No, we don't need a TV tuner built into these boxes-- we need TV production companies to jump onboard some kind of TVoIP scheme that allows us to stream their shows to whatever set-top box we choose without going through a cable company. We need to be able to get movies and TV shows streamed to the set-top box of our choice, rather than have Microsoft put another monopolistic layer on top of the monopolistic cable company's crap.
The things you use to get content have far shorter lifecycles than the products you use to view content. Embedding one within the other is a WOMBAT: Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time.
At least until they really standardize things and everyone gets onboard and the technology gets worked out. MP3, FLAC, and WAV are all pretty old, and all are still being used for audio. The problem is in thinking you want *Napster* built into your stereo. The truth is, you probably do want some kind of MP3 streaming built into your stereo so you can house your library in a central server, but you want that streaming to be open and platform agnostic.
Standardized and open formats and protocols are the key. If you can come up with a 1080p TV that can stream good quality 1080p H264 and WebM in a single standard protocol that's supported by iTunes, Google, Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, Amazon, Microsoft, Linux, and everything else, then it wouldn't be such a waste of time.
A) I'm not sure Apple's goal is to completely dominate the phone market.
B) I'm not sure they could have gotten a real start in the cell phone market without an exclusivity deal. Supposedly the AT&T exclusivity was the price Apple paid for making the device the way they wanted, carrier support for visual voicemail, and unlimited data plans.
C) iPhones range between $99 and $299, so I don't know where you're getting the $500 price.
D) I know many people who have said that they really really wanted an iPhone but were not willing to give up Verizon's superior coverage. I had an Android phone for a little while because I wanted to be on Verizon, but I switched back because the Droid Incredible was incredibly annoying.
E) For most practical purposes, Android is only moderately more open. The Android market's approval process is more open, but that's about it. You're still restricted in what you can do by what carriers/manufacturers will allow. Most people aren't going to want to screw around with the kernel, and those who do will basically have to hack their phone to get it installed.
In many way this is what will allow Verizon to get the iPhone. When the iPhone 5 comes out it is bound to support 4G, so even if Verizon is not an official partner, people will be able to use the phone there.
That's not exactly clear. Will the phone be unlocked? Will all carriers be using the same frequencies for 4G?
It seems like the article is Slashdotted so I don't really know what the guy has to say, but it seems like the complaint is something like, "I keep buying laptops with progressively smaller screens. Why do the screens keep getting smaller?!" The answer: because you're choosing to buy laptops with smaller screens.
Manufacturers have settled on creating either 16:10 or 16:9 monitors because that's what's in demand. They're in demand because lots of people are using their monitors to watch movies; even in cases where the primary use of the monitors is not entertainment, people often want the option to watch movies in a wide aspect ratio. Wide displays are also reasonable because our fields of vision are wider than they are tall, and also small laptops often need to be somewhat wide to accommodate a keyboard.
So you can look at it as them taking pixels from the height or adding pixels on the sides. The real question in my mind is, as monitors get wider, does it make sense for UI designers to continue to use valuable height for common static elements. For example, Apple puts the menu bar along the top of the screen and (by default) the dock along the bottom. Gnome, KDE, and Windows all have similar elements which (by default) take up vertical space. It may be time to reevaluate that choice.
And that's what we're going to get. I simply don't see the point of mentioning NAT as a near-term temporary solution: it ALREADY is doing that.
Yeah, NAT is not an upcoming short-term solution for when we run out of IP addresses. NAT was the last short-term solution. NAT is why we didn't run out of IP addresses a really really long time ago. The fact that we're running out of IP addresses now indicates that the ability of NAT to solve the problem is running out.
I guess I'm not adding much to what you already said, though.
But you also have to adjust bonuses for short-term performance measurements and other kinds of compensation (e.g. "golden parachutes") that enable/encourage people to have a destructive long-term strategy while making out like a bandit.
And even then, that only deals with personal profit motives. Contrary to what some people believe, people are not solely motivated by a rational understanding of what will achieve the greatest personal financial profit.
