And yet all the politicians who think we need to enact all these stricter laws when it comes to video game sales will ignore this and try to claim that any 5 year old can walk into a game store and buy GTA IV on their own.
The industry should have let the politicians make laws, because those laws would almost certainly have been thrown out as unconstitutional. People would laugh at the idea of mandatory age-ratings on books, so why do they accept it on movies and games?
'Self-regulation' of this kind is bad precisely because it does work and can't be eliminated overnight through the courts.
I think the drop in editing did not start with e-books - I've been noticing it with most books over the past 20-30 years. Especially with pop books like the Harry Potter series - a good editor could've pared those down by 40%-50% easily, and made them better.
I've seen a number of published authors complain that their publishers have significantly cut back on editing and marketing for their books, and that it started well before ebooks became popular.
Why do you think ebook prices are artificially high? Amazon's pricing is perniciously low: they intentionally undercut other retailers, accepting real losses in the short-term to gain market advantage. This convinces consumers that the market value of an ebook is lower than the real production costs. All the services that go into making a book are still required: editing, design, PR, etc. These things cost money. Except now, with Amazon forcing prices (ebook and otherwise) to artificial lows, the publishers can't afford to pay the employees that used to be responsible for those aspects of producing a book.
Right now, big publishers are typically keeping around 50% of the price of an ebook sale, and giving a whole 20% to the person who actually wrote the book. If they can't make money from taking $2.50 of a $4.99 ebook sale then they're doing something very wrong.
A major outage on most professional cloud setups means it is down for a few hours. A major outage at work means the full day. It is like saying driving my car is so much safer then flying because I never got into an accident.
Last time I remember a day-long outage at work was 1994, and that was because the license server failed so we couldn't run our own software (we couldn't recompile it to remove the DRM because the compiler also needed a license to run).
I seem to remember that the Mac guys at the company also had a long outage when they couldn't connect to one of their Mac servers, but eventually someone actually went to the server room and discovered that it had been stolen.
Back on topic, I just don't see all these day-long outages that apparenty seem to happen all the time in companies that haven't moved their servers to The Cloud(tm).
XP was on the netbook I bought last year. Other people have claimed that you can still buy new PCs with XP, though I haven't seen one in a while. So I doubt people buying it today are going to be happy to see that Microsoft are going to abandon them in three years.
It only supports 4GB of ram, lots of things want more than that.
Only 64-bit Windows apps can access more than 4GB of RAM, and I've only seen two 64-bit Windows apps in the wild so far, one of wihch is Internet Explorer (Windows 7 may come with some other native 64-bit apps, but IE is the only one that I know is 64-bit... I'm guessing that no-one has really been waiting for 64-bit notepad or minesweeper).
In fact it wouldn't be a stretch to say that Linux/BSD/et al just isn't suitable for phones.
Doesn't the iPhone run on a modified BSD kernel? If so, it would seem odd that pretty much every smart phone runs on an operating system that isn't suitable for phones.
I can tunnel over to IPv6 (waste of time and bandwidth) or I can continue not to care about IPv6 and use the Internet like 95% of internet users who do not care for anything under the hood except for being able to access their email, banks, and facebook account.
I love bashing Microsoft as much as the next guy, but I disagree. The standard components in the XBox did allow developers to do stuff that wasn't possible on the PC - the minimum spec for Halo 2 on the PC is vastly above the original XBox spec.
Uh, what? They wrote a game that could run on a 733MHz P3 with a Geforce 4 and 64MB (?) of RAM, but they couldn't run that on a real PC without requiring much more powerful hardware?
Either they did a lousy port to the PC, or Windows is imposing massive overheads which don't apply on the Xbox.
For a software company like Microsoft, that's a pretty sad state to be in, given that fact tablets have been "the next big thing" for at least a year now.
Bill Gates was telling me that Tablet PCs were "the next big thing" back in 2001. It's not like Microsoft haven't seen this coming.
How does that makes them "big on tablets cince (sic) 1992"?
I think he means: Microsoft have been trying to sell tablets to people since 1992 and consistently failed. Now more innovative companies have taken over the market Microsoft are taking their ball and going home.
How do you explain that when you change the spin of one you change the spin direction of the other aswell?
Two words: Transactional Interpretation.
The only spooky thing about 'spooky action at a distance' is that people think it's spooky. It's just a consequence of using non-relativistic quantum mechanics; you shouldn't be surprised that non-relativistic physics allows things to travel faster than light.
There is little chance your phone data is relavent to an illegal lane change.
The police would presumably argue that they need the data to verify that you weren't distracted by using your phone when you made that lane change. Hence they need your call history, you text messages, all your photos and videos, etc... just in case.
How much of that budget is being funneled to non-production assets (i.e. profiteering suits) ?
Or hiring celebrity voice actors just so I can turn on subtitles and skip over all the audio anyway because I hate cutscenes and read twice as fast as they speak?
