What benefits the consumer is what the consumer wants. What do they want? Do they want the theater experience or do they want the comfort of their own home entertainment center?
Frankly, Even at $25 for two tickets and popcorn, and seeing a movie approxamitely once every other week, if I decided to save that money, I'd still not have enough money for the minimum payment on a $5000 entertainment center, complete with surround sound and super sized TV.
I also find the experience of a theater very enjoyable. The screen is bigger than I can buy anywhere, the accoustics and sound system at a modern theater are very good in my experience, AND I get the experience of being in an audience. Laughing and cheering with a bunch of people in a theater has always made any more more enjoyable. Some of the star wars haters will always complain, but the feeling of the audience whooping and hollering when Yoda uses the force to whip out his lightsabre and get into a fighting stance... it's priceless emotion.
And nothing beats an action movie on a huge screen. Sense and sensibility doesn't lose anything being watched on your TV, but you had to see... and I mean SEE... episode 3 on a big screen at least once to get the beauty of the visuals... if you are into that sort of thing.
Now, you may prefer being at home and not want to deal with the muck on the floor, or stupid people with cell phones. You may not want to have to deal with schedules or times. These do not bother me as much. I'm selective of my movie theaters and some of those theaters do suck much more than others. I prefer comfortable seats and decent equipment and no weird smells. If you don't have a theater like this, I would not be surprised if you prefer home theaters. If your eyes aren't sharp like mine then pretty special effects might not impress you at a 50 foot viewing angle.
The point is, the market should go where ever the market says it wants. If people like movies in the theater, fine. If people want to see more movies sooner at home instead, fine. BOTH of these men are looking at the issue from a selfish perspective, regardless of who is right. I believe there will always be demand for movies in the theater, but how much is dependent on the people buying the tickets and DVDs, not the CEO pigs who want to take your money regardless of what you really want.
I'll admit, I'm not following SCG because I don't general play FPS. However, I will say this is not the first time Blizzard has axed a game well into development, and frankly, I applaud them.
They had some kind of weird video RPG story game (it kind of looked like the 80s dragonslayer) that had Thrall as a young orc in a slave camp, and you played him growing up or some weird stuff like that. Weird premise for a game at that time, and they were right to think "no one will buy this it's so 80s, lets kill this crap."
How much crap has been hyped, delayed, delayed again, put on hold, taken off, and then finally brought to market and shown to be the crap it really was. Why put us all through that?
If Ghost is not going to be a game we can expect something different, fun, or unique of, then lets kill it and move on. I never did like the marketing department at Blizzard as their marketing always comes out like everyone of them has an upper cocktail for breakfast and hype there stuff waaaaaaay too much, but kudos to the people at Blizzard who have the balls to say "this is crap, shut it down and stop the bleeding now. We aren't going to make money." And that's the real thing, will SCG be any real breakout exciting title? Or will it look like a Halo clone based off of a PC strategy game who's only fans will be fans of that strategy game?
Real corporations start projects and kill them all the time without releasing to market. Unfortunately software companies push these projects too hard and announce them very very early as compared to the rest of the business world. It's a skill to know when to kill a project just as much as when to start it.
I agree with you that tax deductions and credits are overused, but launching into the old "lets move to a sales tax based system" has always been and forever will be bad system for the poor and a great system for the rich. Why? Because a loaf of bread costs the same no matter how much you make, but you can buy a whole lot more loaves of bread as a rich person. And yet if you need 21 loaves of bread a week to survive and as a poor person you can only buy 10, how does taxing the loaf of bread make it any fairer when the rich are eating 50 a week?
The rich in this country are extremely rich and the poor are very poor. How does it benefit the economy as a whole and the country to have the rich hoard all that money? It's not like they spend it, that's why they are rich! They hoard it!
Plus if you tax only sales tax the amount of the US budget will go crashing down. Spending is propped up by those who can pay more taxes. Those who make $200,000 may think it's "unfair" but their taxes pay for the military, and for social programs who keep those who have not from picking up guns and knives and robbing their beautiful homes.
This is just empiricle evidence of course, but the nature of multiple paths, whether its the computer's interface or the sorting through the billions of results on Google, really seems to confuse the older generation.
I don't think this is entirely OT, but the above is in fact not true, and has been proven over and over. It's a stereotype based on ageism. Studies show that the percentage of people with the inability to actually get comfortable and knowledgeable with a computer are roughly the same across all age groups. It's just that more seniors don't feel a huge need to get one. If you are retired in 1920 and all you have to do is ride your horse down to the country store twice a week for food, and once more over to your sisters for tea, why are you going to buy one of those fancy horseless carriages?
