Absolutely. If she's depressed, going to parties and taking a holiday is only going to get her healthy faster. Staying home and moping will only make her depression worse.
When I feel down, staying at home and listening to slow, dark, gothic metal makes me feel a lot better.
(But then I'm just a happy guy who likes gothic metal, and I don't actually suffer from depression, no matter what Scientologists want me to believe.)
I read somewhere, many years ago, that sci-fi is popular in good times, when people in general are looking forward to the future, and fantasy is popular in bad times when people are afraid of the future.
Considering that "fearing the future" has become the norm for most of even the "enlightened" societies, I'd expect that sci-fi would be sinking into obsurity for at least the next generation.
I've always loved both SF and fantasy. Somewhere in the late '80s or early '90s, I wondered why there were so many great SF movies, and so very few great fantasy movies. Nowadays it seems to be the other way around.
I think the unrealistic science is really what makes the difference between the two genres. Fantasy, you don't question that the dragons breathe fire. In Sci-fi, you should question the implications of artificial gravity and how the ships in Star Trek have it all. Ditto for universal translators, massive humanoid predominance, force fields, human command of bridges, predominantly manned exploration, predominantly manned warships, etc.
The problem is that lack of manned ships, aliens we can relate to and universal translators, makes it a lot harder to tell some stories.
To use the Neal Stephenson example, what about "The Diamond Age"?
Exactly! I was very surprised by the summary's quote: 'Since Snow Crash, no novel has had quite the same impact on the computing world, and you might argue that sci-fi and hi-tech are drifting further apart,'. What kind of impact did Snow Crash have? There are almost no novel concepts in that book. Metaverse -> Second Life maybe, but that's it. The Diamond Age is a far more visionary book, but nanotech is much to young to see what kind of impact it may have, or whether it's way off base.
I agree that Microsoft had a clear strategy to screw the market, whereas Google merely wants to secure itself in the mobile market. There's a fine line, though, and Google is using its online advertising dominance to make it in the mobile market.
How is it doing that? As far as I can see, it's doing the exact opposite: investing in the mobile market to increase the size of the online search/advertising market. They don't want to move to a different market, they want to stay in their own market, and subvert every other market in order to strengthen the only market they really care about: online advertising.
And I think it's kind of scary the way you seem to sugarcoat Google, seeing as it's a profit-seeking corporation and all:D
How am I sugercoating anything? All I'm saying is that they care about only one market: online advertising. They don't try to invade other markets, they try to subvert them. Destroy them by giving away cool free stuff, just because doing so happens to increase the online advertising market.
They'd probably give everybody a free car if they thought it'd increase the size of the online advertising market. And it's not just about increasing their own market share within that market: it's about increasing the size of the total market. They can do that, and the impact of that is bigger for them, because they are already dominant in the market. That their business model happens to accidentally destroy the market for TomTom and Garmin is just bad luck.
How does their dominance in search and advertising help them gain dominance in mobile OS?
"Less than free" - did you RTFA?
Did you? It's about maintaining dominance in search and ads.
So, like Microsoft gave away IF for free in the browser market to maintain their dominance in the OS market (because, as revealed in court, they feared that browsers would undermine the Windows business model)?
Possibly, but in a less destructive way. MS wanted to disrupt the browser market in order to protect their desktop OS market. Google wants to use the mobile market to drive more traffic to their search/ads market.
Google isn't afraid anything might undermine their business model. They only see opportunities to strengthen it. They don't want to limit people, they want people to do even more. And the more people do, the more opportunities Google will have to sell more effective ads.
Re:Android WILL take over.
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You don't switch your desktop like you switch your phone: on an impulse buy, transferring your data in the shop and off you go browsing the web and making calls with your new phone.
However, with the popularity of app stores, I can imagine that pretty soon, people will want to keep their expensive apps when they move from one smart phone to another. That makes switching to a different OS harder.
I imagine that if you were to use the google free service in your car for a month everywhere you drove, it would cost a tremendous amount unless you have some kind of truly unlimited data plan.
And who the hell doesn't?
Maps on my iPhone also has to fetch data constantly to show me where I am. This only gets expensive when I'm out of the country, which is why I installed offMaps (which relies on OpenStreetmap) when I went to France. Unfortunately offMaps sucks. So good offline map data is definitely valuable for those who travel abroad or don't have an unlimited data plan, but most of the time, online map data would be good enough for me.
What I really want is map data that updates when I want, and downloads in the detail that I need it in, but doesn't suck.
Re:Its the Intel Lawsuit - Google Style
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Didnt Intel just get taken to court by AMD over something very similar? Intel was paying HP and Dell to use there chips (the less than free approach).
