"just factor in the extra cost of having your SUV keyed every couple of months"
Yeah, THAT will put you on the moral high ground.
I didn't say I'd do anything of the sort. I meant exactly what I wrote. Doing something, or having an an attitude or opinion, that is seen as distasteful by many people will have repercussions, including economic ones. And if the poster wants to put an economic perspective on everything he does (itself arguably one of those distasteful attitudes), he had better factor in the costs of that as well.
Taking a crass, economic view of environmental problems will tend to make you seem like a cheap, tightfisted, asocial b*stard to the people around you - which will quite often not be a net positive when angling for a raise or promotion at work, for instance. That is a cost, and needs to be taken into account if he's to be consistent about it. Similarily, the net social benefit or liability of the car he chooses is a factor. That may well make his cost-benefit calculation come out very differently.
Of course, I strongly suspect the poster is just engaging in after-the-fact motivation - he doesn't want to care about the environment, he thinks those who do are sissies, and just uses economy as a way to motivate his views without looking like an banjo-wielding hick.
Aah yes, still clinging to the hope that a person's "love for the environment" can defeat the free market economy. Let me know how that works out for you.
You are aware that normal people do appreciate non-monetary values as well, don't you? I'm sure you have heard of it. And if you do need a monetary motivation for everything, just factor in the extra cost of having your SUV keyed every couple of months...
In old days they used to have a person devoted to operanting an elevator, now there isn't one.
A small quibble, and without taking away your point, but at least some high-end department stores here in Japan do have an employee in the elevator to greet people, help with carts, walkers or strollers, and, yes, press the floor buttons. I guess it's the same as gas stations with manual service, or supermarkets with people packing your bags. It's stuff you can easily do yourself (and usually do too), but the "human touch" (human contact, really) is worth the price premium for the customers.
Doesn't matter, in the general case, if they can afford it. If fighting it loses them more money than going along, then going along it is. Shareholders (the owners) are generally not in a company for the long haul. If the share price is going well (comaperd to market standards) over the next year, it's fine. If not, it's not. When the owners/investors don't give a damn about the long-term prospects of the industry, then neither can the company.
Hmm. As they write, of course the maker-specific titles are going to be exclusive (and that of course includes a slew of - likely - very creative Nintendo titles making use of the wand).
But any one console, as long as it's half-way successful (as all three likely will be), will be too large a market to ignore for many houses. The big impact will be in things like creating things like the graphics, models and level data sizes and so on in such a way that the data is useable on all platforms. And if any one platform has an edge over the other ones, that will likely go underutilized.
And this is coming from a hardcore Nintendo fan. I've been playing Nintendo since I was five years old, and I've actually been inside Nintendo's corporate headquarters in Kyodo, Japan (don't tell the police).
I pass by what I think is their headquarters every week on the train (large off-white square building in southern Kyoto); I'd love to take a tour someday!
Ars Technica had a good piece related to this. Very briefly, they point out that most titles are written to be cross-platform, thus erasing a lot of the relative hardware benefits of each platform.
They don't need to be able to win. All they need is to have enough of a case to threaten them with long, costly litigation - and once the expected cost of defending themselves is greater than the cost of caving in, most businesses will cheerfully cave. In fact, for publicly traded companies you can make a decent case that it's their duty to do so.
Well, if you want to see a site whose domain includes richer character sets, you do no matter what language you speak. Just because you use a local domain doesn't mean there can't be useful information in English after all. And if you are looking for technical information, other languages are frequently less of a problem; you still understand equations, illustrations and code snippets, and automated translation tools are usually good enough to extract the needed info.
Complaining about IDN because you can have characters that look alike is no different than complaining that the address bar font makes little difference between "l" and "1" or "O" and "0" (or, even, in some fonts, "8" and "B"). AFAIK, Firefox clearly marks when an address uses IDN; a much clearer indication than when someone tries a substitute-character trick within the ASCII subset. And if you are relying on the address as the indicator of web site veracity, I have a few hundred PayPal account verification request emails for you.
