Unless you value Free As In Speech Software as a matter of principle (nothing wrong with that - but understand that many potential users don't care) then there is no particular "unique selling point" for Linux on the desktop.
On a server, an embedded device - completely different issue: Linux or BSD FTW unless you're absolutely forced to run some proprietary Microsoft service.
On the desktop, however...
Cost - for home/small biz users: you get Windows or OS X bundled with your computer. OEMs that sell "bare" PCs for less money than ones with Windows do exist - so its not quite hen's teeth - but you'll have a restricted choice. You also might find yourself paying extra for the privilege of knowing that your WiFi card, TV tuner etc. are supported by Linux c.f. the cheap no-brand ones - and with some things, e.g. high-def terrestrial TV (at least in the UK) you're SOL. Now, if you're a larger business paying per-seat licenses for Windows, this may be an area where you have an "in" provided you don't need any Windows-only software for interoperability with clients - but once more than a certain proportion of your seats need Windows, the economies will change.
Free Applications - most of the big-name free applications are available on OS X and/or Windows anyway.
Paid Applications - many of the big-name paid-for applications, are only available for Windows or, in some cases, OS X. Sadly, sometimes you need Office or Adobe CS, if only because you have to interoperate with others. Please don't say LibreOffice etc. will open/save Office files: most of the text, some of the graphics and precious little layout doesn't cut the mustard. Not the developer's fault - the office formats are effectively undocumented, but that doesn't make the problem go away.
Ease of user - contrary to popular belief, you can have ease of use in Linux: just apply the zenfoobar_5_12_14 patch, recompile your kernel then open a shell and do 'apt-get --neutron-flow-polarity=reverse ease_of_use_21234298745 | tachyon_burst > front_deflector_array'... and if you can't do that then you're too bloody stupid to use a computer.
Seriously - Linux was making great strides towards ease-of-use, hampered by three competing desktop ecosystems/UI styles (Gnome, KDE and old-school-X) but just as they were getting somewhere near maturity and almost as good as Windows and OS X they were pretty much dumped by the major distros in favour of immature tablet/netbook-inspired front ends. (Windows may be about to make the same mistake, OS X, despite the fuss, has largely limited the iPadization to optional features that you can ignore if you don't have a 13" screen and a touchpad).
Lets face it, in a corporate environment, unless the Powers That Be have an evangelical conversion to Linux, its the Windows way or the highway. Elsewhere, Windows XP and 7 are in a different class to the old DOS frontends that we loved to hate, and (if you don't mind the premium-but-cool hardware) OS X offers you a decent GUI running on top of Unix, native versions of quite a few of the big-brand paid apps and native versions of major FOSS projects like Firefox and Libreoffice (...plus pretty much everything else via MacPorts, but we're talking desktop).
In most cases, you're talking about a few minutes before and during takeoff and a few minutes during landing. During that time, read a book.
I mostly agree - the most compelling argument that anybody has made here is that silly or arbitrary rules erode respect for important rules. It's also a distraction for the flight crew to have to go around telling people to turn off their Kindles - my concern is that the longer the check-list of remotely possible dangers (electronics, blankets, headphones, small loose objects that could be hurled with lethal force if the plane manoeuvres violently enough to, er, break everybody's neck anyway...) the less likely they are to actually be looking around and engaging brain to see if anything is seriously amiss...
I have to admit it, I got caught up in the hype and I bought an tablet. The novelty wore off after a couple of days. Since then, it has sat on my desk, almost completely unused. In fact, it's one of the worst purchases I've ever made.
I bought a small car the other day. Worst purchase I ever made: it won't tow my boat, there's no room in the back for a goat and it can't transport my family of six. After a 1000 mile drive I feel totally exhausted, and it got stuck 100 yards up the half mile dirt track to my house, where it stays while I drive around in my old SUV.
Oh, wait, that's a lie - I have a small car because I don't have a house at the end of a dirt track, a boat, six kids, a goat or a regular need to drive more than a couple of hundred miles... And If I did, I'd quite possibly keep a second small car for convenience when I didn't need to take the goat.
That's where we're heading: PC=truck, Tablet=small car. Pick one or both depending on your needs.
The tablet is ideal for browsing the web, checking email (and making brief replies), playing casual games etc. while sitting in a comfy chair. I can also run the on-demand players for all 5 main TV channels here (only one of which is available on my "smart" TV). At meetings and conferences it's all I need to carry around unless I'm demoing certain bits of software, and it's a much less obtrusive way of taking meeting notes. I can plug in a camera adapter and preview my shots on the road (thats where the new iPads retina display is going to shine).
