Suffers the same problem that all collaborative media suffers. If anyone can edit it, anyone can also vandalize it or add false information. A few people will do it just to troll, but I'm willing to bet that if IP logs were checked, there would be a lot of edits coming from the police station. Eventually the map becomes so unreliable that it's not even worthwhile to use.
It's a play on a meme concerning Glenn Beck. Here is some back story to it if you're really interested. The most recent episode of South Park (Which you can legally stream online here if you're interested.) does a spoof of is as well.
If you look at it from the network's perspective those actors are quite talented. Their talent is getting a few million people to park their butts in front of 15 minutes of commercials while entertaining them with 45 minutes of content. The ad revenues are quite good, so why shouldn't the actors get a decent cut? If your TV show draws 15 million viewers each week, I'd be asking for a decent cut as the network wants to keep that show running for as long as it can do so.
To reply to the original poster, why shouldn't they monetize everything? They're in it to make money, not art. If you want creative television, go ahead and make your own. Don't complain when almost no one watches it either as the general public doesn't share your tastes. The criminal part is fear on the part of the cartel, and it's actually quite rational. They probably don't realize it yet, but they're going to be replaced by a new cartel soon. Once YouTube (Google), Apple, Boxee, or any other company trying to change the game actually succeeds, it's more likely that we'll see a sitcoms produced by these companies rather then CBS, NBC, or other current networks. Do you expect the current cartel to willingly give up their position?
They've already played their hand wrong up to this point in time and it seems as though they're grasping at whatever solution they think might save them from extinction. Profits were probably going to go down for them no matter what path they decided to take, but it's probably better than going bankrupt. I give the current media cartels of the world 30 years at most before they're replaced. The death throws will be ugly, but they're going to die.
Unfortunately the new straw boss isn't likely to be much better than the old one. You'll still treated like a criminal, just someone else will be doing it.
Here's the link to the website where I found the measurements. I haven't found any other sites to back that data up, so it's possible that the listed values are incorrect.
After doing some more searching, another site gives these values: "114x51x20.4 mm" it would appear that the first site goofed up when converting between cm and mm. If this site is correct, the phone is still pretty fat (in my opinion), just not nearly quite so much.
Based on the numbers from the first site, the phone would actually be as wide as an iPhone/Droid is tall and almost twice as tall. At that size a 5 cm depth wouldn't be terribly bad, but it would be a comically large phone in general. At that size it would be more like a small tablet device.
I'm American so I don't really think in metric. Thanks for catching the slip-up.
I thought that this would be really cool until I saw a video of it. That phone is quite thick.
I found a website that lists the dimensions as: "11.4 x 5.1 x 20.4 cm and weight is about 173g."
For reference, an iPhone is 11.6 x 1.2 x 6.2 cm and weighs 135g. The Droid is 11.6 x 1.4 x 6.0 cm and weighs 169g.
I can't think of anyone who will want to carry something that thick around in their pocket. Even if you split it in half, both halves are still going to be thicker than either the iPhone or the Droid. I suppose it could help you pick up women in a bar though.
I suppose that the Palm Pre and existing Android phones don't count?
I don't own either, but I'd bet money that both have games developed and published by part-time developers. I don't have sales figures for these devices, but I suspect that Apple is leading by a wide margin among the three devices. The market is fairly new if you just include those three phone operating systems. I'm fairly certain you could develop and publish for Windows Mobile as well if you really wanted to do so. Of course including them means that Apple probably doesn't have more than 50% of the market given the large number of current generation Windows mobile phones out there.
I think you're starting at a conclusion and then building evidence for it rather than looking at the evidence and forming a conclusion. The market you've created is so narrowly defined it's almost laughable. Nintendo and Sony could easily allow part-time developers to publish for their machines, but they don't want to do so. Should we charge Asus with having a monopoly on netbooks if every other manufacturer suddenly decided to stop making them because it wasn't worth the money?
#1 Be a general POS compared to most Apple hardware and tarnish their brand.
#2 Canabalize the sales of their more expensive (and higher margin) laptops.
For that matter, I can't say I agree with your points:
#1 How many of those sales will come at the price of a $300 profit laptop or tablet? If they lose 1 high profit sale for every 5 low profit sales they gain, it's a losing strategy.
#2 If they honestly cared about market share over all else they would have taken this approach a long time ago. Considering the amount of money they make I don't think they give two shits about market share in the computer space as long as sales grow by some small amount.
#3 The Hackintosh market is so small that they likely don't care about it. It wouldn't be a bump on their already small sales numbers.
#4 You assume Apple wants to compete in the race to the bottom netbook segment of the market that will likely cannibalize their macbook sales.
#5 I don't have figures, but given that iTunes is something like 75% of online music sales it's pretty obvious that more than Mac users are downloading music with it. It works on Windows as well so they don't need to move more hardware to increase music sales. The same applies to iPods. They really can't grow that market much more than they already have.
Considering that their stock is worth something like ten times what it was since Jobs came back to the company, I think he has a pretty good idea of how things should be run. If Apple manages to catch the next big wave in the tech industry and release a product that's even half as dominating as the iPod, they'll easily surpass Microsoft at the height of its power. Sure their business strategy means you won't get a cheap crappy computer running OS X, but considering you can already make your own, why do you need Apple to release one?
