I should hope that by simulating drunk driving, the game would help to demonstrate the very negative consequences of it, and thus help implant the negatives of it in people's heads better.
This whole "US centric" crap is annoying. This was quoted from a New York Times article. New York. In the United States of America. No shit it's going to have a US bias, it's written by an American for American audiences. Sure Symbian may be the dominant worldwide platform right now, but this article is about the potential future. Smartphones are still predominantly the realm of business users, but that is changing. Apple is currently the best poised to help push consumer-level adoption.
Just because something is legal does not make it right. What Metallica did was to hurt their fans. They might've had the legal right to do what they did, but they hurt themselves in the long run with that act. When musicians worry more about making money than about pleasing their fans, they cease to do the right thing, regardless of legality. Please your fans and they will reward you for it. Backhand your fans and they will punish you for it.
Wow, that brings back memories of 5.25" floppies. Makes me wonder what this tech will look like in 20 years. Internal drives with 3.5" media storing hundreds of terabytes? SD-sized holographic media? Now that this technology has moved from proof-of-concept to a purchasable product (or will be in one month), it'll be very interesting to see how quickly it progresses.
Are you new to the world? This administration has abused every single bit of leverage or opening they've been given. You're damned right we're paranoid, and our government has demonstrated repeatedly why we need to be. Congress is questioning the legality of it while Bush is burning every copy of the Constitution he can find. I don't care at all whether this is legal - it cannot be allowed. As a nation, we elected a whole lot of congressmen in 2006 for the purpose of reigning in Bush and the Iraq war. Not only have they utterly failed to do so, they've allowed our civil liberties to be even further trampled upon. Congress doesn't seem to have the stomach for blocking the administration's abuse of power, so we as voters are left with a choice between evicting as many as possible and starting over, or just electing the same old crew to do the same old job.
I pray that all the Slashdotters who complain about stories like this (and who are citizens the USA) are going to use their right to vote this November to make their voices heard.
"We think it will be hard for Yahoo to come up with alternatives that deliver more value than Microsoft will ultimately be willing to pay," Miller said in the newsletter.
And Miller characterized Microsoft as needing to do the deal. Said Miller: "We think this deal is a strategic imperative for Microsoft."
--
Sure sounds to me like this particular shareholder is saying that Yahoo is going to be hard pressed to prove they are worth more than what Microsoft is "ultimately[] willing to pay". I gather that his implication is that Microsoft might be willing to pay more than their current offer, but I'm pretty sure they're not willing to budge as they've previously stated they will not increase the already extremely high offer. Where his firm is deriving their $40/share value from is beyond me, because the market has already made its determination of value, and it is not even close to that. Looks like we'll be finding out what the rest of the shareholders think of it all in three weeks.
Neither company has a monopoly on anything that would be impacted by this merger. There will be no antitrust or court issues here.
I'm simply amazed at how many people think this won't happen. This merger is going to happen, regardless of what the current Yahoo board may say. If they don't approve it, they will be replaced by the angry shareholders, who are being robbed of the best offer they'll ever see for their shares.
No they won't. Yahoo can only make demands if their shareholders back the current board, but they do not. When Microsoft starts their proxy fight, they will win. The market already decided the value of Yahoo, and it is not as much as Microsoft offered. The board is failing to do their duty to the shareholders by not accepting this offer. Microsoft will win this fight, and I say for the better. Google needs proper competition in the search/advertising arena, which is something that only a combined Yahoo/Microsoft can provide. Although I doubt Google will become stagnant anytime soon, the only way to ensure this is by giving them a good competitor. Yahoo became stagnant and forgot about their core market, which helped spur the rise of Google.
You Office argument is legitimate. However, your gaming one is not. The great majority of PC games being released will not function out of the box under Linux. Nobody expects a PS3 or 360 or Wii game to work on their PC. However, PC gaming became the giant it is (was?) because of the dual-purpose nature of the platform. Take away the ability to play these games (which with Linux, you largely do), and suddenly for many, the PC becomes less attractive.
Furthermore, the OP was not complaining so much as he was pointing out why Linux is not a drop-in Windows replacement at this time. For just about everything else, it is great, but gaming still represents an important part of non-business PC usage for many people. I'd love to run Linux, but I'm not giving up my games to do so, and I am not interested in a virtual machine, as that completely defeats the entire purpose for me. I much prefer to spend my time using my computer, not tweaking or setting up things to work that should simply work out of the box.