What it won't do is supplant my proper computer for serious work. However, I know quite a few people for whom a tablet would be all the portable computer they needed. For me, it's all the computer I need while sitting in an armchair.
Ps. I agree that the ePaper Kindle is a better tool for reading a novel. however, that's all a Kindle can do - even for reference books I find the tablet better.
Microsoft initially licensed content from Funk and Wagnall
For free?
Britannica owned their own content. Maybe they'd have had to pay royalties to individual authors but that's a fraction of what you'd pay to license the content from a third party.
Ah, the common consumer fallacy - it's "just" a CD, so it should be orders of magnitude cheaper...
Thats only a fallacy in the absence of competing products that are an order of magnitude cheaper. Now, maybe Microsoft was subsidising Encarta as a loss leader - on the other hand, they had to start from scratch, while Britannica had all their articles written.
Frankly though, any time your premiums are calculated with a secret proprietary formula you're getting fucked hard without so much as a by-your-leave.
The best bit is where the insurance companies complain about the rising cost of claims, while simultaneously selling the details of anyone who has a no-fault accident to ambulance-chasing lawyers and overpriced replacement car outfits.
If some f***ing idiot thinks he or she can drive around with an uninsured car, which hasn't been tested for roadworthiness (because you can't get an MOT without insurance)
...then the police, who have access to the MOT database, the Insurance database, the numberplate database and the list of registered keepers of all motor vehicles (including whether or not they've been declared as off-the-road) can pull you over when they see your numberplate, or send a human being round to the registered keeper to investigate and quickly discover whether there has been a genuine offence, a database screw up or if someone may be driving around with a copy of your numberplate.
That way, nobody ends up stranded half way between London and Glasgow the poorly-maintained APNR at the filling station misread your numberplate or some secretary at the DVLA reversed 2 letters of your number plate. (Since you're taking an "innocent people have nothing to fear" line, you might prefer your chances of reasoning with a trained police officer rather than a random filling station attendant).
If companies would implement lockout policies, they would have to pay a group of four-five people to answer phones and unlock accounts all day.
After half-a-dozen failures, the user is probably going to have to contact the company anyway.
How about if the lockout was 5 seconds on the first 3 failures, 10 seconds on the next 3, then 20 seconds etc. (a user mistyping their password would just see a pause before failure was reported - they'd only know that they'd been locked out if they immediately tried to log in from a different browser or something)... then " then "go away and come back in 30 minutes"?
And woe betide the company which gets its username list posted somewhere
.If its a remotely secure site, the admin should already be in the server room by then because the klaxons and red strobes should kick off as soon as more than x% of their user base tries to log in from the same IP or y% tries to log in from anywhere within a short space of time.
Anyway, a botnet trying to brute force the password of every user would probably slashdot most websites anyway, lock-out or no.
Even if FaceTime is bandwidth-limited or someting, it'd be nice to take pictures of, say, yourself and your kids in greater than 0.3MP.
That's why its got a 5MP camera on the back. Or you could use a proper camera with decent ergonomics and a lens bigger than a bead. Capturing your fizz for a video call is about the only practical use of the front camera.
Oh, and the name--iPad, iPad 2, The new iPad.
Well, every new iMac since 1998 has been "The new iMac" and that seems to have gone OK.
Of course, Apple should really take a tip from proper, grown-up consumer electronics manufacturers like Sony or Samsung and give its products proper, grown-up names like the "IPD2048-16B2(W)/A":-)
That didn't prevent other giants of traditional photography like Canon and Nikon to evolve and adapt to the new era, successfully competing again the new kinds.
...but Canon and Nikon had a reputation for quality cameras. Companies like Sony and Panasonic were already associated with image quality via TV and video. Kodak's reputation was for film, processing and cheap'n'cheerful cameras built around new film/processing systems.
If you see several digital cameras for around the same price: a Kodak, a Nikon, a Canon, a sony with a big Zeiss label on the lens, or a Leica-branded Panasonic, which one is going to be at the bottom of your shortlist?
Actually, I wonder if Kodak's demise didnt start before digital, when compact, autoloading 35mm point'n'shoots became popular at the expense of cartridge/disc film systems. Of course, they still got to sell the film. Kodak also spent a lot on stop-gap systems like APS and PhotoCD (jolly useful as a cheap way of getting negatives scanned for multimedia development etc. but not a big hit with Joe public).
and apple will have a hard time selling itv in the uk. If they where to name there apple tv Itv.
