While much of what you write is perfectly correct it in no way invalidates anything I wrote. My main point is to dispute the contention that a better product will necessarily sell any better than an inferior product.
If that's really your point, then I agree with you and present just about anything Microsoft as a case in point.
...Indeed the side effects on the cell phone market you attribute to the iPhone's success do appear an enormous boon. Though it's a bit much to claim people buying it originally did it with that in mind. It's also unclear as to whether those things would or would not have happened anyway without apple.
I made no such claim that people bought it with the intention of revolutionizing the existing system. The system was revolutionized because the phone existed and was attractive enough that enough people bought the phone to cause that shift in the larger vendor/carrier relationships. Without that shift, you would have iPhones , Blackberries, and junk. (Having owned "top" models in the "junk" category, I can most certainly attest that in comparison to today's phones, those phones were barely adequate as phones, much less anything else.)
What I'm saying (or trying to say) has little to do with the topic on hand to be honest. I'm not aiming to critique apple. I'm aiming to expose the chaotic nature of the market. Humans like narratives along with well defined cause and effect. Chaotic systems don't really possess such things. The best we can really say about anything is that it happened at all. Why it happened, not so much. If we could look back and say definitively why something happened, then we should be able to look forward and say something definitively will happen, but we cannot. So based on this I maintain that the original statement of yours I responded to (regarding nothing prior to apple's products taking the market over by storm) is fatuous. Particularly as you are so specific in the qualities the market killers need possess and may as well be asking for an example of somebody making the iPhone and iPad before apple did. Other than that I fully agree with everything else you have written although elements of it are flawed as outlined above. I would add that while I concede that it is oftentimes useful or even necessary to oversimplify things due to the limitations of the human mind, it's as well to be aware that you are oversimplifying things.
I was going to edit out some of that, and realized I needed to leave it as a whole for my purposes. First, yes, I agree that markets appear chaotic, and may even be so, I cannot say with certainty that they are, since that would be similar to attempting to prove a negative (no god, no (intelligent) life in universe, etc). From there, if you'll note my original post, I made some rather very simple statements, with only a single quality listed in addition to type of device: a touchscreen phone, with the implication of a touchscreen smartphone. The tablet just had to "be" and take marketshare. I'm not sure how you derived "are so specific in the qualities the market killer need possess" from that, nor how my statements were fatuous as they are merely observations of history in statement form, no more, no less.
For the simple: Show me another smartphone prior to the iPhone, that has as much marketshare. Or, show me one that is not a copy that came after and took that marketshare. The Samsung Galaxy SIII doesn't count, since it was enough of a clone of the iPhone hardware/software that even Google stated in an email to Samsung that they should modify their offering. I'd say that makes Samsung a copier, not an innovator, no matter how successful. I may soon get my hands on a Galaxy SIII for dev purposes, so I'll hopefully have first hand experience with it soon.
It happens a lot - and there's not much a company can do. They can file suits, but if you have a decent lawyer, it won't go far and actually winds up costing them money.
You're focused on buttons - it's a red herring. The real innovation was the break away from the providers controls, and providing a phone that was actually a phone as envisioned by someone whose main interest was not in maximizing revenue to the provider's "store" of sub-par products. The cell phone market of 2006 is a lot like the TV market of 2012 - providers controlled what and how you accessed content. The iPhone broke through that, we can only hope someone does the same to the TV ISPs.
Ripping CDs is not illegal. There is no DRM, so even in the post DMCA world, it's still legal to rip your CDs however many times you want, own ripping software, etc. What you can't do, ever, is distribute copies. I don't know why that is so difficult to understand.
EAC is an awesome tool, used it for years. But, not having owned a windows machine in at least 4 years, I've switched to other programs that appear to do the job just as well.
All that said - maybe that Plextor on my shelf should find it's way back into my current rig. Thanks for the suggestion.
My LG BD/HDDVD/DVD drive runs pretty well for ripping CDs also. As long as the CD is clean, it's a sub 5 min experience, When it's not, CD Paranoia will take it's sweet sweet time, but usually I get a decent quality rip.
I did the same. The beauty of FLAC, AAC (lossless) and any other lossless format (monkeyaudio, etc) is that as long as you have conversion software you can migrate between lossless formats without, you guessed it, losing any information. I've gone through several iterations of lossless file sets, running conversions as needed for my current configuration. Generating MP3s or other lossy formats is no big deal these days and can be done almost as fast as a straight copy for small numbers, or the whole library in several hours (love those multi-core CPUs:)
Anyways - feel free to point out these "good" products prior to the iPhone 1 and iPad, and then state why they failed to perform like these 2 products.