I'm in robotics as well (in Japan), but I haven't really felt the impact of patents on my work. Patents don't disallow you from doing research after all, but "only" commercializing it; having it made into product or processes.
But yes, there are numerous problems with the patent systems around the world. The bar for patents are usually too low (it's supposed to be non-obvious to practictioners, after all); the scope is far too wide; and there is no more than a nod anymore to the idea of prior art (usually, prior art is only searched for among previous patents, not the literature or practices in general).
One big problem, I think, is that time limits are too inflexible. 20 years or so is arguably OK for pharmaceuticals, say, where you do spend a large part of that just getting it out the door. It's far too long in a fast-changing field like computer science, where "new" goes to "established practice" in a year, and "the old, stupid way only old fogies still remember" in another five.
The second one is the difficulty and imbalances in actually challenging bad patents. No idea how to solve it properly; there are so many balances to take into account. The current system is broken, though.
I understand your point - I think you missed mine, though:)
Of course there's lots of foreign, strange, perhaps hard to understand, culture aspects to the medium; that's what makes it, well, foreign. I'm a European living in Japan and I'm acutely aware of just how different Japanese culture differs from American and European (and how much European and American cultures differ despite a surface varnish of similarity).
But you know about these aspects. So do quite a lot of other people in your country, and more and more do as they learn about it. The early adopters are drawn to it in part precisely because it is foreign and strange and average people don't understand it - and because it's new, fresh and exciting - not despite it. They in turn influence others, and if it catches on, these aspects gradually become part of the mainstream cultural knowledge. This is how new cultural influences and signals get propagated.
Despite the fact that this is the most sensible reasoning I've seen so far for using "manga" instead of "comic", it seems a bit daft to make a product full of cultural references and market it exclusively to people outside that culture.
Well, that's beside the point for the definition, isn't it, whether it is a good idea or not?
But it's not daft at all. It happens all the time. What about, say, German jazz bands (playing pieces written by German songwriters)? Japanese wine conossieur magazines? California rolls? I mean, the list would be nearly endless. Taking others' ideas, mixing them and making them our own is what all lively cultures do.
How important are these kinds of certifications really? I assume they are really just a fancy way of saying "we support our software on this platform and are prepared to sell support and consulting services for our system running on it". If $LARGE_CORP decides to run, say, db2 on a system that isn't certified, wouldn't IBM be happy to take their money for support and such anyway - probably with an added surcharge due to the lack of certification, but on the other hand with a rebate for being $LARGE_CORP rather than $SMALL_FRY?
It would be nice if the UN would also regulate the use of traditional weaponary with regards to murdering people with them.
They are; there's a lot of traditional weapons and ammunition that is perfectly fine to use for hunting or somesuch, but not allowed by the convention. The reason is usually because they cause more suffering than necessary, like flechettes or hail that give the target lots of small, hard to remove fragments; or plastic ammo that isn't visible on x-rays. It is of course a balancing act - the harm is weighed against the military utility, thus hand grenades, for instance, are not banned.
Secondly, with government so charged to "protect" consumers from scams, you'd think scams would go away. They won't. The only way that scams will be unprofitable is when government stops "protecting" citizens and lets people learn to be aware of what they're buying.
Yes, and government trying to "protect" consumers from fake medicines or harmful medical practices are also useless. The only way it will stop is when govermnent stays out and lets people learn medicine and biochemistry for themselves and be fully aware of what treatment or substance they're getting.
Government should get out of law enforcement in general. Crimes aren't going to stop until people are ready to self-organize into lynchmobs^H^H^H^H^H^H citizen militias and take charge of their crime situation themselves.
And why are govenrments insisting on feeding armies from the public trough? Shouldn't private business run competing armies and let knowledgeable citizens pay whichever option they felt was best run? Out with government, eh?