So it's a good job that Apple haven't even confirmed that they are making a TV, let alone what it will be called.
Also, the newspaper claim that ITV had contacted Apple to warn them off has been disputed - although I believe it was briefly an issue some years ago when the Apple TV STB was first announced.
Disregarding all that, yes, iTV would be a spectacularly bad name to use in the UK - even legally - because its a household name that has been associated with the second largest TV channel since the 1950s even though the current company is fairly recent. They have already ventured into IPTV with their "ITV Player" service (there's an App for that). Also, if you read the Wikipedia article on ITV you'll see that the "ownership" of the name ITV is far from simple, and acquiring it would be a can of worms (quite probably involving the UK government).
Oh, and since ITV Studios sell shows worldwide, its a fair bet that the trademark is registered in other countries, too.
All that is rather a far cry from buying the trademark rights to the name of a specific, obscure (or possibly discontinued) product.
Plus, most people could eat a can of Alphabetti Spaghetti and puke a better name for a premium-priced television set.
By that argument, Dune is a sci-fi version of the Gospels.
OK, never really finished those, but I don't remember a bit where Mary Magdalene teaches Jesus how to survive in the desert, or where Jesus leads the Jews to victory over the Romans mounted atop a giant sandworm/pterodactyl/whatever (ISTR it was more about reasons not to rise up and fight the Romans). However, I do vaguely remember a bit about riding a donkey, and I know they can be tricky sometimes...
I guess the sequel, Dune Messiah, where the whole thing had got corrupted and caused millions to die in pointless holy wars, was a fairly blatant ripoff, though.
Clinging to the outside of a submarine while it travels halfway around the world...
The fridge stunt was completely in keeping with the tongue-in-cheek tone of the Indy films - the film sucked because it was the much-delayed fourth film in a trilogy. When has that ever worked?
From TFA: 'Homes that cannot receive these alternative platforms will receive up to £10,000 each to "find a solution".'
Really? £10,000? Is television so critical that people will die without it? At today's exchange rates, that USD $15,760. Wow.
The Government is looking to make a metric shedload of money by auctioning off what used to be the analog TV frequencies. Of course they should take steps to ensure that nobody loses out as a result. People have recently paid for DTT boxes and, sometimes, arial upgrades as part of the digital switchover (and theyve had up to a decade to do that) - so this new 4g interference is really a bit of a cockup, and the government has to sweeten it..
These £10k cases are houses that will lose terrestrial digital TV and for whatever reason, cant simply sign up to cable or satellite. Its likely that the money from several affected houses will be pooled in order to run new cable to the community or build a relay transmitter - I doubt many households will be getting a £10k windfall. Most will be getting a few bucks worth of filter.
if your an "administrative user", apple does not like you, they never wanted you, and in all probability they hate you.
Why don't you read one of the actual reports about the new OS? Then you might see the large friendly dialogue box with the "run anything but don't come cryin' to us if you get pwned" option.
So, isn't this rather similar to the feature that Windows has had for years that warns you about running downloaded files
No, OS X has done something like that for years, too - except that works by using metadata to track downloads and warning the first time they are run, rather than just after they are downloaded (it even remembers where it was downloaded from). This adds code signing to the armory (new to OS X, outside the App Store, but obviously not new to the world) - pretty much anybody can get a signing key, but they prevent further changes after signing & Apple can revoke keys for malware.
Plus, you can turn the feature off if you think you're too smart to run a trojan.
Let me tell you something.... many MANY people can't hook up a TV input to save their lives (or would be glad to avoid having to do that).
But that could be improved if you strip out all the legacy connectors (RCA, VGA, SCART in Europe). Have a bunch of easily-accessible, and completely interchangeable, HDMI inputs, and keep everything else behind a cover. Include a network hub and support HDMI+Ethernet on all the inputs, so even "smart"/IPTV boxes only need a single cable. Standardize a bit on auto-sensing, remote control sharing (which you generally get now if you stick to brand X components). Have a "soft" remote control (i.e. a cheap tablet or e-ink device) that works over a wireless link to the telly and encourage component manufacturers to produce interactive remote control "apps" for their devices using something standard like "HTML5".
Basically, stop seeing the TV as the "receiver" and design it as the hub for a collection of content sources.
Oh, yes, and if you're a big, rich electronic company pay a native speaker to write the fsking manual for each country - I'm loathed to mock too much at "Engrish" (being shamelessly monolingual) but when I produced some software for a Japanese customer, I didn't say "how hard can it be?" and muddle through with Google Translate and re-watching Shogun, I got an actual bilingual, literate Japanese person to do the translation.