Hint: You won't be able to, nor even for almost a 2 year period after each was released. There's a reason Apple has the marketshare they do, and it has NOTHING to do with marketing. In fact, I recall almost 0 marketing on the iPhone prior to announcement, and the same for the iPad. The latter had rumors swirling about with all sorts of negativity, and some jokes were even funny. There were predictions from all quarters that Apple would fail, like everyone else, in the tablet arena. Or maybe you're just wallowing in revisionism.
Personally, it's too bad Steve passed away prior to his "cracking the TV" industry. Had he had the same impact on TVs that he did with phones, we'd all be in a better world. (Yes, the major impact of Apple on the cell phone market wasn't the iPhone itself, but a quantum shift away from the throttling control cell providers exerted over hardware, but you'll probably argue that didn't happen either)
What's the obsession with pretending Apple and Microsoft are the only computer vendors on Slashdot? Most of the stuff they do has been done before and better by more interesting companies.
Really? A decent touch screen phone existed before the iPhone and didn't take the market over by storm? A decent tablet existed prior to the iPad and controlled the market and threatened PC sales?
I'm assuming you're probably talking about that Twilight thing I've been assaulted with. Having had the accidental exposure to Kristen Stewart in Snow White and the Huntsman (which really should have been called "The Queen" - Charlize was the show IMHO) the only thing I could note was that she has a lot in common with a marionette, except she occasionally spoke (thank goodness it was only occasionally!!) The movie would have been significantly better, and shorter, had they removed some of the deer in headlight stares of the supposed headline "actress".
Can I install a custom IOS or Android ROM on the hardware?
Yes, Android and Linux both, and a jailbroken iOS version is custom, just not as customized as you can make a Linux kernel.
...
Well it appears you cant do whatever you want. Don't mistake the pitiful increase in rights "jailbreaking" an Iphone gives you for freedom, you are still bound to Apple. With Jailbreaking you're breaking out of your cell, but you're still inside the prison walls.
Apparently, I'm out of the cell, the walls, and even the grounds.
Sureyoucan.
Sorry to burst your bubble of Apple hate.
Got anything newer than the Iphone 3G. Apple locked the bootloader with the second revision of the 3G.
So if you've got a 3G, 3GS, 4, 4S or 5, I'm 100% correct.
Wrong again - iDroid runs on 3G/3GS and work is in progress on the 4. Check the links. Or here, for the truly lazy
Thank you, It's nice to receive 3 consecutive "I was wrong" awards.
I'd call you an idiot, but you posted AC, so there's a chance you may not be a complete idiot.
That said, there's at least a small group of people that prefer no fingerprint smudges on their screens, especially when they are working with graphics, as those smudges tend to blur details. Others just prefer to have clean screens regardless (I fall into both camps) Lastly, your reading comprehension is lacking, as is your ability to research even the most obvious facts - the iMac is cheaper than the touch screen Asus, and for me not having a touch screen, and hence not having any temptation for a moron such as yourself to touch it is worth several hundred extra dollars to me, i.e., raising the value of the iMac, over the Asus even more.
Not true since Vista. Slashdot is full of folks who've last used Windows more than 10 years ago and thus complain of things like bluescreens, bloat etc. which makes them look like idiots.
Get with the times and at least update your hate machine.
You're right - you got black screens of death with Vista. But, since I only run windows in a VM when I have to, I get the friendly VM splash screen instead, so I don't really care what MS throws up these days when their OS cries "uncle". It also makes recovering the OS a trivial affair. Snapshots are a dream compared to in system backups, which, btw, really need to be done with 3rd party added cost software if you want any reliability at all.
Bloat? Still plenty of that. You have to work hard to trim that VM down to something less than 5GB with W7. Random interface changes? Check. Software incompatibilities? Check. Same set of core vulnerabilities that allow owning the computer no matter who you're logged in as? Check.
You're both right. There were at least 2 episodes regarding the former site of Atlantis in Antarctica, and there was also the slave labor episode. I could look them up, but they're boxed away at the moment.
You can still jail break your brand new iPhone in 2012 and do whatever you want.
Can I install a custom IOS or Android ROM on the hardware?
No you say.
Well it appears you cant do whatever you want. Don't mistake the pitiful increase in rights "jailbreaking" an Iphone gives you for freedom, you are still bound to Apple. With Jailbreaking you're breaking out of your cell, but you're still inside the prison walls.
