If you're still listening to anything Facebook says, I don't know what else to tell you. This is hardly the first time they've lied about something like this. They say things that are so implausible that they aren't worth listening to. They want every piece of data. Period. They will do whatever they can to get more data on people. Any time they say something to the contrary, they are lying.
While everyone can agree that this story is a bit silly all around, I can't believe this comment got modded +5. Am I to believe that the real reason this is silly is because people need a PC to play WoW or Starcraft? Or because people like to upgrade their hardware with new CPUs and graphics cards? The fact that the commenter doesn't even know what it is like to buy a pre-built PC should make us pretty skeptical that his/her experience can be generalized to the entire population...
Also, we better not opine about what it is like to write college theses if we can't spell thesis correctly.
Boeing's use of hydraulics instead of fly-by-wire technology has nothing to do with American individualism. And Airbus's use of electronics isn't due to Europeans' greater trust in computers. It's because Airbus's only popular designs are newer than most of Boeing's. Newer technology really is better here, sorry. Remember that American jet that landed safely in the Hudson river recently? It was a lot easier to pull that one off due to its flight controls.
Yeah, basically. It's noteworthy that twitter is useful for this kind of thing. This was not some sort of foregone conclusion. When you first heard that people were twittering about all the inane stuff they do every 5 minutes, would you have thought it would also be useful for this?
It would be noteworthy if 10 other hard-to-control tools sprang up, too, which they probably will in time. The more communication tools people can use to carry out tactics against governments that try to cut off access to those tools, the better. I bet there are some other students in some other country struggling for democracy who think this is pretty noteworthy indeed, and will try to organize this way now.
Never mind that congregating in the galley area could be illegal on flights to/from the US, depending if the galley is near the front of the plane.
(Forgive me if few planes are structured this way, but I just looked up a few seating charts and it seemed that several common Boeing models were)
Person 1: "Well, uh... yeah... I guess... except, um... let's run it on a Mac!" Xgrid only runs on Macs. It is, as I understand it, fairly easy to design for and set up. There is a reason they did this. I've run BOINC. It supports some good projects. But at the time I tried it, it was kind of a pain to manage, update, etc. Something like this based on a built-in component of the OS should be pretty simple. That's the idea.
- Smart voice recognition? Anyone tried it lately? Anyone tried to write pretty standard letters with it? Desastrous.
How about a spell checker constantly running on any text you type? (OS X actually has this available but not all apps can/do use it) Or maybe you are tired of reading other people's misspellings and would like a browser that automatically corrects them. Sure, my computer could handle all of that now, but I'd rather it didn't have to choose between doing that and the multi-MB/sec transfers going on in Azureus (don't worry it's all legit)
But TV ads are also one-size-fits-all. It's a shotgun blast as opposed to one carefully placed bullet. Everyone here is missing the point when they ask what facebook is worth or how it could make any money. It is an advertiser's dream come true. Every logged in user has their interests on file, from music to movies to sports to technology. Targeted advertising couldn't be easier or more personal. Instead of a link to some generic dorm poster site, an ad for a band the user likes comes up. I've seen this, and it works. They know I like the Beatles and Bad Religion, so they show me ads for those posters. I've clicked on the ads, because they provide genuine value: something I like at a supposedly good price. $2 billion is a crapload, but there's plenty of revenue and growth to be had here.
Why do you say there is no such thing as a natural monopoly? Obviously government is required to grant monoopolies legally. What else they are required for is to ensure the production of goods in markets that can't survive under competition. A natural monopoly shoudl exist in an industry where there are declining average total costs. In the case of phones, imagine we don't have any phone lines. For everyone's phone to be able to connect to everyone else's (at least before we had the internet), any company providing phone service will have to run lines to every house. It is unlikely that the most efficient outcome will involve multiple sets of wires going to every house in the country. So the government grants a monopoly to one company who can lay out the fixed investment once and make the money back by adding new customers at very low additional cost. I see where someone might argue that Microsoft is something of a natural monopoly, but I don't think you can use that not being strictly true as an example proving that there are no natural monopolies. Why? Microsoft DOES have competition that can survive in the market!
