1) Microsoft Debuts play for sure. 2) Everybody makes horrendous, terrible, clunky devices with bad battery life and shit for UI w/o a single good music store. 3) Microsoft attempts to salvage it by releasing Zune, which in both of its generations received glowing reviews and was widely regarded as superior to the iPod.
Unfortunately for Microsoft it was too little too late. But they did create a great product that had the potential to succeed.
Microsoft sees the same thing happening again--if they leave their product in the hands of OEMs they are afraid the OEMs will release such inferior products that their software will be irrelevant. So they're releasing both a platform, but unlike Zune, also letting others compete. If they create a better product, great. If they don't, great. It's a win-win.
OEMs will undoubtedly be alienated but screw'em. I don't see Microsoft offering anything in the Surface that any of them couldn't have (but didn't) offer.
The question though in this case isn't "what does it take to run office" so much as "what does it take to run any application in Windows 7 or Windows 8?"
Those system specs are nearly identical to Windows 7's system recommendations.
Essentially all the recommended system specs are saying is. "Your computer needs to run Windows 7, after that Office will be fine with whatever." If your OS is crapping out without any apps running (min OS specs) then you won't be running office smoothly either.
It's because they had to rewrite the UI to deliver a high framerate with almost no latency. (No seriously.) And it actually is rational. When you're scrolling in something for instance with a mouse wheel it just moves in increments and you don't detect any lag. If however you attempt to scroll through a list with your finger and it trails behind a half second it will feel sluggish and weird. There are a number of phone and tablet apps I've used that have this lag and it's really annoying. If they want to deliver a good touch experience--using hardware acceleration is a sensible route.
I disagree to some extent. For one, I can't stand the alternative which is for the story to not take place at all or make me hunt for it.
I like games but after maybe an hour of a single player game I'm just bored of the gameplay mechanic and want to know how the story is going to end. The only reason I've ever finished a single player campaign is for the narrative. If there is no narrative I care about--give me multi-player so that I can at least play against proper opponents and the satisfaction of defeating human beings.
It's not competitive in my opinion if I beat a computer. It's like playing a board game against a 6 year old. You might win--you might lose but you don't feel a sense of pride or satisfaction if you do win. Every victory has an asterisk.
On the other hand I'll wade through the boredom of a game to see the "END". If the game has no end then I won't have much of a motivation to keep going. I don't feel the slightest bit of interest in WOW for that reason. There's no "Winning". There's no catharsis or victory--it's an endless grind which you only abandon but never overcome.
I want to know what secret it is that my parents died to protect or what have you.
Even games like Mass Effect which I was extremely engaged in had such a non-linear story line that I eventually got bored doing stupid pointless side-quests until I lost interest. "What you want me to perform a census of every creature in the galaxy? Well as a completionist I feel compelled to help you with your stupid inane task."
A story with too many branching and peripheral paths inevitably ends up having a bunch of filler crap--with no way to tell what is what. On the other hand a game where you are compelled to move to the next point is often better edited and refined.
Imagine what a movie would be like if you watched all 30 takes of every scene. It would be boring and stupid.
There should be just enough freedom so that you feel free and have room to get immersed and a part of the world--but then have a very clear and concise story path. Games should take a lesson from Dungeons and Dragons--you have a story and your DM will keep you moving forward. He's not going to be like "hello party, would you like to deliver this letter to my cousin in stonebrook?" No, they're hopefully smart enough to constantly filter out all the meaningless shit and no matter what choice you make--eventually end up where you need to go.
The poor are the ones waging a war on the poor. As a result I don't care. If they want to give me a tax cut so be it. When they start looking after their own interests instead of electing people to screw them I'll support their interests.
I think the Tea Party has proven otherwise. And it's that attitude among youth and other voters which leads to disenfranchisement.
The notion that a group can't change policy is complete bullshit. This is actually why I've stopped caring. If the Dems win my ideals win. If the Republicans win I get more money in my pocket. If people want to look out for their interests... they can do it. But the "99%" movement hit upon two conflicting and important points about modern politics--the reason the 99% don't get listened to is because they don't vote based on their interests.
