Maybe the US government should try something radical and stop creating the problem?
It's no different in Canada. Governments are essentially legally forbidden from using cloud services that can't guarantee data won't be stored in the US (ie: all the American ones). That's just because of assanine US government policies and their cavalier attitude towards privacy.
Except that because carriers can block WP7 patches indefinitely, you might NEVER get the fix. AT&T is proving to be notorious about not letting patches through.
Apple doesn't have that problem because they are in total control.
Have you actually WATCHED specialty channels lately? They're already cheap reality crap almost all of the time. I feel no compelling need to pay for any of it, and if some channels go under because of it then so be it. The only reason so many specialty channels survive now is due to this form of corporate socialism.
It's the same in Canada. Channels get money from the cablecos for every subscriber. Some channels (like TSN) can get more then others because they're much more in demand and not reliant on being in a bundle with better channels to survive.
In fact a lot of these channels get far more money from subscriptions then they do from ad revenue. That's why the broadcast channels wanted to implement Fee for Carriage, because CBC/CTV/Global don't have the same arrangement and don't get paid by the cablecos.
Specialty channels in Canada fall into two groups:
1. The ones that draw subscribers. Think TSN and ones like that, which have content people actually go looking for. 2. The ones that are run on the cheap and show reruns of a small group of shows over and over again.
Group #1 would thrive under this model because they could charge more for those channels. If people can subscribe to TSN on its own, TSN can double or triple the price it charges the cable companies. They'll pass it along, and people will pay it because it's still no more then people were paying to get it before. The only difference is that a bunch of channel type #2 are no longer along for the ride.
Group #2 will suffer and many of them will die off, because they simply aren't worth paying for and won't draw subscription money if you need to pick them up seperately. What people don't commonly realize is that these channels make far more money from being in bundles then they do from advertising. It simply doesn't matter if you're watching them or not, so long as you're buying some other channel and they can be in that bundle you're still giving them money. That lets them save on content, because if nobody's watching they can pretty easily get away with constant reruns of bargain basement shows.
It would hardly be a tragedy to lose a bunch of thse channels. We have far too many as it is and they're starting to blend together and all show similar reality crap because it's cheap.
Oh, they do just fine when they're bundled together with TSN.
The fact is that most specialty channels don't care how many people watch them. They get more of their revenue from subscription fees (being in a package that people take) then they do from advertising to actual eyeballs. Why do you think so many of them just have the same few cheap shows on constant reruns?
Most people right now are paying for five channels they don't want for every one they do. Thus, a 300% increase in the price per channel would still be cheaper unless you're one of the few people that actually wants every channel.
I went to visit an area with them last time I was in Ontario, and if you get even remotely close there's significant noise. Far enough away and you can't hear it, but you don't want one in your backyard.
It's pretty easy to understand why people would be opposed to wind power, and if you lived in Ontario you'd already know: the massive taxpayer subsidies required to make it even remotely feasable.
This is not cheap. Not even close to cheap. To make it viable the province agreed to pay a lot more per kW/h of "green" power. Unfortunately people prefer not to pay $0.80 kW/h for their power, so the province didn't pass those costs along in power bills. Instead of doing that, people pay the cheap fossil fuel price, and the government covers the rest. It's doing a pretty good job of helping to bankrupt the province of Ontario.
Take away the subsidies and the wind power industry in Ontario collapses in a hurry, along with the solar industry. Combine that with the facts that turbines are in fact noisy, consume a lot of highly valuable real estate, and don't actually provide much power in the summer when high pressure moves in and the wind dies off (requiring some other source of power to be online anyway) and it's not much of a solution.
Except that their entire Windows 8 strategy is predicated on tablets and phones. If they were to abandon it now, what they'd wind up with is a crummy tablet UI that's only available on desktops.
If enough companies ignore it and continue putting out normal applications instead, Microsoft will have to deal with that. Metro isn't the sun, it's not inevitable if the market outright rejects it.
Yeah that's the issue I see too. Their trajectory before Windows PHone was ruin because Symbian is in decline and everything else they had wasn't getting traction either. Trying to go with WP7 was a gamble, but so was staking the company on Meego.