Now obviously monopolies have led to abuses. Natural monopolies need to be regulated. In areas of the country where we use natural gas, the gas company is regulated so as not to extort our need for heat and cooking. What could we do for the phone system? Well, cable is becoming a good alternative. Here's a possible example of competition being able to survive in the telecommunications industry. But the phone industry and telecommuncation industry are not the same thing. Until the 90s, more or less, the phone lines were just used for phones and faxes. Now we have the same company owning the lines and providing telecommunications services over them that can be provided other ways. We can't very well introduce competition into the physical lines, but we can still keep competition in the services on the lines alive. As long as AT&T doesn't prevent us from getting reasonably-priced DSL from other carriers over the phone lines (I'm unclear how they are able to offer theirs so cheap without running afoul of anti-trust laws already...) or using VOIP over whatever internet service we have, we should be OK. Ideally AT&T would not offer these services at all so as avoid any possibility of abuse of monopoly power over the lines, but yeah right.
On another note, the same company should not be allowed to own both the phone lines and the cable fiber. That's just asking for complete abuse of monopoly power.
There are a lot of old applications that are still completely useful. I'm looking mainly at games. Productivity-wise, there are probably better modern equivilents of nearly anything that existed 10 years ago, but I spend more time playing Civilization I on my Mac than I do playing Doom 3. I'm not saying Apple should make it their priority to make Classic run, but I would sure appreciate it. I'd love to upgrade to an Apple Intel laptop once the second generation comes along, but I may hold off even longer because I can't play my old games.
Yes, it is right in front of their face, and ours too. Do you know what you need to do to understand the open source movement? Read Slashdot. Before I put it in my bookmarks bar, I had only the most basic notion of what the hell was behind all this Linux stuff that was getting so big. That was a few years ago, now by regularly reading discussions like this I am fully on board. Surely some Microsoft employees read this site. Call them in and have them give a talk to the execs. Would be a lot cheaper.
I know where my stuff is too, but I don't necessarily know which file I want to find. I know exactly what folder my IM client saves all my logs in (which is buried in other folders, so using Spotlight to find _it_ could very well be faster), but I don't know which file contains the street address that my brother told me about two weeks ago. The logs are all named by date, and I can't change that. I can use Spotlight to search the content of those logs for his screen name and the street name (or partial zip code or any other random tidbit I remember from the conversation--maybe I know that conversation was the time he mentioned his girlfriend: search for her name) and get it instantly.
My files are all organized pretty well. I have school stuff sorted by year and subject. I have large projects in their own folders. But when I want to find a rough draft of a big paper I wrote 2 years ago that I probably titled Rough Draft because it was in its own project folder, I will be able to find it faster by typing the killer last sentence that I still remember than by navigating through my well-organized folders.
I didn't know you could do that, and after reading your comment I proceeded to marvel at it for several minutes, my fingers dancing across the F-keys. You were joking, but I wouldn't laugh just yet. That is much more plausible than it sounds if the rest of you are half as easily-amused as I am.
The only loosening of restrictions was changing the number of authorized computers to listen to a DRM'd file from three to five.
Which is what most people probably noticed more than the negative examples you cite. It was a change that I for one was very glad to see since I (and most people who buy online music, I bet) mostly play my songs on the computer or an iPod
Do you often need to burn 10 as opposed to 7 copies of a playlist? If you actually do, just recreate an indentical playlist. No problem.
Do you have a legitimate reason to share your music library over the internet as opposed to your local network? If so, you are in the minority. This was used for copyright infringement a la your favorite file-sharing network. This has nothing to do with the iTMS or DRM anyway.
The 5 listeners thing is a valid objection, but this was also used for big-time piracy. I know firsthand from my experience on a college network. This also has nothing to do with the iTMS or DRM
The problem of songs not playing on other systems is new to me, but it sounds like a bug, not a feature, and may get fixed
They have previously said that they will start offering the feature in more of their phones. This is just the first. When I first heard about this some months ago, I understood that the plan was to include it in all Moto phones, at least all that were of a certain spec level. Can't find a link to that, but here's a link to the a shot of the interface, which people have been asking for (yes, that is a different phone in the picture...it's just a demo unit)
The drug companies certainly spend a lot of money developing the practical drugs that we use, but most of the research leading to them being able to get that far is publicly funded, either at public institutions or with public money at private ones. Without the basic medical research we taxpayers fund, the drug companies would have nothing, and yet we have to pay them high prices for drugs. We're paying twice.