You eliminate the tumor. That doesn't mean it eliminates every possible cancer for the rest of your life - people who get cancer will probably end up needing multiple treatments over their 80 year lifespan.
That was the entire point of this therapy - self-replicating T-cells. One treatment theoretically should end that particular type of cancer forever. That's always been the problem with all cancer treatments - did you get all the cells? One surviving cell can cause a whole new set of tumors... This treatment, when effective, would seem to provide a good answer to that particular question - plus you're not poisoning your body to kill them in the first place. That last piece alone is a huge step forward in many ways.
And $5k per treatment? Never gonna happen.
And sequencing the entire human genome wasn't going to happen until 2030, and would never be practical for medicine at millions or billions of dollars. So they said in the 90s when they started the Human Genome project. Now it's 2012 and genetic maps cost roughly $3000, soon to be $1000 or less News flash - technology advances are making many things cheaper very very fast. Once the process is known, mapping the genome and inserting the proper trigger genes will easily be a sub-$5K process, and I could see it eventually being automated and resting in the sub $1K range. Now, you may still need to be in the hospital for a couple of days if your cancer is relatively far along, I won't argue that one.
Yeah, nothing at all - except about 3 months ago, they formed a partnership with Novartis to expand the research. And how, exactly, do you imagine the research was funded to begin with?
Well, I somehow missed that - must have been on vacation when it was announced. Thanks for pulling up a reference. Novartis is interesting - I know them from animal medicine, and from a brief overview, they don't seem to have a vested interest in current cancer treatments (I could be wrong on this). That makes them a perfect candidate to support this new research.
As for who funded this - it was a private angel fund set up in memory of a cancer victim by her family that paid for the development and trial of the treatment. That was why the first trial was so minuscule, funding was a major issue. No one else would touch it at the time.
I'd agree. I would still get an Apple iMac over the Acer, but I'd vote neither personally. And this is from someone that owns Apple products and has built a number of my own systems, including 3 hacks (ie, home built OSX machines) My current rig runs about 20% faster than the equivalent Mac Pro at the time, and cost me significantly less, primarily because I happened upon a deal and a half on the CPU. I installed W7 for all of 10s on it, and the promptly installed Ubuntu and started on the hack, mainly to see if I could do it. I now use it as my primary machine.
This is the OEM business model.... Even with a premium PC line, they won't turn down these dollars thrust upon them from Symantec, and the online-game-of-the-week.
This is a premium PC? Well, premium price anyways, when compared to an Apple iMac I see a higher res screen and better graphics for less. Of course, it'll also come sans all the fingerprints on the screen, since it's not a touch screen. I think that alone is worth several hundred $ in Apple's favor, or however much you value your finger should you ever try to touch my monitor. I kid, I kid... not.
as cancer becomes something cured with a hi-tech shot.
Yes, a hi tech shot, comprised of genetically engineered T-Cells, which need to be targeted at the specific cancer the person has, since it keys on specific protein signatures expressed by the cancer cells.
You realize they're not just injecting you with saline, right? Do you have any idea what resources & effort will go into developing and producing engineered T-Cells? Any drug company that has a shot at developing this treatement would be literally creaming their jeans at the thought of getting a crack at producing this.
In other news - market's still booming for antibiotics, and lots of drug companies are actively researching new antibiotics. This certainly suggests your conspiracy theory that nobody would want to fund developing this treatment is misguided.
Question 1: which is more profitable? A 50K per month treatment that goes on anywhere from 3-12 months, and, if you a lucky one, you get to repeat 2-3 times in your shortened lifespan, or a one-time shot costing less than 5K (once the procedure gets down to daily prescriptions) where the patient walks away?
Question 2: Where's the news that some big pharma has gotten behind this promising research? It's been a year. I've heard nada. You'd think it'd be big news.
Your last statement answers question 2 - antibiotics are recurring revenue, self-regenerating T-cells are not, even though they are much much more effective than any poison (ie, anti-biotic) you can ingest.
Lots of folks here bashed XP and DRM before even 2006. The iPhone 1 was great. There is little hypocrisy there. You can still jail break your brand new iPhone in 2012 and do whatever you want.