Well it's a matter of some debate still. There's no explicit "right to privacy" in the Constitution, but there are rights against unreasonable searches and against self-incrimination, which can be interpreted as an intention to keep the government from getting into your personal affairs without justification.
So my understanding is that, in practice, judges have often ruled that the government can't invade your privacy too much without cause. People who argue against any kind of "right to privacy" usually seem to be saying (a) there's no explicit wording for it in the Constitution; and (b) there can't be an absolute right to privacy of the sort that would allow you to say, "Yes, I've stolen things and killed people and committed various other kind of crimes, but that's my private life!"
I don't think I like the idea of computerized customization of what news I see. I think for real news, the question shouldn't be "is this a topic I'm already interested in?" because maybe you'd be interested if someone informed you about it. The real question is, "Is this important?" I don't see myself ever trusting a computer very far in determining what's important.
Of course, the problem is that the people at news organizations are also doing a terrible job of determining what's important. News organizations are focused on things like Farmville, Lindsay Lohan, the newest viral video to become a big hit, and the latest Twitter buzz. Honestly, even if you do care about those things, you probably shouldn't.
Not that they should prevent you from learning about these things, or even completely fail to cover them, but I feel like media outlets are really failing to keep a sense of priority and a sense of perspective.
In my mind, corporations are an artifice created to grant certain specific protections to people above and beyond what individuals inherently have. Because of this, it is not unreasonable to expect certain trade-offs if it's practical. "Yes, we'll grant you these additional protections insofar as you're acting on behalf of this 'corporation', but you must give up these rights/protections in return."
The right/ability to form corporate structures is not an inalienable human right, and forming corporate structures is entirely voluntary. You can form organizations which are not incorporated. You and I and other like-minded individuals can meet and discuss things on our own and enjoy privacy without any government sanction, and that is guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. However, I don't think there is any Constitutional right to form special government-protected super-organizations with special rights without any anticipation of transparency.
I say even then, no. The reason we protect the privacy of individuals is because we recognize a need for human dignity, and that people have a right to private lives outside of the public sphere. Businesses, however, are public entities. They don't have "private lives". They don't go home to wives and children at the end of the day.
I hate this sort of argument. There are people who constantly use this excuse for every shitty thing that any company does, and it fails to take a few things into account.
First, it's not clear that a business's sole purpose is to make money for shareholders. Businesses and corporations are artifices that society has created for the purpose to increasing productivity and fairness and economic growth for the sake of benefiting society as a whole, i.e. "the common good". We have laws that limit an officer of the corporation from acting against the shareholder's interests, but those are largely in existence to prevent fraud. They are not there to prevent businesses from acting out of moral/ethical responsibility.
Second, your argument assumes (to some degree) that acting to please their customers and to cooperate with their partners and competitors would not be in the company's best interest. That's not a very clear issue. Certainly going against the best interests of your customers is dangerous over the long term, and the Internet is built in a way that assumes that many people are cooperating in good faith.
So no, I'm not surprised that someone might choose to do this, but that doesn't make it appropriate, ethical, or wise.
Yes, and it's been used as a short form of "application" for decades. The fact that Apple has made use of the term has gotten some people to use it conventionally to mean iPhone applications specifically, but I remember people using it to mean "application" long before (e.g. people talking about having a "killer app").
Nice observation. This is the kind of stuff that the dry analytics and reductionism of geeks/businessmen/economists sometimes miss. There are psychological aspects of value that can be very hard to quantify and run contrary to practical utility.
In fact, I think one of the things that have lead to the decline in value of music overall is its ready availability and the immense practicality of the players. You don't have to take time out of your day to listen. You don't have to spend time thinking about music, choosing what to listen to. You aren't bound to stay in one place while you listen. You can stick your headphones in and hit "shuffle", and you're done.
Depends on how it all works out. If somehow the cost of the iPad plus digital textbooks was at all comparable to the cost of all the print textbooks, then It could work out.