It has to be *in* the TVs because this way you'll buy a new one every year when something shinier comes out.
That may have worked in the "end to boom-and-bust" years but it might not work these days.
So far, if you have a decent 1080p panel with HDMI, there's not a lot you can't buy a box for. Apart from 3D (and please wait while I wipe away floods of inconsolable tears over that). Here in the UK they're pulling a fast one and making it very hard to get a set with DVB2/FreeviewHD (which *is* nice to have built in, and people want) without also getting 3D (yes, such sets do exist but good luck finding them in a store... at least active 3D doesn't degrade the picture when its not in use). We'll see if that works or whether people realize that, since they will need a HD PVR box anyway, they can just keep their old HD Ready panel.
I think the industry has pushed things too fast in the last decade - Wide Screen, LCD, Digital, HD, 3D... in the current economic climate people could end up scared to buy lest the next "new thing" appears. I'm used to upgrading gadgets every year or two, but even I'd expect to get 10 years out of a decent TV screen.
Once mounted, a new drive letter appears in Windows Explorer that represents the virtual CD/DVD ROM
Your command line won't do that... and Aunty May isn't going to want to do su; cd/; mkdir A: B: C: D:...etc. and then write a script to find the next free letter (and fail gracefully if they all got used when she connected to the company network). Even though lots of Linux distros have a click-n-drool mechanism for mounting ISOs I bet none of them will create a new drive letter for the volume!
Linux will never take off until all the godless commie nerds writing it forget about the temptations of the Unix file system and implement proper drive letters like every professional operating system since CP/M. Honest god-fearin' People need to know the difference between a device and a directory - or we'll all be doomed. I mean, look at the disgusting terminology: "mount point" for pity's sake! Its the work of the Devil!!!
There will always be times when you need some widget that day, and no amount of money will solve that problem through Amazon.
That's what they don't seem to "get" with their web presence: If I visit a B&M store's website then it means I want to go and pick something up, or look at it before I buy. What I want is to check stock, find out whether its on display and (possibly) reserve it: if I was planning on buying it online I'd go through Amazon or a price comparison site.
Yet, when you go to the typical store's website what you find is an online store with B&M prices - plus some "web exclusive prices" that are still sub-par. Yes, you can usually check stock & reserve (but you often have to add the item to your basket and "go to checkout" to get that far) but I've never seen the "is it on display?" feature.
They're trying to hedge their bets by branching out into online sales, in competition with their own stores, rather than using the web to drive business to their expensively maintained stores. That seems futile: B&M stores can't compete with big, well-established online sellers' prices or range.
If I visit a B&M store website, the first page ought to ask me to choose my local store (or guess it using geolocation) and from then on it should be showing me stock, offers and what was on display at that store. If something was out-of-stock then the site should show the nearest store that had it, or an ETA and only as a last resort the option to buy online. Even with online sales, the option to pay a deposit and have the goods delivered to my local store would be a USP over Amazon: getting packages delivered can be a pain if you work full-time and don't want to/aren't allowed to get stuff delivered to your workplace.
TFA says he ported Darwin - the open-source version of the OS X kernel - and got as far as a multi-user login prompt (he'd need some of the BSD toolchain to get that far, but you could run BSD on the ARM-based Acorn Archimedes in the early 90s).
Not to be sneezed at as an intern project - but a long, long way from porting "OS X".
Its the difference between porting "Linux" (in the correct sense of the name - i.e. the kernel) and porting Linux + GNU tools + X.Org + KDE/Gnome +... in order to make something resembling modern Linux distro.
Not that its remotely unfeasible to port OS X to ARM (nobody outside of Apple knows how much of iOS code is directly ported from OS X but economic common sense says "as much as possible") and I'd be unsurprised if Apple had an ARM-based Mac lashed up behind a closed door at Infinite Loop. Apple know a thing or two about supporting multiple processor architectures and It might just make sense as a stop-gap between the iPad and the Air if it offered size/weight/power savings over Intel. Feasible, but probably not likely.
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Unless you value Free As In Speech Software as a matter of principle (nothing wrong with that - but understand that many potential users don't care) then there is no particular "unique selling point" for Linux on the desktop.
On a server, an embedded device - completely different issue: Linux or BSD FTW unless you're absolutely forced to run some proprietary Microsoft service.
On the desktop, however...