Follow the guidelines for moderation. Moderate UP not DOWN. And browse at -1 Newest Posts First, No Threading.
I know the rules. Preferably moderate up, rather than down. But one reason for moderation is to remove the clutter of trolls, off topic and so on for most people. A negative moderation os not automatically a bad moderation.
I metamoderate three times daily and anything that is modded offtopic or flamebait or troll that isn't obviously so will earn you black mark that will reduce your chances of being selected as a moderator again.
Good. Too few people are metamoderating.
Of course, a discussion about spelling mistakes is almost always off-topic, as is commenting on it being a dupe. If it's at 2 already (probably because of Karma), it is very likely overrated as well. I can't be doing too badly with my moderations; I've gotten an "unfair" less than half a dozen times in the past few years.
And naturally, this whole discussion right here fully deserves to get modded down too.
Punative down-moderations like this are done by the admins, not regular readers. Regular moderators get five points at a time, not the twenty or so that would have been required to reduce all the spelling flames so far so quickly.
I usually mod down language gripes (and dupe complaints) whenever I can, and I'm sure many other moderators do too. Yes, we know there was a misspelt word there, and yes, we know there was a similar post a while ago. So what? No need to point it out. Over. And. Over. Again.
Some examples: they can try forcing adult-oriented websites into.xxx 'because of all the poor children'.
Only US-based sites. Whatever is going on within country domains is out of their control. Likewise, US can really only block content for their own citizens.
They can also charge a fee for TLD (.com,.biz,.net) domains, in effect levying a world-wide internet tax not unlike the world-wide oil tax we pay to Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela etc).
Only if you disregard that most top-level domains are not under such control. I'd foresee a huge surge of interest in other domains if that were to happen. And the ".com" adress seem to be regarded as special and magic as a business domain mostly by americans.
They can decide who gets to control the domain.iq rather than letting the new Iraqi government do it.
And that's basically one part of the rub for many country domain holders. Domains that aren't part of the US (ie. most of them) should not be dealt with at its discretion.
They can ensure that domain-name disputes are resolved in a big-business-friendly atmosphere where you don't have a right to your own name even if you paid for the domain, assuming some compancy has decided to sell a product with a similar name, or if someone with the same name happens to be a movie star.
Again, that is true only for the US-controlled domains. The US has very little say in who gets n ".se" domain, for instance.
Re:Employees not happy?
on
Pixar For Sale?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Shareholders own and manage the company, not employees. If employees dont like it they can leave.
For companies that have much of their value in the talents of their employees, them not liking things and leaving can quickly become a very big problem for the company and its owners, to the point that it may inhibit a sale (or other management move) altogether.
A quibble: Shareholders own the company. Executives manage it. Shareholders can only influence the executives through voting for the board, who in turn oversee the executives. Unless you are a large enough shareholder to be able to put "your" people on the board you don't have much power at all.
Disney has been in a creative slump for a number of years. They did not catch on to the technological changes very quickly, and their stories have been lacking, feeling like new cookie-cutter versions of tropes that ceased to be fresh a long time ago.
I seriously doubt bringing Pixar (or any other animation group) in-house would help, though. There is a very real risk that an already demoralised animation division gives up altogether, while the outside company's group dynamic gets destroyed by the change in corporate culture, the hostility and despair from the in-house people and the inevitable loss of people that do not wish to continue after a merger.
For such a move to work, I believe Disney needs to put its own house in order first, so there is a thriving, positive culture to merge with. If not, you'll just destroy two groups, not rescue one as the plan may be.
The main benefit of sudo is when you have many admins working on a machine. If you're not in such an environment, you really don't need sudo.
In Ubuntu the root account is not active by default, meaning you _always_ use sudo to do administrative tasks. And after geting used to that I feel distinctly uncomfortable with actually having a root shell open and unprotected on the Redhat box. If nothing else I know myself and know it's only a matter of time until I type something into the wrong terminal (and I know that from previous experience)...