But a 600 mhz G3 iBook was not exactly state of the art. The top of the line x86 chips you mention would better be compared to, say, a dual Powermac G4. Compare the iBook to something more reasonably consumer-focused. A Dell Latitude laptop from 2001 was likely to come with a 1.0 GHz PIII mobile (a news announcement of this product) That Dell isn't looking so powerful, is it? Probably fine for web surfing, word processing, etc, but your comparison was not quite fair. The iBook is hardly a smoker by today's standards, but you can't compare it to a 2.0 GHz P4
Yep, they got that one wrong. I don't know how--any idiot can tell you that SoundJam went through several full versions before being bought by Apple. For a truly facinating read on the history of SoundJam, Audion (its competitor) and iTunes, read this history of Audion
I hope you discharge the CRTs and wear good gloves after bashing them up. Between explosions and lead poisoning, monitors are dangerous things. Don't try that at home, kids!
Slashdot Mirror
If you're still listening to anything Facebook says, I don't know what else to tell you. This is hardly the first time they've lied about something like this. They say things that are so implausible that they aren't worth listening to. They want every piece of data. Period. They will do whatever they can to get more data on people. Any time they say something to the contrary, they are lying.
Mod parent up. That lame attempt at a joke bothered me too.
While everyone can agree that this story is a bit silly all around, I can't believe this comment got modded +5. Am I to believe that the real reason this is silly is because people need a PC to play WoW or Starcraft? Or because people like to upgrade their hardware with new CPUs and graphics cards? The fact that the commenter doesn't even know what it is like to buy a pre-built PC should make us pretty skeptical that his/her experience can be generalized to the entire population...
Also, we better not opine about what it is like to write college theses if we can't spell thesis correctly.
And it would have been a lot harder to pull off if it hadn't been... http://www.vanityfair.com/style/features/2009/06/us_airways200906
Boeing's use of hydraulics instead of fly-by-wire technology has nothing to do with American individualism. And Airbus's use of electronics isn't due to Europeans' greater trust in computers. It's because Airbus's only popular designs are newer than most of Boeing's. Newer technology really is better here, sorry. Remember that American jet that landed safely in the Hudson river recently? It was a lot easier to pull that one off due to its flight controls.
Here's an entertaining and actually informative take on that incident: http://www.vanityfair.com/style/features/2009/06/us_airways200906
Feel free to get off any Airbus jet you don't trust, but as someone learning to fly pretty old planes, I'll ride the new ones, thanks.
Yeah, basically. It's noteworthy that twitter is useful for this kind of thing. This was not some sort of foregone conclusion. When you first heard that people were twittering about all the inane stuff they do every 5 minutes, would you have thought it would also be useful for this? It would be noteworthy if 10 other hard-to-control tools sprang up, too, which they probably will in time. The more communication tools people can use to carry out tactics against governments that try to cut off access to those tools, the better. I bet there are some other students in some other country struggling for democracy who think this is pretty noteworthy indeed, and will try to organize this way now.
Never mind that congregating in the galley area could be illegal on flights to/from the US, depending if the galley is near the front of the plane. (Forgive me if few planes are structured this way, but I just looked up a few seating charts and it seemed that several common Boeing models were)
I know neither runs on Windows, but how about Safari and Konqueror?
How about a spell checker constantly running on any text you type? (OS X actually has this available but not all apps can/do use it) Or maybe you are tired of reading other people's misspellings and would like a browser that automatically corrects them. Sure, my computer could handle all of that now, but I'd rather it didn't have to choose between doing that and the multi-MB/sec transfers going on in Azureus (don't worry it's all legit)
Only on Slashdot is this "insightful"
But TV ads are also one-size-fits-all. It's a shotgun blast as opposed to one carefully placed bullet. Everyone here is missing the point when they ask what facebook is worth or how it could make any money. It is an advertiser's dream come true. Every logged in user has their interests on file, from music to movies to sports to technology. Targeted advertising couldn't be easier or more personal. Instead of a link to some generic dorm poster site, an ad for a band the user likes comes up. I've seen this, and it works. They know I like the Beatles and Bad Religion, so they show me ads for those posters. I've clicked on the ads, because they provide genuine value: something I like at a supposedly good price. $2 billion is a crapload, but there's plenty of revenue and growth to be had here.
Now obviously monopolies have led to abuses. Natural monopolies need to be regulated. In areas of the country where we use natural gas, the gas company is regulated so as not to extort our need for heat and cooking. What could we do for the phone system? Well, cable is becoming a good alternative. Here's a possible example of competition being able to survive in the telecommunications industry. But the phone industry and telecommuncation industry are not the same thing. Until the 90s, more or less, the phone lines were just used for phones and faxes. Now we have the same company owning the lines and providing telecommunications services over them that can be provided other ways. We can't very well introduce competition into the physical lines, but we can still keep competition in the services on the lines alive. As long as AT&T doesn't prevent us from getting reasonably-priced DSL from other carriers over the phone lines (I'm unclear how they are able to offer theirs so cheap without running afoul of anti-trust laws already...) or using VOIP over whatever internet service we have, we should be OK. Ideally AT&T would not offer these services at all so as avoid any possibility of abuse of monopoly power over the lines, but yeah right.