Cost - for home/small biz users: you get Windows or OS X bundled with your computer. OEMs that sell "bare" PCs for less money than ones with Windows do exist - so its not quite hen's teeth - but you'll have a restricted choice. You also might find yourself paying extra for the privilege of knowing that your WiFi card, TV tuner etc. are supported by Linux c.f. the cheap no-brand ones - and with some things, e.g. high-def terrestrial TV (at least in the UK) you're SOL. Now, if you're a larger business paying per-seat licenses for Windows, this may be an area where you have an "in" provided you don't need any Windows-only software for interoperability with clients - but once more than a certain proportion of your seats need Windows, the economies will change.
Free Applications - most of the big-name free applications are available on OS X and/or Windows anyway.
Paid Applications - many of the big-name paid-for applications, are only available for Windows or, in some cases, OS X. Sadly, sometimes you need Office or Adobe CS, if only because you have to interoperate with others. Please don't say LibreOffice etc. will open/save Office files: most of the text, some of the graphics and precious little layout doesn't cut the mustard. Not the developer's fault - the office formats are effectively undocumented, but that doesn't make the problem go away.
Ease of user - contrary to popular belief, you can have ease of use in Linux: just apply the zenfoobar_5_12_14 patch, recompile your kernel then open a shell and do 'apt-get --neutron-flow-polarity=reverse ease_of_use_21234298745 | tachyon_burst > front_deflector_array' ... and if you can't do that then you're too bloody stupid to use a computer.
Seriously - Linux was making great strides towards ease-of-use, hampered by three competing desktop ecosystems/UI styles (Gnome, KDE and old-school-X) but just as they were getting somewhere near maturity and almost as good as Windows and OS X they were pretty much dumped by the major distros in favour of immature tablet/netbook-inspired front ends. (Windows may be about to make the same mistake, OS X, despite the fuss, has largely limited the iPadization to optional features that you can ignore if you don't have a 13" screen and a touchpad).
Lets face it, in a corporate environment, unless the Powers That Be have an evangelical conversion to Linux, its the Windows way or the highway. Elsewhere, Windows XP and 7 are in a different class to the old DOS frontends that we loved to hate, and (if you don't mind the premium-but-cool hardware) OS X offers you a decent GUI running on top of Unix, native versions of quite a few of the big-brand paid apps and native versions of major FOSS projects like Firefox and Libreoffice (...plus pretty much everything else via MacPorts, but we're talking desktop).
In most cases, you're talking about a few minutes before and during takeoff and a few minutes during landing. During that time, read a book.
I mostly agree - the most compelling argument that anybody has made here is that silly or arbitrary rules erode respect for important rules. It's also a distraction for the flight crew to have to go around telling people to turn off their Kindles - my concern is that the longer the check-list of remotely possible dangers (electronics, blankets, headphones, small loose objects that could be hurled with lethal force if the plane manoeuvres violently enough to, er, break everybody's neck anyway...) the less likely they are to actually be looking around and engaging brain to see if anything is seriously amiss...
I have to admit it, I got caught up in the hype and I bought an tablet. The novelty wore off after a couple of days. Since then, it has sat on my desk, almost completely unused. In fact, it's one of the worst purchases I've ever made.
I bought a small car the other day. Worst purchase I ever made: it won't tow my boat, there's no room in the back for a goat and it can't transport my family of six. After a 1000 mile drive I feel totally exhausted, and it got stuck 100 yards up the half mile dirt track to my house, where it stays while I drive around in my old SUV.
Oh, wait, that's a lie - I have a small car because I don't have a house at the end of a dirt track, a boat, six kids, a goat or a regular need to drive more than a couple of hundred miles... And If I did, I'd quite possibly keep a second small car for convenience when I didn't need to take the goat.
That's where we're heading: PC=truck, Tablet=small car. Pick one or both depending on your needs.
The tablet is ideal for browsing the web, checking email (and making brief replies), playing casual games etc. while sitting in a comfy chair. I can also run the on-demand players for all 5 main TV channels here (only one of which is available on my "smart" TV). At meetings and conferences it's all I need to carry around unless I'm demoing certain bits of software, and it's a much less obtrusive way of taking meeting notes. I can plug in a camera adapter and preview my shots on the road (thats where the new iPads retina display is going to shine).
What it won't do is supplant my proper computer for serious work. However, I know quite a few people for whom a tablet would be all the portable computer they needed. For me, it's all the computer I need while sitting in an armchair.
Ps. I agree that the ePaper Kindle is a better tool for reading a novel. however, that's all a Kindle can do - even for reference books I find the tablet better.
Sent from my Tablet, sitting in a comfy chair.
