on Waze, our traffic would be vastly improved. And if they were listening to Pandora or Last.fm they'd all be happier. At least that's where the vast majority of my 2.1GB per month of iPhone data is going. I can't say for sure, because all I get is the metered bill. It would be neat to see it broken down by traffic type.
First "My Name is Earl," now this. They cancel everything I like.
Click on the Spock faces at the top of Season Two (Amok Time, http://facemining.pittpatt.com/S2E30/) All Vulcan men look alike to this software.
How many of the books in your library are actually still under copyright? You might be surprised at the quality and quantity of things to read on Project Gutenberg or Feedbooks, and the latter can be directly downloaded to a Kindle over the free wireless network. I was delighted to find the Harvard Classics (the six-foot shelf of books that an educated person is expected to read in his/her lifetime) in well-formatted text form on both sites. If I had any self-discipline whatsoever, that would be enough reading for me for a very long time.
This article misses the point of the Kindle. It doesn't exist to save the consumer's money -- not in this version and likely not in the next, either. The early adopter pays for the getting to use technology first, and that comes at a price. A technology writer should know this. With a Kindle, I can buy a book or newspaper for free in moments and start reading right away, without visiting a bookstore or waiting for a physical shipment. That's worth something to me. How much is your time worth? A Kindle also gives you the convenience of having hundreds of texts in one place, with a device that lasts a long time without needing a charge. That, too, is worth something to me. How much is it worth it to you not to have to lug around bulky, heavy books? On my Kindle, I can also search, annotate, and change the text size to accommodate my vision needs, without putting on reading glasses or buying a large-format version. That's worth something to me. How much ... do you get the picture?
I use OSX and Entourage to hit our Exchange servers. Yes, it's still Microsoft, but it's much faster than Outlook and almost as full-featured. It points straight to the same servers that Outlook Web Access serves up, so I suspect it's working in a similar way as the Evolution + OWA setup. If I were the king of the forest, I'd change this junk out and replace it with Google Mail for Domains.
On my last trip to Vegas, I stayed at the fugly Stardust Hotel, which was imploded shortly after our departure (a coincidence, I'm told). There are links to pics and movies at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardust_Resort_&_Casino It would be amazing if the Star Trek sets got the same treatment instead of the much more likely outcome of being parted out and sold on Ebay. I enjoyed the "Star Trek Experience" but like the TV shows, it hasn't aged well and the stylized paramilitary "culture" shown in this world really grates on my nerves. Blow it up!!!
You could definitely see some logic to why DVD beat VHS:
1. Better quality.
2. More resilient format.
3. The inclusion of extra content.
4. Easy use of indexing and chaptering.
Blu-Ray only brings 1. as an improvement to DVD, and even then you're only going to notice a difference with the best quality TV and equipment. This puts Blu-Ray in league with proper hi-fi - it will be a minority for the real enthusiasts only.
Actually, Blu-Ray brings more than that. 1. Better quality -- this is a given, and the resolution is significantly higher. Anyone with a new HDTV will notice how blurry standard DVDs look now. 2. Blu-Ray discs are coated with a hard anti-scratch coating that is really really difficult to damage. 3. 2x to 5x the content isn't significant? Blu-Ray discs hold a lot of data. HD video is big, but you can fit a lot of SD on a BD. Also, see #4Politics and legalities aside, I also suspect this is a little show. The authorities in the USA did a similar thing with the Nextel "push-to-talk" technology. For a while, it was true that they couldn't intercept and listen to these types of calls. The "bad guys" caught on to this and exploited it. Before long, law enforcement WAS able to listen in and those using Nextel PTT with a false sense of security got careless. I suspect that if the police are openly talking to the media about Skype this way, it's a similar situation.
Ahhh ... there's a difference. Verizon FIOS's On Demand isn't in HD -- so as a result, torrents off the internet have better picture quality than their video tap. Maybe that will change someday, but I guess I won't see it because I'll be using my Tivo. :-)
That's quite a list of demands -- remember there's a company on the other end that would like to turn a profit on their venture. Funny, since I had a similar list of demands, and since Tivo met all of them, I've happily upgraded. I bought a Series 3 HD Tivo for $399 (after $200 rebate) recently. That's 60% of the original list price, and 50% off the standard current price. Since I had a Series 2 Tivo with a lifetime subscription (which I gave to my grateful parents), the monthly fee was only $6.95, or 50% of the original list. Tivo neither supports nor discourages you from adding more storage capacity to their equipment. The Series 3 has an external SATA port that will accept just about any external hard disk for additional storage capacity. Personally, I use my Tivo as a buffer, not a vault, so the default capacity (30 hours HD, 100+ hours SD) is plenty for me. The capacity is WAY better than that of the non-upgradeable Motorola-based POS offered by my cable company. It's cheap enough, the storage is good enough -- the "problem" is that everyone wants huge amounts of storage, with good service, for free. You can't have it all.
> Unless the FIOS DVR sucks, how the hell is TiVo going to compete with $2 a month? You answered your own question. The FIOS DVR sucks. It sucks out loud. In THX Surround Sound. Except it only has RCA audio outputs, so you can't hear the full magnitude of its suckitude.
It's not cost-effective to transfer your lifetime subscription from a Series 2 to a Series 3. If you have multiple Tivo boxes (and you do if you have a "lifetime" S2 and a new S3), the monthly rate for the 2nd subscription is only $6.95 a month. It would take over two years to make that deal pay off, and you would lose the lifetime subscription on the S2 after a year, rendering it useless. By the time the transfer fee was paid off, some other shiny new object will catch your eye. If not, what's $7/month for something you use and like (especially compared to cable programming fees)? I did the math and found a better purpose for my lifetime Series 2 Tivo with an additional internal disk for more storage (easy as pie if you can work a screwdriver and burn a Knoppix CD). My parents have it now, and they're THRILLED with its ease of use. That's worth a hell of a lot more than $200 to us.
All fair points, but have you really looked at On Demand programming? When I got FIOS TV, I thought this would be a great feature, to the point of removing my lovely Linux-based router and putting a clunky, limited Actiontec router in its place. The reality was not nearly as compelling as the fantasy: On Demand sucks. The picture quality, the selection, and the overall noise of the offerings -- covered in advertising -- is gone from my house now. I have a clean Series 3 Tivo, a pair of cable cards, and a SINGLE REMOTE that my wife can use. Life is better with Tivo, and for me, it's worth a few extra bucks a month.
This isn't a cowpox vaccine -- it does not contain any living or dead viral material. Read the article, please. You won't get HIV or AIDS from a synthetic protein.
http://vrc.nih.gov/clintrials/clinstudies.htm These are ongoing safety trials at the National Institutes of Health.