Of course, that's unlikely because the ridiculous cost of print textbooks has nothing to do with the cost of printing.
IA(also)NAL, but I would guess that there's no way you could win a lawsuit on this. I guess I could offer GM a contract that says, "I will not sue you for using wheels on your cars in return for $5," and if they sign the contract, they owe me $5. I don't need to have a patent on wheels for the contract to be legitimate.
Also, I remember reading that the reason Apple discouraged multi-button mice was not because multi-button mice were themselves confusing, but because context menus are confusing.
I don't know if it's true, but supposedly Jobs wasn't a big fan of hiding functionality in invisible menus that change. The contents of a context menu change depending on context, which means you really can't be sure what options will be in the menu until you've clicked. This can be a big UI problem if some application developer decides to put non-obvious functionality in a context menu and nowhere else, especially if that option only shows up under certain circumstances (which is something that Microsoft, for example, used to do).
So rumor is that Jobs opposed the two-button mouse because he didn't want application developers to assume that users would be using context menus. If developers don't assume that users will be checking context menus, then they're not likely to hide important functionality in them.
Honestly, even though I have a multi-button mouse on my Mac, I never really use context menus. I use the right-click for games, and that's about it. I actually use the scroll-click (3rd button) *much* more often than the second button, since it's the button that opens links in new tabs in most browsers.
the would-be emperor isn't even wearing any clothes.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but it seems like a failed attempt to be clever. "It's like the emperor's new clothes, except this time... HE ISN'T EVEN WEARING ANY CLOTHES!" He's not wearing clothes in the original story.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we don't need a TV tuner built into these boxes-- we need TV production companies to jump onboard some kind of TVoIP scheme that allows us to stream their shows to whatever set-top box we choose without going through a cable company. We need to be able to get movies and TV shows streamed to the set-top box of our choice, rather than have Microsoft put another monopolistic layer on top of the monopolistic cable company's crap.
The things you use to get content have far shorter lifecycles than the products you use to view content. Embedding one within the other is a WOMBAT: Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time.
At least until they really standardize things and everyone gets onboard and the technology gets worked out. MP3, FLAC, and WAV are all pretty old, and all are still being used for audio. The problem is in thinking you want *Napster* built into your stereo. The truth is, you probably do want some kind of MP3 streaming built into your stereo so you can house your library in a central server, but you want that streaming to be open and platform agnostic.
Standardized and open formats and protocols are the key. If you can come up with a 1080p TV that can stream good quality 1080p H264 and WebM in a single standard protocol that's supported by iTunes, Google, Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, Amazon, Microsoft, Linux, and everything else, then it wouldn't be such a waste of time.
Well...
A) I'm not sure Apple's goal is to completely dominate the phone market.
B) I'm not sure they could have gotten a real start in the cell phone market without an exclusivity deal. Supposedly the AT&T exclusivity was the price Apple paid for making the device the way they wanted, carrier support for visual voicemail, and unlimited data plans.
C) iPhones range between $99 and $299, so I don't know where you're getting the $500 price.
D) I know many people who have said that they really really wanted an iPhone but were not willing to give up Verizon's superior coverage. I had an Android phone for a little while because I wanted to be on Verizon, but I switched back because the Droid Incredible was incredibly annoying.
E) For most practical purposes, Android is only moderately more open. The Android market's approval process is more open, but that's about it. You're still restricted in what you can do by what carriers/manufacturers will allow. Most people aren't going to want to screw around with the kernel, and those who do will basically have to hack their phone to get it installed.
In many way this is what will allow Verizon to get the iPhone. When the iPhone 5 comes out it is bound to support 4G, so even if Verizon is not an official partner, people will be able to use the phone there.
That's not exactly clear. Will the phone be unlocked? Will all carriers be using the same frequencies for 4G?
It seems like the article is Slashdotted so I don't really know what the guy has to say, but it seems like the complaint is something like, "I keep buying laptops with progressively smaller screens. Why do the screens keep getting smaller?!" The answer: because you're choosing to buy laptops with smaller screens.