I think the media companies thought that when they brought the Pirate Bay to trial and won a conviction that it would scare everyone away from file sharing (legal or otherwise) and that people would go back to buying DVDs, etc. What really happened is that they generated a lot of news which basically informed countless masses unaware that torrent was even a word that they could use these things to get free movies, music, etc. off of the internet.
It's almost a little bit like the Streisand Effect in that they're really only making the problem worse. If they really wanted to do something about piracy, stop talking about P2P and go after the people who are burning physical copies that they're selling. These people are actually distributing thousands of full copies of product for which they have no license to reproduce. That's a battle that the record companies, movie studios, et al. might actually be able to win.
While a bit of an issue with older games, it's not really all that much of a problem when purchasing a new game. Often times the service will allow you to download a large portion of the game before that actual release date and then it will activate the game on the day of the release and allow you to play. A company could take preorders and start pushing out a decent portion of the game (i.e. the art assets or audio files.) that is stable in advance of the rest of the game. Of course today that's not a problem as there's usually a several week period between the game going gold and enough copies being pressed to disc for retailers to sell at brick and mortar stores.
When I used to play World of Warcraft Blizzard would allow users to begin downloading parts of an upcoming patch a week or so before the actual release. Usually 90% or more of the file could be downloaded in advance as it contained textures or other information that was unlikely to change. The last 10% was probably unfinished assets or code that was still being worked on to iron out all of the bugs. On the actual patch day anyone who had been downloading the patch in advance only needed to get a few additional MB of data which wouldn't take long instead of a large 200 MB (Some of the content patches were quite large.) file that might take hours, especially if everyone were trying to download it at the same time.
If you have slower internet, just start the download before going to work or going to bed at night.
I'd certainly be fine with allowing you to offer that service, but you'd be hard-pressed to find many customers if you didn't have any training or experience. If you were to misrepresent your medical training or experience, that would fall under existing fraud laws. Even if you were certified by some government body, does that necessarily ensure that you won't screw up? If it did there wouldn't be any need for malpractice insurance or lawsuits.
If you feel it is important for the Federal government to certify doctors (or other professions) I suggest amending the Constitution to afford it that power. Otherwise leave it to the state governments or the people. It's very likely that doing so would result in a similar outcome in terms of doctor certification by a state body or an independent organization that exists to perform this function. It's also likely that such an system would not result in any organization that is better or worse that the current system.
Rights, inalienable or otherwise, really don't mean a lot to the person holding all of the guns. At a certain point you're only as entitled to your rights as the people who hold the power think you ought to be and your own willingness to fight them to the death for those rights. You can parrot on about your rights as much as you want, but they'll just shoot you in the head.
No, fuck this test if the results are not statistically significant.
The testing methods aren't well explained either and the method used could bias the results. If the same laptop is used for every browser test, the browsers which are tested last will be at a disadvantage due to battery usage. Probably minor, but something that must be accounted for. Their method of simply reloading three tabs doesn't necessarily test normal internet usage either. It just indicates which browser eats the least amount of energy when it refreshes the same three tabs over and over. They only take one sample for each browser for each test machine. If they were to do multiple tests for each browser, and it turns out that the results varied by several minutes, this could completely change the outcome.
But it also allows you to identify those 'dumb' people so much more easily. Why complain about such things when it makes it so much easier for the idiots you decry to make themselves known to you. Then you can have as little to do with them as possible. Why not rejoice in the fact that you'll always have someone to ask you if you'd like fries with your meal.
I don't necessarily see all of the mangled text as stupidity as much as I view it as laziness among other things. Most of the manglers can't be assed to add that extra 'o' as it's too much extra work. Some just end up typing the number as it's phonetically equivalent. Once I was in the company of a friend who was sending a text message. When I pointed out that he had misspelled 'too' he mentioned that he had done it intentionally in an effort to appear less intellectual to the woman he was texting.
If my friend gets laid for butchering the English language, can it really be said that he's all that dumb? It's sad, if nothing else, but it's certainly not dumb.
While we're busy treating anecdotes as scientific fact I'd just like to throw my two cents out there.
When I was younger and discovered video games I noticed that I became less aggressive, despite playing 'violent' games such as Doom. I found that these games and the ability to take out destructive frustrations from other areas in my life actually made me more mellow. I wasn't terribly aggressive or violent to begin with which may have had some influence on my behavior. Even today if I'm feeling stressed and angry, I've found the video games can help me to release some of that frustration.
If you're kid can't play violent video games without taking on some of their violent tendencies, it's probably best that he doesn't play them. It's probably best that you did the responsible thing as a parent to take them away, regardless of his protests. Of course, that doesn't mean that every child is the same or that because some people are unable to handle the content that it should be taken away from everyone. A few religious fanatics have blown up buildings but we don't see any politicians suggesting that we ban the Bible or Quran.
Maybe he just needs to mature a little bit more before he's ready to handle games with violent themes. It's probably important that he learn to be able to consume content containing violence without becoming more violent himself as there's a lot of it out in the world and he'll have to learn to deal with it some day.
I think that they're going to stick with the Xbox 360 for a while longer.