Getting back on-topic, the statements that Vista is slower are by and large backed up with benchmarks showing less than a 5% variation. I abandoned Vista a few months ago due to aggravation with driver issues (DIAF NVIDIA) and poor performance (had an Athlon 64 X2 4000 w/ 2GB ram). I switched to XP x64 and upgraded to 4GB ram. It was painful to discover the lack of support that particular flavor of XP has. Getting it to recognize my Zune, or my Motorola Q (running Windows Mobile 5) was a pain. So, with great reluctance, I switched back to Vista now that I've upgraded (C2D E8400 @ 3.6GHz w/ 8GB ram). This time around, everything has worked flawlessly. I really think a majority of people who have complained about how bad Vista is haven't given it a try on a computer that can really handle it properly. XP is still a great OS, but with no DirectX 10 or larger memory support, I had immediate benefit of the Vista upgrade.
For a lot of users, XP is going to be fine for awhile. But the memory limitations will become an issue over the next couple of years, especially for games.
As much as I dislike Microsoft and what they've obviously done with the ISO voting process, I find the idea of China fighting corruption to be the height of insanity and stupidity.
Normally I might suggest that companies like this feel they don't really need to be concerned with what a bunch of geeks think, as it's just the big OEMs that matter in terms of sales volume. Sadly, for discrete sound cards, that's not really true anymore, because better than 99% of PCs sold today do not include anything more fancy than integrated audio on the motherboard. I've got a suspicion that Creative has decided to exit the sound card market - it can't be nearly as profitable as it used to be due to much much lower volumes. Motherboard integrated sound has pretty much matched what most sound cards under $50 can output. And as the MP3 revolution has shown, there is a fidelity point beyond which the overwhelming majority of people either cannot hear a difference, or simply don't care. To notice the difference between that integrated audio and a specialty $200 sound card, you're going to need much better speakers than what most people have attached to their computers, and better source material than those 128kbps MP3s.
Creative has not been the best source for sound cards for almost a decade now. Their refusal to put out respectable Vista drivers early on took them off the radar entirely for me. With diminishing returns on audio quality from discrete sound cards, I have been waiting for someone to come along with something truly new and different for the market.
#4 is Harley-Davidson, which is listed in the "Hotel & Entertainment" category. Are there Harley Hotels I'm unaware of? Shouldn't they be in "Motor Vehicles"?
The money you pay for cable/satellite TV is almost entirely to support the infrastructure, not the actual television studios, whereas the money you pay for a DVD box set goes back to the studio. However, when you pay for that TV service, you are doing so because you intend to watch television; hence, the studios do get a certain cut of revenue from that paid service. When you pay for internet service, you may intend to listen to music through it, but that is hardly the only (or primary) reason that people get internet service.
The only way I can see a system like this working is if the ISPs and media companies all become a single entity. Hence, you will pay that $250/mo for unlimited* access to television, radio, music, movies, etc delivered through your internet connection.
* Let's not be naive.. such a theoretical monopoly would result in severe limits on what you could get for such a "low" price. They'd probably restrict you to 1GB/mo of "media" traffic unless you upgrade to the $5000/mo plan.
There were fears by some scientists (not many, but a few) of the Manhattan Project that maybe they shouldn't detonate that test atomic bomb because the chain reaction might not actually stop, and could ignite the entire atmosphere.
This is such a cutting-edge field that it is easy for otherwise intelligent people to reach incorrect conclusions. Still, we really don't know with 100% certainty just how everything will work with this aspect of physics. If we did, we wouldn't need to build these ultra-expensive colliders to do testing.
Having just done an upgrade to our accounting software this morning, and going through a number of small but still very real headaches, I can appreciate why the guys managing a major bank's information systems is damned glad that IBM does things the way they do. That's precisely why the mainframe still exists. When 5-nines uptime still isn't good enough, you don't adopt a radically different system just for the sake of change or progress. When billions of dollars rest on the absolute reliability of your computer infrastructure, migration and change are to be approached with the utmost caution, and anything that reduces complexity and presents a smaller degree of change is a godsend.