I think that striving for accuracy and balance of the elements is probably more important than striving for the maximum ____ your system can deliver.
Not to quibble, but I think allowing users to set it up the way they like it is the most important. If somebody really likes Pachebel's Canon with their MegaBass2000+ cranked up to 11 then all the more power to them.
It's the same situation as for webpages, really. The designer's setting should just be viewed as a reasonable default, and should not constrain the users if they prefer - or need - to tweak the appearance.
This may come as a shock to people here, but the vast majority of people do not use their computer to manage large music collections. Most people do not in fact use their computer for music at all. A substantial fraction of any industrialized country's population do not in fact even own a computer.
And getting a special phone? Rather you get that nice phone with the neat design and cool themes that's on offer from your carrier and you will find the music player tucked right in there. And it will be right there, in the main screen menu, ready to use whenever you fancy a new song - including on the way home from the club/pub/bar/concert where you heard that amazing new song that you and that girl/boy/tentacled alien danced to all night and you just need to hear it again and again right now.
To put in another way, if you are reading this, on slashdot, right now, then you are not the target audience.
Sorry to sound like an old man, but I just don't get the point of music on your cell phone. I'm not trying to be a troll, but I really just don't get it. I know that it would be better to just have one single device to do all (phone, camera, music, etc...), but with the limitations of memory, battery, portability (as in moving to the PC) I personally wouldn't want this all-in-one wonder. Can someone please explain this to this old man?
I, too, am "an old man":) And I much prefer having it on my phone.
Yes, it's a bit of a compromise. But I do not use it all day long (when I'm working I need to actually hear my coworkers speaking to me) and I habitually put it into its cradle every night so battery life - which is actually pretty decent - is just not a problem. During normal daily use I never manage to actually move that battery bar from its "full" position.
Moving to and from the PC is the same whatever device you use - or would be if so many devices didn't restrict what formats they accept. I plug in the USB cable and it's just another USB disk-type device to copy files to and from. Things like sound quality too is independent of the device type. It's just a matter of what electronics you put in and what quality design you use, after all. My phone actually sounds better than my older mp3 player, so it's a shame about the sound format; recoding into AAC does degrade the sound.
Camera on the phone is not something I care too much about since I carry an SLR with me, usually. But having one is often immensely practical since you always have it with you. Say you are dismantling a piece of mechanics or electronics - just take a few snapshots along the way and you have documentation on how to put it together again. Or if you're going to the store to get a cable for a certain connector, then just take a picture of the connector for reference.
And actually, recent camera phones aren't all that bad anymore either. They are as good as lower-end cameras of a year or two ago, which means "good enough" for a lot of uses.
Lastly, and the big selling point for me, is that the phone version of things is infinitely better than any device that I end up leaving at home since I'm carrying too much junk already. The radio, music player, and so on may not be the best possible, but at least I have it with me. It's always a compromise, yes, but once you reach "good enough" it ceases to matter.
Music store for mobile downloads has been available for some time here in Japan already, under then name "chaku uta" (very approximately "arriving song" I think). In fact, with the manufacturers listed I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same system.
That said, it sucks for me (just like iTunes does). Most of what I listen to is just not available, and I sure hate to pay all over again for the stuff that is. At least my phone allows me to upload my own files as well.
But what if someone you know calls you from a foreign phone? And what if that call were urgent, for example?
And what if I'm not home? Or have forgotten to turn on the mobile? Or my aqcuaintance didn't have change for the payphone? Or I'm driving and don't hear the signal? Or...
Up until ten years ago there was no way for most people to be reachable 24/7, and no perceived need. You could get a beeper but very few people would bother unless it was for work. It was very rarely a problem then, and so far has never been a problem for me. If they can't reach me, they can call another friend, or try to guess where I am and try there, or just send an email - it's fast enough after all.
