Not really - fewer transistors, sure, but the inefficiency where it matters (power usage, performance) is still worse than the previous generation, and well behind where Intel is. If anything, the fact that it is 1.2bn transistors instead of 2bn gives them even less of an excuse for the amount of power these things are sucking down while doing less work than the last generation.
That's kinda what they did when they went AT&T exclusive at the start.. there's a whole big argument to be made regarding what would've happened with iOS vs. Android had Verizon not been left out of the iPhone sales fest early on and decided to retaliate with pushing and marketing the Droid the way they did.
If you mean a display device with a tuner built into it, then there are two in my house (old CRTs), neither connected to cable.
If you mean a display device that can be used to display content regardless of a tuner (such as via the Internet), then I have 12, not counting cell phones/iPods. (7 LCDs, three laptops, two CRTs)
If you mean a display device with a coaxial cable or antenna connection that is actively used for watching sat/cable/ota broadcasts, it would be a bit fuzzy in my case. I've got a single HTPC that is connected to an LCD monitor and also streams cable broadcasts to two XBOX 360s. So there are three display devices that can be used to view broadcast television content (theoretically four, as I have 4 tuners in the HTPC, but have not assigned the 4th to any other device).
"TV" as it existed as a physical device ten years ago, does not really match up to what is sold today. Most "TV"s sold today are really just monitors, as they often lack tuners.
I'm sure the numbers can be manipulated to show whatever the interpreter desires, just like "record" sales.
I'm sorry, I don't understand how you think taking money from the middle class and giving it to the poor fixes anything. Corporations and the upper-class have more than enough to be able to bring the poor out of the danger zone and still remain wealthy. The middle class, by and large, did not get there by doing anything other than working their asses off and getting paid salaries proportionate to their work. Whereas the upper class more often than not are getting paid money that is vastly beyond what the rest of society considers appropriate for the work they do. CEO of a company that fired 10,000 people last year and lost $5 billion? Earn a severance package of $100 million. Gamble with other people's money on the market and send $500 billion up in smoke? Get a $2 million bonus.
This is valid when we're talking about a manufactured good with a material production cost. The manufacturing cost of a single copy of a console game, sold in a store, shrinkwrap and all, is pretty small. I don't know the exact numbers, but it can't be much more than a couple of bucks, especially with the cheap 2-3 page black and white manuals that have shown up in the game boxes lately. The manufacturing cost of a digitally distributed game is zero. In both cases, there is a fraction of overhead, in terms of distribution, marketing, etc. While a whole lot of people will buy games at $60, there are a significant number of people who will not pay that much for games. Just as there are a significant number of people who won't pay $30 or $40 for a new hardback book.
When you price things at "impulse buy" level, you sell a lot more. When Steam has one of their huge sales, people start buying up tons of games that they otherwise would not have bothered with. I spent well over $100 on games during their sale this past summer - money I would not have spent on games if not for the sale. A few hours of entertainment that may or may not be good is really only worth about $15-$20 for me, and that's pushing it. Gambling $60 on the chance that a game will have enough content at a high enough quality to keep me interested for a couple of weeks or a month is just not going to happen.
Books, music, movies, and games are all competing for our entertainment dollars. Whoever provides the biggest value for the money generally gets the sales. For me, that value is reduced the more the item is restricted. I used to buy a lot of books, but paperbacks are increasingly inconvenient for me, and an e-reader would be the perfect solution... except that those e books are usually saddled with DRM or are more expensive. Computer books, such as those for various industry certifications, have always been expensive, but when the electronic version is even more so, it's just insulting.
If I could find a large selection of $5-$10 novels that interested me in electronic format with no DRM, I'd be buying them up. But right now the value proposition just isn't there to justify the initial purchase of a Nook or Kindle.
In a thousand years, if archaeologists cannot gather sufficient data from other observations besides paper records, then it really wasn't that important anyway.
I disagree with your assessment of what constitutes basic knowledge. Perhaps you'll disagree with my assessment that since this is a US-based and US-centric site, it is to be expected that most of the readership and comments will be from the viewpoint of US residents?
While it's true that those factors would reduce the spread and effectiveness of such an outbreak, the ease and speed of worldwide travel serve to negate that and then some.
Any time an exceedingly obvious patent is filed by a company, it should be immediately placed in the public domain, and the company that filed it should be forced to pay royalties to the government. Not only would this reduce the amount of stupid patent filings and court battles, it would get our national debt paid off within a year or two.
