Well I need decent Internet and no one else seems to be able to provide it. Verizon won't, Time Warner can't, and the government can't afford to because we need to give ever-increasing kick-backs to rich people. If Google's willing to do it because it's in the best interest of their business, then I don't mind.
I mean, who do you think *is* going to provide fast Internet out of the kindness of their hearts?
Remember what laptops used to cost? Manufacturers will just have to get over it. The high margin time window just gets shorter and shorter.
laptops didn't get cheaper just because manufacturers dropped their margins. The technology got better, faster, and cheaper. In this case, HP decided to take a product that wasn't selling and sell it at a big loss. It's neat that people have snapped them up, but there's no business model here-- not unless these tablets can be sold as loss-leaders for some other expensive product.
I think you're misunderstanding the idea of focusing on "user experience". It doesn't necessarily mean making things pretty or giving you fun animations, but it is precisely about helping you get your tasks completed with as little nonsense and as few annoyances as possible.
I didn't RTFA, but I'm guessing the author isn't railing against algorithms per se, in the sense that nature uses algorithms, but against entrusting our decision-making to computers running man-made algorithms.
And again, the problem with these computer-driven man-made algorithms is not that they're algorithms, but that they're created by people (and people often fail to anticipate the consequences of the systems they design) and executed by computers (which exercise no judgement over whether what they're doing is a good idea). Poorly designed systems, executed without judgement, without an adequate system of feedback and regulation-- you can get disasters that way.
It's like whoever designed the religious laws somehow knew about germ theory hundreds of years before anyone else.
I've long thought that some of this might be an issue of language. Someone says, "It's bad luck to walk under ladders," and they have in mind that you might knock over the ladder, or someone might drop something on you. Someone else hears this, and a superstition is born. Someone says, "Don't touch the man with sores all over his body because he's cursed, and you might be cursed too if you touch him." Now they don't have a modern scientific language of "virus" and "bacteria", and they don't have the concept of "germs", but maybe they've just learned from experience that sickness is contagious. Maybe they just use the word "curse".
If you really study all of these primitive screwheads, you'll probably notice that they aren't all that dumb. They knew a lot, and even some of their common misunderstandings were believed for good reason.
I'm not so sure they're disinterested in new standards. If Apple wants to have their products use this method, they'll want other manufacturers to support it. I'm not sure it's fair to say that Apple "doesn't like to share". They made their mini display port available without licensing fees. They've apparently helped develop Thunderbolt, which is supposed to be a new upcoming standard for Intel. They've worked with open source projects and created new open source projects. They've pushed standards like USB forward.
Regardless, a patent application isn't a clear sign of intent. Companies like Apple basically patent any idea that their employees have that can be patented, and many of the patents don't turn into products. I'd be kind of surprised if Apple did anything with this.
Personally, I don't mind screwing with standards now and then, as long as the result is a new standard. Given the age of the current 3.5mm jack, I wouldn't be surprised if they could come up with something that was more compact and generally superior. If you got all the manufacturers onboard, it could be good.
Of course, that never seems to be what happens these days. Apple comes up with a standard, and then Sony doesn't like the idea of a standard existing without them collecting patent licensing fees, so they'll need to create a competing standard. Then someone else will come up with a third, and right when it seems like it's starting to settle out, someone will develop a new iteration of the technology and we'll be back where we started.
Well either way they were 2 incompatible networks, and that's a big pain to migrate everyone from one to another. It requires that they get new phones, that you manage 2 different networks while the transition happens. Even ignoring push-to-talk, it's going to be a big mess, and most of what you get out of it is a customer base which might leave anyway due to the messy migration. Given all the trouble, it might be easier and cheaper to steal the customers outright without buying the company.
I still don't quite get why Sprint bought Nextel. Given how much trouble they've had, I think it was probably a mistake.
Every article about a bike riding event warrants thousands of comments about how much these people wish they could go drive over the riders in their Canyonero and other such crap.
There's a strong backlash for a lot of reasons, one of them being a sort of denial. If you offer convincing evidence that people's behaviors are causing massive problems, then they either need to change their behavior, or they need to react violently against the evidence. Nobody wants to admit to themselves that they're a bad person, that their selfish behavior causes problems. People certainly don't want to find out that their addiction to convenience is going to destroy the world. The only remaining recourse is to hate people who are trying to change things.
Yeah, if they're counting "food production" in the carbon footprint of walking, are they also counting food production in their estimate of the carbon footprint of driving? Because it's not like you stop eating when you drive a car. You always eat, and you might not eat any more when you walk then when you don't walk. There might even be complex reasons why you would eat less if you walk a lot.