Yet, remarkably, the human race managed to progress from the primeval slime to the industrial revolution without being able to patent putting rounded corners on a rectangular object.
Because these vehicles are one shot use, as opposed to an airplane, there is a definite limit as to how much product can be offered.
But if they were reusable like an aircraft they'd probably only have to build one.
I agree that, the market isn't there right now because the primary market for space launches is comsats who don't care that much about launch costs (saving $100,000,000 would be nice, but it's not going to double the number of billion-dollar satellites). SpaceX appear to be hoping that by dramatically cutting launch costs they can increase the market to compensate.
I think "mass production" in terms of rockets means "a dozen". It's the kind of "mass production" where China has little to offer.
SpaceX are talking about manufacturing 400 engines per year; there aren't many rocket booster engines that have been produced in three digit numbers, let alone that many per year.
I believe a single Falcon Heavy launch would have more engines on it than all the SSMEs ever built, for example.
Now, the SpaceX cost structure may be fine now, it remains to be seen if they can continue this approach as their designs are scaled up in size. The Space Shuttle tank for example has a large number of baffles on the interior of the tank to prevent sloshing of the liquid hydrogen. Again, very expensive.
The Falcon Heavy is essentially just three Falcon-9s side by side with some plumbing between them, so it probably won't need many changes to the tank design. And they don't use liquid hydrogen, which is one of the reasons why it's cheaper than the competition.
They were all touted early on as being very inexpensive, prices ended up increasing much faster than inflation.
The difference is that SpaceX have actually proven they can do things cheaper than the competition. SpaceX developed a new engine and two new launchers and a new reentry vehicle and launched several of them into space for about the same amount of money as NASA spent putting a fake upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB and launching it in a big firework display.
Space rockets aren't produced in big enough batches to mass produce and generally require a lot of skilled labor. Exactly the sort of product where the US tends to have an advantage.
Yet the reason why SpaceX believe they can get the costs down to a tenth of the competition is precisely because they plan to mass-produce their rocket components (e.g. three first stages with the same basic design and nine of the same engines on each stage).
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And yet all the politicians who think we need to enact all these stricter laws when it comes to video game sales will ignore this and try to claim that any 5 year old can walk into a game store and buy GTA IV on their own.
The industry should have let the politicians make laws, because those laws would almost certainly have been thrown out as unconstitutional. People would laugh at the idea of mandatory age-ratings on books, so why do they accept it on movies and games?
'Self-regulation' of this kind is bad precisely because it does work and can't be eliminated overnight through the courts.
I think the drop in editing did not start with e-books - I've been noticing it with most books over the past 20-30 years. Especially with pop books like the Harry Potter series - a good editor could've pared those down by 40%-50% easily, and made them better.
I've seen a number of published authors complain that their publishers have significantly cut back on editing and marketing for their books, and that it started well before ebooks became popular.
Why do you think ebook prices are artificially high? Amazon's pricing is perniciously low: they intentionally undercut other retailers, accepting real losses in the short-term to gain market advantage. This convinces consumers that the market value of an ebook is lower than the real production costs. All the services that go into making a book are still required: editing, design, PR, etc. These things cost money. Except now, with Amazon forcing prices (ebook and otherwise) to artificial lows, the publishers can't afford to pay the employees that used to be responsible for those aspects of producing a book.
Right now, big publishers are typically keeping around 50% of the price of an ebook sale, and giving a whole 20% to the person who actually wrote the book. If they can't make money from taking $2.50 of a $4.99 ebook sale then they're doing something very wrong.
A major outage on most professional cloud setups means it is down for a few hours. A major outage at work means the full day. It is like saying driving my car is so much safer then flying because I never got into an accident.
Last time I remember a day-long outage at work was 1994, and that was because the license server failed so we couldn't run our own software (we couldn't recompile it to remove the DRM because the compiler also needed a license to run).
I seem to remember that the Mac guys at the company also had a long outage when they couldn't connect to one of their Mac servers, but eventually someone actually went to the server room and discovered that it had been stolen.
Back on topic, I just don't see all these day-long outages that apparenty seem to happen all the time in companies that haven't moved their servers to The Cloud(tm).
XP was on the netbook I bought last year. Other people have claimed that you can still buy new PCs with XP, though I haven't seen one in a while. So I doubt people buying it today are going to be happy to see that Microsoft are going to abandon them in three years.
It only supports 4GB of ram, lots of things want more than that.
Only 64-bit Windows apps can access more than 4GB of RAM, and I've only seen two 64-bit Windows apps in the wild so far, one of wihch is Internet Explorer (Windows 7 may come with some other native 64-bit apps, but IE is the only one that I know is 64-bit... I'm guessing that no-one has really been waiting for 64-bit notepad or minesweeper).
Dude, XP is over 10 years old. Please inform me which popular Linux desktop distro has backwards support for 10 year old packages?