First of all, they have previously stated that they wanted to be profitable this go around. Even though Windows and Word are still a large cash cow for Microsoft, they can't afford to continue to bleed money in other divisions. They probably would reach profitability on this current generation and have started making up for the losses of the original Xbox if they hadn't run into the red ring problems. That probably set them back a year or so at least.
They're also in no real danger of being one-upped by Sony either. The PS3 may have technical superiority, but it's not by a large enough margin to cause people to move away from the Xbox 360. Sony also has a lot of costs to recoup as well and it doesn't appear as though they're in a hurry to release a new console any time soon.
It also seems as though Nintendo has begun to hit market saturation with the Wii at its current price. The sales have been down over the last few months and there's still no word of a price cut. I'm expecting one around Christmas, but they may be running out of steam. If anyone needs to come out with a new piece of hardware it's Nintendo.
If they announce a new system in the near future, sales of their current generation will probably tank. At that point Sony will be able to catch them in sales and they'll end up as the also ran of the current generation. It's likely that they're discussing hardware options for a future console at this point and possibly sharing some of that information with third parties that they'd like to keep close. It's also unlikely that they'll rush in attempt to be the first out of the door as it cost them a lot this time around.
They're also between a rock and a hard place in terms of making a decision of whether they'll move heavily towards digital distribution. They probably don't want to put a Blu-ray drive in their next machine as it increases the cost and justifies Sony's position. A DVD drive likely won't cut it for the next generation of games and the hard drives being included in consoles aren't there in terms of size yet. They'll need at least 500 GB drives if they want to move towards digital distribution and given the drives consoles are currently shipping with it will probably be another 2 years before 500 GB drives come standard. I don't foresee Microsoft using a PPC chip in their next console either which will probably kill backwards compatibility or add to the cost of the machine if they decide to support it.
They likely have plans, but I don't expect them to make any moves until either Sony or Nintendo does something first. My bet is on Nintendo just because they're flush with cash and really lagging behind in terms of hardware, especially with both Sony and Microsoft releasing motion control features in the near future.
I'm not just talking about hardware companies, but also software companies. I suppose my comment sounds like the regular anti-microsoft bile that passes for a quick up-mod on Slashdot and on a second read it does come off a bit harsh. I use Microsoft products on a daily basis and a lot of them are quite decent, but if I were in business there's no way I'd make a deal with that company. Hell sometimes you don't even need to make a deal with them, they'll just throw their weight around to crush you.
Just because I think they tend towards the evil side of the spectrum doesn't mean I think that all of their products are somehow inferior or a complete waste. I just think it's sound business advice to stay the hell away from them as best as possible.
If ARM netbooks start becoming the next big thing, eventually Microsoft will want to be in on it but no one will owe them any favors. If you try to make some deal with Microsoft, who knows what kind of terms or conditions they'll want which probably serve their own interests far more than anyone else's. I'm just stating that any company should be wary of Microsoft.
Don't even bother trying to make a deal with the devil. The rotting corpses of the scores of companies screwed over through their dealings with Microsoft line the landscape of the past decades tech industry. Instead, make them come to you and don't make any deals with them either. If ARM based netbooks start becoming a huge commodity, Microsoft is going to have to port a version of Windows to run on ARM processors or they'll end up missing out on sales.
It would probably make a great deal of sense for Microsoft to work on this as well as it would most certainly help out their ailing phone technologies as well. They'd probably rather that ARM-based netbooks not take off in the market, but if they were to do so, Microsoft wouldn't be able to ignore them. I wouldn't bother making any plans with them at this point; they'd only find some way to fuck you over.
If that's all it takes, they could easily include a legacy version of IE 6 with Windows for business customers that lives in a sandbox so that it doesn't crap all over everything else.
Now that IE 8 is actually more standards-compliant, that ship has sailed. If someone is having new intranet applications developed that will only work in IE 6, I'll politely inform them that they're an idiot for you. New development is going to aim for browser independence at least to the extent that it can conform to the standards that are widely supported. As long as the only place to get legacy support is on Windows through a bundled IE 6 browser, the businesses will tend to stick with it.
Microsoft could probably do more than just PR work if the company had a more clear plan for the future. Right now they seem to be throwing as many things against the wall as possible to see what will stick. I think they realize that at some point in the future, their core businesses are going to be irrelevant and that they need to find the next frontier. The internet browser is now largely irrelevant to the company and they can't use it to forward their other products as they had hoped to do once upon a time. It's time that they stop worrying about it and focus their efforts on something that will be important to the company several years from now. The Xbox might be one of those things; so might the touch screen table device that they've been working on for a while now. Whatever is their next big thing, IE isn't.
Forget individual standards and other pointlessness, Microsoft should just give up on the browser wars and fork Firefox. They get a browser (largely for free) that's arguably better than there own efforts, even though they've been trying to do better. This nets them numerous benefits:
1) They can spend a lot less money developing their own competing product that's slowly hemorrhaging market-share regardless of what they do. There's not much money in the browser market anyway and they can make a few modifications to point the default search at Bing instead of Google.
2) They get all of the wonderful extensions that Firefox already has. In fact, they could have a few of the really nice ones enabled by default and claim that their browser offers more protection out of the box.