Nah, I kinda doubt that and here is why: Look at how many companies that HATE each other, like AMD and Intel, or AMD and Nvidia have cross licenses. Even when AMD and Intel were slugging it out in court neither tried to revoke those cross licenses, why? Because they knew that once you get into the thousands of patents you are looking at mutually assured destruction which is why you don't see these megacorps tear into each other as much anymore.
Exactly why I have been perplexed that this patent war has erupted in the mobile space. Yes, Google was lacking in patents to retaliate with, but Apple and Microsoft knew that to directly attack Google could backfire fast, so they went after smaller players. B&N just decided to find out if those patent nukes MS was threatening to throw were actually going to detonate, or if they were duds. Looks like the emperor's got no clothes on.
Now, the real question - if the court decides these patents are bogus (which I can't seem them not doing), what happens to the other companies who licensed from Microsoft? Can they have those agreements invalidated?
When there are billions of dollars at stake, hard work and cheap labor are easy. For a few hundred thousand or a couple million dollars of traceable merchandise, no, it is not worth digging such a tunnel.
ICS is designed to work nicely on both phones and tablets. Google knew that 2.x was not really ideal for tablets, hence Honeycomb. But forking their own OS was not ideal, either, so ICS now combines the best of both and should provide a great experience on either format.
Because 5.6 is the largest ever recorded in the state, perhaps? Just because it's normal or boring to someone in another part of the world doesn't discount this as news. If 1/3 of the population of Europe were on the brink of starvation, would it be normal and un-newsworthy simply because there are countries in Africa where that (or worse) is normal?
Using your logic, it can be argued that nothing is newsworthy here, simply because in all probability, everything interesting has already happened on a larger scale somewhere else in the universe.
You're missing the point. Lawyers do that all the time because they get caught up in technicalities, and it's why they are so despised. Back away from the case, look at it objectively, and you can see that the legal frameworks surrounding patent and copyright are fundamentally broken. Laws are supposed to come into existence because of a fundamental need to protect. When they become subverted and abused, like the entire "intellectual property" industry has done, they start damaging far more than protecting. In the same way that the First Amendment does not protect you yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, or threatening to kill someone, patent and copyright law should not protect trolls or obvious implementations.
Your argument largely consists of "this is legal", and while that may be true, that was not the point of the parent post. The point of the parent post was that for this nonsense to continue provides evidence of a fundamentally broken system because it has been many many years, and this case has been dealt setback after setback, yet it's not done. If the system is so overly complex and backlogged that it takes, what, almost a decade for this sort of thing to be resolved, that is a massive problem.
NPRP is the last line of defense? Cool. Glad they didn't cut the first line of defense, which is the engineer team that is responsible for creating a superior product in the first place.
I'm confused. I've been doing voice search on my Android phone for quite some time. Google has been collecting this data for at least a year (probably longer), and also has voicemail transcription data as well, so accuracy is not an issue.
I actually much prefer having it take me to Google search results instead of just giving me one answer, because sometimes my question is not that simple. Most of the time, the first search result is accurate, but I like having the options there.
I guess maybe I just prefer to have the answers clearly referenced. Maybe if I used Siri, I'd understand what all the fuss is about. But ultimately, I have zero interest in using the iPhone, because I do not like iOS.
[quote] The fact that we're STILL talking about Fukushima instead of getting basic infrastructure such as roads and sewers fixed just goes to show how much of a media circus this Fukushima is.[/quote]
I seriously cannot stand when people use this argument. "We" are not a singular collective with only one focus. Nuclear plant engineers and operators world over need to know the exact details of what happened so that precautions can be taken at the other plants that are in potential flood/tsunami areas. What can those people possibly contribute to rebuilding roads and sewers, or changing the designs of other buildings in those areas? The nice thing about being human is that we're not the fscking borg, and we can actually have a whole crapton of individual pursuits.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really - fewer transistors, sure, but the inefficiency where it matters (power usage, performance) is still worse than the previous generation, and well behind where Intel is. If anything, the fact that it is 1.2bn transistors instead of 2bn gives them even less of an excuse for the amount of power these things are sucking down while doing less work than the last generation.
That's kinda what they did when they went AT&T exclusive at the start.. there's a whole big argument to be made regarding what would've happened with iOS vs. Android had Verizon not been left out of the iPhone sales fest early on and decided to retaliate with pushing and marketing the Droid the way they did.