Slashdot Mirror
"just factor in the extra cost of having your SUV keyed every couple of months"
Yeah, THAT will put you on the moral high ground.
I didn't say I'd do anything of the sort. I meant exactly what I wrote. Doing something, or having an an attitude or opinion, that is seen as distasteful by many people will have repercussions, including economic ones. And if the poster wants to put an economic perspective on everything he does (itself arguably one of those distasteful attitudes), he had better factor in the costs of that as well.
Taking a crass, economic view of environmental problems will tend to make you seem like a cheap, tightfisted, asocial b*stard to the people around you - which will quite often not be a net positive when angling for a raise or promotion at work, for instance. That is a cost, and needs to be taken into account if he's to be consistent about it. Similarily, the net social benefit or liability of the car he chooses is a factor. That may well make his cost-benefit calculation come out very differently.
Of course, I strongly suspect the poster is just engaging in after-the-fact motivation - he doesn't want to care about the environment, he thinks those who do are sissies, and just uses economy as a way to motivate his views without looking like an banjo-wielding hick.
Aah yes, still clinging to the hope that a person's "love for the environment" can defeat the free market economy. Let me know how that works out for you.
You are aware that normal people do appreciate non-monetary values as well, don't you? I'm sure you have heard of it. And if you do need a monetary motivation for everything, just factor in the extra cost of having your SUV keyed every couple of months...
In old days they used to have a person devoted to operanting an elevator, now there isn't one.
A small quibble, and without taking away your point, but at least some high-end department stores here in Japan do have an employee in the elevator to greet people, help with carts, walkers or strollers, and, yes, press the floor buttons. I guess it's the same as gas stations with manual service, or supermarkets with people packing your bags. It's stuff you can easily do yourself (and usually do too), but the "human touch" (human contact, really) is worth the price premium for the customers.
Doesn't matter, in the general case, if they can afford it. If fighting it loses them more money than going along, then going along it is. Shareholders (the owners) are generally not in a company for the long haul. If the share price is going well (comaperd to market standards) over the next year, it's fine. If not, it's not. When the owners/investors don't give a damn about the long-term prospects of the industry, then neither can the company.
Hmm. As they write, of course the maker-specific titles are going to be exclusive (and that of course includes a slew of - likely - very creative Nintendo titles making use of the wand).
But any one console, as long as it's half-way successful (as all three likely will be), will be too large a market to ignore for many houses. The big impact will be in things like creating things like the graphics, models and level data sizes and so on in such a way that the data is useable on all platforms. And if any one platform has an edge over the other ones, that will likely go underutilized.
And this is coming from a hardcore Nintendo fan. I've been playing Nintendo since I was five years old, and I've actually been inside Nintendo's corporate headquarters in Kyodo, Japan (don't tell the police).
I pass by what I think is their headquarters every week on the train (large off-white square building in southern Kyoto); I'd love to take a tour someday!
Ars Technica had a good piece related to this. Very briefly, they point out that most titles are written to be cross-platform, thus erasing a lot of the relative hardware benefits of each platform.
r ossplatform.ars
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/c
I think Nintendo is on to a winner; we'll see if the execution is as good as their ideas.
They don't need to be able to win. All they need is to have enough of a case to threaten them with long, costly litigation - and once the expected cost of defending themselves is greater than the cost of caving in, most businesses will cheerfully cave. In fact, for publicly traded companies you can make a decent case that it's their duty to do so.
Well, if you want to see a site whose domain includes richer character sets, you do no matter what language you speak. Just because you use a local domain doesn't mean there can't be useful information in English after all. And if you are looking for technical information, other languages are frequently less of a problem; you still understand equations, illustrations and code snippets, and automated translation tools are usually good enough to extract the needed info.
Complaining about IDN because you can have characters that look alike is no different than complaining that the address bar font makes little difference between "l" and "1" or "O" and "0" (or, even, in some fonts, "8" and "B"). AFAIK, Firefox clearly marks when an address uses IDN; a much clearer indication than when someone tries a substitute-character trick within the ASCII subset. And if you are relying on the address as the indicator of web site veracity, I have a few hundred PayPal account verification request emails for you.
