To be fair they wrote their reviews before Steve Jobs died and stirred up a mass hysteria over all things Apple, and definitely before preorders opened. Or are you telling me that you don't think that 10,000 articles about Apple nostalgia wouldn't drive up sales?
No, but I fully expected that people like you would find some lame excuse when the iPhone 4s would sell well.
My money is on the fact that the true path of the beam was not from one city to the other, but from the spot where one city was when it started to where the other city was when it stopped. If the path was opposite the rotation of the earth, that'd be very slightly shorter right? Earth doesn't spin fast compared to the speed of light, but this error wasn't very large either
To be fair they wrote their reviews before Steve Jobs died and stirred up a mass hysteria over all things Apple, and definitely before preorders opened. Or are you telling me that you don't think that 10,000 articles about Apple nostalgia wouldn't drive up sales?
1. Tell the new employer that you'd like to give a longer-than-usual notice to your current employer
2. Figure out between you and your new employer what length of time is reasonable
3. Tell your old employer that you're leaving, but that you're giving them this extended notice
4. Make the move
Hopefully when you're looking for the next job after this one your current employer will remember that you did them a favor, because that's who you'll likely be using as a reference and not these new people you're talking to now. And even if they forget that you were nice to them on the way out, you'll still know that you did "the right thing" (and not "the sucker thing" by staying forever just because they weren't smart enough to make people slightly redundant)
I think there are good ways to be involved and bad ways to be involved in the market. IMHO the anger over Solyndra's loans is justified not just by the facts that were apparently readily available about that company, but by the way the government was essentially picking winners in the market and providing money before any good was delivered rather than promising to support companies that had already proved their own value. I'd much rather the government say "we're going to start buying electric cars for our own fleets on X date, and we'll do it from whoever can make the best product" than say "we're going to give new company X some money to design and build electric cars." You could do the same thing by committing to buy green power from nuclear/solar/wind providers rather than providing or guaranteeing loans from unstarted companies. I think if we can make commitments to buy products from companies that have already worked out the details and have proven themselves to investors we can get a healthier outcome. Not only does that get them value for the money that they did spend, but it will multiply that value by adding itself to money from investors in the other startups that didn't get picked but produced second-best products or valuable new technology. If the market knows that there will be a buyer, then someone will get the investment that is needed to become a producer.
I know it won't happen, but it seems like the best way to spend this subsidy money would be for the government to defray the cost from the best and cheapest rural Internet providers (or give out vouchers that people can use to pick their own supplier). That way there will be incentive to provide good service, and there will likely be service provided by more than just the companies that end up coming out on top and getting government money. I'm sure what they'll do instead is just throw money at anyone who provides even crummy service, and as a result they'll get the lowest denominator return on that investment. Maybe this plan won't work as well in monopoly industries like cable, but it seems like the majority of the markets would work better this way.
The thing is: Most people don't want to lug around a separate device that can't be used for *anything* other than reading text, especially when the devices are reliant on proprietary (i.e. device specific) software, restricting the available input formats and causing rendering problems on more complicated PDFs and such. I've heard many a complaint about eBook readers' PDF rendering - they don't seem to be suitable for anything much other than reading fully reflowable text.
That's not really an e-ink problem, it's not like e-ink and PDFs are incompatible
No one ever talks about revenue or spending either, just debt. Debt is the result of revenue minus spending, and any idiot could have predicted that revenue would not be doing well after the economy tanked. I'd like to see a graph of how much revenue and spending changed over the years, so that we can factor out declines in revenue from the increases in the debt.
AFAIK Android intents are push rather than pull. And that's a pretty big difference, since you have to either select the app/site you're pushing to at the time of the push or preset it beforehand (meaning you have control of who's receiving the data). This looks like it has a return path though, so it does seem like it might be risky.
It doesn't make sense that this email was a start of a suggestion that they get a license, since it seems to be the culmination of them going through "a hundred of these" alternatives to Java and discounting them all. Whoever sent the email saying that they should look through a hundred alternatives to Java (TFA says that it's Larry and Sergey) was already considering whether or not they should get a license. It seems like if they were confident that they still wouldn't need a license they wouldn't have initiated what must have been a fairly large process of checking alternatives.
I think they went wrong blaming the price raise on DVDs, and giving a completely bizarre narrative of how the prices changed. They claimed that most people were getting DVDs for $2 and that wasn't enough money, but most of their longtime subscribers had instead had streaming tacked onto their account for $2 (after it had been tacked on for free just prior to that). If they had just said this it would have been better: "First we gave you streaming for free while we built our library. Then we bumped that up to $2 on DVD accounts to pay for the improvements that we made to the library. Now we're bumping it to $8 to pay for the improvements that we've made since then. We realize that some DVD subscribers aren't going to want to pay for both features, so we're making them separate charges so that you can sign up for either or both."