Microsoft initially licensed content from Funk and Wagnall
For free?
Britannica owned their own content. Maybe they'd have had to pay royalties to individual authors but that's a fraction of what you'd pay to license the content from a third party.
Ah, the common consumer fallacy - it's "just" a CD, so it should be orders of magnitude cheaper...
Thats only a fallacy in the absence of competing products that are an order of magnitude cheaper. Now, maybe Microsoft was subsidising Encarta as a loss leader - on the other hand, they had to start from scratch, while Britannica had all their articles written.
Plus, if you cut the price, you sell more.
Frankly though, any time your premiums are calculated with a secret proprietary formula you're getting fucked hard without so much as a by-your-leave.
The best bit is where the insurance companies complain about the rising cost of claims, while simultaneously selling the details of anyone who has a no-fault accident to ambulance-chasing lawyers and overpriced replacement car outfits.
If some f***ing idiot thinks he or she can drive around with an uninsured car, which hasn't been tested for roadworthiness (because you can't get an MOT without insurance)
...then the police, who have access to the MOT database, the Insurance database, the numberplate database and the list of registered keepers of all motor vehicles (including whether or not they've been declared as off-the-road) can pull you over when they see your numberplate, or send a human being round to the registered keeper to investigate and quickly discover whether there has been a genuine offence, a database screw up or if someone may be driving around with a copy of your numberplate.
That way, nobody ends up stranded half way between London and Glasgow the poorly-maintained APNR at the filling station misread your numberplate or some secretary at the DVLA reversed 2 letters of your number plate. (Since you're taking an "innocent people have nothing to fear" line, you might prefer your chances of reasoning with a trained police officer rather than a random filling station attendant).
If companies would implement lockout policies, they would have to pay a group of four-five people to answer phones and unlock accounts all day.
After half-a-dozen failures, the user is probably going to have to contact the company anyway.
How about if the lockout was 5 seconds on the first 3 failures, 10 seconds on the next 3, then 20 seconds etc. (a user mistyping their password would just see a pause before failure was reported - they'd only know that they'd been locked out if they immediately tried to log in from a different browser or something)... then " then "go away and come back in 30 minutes"?
And woe betide the company which gets its username list posted somewhere
.If its a remotely secure site, the admin should already be in the server room by then because the klaxons and red strobes should kick off as soon as more than x% of their user base tries to log in from the same IP or y% tries to log in from anywhere within a short space of time.
Anyway, a botnet trying to brute force the password of every user would probably slashdot most websites anyway, lock-out or no.
Even if FaceTime is bandwidth-limited or someting, it'd be nice to take pictures of, say, yourself and your kids in greater than 0.3MP.
That's why its got a 5MP camera on the back. Or you could use a proper camera with decent ergonomics and a lens bigger than a bead. Capturing your fizz for a video call is about the only practical use of the front camera.
Oh, and the name--iPad, iPad 2, The new iPad.
Well, every new iMac since 1998 has been "The new iMac" and that seems to have gone OK.
Of course, Apple should really take a tip from proper, grown-up consumer electronics manufacturers like Sony or Samsung and give its products proper, grown-up names like the "IPD2048-16B2(W)/A" :-)
I predict that factors like this will be the impetus for society ultimately being OK with switching over to computer driven vehicles.
Good idea. Computers will give the road their full attention and, unlike humans, are immune to distrac....
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Crunch!
That didn't prevent other giants of traditional photography like Canon and Nikon to evolve and adapt to the new era, successfully competing again the new kinds.
...but Canon and Nikon had a reputation for quality cameras. Companies like Sony and Panasonic were already associated with image quality via TV and video. Kodak's reputation was for film, processing and cheap'n'cheerful cameras built around new film/processing systems.
If you see several digital cameras for around the same price: a Kodak, a Nikon, a Canon, a sony with a big Zeiss label on the lens, or a Leica-branded Panasonic, which one is going to be at the bottom of your shortlist?
Actually, I wonder if Kodak's demise didnt start before digital, when compact, autoloading 35mm point'n'shoots became popular at the expense of cartridge/disc film systems. Of course, they still got to sell the film. Kodak also spent a lot on stop-gap systems like APS and PhotoCD (jolly useful as a cheap way of getting negatives scanned for multimedia development etc. but not a big hit with Joe public).
and apple will have a hard time selling itv in the uk. If they where to name there apple tv Itv.
So it's a good job that Apple haven't even confirmed that they are making a TV, let alone what it will be called.