3) They can use it as an excuse to get the EU off of their back. It's not longer so much their browser as it is a rebranding of some other popular browser. Hell they could even include a version of Opera that defaults its searches to Bing.
4) If there's some horrible exploit released it will hit both Firefox and IE users so it can't be said that one is more secure than the other. This even gives Microsoft the added benefit of railing against the problems of Open Source software and claiming that their own closed source solution would be better, even though that's probably not true.
5) They can stop worrying about the browser market and actually focus on something that actually matters. If all browsers are standards compliant and have similar performance, does it really matter which browser a person actually uses? Microsoft hasn't been able to leverage any of its encoding formats through their browser. MP3 and AAC have completely outstripped WMA and I'm not aware of any major player utilizing WMV on the video side. That battle has been lost for Microsoft and to carry it on any further is futile and counter-productive.
6) They get to talk about how they're embracing open standards and open source so that they can appear like good guys when in reality the move would give them plenty of angles to play in the future and several ways to deride open source software.
Maybe it's just me, but I can't see a reason for Microsoft not to make this transition. Formats are going to slowly slip through their fingers and they'll only end up loosing market share to superior browsers. If they would fork Firefox and toss their own interface on it so that it looks more like IE, then there's no real reason to use Firefox instead of IE. Neither is more or less secure and both would offer the exact same opportunities for customization and extension. Hell, a move like this could really hurt Mozilla which makes most of its money through their partnership with Google. Any exploits would also affect Firefox and someone is likely to have a decent patch available long before Microsoft would generally make one available. They would have to do a minimal amount of work and stay completely caught up with the Joneses.
Perhaps it's nothing more than coincidence, but my hand-writing bears a very close resemblance to that of my mother's, and of my parents, I would say I take after her more than I do my father. It strikes me as a little odd that a person has a writing style similar to one of their parent's styles with little influence from the parent.
I want to dismiss the notion as coincidence and feel as though I may be reading into it too much, but then again I've never asked anyone else if their handwriting is similar to either of their parents. Some very quick google searching doesn't seem to turn up any studies or insight on the matter, but it does interest me nonetheless.
Does anyone know of any studies related to this or at least have some anecdotal data that contradicts my line of reasoning? For all I know it could be completely random or only present in a small minority of the population or some subset of people with other similar traits.
Because Microsoft probably has close to 90% of the consumer PC market whereas Apple and various Linux distributions account for the remaining 10%. Hell, 10% may be overly generous. The only way you could even come close to claiming that Apple is a monopoly is by suggesting that they have a monopoly on Macintosh hardware. Most people (Myself included.) tend to think that is an incredibly stupid argument. You might also say that they come damned close to having a monopoly in certain markets such as portable music players and I'd agree that if they had another 10% market-share and fewer competitors then you'd probably be right, but the portable music player market is a hell of a lot more healthy than the PC market.
Here's the reason that no one else sees it your way. Your definition of monopoly isn't the same definition that the rest of the world is using. Apple has pulled plenty of dick moves over the years so I can see where you're coming from, but they don't even come close to the damage done by Microsoft. Microsoft used their monopoly to completely make a mess of web standards to the extent that for a long while they were standards in name only. They stifled innovation by announcing vaporware to drive sales away from existing competition even when they had no real intention of delivering a product. They've also outright stolen code from other companies to use in their own products which they've attempted to leverage through Windows to make them market standards.
Personally I don't care if they bundle Explorer with their Operating System, but I do believe that the hardware manufacturers should have the opportunity to install additional browsers alongside or instead of Explorer. Since Bing seems to have the makings of a decent search engine they could probably just cut Opera the same deal that Google does and offer to install Opera as a default Browser if the default search is set to use Bing. There were definitely many better solutions to the outcome that was chosen, but it doesn't change that Microsoft is a monopoly.
I've seen the video, and while there's the possibility that he could have been looking at something else, why should he? Seriously, any sane man would definitely be checking that out. I don't care if I were the king of the universe, I would still be giving that at least a twice over. I don't care if you think it's immoral, inappropriate, or just plain wrong, it's normal male behavior. I don't care if that makes us pigs or not, the only way you couldn't at least toss a casual glance at that either means you're inhuman or not interested.
If you watch the video you can tell that Sarkozy is definitely checking that out and for the most part his country could probably give two shits less. If nothing else, that picture tells me that Obama is an average Joe, at least on some level. He may not by the president people want to have a beer with, but I'd stare at some hot ass with him.
If anyone thinks this is immoral or inappropriate, go fuck yourself. Seriously, go fuck yourself. You're the same dipshit who wasted time debating whether or not Clinton was getting some side action. You're worrying about the wrong things.
Assuming you're not already compressing your data, this would be a good method to make it "lighter." A quick Google search has a test which shows gzip compressing things down to between 25% to 40% of their original size. This pretty much makes the data useless for mining or quick lookups, but it would drop the weight of storage media required, regardless of what you're using to store it. If it's just data that needs to be stored as a backup then it shouldn't be too much of a problem.
Some other poster did it in 20Kg using MicroSD cards. Use the cards and compression and you've maybe dropped it down to 5Kg with an excellent compression ratio.