What car do you have that by merely pressing a few buttons (or turning some knobs), you can listen to podcasts without any extra technology? The beauty of radio is that it is always there, and it's always updating (ignoring the repetitive nature of music these days). World War III starts, your radio will tell you (unless you're dead already). Natural disaster or severe weather happens, your radio will tell you. Podcasts can't do that.
Radio may some day transform from the traditional AM/FM we've come to know and love (satellite radio, global Wi-Fi streaming, etc ), but the basic idea almost certainly isn't going away anytime soon.
Doesn't the hum of the lines bother you, though? I used to take walks through my neighborhood, and the hum of the power lines I'd go past always made me wonder about the people who lived right by them. Seems it would give me a headache to live that close to a constant hum.
Yes, but the other 70% of the US would suddenly and immediately realize why the Second Amendment exists. In a twist of irony, Bush's own anti-gun control agenda would be fulfilled as his lasting legacy, as even ultra-liberal Democrats would literally take up arms against such an action.
You can bet that my sympathy for those who were screwed over by the subprime lending industry is limited (though it's still there). However, the fact remains that those subprime lenders acted irresponsibly, and have created a massive credit crunch as a result. This has been amplified by the falling US dollar. Why has the dollar fallen? Largely because the US government has overspent its earnings, much like these folks who can no longer afford to pay their debts back. The US has historically run at a deficit, but rarely one so large and rarely one created so rapidly after previously having been at a surplus. Most Americans live their lives with a certain amount of debt, whether it be from student loans, car loans, or a mortgage, but that debt level has risen dramatically at the same time as the dollar has weakened, thus amplifying the problem.
So while the people who may have gotten into a stupid deal with their mortgages are victims of their own mistakes, they are also victims of incompetent government and immoral, excessively greedy banking institutions.
HD-DVD (which arrived at retail in mid 2006) lost because the 360 (which arrived at retail in late 2005) didn't include it as standard? Putting an HD-DVD drive into the 360 at the time of launch may have been an impossibility due to the maturity level of the technology. It certainly would have been a financial impossibility for the price, which was considered high at the time. Had the 360 been $100 more at launch than it was (which would've also meant MS would be losing substantially more money per console), adoption would have been much slower than it was. Microsoft is more concerned with winning the console war than fighting in a storage medium war. Offering the HD-DVD addon was merely a ploy to slow PS3 adoption and possibly hurt Sony. What might have been more effective would be if they had offered a $200 Bluray addon instead of the HD-DVD offering. Thus, the sales case for the PS3, when the games library was so small, would no longer have included BR. BR is the only reason I bought my PS3. Having the option of playing a few exclusive games at some point is nice, but not an argument for buying yet another expensive console when I already own a 360 that will be able to play 95% of the games the PS3 can (at least of the ones I'm interested in).
The Department of Defense does not set policy. Deciding what is an act of war is policy. You seem to be very confused on this subject. It is up to the elected officials of this country to make that determination. Developing potential plans and actions is something that DoD does quite well, but unless the Executive branch makes the decision to utilize them, they are merely theoretical exercises. Any cyber attack that might fall into the "act of war" category as determined by the CinC would trigger a number of potential response plans that the DoD may have available, but these would not necessarily be related to the specific attack. If China managed to somehow hack into our nuclear power plants and trigger meltdowns*, I'd expect the President to declare it an act of war and retaliate, but the retaliatory act wouldn't be specific to the action that was declared an act of war.
The debate over what is considered an act of war is one of politics and policy, and isn't at all related to what the DoD does beyond, "is what we are going to do a violation of US/international policy or law?"
* Obviously this isn't physically possible from a remote location, but I was unable to think of a cyber attack that would sufficient grounds for war.
Wow, I never knew all you needed for PC gaming was a graphics card. I'm going to throw out my motherboard, CPU, ram, monitors, hard drives, DVD drive, case, power supply, cables, and speakers now. I'm so ashamed I wasted $1500 on this setup thinking it was all needed to get Crysis running at a reasonable framerate when a $200 graphics card could've done the entire job instead.
If all that landmass jumped off a cliff, the chaos caused to the world climate would be horrible. Might as well join them on the crazy ride down that ridiculously huge cliff they've found.