P.S. I'm pretty sure this is the first time that TFA linked to on Slashdot was a podcast with no transcript, and I'm hoping it's also the last time
USA Network does a 30-day wait on every episode past the first 2 of the season. It makes it annoying for someone to watch a series exclusively on the web, because their windows for taking down content aren't nearly as long
That's the point. People assumed that she was using this outside email service to avoid having her conversations archived, so they are anticipating finding something in the emails that she didn't want made public. Still, since 4% of the emails weren't released, even if nothing is found in this 96% people will wonder about the rest.
Well, if they make it so that the penalty for giving the wrong answer to "What is your favorite color?" is being thrown off a bridge I imagine you wouldn't want to go around guessing other people's answers to get into their account
Had Netflix chosen Adobe Flash, they wouldn't be having so much trouble supporting platforms other than Windows.
For the record Netflix had a Flash player first, and then they moved from there to Silverlight. So it's possible that they knew something that you don't
Xbox features the metro UI. That said I don't think the reason Zune never took off was because of the UI. Lack of marketing, US only markplace, limited international availability, competition with the most popular MP3 player on the planet, and a shift away from MP3 players toward phones all contributed more heavily
The 10 Windows Phone ads that I see on my TV every day as well as an advertising intro to seemingly every single Flash video player on the internet would disagree with your assessment that Windows Phones aren't being marketed. Apple advertises a ton as always (though more often for iPads these days), but the Windows Phone ad budget seems to dwarf the combined Android marketing of all the carriers and handset makers.
Because they will make it so that if you already do use an iOS device that you CAN'T use the Amazon or Google products on them. There is no Amazon MP3 store app for the iPhone right now for instance. That didn't matter as much when they were just selling song downloads that you could then transfer to iTunes on your computer, but if we're talking about streaming features you'd really need the actual app installed on your device (technically they could make it a mobile web app, but those never seem to work as well). So now you've got an open music store, but you can't put it on your closed device that happens to have a huge install base. That's not entirely different than where we were at with iTunes DRM versus Microsoft's DRM "that can play on any device except iPods", though they don't have quite as much of a market lead as they did back then.
I think it's because they use the exact same marketing-speak when they add something that actually is new and interesting as they use when they add something that isn't novel at all, like cut-and-paste. No, I don't expect them to say "this is really boring, it's cut and paste", but maybe they could just say "we have cut and paste now" or add it in a bullet point somewhere and leave it at that (AND they use this same lavish praise to describe features that they previously described as worthless and unnecessary when they didn't have them). Most companies have lists of standard features that are beneath discussion and spend their time talking about the ones that are, but Apple seems to require 5 paragraphs of praise for each and every aspect of their products.
That external antenna that everyone was raving about on the iPhone 4 is a good example of this too. Maybe if they weren't talking about how amazing it was to have an external antenna when that fact looked completely meaningless, then people wouldn't have jumped all over them when it became clear that having an external antenna was a really bad idea.
Wasn't there actually a cap on the number of cars that could be imported to the US from Japan, whereas there was no cap on truck imports? I thought the rise of small SUVs like the Suzuki Samurai was partly because they could be shipped to the US without a back seat, and since that made them a "truck" they didn't count against the cap. They'd throw a seat in it when it got over here and sell it as a passenger vehicle, but it was imported as a truck
I would consider "I won't use an app with ads" an unreasonable requirement, but it's obviously something that you're passionate about so I'll say to each his own. The problem is that if 99% of the market doesn't feel the same way that you do, then it's likely that you might not be able to find a single app in a category that fits your needs. Angry Birds has about a billion competitors though, so I think that's something different than what I'm talking about.
My problem is when I see apps like this or this that are obviously over-reaching. I don't think that it's just the case that most people don't look at the permissions of apps they're installing, though I do think that is part of the problem. I think that permissions of apps that the maker knows will come pre-installed on phones quite often have these crazy permissions (since the user didn't do the first install they didn't read it), and I think that there are also categories of apps where there are few competitors where they've essentially all agreed to ask for too much because like I said the "nuclear option" of not installing any app from an entire category is rarely taken.
Slashdot Mirror
I would think with the death of WebOS you might want to install Android at some point just to get new apps
To be fair they wrote their reviews before Steve Jobs died and stirred up a mass hysteria over all things Apple, and definitely before preorders opened. Or are you telling me that you don't think that 10,000 articles about Apple nostalgia wouldn't drive up sales?