I've known plenty of 60+ seniors who know their way in, out, around, sideways, diagonally, and interdimensionally thru a computer. I've also known plenty of teenagers, college students, and twenty somethings who take one look at a computer, scream, and run the other way.
The inability to work a computer does not come from age, but from the inability to adapt to the whole computing metaphor. Give a group of seniors both a reason to use a computer and enough time and they will learn it. As seniors they may learn slower than school kids, since kids learn more quickly than adults, but the can learn it just fine. The stereo
I saw this in another thread, but the fall of 9 percent can be explained by the "passion of the christ," which came out in 2004. It brought out movie goers who don't normally go to the movies, sometimes more than once. It was explained by Roger Ebert that basically the 2004 figures were inflated by this figure, and they simply droped off to a normal trend in 2005.
So Cinema isn't dead, the movie companies aren't hurting, it's just that all this is a myopic response to an abberation in the figures the year before.
Liebermann has run for presidental a couple of times now. Mrs. Clinton has long been suspected to be running.
This is a tactic to get to the "middle" of the american political spectrum. I seriously doubt Clinton and Liebermann really believe this, or really care. They might, but Clinton is waaaaay too smart for me to believe that she has a true heartfelt conviction that games are hurting kids.
The tactic is to basically look appealing to republican and undecided voters by pulling the "I am concerned about children and families" card. I'll admit, if Hillary runs, I'll still vote for her, frankly because once she gets to the white house I seriously doubt she'll push too far on this... she'll be working to hard on health care reform:)
This has got to be the biggest conspiracy over nothing that I have every seen. First, Slashdot posts a sensational post about how the new products at Apple are overhyped and links an article that doesn't over hype anything! Then Cnet comes out with an article saying it's over hyped which slashdot posts as well! Ten out of Ten points for getting lots of hits and comments but -1000000 points for lack of intelligence. I say what everyone else is saying... what hype?
For a product to be overhyped I have to see it somewhere other than slashdot which does get a high bandwidth of users but does not have mainstream penetration.
This administration has already proven it's unwilling to pursue anti-trust litigation. They managed to bury the single most important anti-trust suit of our time to date, and microsoft is still doing what they do in the US, while the rest of the world cracks down on them.
Personally I think this is just that, an investigation, with little backbone or political will to see it come to court. It would detract from their "war on terrorism" and listening in on all their warrentless wiretaps.
In the world of software design, "Null" is commonly used to represent "no value" or "0."
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!
Null is commonly used to represent "no value" or the absence of data. In programming, zero is discrete and specific data. Zero is data. Null is the lack of any data.
Okay so this isn't exactly a programming or data base design article but these things are important. I work in a support department and do you know how hard it is to explain what NULL is? Misinformation should not be spread to the masses!:)
In an effort to be negative, you're too far inside the slashbox mode of thinking. Grab a blurb from the article, take an angle and get crabby. That or you are just bitter:)
I think you have a right to be bitter. Per the rules you posted, you should not have gotten an F. Now, if during your class the spirit of the class was to deal with materials or polymers or impact resistance then your parachute idea would have been against the spirit of the contest. Egg dropping contests are common in engineering and science classes, and kids have been subverting them for years, but each class has a slightly different reason for introducing the subject. Sometimes, it's just to see if the kids are clever enough to think "outside the box."
And perhaps that's the point here. Get a bunch of engineering students to think about a project and see which ones think creatively. Why design a $10,000 coffee mug when a $10 design could work just fine?
That being said, I think you were ripped off and I think these kids were given a gift. Egg dropping contests are notoriously run by grumpy people tired of kids who "subvert spirit of the rules" which is incredibly stupid if you just use the project as a grading exercise. It then becomes "how well did you follow the rules?" not "how creative are you?"
A parachute is highly practical, while this design is not at all practical for actually drinking coffee. Then again, I have no idea if any of the other submissions were practical either. And the blurb you pulled from the article, that could just be some throwaway line the reporter slapped down. We have no real idea what other designs there were and if there were any other type of creative designs that were just as wacky and impractical.
In other words, I'm now confident you are just bitter;) Let me get you a cup of coffee so you can relax.