XP was still on sale last year when I bought my netbook (now wiped and running Ubuntu). The date it was first released is meaningless.
In fact it wouldn't be a stretch to say that Linux/BSD/et al just isn't suitable for phones.
Doesn't the iPhone run on a modified BSD kernel? If so, it would seem odd that pretty much every smart phone runs on an operating system that isn't suitable for phones.
I can tunnel over to IPv6 (waste of time and bandwidth) or I can continue not to care about IPv6 and use the Internet like 95% of internet users who do not care for anything under the hood except for being able to access their email, banks, and facebook account.
All the cool kids use IPV6.
I love bashing Microsoft as much as the next guy, but I disagree. The standard components in the XBox did allow developers to do stuff that wasn't possible on the PC - the minimum spec for Halo 2 on the PC is vastly above the original XBox spec.
Uh, what? They wrote a game that could run on a 733MHz P3 with a Geforce 4 and 64MB (?) of RAM, but they couldn't run that on a real PC without requiring much more powerful hardware?
Either they did a lousy port to the PC, or Windows is imposing massive overheads which don't apply on the Xbox.
For a software company like Microsoft, that's a pretty sad state to be in, given that fact tablets have been "the next big thing" for at least a year now.
Bill Gates was telling me that Tablet PCs were "the next big thing" back in 2001. It's not like Microsoft haven't seen this coming.
How does that makes them "big on tablets cince (sic) 1992"?
I think he means: Microsoft have been trying to sell tablets to people since 1992 and consistently failed. Now more innovative companies have taken over the market Microsoft are taking their ball and going home.
If you are satisfied with pseudorandom pads, all you need to keep is the seed.
If you're using a 'pseudorandom pad', then you should be using a real encryption scheme instead.
Do you really think AES256 would stop the feds?
Um, yes. Unless your password was 'password', anyway.
If the feds have found some way to break AES256, then that would lead to a revolution in cryptography.
How do you explain that when you change the spin of one you change the spin direction of the other aswell?
Two words: Transactional Interpretation.
The only spooky thing about 'spooky action at a distance' is that people think it's spooky. It's just a consequence of using non-relativistic quantum mechanics; you shouldn't be surprised that non-relativistic physics allows things to travel faster than light.
There is little chance your phone data is relavent to an illegal lane change.
The police would presumably argue that they need the data to verify that you weren't distracted by using your phone when you made that lane change. Hence they need your call history, you text messages, all your photos and videos, etc... just in case.
How much of that budget is being funneled to non-production assets (i.e. profiteering suits) ?
Or hiring celebrity voice actors just so I can turn on subtitles and skip over all the audio anyway because I hate cutscenes and read twice as fast as they speak?
Yet, remarkably, the human race managed to progress from the primeval slime to the industrial revolution without being able to patent putting rounded corners on a rectangular object.
GPL is really another word for socialist run software development.
Actually, 'socialist software development' would be where you let someone else develop the software, then steal it and put your name on it.
Because these vehicles are one shot use, as opposed to an airplane, there is a definite limit as to how much product can be offered.
But if they were reusable like an aircraft they'd probably only have to build one.
I agree that, the market isn't there right now because the primary market for space launches is comsats who don't care that much about launch costs (saving $100,000,000 would be nice, but it's not going to double the number of billion-dollar satellites). SpaceX appear to be hoping that by dramatically cutting launch costs they can increase the market to compensate.
I think "mass production" in terms of rockets means "a dozen". It's the kind of "mass production" where China has little to offer.
SpaceX are talking about manufacturing 400 engines per year; there aren't many rocket booster engines that have been produced in three digit numbers, let alone that many per year.
I believe a single Falcon Heavy launch would have more engines on it than all the SSMEs ever built, for example.
Now, the SpaceX cost structure may be fine now, it remains to be seen if they can continue this approach as their designs are scaled up in size. The Space Shuttle tank for example has a large number of baffles on the interior of the tank to prevent sloshing of the liquid hydrogen. Again, very expensive.
The Falcon Heavy is essentially just three Falcon-9s side by side with some plumbing between them, so it probably won't need many changes to the tank design. And they don't use liquid hydrogen, which is one of the reasons why it's cheaper than the competition.
They were all touted early on as being very inexpensive, prices ended up increasing much faster than inflation.
The difference is that SpaceX have actually proven they can do things cheaper than the competition. SpaceX developed a new engine and two new launchers and a new reentry vehicle and launched several of them into space for about the same amount of money as NASA spent putting a fake upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB and launching it in a big firework display.
Who said anything about it being voluntary?
You mean other than the part about "require tech transfers to Chinese companies"?
Space rockets aren't produced in big enough batches to mass produce and generally require a lot of skilled labor. Exactly the sort of product where the US tends to have an advantage.
Yet the reason why SpaceX believe they can get the costs down to a tenth of the competition is precisely because they plan to mass-produce their rocket components (e.g. three first stages with the same basic design and nine of the same engines on each stage).