On another note, the same company should not be allowed to own both the phone lines and the cable fiber. That's just asking for complete abuse of monopoly power.
There are a lot of old applications that are still completely useful. I'm looking mainly at games. Productivity-wise, there are probably better modern equivilents of nearly anything that existed 10 years ago, but I spend more time playing Civilization I on my Mac than I do playing Doom 3. I'm not saying Apple should make it their priority to make Classic run, but I would sure appreciate it. I'd love to upgrade to an Apple Intel laptop once the second generation comes along, but I may hold off even longer because I can't play my old games.
Yes, it is right in front of their face, and ours too. Do you know what you need to do to understand the open source movement? Read Slashdot. Before I put it in my bookmarks bar, I had only the most basic notion of what the hell was behind all this Linux stuff that was getting so big. That was a few years ago, now by regularly reading discussions like this I am fully on board. Surely some Microsoft employees read this site. Call them in and have them give a talk to the execs. Would be a lot cheaper.
That was from the article. The author himself wrote it. It wasn't a jab at anything, just an explanation of the review.
I know where my stuff is too, but I don't necessarily know which file I want to find. I know exactly what folder my IM client saves all my logs in (which is buried in other folders, so using Spotlight to find _it_ could very well be faster), but I don't know which file contains the street address that my brother told me about two weeks ago. The logs are all named by date, and I can't change that. I can use Spotlight to search the content of those logs for his screen name and the street name (or partial zip code or any other random tidbit I remember from the conversation--maybe I know that conversation was the time he mentioned his girlfriend: search for her name) and get it instantly. My files are all organized pretty well. I have school stuff sorted by year and subject. I have large projects in their own folders. But when I want to find a rough draft of a big paper I wrote 2 years ago that I probably titled Rough Draft because it was in its own project folder, I will be able to find it faster by typing the killer last sentence that I still remember than by navigating through my well-organized folders.
I didn't know you could do that, and after reading your comment I proceeded to marvel at it for several minutes, my fingers dancing across the F-keys. You were joking, but I wouldn't laugh just yet. That is much more plausible than it sounds if the rest of you are half as easily-amused as I am.
Which is what most people probably noticed more than the negative examples you cite. It was a change that I for one was very glad to see since I (and most people who buy online music, I bet) mostly play my songs on the computer or an iPod
Do you often need to burn 10 as opposed to 7 copies of a playlist? If you actually do, just recreate an indentical playlist. No problem.
Do you have a legitimate reason to share your music library over the internet as opposed to your local network? If so, you are in the minority. This was used for copyright infringement a la your favorite file-sharing network. This has nothing to do with the iTMS or DRM anyway.
The 5 listeners thing is a valid objection, but this was also used for big-time piracy. I know firsthand from my experience on a college network. This also has nothing to do with the iTMS or DRM
The problem of songs not playing on other systems is new to me, but it sounds like a bug, not a feature, and may get fixed
By then it won't matter. Do you know how much coal we have? Hundreds of years worth. Hundreds of years of global warming would be disastrous.
Pictures of iPod-like interface
Don't believe me? Read all about it
But a 600 mhz G3 iBook was not exactly state of the art. The top of the line x86 chips you mention would better be compared to, say, a dual Powermac G4. Compare the iBook to something more reasonably consumer-focused. A Dell Latitude laptop from 2001 was likely to come with a 1.0 GHz PIII mobile (a news announcement of this product) That Dell isn't looking so powerful, is it? Probably fine for web surfing, word processing, etc, but your comparison was not quite fair. The iBook is hardly a smoker by today's standards, but you can't compare it to a 2.0 GHz P4
Yep, they got that one wrong. I don't know how--any idiot can tell you that SoundJam went through several full versions before being bought by Apple. For a truly facinating read on the history of SoundJam, Audion (its competitor) and iTunes, read this history of Audion
I hope you discharge the CRTs and wear good gloves after bashing them up. Between explosions and lead poisoning, monitors are dangerous things. Don't try that at home, kids!