First of all, no firm date has been set ever, it's primarily been estimated dates but they did once say they planned on releasing it for Christmas. That was their first intended date, because it would be in time for the last game rush before the Revolution came out. The second estimate was spring, now it's fall. The articles all imply that these are promises, but really they are only estimates, there are no promises. However, if you let things slide too long and you let the estimates slide too long, estimates to rabid hungry gamers are as good as promises.
Now the revolution is planned for spring, and this is planned to be a Gamecube release. I'll still buy it and enjoy it, but now I'm worried if they let it slip this far that maybe they will decide to make it a revolution title. Gamecube owners in the US aren't as upgrade happy as PS and Xbox fans, but we've seen people promise titles for one platform and then change their minds because the change made more sense later than it does now.
You have to read all the articles, not just the attached one, but the three articles at the beginning of the referenced one. This wasn't just bundling, this was bait and switch.
Here's an example snippet from one of those articles:
TMCnet news reports similar events in Spokane, WA. Best Buy's Sunday ad offered the Xbox 360 for $299 dollars, but a sign was posted at the store on Tuesday as a "correction notice" to inform customers that they could only buy package deals starting at $569.93.
If best buy advertises something for $299, and doesn't actually have that item but has a similar one that's more expensive, that's bait and switch, and it's illegal in the United States. You cannot advertise one price for one model or package then sell another model/package that has more features but at a higher price simply because you never had that model. The ad said they were selling it so they better sell it. In fact, the law states that those people had the right to demand the higher bundle for the lower price, but I infer from the article that Best Buy obfuscated this enough so that few to none of the people scammed were able to catch that when they first went in.
And to top it all off, companies should and do go out of their way to avoid these mistakes, because the law also says that if a company does make this mistake, customers have every right to take advantage of it. This is to make sure companies don't up and use the "oops, That's a mistake in the ad we don't stock that. Gee, that's 4 mistakes in just one month, sorry, but I do have the higher end model for you if you like."
If it were a simple stock out that's one thing but some stores never even stocked one of the nonbundled console.
This smacks of a small time conspiracy but it's most definitely illegal. Best Buy is cleaning house to make it look like they care and showing good will so as to deflect any consumer lawsuits.
The students should be taken out and beaten. Anyone with any level of computer knowledge these days should know such activities are both highly immoral and illegal. This isn't stealing MP3s. And to attack a hospital? How thoughtless can you get? However, it's easy to be tempted by this type of thing, while these students got caught, many more got away with it at some point.
The Hospital should be scolded, but it's hard to know just from the story to what degree. It could range from a slap on the wrist to a lawsuit. If they had good computer security, then the students were just good at getting through. If it was bad computer security, then they need to step up and admit it. In any case, they are a hospital that appears to be running Windows to control their sensitive security systems. Bad choice, and that alone warrants one finger pointed at the hospital, if it's true. However, many hospitals are notoriously underfunded. In any case, I hope the IT staff of the hospital reviews this situation and revamps their software to minimize this risk in the future.
The adware makes should all be taken out and shot. They are the immoral facilitators and the ones who should take the most blame. They are the modern day equivalent of drug dealers. They didn't kill the person taking their drugs, but they knew it eventually would come to that, and they never stopped selling. They put all the risk for the crime on the students, knowing full well they could get caught, and that someone elses computer system would be seriously damaged. Something very gruesome and painful should befall them, before execution.
In terms of business, Google so far is a great business that tries to do no evil and approaches a lot of problems from an academic standpoint. It makes them money and it makes people's jobs easier. Good for them and good for us.
But $160 million in stock options? $1.68 billion in 2 years? Damn! Do you know how much rice and grain you could buy for starving people? How many middle class and working class people you could employ with that? The 8th highest paid executive in the world is the CEO of ExxonMobil and he made $88 million this year.
It's good that these stock options are tied to performance, because if Google tanked, they'd get nothing. But let's put the amount of money into perspective. Can we tone down on corporate greed? Did these guys really need that much in stock options?
I'm just saying...
The advantage of this hub
on
Wireless USB hubs
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
For those who don't get it, the point of the hub is to provide a place where you can plug in your scanner, printer, and other external peripherals, providing them all with wireless functionality, without the scanner and printer actually having the wireless capability built in. Makes sense for those of us with lots of USB peripherals who also have a wireless laptop.
What's a little odd is that they aren't using bluetooth, but the article claims its 100x faster than bluetooth. Perhaps this opens up the idea of plugging in hard drives into a USB hub like this, either for backup, for extra workspace, or just a great way to store your extensive mp3/movie/pr0n collection.