Women concerned about their rights? They make up more than 50% of the voting population. Why do I need to look out for their interests? You want the government looking out for women's rights... easy solution--every single woman show up to vote. That's it. If 90% of women showed up to vote in 2012 I can guarantee that their interests would get nearly exclusive attention from candidates. If 90% of Latinos showed up to vote you can guarantee that their interests would be represented.
The reason voting doesn't seem to change anything is because the demographics of voters doesn't change. Except in the case of the Tea Party. They got out... they all voted and they managed to dramatically change the character of congress. If the Occupy movement got out of parks and all showed up at the poll booths they could have a similar change on national policy.
Disengaging due to cynicism is why things don't change.
Or you can say that if you have a list and 1/3rd of them are wrong the list is highly suspect and the other 2/3rds should be investigated. If anyone ever gave me a job that was done 1/3rd wrong I would operate on the assumption that the other 2/3rds are wrong but just less obviously.
Yes Stallman's suggestion is to put a tax on *everybody* who buys internet regardless of their music consumption habits. That's been reallly well received by Slashdot in past articles. I'm surprised nobody latched onto it.
The other idea? "Just quickly send money to the artist." So he proposes two solutions:
1) Tax everybody regardless of their use. 2) Have artists beg for money.
He also says that going to concerts is probably paying for music. This is definitely untrue. For everybody except for arena filling rock stars concerts are a loss leader to sell CDs and MP3s.
There was a time when 95% of customers only used the keyboard. There was a time when 95% of customers didn't have an internet connection. There was a time when 95% of customers had no GPU acceleration. There was a time when 95% of smart phones had no capacitive touch due to price and availability and therefore couldn't respond properly to finger input.
Yeah I would be interested to know about scalability. Could this be a future solution to commercial airliners? Save a shit-ton of weight by just having enough battery power to get a plane to the nearest airport but then charge in-flight through recharge corridors.
Probably not economically feasible but could be cheaper to build a laser station every 10km than to build transcontinental highspeed rail.
The only limitations I have on my success is my own ability and initiative.
*And privilege. Your most accurate prediction of success is the success of your parents. The most accurate prediction of your wealth is the wealth of your parents.
It would be nice if we lived in a pure meritocracy but we're almost universally dependent on the success of our parents than we are on our own innate ability or drive.
I see this in my own life. In college I had a car and could focus on my school instead of working. As a result I got all my work done and was able to network with my classmates. Out of college I had a job waiting for me. Out of college I saw a lot of people who were trying to split their time between work and school who had no connections (from always working out of class) and didn't develop the relationships necessary to be employed. Small little assistance from my parents--made a world of a difference. Also a good heaping of good luck.
Because it's an obviously racist law. The problem isn't the immigrants, it's the LEGAL CITIZENS.
Imagine you're Hispanic, and you have an accent but you're a naturalized American Citizen.
Now imagine that every time you get pulled over by a police officers you need to present your proof of citizenship. The only reason you as a US citizen was harassed by the police was because you were a minority. That's bullshit. And if you refuse to show your green card... they used to be able to haul your ass off to jail.
It's like pulling over every Latino and asking them where they buried their murder victims--and then throwing them in jail until they 'fess up'. The only way they can tell if you're a Citizen is if you don't show them immigration papers... but if you're a citizen... you have no immigration papers. As a citizen you can also tell the police to fuck-off since you're a citizen and you don't have to show proof of citizenship--but now you're trusting that they believe you. If for some reason they don't believe you (aka you look extra canadian) then they could arrest you even if you were a citizen for failing to present your nonexistent papers. It's a huge violation of the search and seizure protection in the US constitution.
So the US Supreme court obviously overturned the bits where US citizens could be arrested for failing to prove they were US Citizens--but left in the provision asking for proof of citizenship. Of course without the power to arrest or detain you all you have to do is say "I'm a US Citizen!" and they have to let you go. So the law is now completely dysfunctional as it should be.