I'm in robotics as well (in Japan), but I haven't really felt the impact of patents on my work. Patents don't disallow you from doing research after all, but "only" commercializing it; having it made into product or processes.
But yes, there are numerous problems with the patent systems around the world. The bar for patents are usually too low (it's supposed to be non-obvious to practictioners, after all); the scope is far too wide; and there is no more than a nod anymore to the idea of prior art (usually, prior art is only searched for among previous patents, not the literature or practices in general).
One big problem, I think, is that time limits are too inflexible. 20 years or so is arguably OK for pharmaceuticals, say, where you do spend a large part of that just getting it out the door. It's far too long in a fast-changing field like computer science, where "new" goes to "established practice" in a year, and "the old, stupid way only old fogies still remember" in another five.
The second one is the difficulty and imbalances in actually challenging bad patents. No idea how to solve it properly; there are so many balances to take into account. The current system is broken, though.
I understand your point - I think you missed mine, though :)
Of course there's lots of foreign, strange, perhaps hard to understand, culture aspects to the medium; that's what makes it, well, foreign. I'm a European living in Japan and I'm acutely aware of just how different Japanese culture differs from American and European (and how much European and American cultures differ despite a surface varnish of similarity).
But you know about these aspects. So do quite a lot of other people in your country, and more and more do as they learn about it. The early adopters are drawn to it in part precisely because it is foreign and strange and average people don't understand it - and because it's new, fresh and exciting - not despite it. They in turn influence others, and if it catches on, these aspects gradually become part of the mainstream cultural knowledge. This is how new cultural influences and signals get propagated.
Despite the fact that this is the most sensible reasoning I've seen so far for using "manga" instead of "comic", it seems a bit daft to make a product full of cultural references and market it exclusively to people outside that culture.
Well, that's beside the point for the definition, isn't it, whether it is a good idea or not?
But it's not daft at all. It happens all the time. What about, say, German jazz bands (playing pieces written by German songwriters)? Japanese wine conossieur magazines? California rolls? I mean, the list would be nearly endless. Taking others' ideas, mixing them and making them our own is what all lively cultures do.
How important are these kinds of certifications really? I assume they are really just a fancy way of saying "we support our software on this platform and are prepared to sell support and consulting services for our system running on it". If $LARGE_CORP decides to run, say, db2 on a system that isn't certified, wouldn't IBM be happy to take their money for support and such anyway - probably with an added surcharge due to the lack of certification, but on the other hand with a rebate for being $LARGE_CORP rather than $SMALL_FRY?
It would be nice if the UN would also regulate the use of traditional weaponary with regards to murdering people with them.
They are; there's a lot of traditional weapons and ammunition that is perfectly fine to use for hunting or somesuch, but not allowed by the convention. The reason is usually because they cause more suffering than necessary, like flechettes or hail that give the target lots of small, hard to remove fragments; or plastic ammo that isn't visible on x-rays. It is of course a balancing act - the harm is weighed against the military utility, thus hand grenades, for instance, are not banned.
Secondly, with government so charged to "protect" consumers from scams, you'd think scams would go away. They won't. The only way that scams will be unprofitable is when government stops "protecting" citizens and lets people learn to be aware of what they're buying.
Yes, and government trying to "protect" consumers from fake medicines or harmful medical practices are also useless. The only way it will stop is when govermnent stays out and lets people learn medicine and biochemistry for themselves and be fully aware of what treatment or substance they're getting.
Government should get out of law enforcement in general. Crimes aren't going to stop until people are ready to self-organize into lynchmobs^H^H^H^H^H^H citizen militias and take charge of their crime situation themselves.
And why are govenrments insisting on feeding armies from the public trough? Shouldn't private business run competing armies and let knowledgeable citizens pay whichever option they felt was best run? Out with government, eh?