It's easy to blame the education system, and then forget all the other factors. It's also easy to blame this on laziness. However, you equate the inability comprehend the statement to laziness and that's the classic correlation-causation cop out. Stupidity is not lazinessand vice versa.
I think the biggest factor, I think, are the corporations, who are always going to be smarter than the common man, because they can pay a few lawyers to make up language that the common man and woman cannot speak in the hopes that they do exactly what they expect, be lazy. When someone has a real problem, the bank points to the agreement and they're screwed.
The education system can't keep up with a multi-national bank churning out legalise like cheap pasta. I don't think the common person is so lazy that they cannot read their statements. I think they have better things to do. Credit cards are given to millions of americans, and are easy to use. The terms of service should be relatively easy as well. What we need is a legal system which uses simple language that not everyone needs a lawyer for just to understand. After all, government is supposed to be by the people.
I recall a company in the past that wouldn't sell you their software unless you purchased their hardrware. They were taken to court and forced to unbundle the OS from the Hardware since the OS was capable for running on other hardware. I can't recall the company name off hand but I feel someone will to do the same to Apple.
People who don't understand monopoly law should have their fingers hacked off so they don't post such stupid comments.
Look, I know some people like to bash Apple because they tie the OS to the hardware. Bash away on that argument I don't care, on several levels you are right. But your not so subtle implication is that somehow Apple's situation is the same as Microsoft's is a fundamental lack of brain matter for anyone who's posted on slashdot.
Apple is NOT a monopoly, Microsoft IS a monopoly. The first step to understanding monopolies is quite simply that the rules change once you are a monopoly. Monopolies wield incredible power and pervert the forces of a free market into something that is definitely not a free market. Everyone argument ever made that is anti-Microsoft is based on this premise. Bassed on that, Microsoft's actions are typically illegal, while Apple's actions at worst are quite simply immoral. It doesn't make them any less annoying, but under law they aren't illegal, because market forces have the opportunity to break that bundling package if someone with a better business model (that's not illegal) comes along.
Go back to the shallow end of the gene pool where you belong. John Dvorak has a seat next to him waiting for you.
Will your notebook or desktop PC someday sport quantum innards? It's unlikely, at least in the immediate future. Researchers believe quantum systems will be much more efficient at rock-solid cryptography and mass database searches than running the latest version of Doom.
The complaint is that they are approving too many frivolous patents not that they can't approve good patents fast enough. Giving someone better equipment means they can approve patents faster. The problem is not the equipment, it's the process.
How many times have we seen a frivolous lawsuit post on slashdot, and how many people within 15 minutes of it's posting came up with links to prior art? Give a person a faster computer can help if they are experiencing slowed down processes. If I can find prior art with a $300 PC, what good is a major software/hardware upgrade if people in the patent office aren't finding this prior art to begin with?
This is PR spin. I'm not discounting the need for the right technology to make the process more efficient, and faster equipment will help speed the process once the right process is in place. I want to know more about the changes in the process they are making. This article makes the change in technology a much larger part of the patent reform process than it really is.
Obviously I'm missing something, and so is the article.
$10 x 280,000,000 11,200,000,00
Where did the other factor of ~3 go? Maybe that's the judge was convinced that, like any IT project, you should just automatically multiply the requirements by 3.
The author should know someone's going to ask questions about that because because we want to know where the money is coming from and where it's going. Not clarifying that makes the article just regurgitation and makes it look like somethings being hidden.
This is an interesting statement. Not only is it absurd to think that anyone will "take out" IBM any time soon (IBM has weathered lots of storms, and has adapted to every one of them) this mentality is very common when talking about Microsoft.
Balmer wants to kill Google. darkonc talkes about taking out IBM. This is legal business, not the mafia. Microsoft is out to go after competition and kill it in order to win all the chips. Others might think about wanting to kill their competition, but no where is this sentiment more discussed when talking about Microsoft.
Killing competition! You know... what monopolies do??
And no one currently in the justice department wants to get the giant sized clue that is constantly being handed to them.
Slashdot Mirror
The writing for SMAC was excellent, and very creepy, considering just how true it was. You reminded me just how good and creepy it was.
Sign me up for the "Unity" crew.
What benefits the consumer is what the consumer wants. What do they want? Do they want the theater experience or do they want the comfort of their own home entertainment center?
