The real drama is now between PCs and managed handhelds like iPhone, iPad, Android, etc. If all these smartphones end up with bigger-brother tablets that sell well, then PC culture will shrink and the new normal will be systems like iPad that operate within walled gardens that have an anti-Web bias.
People are not engineers: they buy air conditioners, refrigerators and cars. Very few people can design, build and service them. That's coming with computers as well: we're going to have a lot of single purpose or reduced capabilities appliances and less general purpose computers. That should be ok for both users and developers. The only problem could be if companies won't let developers fiddle with their devices but if even Apple's letting developers program its devices (with some form censorship) that means that we're going to be able to do it even in future. Too bad we're going to have to buy dozens of different and incompatible pieces of hardware. It will be like developing games for a dozen consoles at the beginning of the 80's.
Is this durability real? If you bought a desktop computer 5 years ago and wanted to upgrade it with the most recent components what would you have kept of the original machine? Maybe the fans, maybe the power supply, probably the case. Anything else? The only advantage a desktop can give you is that you can change a few parts per time. That's something you usually can't do with a laptop with the exception of ram and disk.
Nobody really cares at about how well a team plays if that team never wins anything. Or: nobody cares how bad a team plays if it wins a trophy. You can play awfully but if you win the World Cup all your country will celebrate at least until the next day.
A metric could be more interesting for single players but again: if the computer says that you're good but you never win anything maybe your not so good. Getting in the right team at the right moment is also an important skill.
There is only a handful of countries that need to distinguish between different football games. Most of the world has only one such a game, the one played in the World Cup right now, so calling it football is right in almost every country.
Thank you for pointing me out how US taxation works. I had only second hands tales about it. And thank you for the link about the UAE: I'm happy to know that at least in one country things went the way they should but I'm not optimistic about Afghanistan, do you?
Who do you think works for the corporations? Answer: The taxpayers.
My understanding is that US citizens must pay taxes in the USA even if they work abroad, but that's not the case for every other nationalities. So part of these salaries will go to the USA and part not.
Also, do you think mining is going to be a nonprofit organization? They'll pay taxes to the government.
Of which country? Corporations have proven to be very good at paying taxes where they cost them less money. Check this for an example.
This is great news because this could help wipe out Afghanistan's poverty, the actual biggest obstacle to a functioning government.
That's exactly what happened everywhere oil or minerals have been discovered around the world. Middle East currently enjoys highest standard of living than the rest of the world thanks to half a century of massive oil extraction. Oh wait...
Unfortunately it seems that shotwell doesn't import f-spot's tags database. That's a big annoyance for anybody who tagged an extensive photo collection and it could be a motivation to keep using f-spot. The ability to import data from competing software has been a very important feature for any new program that wants to divert users from an existing one (Firefox imports IE bookmarks, Thunderbird imports mails and address book from Outlook Express, etc) so I'm surprised the shotwell didn't do that from its very first release.
3G phones with video calling have existed in the UK since 2004/2005.
3 launched in the UK on 3/3/2003 and they had phones that could do videocalls, as they did in all the other countries where 3 operates. However costs and the basic uselessness to look at somebody when talking to him/her over a phone turned videocalls into a redundant feature for almost every single customer.
The iPad WiFi-only videocall could be successful in a desk environment: you place the iPad close to your computer and you videocall on it while you keep working. You free space on the desktop and you get a large picture that never goes under any window. Unfortunately it's an iPad only thing and I don't see Skype or other players of the videocall business integrating it into their clients.
That applies to any monoculture, from corn to poultry. Consider this example.
Lack of genetic variation, simply put, equals greater risk. Members of a population that shares the same set of genes can all be overcome by a disease, but if a population’s members contain different gene sets, there is a chance some will survive.
Unfortunately monocultures are convenient, even in IT.
Good for you. Some companies are still on Win2k because it gives them with a good enough typewriter and email system. They'll eventually move to something more recent only because they won't be able to run Win2k on the new hardware they'll have to buy to replace the one that fails.
If the gaming industry really lost those 41 billions and assuming that they didn't go entirely into savings, which other industries earned those money instead?
Whatever they were the overall economy should have benefited of those expenses.
However my assumption is almost nobody got them because people pirating games don't want or don't have money to spend so those losses are purely hypothetical.