And that's part of the problem with a lot of these numbers-- you don't actually know what they're counting. Ok, they're counting the cost of manufacturing and the cost of food, but are they counting the cost of repairs? Are they counting the costs of additional roadwork? Are they counting the costs ob building car dealerships vs. bike shops?
For that matter, are they counting all the social and economic changes that come into a society when it drives more or less, bikes more or less? Even if you try, you can only do this to a certain degree; at some point, the math fails you. You can't predict what the changes will be in a system as complex as major civilization, especially as this civilization becomes a global one. As much as I hate to say it, at some point you have to stop using science and start using judgment.
Sprint had (has?) a substantial problem when they bought Nextel, since it meant that they had to maintain two incompatible networks: CDMA and IDEN. Now they're going to buy a GSM carrier too? Seems silly.
What's with insisting things are done with cmd+{x} where as every other operating system I've ever used ALL use +{x}. Apple seems to have gone totally out of its way to make things work differently than everything else before it and all the fanbois lap up this bullshit with avid enthusiasm.
Honestly it's generally not so much that Apple has arbitrarily chosen to do things differently, but that Apple is still kicking from the days where *everyone* did lots of things differently. Once upon a time, every computer manufacturer basically had different and completely incompatible operating systems, and each one had different methods of doing things. In the 80s, everyone standardized on doing things the IBM/Microsoft way, and so people assume that Microsoft UI conventions and IBM keyboard layouts are "normal", and everything else is "weird". However, for at least part of Apple's "weirdness", it's just Apple doing it the same way they've always done it, from before there was a "standard" way of doing it.
Why not devise better (realistic) solutions for end-to-end encryption. If I have authenticated/encrypted traffic to an end-point, then there's a limit to what information can be sniffed from an open wifi connection. If you come up with easier wifi encryption, then you still don't know what's happening once your traffic has been received by the wireless access point.
Does it say it's an average in the article? I was looking for details that might answer your question. Maybe they're averaging many users on the same day, or maybe they aren't averaging consecutive days.
There really are legit reasons to dislike Flash, dont get me wrong -- the privacy controls should be more easily discoverable and integrated with the browser. And it does hog CPU to give performance.
Those aren't the only complaints. It's also essentially proprietary. It creates problems in dealing with text (text isn't necessarily searchable or selectable). Deep linking is still a problem. There are other subtle but serious problems that aren't coming to mind at the moment. Flash is a problem, and at this point the only valid uses that I can think of is video playback or games.
2) License that shit to a company in the industry.
To be fair, sometimes the route to such licensing is to release an announcement and demo showcasing the technology in order to attract interested parties.
I agree, though, with the "put up or shut up" mentality. I've seen enough vaporware over the years that I don't pay any attention to these things until there's an actual product.
I also think it's funny that people complain about Netflix's streaming selection being too limited, and then complain about a price hike. How do you think they're going to get licensing for more movies (especially new releases) without raising more money to pay increased licensing fees?
Of course, it depends greatly on what kind of operations the format allows. If the operations are limited and well-defined, then it may be able to be done with relative safety. If you're embedding a full programming language and allowing the document to execute arbitrary code without sandboxing the whole thing, then you're right, it's a disaster waiting to happen.
I don't think it is just the business model. Whenever I heard about software vendors asking people to pay subscriptions, I get suspicious that they are getting tired of working for their money.
Right now, the deal is that EA can release a new Madden game every couple of years, but they have to continually make improvements. I know people who spend tons of time playing Madden, and I've heard them complain, "Oh this year's version kind of sucks. I'm going to stick to last year's version." So they do still need to sell each version, make each version better. Not so with subscription fees.
Yup. I think we really need to knuckle down and come up with a good universal-authentication scheme, maybe based on private-key encryption. It's not just a problem that people have so many passwords that they struggle to remember several strong ones, but one of the solutions that people employ is to reuse the same password for everything. Password reuse is a huge security flaw.
It's important to remember that security isn't much stronger than the weakest link. If you use the same password for everything, and then a single service gets compromised, then everything is compromised. You use the same password for PSN, Gmail, and your bank? Well the Playstation network got hacked, and now those hackers have your bank password. What fun!
I wonder if it's accidental, or if it's an attempt to undercut Google+. It reminds me a little bit of Microsoft publicizing the Courier concept right around the time that Apple revealed the iPad.
What happens when Facebook and/or Twitter decides they want to block Microsoft if it ever becomes a rival or a deal falls through?
It's also slightly funny for Microsoft to be competing with Facebook while partnering both for authentication and, if they're buying Skype, for video chat.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I need decent Internet and no one else seems to be able to provide it. Verizon won't, Time Warner can't, and the government can't afford to because we need to give ever-increasing kick-backs to rich people. If Google's willing to do it because it's in the best interest of their business, then I don't mind.