Everybody's having a hard time competing against the twin juggernauts in this market.
The problem Nokia faced is that Symbian was a fading, older platform. It still has fans and users, but that's a market in decline and a sure road to ruin (eventually). Meego was having trouble getting off the ground and wasn't gaining much traction.
Microsoft shows up with a wad of cash and offers to make them the premier Windows Phone people. If it works, they're set. If it doesn't work, they're on a faster road to ruin.
But really, if you're already on a road to ruin (which they were), can you afford not to take a risk to try and get off it? I don't think Nokia really had better options aside from becoming yet another Android handset maker. That gamble hasn't worked out for them, which happens sometimes. Shame too, I loved Nokia phones back in the day for how tough they were.
At this point, their best chance is the unlikely scenario that Windows 8 tablets take off. If they do, people will become more intersted in phones that can run the same things and work with the same UI, so Windows Phone 8 devices will see growth. I'm not willing to bet on it though, and it's a bad place for Nokia to be because their success now depends on things outside their control.
That's exactly my understanding of what they're doing. They're not licensing it themselves, they're just going to rely on the OS implementaiton where one exists.
Firefox isn't implementing h.264 though. They're simply going to call the system codec if the OS has one. Typically the OS vendors that do that also offer patent indemnification for their users, so if someone sues you for using h.264 in FIrefox on Windows, Microsoft would get involved because they already paid to license it to Windows users.
How about if I want it to sound "loud", I turn up the knob called "volume"? It's pretty easy to find.
What do I do if I want to sound like music, instead of monotone noise played through a crappy laptop speaker? Death Magnetic has no fix for that except "Download the Guitar Hero version". The CD version is impossible to listen to because it's so awful.
They had to redo the skill system because back when I played the beta it was fucking horrible. "Here's a ton of skills. Pick a couple. Spam them. You won't be allowed to use the rest unless you go back to town and we allow you to pick new ones."
Governments are prone to several problems that cause serious problems with program quality. Speaking as a government programmer, starting with the biggest problem:
1. Consultants. Anytime you have someone external come in and build the code, they don't know anything about the business. They build whatever the spec is (hopefully). In my experience in government, specs are usually very bad at explaining what the users actually need. You need to understand the business in question pretty well to do that. Someone who actually understands how Environmental Inspection & Enforcement is done will be able to write a better program to do it then some guy who is just reading what a word doc says to build, because the first person has the knowledge to know when the spec is wrong.
And that's on a good day. Then you get the consultants who use crappy obsolete technology to throw stuff out quickly, hoping to get more money to fix it later. It won't integrate with anything else, because other consultants did that. When it needs changes because of legislative changes to the business put in by the politicians, nobody is going to know how to change it. It's an expensive and ineffecient model.
Whenever you hear about a $300 million system that didn't work, the odds are good a lot of consultants were involved.
2. Scope creep. Governments are infamous for this. They say we're going to do X. Then another branch jumps in later, now we're doing Y. Then another one. Oh, then there is a department merger and we need it to also work for some other department. Then there's an election and the priorities all changed. Good luck keeping up with that. It's made even worse if you're trying to do the project as one giant release that's all things to all people.
What governments need to do in order to deal with this inevitable problem is split projects up into phases and deliver smaller pieces. It's a lot better to get the first piece out there and in use in a relatively short timeframe then it is to try and build the entire mega-solution at once.
3. It's easy for government employees to become insular, because government is different from the rest of the industry. It's a trap to fall into where you don't keep up with what's new and changing just because you don't particularly need to. Given enough time, skills can become lax and obsolete. It's something that can be dealt with, but employees have to be encouraged to keep learning.
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Hypocrisy in trade is pretty much US government policy.
Maybe the US government should try something radical and stop creating the problem?
It's no different in Canada. Governments are essentially legally forbidden from using cloud services that can't guarantee data won't be stored in the US (ie: all the American ones). That's just because of assanine US government policies and their cavalier attitude towards privacy.
Except that because carriers can block WP7 patches indefinitely, you might NEVER get the fix. AT&T is proving to be notorious about not letting patches through.