Frankly, Even at $25 for two tickets and popcorn, and seeing a movie approxamitely once every other week, if I decided to save that money, I'd still not have enough money for the minimum payment on a $5000 entertainment center, complete with surround sound and super sized TV.
I also find the experience of a theater very enjoyable. The screen is bigger than I can buy anywhere, the accoustics and sound system at a modern theater are very good in my experience, AND I get the experience of being in an audience. Laughing and cheering with a bunch of people in a theater has always made any more more enjoyable. Some of the star wars haters will always complain, but the feeling of the audience whooping and hollering when Yoda uses the force to whip out his lightsabre and get into a fighting stance... it's priceless emotion.
And nothing beats an action movie on a huge screen. Sense and sensibility doesn't lose anything being watched on your TV, but you had to see... and I mean SEE... episode 3 on a big screen at least once to get the beauty of the visuals... if you are into that sort of thing.
Now, you may prefer being at home and not want to deal with the muck on the floor, or stupid people with cell phones. You may not want to have to deal with schedules or times. These do not bother me as much. I'm selective of my movie theaters and some of those theaters do suck much more than others. I prefer comfortable seats and decent equipment and no weird smells. If you don't have a theater like this, I would not be surprised if you prefer home theaters. If your eyes aren't sharp like mine then pretty special effects might not impress you at a 50 foot viewing angle.
The point is, the market should go where ever the market says it wants. If people like movies in the theater, fine. If people want to see more movies sooner at home instead, fine. BOTH of these men are looking at the issue from a selfish perspective, regardless of who is right. I believe there will always be demand for movies in the theater, but how much is dependent on the people buying the tickets and DVDs, not the CEO pigs who want to take your money regardless of what you really want.
I'll admit, I'm not following SCG because I don't general play FPS. However, I will say this is not the first time Blizzard has axed a game well into development, and frankly, I applaud them.
They had some kind of weird video RPG story game (it kind of looked like the 80s dragonslayer) that had Thrall as a young orc in a slave camp, and you played him growing up or some weird stuff like that. Weird premise for a game at that time, and they were right to think "no one will buy this it's so 80s, lets kill this crap."
How much crap has been hyped, delayed, delayed again, put on hold, taken off, and then finally brought to market and shown to be the crap it really was. Why put us all through that?
If Ghost is not going to be a game we can expect something different, fun, or unique of, then lets kill it and move on. I never did like the marketing department at Blizzard as their marketing always comes out like everyone of them has an upper cocktail for breakfast and hype there stuff waaaaaaay too much, but kudos to the people at Blizzard who have the balls to say "this is crap, shut it down and stop the bleeding now. We aren't going to make money." And that's the real thing, will SCG be any real breakout exciting title? Or will it look like a Halo clone based off of a PC strategy game who's only fans will be fans of that strategy game?
Real corporations start projects and kill them all the time without releasing to market. Unfortunately software companies push these projects too hard and announce them very very early as compared to the rest of the business world. It's a skill to know when to kill a project just as much as when to start it.
I agree with you that tax deductions and credits are overused, but launching into the old "lets move to a sales tax based system" has always been and forever will be bad system for the poor and a great system for the rich. Why? Because a loaf of bread costs the same no matter how much you make, but you can buy a whole lot more loaves of bread as a rich person. And yet if you need 21 loaves of bread a week to survive and as a poor person you can only buy 10, how does taxing the loaf of bread make it any fairer when the rich are eating 50 a week?
The rich in this country are extremely rich and the poor are very poor. How does it benefit the economy as a whole and the country to have the rich hoard all that money? It's not like they spend it, that's why they are rich! They hoard it!
Plus if you tax only sales tax the amount of the US budget will go crashing down. Spending is propped up by those who can pay more taxes. Those who make $200,000 may think it's "unfair" but their taxes pay for the military, and for social programs who keep those who have not from picking up guns and knives and robbing their beautiful homes.
This is just empiricle evidence of course, but the nature of multiple paths, whether its the computer's interface or the sorting through the billions of results on Google, really seems to confuse the older generation.
I don't think this is entirely OT, but the above is in fact not true, and has been proven over and over. It's a stereotype based on ageism. Studies show that the percentage of people with the inability to actually get comfortable and knowledgeable with a computer are roughly the same across all age groups. It's just that more seniors don't feel a huge need to get one. If you are retired in 1920 and all you have to do is ride your horse down to the country store twice a week for food, and once more over to your sisters for tea, why are you going to buy one of those fancy horseless carriages?