How do you define "TV"?
If you mean a display device with a tuner built into it, then there are two in my house (old CRTs), neither connected to cable.
If you mean a display device that can be used to display content regardless of a tuner (such as via the Internet), then I have 12, not counting cell phones/iPods. (7 LCDs, three laptops, two CRTs)
If you mean a display device with a coaxial cable or antenna connection that is actively used for watching sat/cable/ota broadcasts, it would be a bit fuzzy in my case. I've got a single HTPC that is connected to an LCD monitor and also streams cable broadcasts to two XBOX 360s. So there are three display devices that can be used to view broadcast television content (theoretically four, as I have 4 tuners in the HTPC, but have not assigned the 4th to any other device).
"TV" as it existed as a physical device ten years ago, does not really match up to what is sold today. Most "TV"s sold today are really just monitors, as they often lack tuners.
I'm sure the numbers can be manipulated to show whatever the interpreter desires, just like "record" sales.
I'm sorry, I don't understand how you think taking money from the middle class and giving it to the poor fixes anything. Corporations and the upper-class have more than enough to be able to bring the poor out of the danger zone and still remain wealthy. The middle class, by and large, did not get there by doing anything other than working their asses off and getting paid salaries proportionate to their work. Whereas the upper class more often than not are getting paid money that is vastly beyond what the rest of society considers appropriate for the work they do. CEO of a company that fired 10,000 people last year and lost $5 billion? Earn a severance package of $100 million. Gamble with other people's money on the market and send $500 billion up in smoke? Get a $2 million bonus.
So only non-idiots and non-Microsoft shills believe that flamewars work? Man, I don't know which side of this I want to be on...
I am pretty sure that a carrier in the EU would open itself up for criminal charges if they tried to pull a stunt like this.
Welcome to America, where corporations are protected like deities, and the average citizen is expected to forfeit any and all rights.
Hehe. You said "logic".
This is valid when we're talking about a manufactured good with a material production cost. The manufacturing cost of a single copy of a console game, sold in a store, shrinkwrap and all, is pretty small. I don't know the exact numbers, but it can't be much more than a couple of bucks, especially with the cheap 2-3 page black and white manuals that have shown up in the game boxes lately. The manufacturing cost of a digitally distributed game is zero. In both cases, there is a fraction of overhead, in terms of distribution, marketing, etc. While a whole lot of people will buy games at $60, there are a significant number of people who will not pay that much for games. Just as there are a significant number of people who won't pay $30 or $40 for a new hardback book.
When you price things at "impulse buy" level, you sell a lot more. When Steam has one of their huge sales, people start buying up tons of games that they otherwise would not have bothered with. I spent well over $100 on games during their sale this past summer - money I would not have spent on games if not for the sale. A few hours of entertainment that may or may not be good is really only worth about $15-$20 for me, and that's pushing it. Gambling $60 on the chance that a game will have enough content at a high enough quality to keep me interested for a couple of weeks or a month is just not going to happen.
Books, music, movies, and games are all competing for our entertainment dollars. Whoever provides the biggest value for the money generally gets the sales. For me, that value is reduced the more the item is restricted. I used to buy a lot of books, but paperbacks are increasingly inconvenient for me, and an e-reader would be the perfect solution... except that those e books are usually saddled with DRM or are more expensive. Computer books, such as those for various industry certifications, have always been expensive, but when the electronic version is even more so, it's just insulting.
If I could find a large selection of $5-$10 novels that interested me in electronic format with no DRM, I'd be buying them up. But right now the value proposition just isn't there to justify the initial purchase of a Nook or Kindle.
In a thousand years, if archaeologists cannot gather sufficient data from other observations besides paper records, then it really wasn't that important anyway.
I disagree with your assessment of what constitutes basic knowledge. Perhaps you'll disagree with my assessment that since this is a US-based and US-centric site, it is to be expected that most of the readership and comments will be from the viewpoint of US residents?
Email sex isn't too bad. Just have to be careful not to get any Epaper cuts.
While it's true that those factors would reduce the spread and effectiveness of such an outbreak, the ease and speed of worldwide travel serve to negate that and then some.
Yeah, counter extremism with extremism, good fucking plan, jackass.
This is precisely what the US government has been doing for the last decade, in case you hadn't noticed.
Any time an exceedingly obvious patent is filed by a company, it should be immediately placed in the public domain, and the company that filed it should be forced to pay royalties to the government. Not only would this reduce the amount of stupid patent filings and court battles, it would get our national debt paid off within a year or two.