Apple doesn't have that problem because they are in total control.
My wife's PC laptop behaves the same way. I suspect it's some kind of hardware issue.
This kind of anti-customer behavior couldn't possibly have anything to do with Best Buy crashing and burning, could it?
Nah. I'm sure the MBAs must have thought the policy through carefully.
Have you actually WATCHED specialty channels lately? They're already cheap reality crap almost all of the time. I feel no compelling need to pay for any of it, and if some channels go under because of it then so be it. The only reason so many specialty channels survive now is due to this form of corporate socialism.
It's the same in Canada. Channels get money from the cablecos for every subscriber. Some channels (like TSN) can get more then others because they're much more in demand and not reliant on being in a bundle with better channels to survive.
In fact a lot of these channels get far more money from subscriptions then they do from ad revenue. That's why the broadcast channels wanted to implement Fee for Carriage, because CBC/CTV/Global don't have the same arrangement and don't get paid by the cablecos.
Specialty channels in Canada fall into two groups:
1. The ones that draw subscribers. Think TSN and ones like that, which have content people actually go looking for.
2. The ones that are run on the cheap and show reruns of a small group of shows over and over again.
Group #1 would thrive under this model because they could charge more for those channels. If people can subscribe to TSN on its own, TSN can double or triple the price it charges the cable companies. They'll pass it along, and people will pay it because it's still no more then people were paying to get it before. The only difference is that a bunch of channel type #2 are no longer along for the ride.
Group #2 will suffer and many of them will die off, because they simply aren't worth paying for and won't draw subscription money if you need to pick them up seperately. What people don't commonly realize is that these channels make far more money from being in bundles then they do from advertising. It simply doesn't matter if you're watching them or not, so long as you're buying some other channel and they can be in that bundle you're still giving them money. That lets them save on content, because if nobody's watching they can pretty easily get away with constant reruns of bargain basement shows.
It would hardly be a tragedy to lose a bunch of thse channels. We have far too many as it is and they're starting to blend together and all show similar reality crap because it's cheap.
Have you seen History channel lately? It's got nothing to do with History at all, unless you consider Pawn Stars and JAG returns to be historical.
Oh, they do just fine when they're bundled together with TSN.
The fact is that most specialty channels don't care how many people watch them. They get more of their revenue from subscription fees (being in a package that people take) then they do from advertising to actual eyeballs. Why do you think so many of them just have the same few cheap shows on constant reruns?
Most people right now are paying for five channels they don't want for every one they do. Thus, a 300% increase in the price per channel would still be cheaper unless you're one of the few people that actually wants every channel.
I went to visit an area with them last time I was in Ontario, and if you get even remotely close there's significant noise. Far enough away and you can't hear it, but you don't want one in your backyard.
It's pretty easy to understand why people would be opposed to wind power, and if you lived in Ontario you'd already know: the massive taxpayer subsidies required to make it even remotely feasable.
This is not cheap. Not even close to cheap. To make it viable the province agreed to pay a lot more per kW/h of "green" power. Unfortunately people prefer not to pay $0.80 kW/h for their power, so the province didn't pass those costs along in power bills. Instead of doing that, people pay the cheap fossil fuel price, and the government covers the rest. It's doing a pretty good job of helping to bankrupt the province of Ontario.
Take away the subsidies and the wind power industry in Ontario collapses in a hurry, along with the solar industry. Combine that with the facts that turbines are in fact noisy, consume a lot of highly valuable real estate, and don't actually provide much power in the summer when high pressure moves in and the wind dies off (requiring some other source of power to be online anyway) and it's not much of a solution.
Gartner, probably. They're pretty famous for laughably wrong mobile predictions.
Except that their entire Windows 8 strategy is predicated on tablets and phones. If they were to abandon it now, what they'd wind up with is a crummy tablet UI that's only available on desktops.
Stuff like the Zune and Kin were peripheral.
If enough companies ignore it and continue putting out normal applications instead, Microsoft will have to deal with that. Metro isn't the sun, it's not inevitable if the market outright rejects it.