Also, the newspaper claim that ITV had contacted Apple to warn them off has been disputed - although I believe it was briefly an issue some years ago when the Apple TV STB was first announced.
Disregarding all that, yes, iTV would be a spectacularly bad name to use in the UK - even legally - because its a household name that has been associated with the second largest TV channel since the 1950s even though the current company is fairly recent. They have already ventured into IPTV with their "ITV Player" service (there's an App for that). Also, if you read the Wikipedia article on ITV you'll see that the "ownership" of the name ITV is far from simple, and acquiring it would be a can of worms (quite probably involving the UK government).
Oh, and since ITV Studios sell shows worldwide, its a fair bet that the trademark is registered in other countries, too.
All that is rather a far cry from buying the trademark rights to the name of a specific, obscure (or possibly discontinued) product.
Plus, most people could eat a can of Alphabetti Spaghetti and puke a better name for a premium-priced television set.
By that argument, Dune is a sci-fi version of the Gospels.
OK, never really finished those, but I don't remember a bit where Mary Magdalene teaches Jesus how to survive in the desert, or where Jesus leads the Jews to victory over the Romans mounted atop a giant sandworm/pterodactyl/whatever (ISTR it was more about reasons not to rise up and fight the Romans). However, I do vaguely remember a bit about riding a donkey, and I know they can be tricky sometimes...
I guess the sequel, Dune Messiah, where the whole thing had got corrupted and caused millions to die in pointless holy wars, was a fairly blatant ripoff, though.
Never having seen Dances with Wolves or Ferngully the Last Rainforest, I even enjoyed the plot of Avatar when I went to see it.
All these people saying that Avatar was just a ripoff of "Ferngully, the Last Dances With Pocahontas" are completely missing the point.
...which is that Avatar was a dumbed-down version of Dune :-).
Clinging to the outside of a submarine while it travels halfway around the world...
The fridge stunt was completely in keeping with the tongue-in-cheek tone of the Indy films - the film sucked because it was the much-delayed fourth film in a trilogy. When has that ever worked?
From TFA: 'Homes that cannot receive these alternative platforms will receive up to £10,000 each to "find a solution".'
Really? £10,000? Is television so critical that people will die without it? At today's exchange rates, that USD $15,760. Wow.
The Government is looking to make a metric shedload of money by auctioning off what used to be the analog TV frequencies. Of course they should take steps to ensure that nobody loses out as a result. People have recently paid for DTT boxes and, sometimes, arial upgrades as part of the digital switchover (and theyve had up to a decade to do that) - so this new 4g interference is really a bit of a cockup, and the government has to sweeten it..
These £10k cases are houses that will lose terrestrial digital TV and for whatever reason, cant simply sign up to cable or satellite. Its likely that the money from several affected houses will be pooled in order to run new cable to the community or build a relay transmitter - I doubt many households will be getting a £10k windfall. Most will be getting a few bucks worth of filter.
Does this mean that is supports Quadroscopic Anaglyph mode? After all, if you have four eyes, Stereoscopic is never going to be enough...
Do VLC now provide inn-sewer-ants against patent infringements?
if your an "administrative user", apple does not like you, they never wanted you, and in all probability they hate you.
Why don't you read one of the actual reports about the new OS? Then you might see the large friendly dialogue box with the "run anything but don't come cryin' to us if you get pwned" option.
So, isn't this rather similar to the feature that Windows has had for years that warns you about running downloaded files
No, OS X has done something like that for years, too - except that works by using metadata to track downloads and warning the first time they are run, rather than just after they are downloaded (it even remembers where it was downloaded from). This adds code signing to the armory (new to OS X, outside the App Store, but obviously not new to the world) - pretty much anybody can get a signing key, but they prevent further changes after signing & Apple can revoke keys for malware.
Plus, you can turn the feature off if you think you're too smart to run a trojan.
Let me tell you something.... many MANY people can't hook up a TV input to save their lives (or would be glad to avoid having to do that).
But that could be improved if you strip out all the legacy connectors (RCA, VGA, SCART in Europe). Have a bunch of easily-accessible, and completely interchangeable, HDMI inputs, and keep everything else behind a cover. Include a network hub and support HDMI+Ethernet on all the inputs, so even "smart"/IPTV boxes only need a single cable. Standardize a bit on auto-sensing, remote control sharing (which you generally get now if you stick to brand X components). Have a "soft" remote control (i.e. a cheap tablet or e-ink device) that works over a wireless link to the telly and encourage component manufacturers to produce interactive remote control "apps" for their devices using something standard like "HTML5".