No, but I fully expected that people like you would find some lame excuse when the iPhone 4s would sell well.
"people like me" meaning anyone that disagrees?
My money is on the fact that the true path of the beam was not from one city to the other, but from the spot where one city was when it started to where the other city was when it stopped. If the path was opposite the rotation of the earth, that'd be very slightly shorter right? Earth doesn't spin fast compared to the speed of light, but this error wasn't very large either
To be fair they wrote their reviews before Steve Jobs died and stirred up a mass hysteria over all things Apple, and definitely before preorders opened. Or are you telling me that you don't think that 10,000 articles about Apple nostalgia wouldn't drive up sales?
1. Tell the new employer that you'd like to give a longer-than-usual notice to your current employer
2. Figure out between you and your new employer what length of time is reasonable
3. Tell your old employer that you're leaving, but that you're giving them this extended notice
4. Make the move
Hopefully when you're looking for the next job after this one your current employer will remember that you did them a favor, because that's who you'll likely be using as a reference and not these new people you're talking to now. And even if they forget that you were nice to them on the way out, you'll still know that you did "the right thing" (and not "the sucker thing" by staying forever just because they weren't smart enough to make people slightly redundant)
I think there are good ways to be involved and bad ways to be involved in the market. IMHO the anger over Solyndra's loans is justified not just by the facts that were apparently readily available about that company, but by the way the government was essentially picking winners in the market and providing money before any good was delivered rather than promising to support companies that had already proved their own value. I'd much rather the government say "we're going to start buying electric cars for our own fleets on X date, and we'll do it from whoever can make the best product" than say "we're going to give new company X some money to design and build electric cars." You could do the same thing by committing to buy green power from nuclear/solar/wind providers rather than providing or guaranteeing loans from unstarted companies. I think if we can make commitments to buy products from companies that have already worked out the details and have proven themselves to investors we can get a healthier outcome. Not only does that get them value for the money that they did spend, but it will multiply that value by adding itself to money from investors in the other startups that didn't get picked but produced second-best products or valuable new technology. If the market knows that there will be a buyer, then someone will get the investment that is needed to become a producer.
I know it won't happen, but it seems like the best way to spend this subsidy money would be for the government to defray the cost from the best and cheapest rural Internet providers (or give out vouchers that people can use to pick their own supplier). That way there will be incentive to provide good service, and there will likely be service provided by more than just the companies that end up coming out on top and getting government money. I'm sure what they'll do instead is just throw money at anyone who provides even crummy service, and as a result they'll get the lowest denominator return on that investment. Maybe this plan won't work as well in monopoly industries like cable, but it seems like the majority of the markets would work better this way.
The thing is: Most people don't want to lug around a separate device that can't be used for *anything* other than reading text, especially when the devices are reliant on proprietary (i.e. device specific) software, restricting the available input formats and causing rendering problems on more complicated PDFs and such. I've heard many a complaint about eBook readers' PDF rendering - they don't seem to be suitable for anything much other than reading fully reflowable text.
That's not really an e-ink problem, it's not like e-ink and PDFs are incompatible
No one ever talks about revenue or spending either, just debt. Debt is the result of revenue minus spending, and any idiot could have predicted that revenue would not be doing well after the economy tanked. I'd like to see a graph of how much revenue and spending changed over the years, so that we can factor out declines in revenue from the increases in the debt.
AFAIK Android intents are push rather than pull. And that's a pretty big difference, since you have to either select the app/site you're pushing to at the time of the push or preset it beforehand (meaning you have control of who's receiving the data). This looks like it has a return path though, so it does seem like it might be risky.
It doesn't make sense that this email was a start of a suggestion that they get a license, since it seems to be the culmination of them going through "a hundred of these" alternatives to Java and discounting them all. Whoever sent the email saying that they should look through a hundred alternatives to Java (TFA says that it's Larry and Sergey) was already considering whether or not they should get a license. It seems like if they were confident that they still wouldn't need a license they wouldn't have initiated what must have been a fairly large process of checking alternatives.
I assume he's referring to this
I think they went wrong blaming the price raise on DVDs, and giving a completely bizarre narrative of how the prices changed. They claimed that most people were getting DVDs for $2 and that wasn't enough money, but most of their longtime subscribers had instead had streaming tacked onto their account for $2 (after it had been tacked on for free just prior to that). If they had just said this it would have been better: "First we gave you streaming for free while we built our library. Then we bumped that up to $2 on DVD accounts to pay for the improvements that we made to the library. Now we're bumping it to $8 to pay for the improvements that we've made since then. We realize that some DVD subscribers aren't going to want to pay for both features, so we're making them separate charges so that you can sign up for either or both."