Yeah that's the issue I see too. Their trajectory before Windows PHone was ruin because Symbian is in decline and everything else they had wasn't getting traction either. Trying to go with WP7 was a gamble, but so was staking the company on Meego.
Everybody's having a hard time competing against the twin juggernauts in this market.
The problem Nokia faced is that Symbian was a fading, older platform. It still has fans and users, but that's a market in decline and a sure road to ruin (eventually). Meego was having trouble getting off the ground and wasn't gaining much traction.
Microsoft shows up with a wad of cash and offers to make them the premier Windows Phone people. If it works, they're set. If it doesn't work, they're on a faster road to ruin.
But really, if you're already on a road to ruin (which they were), can you afford not to take a risk to try and get off it? I don't think Nokia really had better options aside from becoming yet another Android handset maker. That gamble hasn't worked out for them, which happens sometimes. Shame too, I loved Nokia phones back in the day for how tough they were.
At this point, their best chance is the unlikely scenario that Windows 8 tablets take off. If they do, people will become more intersted in phones that can run the same things and work with the same UI, so Windows Phone 8 devices will see growth. I'm not willing to bet on it though, and it's a bad place for Nokia to be because their success now depends on things outside their control.
That's exactly my understanding of what they're doing. They're not licensing it themselves, they're just going to rely on the OS implementaiton where one exists.
Firefox isn't implementing h.264 though. They're simply going to call the system codec if the OS has one. Typically the OS vendors that do that also offer patent indemnification for their users, so if someone sues you for using h.264 in FIrefox on Windows, Microsoft would get involved because they already paid to license it to Windows users.
How about if I want it to sound "loud", I turn up the knob called "volume"? It's pretty easy to find.
What do I do if I want to sound like music, instead of monotone noise played through a crappy laptop speaker? Death Magnetic has no fix for that except "Download the Guitar Hero version". The CD version is impossible to listen to because it's so awful.
Same problem here. It didn't hook me at all. I had to force myself to play it a second time.
Only difference is that I found the graphics bland and ugly. You can only use 500 shades of "dank" before everything starts to blend together.
How is "single player" not the target market of Diablo?
They had to redo the skill system because back when I played the beta it was fucking horrible. "Here's a ton of skills. Pick a couple. Spam them. You won't be allowed to use the rest unless you go back to town and we allow you to pick new ones."
The whole game was incredibly disappointing.
Governments are prone to several problems that cause serious problems with program quality. Speaking as a government programmer, starting with the biggest problem:
1. Consultants. Anytime you have someone external come in and build the code, they don't know anything about the business. They build whatever the spec is (hopefully). In my experience in government, specs are usually very bad at explaining what the users actually need. You need to understand the business in question pretty well to do that. Someone who actually understands how Environmental Inspection & Enforcement is done will be able to write a better program to do it then some guy who is just reading what a word doc says to build, because the first person has the knowledge to know when the spec is wrong.
And that's on a good day. Then you get the consultants who use crappy obsolete technology to throw stuff out quickly, hoping to get more money to fix it later. It won't integrate with anything else, because other consultants did that. When it needs changes because of legislative changes to the business put in by the politicians, nobody is going to know how to change it. It's an expensive and ineffecient model.
Whenever you hear about a $300 million system that didn't work, the odds are good a lot of consultants were involved.
2. Scope creep. Governments are infamous for this. They say we're going to do X. Then another branch jumps in later, now we're doing Y. Then another one. Oh, then there is a department merger and we need it to also work for some other department. Then there's an election and the priorities all changed. Good luck keeping up with that. It's made even worse if you're trying to do the project as one giant release that's all things to all people.
What governments need to do in order to deal with this inevitable problem is split projects up into phases and deliver smaller pieces. It's a lot better to get the first piece out there and in use in a relatively short timeframe then it is to try and build the entire mega-solution at once.
3. It's easy for government employees to become insular, because government is different from the rest of the industry. It's a trap to fall into where you don't keep up with what's new and changing just because you don't particularly need to. Given enough time, skills can become lax and obsolete. It's something that can be dealt with, but employees have to be encouraged to keep learning.