RadioShack = Dollar store of electronics
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RadioShack CEO Resigns
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· Score: 5, Insightful
If you want to turn around profits, then stop selling the house-brand crappy electronics that are made in China that you can buy at a Dollar Store for a buck (but RadioShack sells for $20). People recognize quality when they see it, and RadioShack doesn't represent quality.
Even the name brands they sell tend to be the low end economy models that Sony, Panasonic, etc will sell at Walmart or grocery stores, of course for a far cheaper price then RadioShack.
There may have been a time when you can pass off a cheap Chinese boom box for $100, and that is when RadioShack raked in the money, but these days people are a little more discriminating in the quality of electronics they buy, and RadioShack hasn't offered those better quality products. They still insist on selling that cheap Chinese boom boxes for $100.
RadioShack should simply refocus on selling batteries and remote control cars, its about all they do well. Stop trying to sell cheap home theater and stereo equipment and televisions, drop computers period, and focus on smaller electronic gadgets that you can't find elsewhere. Either that, our start offering high end stuff you can't find anywhere else, open up a niche market that walmart, Best Buy and Target can't touch.
Just, don't go on as business as usual. It obviously isn't working, and those no-name brands you keep carrying and selling for the same price as name brands are not making you money.
The portable document format was really established to facilitate the paper-less office, by taking content that normally would be printed (like word documents or spreadsheets) and turn them into an electronic version that is standardized across multiple platforms. Eventually, manufactures realized that instead of the wasted expense and resources of printing brochures and manuals on paper, they published these documents in electronic form as a PDF and distributed them online or on installation CD's.
I would hardly consider PDF to be a content distribution mechanism for web pages. Most HTML based web pages print horribly and usually require a stripped down simpler version of them, or an actual PDF version.
Unipage sounds like it has its merits, condensing a web page into a single element instead of a file linked to other sources and files. But Unipage and PDF are mostly mutually exclusive document formats.
I can easily see unipage become the standard for distributing dynamic content. "Hey, have you seen this website?". Instead of linking to a website whose content has either already changed, or the page is no longer available, sending the content as a single file would be more ideal then linking to web content. It certainly would be beneficial for Slashdot to implement this technology rather then linking to servers that can't handle the slashdot effect and effectively having dead links everywhere.
But, for printed material, PDF is still king and it was never intended to distribute dynamic content. I doubt there is any real ability for unipage to be used as a printed document format, only if the content provider carefully constructed their HTML page to print nicely.
I like the idea of Unipage, but it is hardly a PDF killer. Both are intended for entirely different worlds, one of dynamic online content, the other for printed materials.
Could we stop chauking up the lack of virii to the quality of the OS?
I mean, honestly, no OS/2 virii? Is there any reason to target the 10 people out there still running OS/2 Warp with a virus?
While I will agree that good OS design will prevent the kind of zombie take over of a machine that allow viruses to propogate and activate without user intervention, I don't believe for a second that ANY OS is virus proof.
Virii are weapons of mass desctruction, that is, they want to have the greatest number of targets. An OS/2 virus, even if it had a 100% infection rate, would not make the news rounds, and might get a quick blurb on Slashdot. Virus writers are not going to waste time exploiting OS/2.
We have seen a virus launched against OSX recently, probably due to the higher profile Apple has been getting recently with their new Macintel machines. Before this, people assumed OSX was virus proof, but its just that it wouldn't make an impact to write an OSX virus unless the writer can claim some fame by having it affect the greatest number of people and be talked about in the news.
Also, when it comes to OS/2 having lower system requirements, it WAS written for computers designed about 15 years ago. I doubt OS/2 Warp server would be able to run or peform well with the typical client load that most servers today have to contend with. Email spam filtering alone can bring a modern server to its knees, I doubt OS/2 Warp Server would be able to function properly with 256mb of RAM, 10 gb hard drive space running on a Pentium class CPU even handling the email load a typical small business puts on today's servers.
Anyways, I don't believe that OS/2 has any better ability to fight off virii then any other OS, just that its been forgotten about except by those too cheap to upgrade to a new computer and OS.
When I first accessed the internet, over 15 years ago, I thought, wow, eventually all computers would become thin clients and our data will be stored in server facilities that could offer fast, large capacity storage and ensure our data is always backed up, safe and secure.
How naive was I?
I still feel that I would prefer to have offsite storage for data. I have lost entire music libraries, personal digital pictures and videos simply because the 80 then 120 then 250 gb hard drive in my computer failed.
I have taken to backing up data, but how does one back up 200+ gb of data without spending a fortune on tape backup which never has proven to be really that secure? Buy a second 200+ gb hard drive and hope for the best I guess? Or, you could implement a redundant RAID system, if money wasn't an issue.