The real driver here is cost - they get rid of the extra socket piece, and can build an integrated 1 piece solution. I'm surprised we're not down to a 1 or 2 chip system yet, in the PC world. In that world, the "motherboard" becomes an essentially replaceable unit that costs about what a current CPU does. (And I can't say I mind, given that my last motherboard was in the $300 range)
If you're throwing out a $30 PC for a $10 battery (have you seen battery prices at radio shack?) maybe it's not such a bad deal;)
Interestingly enough, if it works and is harmless, the pharmaceutical companies will wind up with much lower revenue and profits, as cancer becomes something cured with a hi-tech shot. Guess who's not clamoring to fund the research?
But this is irrelevant because Bitcoin is not a deflationary currency. It's at present an inflationary one, and will eventually become a stable currency.
In a stable currency, if people stop investing or something happens to make the economy shrink, then you have the same amount of currency being mapped to less goods and services, ie you have inflation. You only have deflation if the economy is growing. So saying that Bitcoin would cause the economy to shrink because of deflation is a self-defeating argument. If that happened (it won't) then Bitcoin would become inflationary again.
You are correct - Bitcoin is not deflationary in and of itself. The US ran a similar system for a long long time while we were under the silver/gold standards. The GDP grew at limited rates, and it did not protect anyone from the effects of the Great Depression. The only plus was that silver/gold were not fixed, and increases in the amounts available continue even today.
The reason that Bitcoin is deflationary is that the population is still growing, and hence the other aspect of the economy also impacts deflationary pressures. If 100 people have 100 Bitcoins, then each can have one. When there's 100 million people, now they can only have 1 millionth of a Bitcoin. So each person has less access to wealth in a fixed coinage system and the entire thing is keyed to a ponzi scheme with the early ins and holders being the winners as the value of their holdings continue to inflate compared to all others. Provided, of course, that the scheme doesn't collapse.
You believe inflation is "healthy" because economists like Bernanke tell you that. It's not based on anything real, just some self-serving arguments made by the people who are (surprise) the ones inflating the system. In reality compound inflation (in which the currency grows by more every year than it did the previous year) has locked our society into waves of crippling asset bubbles, in which people "invest" in things like houses that aren't needed or internet stocks for companies with no-hope business models. A stable currency would result in investment happening when it actually makes sense, not because the system presents you with an invest-or-lose proposition.
The available money has to increase with the population, or you will wind up with pools of wealth and large amounts of poor with no impetus for the wealthy to spend. In the time of the silver/gold standards, new mining allowed the pool to grown, albeit slowly in economic terms. This worked for a while until the industrial revolution kicked into high gear and started creating new items that either increased the pool of "wealth", or caused other items to become "cheaper" in comparison. The former leads to a requirement to increase the available pool of money, the latter requires deflation for at least a portion of the current goods in the economy to make room for the "new wealth". Bitcoin forces you into the latter mode without compromise.
It's nice that he's getting lots of support and poems and such.
The really interesting thing is that this displays that doctors need to have an information sharing system that is more real time and more collaborative. It's not surprising, you can read news stories and such any week and find stories where a doctor misdiagnosed or used an outdated treatment to bad ends. You'd think that one of the AMA's and like organizations purposes would be to keep doctors up to date, but we'll have to defer to a doctor on how well that purpose is fulfilled, and whether the "problem" doctors are just negligent in keeping up.
I also don't believe every patient can benefit from this approach, as then doctors would be spending all their time reading the internet instead of helping patients. Obviously that won't do. What they really need is a searchable database that will actually work for the problem domain, and perhaps could be searchable by patients too. Never hurts to have access to more information, as long as it's presented in a normalized format.
When PGP 2.6.2 was released,... It led to the rapid expansion of the internet, secured business transactions; It made quite a few people very wealthy, and changed the entire landscape of society.
PGP had nothing to do with the expansion of the internet. It did not lead to secured business transactions. It did not make anyone wealthy (it was given away for free). It almost put someone (Phil) in jail. It also did not change the entire landscape of society.
What PGP did do was offer encryption of email and files with an open encryption system that happened to be quite good. Nothing more, nothing less. I wish more people would use it on a regular basis, but that's largely a pipe dream.
Something that's had far far more impact on communications are encrypted protocols such as SSL, TLS, and the SSH services, which encrypt the communication channel itself, not merely content. This is part of the unsubstantiated crap the GGP was making claims about.
Another unsubstantiated GGP claim is the implication that oh my, if the big bad govs would just not inspect all this traffic, the criminals wouldn't use this strong encryption. Smart criminals, and there are some, will use whatever they can to prevent themselves from getting caught. This includes software development - just look at all the malware out there.
Those are just some claims, the rest I don't have time to dispute item by item.