Slashdot Mirror
No, absolutely not.
I should hope that by simulating drunk driving, the game would help to demonstrate the very negative consequences of it, and thus help implant the negatives of it in people's heads better.
This whole "US centric" crap is annoying. This was quoted from a New York Times article. New York. In the United States of America. No shit it's going to have a US bias, it's written by an American for American audiences. Sure Symbian may be the dominant worldwide platform right now, but this article is about the potential future. Smartphones are still predominantly the realm of business users, but that is changing. Apple is currently the best poised to help push consumer-level adoption.
Just because something is legal does not make it right. What Metallica did was to hurt their fans. They might've had the legal right to do what they did, but they hurt themselves in the long run with that act. When musicians worry more about making money than about pleasing their fans, they cease to do the right thing, regardless of legality. Please your fans and they will reward you for it. Backhand your fans and they will punish you for it.
Metallica lost me with the Napster debacle. That said, PACs are a worse evil than what the RIAA/Metallica did. You don't fight napalm with napalm.
Wow, that brings back memories of 5.25" floppies. Makes me wonder what this tech will look like in 20 years. Internal drives with 3.5" media storing hundreds of terabytes? SD-sized holographic media? Now that this technology has moved from proof-of-concept to a purchasable product (or will be in one month), it'll be very interesting to see how quickly it progresses.
Chance for abuse? CHANCE FOR ABUSE?!
Are you new to the world? This administration has abused every single bit of leverage or opening they've been given. You're damned right we're paranoid, and our government has demonstrated repeatedly why we need to be. Congress is questioning the legality of it while Bush is burning every copy of the Constitution he can find. I don't care at all whether this is legal - it cannot be allowed. As a nation, we elected a whole lot of congressmen in 2006 for the purpose of reigning in Bush and the Iraq war. Not only have they utterly failed to do so, they've allowed our civil liberties to be even further trampled upon. Congress doesn't seem to have the stomach for blocking the administration's abuse of power, so we as voters are left with a choice between evicting as many as possible and starting over, or just electing the same old crew to do the same old job.
I pray that all the Slashdotters who complain about stories like this (and who are citizens the USA) are going to use their right to vote this November to make their voices heard.
From your linked article:
"We think it will be hard for Yahoo to come up with alternatives that deliver more value than Microsoft will ultimately be willing to pay," Miller said in the newsletter.
And Miller characterized Microsoft as needing to do the deal. Said Miller: "We think this deal is a strategic imperative for Microsoft."
--
Sure sounds to me like this particular shareholder is saying that Yahoo is going to be hard pressed to prove they are worth more than what Microsoft is "ultimately[] willing to pay". I gather that his implication is that Microsoft might be willing to pay more than their current offer, but I'm pretty sure they're not willing to budge as they've previously stated they will not increase the already extremely high offer. Where his firm is deriving their $40/share value from is beyond me, because the market has already made its determination of value, and it is not even close to that. Looks like we'll be finding out what the rest of the shareholders think of it all in three weeks.
Neither company has a monopoly on anything that would be impacted by this merger. There will be no antitrust or court issues here.
I'm simply amazed at how many people think this won't happen. This merger is going to happen, regardless of what the current Yahoo board may say. If they don't approve it, they will be replaced by the angry shareholders, who are being robbed of the best offer they'll ever see for their shares.
I'd go with incredibly stuck-up and stupid, to be honest. Coy would be if the offer legitimately undervalued the company, which it does not.
No they won't. Yahoo can only make demands if their shareholders back the current board, but they do not. When Microsoft starts their proxy fight, they will win. The market already decided the value of Yahoo, and it is not as much as Microsoft offered. The board is failing to do their duty to the shareholders by not accepting this offer. Microsoft will win this fight, and I say for the better. Google needs proper competition in the search/advertising arena, which is something that only a combined Yahoo/Microsoft can provide. Although I doubt Google will become stagnant anytime soon, the only way to ensure this is by giving them a good competitor. Yahoo became stagnant and forgot about their core market, which helped spur the rise of Google.