Yep. It's actually illegal to sell a gun to someone who you believe is acting as a proxy or straw buyer. From Wikipedia;
"Beginning in 1975, ATF officials apparently reached a judgment that a dealer who sells to a legitimate purchaser may nonetheless be subject to prosecution or license revocation if he knows that that individual intends to transfer the firearm to a nonresident or other unqualified purchaser." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_purchase
If software not working properly is evidence that someone is blocking it in order to further their own gains... then a lot of the software I try to run on linux must be competing with an open source offering that greased the Kernel dev's palms.:P
Either that or the obvious truth is that shit doesn't always work perfectly because platforms have bugs. But there's nooooo way that's the case. Clearly it's a conspiracy!
Seeing AMD trying is all it takes to make me a loyal customer for life.
Am I the only one who doesn't care how hard a company tries but how well they succeed?
AMD has been "trying" for a decade and in my experience never really worked right. So whatever they're doing in my opinion is the wrong approach or they would have something working by now.
You sound quite arrogant, and my guess is that you grossly overvalue your own work and opinion.
You sound like one of those people say "everybody's opinion is valid".
Not everyone's opinion is valid. In fact most of the time it's not. Democracy consistently produces "mediocre" results. The important point is "Consistently"... it consistently creates below average work, but in many respects consistently below average is better than volatile above/below average work. In other words we are ok with an incompetent congress since we would rather have an incompetent congress a chance of getting an exceptional ruler.
Similarly, Wikipedia will consistently produce average to below average results... but the cost of little to no bad results is that is the potential for extraordinary results.
Not everyone's opinion is valid. But when you average out everyone's opinion it's often tolerable.
1) People walk into Apple stores to buy Apple products. iPhones literally sell themselves. It's not the guy with the credit card scanner.
So in this regard, the sales staff, while important--aren't terribly unique or important to the transaction except not being bad. And there are plenty of not-bad employees to choose from. So I see no reason to have high wages.
2) The flip side is that as they say an Apple sales person can easily sell $350,000 worth of *PROFIT* per year. Probably gross sales for an Apple retail employee are a fraction of say a Target checker but that's incredibly efficient--so it seems from a one-off perspective a company which makes $350k from someone's labor every year should give him a good cut of that. Instead they just put the profit into the bank.
As to the article in specific. Comparing an Apple Employee to a Tiffany's employee is a bad comparison. Like I said, an iPhone sells itself. A tiffany's employee needs to present a high-end image to the client. A Tiffany sales person needs to compose themselves like as if they too could afford their goods. That means their expenses for wardrobe are higher, they will have a higher demand on their physical appearance and they need to present an image.
A 20 something sales person at Apple though just needs to be a 20 something person who uses a smart phone... which is pretty much every 20 something in existence.
Have you ever seen the Zune packaging though? The original Zune 30 came in this sexy little box that opened like a wardrobe and even had a little drawer inside. Everyone I showed it to including die hard apple fans agreed it was one of the coolest boxes they'd ever seen for a device.
The Zune is a perfect example of what's going on--and why Microsoft is doing the right thing here.
Microsoft released Play for Sure--and everyone made shitty unusable products with it. So Microsoft (too late) created the Zune 30 which is still one of their best products ever made. The things are indestructible, look good and work amazingly well as a PMP. They also added innovative features years before ipod like wifi-sync, fm radio, games and more. But the ZuneHD ended up going against the entire iPhone ecosystem and nobody was going to develop apps for a single PMP.
This time Microsoft isn't going to sit around with its thumbs in its ass because its hardware partners are lazy, incompetent stooges. If they innovate, great, if they don't, great. Either way Microsoft wins. They need this. They need a reference hardware standard that shows off what the software is capable of. There's nothing stopping any partners from releasing competing products except for their complete lack of competence. It's about time there was some real competition in the PC marketplace. And you know who wins? The OEMs. This isn't screwing the OEMs, this is forcing them start competing again--which will push them to innovate in order to survive. The alternative is to get steam-rolled by Apple who actually hires average to above average engineers.