I've known plenty of 60+ seniors who know their way in, out, around, sideways, diagonally, and interdimensionally thru a computer. I've also known plenty of teenagers, college students, and twenty somethings who take one look at a computer, scream, and run the other way.
The inability to work a computer does not come from age, but from the inability to adapt to the whole computing metaphor. Give a group of seniors both a reason to use a computer and enough time and they will learn it. As seniors they may learn slower than school kids, since kids learn more quickly than adults, but the can learn it just fine. The stereo
I saw this in another thread, but the fall of 9 percent can be explained by the "passion of the christ," which came out in 2004. It brought out movie goers who don't normally go to the movies, sometimes more than once. It was explained by Roger Ebert that basically the 2004 figures were inflated by this figure, and they simply droped off to a normal trend in 2005.
So Cinema isn't dead, the movie companies aren't hurting, it's just that all this is a myopic response to an abberation in the figures the year before.
Liebermann has run for presidental a couple of times now. Mrs. Clinton has long been suspected to be running.
:)
This is a tactic to get to the "middle" of the american political spectrum. I seriously doubt Clinton and Liebermann really believe this, or really care. They might, but Clinton is waaaaay too smart for me to believe that she has a true heartfelt conviction that games are hurting kids.
The tactic is to basically look appealing to republican and undecided voters by pulling the "I am concerned about children and families" card. I'll admit, if Hillary runs, I'll still vote for her, frankly because once she gets to the white house I seriously doubt she'll push too far on this... she'll be working to hard on health care reform
This has got to be the biggest conspiracy over nothing that I have every seen. First, Slashdot posts a sensational post about how the new products at Apple are overhyped and links an article that doesn't over hype anything! Then Cnet comes out with an article saying it's over hyped which slashdot posts as well! Ten out of Ten points for getting lots of hits and comments but -1000000 points for lack of intelligence. I say what everyone else is saying... what hype?
For a product to be overhyped I have to see it somewhere other than slashdot which does get a high bandwidth of users but does not have mainstream penetration.
It's not alarming that it's shrinking by that rate compared to any historical values we have.
It's alarming because "oh shit, that's a lot of ice making the sea levels rise."
This administration has already proven it's unwilling to pursue anti-trust litigation. They managed to bury the single most important anti-trust suit of our time to date, and microsoft is still doing what they do in the US, while the rest of the world cracks down on them.
Personally I think this is just that, an investigation, with little backbone or political will to see it come to court. It would detract from their "war on terrorism" and listening in on all their warrentless wiretaps.
From the article:
:)
In the world of software design, "Null" is commonly used to represent "no value" or "0."
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!
Null is commonly used to represent "no value" or the absence of data. In programming, zero is discrete and specific data. Zero is data. Null is the lack of any data.
Okay so this isn't exactly a programming or data base design article but these things are important. I work in a support department and do you know how hard it is to explain what NULL is? Misinformation should not be spread to the masses!
In an effort to be negative, you're too far inside the slashbox mode of thinking. Grab a blurb from the article, take an angle and get crabby. That or you are just bitter :)
;) Let me get you a cup of coffee so you can relax.
I think you have a right to be bitter. Per the rules you posted, you should not have gotten an F. Now, if during your class the spirit of the class was to deal with materials or polymers or impact resistance then your parachute idea would have been against the spirit of the contest. Egg dropping contests are common in engineering and science classes, and kids have been subverting them for years, but each class has a slightly different reason for introducing the subject. Sometimes, it's just to see if the kids are clever enough to think "outside the box."
And perhaps that's the point here. Get a bunch of engineering students to think about a project and see which ones think creatively. Why design a $10,000 coffee mug when a $10 design could work just fine?
That being said, I think you were ripped off and I think these kids were given a gift. Egg dropping contests are notoriously run by grumpy people tired of kids who "subvert spirit of the rules" which is incredibly stupid if you just use the project as a grading exercise. It then becomes "how well did you follow the rules?" not "how creative are you?"
A parachute is highly practical, while this design is not at all practical for actually drinking coffee. Then again, I have no idea if any of the other submissions were practical either. And the blurb you pulled from the article, that could just be some throwaway line the reporter slapped down. We have no real idea what other designs there were and if there were any other type of creative designs that were just as wacky and impractical.
In other words, I'm now confident you are just bitter
Not true, in a sense.