If Intel was paying them to use their chips, then how did Intel make any money?
So, Google are leveraging their monopoly in search/advertising to break into the mobile platform market? Is this Google being evil?
I don't think so. They're leveraging their ample pile of money to break into the mobile platform market in order to leverage their presence there to strengthen their position in the search/advertising market.
Really, search/advertising is all Google really cares about. The rest is just extra.
Way to set up the straw-man btw. The concern isn't that Google is using anti-competitive tactics in the search/advertising business. Instead, it is about Google using its dominant position in the search/advertising space to compete in the mobile os space.
Is it really doing that? How does their dominance in search and advertising help them gain dominance in mobile OS? Do users want their search and advertising, but is using Android the only way to get it? No. You can also get Google's search, maps, etc if you buy an iPhone. Any other phone manufacturer is free to give their customers access to Google.
What Google is doing is not leveraging their dominance in the search/ad market to gain dominance elsewhere, they're giving stuff away for free in other markets in order to maintain their dominance in their original market. They couldn't care less about the other markets. They just want to enable as many people as possible to use those few products where Google makes the big bucks.
Re:Gee, it's almost like they have a monopoly or s
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TV stations have been run according to the same business model for ages. The only difference is that Google's ads are less invasive and a lot less annoying. Google is the first advertising giant I don't hate.
Re:Gee, it's almost like they have a monopoly or s
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Google probably controls almost 80% of search *by itself*. If 4 companies owning 80% of a market can do serious damage, one company owning 70% or 80% is a potential catastrophe.
Does Google really control that much? I'm sure they perform 80% of the searches, but people are free to use other search engines. People choose Google for various reasons, but mostly because they give them what they want. The minute a better search engine shows up, people will start switching.
Well, only private people will. Browsers and others who get money from Google won't, because an upstart search engine won't be able to offer the kind of money Google does.
Re:Horseshit. - Hiroshima
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Japanese are comfortable being bombarded.
Too soon?!?
I once heard about a famous go-player who was playing an important match in the outskirts of Hiroshima. Suddenly the roof was blown off the building and the go stones were all over the place. They quietly put the stones back, and continued their game.
Apparently they can be quite confortable while being bombarded.
I just got a G1 from my brother to use for development. I thought it was very cool I could wipe the firmware from T-Mobile and put a custom mod on there that allowed me to move apps to the SD card, use WiFi tethering, etc. Show me another phone/OS environment you see that happen on.
Maemo 5.
I already posted, so I can't mod you up anymore, but yes, Maemo sounds like it beats Android at its own game. No need to root it, because you are already root. It's your machine, after all. And the machine is basically a full PC in the shape of a smart phone.
Still Android sounds like it's going to have a lot more support, so I'm still undecided.
Re:So let me get this straight...
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You can even flash Android ONTO some WinMo devices like the Kaiser, with various levels of success.
This sounds like a really great idea. I've been wondering why the HTC HD2, with its gigantic screen, came with WinMo rather than Android. Sounds like a wonderful candidate for this operation, but how well will it work? Could the HD2 have any features that aren't properly supported by Android?
Re:So let me get this straight...
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Let's see... HTC Dream and HTC Magic, for one. And there are decent custom ROMs available too, like http://www.cyanogenmod.com./
What exactly does ROM mean in this usage? I've seen it a lot lately, and I only know the old (and practically irrelevant) meaning of Read-Only Memory. Your usage suggests it means something like OS or distribution, and others seem to use it as if it means "firmware".
So could you please enlighten me on this new meaning of ROM?
I wouldn't focus too much on the number involved -- the principle is that everyone has their price.
Is there room in your world view for the possibility that most people do not have a price, and are not for sale? Not everyone is a ravenous consumer out grubbing for every thin dime they can get their hands on... some people actually choose the businesses they patronize because they respect them and wish to support their ongoing operation.
Are you honestly saying that you wouldn't be willing to shop somewhere else in exchange for, let's say, a billion dollars?
Everybody has their price, but some people have an extremely high price.
If Bing dominated the market as a result of this move,
That's a very big if. People don't just use Google to find the top-1000 sites, they use it to find stuff they don't know where to find. And there's a lot more than 1000 sites where people could find that. Sure, Wikipedia disappearing from Google results would suck, but there are a lot of Wikipedia clones out there who carry the same information.
But hey, if some guy wants to give his money away to websites, I'm not going to stop him. (Does he know he'd be giving a couple of million to Google too?)
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely. If she's depressed, going to parties and taking a holiday is only going to get her healthy faster. Staying home and moping will only make her depression worse.