P.S. I'm pretty sure this is the first time that TFA linked to on Slashdot was a podcast with no transcript, and I'm hoping it's also the last time
At last we'll have these in the EBook format that George Lucas always intended
USA Network does a 30-day wait on every episode past the first 2 of the season. It makes it annoying for someone to watch a series exclusively on the web, because their windows for taking down content aren't nearly as long
That's the point. People assumed that she was using this outside email service to avoid having her conversations archived, so they are anticipating finding something in the emails that she didn't want made public. Still, since 4% of the emails weren't released, even if nothing is found in this 96% people will wonder about the rest.
It was also possible for people to be investigated by PI's and have their character assassinated by too-freely-shared pictures before Facebook
That doesn't have the list of apps either. The internet is broken.
Well, if they make it so that the penalty for giving the wrong answer to "What is your favorite color?" is being thrown off a bridge I imagine you wouldn't want to go around guessing other people's answers to get into their account
Had Netflix chosen Adobe Flash, they wouldn't be having so much trouble supporting platforms other than Windows.
For the record Netflix had a Flash player first, and then they moved from there to Silverlight. So it's possible that they knew something that you don't
Xbox features the metro UI. That said I don't think the reason Zune never took off was because of the UI. Lack of marketing, US only markplace, limited international availability, competition with the most popular MP3 player on the planet, and a shift away from MP3 players toward phones all contributed more heavily
The 10 Windows Phone ads that I see on my TV every day as well as an advertising intro to seemingly every single Flash video player on the internet would disagree with your assessment that Windows Phones aren't being marketed. Apple advertises a ton as always (though more often for iPads these days), but the Windows Phone ad budget seems to dwarf the combined Android marketing of all the carriers and handset makers.
I think SOE did enough damage to the people who played SWG without also losing their credit cards 5 years later
Because they will make it so that if you already do use an iOS device that you CAN'T use the Amazon or Google products on them. There is no Amazon MP3 store app for the iPhone right now for instance. That didn't matter as much when they were just selling song downloads that you could then transfer to iTunes on your computer, but if we're talking about streaming features you'd really need the actual app installed on your device (technically they could make it a mobile web app, but those never seem to work as well). So now you've got an open music store, but you can't put it on your closed device that happens to have a huge install base. That's not entirely different than where we were at with iTunes DRM versus Microsoft's DRM "that can play on any device except iPods", though they don't have quite as much of a market lead as they did back then.
I think it's because they use the exact same marketing-speak when they add something that actually is new and interesting as they use when they add something that isn't novel at all, like cut-and-paste. No, I don't expect them to say "this is really boring, it's cut and paste", but maybe they could just say "we have cut and paste now" or add it in a bullet point somewhere and leave it at that (AND they use this same lavish praise to describe features that they previously described as worthless and unnecessary when they didn't have them). Most companies have lists of standard features that are beneath discussion and spend their time talking about the ones that are, but Apple seems to require 5 paragraphs of praise for each and every aspect of their products.
That external antenna that everyone was raving about on the iPhone 4 is a good example of this too. Maybe if they weren't talking about how amazing it was to have an external antenna when that fact looked completely meaningless, then people wouldn't have jumped all over them when it became clear that having an external antenna was a really bad idea.
Wasn't there actually a cap on the number of cars that could be imported to the US from Japan, whereas there was no cap on truck imports? I thought the rise of small SUVs like the Suzuki Samurai was partly because they could be shipped to the US without a back seat, and since that made them a "truck" they didn't count against the cap. They'd throw a seat in it when it got over here and sell it as a passenger vehicle, but it was imported as a truck
I would consider "I won't use an app with ads" an unreasonable requirement, but it's obviously something that you're passionate about so I'll say to each his own. The problem is that if 99% of the market doesn't feel the same way that you do, then it's likely that you might not be able to find a single app in a category that fits your needs. Angry Birds has about a billion competitors though, so I think that's something different than what I'm talking about.
My problem is when I see apps like this or this that are obviously over-reaching. I don't think that it's just the case that most people don't look at the permissions of apps they're installing, though I do think that is part of the problem. I think that permissions of apps that the maker knows will come pre-installed on phones quite often have these crazy permissions (since the user didn't do the first install they didn't read it), and I think that there are also categories of apps where there are few competitors where they've essentially all agreed to ask for too much because like I said the "nuclear option" of not installing any app from an entire category is rarely taken.