I'm pretty sure that if we sum up all the potential losses of all industries due to piracy (fashion, cosmetics, pharma, movies, songs, games) we end up with a figure greater than the GDP of their customer base.
There is a standard for video calls on phones. It's the one that all 3G phones use since 2002. Actually, I've got phones that can do video calls since 2003. Obviously Apple tought that going their proprietary way would let them make more money.
The energy comes, ultimately, from the wind. One might as well ask, "Where would the energy to move a sailboat faster than the prevailing wind come from?"
It also comes from the wind, but I know that you know that.
A boat (an iceboat, a sandboat, a windsurf) might be much faster than the real wind but it's never faster than the apparent wind. By the way, that's an unfortunate name because it's very real. Did everybody try to wave a hand out of a car on an highway and feel the strength of the apparent wind, right?:-)
... of paper on my desktop, the one under my notebook. I write in shades of gray (or blue) so it would be functionally equivalent to paper and much better for long term storage of my notes (which I can afford to lose). But it must start up *quickly*. Paper starts up in zero time.
Furthermore I can hopefully put pdf files in it with a SD card:-)
If they want your fucking finger print they can get it from any of the several thousand other impressions you make during the day. From the desk you were sitting at, the papers you turn in, the locker door you open, the toilet you flush.
Think about the cost of collecting fingerprints on every desk and associate them with a name compared to the convenience of people voluntarily providing you both.
Same here. It started with my netbook, as I tried desperately to maximize vertical space so that I could actually read pdfs and long web pages. From there it trickled into my main machine.
I'm using eeebuntu NetBook Remix on my netbook. It's got a full screen launcher menu which stays at the bottom of the windows stack, hiding the desktop which on a machine like that is pretty useless anyway. I pop up the launcher with a key. I maximize all windows and run everything I can fullscreen to remove borders, menus, icons. Firefox is particularly good at this: try F11 now and move the mouse to the top to make the menu appear and disappear. Evince (PDF) does well too.
The left toolbar proposed by Ubuntu always steals precious screen space and doesn't accommodate enough information as NBR's launcher. Furthermore on a netbook is almost useless because you never run many applications at once (and I've got 2 GB on mine). Maybe Ubuntu should just copy from NBR. You can check it at http://www.eeextra.com/reviews/eeebuntu-netbook-remix-on-the-eee-pc.html.
Things are different on a notebook. Luckily I bought my one 3.5 years ago when good old tall displays were still common and luckily it's still a fast enough machine not to have to buy a new one with those bad short widescreens. If I had to, maybe a left toolbar could be good.
And people use Gnome because KDE is too much like Windows (i.e. the default theme has the panel at the bottom).
I removed the top bar of my gnome desktop because it's on the way of my apps there and moved everything into the bottom one. And yes, I don't use KDE because it's too much like Windows but I could switch if gnome 3.0 kills the way I like to use my computer as in the demoes I saw.
I've got phones with both a back facing camera and a front facing camera since 2003. One is for taking pictures, the other one is for video calls or skype. I probably made no more than a couple of such calls in seven years but manufacturers keep insisting to put two cameras in 3G phones here in Europe. I remember that the iPhone was a big departure from this standard when it launched. "Wow, no front facing camera? No MMS? Will it sell?" Maybe this new iPhone version will bring video calls to the masses at last.
The Orthodox Church had (and still has) its own chain of command and its own agenda. Both could be in contrast with the agenda of Stalin. Every dictator attempted to control religion since the beginning of the world. You can see that happening today in many parts of the world. My take is that the real reason Stalin killed priests was not religion or communism but because they were part of a possibly competing organization. Atheism was just a convenient excuse to justify the killings and the deportations and I see that many people are still buying it. Stalin did its best to kill off every competitor starting from inside its own party and yes, I think he cared much more about himself than about communism. Even communism was for him a convenient excuse to rule a country on his own.
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The real drama is now between PCs and managed handhelds like iPhone, iPad, Android, etc. If all these smartphones end up with bigger-brother tablets that sell well, then PC culture will shrink and the new normal will be systems like iPad that operate within walled gardens that have an anti-Web bias.