I mean, who do you think *is* going to provide fast Internet out of the kindness of their hearts?
Remember what laptops used to cost? Manufacturers will just have to get over it. The high margin time window just gets shorter and shorter.
laptops didn't get cheaper just because manufacturers dropped their margins. The technology got better, faster, and cheaper. In this case, HP decided to take a product that wasn't selling and sell it at a big loss. It's neat that people have snapped them up, but there's no business model here-- not unless these tablets can be sold as loss-leaders for some other expensive product.
I think you're misunderstanding the idea of focusing on "user experience". It doesn't necessarily mean making things pretty or giving you fun animations, but it is precisely about helping you get your tasks completed with as little nonsense and as few annoyances as possible.
I didn't RTFA, but I'm guessing the author isn't railing against algorithms per se, in the sense that nature uses algorithms, but against entrusting our decision-making to computers running man-made algorithms.
And again, the problem with these computer-driven man-made algorithms is not that they're algorithms, but that they're created by people (and people often fail to anticipate the consequences of the systems they design) and executed by computers (which exercise no judgement over whether what they're doing is a good idea). Poorly designed systems, executed without judgement, without an adequate system of feedback and regulation-- you can get disasters that way.
It's like whoever designed the religious laws somehow knew about germ theory hundreds of years before anyone else.
I've long thought that some of this might be an issue of language. Someone says, "It's bad luck to walk under ladders," and they have in mind that you might knock over the ladder, or someone might drop something on you. Someone else hears this, and a superstition is born. Someone says, "Don't touch the man with sores all over his body because he's cursed, and you might be cursed too if you touch him." Now they don't have a modern scientific language of "virus" and "bacteria", and they don't have the concept of "germs", but maybe they've just learned from experience that sickness is contagious. Maybe they just use the word "curse".
If you really study all of these primitive screwheads, you'll probably notice that they aren't all that dumb. They knew a lot, and even some of their common misunderstandings were believed for good reason.
Well also, if the customers already prefer unlimited plans, then there's no need to force them into it, right?
I'm not so sure they're disinterested in new standards. If Apple wants to have their products use this method, they'll want other manufacturers to support it. I'm not sure it's fair to say that Apple "doesn't like to share". They made their mini display port available without licensing fees. They've apparently helped develop Thunderbolt, which is supposed to be a new upcoming standard for Intel. They've worked with open source projects and created new open source projects. They've pushed standards like USB forward.
Regardless, a patent application isn't a clear sign of intent. Companies like Apple basically patent any idea that their employees have that can be patented, and many of the patents don't turn into products. I'd be kind of surprised if Apple did anything with this.
Personally, I don't mind screwing with standards now and then, as long as the result is a new standard. Given the age of the current 3.5mm jack, I wouldn't be surprised if they could come up with something that was more compact and generally superior. If you got all the manufacturers onboard, it could be good.
Of course, that never seems to be what happens these days. Apple comes up with a standard, and then Sony doesn't like the idea of a standard existing without them collecting patent licensing fees, so they'll need to create a competing standard. Then someone else will come up with a third, and right when it seems like it's starting to settle out, someone will develop a new iteration of the technology and we'll be back where we started.
Well either way they were 2 incompatible networks, and that's a big pain to migrate everyone from one to another. It requires that they get new phones, that you manage 2 different networks while the transition happens. Even ignoring push-to-talk, it's going to be a big mess, and most of what you get out of it is a customer base which might leave anyway due to the messy migration. Given all the trouble, it might be easier and cheaper to steal the customers outright without buying the company.
I still don't quite get why Sprint bought Nextel. Given how much trouble they've had, I think it was probably a mistake.
Every article about a bike riding event warrants thousands of comments about how much these people wish they could go drive over the riders in their Canyonero and other such crap.
There's a strong backlash for a lot of reasons, one of them being a sort of denial. If you offer convincing evidence that people's behaviors are causing massive problems, then they either need to change their behavior, or they need to react violently against the evidence. Nobody wants to admit to themselves that they're a bad person, that their selfish behavior causes problems. People certainly don't want to find out that their addiction to convenience is going to destroy the world. The only remaining recourse is to hate people who are trying to change things.
Yeah, if they're counting "food production" in the carbon footprint of walking, are they also counting food production in their estimate of the carbon footprint of driving? Because it's not like you stop eating when you drive a car. You always eat, and you might not eat any more when you walk then when you don't walk. There might even be complex reasons why you would eat less if you walk a lot.