Slashdot Mirror
Suffers the same problem that all collaborative media suffers. If anyone can edit it, anyone can also vandalize it or add false information. A few people will do it just to troll, but I'm willing to bet that if IP logs were checked, there would be a lot of edits coming from the police station. Eventually the map becomes so unreliable that it's not even worthwhile to use.
No, it uses an ARM Cortex A8 according to Wikipedia. As another poster has pointed out, this probably is due to a software bug.
It's a play on a meme concerning Glenn Beck. Here is some back story to it if you're really interested. The most recent episode of South Park (Which you can legally stream online here if you're interested.) does a spoof of is as well.
If you look at it from the network's perspective those actors are quite talented. Their talent is getting a few million people to park their butts in front of 15 minutes of commercials while entertaining them with 45 minutes of content. The ad revenues are quite good, so why shouldn't the actors get a decent cut? If your TV show draws 15 million viewers each week, I'd be asking for a decent cut as the network wants to keep that show running for as long as it can do so.
To reply to the original poster, why shouldn't they monetize everything? They're in it to make money, not art. If you want creative television, go ahead and make your own. Don't complain when almost no one watches it either as the general public doesn't share your tastes. The criminal part is fear on the part of the cartel, and it's actually quite rational. They probably don't realize it yet, but they're going to be replaced by a new cartel soon. Once YouTube (Google), Apple, Boxee, or any other company trying to change the game actually succeeds, it's more likely that we'll see a sitcoms produced by these companies rather then CBS, NBC, or other current networks. Do you expect the current cartel to willingly give up their position?
They've already played their hand wrong up to this point in time and it seems as though they're grasping at whatever solution they think might save them from extinction. Profits were probably going to go down for them no matter what path they decided to take, but it's probably better than going bankrupt. I give the current media cartels of the world 30 years at most before they're replaced. The death throws will be ugly, but they're going to die.
Unfortunately the new straw boss isn't likely to be much better than the old one. You'll still treated like a criminal, just someone else will be doing it.
Here's the link to the website where I found the measurements. I haven't found any other sites to back that data up, so it's possible that the listed values are incorrect.
After doing some more searching, another site gives these values: "114x51x20.4 mm" it would appear that the first site goofed up when converting between cm and mm. If this site is correct, the phone is still pretty fat (in my opinion), just not nearly quite so much.
Based on the numbers from the first site, the phone would actually be as wide as an iPhone/Droid is tall and almost twice as tall. At that size a 5 cm depth wouldn't be terribly bad, but it would be a comically large phone in general. At that size it would be more like a small tablet device.
I'm American so I don't really think in metric. Thanks for catching the slip-up.
I thought that this would be really cool until I saw a video of it. That phone is quite thick.
I found a website that lists the dimensions as: "11.4 x 5.1 x 20.4 cm and weight is about 173g."
For reference, an iPhone is 11.6 x 1.2 x 6.2 cm and weighs 135g. The Droid is 11.6 x 1.4 x 6.0 cm and weighs 169g.
I can't think of anyone who will want to carry something that thick around in their pocket. Even if you split it in half, both halves are still going to be thicker than either the iPhone or the Droid. I suppose it could help you pick up women in a bar though.
I suppose that the Palm Pre and existing Android phones don't count?
I don't own either, but I'd bet money that both have games developed and published by part-time developers. I don't have sales figures for these devices, but I suspect that Apple is leading by a wide margin among the three devices. The market is fairly new if you just include those three phone operating systems. I'm fairly certain you could develop and publish for Windows Mobile as well if you really wanted to do so. Of course including them means that Apple probably doesn't have more than 50% of the market given the large number of current generation Windows mobile phones out there.
I think you're starting at a conclusion and then building evidence for it rather than looking at the evidence and forming a conclusion. The market you've created is so narrowly defined it's almost laughable. Nintendo and Sony could easily allow part-time developers to publish for their machines, but they don't want to do so. Should we charge Asus with having a monopoly on netbooks if every other manufacturer suddenly decided to stop making them because it wasn't worth the money?
But a $300 netbook will also:
#1 Be a general POS compared to most Apple hardware and tarnish their brand.
#2 Canabalize the sales of their more expensive (and higher margin) laptops.
For that matter, I can't say I agree with your points:
#1 How many of those sales will come at the price of a $300 profit laptop or tablet? If they lose 1 high profit sale for every 5 low profit sales they gain, it's a losing strategy.
#2 If they honestly cared about market share over all else they would have taken this approach a long time ago. Considering the amount of money they make I don't think they give two shits about market share in the computer space as long as sales grow by some small amount.
#3 The Hackintosh market is so small that they likely don't care about it. It wouldn't be a bump on their already small sales numbers.
#4 You assume Apple wants to compete in the race to the bottom netbook segment of the market that will likely cannibalize their macbook sales.
#5 I don't have figures, but given that iTunes is something like 75% of online music sales it's pretty obvious that more than Mac users are downloading music with it. It works on Windows as well so they don't need to move more hardware to increase music sales. The same applies to iPods. They really can't grow that market much more than they already have.
Considering that their stock is worth something like ten times what it was since Jobs came back to the company, I think he has a pretty good idea of how things should be run. If Apple manages to catch the next big wave in the tech industry and release a product that's even half as dominating as the iPod, they'll easily surpass Microsoft at the height of its power. Sure their business strategy means you won't get a cheap crappy computer running OS X, but considering you can already make your own, why do you need Apple to release one?