When I feel down, staying at home and listening to slow, dark, gothic metal makes me feel a lot better.
(But then I'm just a happy guy who likes gothic metal, and I don't actually suffer from depression, no matter what Scientologists want me to believe.)
What if there was an evil dystopic government that monitored our every move.
This one doesn't really count as SF anymore.
I read somewhere, many years ago, that sci-fi is popular in good times, when people in general are looking forward to the future, and fantasy is popular in bad times when people are afraid of the future.
Considering that "fearing the future" has become the norm for most of even the "enlightened" societies, I'd expect that sci-fi would be sinking into obsurity for at least the next generation.
I've always loved both SF and fantasy. Somewhere in the late '80s or early '90s, I wondered why there were so many great SF movies, and so very few great fantasy movies. Nowadays it seems to be the other way around.
I think the unrealistic science is really what makes the difference between the two genres. Fantasy, you don't question that the dragons breathe fire. In Sci-fi, you should question the implications of artificial gravity and how the ships in Star Trek have it all. Ditto for universal translators, massive humanoid predominance, force fields, human command of bridges, predominantly manned exploration, predominantly manned warships, etc.
The problem is that lack of manned ships, aliens we can relate to and universal translators, makes it a lot harder to tell some stories.
To use the Neal Stephenson example, what about "The Diamond Age"?
Exactly! I was very surprised by the summary's quote: 'Since Snow Crash, no novel has had quite the same impact on the computing world, and you might argue that sci-fi and hi-tech are drifting further apart,'. What kind of impact did Snow Crash have? There are almost no novel concepts in that book. Metaverse -> Second Life maybe, but that's it. The Diamond Age is a far more visionary book, but nanotech is much to young to see what kind of impact it may have, or whether it's way off base.
> Like the TV show Heroes? It's fun to watch
Are you watching the same series that I stopped watching after season 2?
I stopped watching after season 1, but season 1 was absolutely fantastic.
Sounds like a less objective study, though.
I agree that Microsoft had a clear strategy to screw the market, whereas Google merely wants to secure itself in the mobile market. There's a fine line, though, and Google is using its online advertising dominance to make it in the mobile market.
How is it doing that? As far as I can see, it's doing the exact opposite: investing in the mobile market to increase the size of the online search/advertising market. They don't want to move to a different market, they want to stay in their own market, and subvert every other market in order to strengthen the only market they really care about: online advertising.
And I think it's kind of scary the way you seem to sugarcoat Google, seeing as it's a profit-seeking corporation and all :D
How am I sugercoating anything? All I'm saying is that they care about only one market: online advertising. They don't try to invade other markets, they try to subvert them. Destroy them by giving away cool free stuff, just because doing so happens to increase the online advertising market.
They'd probably give everybody a free car if they thought it'd increase the size of the online advertising market. And it's not just about increasing their own market share within that market: it's about increasing the size of the total market. They can do that, and the impact of that is bigger for them, because they are already dominant in the market. That their business model happens to accidentally destroy the market for TomTom and Garmin is just bad luck.
"Less than free" - did you RTFA?
Did you? It's about maintaining dominance in search and ads.
So, like Microsoft gave away IF for free in the browser market to maintain their dominance in the OS market (because, as revealed in court, they feared that browsers would undermine the Windows business model)?
Possibly, but in a less destructive way. MS wanted to disrupt the browser market in order to protect their desktop OS market. Google wants to use the mobile market to drive more traffic to their search/ads market.
Google isn't afraid anything might undermine their business model. They only see opportunities to strengthen it. They don't want to limit people, they want people to do even more. And the more people do, the more opportunities Google will have to sell more effective ads.
You don't switch your desktop like you switch your phone: on an impulse buy, transferring your data in the shop and off you go browsing the web and making calls with your new phone.
However, with the popularity of app stores, I can imagine that pretty soon, people will want to keep their expensive apps when they move from one smart phone to another. That makes switching to a different OS harder.
I imagine that if you were to use the google free service in your car for a month everywhere you drove, it would cost a tremendous amount unless you have some kind of truly unlimited data plan.
And who the hell doesn't?
Maps on my iPhone also has to fetch data constantly to show me where I am. This only gets expensive when I'm out of the country, which is why I installed offMaps (which relies on OpenStreetmap) when I went to France. Unfortunately offMaps sucks. So good offline map data is definitely valuable for those who travel abroad or don't have an unlimited data plan, but most of the time, online map data would be good enough for me.
What I really want is map data that updates when I want, and downloads in the detail that I need it in, but doesn't suck.