You Office argument is legitimate. However, your gaming one is not. The great majority of PC games being released will not function out of the box under Linux. Nobody expects a PS3 or 360 or Wii game to work on their PC. However, PC gaming became the giant it is (was?) because of the dual-purpose nature of the platform. Take away the ability to play these games (which with Linux, you largely do), and suddenly for many, the PC becomes less attractive.
Furthermore, the OP was not complaining so much as he was pointing out why Linux is not a drop-in Windows replacement at this time. For just about everything else, it is great, but gaming still represents an important part of non-business PC usage for many people. I'd love to run Linux, but I'm not giving up my games to do so, and I am not interested in a virtual machine, as that completely defeats the entire purpose for me. I much prefer to spend my time using my computer, not tweaking or setting up things to work that should simply work out of the box.
Getting back on-topic, the statements that Vista is slower are by and large backed up with benchmarks showing less than a 5% variation. I abandoned Vista a few months ago due to aggravation with driver issues (DIAF NVIDIA) and poor performance (had an Athlon 64 X2 4000 w/ 2GB ram). I switched to XP x64 and upgraded to 4GB ram. It was painful to discover the lack of support that particular flavor of XP has. Getting it to recognize my Zune, or my Motorola Q (running Windows Mobile 5) was a pain. So, with great reluctance, I switched back to Vista now that I've upgraded (C2D E8400 @ 3.6GHz w/ 8GB ram). This time around, everything has worked flawlessly. I really think a majority of people who have complained about how bad Vista is haven't given it a try on a computer that can really handle it properly. XP is still a great OS, but with no DirectX 10 or larger memory support, I had immediate benefit of the Vista upgrade.
For a lot of users, XP is going to be fine for awhile. But the memory limitations will become an issue over the next couple of years, especially for games.
As much as I dislike Microsoft and what they've obviously done with the ISO voting process, I find the idea of China fighting corruption to be the height of insanity and stupidity.
Normally I might suggest that companies like this feel they don't really need to be concerned with what a bunch of geeks think, as it's just the big OEMs that matter in terms of sales volume. Sadly, for discrete sound cards, that's not really true anymore, because better than 99% of PCs sold today do not include anything more fancy than integrated audio on the motherboard. I've got a suspicion that Creative has decided to exit the sound card market - it can't be nearly as profitable as it used to be due to much much lower volumes. Motherboard integrated sound has pretty much matched what most sound cards under $50 can output. And as the MP3 revolution has shown, there is a fidelity point beyond which the overwhelming majority of people either cannot hear a difference, or simply don't care. To notice the difference between that integrated audio and a specialty $200 sound card, you're going to need much better speakers than what most people have attached to their computers, and better source material than those 128kbps MP3s.
Creative has not been the best source for sound cards for almost a decade now. Their refusal to put out respectable Vista drivers early on took them off the radar entirely for me. With diminishing returns on audio quality from discrete sound cards, I have been waiting for someone to come along with something truly new and different for the market.
#4 is Harley-Davidson, which is listed in the "Hotel & Entertainment" category. Are there Harley Hotels I'm unaware of? Shouldn't they be in "Motor Vehicles"?
The money you pay for cable/satellite TV is almost entirely to support the infrastructure, not the actual television studios, whereas the money you pay for a DVD box set goes back to the studio. However, when you pay for that TV service, you are doing so because you intend to watch television; hence, the studios do get a certain cut of revenue from that paid service. When you pay for internet service, you may intend to listen to music through it, but that is hardly the only (or primary) reason that people get internet service.
The only way I can see a system like this working is if the ISPs and media companies all become a single entity. Hence, you will pay that $250/mo for unlimited* access to television, radio, music, movies, etc delivered through your internet connection.
* Let's not be naive.. such a theoretical monopoly would result in severe limits on what you could get for such a "low" price. They'd probably restrict you to 1GB/mo of "media" traffic unless you upgrade to the $5000/mo plan.
There were fears by some scientists (not many, but a few) of the Manhattan Project that maybe they shouldn't detonate that test atomic bomb because the chain reaction might not actually stop, and could ignite the entire atmosphere.
This is such a cutting-edge field that it is easy for otherwise intelligent people to reach incorrect conclusions. Still, we really don't know with 100% certainty just how everything will work with this aspect of physics. If we did, we wouldn't need to build these ultra-expensive colliders to do testing.