Simply beautiful.
I think the media companies thought that when they brought the Pirate Bay to trial and won a conviction that it would scare everyone away from file sharing (legal or otherwise) and that people would go back to buying DVDs, etc. What really happened is that they generated a lot of news which basically informed countless masses unaware that torrent was even a word that they could use these things to get free movies, music, etc. off of the internet.
It's almost a little bit like the Streisand Effect in that they're really only making the problem worse. If they really wanted to do something about piracy, stop talking about P2P and go after the people who are burning physical copies that they're selling. These people are actually distributing thousands of full copies of product for which they have no license to reproduce. That's a battle that the record companies, movie studios, et al. might actually be able to win.
While a bit of an issue with older games, it's not really all that much of a problem when purchasing a new game. Often times the service will allow you to download a large portion of the game before that actual release date and then it will activate the game on the day of the release and allow you to play. A company could take preorders and start pushing out a decent portion of the game (i.e. the art assets or audio files.) that is stable in advance of the rest of the game. Of course today that's not a problem as there's usually a several week period between the game going gold and enough copies being pressed to disc for retailers to sell at brick and mortar stores.
When I used to play World of Warcraft Blizzard would allow users to begin downloading parts of an upcoming patch a week or so before the actual release. Usually 90% or more of the file could be downloaded in advance as it contained textures or other information that was unlikely to change. The last 10% was probably unfinished assets or code that was still being worked on to iron out all of the bugs. On the actual patch day anyone who had been downloading the patch in advance only needed to get a few additional MB of data which wouldn't take long instead of a large 200 MB (Some of the content patches were quite large.) file that might take hours, especially if everyone were trying to download it at the same time.
If you have slower internet, just start the download before going to work or going to bed at night.
I'd certainly be fine with allowing you to offer that service, but you'd be hard-pressed to find many customers if you didn't have any training or experience. If you were to misrepresent your medical training or experience, that would fall under existing fraud laws. Even if you were certified by some government body, does that necessarily ensure that you won't screw up? If it did there wouldn't be any need for malpractice insurance or lawsuits.
If you feel it is important for the Federal government to certify doctors (or other professions) I suggest amending the Constitution to afford it that power. Otherwise leave it to the state governments or the people. It's very likely that doing so would result in a similar outcome in terms of doctor certification by a state body or an independent organization that exists to perform this function. It's also likely that such an system would not result in any organization that is better or worse that the current system.
Rights, inalienable or otherwise, really don't mean a lot to the person holding all of the guns. At a certain point you're only as entitled to your rights as the people who hold the power think you ought to be and your own willingness to fight them to the death for those rights. You can parrot on about your rights as much as you want, but they'll just shoot you in the head.
No, fuck this test if the results are not statistically significant.
The testing methods aren't well explained either and the method used could bias the results. If the same laptop is used for every browser test, the browsers which are tested last will be at a disadvantage due to battery usage. Probably minor, but something that must be accounted for. Their method of simply reloading three tabs doesn't necessarily test normal internet usage either. It just indicates which browser eats the least amount of energy when it refreshes the same three tabs over and over. They only take one sample for each browser for each test machine. If they were to do multiple tests for each browser, and it turns out that the results varied by several minutes, this could completely change the outcome.
The OP is right. This test is crap.
But it also allows you to identify those 'dumb' people so much more easily. Why complain about such things when it makes it so much easier for the idiots you decry to make themselves known to you. Then you can have as little to do with them as possible. Why not rejoice in the fact that you'll always have someone to ask you if you'd like fries with your meal.
I don't necessarily see all of the mangled text as stupidity as much as I view it as laziness among other things. Most of the manglers can't be assed to add that extra 'o' as it's too much extra work. Some just end up typing the number as it's phonetically equivalent. Once I was in the company of a friend who was sending a text message. When I pointed out that he had misspelled 'too' he mentioned that he had done it intentionally in an effort to appear less intellectual to the woman he was texting.
If my friend gets laid for butchering the English language, can it really be said that he's all that dumb? It's sad, if nothing else, but it's certainly not dumb.
While we're busy treating anecdotes as scientific fact I'd just like to throw my two cents out there.
When I was younger and discovered video games I noticed that I became less aggressive, despite playing 'violent' games such as Doom. I found that these games and the ability to take out destructive frustrations from other areas in my life actually made me more mellow. I wasn't terribly aggressive or violent to begin with which may have had some influence on my behavior. Even today if I'm feeling stressed and angry, I've found the video games can help me to release some of that frustration.
If you're kid can't play violent video games without taking on some of their violent tendencies, it's probably best that he doesn't play them. It's probably best that you did the responsible thing as a parent to take them away, regardless of his protests. Of course, that doesn't mean that every child is the same or that because some people are unable to handle the content that it should be taken away from everyone. A few religious fanatics have blown up buildings but we don't see any politicians suggesting that we ban the Bible or Quran.
Maybe he just needs to mature a little bit more before he's ready to handle games with violent themes. It's probably important that he learn to be able to consume content containing violence without becoming more violent himself as there's a lot of it out in the world and he'll have to learn to deal with it some day.