Slashdot Mirror
While much of what you write is perfectly correct it in no way invalidates anything I wrote. My main point is to dispute the contention that a better product will necessarily sell any better than an inferior product.
If that's really your point, then I agree with you and present just about anything Microsoft as a case in point.
...Indeed the side effects on the cell phone market you attribute to the iPhone's success do appear an enormous boon. Though it's a bit much to claim people buying it originally did it with that in mind. It's also unclear as to whether those things would or would not have happened anyway without apple.
I made no such claim that people bought it with the intention of revolutionizing the existing system. The system was revolutionized because the phone existed and was attractive enough that enough people bought the phone to cause that shift in the larger vendor/carrier relationships. Without that shift, you would have iPhones , Blackberries, and junk. (Having owned "top" models in the "junk" category, I can most certainly attest that in comparison to today's phones, those phones were barely adequate as phones, much less anything else.)
What I'm saying (or trying to say) has little to do with the topic on hand to be honest. I'm not aiming to critique apple. I'm aiming to expose the chaotic nature of the market. Humans like narratives along with well defined cause and effect. Chaotic systems don't really possess such things. The best we can really say about anything is that it happened at all. Why it happened, not so much. If we could look back and say definitively why something happened, then we should be able to look forward and say something definitively will happen, but we cannot. So based on this I maintain that the original statement of yours I responded to (regarding nothing prior to apple's products taking the market over by storm) is fatuous. Particularly as you are so specific in the qualities the market killers need possess and may as well be asking for an example of somebody making the iPhone and iPad before apple did. Other than that I fully agree with everything else you have written although elements of it are flawed as outlined above. I would add that while I concede that it is oftentimes useful or even necessary to oversimplify things due to the limitations of the human mind, it's as well to be aware that you are oversimplifying things.
I was going to edit out some of that, and realized I needed to leave it as a whole for my purposes. First, yes, I agree that markets appear chaotic, and may even be so, I cannot say with certainty that they are, since that would be similar to attempting to prove a negative (no god, no (intelligent) life in universe, etc). From there, if you'll note my original post, I made some rather very simple statements, with only a single quality listed in addition to type of device: a touchscreen phone, with the implication of a touchscreen smartphone. The tablet just had to "be" and take marketshare. I'm not sure how you derived "are so specific in the qualities the market killer need possess" from that, nor how my statements were fatuous as they are merely observations of history in statement form, no more, no less.
For the simple: Show me another smartphone prior to the iPhone, that has as much marketshare. Or, show me one that is not a copy that came after and took that marketshare. The Samsung Galaxy SIII doesn't count, since it was enough of a clone of the iPhone hardware/software that even Google stated in an email to Samsung that they should modify their offering. I'd say that makes Samsung a copier, not an innovator, no matter how successful. I may soon get my hands on a Galaxy SIII for dev purposes, so I'll hopefully have first hand experience with it soon.
It happens a lot - and there's not much a company can do. They can file suits, but if you have a decent lawyer, it won't go far and actually winds up costing them money.
You're focused on buttons - it's a red herring. The real innovation was the break away from the providers controls, and providing a phone that was actually a phone as envisioned by someone whose main interest was not in maximizing revenue to the provider's "store" of sub-par products. The cell phone market of 2006 is a lot like the TV market of 2012 - providers controlled what and how you accessed content. The iPhone broke through that, we can only hope someone does the same to the TV ISPs.
Ripping CDs is not illegal. There is no DRM, so even in the post DMCA world, it's still legal to rip your CDs however many times you want, own ripping software, etc. What you can't do, ever, is distribute copies. I don't know why that is so difficult to understand.
EAC is an awesome tool, used it for years. But, not having owned a windows machine in at least 4 years, I've switched to other programs that appear to do the job just as well.
All that said - maybe that Plextor on my shelf should find it's way back into my current rig. Thanks for the suggestion.
My LG BD/HDDVD/DVD drive runs pretty well for ripping CDs also. As long as the CD is clean, it's a sub 5 min experience, When it's not, CD Paranoia will take it's sweet sweet time, but usually I get a decent quality rip.
I did the same. The beauty of FLAC, AAC (lossless) and any other lossless format (monkeyaudio, etc) is that as long as you have conversion software you can migrate between lossless formats without, you guessed it, losing any information. I've gone through several iterations of lossless file sets, running conversions as needed for my current configuration. Generating MP3s or other lossy formats is no big deal these days and can be done almost as fast as a straight copy for small numbers, or the whole library in several hours (love those multi-core CPUs :)
Love the troll mods. They rock :)
Anyways - feel free to point out these "good" products prior to the iPhone 1 and iPad, and then state why they failed to perform like these 2 products.