Apple isn't exceptional they're just acceptable but in a market full of buffoons that comes across as extraordinary.
Normally I'm in agreement with this sentiment. But in this case Craigslist is asking its users to post its content. So why should *MY* posting be copyrighted by craigslist? I want to sell/rent my shit--whoever wants to scrape my listing and repost it is more than welcome.
Only at an incredibly inconsequential scale. And even then it's random--which is kind of the point. By "Deterministic" I'm sure the parent meant to imply "Not deliberate" which is the subject of the original post. The weather is purely deterministic but highly unpredictable and apparently random. But we largely don't imbue the weather with any notion of sentience or deliberation.
It gets really difficult to differentiate between human sapience and some large scale programs like Google or Facebook. If you have simple codified rules "If This, then That" then yes it's the programmer's intent. But if the software has even the slightest bit of intelligence and adaptability then even the programmer can no longer predict the exact results of their software.
For every search query there is a completely unique result. So if you search for "how to make brownies" and my search engine scours the internet for brownie recipes and returns a recipe is that "speech"? No programmer programmed it specifically to return that result. No programmer would even know what the result would be. Sure if you could perfectly know the state of the database and the input query you could perfectly reproduce the response from the code--but similarly if you perfectly knew the code to the brain and the exact neurological arrangement when you as a person a question you could hypothetically know exactly what their response would be.
They didn't "Drop Support" they'll update it to 7.8. It just won't get features like NFC... which wouldn't do any good since it has no NFC chip in it anyway.
What good does updating the kernel of the Lumia 900 to support 64 cores or 720p screens do for the Lumia? No software update will add those features.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, it is Zune 2.0.
1) Microsoft Debuts play for sure.
2) Everybody makes horrendous, terrible, clunky devices with bad battery life and shit for UI w/o a single good music store.
3) Microsoft attempts to salvage it by releasing Zune, which in both of its generations received glowing reviews and was widely regarded as superior to the iPod.
Unfortunately for Microsoft it was too little too late. But they did create a great product that had the potential to succeed.
Microsoft sees the same thing happening again--if they leave their product in the hands of OEMs they are afraid the OEMs will release such inferior products that their software will be irrelevant. So they're releasing both a platform, but unlike Zune, also letting others compete. If they create a better product, great. If they don't, great. It's a win-win.
OEMs will undoubtedly be alienated but screw'em. I don't see Microsoft offering anything in the Surface that any of them couldn't have (but didn't) offer.
The question though in this case isn't "what does it take to run office" so much as "what does it take to run any application in Windows 7 or Windows 8?"
Those system specs are nearly identical to Windows 7's system recommendations.
Essentially all the recommended system specs are saying is. "Your computer needs to run Windows 7, after that Office will be fine with whatever." If your OS is crapping out without any apps running (min OS specs) then you won't be running office smoothly either.
It's because they had to rewrite the UI to deliver a high framerate with almost no latency. (No seriously.) And it actually is rational. When you're scrolling in something for instance with a mouse wheel it just moves in increments and you don't detect any lag. If however you attempt to scroll through a list with your finger and it trails behind a half second it will feel sluggish and weird. There are a number of phone and tablet apps I've used that have this lag and it's really annoying. If they want to deliver a good touch experience--using hardware acceleration is a sensible route.
I disagree to some extent. For one, I can't stand the alternative which is for the story to not take place at all or make me hunt for it.
I like games but after maybe an hour of a single player game I'm just bored of the gameplay mechanic and want to know how the story is going to end. The only reason I've ever finished a single player campaign is for the narrative. If there is no narrative I care about--give me multi-player so that I can at least play against proper opponents and the satisfaction of defeating human beings.
It's not competitive in my opinion if I beat a computer. It's like playing a board game against a 6 year old. You might win--you might lose but you don't feel a sense of pride or satisfaction if you do win. Every victory has an asterisk.