I think that they're going to stick with the Xbox 360 for a while longer.
First of all, they have previously stated that they wanted to be profitable this go around. Even though Windows and Word are still a large cash cow for Microsoft, they can't afford to continue to bleed money in other divisions. They probably would reach profitability on this current generation and have started making up for the losses of the original Xbox if they hadn't run into the red ring problems. That probably set them back a year or so at least.
They're also in no real danger of being one-upped by Sony either. The PS3 may have technical superiority, but it's not by a large enough margin to cause people to move away from the Xbox 360. Sony also has a lot of costs to recoup as well and it doesn't appear as though they're in a hurry to release a new console any time soon.
It also seems as though Nintendo has begun to hit market saturation with the Wii at its current price. The sales have been down over the last few months and there's still no word of a price cut. I'm expecting one around Christmas, but they may be running out of steam. If anyone needs to come out with a new piece of hardware it's Nintendo.
If they announce a new system in the near future, sales of their current generation will probably tank. At that point Sony will be able to catch them in sales and they'll end up as the also ran of the current generation. It's likely that they're discussing hardware options for a future console at this point and possibly sharing some of that information with third parties that they'd like to keep close. It's also unlikely that they'll rush in attempt to be the first out of the door as it cost them a lot this time around.
They're also between a rock and a hard place in terms of making a decision of whether they'll move heavily towards digital distribution. They probably don't want to put a Blu-ray drive in their next machine as it increases the cost and justifies Sony's position. A DVD drive likely won't cut it for the next generation of games and the hard drives being included in consoles aren't there in terms of size yet. They'll need at least 500 GB drives if they want to move towards digital distribution and given the drives consoles are currently shipping with it will probably be another 2 years before 500 GB drives come standard. I don't foresee Microsoft using a PPC chip in their next console either which will probably kill backwards compatibility or add to the cost of the machine if they decide to support it.
They likely have plans, but I don't expect them to make any moves until either Sony or Nintendo does something first. My bet is on Nintendo just because they're flush with cash and really lagging behind in terms of hardware, especially with both Sony and Microsoft releasing motion control features in the near future.
I'm not just talking about hardware companies, but also software companies. I suppose my comment sounds like the regular anti-microsoft bile that passes for a quick up-mod on Slashdot and on a second read it does come off a bit harsh. I use Microsoft products on a daily basis and a lot of them are quite decent, but if I were in business there's no way I'd make a deal with that company. Hell sometimes you don't even need to make a deal with them, they'll just throw their weight around to crush you.
Just because I think they tend towards the evil side of the spectrum doesn't mean I think that all of their products are somehow inferior or a complete waste. I just think it's sound business advice to stay the hell away from them as best as possible.
If ARM netbooks start becoming the next big thing, eventually Microsoft will want to be in on it but no one will owe them any favors. If you try to make some deal with Microsoft, who knows what kind of terms or conditions they'll want which probably serve their own interests far more than anyone else's. I'm just stating that any company should be wary of Microsoft.
Don't even bother trying to make a deal with the devil. The rotting corpses of the scores of companies screwed over through their dealings with Microsoft line the landscape of the past decades tech industry. Instead, make them come to you and don't make any deals with them either. If ARM based netbooks start becoming a huge commodity, Microsoft is going to have to port a version of Windows to run on ARM processors or they'll end up missing out on sales.
It would probably make a great deal of sense for Microsoft to work on this as well as it would most certainly help out their ailing phone technologies as well. They'd probably rather that ARM-based netbooks not take off in the market, but if they were to do so, Microsoft wouldn't be able to ignore them. I wouldn't bother making any plans with them at this point; they'd only find some way to fuck you over.
If that's all it takes, they could easily include a legacy version of IE 6 with Windows for business customers that lives in a sandbox so that it doesn't crap all over everything else.
Now that IE 8 is actually more standards-compliant, that ship has sailed. If someone is having new intranet applications developed that will only work in IE 6, I'll politely inform them that they're an idiot for you. New development is going to aim for browser independence at least to the extent that it can conform to the standards that are widely supported. As long as the only place to get legacy support is on Windows through a bundled IE 6 browser, the businesses will tend to stick with it.
Microsoft could probably do more than just PR work if the company had a more clear plan for the future. Right now they seem to be throwing as many things against the wall as possible to see what will stick. I think they realize that at some point in the future, their core businesses are going to be irrelevant and that they need to find the next frontier. The internet browser is now largely irrelevant to the company and they can't use it to forward their other products as they had hoped to do once upon a time. It's time that they stop worrying about it and focus their efforts on something that will be important to the company several years from now. The Xbox might be one of those things; so might the touch screen table device that they've been working on for a while now. Whatever is their next big thing, IE isn't.
Forget individual standards and other pointlessness, Microsoft should just give up on the browser wars and fork Firefox. They get a browser (largely for free) that's arguably better than there own efforts, even though they've been trying to do better. This nets them numerous benefits:
1) They can spend a lot less money developing their own competing product that's slowly hemorrhaging market-share regardless of what they do. There's not much money in the browser market anyway and they can make a few modifications to point the default search at Bing instead of Google.
2) They get all of the wonderful extensions that Firefox already has. In fact, they could have a few of the really nice ones enabled by default and claim that their browser offers more protection out of the box.