Hint: You won't be able to, nor even for almost a 2 year period after each was released. There's a reason Apple has the marketshare they do, and it has NOTHING to do with marketing. In fact, I recall almost 0 marketing on the iPhone prior to announcement, and the same for the iPad. The latter had rumors swirling about with all sorts of negativity, and some jokes were even funny. There were predictions from all quarters that Apple would fail, like everyone else, in the tablet arena. Or maybe you're just wallowing in revisionism.
Personally, it's too bad Steve passed away prior to his "cracking the TV" industry. Had he had the same impact on TVs that he did with phones, we'd all be in a better world. (Yes, the major impact of Apple on the cell phone market wasn't the iPhone itself, but a quantum shift away from the throttling control cell providers exerted over hardware, but you'll probably argue that didn't happen either)
What's the obsession with pretending Apple and Microsoft are the only computer vendors on Slashdot? Most of the stuff they do has been done before and better by more interesting companies.
Really? A decent touch screen phone existed before the iPhone and didn't take the market over by storm? A decent tablet existed prior to the iPad and controlled the market and threatened PC sales?
I like your world. I'd be a trillionaire in it.
From Harry Potter? Don't think so...
I'm assuming you're probably talking about that Twilight thing I've been assaulted with. Having had the accidental exposure to Kristen Stewart in Snow White and the Huntsman (which really should have been called "The Queen" - Charlize was the show IMHO) the only thing I could note was that she has a lot in common with a marionette, except she occasionally spoke (thank goodness it was only occasionally!!) The movie would have been significantly better, and shorter, had they removed some of the deer in headlight stares of the supposed headline "actress".
Can I install a custom IOS or Android ROM on the hardware?
Yes, Android and Linux both, and a jailbroken iOS version is custom, just not as customized as you can make a Linux kernel.
... Well it appears you cant do whatever you want. Don't mistake the pitiful increase in rights "jailbreaking" an Iphone gives you for freedom, you are still bound to Apple. With Jailbreaking you're breaking out of your cell, but you're still inside the prison walls.
Apparently, I'm out of the cell, the walls, and even the grounds.
Sure you can. Sorry to burst your bubble of Apple hate.
Got anything newer than the Iphone 3G. Apple locked the bootloader with the second revision of the 3G. So if you've got a 3G, 3GS, 4, 4S or 5, I'm 100% correct.
Wrong again - iDroid runs on 3G/3GS and work is in progress on the 4. Check the links. Or here, for the truly lazy
Thank you, It's nice to receive 3 consecutive "I was wrong" awards.
FTFY
I'd call you an idiot, but you posted AC, so there's a chance you may not be a complete idiot.
That said, there's at least a small group of people that prefer no fingerprint smudges on their screens, especially when they are working with graphics, as those smudges tend to blur details. Others just prefer to have clean screens regardless (I fall into both camps) Lastly, your reading comprehension is lacking, as is your ability to research even the most obvious facts - the iMac is cheaper than the touch screen Asus, and for me not having a touch screen, and hence not having any temptation for a moron such as yourself to touch it is worth several hundred extra dollars to me, i.e., raising the value of the iMac, over the Asus even more.
I take it back - you are an idiot.
Not true since Vista. Slashdot is full of folks who've last used Windows more than 10 years ago and thus complain of things like bluescreens, bloat etc. which makes them look like idiots.
Get with the times and at least update your hate machine.
You're right - you got black screens of death with Vista. But, since I only run windows in a VM when I have to, I get the friendly VM splash screen instead, so I don't really care what MS throws up these days when their OS cries "uncle". It also makes recovering the OS a trivial affair. Snapshots are a dream compared to in system backups, which, btw, really need to be done with 3rd party added cost software if you want any reliability at all.
Bloat? Still plenty of that. You have to work hard to trim that VM down to something less than 5GB with W7. Random interface changes? Check. Software incompatibilities? Check. Same set of core vulnerabilities that allow owning the computer no matter who you're logged in as? Check.
You're both right. There were at least 2 episodes regarding the former site of Atlantis in Antarctica, and there was also the slave labor episode. I could look them up, but they're boxed away at the moment.
First, the precursor to this trick is to make sure she bought something first... :)
You can still jail break your brand new iPhone in 2012 and do whatever you want.