And if you trust Consumer Reports' methodology, you have less than half a brain.
http://www.allpar.com/cr.html
http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2011/03/consumer-reports-admits-reliability-data-was-scarce-for-chrysler.html
http://www.truedelta.com/pieces/shortcomings.php
There are plenty more articles out there explaining the problem.
Nah, I kinda doubt that and here is why: Look at how many companies that HATE each other, like AMD and Intel, or AMD and Nvidia have cross licenses. Even when AMD and Intel were slugging it out in court neither tried to revoke those cross licenses, why? Because they knew that once you get into the thousands of patents you are looking at mutually assured destruction which is why you don't see these megacorps tear into each other as much anymore.
Exactly why I have been perplexed that this patent war has erupted in the mobile space. Yes, Google was lacking in patents to retaliate with, but Apple and Microsoft knew that to directly attack Google could backfire fast, so they went after smaller players. B&N just decided to find out if those patent nukes MS was threatening to throw were actually going to detonate, or if they were duds. Looks like the emperor's got no clothes on.
Now, the real question - if the court decides these patents are bogus (which I can't seem them not doing), what happens to the other companies who licensed from Microsoft? Can they have those agreements invalidated?
When there are billions of dollars at stake, hard work and cheap labor are easy. For a few hundred thousand or a couple million dollars of traceable merchandise, no, it is not worth digging such a tunnel.
ICS is designed to work nicely on both phones and tablets. Google knew that 2.x was not really ideal for tablets, hence Honeycomb. But forking their own OS was not ideal, either, so ICS now combines the best of both and should provide a great experience on either format.
Sorry, union regulations prohibit the toaster from ejecting until the timer gives approval.
Because 5.6 is the largest ever recorded in the state, perhaps? Just because it's normal or boring to someone in another part of the world doesn't discount this as news. If 1/3 of the population of Europe were on the brink of starvation, would it be normal and un-newsworthy simply because there are countries in Africa where that (or worse) is normal?
Using your logic, it can be argued that nothing is newsworthy here, simply because in all probability, everything interesting has already happened on a larger scale somewhere else in the universe.
You're missing the point. Lawyers do that all the time because they get caught up in technicalities, and it's why they are so despised. Back away from the case, look at it objectively, and you can see that the legal frameworks surrounding patent and copyright are fundamentally broken. Laws are supposed to come into existence because of a fundamental need to protect. When they become subverted and abused, like the entire "intellectual property" industry has done, they start damaging far more than protecting. In the same way that the First Amendment does not protect you yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, or threatening to kill someone, patent and copyright law should not protect trolls or obvious implementations.
Your argument largely consists of "this is legal", and while that may be true, that was not the point of the parent post. The point of the parent post was that for this nonsense to continue provides evidence of a fundamentally broken system because it has been many many years, and this case has been dealt setback after setback, yet it's not done. If the system is so overly complex and backlogged that it takes, what, almost a decade for this sort of thing to be resolved, that is a massive problem.
NPRP is the last line of defense? Cool. Glad they didn't cut the first line of defense, which is the engineer team that is responsible for creating a superior product in the first place.
I'm confused. I've been doing voice search on my Android phone for quite some time. Google has been collecting this data for at least a year (probably longer), and also has voicemail transcription data as well, so accuracy is not an issue.
I actually much prefer having it take me to Google search results instead of just giving me one answer, because sometimes my question is not that simple. Most of the time, the first search result is accurate, but I like having the options there.
I guess maybe I just prefer to have the answers clearly referenced. Maybe if I used Siri, I'd understand what all the fuss is about. But ultimately, I have zero interest in using the iPhone, because I do not like iOS.
No you won't. You'll almost certainly be dead.
[quote] The fact that we're STILL talking about Fukushima instead of getting basic infrastructure such as roads and sewers fixed just goes to show how much of a media circus this Fukushima is.[/quote]
I seriously cannot stand when people use this argument. "We" are not a singular collective with only one focus. Nuclear plant engineers and operators world over need to know the exact details of what happened so that precautions can be taken at the other plants that are in potential flood/tsunami areas. What can those people possibly contribute to rebuilding roads and sewers, or changing the designs of other buildings in those areas? The nice thing about being human is that we're not the fscking borg, and we can actually have a whole crapton of individual pursuits.
Seeing as how RIM is Canadian, this has already been done: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109370/