It's called a search warrant. Get it from the court, and they can search anything in your possession: you cars, house, Facebook, even your porno collection. Anything less is just invasion of privacy.
There's a company that pumped the highest profit in a quarter without pumping oil. Massive cash pile, no debt. And Wall Street continues to punish it.
Wall Street wants bloods.
The market does not lack in selection of entry level cameras that can take pictures with minimum efforts from the "photographer". Sony has some good looking ones with okay lenses. Or any Canon compacts are good enough without looking too chunky. I don't like Nikon compacts, though I do like their pros, but it's a venue you can explore.
My experience is different from yours. I shot a lot of compacts, but really hated that you have to hold it 3 feet from your face, and look into the LCD screen to compose. My friends laughed when I looked into the optical viewfinder, like the "old way". I decided to get serious about photography and after much research, bought a Leica M8 and a Summarit-M 35mm, both used for a total of $3800. Nearly everything you know about modern cameras is not present in this combo: no autofocus, no zoom lens, no auto mode of any kind, rear LCD screen is crap, battery life is subpar at best. But all the "old world" goodies are there: excellent lenses, instant feedback, excellent craftsmanship, big bright optical viewfinder, inconspicuous (my favourite feedback: "where did you get that toy camera?"). I am completely in love with the combo, and won't trade it for any DSLR.
I don't say that you need a Leica to begin photography. But since you asked the question on Slashdot, chances are that you do care somewhat about photography. Most people don't come here to ask a $300 question.
Have you used SQL Server lately? As a business analyst using it since 2000, I can say Microsoft has made leaps and bounds in improving of the tool. A lot of that is just playing catch up with Oracle, but the latest version is highly competitive for its price.
they took a step backwards, to protect themselves from piracy - a concern people making Debian CD's have no concern about
They are a for profit company. Can't blame them for taking a hard stance on piracy. If you were Rolex, you would have wanted to crack down on the counterfeiters too. I agree that they go beyond and above reasons to make sure you conform to the draconian EULA, but such is life. Debian is a Linux distribution. Linux has "love me, share me, copy me" written all over it. Perhaps a more apt comparison would be Apple which ship a full version of Mac OS X with every computer they sell. The EULA says you can't install the OS on another machine, but there is no mechanism to prevent so.
Then they rip off Apple's Mac interface (which Apple themselves ripped off from Xerox)
I'm surprised to see this statement coming out of someone who has read Steve Jobs' biography. Xerox didn't allow Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson to come to PARC for nothing. Apple had to agree to give Xerox a stake at a favourable price in exchange. Some innovations, like overlapping windows, was made by Apple because Bill Atkinson was under the impression that he had seen it at PARC. The machine that Xerox eventually made, the Xerox Alto, was a flop.
You harshly criticized Microsoft for lacking of innovation, but have you considered other things that they did right: Visual Studio is one of the best IDEs around, Kinnect was revolutionary method of interaction, Courier was a highly promising concept (but the technology was released by Apple first).
When looking into Microsoft, I see not a cool brand, not something that ignite excitement when you hear the name. What I see is an IBM in the making: tremendously important to businesses (Windows, Office, dev tools), yet irrelevant to the regular consumers.
Does Microsoft understand that different form-factor requires different GUI design? They try to shove the one-size-fit-all approach to all the devices that they design, that's why they fail so hard.
You can't take a PC interface, with mouse and keyboard, and copy it directly over to a tablet, where an icon is too small to be touched precisely by a stylus.
You can't do serious document editing or spreadsheet on a phone / tablet so design those apps with a "good enough" feature set and let go.
You can't copy a panel-based interface to a keyboard and mouse environment.
Apple knows how to do those things: they have a scroller for the phone, a pop up for the tablet, and a plain old drop down for the computer. They make them "consistent" but far from identical, cause your interaction with them are different.
It almost killed him, but he would inevitably die with cancer anyway. I think most patients will accept the risk.
Now that he has 1 billions modified T-cells, possibly double that now, how do they plan on getting them out, or make the body accept them? Surviving cancer just to die from your own T-cells doesn't sound cool.
This is how you retain top talents in a company. Tim Cook is no newbie, he has been with Apple since 1998. The guy has proven himself to be capable of running Apple when Steve Jobs was away in the past. Lately, he's been leading the delegate in negotiation with China Mobile.
As an Apple shareholder, I have no problem with this compensation plan: it's clear, easy to understand, and has a long term outlook.
All of the big 3 in Canada allow tethering. I started with Rogers in 2008 not blocking jailbroken tethering. When Bell and Telus got the iPhone, they also allowed it. However, prices have gone up quite a bit, from $30 / 6GB to $30 / 1GB (3 times increase???) in three years. The good thing is, they usually let you keep your old plan even if you no longer qualify as student, or not part of a family pack, etc.
My manager bought the Viewsonic G Tablet the same time I bought my iPad 2. His reasoning was that the G Tablet has the same hardware, hackable to run Honeycomb but at half the price of the iPad. He tried to sell it 2 weeks later for a $50 discount and no buyer as of yet (3+ months). It really scared me about the things that the G can't do: Skype video call, Netflix streaming, dearth of apps. At least Angry Birds was good.