Manufacturers have settled on creating either 16:10 or 16:9 monitors because that's what's in demand. They're in demand because lots of people are using their monitors to watch movies; even in cases where the primary use of the monitors is not entertainment, people often want the option to watch movies in a wide aspect ratio. Wide displays are also reasonable because our fields of vision are wider than they are tall, and also small laptops often need to be somewhat wide to accommodate a keyboard.
So you can look at it as them taking pixels from the height or adding pixels on the sides. The real question in my mind is, as monitors get wider, does it make sense for UI designers to continue to use valuable height for common static elements. For example, Apple puts the menu bar along the top of the screen and (by default) the dock along the bottom. Gnome, KDE, and Windows all have similar elements which (by default) take up vertical space. It may be time to reevaluate that choice.
And that's what we're going to get. I simply don't see the point of mentioning NAT as a near-term temporary solution: it ALREADY is doing that.
Yeah, NAT is not an upcoming short-term solution for when we run out of IP addresses. NAT was the last short-term solution. NAT is why we didn't run out of IP addresses a really really long time ago. The fact that we're running out of IP addresses now indicates that the ability of NAT to solve the problem is running out.
I guess I'm not adding much to what you already said, though.
But you also have to adjust bonuses for short-term performance measurements and other kinds of compensation (e.g. "golden parachutes") that enable/encourage people to have a destructive long-term strategy while making out like a bandit.
And even then, that only deals with personal profit motives. Contrary to what some people believe, people are not solely motivated by a rational understanding of what will achieve the greatest personal financial profit.
Well it's a matter of some debate still. There's no explicit "right to privacy" in the Constitution, but there are rights against unreasonable searches and against self-incrimination, which can be interpreted as an intention to keep the government from getting into your personal affairs without justification.
So my understanding is that, in practice, judges have often ruled that the government can't invade your privacy too much without cause. People who argue against any kind of "right to privacy" usually seem to be saying (a) there's no explicit wording for it in the Constitution; and (b) there can't be an absolute right to privacy of the sort that would allow you to say, "Yes, I've stolen things and killed people and committed various other kind of crimes, but that's my private life!"
I don't think I like the idea of computerized customization of what news I see. I think for real news, the question shouldn't be "is this a topic I'm already interested in?" because maybe you'd be interested if someone informed you about it. The real question is, "Is this important?" I don't see myself ever trusting a computer very far in determining what's important.
Of course, the problem is that the people at news organizations are also doing a terrible job of determining what's important. News organizations are focused on things like Farmville, Lindsay Lohan, the newest viral video to become a big hit, and the latest Twitter buzz. Honestly, even if you do care about those things, you probably shouldn't.
Not that they should prevent you from learning about these things, or even completely fail to cover them, but I feel like media outlets are really failing to keep a sense of priority and a sense of perspective.
When a corporation is dissolved, couldn't that just involve all the executives and assets parting ways, possibly temporarily?
Does it even necessarily mean that? Can't the executives just turn around and start a new company?
In my mind, corporations are an artifice created to grant certain specific protections to people above and beyond what individuals inherently have. Because of this, it is not unreasonable to expect certain trade-offs if it's practical. "Yes, we'll grant you these additional protections insofar as you're acting on behalf of this 'corporation', but you must give up these rights/protections in return."
The right/ability to form corporate structures is not an inalienable human right, and forming corporate structures is entirely voluntary. You can form organizations which are not incorporated. You and I and other like-minded individuals can meet and discuss things on our own and enjoy privacy without any government sanction, and that is guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. However, I don't think there is any Constitutional right to form special government-protected super-organizations with special rights without any anticipation of transparency.
I say even then, no. The reason we protect the privacy of individuals is because we recognize a need for human dignity, and that people have a right to private lives outside of the public sphere. Businesses, however, are public entities. They don't have "private lives". They don't go home to wives and children at the end of the day.