In the end, I have been longing for an online service that would offer 100's of GB of storage, not just 100mb or 2gb of email storage, but 100's of gigabytes of online storage available at a reasonable monthly rate where I could save my important data file in a safe and secure environment. This service would ensure the data is backed up and kept safe by implementing RAID systems and backup technologies that I can't afford. Then I could know that regardless of my local hard drive crapping out, or a house fire, or theft, my important data is always kept safe on an offsite server.
Security and privacy issues aside, I think the problem is that it is still too costly to offer millions of subscribers 100+ gigabytes of data storage online. While the internet is fast enough to access offsite storage, there simply isn't enough capacity in desktop hard drives to both provide the required storage AND make sure the storage is redundant and safe using RAID systems.
So, perhaps we shouldn't laugh at the idea of a Petabyte hard drive. I don't see any reason why anyone would need that amount of storage at home. But perhaps this would enable a service that is sorely missing from the internet, the idea of ubiquitous access to your personal data, the thousands of music files, photos, videos and other data that can be kept safe and secure and always available regardless of how many times your local hard drive dies or damages or looses that important data. I for one say, bring it ON!
Windows Vista (which seems to have been easily ported to run on Macintels), will be a highly skinnable OS and integrate features for far more expressive UI then what OSX is capable of. Windows is basically building into its presentation layer a Flash like interface that will allow for animated and highly customized UI. With this presentation foundation, Apple could easily make Windows look good with fancy Apple widgets and even the OSX look and feel.
Think it crazy? Remember that Apple dropped its own proprietary OS in favour of a Unix derivative. OSX is simply Free BSD skinned by Apple. Also, Apple hasn't really done anything to prevent Windows from running on Macintels. It is very possible that if Apple sees a huge campaign of PC users buying Mac toys to run Windows on, why fight it?
Anyways, back to reality, I doubt Apple would give up that readily, but the points made in the article are truths that Mac diehards find hard to swallow. Whether Apple would want to continue to make their own OS, or possibly cave into Microsoft is yet to be seen, but Apple has to do something dramatic to get PC users to switch. NOTHING they have done to date has allowed them to grab more marketshare. Its the old "If you can't beat em, join em!" adage.
Canada is the US's single largest supplier of oil. I think we actually product the same amount of oil as the Middle East combined. The Alberta Tar Sands have an estimated 1700 - 2500 Billion barrels of oil locked away in clay and minerals, and current technologies are unlocking that trapped oil and making it economical to extract and process. By contrast, Saudi Arabia has only about 240 billion barrels in reserve. Currently, Canada has about 300 billion barrels of oil available to be easily processed.
While I believe we should be weening ourselves off of oil as a fuel, I can't believe how reports like this suggest we are in a dire state with oil production slowing down and we are nearing saturation of the oil we use. I can only imagine these reports are funded by the oil companies to ensure that the price of oil remains artificially high and keep the prices rising.
This is good in the long run because it will drive consumers to find alternatives, such as ethanol which is cleaner burning and renewable. You will know when the oil companies feel the blow back of keeping the price of oil too high when you can suddenly fill up a tank of gas for 40 cents a litre again because everyone else is running ethanol or bio-diesel or electric or hydrogen (not from oil sources) powered vehicles, the oil companies are just screwing themselves.
Whore: "I promise to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth."
Attorney: "Are you a prostitute?"
Whore: "Yes, I am"...
CNN's Anderson Cooper: "And in today's news, the 1000th prostitute was thrown in jail for admitting they were in the illegal sex trade. Thousands more are lining up around the block to give their testimony to the supreme court...."
I mean, we are all geeks and nerds, so we of all people should support this science.
Its something I will have to see to believe, but in theory, it all sounds quite practical. The only "IF" in the whole concept is if we can actually manufacture a carbon nanotube ribbon 62,000 miles long and how exactly are we going to get it in place. A smaller if is whether we should actually do it. Something falling out of the sky with 62,000miles of cord attached to it could mess things up around the equator pretty bad. (BTW, read the Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy)
I think this is one of those things that while we try and pursue it, even if its natural end is failure, much new technology and science will result from it. An effective, cheap and efficient way to generating carbon nanotube structures is what I hope will result from the endeavour, if not an actual space elevator. It just seems they are working on the elevator part before working on the part that will actually make the concept work.
I.e. lots of common sense things that anyone with a brain should understand, but feel they need the comfort of reading it in a book first before they feel comfortable exercising their God given intellect, or rather, being ripped of $40 to find out you already know everything the book feels the need to explain.