What car do you have that by merely pressing a few buttons (or turning some knobs), you can listen to podcasts without any extra technology? The beauty of radio is that it is always there, and it's always updating (ignoring the repetitive nature of music these days). World War III starts, your radio will tell you (unless you're dead already). Natural disaster or severe weather happens, your radio will tell you. Podcasts can't do that.
Radio may some day transform from the traditional AM/FM we've come to know and love (satellite radio, global Wi-Fi streaming, etc ), but the basic idea almost certainly isn't going away anytime soon.
Doesn't the hum of the lines bother you, though? I used to take walks through my neighborhood, and the hum of the power lines I'd go past always made me wonder about the people who lived right by them. Seems it would give me a headache to live that close to a constant hum.
Yes, but the other 70% of the US would suddenly and immediately realize why the Second Amendment exists. In a twist of irony, Bush's own anti-gun control agenda would be fulfilled as his lasting legacy, as even ultra-liberal Democrats would literally take up arms against such an action.
You can bet that my sympathy for those who were screwed over by the subprime lending industry is limited (though it's still there). However, the fact remains that those subprime lenders acted irresponsibly, and have created a massive credit crunch as a result. This has been amplified by the falling US dollar. Why has the dollar fallen? Largely because the US government has overspent its earnings, much like these folks who can no longer afford to pay their debts back. The US has historically run at a deficit, but rarely one so large and rarely one created so rapidly after previously having been at a surplus. Most Americans live their lives with a certain amount of debt, whether it be from student loans, car loans, or a mortgage, but that debt level has risen dramatically at the same time as the dollar has weakened, thus amplifying the problem.
So while the people who may have gotten into a stupid deal with their mortgages are victims of their own mistakes, they are also victims of incompetent government and immoral, excessively greedy banking institutions.
HD-DVD (which arrived at retail in mid 2006) lost because the 360 (which arrived at retail in late 2005) didn't include it as standard? Putting an HD-DVD drive into the 360 at the time of launch may have been an impossibility due to the maturity level of the technology. It certainly would have been a financial impossibility for the price, which was considered high at the time. Had the 360 been $100 more at launch than it was (which would've also meant MS would be losing substantially more money per console), adoption would have been much slower than it was. Microsoft is more concerned with winning the console war than fighting in a storage medium war. Offering the HD-DVD addon was merely a ploy to slow PS3 adoption and possibly hurt Sony. What might have been more effective would be if they had offered a $200 Bluray addon instead of the HD-DVD offering. Thus, the sales case for the PS3, when the games library was so small, would no longer have included BR. BR is the only reason I bought my PS3. Having the option of playing a few exclusive games at some point is nice, but not an argument for buying yet another expensive console when I already own a 360 that will be able to play 95% of the games the PS3 can (at least of the ones I'm interested in).
The Department of Defense does not set policy. Deciding what is an act of war is policy. You seem to be very confused on this subject. It is up to the elected officials of this country to make that determination. Developing potential plans and actions is something that DoD does quite well, but unless the Executive branch makes the decision to utilize them, they are merely theoretical exercises. Any cyber attack that might fall into the "act of war" category as determined by the CinC would trigger a number of potential response plans that the DoD may have available, but these would not necessarily be related to the specific attack. If China managed to somehow hack into our nuclear power plants and trigger meltdowns*, I'd expect the President to declare it an act of war and retaliate, but the retaliatory act wouldn't be specific to the action that was declared an act of war.
The debate over what is considered an act of war is one of politics and policy, and isn't at all related to what the DoD does beyond, "is what we are going to do a violation of US/international policy or law?"
* Obviously this isn't physically possible from a remote location, but I was unable to think of a cyber attack that would sufficient grounds for war.
Wow, I never knew all you needed for PC gaming was a graphics card. I'm going to throw out my motherboard, CPU, ram, monitors, hard drives, DVD drive, case, power supply, cables, and speakers now. I'm so ashamed I wasted $1500 on this setup thinking it was all needed to get Crysis running at a reasonable framerate when a $200 graphics card could've done the entire job instead.
Damn right!
If all that landmass jumped off a cliff, the chaos caused to the world climate would be horrible. Might as well join them on the crazy ride down that ridiculously huge cliff they've found.