Can I install a custom IOS or Android ROM on the hardware? No you say. Well it appears you cant do whatever you want. Don't mistake the pitiful increase in rights "jailbreaking" an Iphone gives you for freedom, you are still bound to Apple. With Jailbreaking you're breaking out of your cell, but you're still inside the prison walls.
Sure you can.
Sorry to burst your bubble of Apple hate.
You eliminate the tumor. That doesn't mean it eliminates every possible cancer for the rest of your life - people who get cancer will probably end up needing multiple treatments over their 80 year lifespan.
That was the entire point of this therapy - self-replicating T-cells. One treatment theoretically should end that particular type of cancer forever. That's always been the problem with all cancer treatments - did you get all the cells? One surviving cell can cause a whole new set of tumors... This treatment, when effective, would seem to provide a good answer to that particular question - plus you're not poisoning your body to kill them in the first place. That last piece alone is a huge step forward in many ways.
And $5k per treatment? Never gonna happen.
And sequencing the entire human genome wasn't going to happen until 2030, and would never be practical for medicine at millions or billions of dollars. So they said in the 90s when they started the Human Genome project. Now it's 2012 and genetic maps cost roughly $3000, soon to be $1000 or less News flash - technology advances are making many things cheaper very very fast. Once the process is known, mapping the genome and inserting the proper trigger genes will easily be a sub-$5K process, and I could see it eventually being automated and resting in the sub $1K range. Now, you may still need to be in the hospital for a couple of days if your cancer is relatively far along, I won't argue that one.
Yeah, nothing at all - except about 3 months ago, they formed a partnership with Novartis to expand the research. And how, exactly, do you imagine the research was funded to begin with?
Well, I somehow missed that - must have been on vacation when it was announced. Thanks for pulling up a reference. Novartis is interesting - I know them from animal medicine, and from a brief overview, they don't seem to have a vested interest in current cancer treatments (I could be wrong on this). That makes them a perfect candidate to support this new research.
As for who funded this - it was a private angel fund set up in memory of a cancer victim by her family that paid for the development and trial of the treatment. That was why the first trial was so minuscule, funding was a major issue. No one else would touch it at the time.
I'd agree. I would still get an Apple iMac over the Acer, but I'd vote neither personally. And this is from someone that owns Apple products and has built a number of my own systems, including 3 hacks (ie, home built OSX machines) My current rig runs about 20% faster than the equivalent Mac Pro at the time, and cost me significantly less, primarily because I happened upon a deal and a half on the CPU. I installed W7 for all of 10s on it, and the promptly installed Ubuntu and started on the hack, mainly to see if I could do it. I now use it as my primary machine.
This is the OEM business model. ... Even with a premium PC line, they won't turn down these dollars thrust upon them from Symantec, and the online-game-of-the-week.
This is a premium PC? Well, premium price anyways, when compared to an Apple iMac I see a higher res screen and better graphics for less. Of course, it'll also come sans all the fingerprints on the screen, since it's not a touch screen. I think that alone is worth several hundred $ in Apple's favor, or however much you value your finger should you ever try to touch my monitor. I kid, I kid... not.
Yes, a hi tech shot, comprised of genetically engineered T-Cells, which need to be targeted at the specific cancer the person has, since it keys on specific protein signatures expressed by the cancer cells.
You realize they're not just injecting you with saline, right? Do you have any idea what resources & effort will go into developing and producing engineered T-Cells? Any drug company that has a shot at developing this treatement would be literally creaming their jeans at the thought of getting a crack at producing this.
In other news - market's still booming for antibiotics, and lots of drug companies are actively researching new antibiotics. This certainly suggests your conspiracy theory that nobody would want to fund developing this treatment is misguided.
Question 1: which is more profitable? A 50K per month treatment that goes on anywhere from 3-12 months, and, if you a lucky one, you get to repeat 2-3 times in your shortened lifespan, or a one-time shot costing less than 5K (once the procedure gets down to daily prescriptions) where the patient walks away?
Question 2: Where's the news that some big pharma has gotten behind this promising research? It's been a year. I've heard nada. You'd think it'd be big news.
Your last statement answers question 2 - antibiotics are recurring revenue, self-regenerating T-cells are not, even though they are much much more effective than any poison (ie, anti-biotic) you can ingest.
Lots of folks here bashed XP and DRM before even 2006. The iPhone 1 was great. There is little hypocrisy there. You can still jail break your brand new iPhone in 2012 and do whatever you want.