Anyways, my digital camera cost $1200, so I don't think I will go near it with a Dremel tool just to make it work with some tripod that wasn't designed to use as universal camera adapter. About the closest thing I did to hack my Digital Rebel was to update its firmware with one from a more expensive Canon digital camera, only to find out that while most of the menu options from the more expensive camera are available, most of the features are not supported in the Rebel.
I found it interesting that the book had to explain the math and concepts behind photography. This is analogous to the editor saying that you need to write a 500 page book, and you found out you only have 200 pages of real content, so throw in some superfluous information that you can find in an encyclopedia so you can fill in the void. I bet the book also features lots of full color picture pages showing all the neat things a camera can do (like take pictures of pretty things).
I find most how to manuals and "hacker" guides to be generally lacking in anything practical and filled with information you could probably think of if you took the time to think of it. The author hopes you don't think too hard and would drop $40 on the book. The only two "how to" guides I found ever useful and worth the money was "101 things to do with a dead cat" and "Everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten".
BTW, I hear Opera is bitter and doing an expose on the author of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" because apparently the author lied and the truth is that men and women are both born on Earth.
It would be very quick to assume that interrupting current flow would be a definite consideration, but your talking about billions of tonnes of water moving at a very strong flow. There is just TOO much energy involved to worry about whether a turbine will stop ocean currents. Turbines are also passive, allowing water to pass through them. The amount of energy they remove is negligible compared to what is needed to make the water move past it.
Some news stories don't need them, but anytime a press release comes out about some new visual technology (eInk, laser projectors, etc), I get annoyed that they can't show the technology being demonstrated. Sounds more like vaporware and a company trying to get investors excited to dump millions into them before finding out the technology isn't feasible and walk away with those millions leaving the company bankrupt.
Rant aside, if this technology DOES exist, it is very cool. Integrating a projector into mobile devices or notebooks is great, but considering the resolution, it would a great Home Theater projector as well. Laser light remains strong and bright over long distances, so in theory, you should be able to get big screens in the home without worrying about dimming the image.
The only thing I worry about is that while having a high resolution, laser is such a highly focused light that will these "pixels" be too separated to offer a decent image? Even at 2000+ points across, if those points are spread out too far apart, then you won't get a decent projected image. Chances are, mobile applications where you can shine the image a few inches or feet away is probably all that laser projectors are good for. Throwing the image across 20 feet, while still bright, might separate the pixels too much and make for a poor image.
So far, it looks like this company is just looking for investors, and as such, I would consider this vaporware. They are definitely looking to bank off the success of iPod video devices as well as the current fad of displaying television on Cell phones.
You agree then that the cable companies should monopolize digital cable, forcing second rate digital boxes on the masses, forcing them to pay more for something that should work better, instead of buying potentially excellent 3rd party options.
You also agree that I am forced to use some poorly implemented interface to navigate digital cable content instead of allowing 3rd party developers to create more rich and robust interfaces allowing for quicker searching and selecting of digital cable content.
I don't agree, and I think that as long as cable companies INSIST on keeping digital cable proprietary, FORCING solutions like CableCards which only protect the cable companies interest, that there will never be an ideal solution for digital cable access.
Its the cable companies that have ruined digital cable and HDTV, they rolled it out poorly and now are trying to prevent companies like TIVO or Microsoft to enter their turf by offering better and cheaper solutions for PVR/DVR and digital cable interactive displays.
What needs to happen is the Cable companies open up digital cable standards, allowing 3rd parties to access digital cable streams WITHOUT authorization from cable companies, thus allowing televisions, DVD Recorders and DVR's and TIVO devices to offer native digital cable support unencumbered without having the end user buy or rent a cable company provided solution and paying through the nose for it.
Your a cable technician, you string wires out of the wall into a box. CableCards might be a hassle, but they are at least offering consumers a choice in how they want to access and view and record their digital cable, which they pay $80+ a month for and have to use second rate expensive equipemnt to access it on the terms of the cable company.
CableCards might not be the solution, but they are poorly impelemented because of the cable companies not wanting to let go of the monopoly they hold in their tights fists.
While this is unusual and I wouldn't say typical, it does pay to look around and determine if the monitor you got was the best for the money, or if you should have spent a little more money.
Color calibration is important for those in the printing and graphics industry, but then, your talking about calibrating $1000 displays, ones designed and certified to offer highly accurate color display. There is a reason why those Apple displays are so pricey, they are certified for the graphics industry.
Any sub $500 LCD monitor doesn't fall into that category. While you may be able to get near accurate colors, spending too much time calibrating the display (or being too finicky about the accuracy) will just result in a head ache.