On the other hand I'll wade through the boredom of a game to see the "END". If the game has no end then I won't have much of a motivation to keep going. I don't feel the slightest bit of interest in WOW for that reason. There's no "Winning". There's no catharsis or victory--it's an endless grind which you only abandon but never overcome.
I want to know what secret it is that my parents died to protect or what have you.
Even games like Mass Effect which I was extremely engaged in had such a non-linear story line that I eventually got bored doing stupid pointless side-quests until I lost interest. "What you want me to perform a census of every creature in the galaxy? Well as a completionist I feel compelled to help you with your stupid inane task."
A story with too many branching and peripheral paths inevitably ends up having a bunch of filler crap--with no way to tell what is what. On the other hand a game where you are compelled to move to the next point is often better edited and refined.
Imagine what a movie would be like if you watched all 30 takes of every scene. It would be boring and stupid.
There should be just enough freedom so that you feel free and have room to get immersed and a part of the world--but then have a very clear and concise story path. Games should take a lesson from Dungeons and Dragons--you have a story and your DM will keep you moving forward. He's not going to be like "hello party, would you like to deliver this letter to my cousin in stonebrook?" No, they're hopefully smart enough to constantly filter out all the meaningless shit and no matter what choice you make--eventually end up where you need to go.
The poor are the ones waging a war on the poor. As a result I don't care. If they want to give me a tax cut so be it. When they start looking after their own interests instead of electing people to screw them I'll support their interests.
I think the Tea Party has proven otherwise. And it's that attitude among youth and other voters which leads to disenfranchisement.
The notion that a group can't change policy is complete bullshit. This is actually why I've stopped caring. If the Dems win my ideals win. If the Republicans win I get more money in my pocket. If people want to look out for their interests... they can do it. But the "99%" movement hit upon two conflicting and important points about modern politics--the reason the 99% don't get listened to is because they don't vote based on their interests.
Women concerned about their rights? They make up more than 50% of the voting population. Why do I need to look out for their interests? You want the government looking out for women's rights... easy solution--every single woman show up to vote. That's it. If 90% of women showed up to vote in 2012 I can guarantee that their interests would get nearly exclusive attention from candidates. If 90% of Latinos showed up to vote you can guarantee that their interests would be represented.
The reason voting doesn't seem to change anything is because the demographics of voters doesn't change. Except in the case of the Tea Party. They got out... they all voted and they managed to dramatically change the character of congress. If the Occupy movement got out of parks and all showed up at the poll booths they could have a similar change on national policy.
Disengaging due to cynicism is why things don't change.
Or you can say that if you have a list and 1/3rd of them are wrong the list is highly suspect and the other 2/3rds should be investigated. If anyone ever gave me a job that was done 1/3rd wrong I would operate on the assumption that the other 2/3rds are wrong but just less obviously.
"61. No screenshots or app to do it."
I have a screenshot app. Works fine. I assume if I bothered I would see even more that aren't accurate.
Microsoft is releasing this brand new product called "sharepoint".
Yes Stallman's suggestion is to put a tax on *everybody* who buys internet regardless of their music consumption habits. That's been reallly well received by Slashdot in past articles. I'm surprised nobody latched onto it.
The other idea? "Just quickly send money to the artist." So he proposes two solutions:
1) Tax everybody regardless of their use.
2) Have artists beg for money.
He also says that going to concerts is probably paying for music. This is definitely untrue. For everybody except for arena filling rock stars concerts are a loss leader to sell CDs and MP3s.
There was a time when 95% of customers only used the keyboard. There was a time when 95% of customers didn't have an internet connection. There was a time when 95% of customers had no GPU acceleration. There was a time when 95% of smart phones had no capacitive touch due to price and availability and therefore couldn't respond properly to finger input.
Sometimes you need to bite the bullet and lead.
Yeah I would be interested to know about scalability. Could this be a future solution to commercial airliners? Save a shit-ton of weight by just having enough battery power to get a plane to the nearest airport but then charge in-flight through recharge corridors.
Probably not economically feasible but could be cheaper to build a laser station every 10km than to build transcontinental highspeed rail.