Even if Samsung is willing to take a dive and have a $75 price advantage over the iPad, the iPad still has better name recognition, and more apps. All the Android manufacturers keep pushing out new hardware, but software is what makes the consumers want them. Has any of them push for more indie dev other than Google?
Disclaimer: I own Apple share.
That's because HTC actually copied more than a few things from Apple. Ever notice that since the iPhone came out, virtually any smart phone looks like a rectangular block with an edge-to-edge screen. You can scream that Apple is not the first to invent format, but they catapulted it to mainstream recognition. On the side, you need to understand Steve Job's painful lesson in patents: if you license them, or don't defend them, they get stolen without remorse, aka. Microsoft Windows.
Apple has become much more of a patent bully lately, but they are far from the patent trolls who knock on their doors frequently.
Time and time again Sony blow up on their PR. Order court arrest of hackers who are tinkering with their products to make them even more useful to the community. Whatever these guys to hack the PS3, it's only for the good of Sony. Think about the free publicity when your PS3 can do this and that with a simple jailbreak. Sony can simply turn a blind eye, or better yet, encourage those efforts from the community. What if they break the hypervisor? It's not like a modern PS3 game is easy to make, so you will need an SDK and Sony's support anyways. PS3 works in a pretty small confinement defined by Sony, step outside its border and you will be sued. This is a sad example of a company run by lawyers. Had Ken Kutaragi been at the helm, he would no doubt feel excited about those attempts given his engineering background.
Even Apple turns a blind eye on the jailbreakers. New iOS updates break them all of time, but Apple didn't go sue anyone. They silently watch the apps in the jailbreak world and turn some of them into iOS (tethering, bluetooth keyboard, etc.) That's smart marketing.
This small, ultra-high speed gizmo just telling me that computers of future whould be even much more portable than those of current generation.
In the future, we will have small cards with 200GB of storage that act like our current HDD. These cards can be easily plugged into any "bare-bone terminal" with monitor, mouse, keyboard and speaker ready and run right out of the bag. The OS is pre-installed on the card as well. Another card will be sloted into your iPod. Everytime you want to sync your iPod with your comp, push the card out and plug into it the right slot, it cannot be simpler! USB, FireWire, PS/2 and other external ports will be replaced by this single standard.
If you want to build a dream machine of your own, just buy some of those cards (gfx, sound, RAM, external BD/HD-DVD writer...) and slot them into a much smaller box than today's CPU case. No screw will ever need to be turned. In short, the computer of tomorrow will be extrememely portable.
It may sound like "I, Robot" or "The Minority Report" now but that's how computers will go for the future
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It's called a search warrant. Get it from the court, and they can search anything in your possession: you cars, house, Facebook, even your porno collection. Anything less is just invasion of privacy.
But I did not utter the name of It-Who-Cannot-be-Named :((
There's a company that pumped the highest profit in a quarter without pumping oil. Massive cash pile, no debt. And Wall Street continues to punish it. Wall Street wants bloods.
The market does not lack in selection of entry level cameras that can take pictures with minimum efforts from the "photographer". Sony has some good looking ones with okay lenses. Or any Canon compacts are good enough without looking too chunky. I don't like Nikon compacts, though I do like their pros, but it's a venue you can explore. My experience is different from yours. I shot a lot of compacts, but really hated that you have to hold it 3 feet from your face, and look into the LCD screen to compose. My friends laughed when I looked into the optical viewfinder, like the "old way". I decided to get serious about photography and after much research, bought a Leica M8 and a Summarit-M 35mm, both used for a total of $3800. Nearly everything you know about modern cameras is not present in this combo: no autofocus, no zoom lens, no auto mode of any kind, rear LCD screen is crap, battery life is subpar at best. But all the "old world" goodies are there: excellent lenses, instant feedback, excellent craftsmanship, big bright optical viewfinder, inconspicuous (my favourite feedback: "where did you get that toy camera?"). I am completely in love with the combo, and won't trade it for any DSLR. I don't say that you need a Leica to begin photography. But since you asked the question on Slashdot, chances are that you do care somewhat about photography. Most people don't come here to ask a $300 question.
Have you used SQL Server lately? As a business analyst using it since 2000, I can say Microsoft has made leaps and bounds in improving of the tool. A lot of that is just playing catch up with Oracle, but the latest version is highly competitive for its price.
They are a for profit company. Can't blame them for taking a hard stance on piracy. If you were Rolex, you would have wanted to crack down on the counterfeiters too. I agree that they go beyond and above reasons to make sure you conform to the draconian EULA, but such is life. Debian is a Linux distribution. Linux has "love me, share me, copy me" written all over it. Perhaps a more apt comparison would be Apple which ship a full version of Mac OS X with every computer they sell. The EULA says you can't install the OS on another machine, but there is no mechanism to prevent so.
I'm surprised to see this statement coming out of someone who has read Steve Jobs' biography. Xerox didn't allow Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson to come to PARC for nothing. Apple had to agree to give Xerox a stake at a favourable price in exchange. Some innovations, like overlapping windows, was made by Apple because Bill Atkinson was under the impression that he had seen it at PARC. The machine that Xerox eventually made, the Xerox Alto, was a flop.