So he's busy doing the Apple thing and won't have time to make fart and piss apps for RIM.
Too bad. If he'd been hired by RIM instead, we'd have lots of jokes about how the fart-app guy got a RIM job.
I hate this sort of argument. There are people who constantly use this excuse for every shitty thing that any company does, and it fails to take a few things into account.
First, it's not clear that a business's sole purpose is to make money for shareholders. Businesses and corporations are artifices that society has created for the purpose to increasing productivity and fairness and economic growth for the sake of benefiting society as a whole, i.e. "the common good". We have laws that limit an officer of the corporation from acting against the shareholder's interests, but those are largely in existence to prevent fraud. They are not there to prevent businesses from acting out of moral/ethical responsibility.
Second, your argument assumes (to some degree) that acting to please their customers and to cooperate with their partners and competitors would not be in the company's best interest. That's not a very clear issue. Certainly going against the best interests of your customers is dangerous over the long term, and the Internet is built in a way that assumes that many people are cooperating in good faith.
So no, I'm not surprised that someone might choose to do this, but that doesn't make it appropriate, ethical, or wise.
Well I'm not sure it's worth getting personal about it.
Yes, and it's been used as a short form of "application" for decades. The fact that Apple has made use of the term has gotten some people to use it conventionally to mean iPhone applications specifically, but I remember people using it to mean "application" long before (e.g. people talking about having a "killer app").
I didn't say "people don't value things that they haven't paid for."
I didn't say it was the downfall of music, I said that there's a decline in the perceived value of music.
Nice observation. This is the kind of stuff that the dry analytics and reductionism of geeks/businessmen/economists sometimes miss. There are psychological aspects of value that can be very hard to quantify and run contrary to practical utility.
In fact, I think one of the things that have lead to the decline in value of music overall is its ready availability and the immense practicality of the players. You don't have to take time out of your day to listen. You don't have to spend time thinking about music, choosing what to listen to. You aren't bound to stay in one place while you listen. You can stick your headphones in and hit "shuffle", and you're done.
People don't value things that come easily.
And then you copy that reel-to-reel tape to CD, and then rip the CD to MP3.
Even if the contract mentions the patent, it doesn't seem like the company would be misrepresenting itself.
Depends on how it all works out. If somehow the cost of the iPad plus digital textbooks was at all comparable to the cost of all the print textbooks, then It could work out.
Of course, that's unlikely because the ridiculous cost of print textbooks has nothing to do with the cost of printing.
IA(also)NAL, but I would guess that there's no way you could win a lawsuit on this. I guess I could offer GM a contract that says, "I will not sue you for using wheels on your cars in return for $5," and if they sign the contract, they owe me $5. I don't need to have a patent on wheels for the contract to be legitimate.
Also, I remember reading that the reason Apple discouraged multi-button mice was not because multi-button mice were themselves confusing, but because context menus are confusing.
I don't know if it's true, but supposedly Jobs wasn't a big fan of hiding functionality in invisible menus that change. The contents of a context menu change depending on context, which means you really can't be sure what options will be in the menu until you've clicked. This can be a big UI problem if some application developer decides to put non-obvious functionality in a context menu and nowhere else, especially if that option only shows up under certain circumstances (which is something that Microsoft, for example, used to do).
So rumor is that Jobs opposed the two-button mouse because he didn't want application developers to assume that users would be using context menus. If developers don't assume that users will be checking context menus, then they're not likely to hide important functionality in them.
Honestly, even though I have a multi-button mouse on my Mac, I never really use context menus. I use the right-click for games, and that's about it. I actually use the scroll-click (3rd button) *much* more often than the second button, since it's the button that opens links in new tabs in most browsers.
the would-be emperor isn't even wearing any clothes.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but it seems like a failed attempt to be clever. "It's like the emperor's new clothes, except this time... HE ISN'T EVEN WEARING ANY CLOTHES!" He's not wearing clothes in the original story.