3) They can use it as an excuse to get the EU off of their back. It's not longer so much their browser as it is a rebranding of some other popular browser. Hell they could even include a version of Opera that defaults its searches to Bing.
4) If there's some horrible exploit released it will hit both Firefox and IE users so it can't be said that one is more secure than the other. This even gives Microsoft the added benefit of railing against the problems of Open Source software and claiming that their own closed source solution would be better, even though that's probably not true.
5) They can stop worrying about the browser market and actually focus on something that actually matters. If all browsers are standards compliant and have similar performance, does it really matter which browser a person actually uses? Microsoft hasn't been able to leverage any of its encoding formats through their browser. MP3 and AAC have completely outstripped WMA and I'm not aware of any major player utilizing WMV on the video side. That battle has been lost for Microsoft and to carry it on any further is futile and counter-productive.
6) They get to talk about how they're embracing open standards and open source so that they can appear like good guys when in reality the move would give them plenty of angles to play in the future and several ways to deride open source software.
Maybe it's just me, but I can't see a reason for Microsoft not to make this transition. Formats are going to slowly slip through their fingers and they'll only end up loosing market share to superior browsers. If they would fork Firefox and toss their own interface on it so that it looks more like IE, then there's no real reason to use Firefox instead of IE. Neither is more or less secure and both would offer the exact same opportunities for customization and extension. Hell, a move like this could really hurt Mozilla which makes most of its money through their partnership with Google. Any exploits would also affect Firefox and someone is likely to have a decent patch available long before Microsoft would generally make one available. They would have to do a minimal amount of work and stay completely caught up with the Joneses.
Perhaps it's nothing more than coincidence, but my hand-writing bears a very close resemblance to that of my mother's, and of my parents, I would say I take after her more than I do my father. It strikes me as a little odd that a person has a writing style similar to one of their parent's styles with little influence from the parent.
I want to dismiss the notion as coincidence and feel as though I may be reading into it too much, but then again I've never asked anyone else if their handwriting is similar to either of their parents. Some very quick google searching doesn't seem to turn up any studies or insight on the matter, but it does interest me nonetheless.
Does anyone know of any studies related to this or at least have some anecdotal data that contradicts my line of reasoning? For all I know it could be completely random or only present in a small minority of the population or some subset of people with other similar traits.
Because Microsoft probably has close to 90% of the consumer PC market whereas Apple and various Linux distributions account for the remaining 10%. Hell, 10% may be overly generous. The only way you could even come close to claiming that Apple is a monopoly is by suggesting that they have a monopoly on Macintosh hardware. Most people (Myself included.) tend to think that is an incredibly stupid argument. You might also say that they come damned close to having a monopoly in certain markets such as portable music players and I'd agree that if they had another 10% market-share and fewer competitors then you'd probably be right, but the portable music player market is a hell of a lot more healthy than the PC market.
Here's the reason that no one else sees it your way. Your definition of monopoly isn't the same definition that the rest of the world is using. Apple has pulled plenty of dick moves over the years so I can see where you're coming from, but they don't even come close to the damage done by Microsoft. Microsoft used their monopoly to completely make a mess of web standards to the extent that for a long while they were standards in name only. They stifled innovation by announcing vaporware to drive sales away from existing competition even when they had no real intention of delivering a product. They've also outright stolen code from other companies to use in their own products which they've attempted to leverage through Windows to make them market standards.
Personally I don't care if they bundle Explorer with their Operating System, but I do believe that the hardware manufacturers should have the opportunity to install additional browsers alongside or instead of Explorer. Since Bing seems to have the makings of a decent search engine they could probably just cut Opera the same deal that Google does and offer to install Opera as a default Browser if the default search is set to use Bing. There were definitely many better solutions to the outcome that was chosen, but it doesn't change that Microsoft is a monopoly.
I've seen the video, and while there's the possibility that he could have been looking at something else, why should he? Seriously, any sane man would definitely be checking that out. I don't care if I were the king of the universe, I would still be giving that at least a twice over. I don't care if you think it's immoral, inappropriate, or just plain wrong, it's normal male behavior. I don't care if that makes us pigs or not, the only way you couldn't at least toss a casual glance at that either means you're inhuman or not interested. If you watch the video you can tell that Sarkozy is definitely checking that out and for the most part his country could probably give two shits less. If nothing else, that picture tells me that Obama is an average Joe, at least on some level. He may not by the president people want to have a beer with, but I'd stare at some hot ass with him. If anyone thinks this is immoral or inappropriate, go fuck yourself. Seriously, go fuck yourself. You're the same dipshit who wasted time debating whether or not Clinton was getting some side action. You're worrying about the wrong things.
Assuming you're not already compressing your data, this would be a good method to make it "lighter." A quick Google search has a test which shows gzip compressing things down to between 25% to 40% of their original size. This pretty much makes the data useless for mining or quick lookups, but it would drop the weight of storage media required, regardless of what you're using to store it. If it's just data that needs to be stored as a backup then it shouldn't be too much of a problem.
Some other poster did it in 20Kg using MicroSD cards. Use the cards and compression and you've maybe dropped it down to 5Kg with an excellent compression ratio.