People are not engineers: they buy air conditioners, refrigerators and cars. Very few people can design, build and service them. That's coming with computers as well: we're going to have a lot of single purpose or reduced capabilities appliances and less general purpose computers. That should be ok for both users and developers. The only problem could be if companies won't let developers fiddle with their devices but if even Apple's letting developers program its devices (with some form censorship) that means that we're going to be able to do it even in future. Too bad we're going to have to buy dozens of different and incompatible pieces of hardware. It will be like developing games for a dozen consoles at the beginning of the 80's.
Is this durability real? If you bought a desktop computer 5 years ago and wanted to upgrade it with the most recent components what would you have kept of the original machine? Maybe the fans, maybe the power supply, probably the case. Anything else? The only advantage a desktop can give you is that you can change a few parts per time. That's something you usually can't do with a laptop with the exception of ram and disk.
Nobody really cares at about how well a team plays if that team never wins anything. Or: nobody cares how bad a team plays if it wins a trophy. You can play awfully but if you win the World Cup all your country will celebrate at least until the next day.
A metric could be more interesting for single players but again: if the computer says that you're good but you never win anything maybe your not so good. Getting in the right team at the right moment is also an important skill.
There is only a handful of countries that need to distinguish between different football games. Most of the world has only one such a game, the one played in the World Cup right now, so calling it football is right in almost every country.
Italian Prosecutors are appointed and not elected http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_of_Italy
It reminds me this famous scam (English subtitles) in a 60s Italian movie. "Selling the Trevi fountain" has become an idiom in Italy since then.
Thank you for pointing me out how US taxation works. I had only second hands tales about it. And thank you for the link about the UAE: I'm happy to know that at least in one country things went the way they should but I'm not optimistic about Afghanistan, do you?
Who do you think works for the corporations? Answer: The taxpayers.
My understanding is that US citizens must pay taxes in the USA even if they work abroad, but that's not the case for every other nationalities. So part of these salaries will go to the USA and part not.
Also, do you think mining is going to be a nonprofit organization? They'll pay taxes to the government.
Of which country? Corporations have proven to be very good at paying taxes where they cost them less money. Check this for an example.
This is great news because this could help wipe out Afghanistan's poverty, the actual biggest obstacle to a functioning government.
That's exactly what happened everywhere oil or minerals have been discovered around the world. Middle East currently enjoys highest standard of living than the rest of the world thanks to half a century of massive oil extraction. Oh wait...
Unfortunately it seems that shotwell doesn't import f-spot's tags database. That's a big annoyance for anybody who tagged an extensive photo collection and it could be a motivation to keep using f-spot. The ability to import data from competing software has been a very important feature for any new program that wants to divert users from an existing one (Firefox imports IE bookmarks, Thunderbird imports mails and address book from Outlook Express, etc) so I'm surprised the shotwell didn't do that from its very first release.
3G phones with video calling have existed in the UK since 2004/2005.
3 launched in the UK on 3/3/2003 and they had phones that could do videocalls, as they did in all the other countries where 3 operates. However costs and the basic uselessness to look at somebody when talking to him/her over a phone turned videocalls into a redundant feature for almost every single customer.
The iPad WiFi-only videocall could be successful in a desk environment: you place the iPad close to your computer and you videocall on it while you keep working. You free space on the desktop and you get a large picture that never goes under any window. Unfortunately it's an iPad only thing and I don't see Skype or other players of the videocall business integrating it into their clients.
That applies to any monoculture, from corn to poultry. Consider this example.
Lack of genetic variation, simply put, equals greater risk. Members of a population that shares the same set of genes can all be overcome by a disease, but if a population’s members contain different gene sets, there is a chance some will survive.
Unfortunately monocultures are convenient, even in IT.
Good for you. Some companies are still on Win2k because it gives them with a good enough typewriter and email system. They'll eventually move to something more recent only because they won't be able to run Win2k on the new hardware they'll have to buy to replace the one that fails.
If the gaming industry really lost those 41 billions and assuming that they didn't go entirely into savings, which other industries earned those money instead? Whatever they were the overall economy should have benefited of those expenses.
However my assumption is almost nobody got them because people pirating games don't want or don't have money to spend so those losses are purely hypothetical. I'm pretty sure that if we sum up all the potential losses of all industries due to piracy (fashion, cosmetics, pharma, movies, songs, games) we end up with a figure greater than the GDP of their customer base.