You harshly criticized Microsoft for lacking of innovation, but have you considered other things that they did right: Visual Studio is one of the best IDEs around, Kinnect was revolutionary method of interaction, Courier was a highly promising concept (but the technology was released by Apple first).
When looking into Microsoft, I see not a cool brand, not something that ignite excitement when you hear the name. What I see is an IBM in the making: tremendously important to businesses (Windows, Office, dev tools), yet irrelevant to the regular consumers.
Does Microsoft understand that different form-factor requires different GUI design? They try to shove the one-size-fit-all approach to all the devices that they design, that's why they fail so hard. You can't take a PC interface, with mouse and keyboard, and copy it directly over to a tablet, where an icon is too small to be touched precisely by a stylus. You can't do serious document editing or spreadsheet on a phone / tablet so design those apps with a "good enough" feature set and let go. You can't copy a panel-based interface to a keyboard and mouse environment. Apple knows how to do those things: they have a scroller for the phone, a pop up for the tablet, and a plain old drop down for the computer. They make them "consistent" but far from identical, cause your interaction with them are different.
It almost killed him, but he would inevitably die with cancer anyway. I think most patients will accept the risk. Now that he has 1 billions modified T-cells, possibly double that now, how do they plan on getting them out, or make the body accept them? Surviving cancer just to die from your own T-cells doesn't sound cool.
This is how you retain top talents in a company. Tim Cook is no newbie, he has been with Apple since 1998. The guy has proven himself to be capable of running Apple when Steve Jobs was away in the past. Lately, he's been leading the delegate in negotiation with China Mobile. As an Apple shareholder, I have no problem with this compensation plan: it's clear, easy to understand, and has a long term outlook.
All of the big 3 in Canada allow tethering. I started with Rogers in 2008 not blocking jailbroken tethering. When Bell and Telus got the iPhone, they also allowed it. However, prices have gone up quite a bit, from $30 / 6GB to $30 / 1GB (3 times increase???) in three years. The good thing is, they usually let you keep your old plan even if you no longer qualify as student, or not part of a family pack, etc.
My manager bought the Viewsonic G Tablet the same time I bought my iPad 2. His reasoning was that the G Tablet has the same hardware, hackable to run Honeycomb but at half the price of the iPad. He tried to sell it 2 weeks later for a $50 discount and no buyer as of yet (3+ months). It really scared me about the things that the G can't do: Skype video call, Netflix streaming, dearth of apps. At least Angry Birds was good. Even if Samsung is willing to take a dive and have a $75 price advantage over the iPad, the iPad still has better name recognition, and more apps. All the Android manufacturers keep pushing out new hardware, but software is what makes the consumers want them. Has any of them push for more indie dev other than Google?
Disclaimer: I own Apple share. That's because HTC actually copied more than a few things from Apple. Ever notice that since the iPhone came out, virtually any smart phone looks like a rectangular block with an edge-to-edge screen. You can scream that Apple is not the first to invent format, but they catapulted it to mainstream recognition. On the side, you need to understand Steve Job's painful lesson in patents: if you license them, or don't defend them, they get stolen without remorse, aka. Microsoft Windows. Apple has become much more of a patent bully lately, but they are far from the patent trolls who knock on their doors frequently.
Time and time again Sony blow up on their PR. Order court arrest of hackers who are tinkering with their products to make them even more useful to the community. Whatever these guys to hack the PS3, it's only for the good of Sony. Think about the free publicity when your PS3 can do this and that with a simple jailbreak. Sony can simply turn a blind eye, or better yet, encourage those efforts from the community. What if they break the hypervisor? It's not like a modern PS3 game is easy to make, so you will need an SDK and Sony's support anyways. PS3 works in a pretty small confinement defined by Sony, step outside its border and you will be sued. This is a sad example of a company run by lawyers. Had Ken Kutaragi been at the helm, he would no doubt feel excited about those attempts given his engineering background. Even Apple turns a blind eye on the jailbreakers. New iOS updates break them all of time, but Apple didn't go sue anyone. They silently watch the apps in the jailbreak world and turn some of them into iOS (tethering, bluetooth keyboard, etc.) That's smart marketing.
Damn the people who accept this story on Slashdot. They put the whole review on the front page. Now this looks like spam!
In the future, we will have small cards with 200GB of storage that act like our current HDD. These cards can be easily plugged into any "bare-bone terminal" with monitor, mouse, keyboard and speaker ready and run right out of the bag. The OS is pre-installed on the card as well. Another card will be sloted into your iPod. Everytime you want to sync your iPod with your comp, push the card out and plug into it the right slot, it cannot be simpler! USB, FireWire, PS/2 and other external ports will be replaced by this single standard.
If you want to build a dream machine of your own, just buy some of those cards (gfx, sound, RAM, external BD/HD-DVD writer...) and slot them into a much smaller box than today's CPU case. No screw will ever need to be turned. In short, the computer of tomorrow will be extrememely portable.
It may sound like "I, Robot" or "The Minority Report" now but that's how computers will go for the future