The real driver here is cost - they get rid of the extra socket piece, and can build an integrated 1 piece solution. I'm surprised we're not down to a 1 or 2 chip system yet, in the PC world. In that world, the "motherboard" becomes an essentially replaceable unit that costs about what a current CPU does. (And I can't say I mind, given that my last motherboard was in the $300 range)
If you're throwing out a $30 PC for a $10 battery (have you seen battery prices at radio shack?) maybe it's not such a bad deal ;)
There is a promising new treatment, still in the earliest experimental stages.
Interestingly enough, if it works and is harmless, the pharmaceutical companies will wind up with much lower revenue and profits, as cancer becomes something cured with a hi-tech shot. Guess who's not clamoring to fund the research?
But this is irrelevant because Bitcoin is not a deflationary currency. It's at present an inflationary one, and will eventually become a stable currency.
In a stable currency, if people stop investing or something happens to make the economy shrink, then you have the same amount of currency being mapped to less goods and services, ie you have inflation. You only have deflation if the economy is growing. So saying that Bitcoin would cause the economy to shrink because of deflation is a self-defeating argument. If that happened (it won't) then Bitcoin would become inflationary again.
You are correct - Bitcoin is not deflationary in and of itself. The US ran a similar system for a long long time while we were under the silver/gold standards. The GDP grew at limited rates, and it did not protect anyone from the effects of the Great Depression. The only plus was that silver/gold were not fixed, and increases in the amounts available continue even today.
The reason that Bitcoin is deflationary is that the population is still growing, and hence the other aspect of the economy also impacts deflationary pressures. If 100 people have 100 Bitcoins, then each can have one. When there's 100 million people, now they can only have 1 millionth of a Bitcoin. So each person has less access to wealth in a fixed coinage system and the entire thing is keyed to a ponzi scheme with the early ins and holders being the winners as the value of their holdings continue to inflate compared to all others. Provided, of course, that the scheme doesn't collapse.
You believe inflation is "healthy" because economists like Bernanke tell you that. It's not based on anything real, just some self-serving arguments made by the people who are (surprise) the ones inflating the system. In reality compound inflation (in which the currency grows by more every year than it did the previous year) has locked our society into waves of crippling asset bubbles, in which people "invest" in things like houses that aren't needed or internet stocks for companies with no-hope business models. A stable currency would result in investment happening when it actually makes sense, not because the system presents you with an invest-or-lose proposition.
The available money has to increase with the population, or you will wind up with pools of wealth and large amounts of poor with no impetus for the wealthy to spend. In the time of the silver/gold standards, new mining allowed the pool to grown, albeit slowly in economic terms. This worked for a while until the industrial revolution kicked into high gear and started creating new items that either increased the pool of "wealth", or caused other items to become "cheaper" in comparison. The former leads to a requirement to increase the available pool of money, the latter requires deflation for at least a portion of the current goods in the economy to make room for the "new wealth". Bitcoin forces you into the latter mode without compromise.
It's nice that he's getting lots of support and poems and such.
The really interesting thing is that this displays that doctors need to have an information sharing system that is more real time and more collaborative. It's not surprising, you can read news stories and such any week and find stories where a doctor misdiagnosed or used an outdated treatment to bad ends. You'd think that one of the AMA's and like organizations purposes would be to keep doctors up to date, but we'll have to defer to a doctor on how well that purpose is fulfilled, and whether the "problem" doctors are just negligent in keeping up.
I also don't believe every patient can benefit from this approach, as then doctors would be spending all their time reading the internet instead of helping patients. Obviously that won't do. What they really need is a searchable database that will actually work for the problem domain, and perhaps could be searchable by patients too. Never hurts to have access to more information, as long as it's presented in a normalized format.
PGP had nothing to do with the expansion of the internet. It did not lead to secured business transactions. It did not make anyone wealthy (it was given away for free). It almost put someone (Phil) in jail. It also did not change the entire landscape of society.
What PGP did do was offer encryption of email and files with an open encryption system that happened to be quite good. Nothing more, nothing less. I wish more people would use it on a regular basis, but that's largely a pipe dream.
Something that's had far far more impact on communications are encrypted protocols such as SSL, TLS, and the SSH services, which encrypt the communication channel itself, not merely content. This is part of the unsubstantiated crap the GGP was making claims about.
Another unsubstantiated GGP claim is the implication that oh my, if the big bad govs would just not inspect all this traffic, the criminals wouldn't use this strong encryption. Smart criminals, and there are some, will use whatever they can to prevent themselves from getting caught. This includes software development - just look at all the malware out there.
Those are just some claims, the rest I don't have time to dispute item by item.
Yes, you should.