There is a standard for video calls on phones. It's the one that all 3G phones use since 2002. Actually, I've got phones that can do video calls since 2003. Obviously Apple tought that going their proprietary way would let them make more money.
The energy comes, ultimately, from the wind. One might as well ask, "Where would the energy to move a sailboat faster than the prevailing wind come from?"
It also comes from the wind, but I know that you know that. A boat (an iceboat, a sandboat, a windsurf) might be much faster than the real wind but it's never faster than the apparent wind. By the way, that's an unfortunate name because it's very real. Did everybody try to wave a hand out of a car on an highway and feel the strength of the apparent wind, right? :-)
This is a good read for everybody http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_faster_than_the_wind#Speed_made_good (link to the part about getting from point to point faster than the wind does).
... of paper on my desktop, the one under my notebook. I write in shades of gray (or blue) so it would be functionally equivalent to paper and much better for long term storage of my notes (which I can afford to lose). But it must start up *quickly*. Paper starts up in zero time.
Furthermore I can hopefully put pdf files in it with a SD card :-)
Hidden agenda?
If they want your fucking finger print they can get it from any of the several thousand other impressions you make during the day. From the desk you were sitting at, the papers you turn in, the locker door you open, the toilet you flush.
Think about the cost of collecting fingerprints on every desk and associate them with a name compared to the convenience of people voluntarily providing you both.
They meant: more open than a PS3 but still under our tight control.
Same here. It started with my netbook, as I tried desperately to maximize vertical space so that I could actually read pdfs and long web pages. From there it trickled into my main machine.
I'm using eeebuntu NetBook Remix on my netbook. It's got a full screen launcher menu which stays at the bottom of the windows stack, hiding the desktop which on a machine like that is pretty useless anyway. I pop up the launcher with a key. I maximize all windows and run everything I can fullscreen to remove borders, menus, icons. Firefox is particularly good at this: try F11 now and move the mouse to the top to make the menu appear and disappear. Evince (PDF) does well too.
The left toolbar proposed by Ubuntu always steals precious screen space and doesn't accommodate enough information as NBR's launcher. Furthermore on a netbook is almost useless because you never run many applications at once (and I've got 2 GB on mine). Maybe Ubuntu should just copy from NBR. You can check it at http://www.eeextra.com/reviews/eeebuntu-netbook-remix-on-the-eee-pc.html.
Things are different on a notebook. Luckily I bought my one 3.5 years ago when good old tall displays were still common and luckily it's still a fast enough machine not to have to buy a new one with those bad short widescreens. If I had to, maybe a left toolbar could be good.
You start with AA AA, as in Adventurous Amazing Awesome Apes.
And people use Gnome because KDE is too much like Windows (i.e. the default theme has the panel at the bottom).
I removed the top bar of my gnome desktop because it's on the way of my apps there and moved everything into the bottom one. And yes, I don't use KDE because it's too much like Windows but I could switch if gnome 3.0 kills the way I like to use my computer as in the demoes I saw.
I've got phones with both a back facing camera and a front facing camera since 2003. One is for taking pictures, the other one is for video calls or skype. I probably made no more than a couple of such calls in seven years but manufacturers keep insisting to put two cameras in 3G phones here in Europe. I remember that the iPhone was a big departure from this standard when it launched. "Wow, no front facing camera? No MMS? Will it sell?" Maybe this new iPhone version will bring video calls to the masses at last.
I won't reboot my computer each time I have to connect to my bank. I'd move my money to another bank with a more convenient online banking instead.
The Orthodox Church had (and still has) its own chain of command and its own agenda. Both could be in contrast with the agenda of Stalin. Every dictator attempted to control religion since the beginning of the world. You can see that happening today in many parts of the world. My take is that the real reason Stalin killed priests was not religion or communism but because they were part of a possibly competing organization. Atheism was just a convenient excuse to justify the killings and the deportations and I see that many people are still buying it. Stalin did its best to kill off every competitor starting from inside its own party and yes, I think he cared much more about himself than about communism. Even communism was for him a convenient excuse to rule a country on his own.
Yes, but also these little single words: blackout, backup, durability.