Basically, stop seeing the TV as the "receiver" and design it as the hub for a collection of content sources.
Oh, yes, and if you're a big, rich electronic company pay a native speaker to write the fsking manual for each country - I'm loathed to mock too much at "Engrish" (being shamelessly monolingual) but when I produced some software for a Japanese customer, I didn't say "how hard can it be?" and muddle through with Google Translate and re-watching Shogun, I got an actual bilingual, literate Japanese person to do the translation.
It has to be *in* the TVs because this way you'll buy a new one every year when something shinier comes out.
That may have worked in the "end to boom-and-bust" years but it might not work these days.
So far, if you have a decent 1080p panel with HDMI, there's not a lot you can't buy a box for. Apart from 3D (and please wait while I wipe away floods of inconsolable tears over that). Here in the UK they're pulling a fast one and making it very hard to get a set with DVB2/FreeviewHD (which *is* nice to have built in, and people want) without also getting 3D (yes, such sets do exist but good luck finding them in a store... at least active 3D doesn't degrade the picture when its not in use). We'll see if that works or whether people realize that, since they will need a HD PVR box anyway, they can just keep their old HD Ready panel.
I think the industry has pushed things too fast in the last decade - Wide Screen, LCD, Digital, HD, 3D... in the current economic climate people could end up scared to buy lest the next "new thing" appears. I'm used to upgrading gadgets every year or two, but even I'd expect to get 10 years out of a decent TV screen.
Read the TFA:
Once mounted, a new drive letter appears in Windows Explorer that represents the virtual CD/DVD ROM
Your command line won't do that... and Aunty May isn't going to want to do su; cd /; mkdir A: B: C: D: ...etc. and then write a script to find the next free letter (and fail gracefully if they all got used when she connected to the company network). Even though lots of Linux distros have a click-n-drool mechanism for mounting ISOs I bet none of them will create a new drive letter for the volume!
Linux will never take off until all the godless commie nerds writing it forget about the temptations of the Unix file system and implement proper drive letters like every professional operating system since CP/M. Honest god-fearin' People need to know the difference between a device and a directory - or we'll all be doomed. I mean, look at the disgusting terminology: "mount point" for pity's sake! Its the work of the Devil!!!
There will always be times when you need some widget that day, and no amount of money will solve that problem through Amazon.
That's what they don't seem to "get" with their web presence: If I visit a B&M store's website then it means I want to go and pick something up, or look at it before I buy. What I want is to check stock, find out whether its on display and (possibly) reserve it: if I was planning on buying it online I'd go through Amazon or a price comparison site.
Yet, when you go to the typical store's website what you find is an online store with B&M prices - plus some "web exclusive prices" that are still sub-par. Yes, you can usually check stock & reserve (but you often have to add the item to your basket and "go to checkout" to get that far) but I've never seen the "is it on display?" feature.
They're trying to hedge their bets by branching out into online sales, in competition with their own stores, rather than using the web to drive business to their expensively maintained stores. That seems futile: B&M stores can't compete with big, well-established online sellers' prices or range.
If I visit a B&M store website, the first page ought to ask me to choose my local store (or guess it using geolocation) and from then on it should be showing me stock, offers and what was on display at that store. If something was out-of-stock then the site should show the nearest store that had it, or an ETA and only as a last resort the option to buy online. Even with online sales, the option to pay a deposit and have the goods delivered to my local store would be a USP over Amazon: getting packages delivered can be a pain if you work full-time and don't want to/aren't allowed to get stuff delivered to your workplace.
TFA says he ported Darwin - the open-source version of the OS X kernel - and got as far as a multi-user login prompt (he'd need some of the BSD toolchain to get that far, but you could run BSD on the ARM-based Acorn Archimedes in the early 90s). Not to be sneezed at as an intern project - but a long, long way from porting "OS X".
Its the difference between porting "Linux" (in the correct sense of the name - i.e. the kernel) and porting Linux + GNU tools + X.Org + KDE/Gnome + ... in order to make something resembling modern Linux distro.
Not that its remotely unfeasible to port OS X to ARM (nobody outside of Apple knows how much of iOS code is directly ported from OS X but economic common sense says "as much as possible") and I'd be unsurprised if Apple had an ARM-based Mac lashed up behind a closed door at Infinite Loop. Apple know a thing or two about supporting multiple processor architectures and It might just make sense as a stop-gap between the iPad and the Air if it offered size/weight/power savings over Intel. Feasible, but probably not likely.
Despair not: some of us got the joke.... :-)