The only limitations I have on my success is my own ability and initiative.
*And privilege. Your most accurate prediction of success is the success of your parents. The most accurate prediction of your wealth is the wealth of your parents.
It would be nice if we lived in a pure meritocracy but we're almost universally dependent on the success of our parents than we are on our own innate ability or drive.
I see this in my own life. In college I had a car and could focus on my school instead of working. As a result I got all my work done and was able to network with my classmates. Out of college I had a job waiting for me. Out of college I saw a lot of people who were trying to split their time between work and school who had no connections (from always working out of class) and didn't develop the relationships necessary to be employed. Small little assistance from my parents--made a world of a difference. Also a good heaping of good luck.
Because it's an obviously racist law. The problem isn't the immigrants, it's the LEGAL CITIZENS.
Imagine you're Hispanic, and you have an accent but you're a naturalized American Citizen.
Now imagine that every time you get pulled over by a police officers you need to present your proof of citizenship. The only reason you as a US citizen was harassed by the police was because you were a minority. That's bullshit. And if you refuse to show your green card... they used to be able to haul your ass off to jail.
It's like pulling over every Latino and asking them where they buried their murder victims--and then throwing them in jail until they 'fess up'. The only way they can tell if you're a Citizen is if you don't show them immigration papers... but if you're a citizen... you have no immigration papers. As a citizen you can also tell the police to fuck-off since you're a citizen and you don't have to show proof of citizenship--but now you're trusting that they believe you. If for some reason they don't believe you (aka you look extra canadian) then they could arrest you even if you were a citizen for failing to present your nonexistent papers. It's a huge violation of the search and seizure protection in the US constitution.
So the US Supreme court obviously overturned the bits where US citizens could be arrested for failing to prove they were US Citizens--but left in the provision asking for proof of citizenship. Of course without the power to arrest or detain you all you have to do is say "I'm a US Citizen!" and they have to let you go. So the law is now completely dysfunctional as it should be.
Yep. It's actually illegal to sell a gun to someone who you believe is acting as a proxy or straw buyer. From Wikipedia;
"Beginning in 1975, ATF officials apparently reached a judgment that a dealer who sells to a legitimate purchaser may nonetheless be subject to prosecution or license revocation if he knows that that individual intends to transfer the firearm to a nonresident or other unqualified purchaser."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_purchase
If software not working properly is evidence that someone is blocking it in order to further their own gains... then a lot of the software I try to run on linux must be competing with an open source offering that greased the Kernel dev's palms. :P
Either that or the obvious truth is that shit doesn't always work perfectly because platforms have bugs. But there's nooooo way that's the case. Clearly it's a conspiracy!
in both cases you can point to closed vendor hardware....
hrm... patern?
Dell and Nvidia? Yeah, the pattern sounds like he was using real computers that an average user would encounter.
God forbid someone try running normal computers that aren't religiously pure.
Seeing AMD trying is all it takes to make me a loyal customer for life.
Am I the only one who doesn't care how hard a company tries but how well they succeed?
AMD has been "trying" for a decade and in my experience never really worked right. So whatever they're doing in my opinion is the wrong approach or they would have something working by now.
And yet their open source drivers still are unusable...
I don't give 2 shits about "Theoretically" working drivers. I need reliable, stable and fast drivers. The AMD Drivers are none of those things.
You sound quite arrogant, and my guess is that you grossly overvalue your own work and opinion.
You sound like one of those people say "everybody's opinion is valid".
Not everyone's opinion is valid. In fact most of the time it's not. Democracy consistently produces "mediocre" results. The important point is "Consistently"... it consistently creates below average work, but in many respects consistently below average is better than volatile above/below average work. In other words we are ok with an incompetent congress since we would rather have an incompetent congress a chance of getting an exceptional ruler.
Similarly, Wikipedia will consistently produce average to below average results... but the cost of little to no bad results is that is the potential for extraordinary results.
Not everyone's opinion is valid. But when you average out everyone's opinion it's often tolerable.
I see two sides to this.