First of all, no firm date has been set ever, it's primarily been estimated dates but they did once say they planned on releasing it for Christmas. That was their first intended date, because it would be in time for the last game rush before the Revolution came out. The second estimate was spring, now it's fall. The articles all imply that these are promises, but really they are only estimates, there are no promises. However, if you let things slide too long and you let the estimates slide too long, estimates to rabid hungry gamers are as good as promises.
Now the revolution is planned for spring, and this is planned to be a Gamecube release. I'll still buy it and enjoy it, but now I'm worried if they let it slip this far that maybe they will decide to make it a revolution title. Gamecube owners in the US aren't as upgrade happy as PS and Xbox fans, but we've seen people promise titles for one platform and then change their minds because the change made more sense later than it does now.
You have to read all the articles, not just the attached one, but the three articles at the beginning of the referenced one. This wasn't just bundling, this was bait and switch.
Here's an example snippet from one of those articles:
TMCnet news reports similar events in Spokane, WA. Best Buy's Sunday ad offered the Xbox 360 for $299 dollars, but a sign was posted at the store on Tuesday as a "correction notice" to inform customers that they could only buy package deals starting at $569.93.
If best buy advertises something for $299, and doesn't actually have that item but has a similar one that's more expensive, that's bait and switch, and it's illegal in the United States. You cannot advertise one price for one model or package then sell another model/package that has more features but at a higher price simply because you never had that model. The ad said they were selling it so they better sell it. In fact, the law states that those people had the right to demand the higher bundle for the lower price, but I infer from the article that Best Buy obfuscated this enough so that few to none of the people scammed were able to catch that when they first went in.
And to top it all off, companies should and do go out of their way to avoid these mistakes, because the law also says that if a company does make this mistake, customers have every right to take advantage of it. This is to make sure companies don't up and use the "oops, That's a mistake in the ad we don't stock that. Gee, that's 4 mistakes in just one month, sorry, but I do have the higher end model for you if you like."
If it were a simple stock out that's one thing but some stores never even stocked one of the nonbundled console.
This smacks of a small time conspiracy but it's most definitely illegal. Best Buy is cleaning house to make it look like they care and showing good will so as to deflect any consumer lawsuits.
All three are to blame, but to different degrees.
The students should be taken out and beaten. Anyone with any level of computer knowledge these days should know such activities are both highly immoral and illegal. This isn't stealing MP3s. And to attack a hospital? How thoughtless can you get? However, it's easy to be tempted by this type of thing, while these students got caught, many more got away with it at some point.
The Hospital should be scolded, but it's hard to know just from the story to what degree. It could range from a slap on the wrist to a lawsuit. If they had good computer security, then the students were just good at getting through. If it was bad computer security, then they need to step up and admit it. In any case, they are a hospital that appears to be running Windows to control their sensitive security systems. Bad choice, and that alone warrants one finger pointed at the hospital, if it's true. However, many hospitals are notoriously underfunded. In any case, I hope the IT staff of the hospital reviews this situation and revamps their software to minimize this risk in the future.
The adware makes should all be taken out and shot. They are the immoral facilitators and the ones who should take the most blame. They are the modern day equivalent of drug dealers. They didn't kill the person taking their drugs, but they knew it eventually would come to that, and they never stopped selling. They put all the risk for the crime on the students, knowing full well they could get caught, and that someone elses computer system would be seriously damaged. Something very gruesome and painful should befall them, before execution.
In terms of business, Google so far is a great business that tries to do no evil and approaches a lot of problems from an academic standpoint. It makes them money and it makes people's jobs easier. Good for them and good for us.
But $160 million in stock options? $1.68 billion in 2 years? Damn! Do you know how much rice and grain you could buy for starving people? How many middle class and working class people you could employ with that? The 8th highest paid executive in the world is the CEO of ExxonMobil and he made $88 million this year.
It's good that these stock options are tied to performance, because if Google tanked, they'd get nothing. But let's put the amount of money into perspective. Can we tone down on corporate greed? Did these guys really need that much in stock options?
I'm just saying...
For those who don't get it, the point of the hub is to provide a place where you can plug in your scanner, printer, and other external peripherals, providing them all with wireless functionality, without the scanner and printer actually having the wireless capability built in. Makes sense for those of us with lots of USB peripherals who also have a wireless laptop.
What's a little odd is that they aren't using bluetooth, but the article claims its 100x faster than bluetooth. Perhaps this opens up the idea of plugging in hard drives into a USB hub like this, either for backup, for extra workspace, or just a great way to store your extensive mp3/movie/pr0n collection.