And that's part of the problem with a lot of these numbers-- you don't actually know what they're counting. Ok, they're counting the cost of manufacturing and the cost of food, but are they counting the cost of repairs? Are they counting the costs of additional roadwork? Are they counting the costs ob building car dealerships vs. bike shops?
For that matter, are they counting all the social and economic changes that come into a society when it drives more or less, bikes more or less? Even if you try, you can only do this to a certain degree; at some point, the math fails you. You can't predict what the changes will be in a system as complex as major civilization, especially as this civilization becomes a global one. As much as I hate to say it, at some point you have to stop using science and start using judgment.
Sprint had (has?) a substantial problem when they bought Nextel, since it meant that they had to maintain two incompatible networks: CDMA and IDEN. Now they're going to buy a GSM carrier too? Seems silly.
What's with insisting things are done with cmd+{x} where as every other operating system I've ever used ALL use +{x}. Apple seems to have gone totally out of its way to make things work differently than everything else before it and all the fanbois lap up this bullshit with avid enthusiasm.
Honestly it's generally not so much that Apple has arbitrarily chosen to do things differently, but that Apple is still kicking from the days where *everyone* did lots of things differently. Once upon a time, every computer manufacturer basically had different and completely incompatible operating systems, and each one had different methods of doing things. In the 80s, everyone standardized on doing things the IBM/Microsoft way, and so people assume that Microsoft UI conventions and IBM keyboard layouts are "normal", and everything else is "weird". However, for at least part of Apple's "weirdness", it's just Apple doing it the same way they've always done it, from before there was a "standard" way of doing it.
Why not devise better (realistic) solutions for end-to-end encryption. If I have authenticated/encrypted traffic to an end-point, then there's a limit to what information can be sniffed from an open wifi connection. If you come up with easier wifi encryption, then you still don't know what's happening once your traffic has been received by the wireless access point.
Or am I missing the point?
Does it say it's an average in the article? I was looking for details that might answer your question. Maybe they're averaging many users on the same day, or maybe they aren't averaging consecutive days.
There really are legit reasons to dislike Flash, dont get me wrong -- the privacy controls should be more easily discoverable and integrated with the browser. And it does hog CPU to give performance.
Those aren't the only complaints. It's also essentially proprietary. It creates problems in dealing with text (text isn't necessarily searchable or selectable). Deep linking is still a problem. There are other subtle but serious problems that aren't coming to mind at the moment. Flash is a problem, and at this point the only valid uses that I can think of is video playback or games.
2) License that shit to a company in the industry.
To be fair, sometimes the route to such licensing is to release an announcement and demo showcasing the technology in order to attract interested parties.
I agree, though, with the "put up or shut up" mentality. I've seen enough vaporware over the years that I don't pay any attention to these things until there's an actual product.
I don't know their licensing deals, but increased volume probably means increased licensing fees.
I also think it's funny that people complain about Netflix's streaming selection being too limited, and then complain about a price hike. How do you think they're going to get licensing for more movies (especially new releases) without raising more money to pay increased licensing fees?
Of course, it depends greatly on what kind of operations the format allows. If the operations are limited and well-defined, then it may be able to be done with relative safety. If you're embedding a full programming language and allowing the document to execute arbitrary code without sandboxing the whole thing, then you're right, it's a disaster waiting to happen.
I don't think it is just the business model. Whenever I heard about software vendors asking people to pay subscriptions, I get suspicious that they are getting tired of working for their money.
Right now, the deal is that EA can release a new Madden game every couple of years, but they have to continually make improvements. I know people who spend tons of time playing Madden, and I've heard them complain, "Oh this year's version kind of sucks. I'm going to stick to last year's version." So they do still need to sell each version, make each version better. Not so with subscription fees.
Yup. I think we really need to knuckle down and come up with a good universal-authentication scheme, maybe based on private-key encryption. It's not just a problem that people have so many passwords that they struggle to remember several strong ones, but one of the solutions that people employ is to reuse the same password for everything. Password reuse is a huge security flaw.
It's important to remember that security isn't much stronger than the weakest link. If you use the same password for everything, and then a single service gets compromised, then everything is compromised. You use the same password for PSN, Gmail, and your bank? Well the Playstation network got hacked, and now those hackers have your bank password. What fun!
... with a 768kbps upload rate.
I wonder if it's accidental, or if it's an attempt to undercut Google+. It reminds me a little bit of Microsoft publicizing the Courier concept right around the time that Apple revealed the iPad.
What happens when Facebook and/or Twitter decides they want to block Microsoft if it ever becomes a rival or a deal falls through?
It's also slightly funny for Microsoft to be competing with Facebook while partnering both for authentication and, if they're buying Skype, for video chat.