1) People walk into Apple stores to buy Apple products. iPhones literally sell themselves. It's not the guy with the credit card scanner.
So in this regard, the sales staff, while important--aren't terribly unique or important to the transaction except not being bad. And there are plenty of not-bad employees to choose from. So I see no reason to have high wages.
2) The flip side is that as they say an Apple sales person can easily sell $350,000 worth of *PROFIT* per year. Probably gross sales for an Apple retail employee are a fraction of say a Target checker but that's incredibly efficient--so it seems from a one-off perspective a company which makes $350k from someone's labor every year should give him a good cut of that. Instead they just put the profit into the bank.
As to the article in specific. Comparing an Apple Employee to a Tiffany's employee is a bad comparison. Like I said, an iPhone sells itself. A tiffany's employee needs to present a high-end image to the client. A Tiffany sales person needs to compose themselves like as if they too could afford their goods. That means their expenses for wardrobe are higher, they will have a higher demand on their physical appearance and they need to present an image.
A 20 something sales person at Apple though just needs to be a 20 something person who uses a smart phone... which is pretty much every 20 something in existence.
Have you ever seen the Zune packaging though? The original Zune 30 came in this sexy little box that opened like a wardrobe and even had a little drawer inside. Everyone I showed it to including die hard apple fans agreed it was one of the coolest boxes they'd ever seen for a device.
The Zune is a perfect example of what's going on--and why Microsoft is doing the right thing here.
Microsoft released Play for Sure--and everyone made shitty unusable products with it. So Microsoft (too late) created the Zune 30 which is still one of their best products ever made. The things are indestructible, look good and work amazingly well as a PMP. They also added innovative features years before ipod like wifi-sync, fm radio, games and more. But the ZuneHD ended up going against the entire iPhone ecosystem and nobody was going to develop apps for a single PMP.
This time Microsoft isn't going to sit around with its thumbs in its ass because its hardware partners are lazy, incompetent stooges. If they innovate, great, if they don't, great. Either way Microsoft wins. They need this. They need a reference hardware standard that shows off what the software is capable of. There's nothing stopping any partners from releasing competing products except for their complete lack of competence. It's about time there was some real competition in the PC marketplace. And you know who wins? The OEMs. This isn't screwing the OEMs, this is forcing them start competing again--which will push them to innovate in order to survive. The alternative is to get steam-rolled by Apple who actually hires average to above average engineers.
Apple isn't exceptional they're just acceptable but in a market full of buffoons that comes across as extraordinary.
Normally I'm in agreement with this sentiment. But in this case Craigslist is asking its users to post its content. So why should *MY* posting be copyrighted by craigslist? I want to sell/rent my shit--whoever wants to scrape my listing and repost it is more than welcome.
Only at an incredibly inconsequential scale. And even then it's random--which is kind of the point. By "Deterministic" I'm sure the parent meant to imply "Not deliberate" which is the subject of the original post. The weather is purely deterministic but highly unpredictable and apparently random. But we largely don't imbue the weather with any notion of sentience or deliberation.
It gets really difficult to differentiate between human sapience and some large scale programs like Google or Facebook. If you have simple codified rules "If This, then That" then yes it's the programmer's intent. But if the software has even the slightest bit of intelligence and adaptability then even the programmer can no longer predict the exact results of their software.
For every search query there is a completely unique result. So if you search for "how to make brownies" and my search engine scours the internet for brownie recipes and returns a recipe is that "speech"? No programmer programmed it specifically to return that result. No programmer would even know what the result would be. Sure if you could perfectly know the state of the database and the input query you could perfectly reproduce the response from the code--but similarly if you perfectly knew the code to the brain and the exact neurological arrangement when you as a person a question you could hypothetically know exactly what their response would be.
They didn't "Drop Support" they'll update it to 7.8. It just won't get features like NFC... which wouldn't do any good since it has no NFC chip in it anyway.
What good does updating the kernel of the Lumia 900 to support 64 cores or 720p screens do for the Lumia? No software update will add those features.