It's easy to blame the education system, and then forget all the other factors. It's also easy to blame this on laziness. However, you equate the inability comprehend the statement to laziness and that's the classic correlation-causation cop out. Stupidity is not lazinessand vice versa.
I think the biggest factor, I think, are the corporations, who are always going to be smarter than the common man, because they can pay a few lawyers to make up language that the common man and woman cannot speak in the hopes that they do exactly what they expect, be lazy. When someone has a real problem, the bank points to the agreement and they're screwed.
The education system can't keep up with a multi-national bank churning out legalise like cheap pasta. I don't think the common person is so lazy that they cannot read their statements. I think they have better things to do. Credit cards are given to millions of americans, and are easy to use. The terms of service should be relatively easy as well. What we need is a legal system which uses simple language that not everyone needs a lawyer for just to understand. After all, government is supposed to be by the people.
I recall a company in the past that wouldn't sell you their software unless you purchased their hardrware. They were taken to court and forced to unbundle the OS from the Hardware since the OS was capable for running on other hardware. I can't recall the company name off hand but I feel someone will to do the same to Apple.
People who don't understand monopoly law should have their fingers hacked off so they don't post such stupid comments.
Look, I know some people like to bash Apple because they tie the OS to the hardware. Bash away on that argument I don't care, on several levels you are right. But your not so subtle implication is that somehow Apple's situation is the same as Microsoft's is a fundamental lack of brain matter for anyone who's posted on slashdot.
Apple is NOT a monopoly, Microsoft IS a monopoly. The first step to understanding monopolies is quite simply that the rules change once you are a monopoly. Monopolies wield incredible power and pervert the forces of a free market into something that is definitely not a free market. Everyone argument ever made that is anti-Microsoft is based on this premise. Bassed on that, Microsoft's actions are typically illegal, while Apple's actions at worst are quite simply immoral. It doesn't make them any less annoying, but under law they aren't illegal, because market forces have the opportunity to break that bundling package if someone with a better business model (that's not illegal) comes along.
Go back to the shallow end of the gene pool where you belong. John Dvorak has a seat next to him waiting for you.
As if a million Google supporters cried out at once, and then were silent.
It's Friday the 13th, I think good has taken it's first serious step towards the dark side.
Will your notebook or desktop PC someday sport quantum innards? It's unlikely, at least in the immediate future. Researchers believe quantum systems will be much more efficient at rock-solid cryptography and mass database searches than running the latest version of Doom.
NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'm crushed!
The complaint is that they are approving too many frivolous patents not that they can't approve good patents fast enough. Giving someone better equipment means they can approve patents faster. The problem is not the equipment, it's the process.
How many times have we seen a frivolous lawsuit post on slashdot, and how many people within 15 minutes of it's posting came up with links to prior art? Give a person a faster computer can help if they are experiencing slowed down processes. If I can find prior art with a $300 PC, what good is a major software/hardware upgrade if people in the patent office aren't finding this prior art to begin with?
This is PR spin. I'm not discounting the need for the right technology to make the process more efficient, and faster equipment will help speed the process once the right process is in place. I want to know more about the changes in the process they are making. This article makes the change in technology a much larger part of the patent reform process than it really is.
Although a stable of Sci-Fi space travel
Staple!!!!! A STAPLE of sci-fi! Sheesh!
Obviously I'm missing something, and so is the article.
$10 x 280,000,000 11,200,000,00
Where did the other factor of ~3 go? Maybe that's the judge was convinced that, like any IT project, you should just automatically multiply the requirements by 3.
The author should know someone's going to ask questions about that because because we want to know where the money is coming from and where it's going. Not clarifying that makes the article just regurgitation and makes it look like somethings being hidden.
Not that I'm upset with the verdict, in any case.
IF MS takes out IBM
This is an interesting statement. Not only is it absurd to think that anyone will "take out" IBM any time soon (IBM has weathered lots of storms, and has adapted to every one of them) this mentality is very common when talking about Microsoft.
Balmer wants to kill Google. darkonc talkes about taking out IBM. This is legal business, not the mafia. Microsoft is out to go after competition and kill it in order to win all the chips. Others might think about wanting to kill their competition, but no where is this sentiment more discussed when talking about Microsoft.
Killing competition! You know... what monopolies do??
And no one currently in the justice department wants to get the giant sized clue that is constantly being handed to them.