Follow the guidelines for moderation. Moderate UP not DOWN. And browse at -1 Newest Posts First, No Threading.
I know the rules. Preferably moderate up, rather than down. But one reason for moderation is to remove the clutter of trolls, off topic and so on for most people. A negative moderation os not automatically a bad moderation.
I metamoderate three times daily and anything that is modded offtopic or flamebait or troll that isn't obviously so will earn you black mark that will reduce your chances of being selected as a moderator again.
Good. Too few people are metamoderating.
Of course, a discussion about spelling mistakes is almost always off-topic, as is commenting on it being a dupe. If it's at 2 already (probably because of Karma), it is very likely overrated as well. I can't be doing too badly with my moderations; I've gotten an "unfair" less than half a dozen times in the past few years.
And naturally, this whole discussion right here fully deserves to get modded down too.
Punative down-moderations like this are done by the admins, not regular readers. Regular moderators get five points at a time, not the twenty or so that would have been required to reduce all the spelling flames so far so quickly.
I usually mod down language gripes (and dupe complaints) whenever I can, and I'm sure many other moderators do too. Yes, we know there was a misspelt word there, and yes, we know there was a similar post a while ago. So what? No need to point it out. Over. And. Over. Again.
Some examples: they can try forcing adult-oriented websites into .xxx 'because of all the poor children'.
.biz, .net) domains, in effect levying a world-wide internet tax not unlike the world-wide oil tax we pay to Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela etc).
.iq rather than letting the new Iraqi government do it.
Only US-based sites. Whatever is going on within country domains is out of their control. Likewise, US can really only block content for their own citizens.
They can also charge a fee for TLD (.com,
Only if you disregard that most top-level domains are not under such control. I'd foresee a huge surge of interest in other domains if that were to happen. And the ".com" adress seem to be regarded as special and magic as a business domain mostly by americans.
They can decide who gets to control the domain
And that's basically one part of the rub for many country domain holders. Domains that aren't part of the US (ie. most of them) should not be dealt with at its discretion.
They can ensure that domain-name disputes are resolved in a big-business-friendly atmosphere where you don't have a right to your own name even if you paid for the domain, assuming some compancy has decided to sell a product with a similar name, or if someone with the same name happens to be a movie star.
Again, that is true only for the US-controlled domains. The US has very little say in who gets n ".se" domain, for instance.
Shareholders own and manage the company, not employees. If employees dont like it they can leave.
For companies that have much of their value in the talents of their employees, them not liking things and leaving can quickly become a very big problem for the company and its owners, to the point that it may inhibit a sale (or other management move) altogether.
A quibble: Shareholders own the company. Executives manage it. Shareholders can only influence the executives through voting for the board, who in turn oversee the executives. Unless you are a large enough shareholder to be able to put "your" people on the board you don't have much power at all.
Disney has been in a creative slump for a number of years. They did not catch on to the technological changes very quickly, and their stories have been lacking, feeling like new cookie-cutter versions of tropes that ceased to be fresh a long time ago.
I seriously doubt bringing Pixar (or any other animation group) in-house would help, though. There is a very real risk that an already demoralised animation division gives up altogether, while the outside company's group dynamic gets destroyed by the change in corporate culture, the hostility and despair from the in-house people and the inevitable loss of people that do not wish to continue after a merger.
For such a move to work, I believe Disney needs to put its own house in order first, so there is a thriving, positive culture to merge with. If not, you'll just destroy two groups, not rescue one as the plan may be.
But then, what do I know...
The main benefit of sudo is when you have many admins working on a machine. If you're not in such an environment, you really don't need sudo.
In Ubuntu the root account is not active by default, meaning you _always_ use sudo to do administrative tasks. And after geting used to that I feel distinctly uncomfortable with actually having a root shell open and unprotected on the Redhat box. If nothing else I know myself and know it's only a matter of time until I type something into the wrong terminal (and I know that from previous experience)...