Didnt Intel just get taken to court by AMD over something very similar? Intel was paying HP and Dell to use there chips (the less than free approach).
If Intel was paying them to use their chips, then how did Intel make any money?
If a company throws a party with an open bar to advertise their products would you say they're breaking into the booze market?
It would probably suck to be the bar next door if the party seems to be scheduled every night for the next ten years.
But does that mean it should be illegal to give stuff away for free?
So, Google are leveraging their monopoly in search/advertising to break into the mobile platform market? Is this Google being evil?
I don't think so. They're leveraging their ample pile of money to break into the mobile platform market in order to leverage their presence there to strengthen their position in the search/advertising market.
Really, search/advertising is all Google really cares about. The rest is just extra.
Way to set up the straw-man btw. The concern isn't that Google is using anti-competitive tactics in the search/advertising business. Instead, it is about Google using its dominant position in the search/advertising space to compete in the mobile os space.
Is it really doing that? How does their dominance in search and advertising help them gain dominance in mobile OS? Do users want their search and advertising, but is using Android the only way to get it? No. You can also get Google's search, maps, etc if you buy an iPhone. Any other phone manufacturer is free to give their customers access to Google.
What Google is doing is not leveraging their dominance in the search/ad market to gain dominance elsewhere, they're giving stuff away for free in other markets in order to maintain their dominance in their original market. They couldn't care less about the other markets. They just want to enable as many people as possible to use those few products where Google makes the big bucks.
TV stations have been run according to the same business model for ages. The only difference is that Google's ads are less invasive and a lot less annoying. Google is the first advertising giant I don't hate.
Google probably controls almost 80% of search *by itself*. If 4 companies owning 80% of a market can do serious damage, one company owning 70% or 80% is a potential catastrophe.
Does Google really control that much? I'm sure they perform 80% of the searches, but people are free to use other search engines. People choose Google for various reasons, but mostly because they give them what they want. The minute a better search engine shows up, people will start switching.
Well, only private people will. Browsers and others who get money from Google won't, because an upstart search engine won't be able to offer the kind of money Google does.
Japanese are comfortable being bombarded.
Too soon?!?
I once heard about a famous go-player who was playing an important match in the outskirts of Hiroshima. Suddenly the roof was blown off the building and the go stones were all over the place. They quietly put the stones back, and continued their game.
Apparently they can be quite confortable while being bombarded.
Maemo 5.
I already posted, so I can't mod you up anymore, but yes, Maemo sounds like it beats Android at its own game. No need to root it, because you are already root. It's your machine, after all. And the machine is basically a full PC in the shape of a smart phone.
Still Android sounds like it's going to have a lot more support, so I'm still undecided.
You can even flash Android ONTO some WinMo devices like the Kaiser, with various levels of success.
This sounds like a really great idea. I've been wondering why the HTC HD2, with its gigantic screen, came with WinMo rather than Android. Sounds like a wonderful candidate for this operation, but how well will it work? Could the HD2 have any features that aren't properly supported by Android?
Let's see... HTC Dream and HTC Magic, for one. And there are decent custom ROMs available too, like http://www.cyanogenmod.com./
What exactly does ROM mean in this usage? I've seen it a lot lately, and I only know the old (and practically irrelevant) meaning of Read-Only Memory. Your usage suggests it means something like OS or distribution, and others seem to use it as if it means "firmware".
So could you please enlighten me on this new meaning of ROM?
Even so, imagine the issues involved in playing a non-ascii game over your SSH client.
I wouldn't focus too much on the number involved -- the principle is that everyone has their price.
Is there room in your world view for the possibility that most people do not have a price, and are not for sale? Not everyone is a ravenous consumer out grubbing for every thin dime they can get their hands on... some people actually choose the businesses they patronize because they respect them and wish to support their ongoing operation.
Are you honestly saying that you wouldn't be willing to shop somewhere else in exchange for, let's say, a billion dollars?
Everybody has their price, but some people have an extremely high price.
If Bing dominated the market as a result of this move,
That's a very big if. People don't just use Google to find the top-1000 sites, they use it to find stuff they don't know where to find. And there's a lot more than 1000 sites where people could find that. Sure, Wikipedia disappearing from Google results would suck, but there are a lot of Wikipedia clones out there who carry the same information.
But hey, if some guy wants to give his money away to websites, I'm not going to stop him. (Does he know he'd be giving a couple of million to Google too?)
Meanwhile, Nethack works just fine...
Amazing how you never have to worry about turn-based games playing too fast, isn't it?
Or ascii-based games running into problems with tiny pixels or miss-matched resolutions.