I think that striving for accuracy and balance of the elements is probably more important than striving for the maximum ____ your system can deliver.
Not to quibble, but I think allowing users to set it up the way they like it is the most important. If somebody really likes Pachebel's Canon with their MegaBass2000+ cranked up to 11 then all the more power to them.
It's the same situation as for webpages, really. The designer's setting should just be viewed as a reasonable default, and should not constrain the users if they prefer - or need - to tweak the appearance.
This may come as a shock to people here, but the vast majority of people do not use their computer to manage large music collections. Most people do not in fact use their computer for music at all. A substantial fraction of any industrialized country's population do not in fact even own a computer.
And getting a special phone? Rather you get that nice phone with the neat design and cool themes that's on offer from your carrier and you will find the music player tucked right in there. And it will be right there, in the main screen menu, ready to use whenever you fancy a new song - including on the way home from the club/pub/bar/concert where you heard that amazing new song that you and that girl/boy/tentacled alien danced to all night and you just need to hear it again and again right now.
To put in another way, if you are reading this, on slashdot, right now, then you are not the target audience.
Sorry to sound like an old man, but I just don't get the point of music on your cell phone. I'm not trying to be a troll, but I really just don't get it. I know that it would be better to just have one single device to do all (phone, camera, music, etc...), but with the limitations of memory, battery, portability (as in moving to the PC) I personally wouldn't want this all-in-one wonder. Can someone please explain this to this old man?
:) And I much prefer having it on my phone.
I, too, am "an old man"
Yes, it's a bit of a compromise. But I do not use it all day long (when I'm working I need to actually hear my coworkers speaking to me) and I habitually put it into its cradle every night so battery life - which is actually pretty decent - is just not a problem. During normal daily use I never manage to actually move that battery bar from its "full" position.
Moving to and from the PC is the same whatever device you use - or would be if so many devices didn't restrict what formats they accept. I plug in the USB cable and it's just another USB disk-type device to copy files to and from. Things like sound quality too is independent of the device type. It's just a matter of what electronics you put in and what quality design you use, after all. My phone actually sounds better than my older mp3 player, so it's a shame about the sound format; recoding into AAC does degrade the sound.
Camera on the phone is not something I care too much about since I carry an SLR with me, usually. But having one is often immensely practical since you always have it with you. Say you are dismantling a piece of mechanics or electronics - just take a few snapshots along the way and you have documentation on how to put it together again. Or if you're going to the store to get a cable for a certain connector, then just take a picture of the connector for reference.
And actually, recent camera phones aren't all that bad anymore either. They are as good as lower-end cameras of a year or two ago, which means "good enough" for a lot of uses.
Lastly, and the big selling point for me, is that the phone version of things is infinitely better than any device that I end up leaving at home since I'm carrying too much junk already. The radio, music player, and so on may not be the best possible, but at least I have it with me. It's always a compromise, yes, but once you reach "good enough" it ceases to matter.
Music store for mobile downloads has been available for some time here in Japan already, under then name "chaku uta" (very approximately "arriving song" I think). In fact, with the manufacturers listed I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same system.
That said, it sucks for me (just like iTunes does). Most of what I listen to is just not available, and I sure hate to pay all over again for the stuff that is. At least my phone allows me to upload my own files as well.
But what if someone you know calls you from a foreign phone? And what if that call were urgent, for example?
And what if I'm not home? Or have forgotten to turn on the mobile? Or my aqcuaintance didn't have change for the payphone? Or I'm driving and don't hear the signal? Or...
Up until ten years ago there was no way for most people to be reachable 24/7, and no perceived need. You could get a beeper but very few people would bother unless it was for work. It was very rarely a problem then, and so far has never been a problem for me. If they can't reach me, they can call another friend, or try to guess where I am and try there, or just send an email - it's fast enough after all.