Sounds like either your LCD is defective, or that perhaps you set the color temperature without realizing it. If your color temperature (ViewMatch Color on Viewsonics) isn't set to 9300K, then your going to get a redder screen. If that isn't the problem, and brightness/contrast settings don't have an effect, return the monitor of get it serviced, it could be a problem with the backlighting.
Doing a quick search on Google for reviews of this monitor shows it to not have great image quality and middling overall appeal. It may be cheap, but it looks like you get what you pay for in this case.
My first impression upon hearing this was "did they speed it up"?
Using it early before FireFox came out, it wasn't my first, second, or thrid browser of choice on the Mac, I even prefered IE over it.
FireFox still is kind of slow on the OSX, so I won't hold my breath that Camino improves upon it much. Why wouldn't FireFox have the best tech in it compared to Camino?
But I will give it a try, neither FF or Safari I would say are wonders on the Mac platform. There is only room for improvment for web browsing on Mac's.
Throw enough money at any review website (or enough free Xbox360's and games) and your going to get nice reviews.
But real life numbers speak for themselves. The Xbox360's are not selling, you can't find them, and the games by independent and credible review sites say that they definitely don't shine, bugs and issues asside.
Microsoft rushed the Xbox360 out the door, and it shows. There is no trolling going on, just the truth.
As much as I love Tetris, there are only so many ways to skin a dead horse.
Making a cutesy, semi autonomous version of an NES game playing on one screen while you scramble to make lines on a Tetris board below is really lame, in my opinion.
I have been wanting to develop a version of Tetris that uses some novel ideas to the game play I haven't yet seen (although Tetris worlds and Tetris Elements have used some of the ideas I have had). I.e. I want to add to the Tetris experience, not just add some gimmicks to it. Of course I can't call it Tetris, but "That block falling game" has some appeal.
I don't know if the Tetris experience is improved with a touch screen, my guess is it just makes it annoying compared to the quick response of a gamepad and buttons.
In all, this is a childish gimmick, certainly not in keeping with Nintendo's supposed statement that they aim to target the 35+ year old market. Keep flogging the Mario, Donkey Kong and Zela franchises in hundreds of off-shoot games and your never going to get adults believing you are making games for them.
Re:This is a good thing for Apple
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OSx86 Cracked Again
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Missing one point.
Developing software for retail with an illegal copy of OSX is one way to get sued up the wazoo or even land in jail.
If your going to develop for OSX, then your going to own a Mac and own OSX as well.
All this will do is cause OSX to be distributed for free, run on PC's, and hurt Apple because it is currently expected every license of OSX is for a Mac sold by Apple. Without the ability to tie OSX to Mac based hardware, Apple cannot sustain OSX development.
Apple doesn't want to become an OS only vendor, they will fail. OSX hasn't inspired PC owners to switch, even with cheap Mac Mini's and other novel computers. If Apple dropped Mac hardware and simply sold another PC Windows competitor, they won't inspire much of a switch as well. Despite all the benefits and strengths of OSX, there still isn't great software support. Developing software for OSX isn't because of a lack of exposure, its because of a lack of good quality development tools, including Apple's own XCode which is that last tool I would want to work with.
In the end, Apple would love it if people ran Windows on Mac hardware, they want to sell more Mac hardware. But it is Apple's worst nightmare for OSX to become a novelty OS for PC's. I can't understand why the didn't think this would happen or take greater steps to prevent this from happening.
Nintendo hopes to gain the 35+ market, their spokesperson says so. ( I think its more they need to capture the 20+ market).
Then he goes on about Nintendogs, a game squarely marketed for juvenile girls.
I am all up for the new Revolution, hoping Nintendo will put their money where their mouth is, but I have no doubts that the new Revolution will cater to children with derivative Mario Party titles that will make novel use of the new motion based controller system. Nintendo has not yet focused on adult gaming, and one can only hope that Nintendo is finally realizing that adult gamers are making up a larger market with disposable income.
To say Sony and Microsoft failed suggest that Nintendo is trying to downplay the fact they have been underdogs in an industry that almost passed them buy. Without catering to an adult market, Nintendo allowed their once near 90% marketshare to slip to less then 20%.
We will see what Nintendo's goal is with the new Revolution. But I am sure that the first 6 Nintendo titles will be based on a Mario, Luigi, Wario, Kirby, Zelda, Metroid, or Nintendogs franchise. Probably throw in a Resident Evil just to say they are not entirely a G rated company. The rest of the release titles by 3rd party companies will be party based novelty games that make generous use of the remote controller. But, NONE of the games will cater to the adult market.
The only thing Nintendo has going for them in the Revolution is support for their entire backlibrary (hopefully this feature won't be dropped). Adult players will probably pick up the Revolution for nostalgic reasons, playing old favourites once again.
Only time will tell if Nintendo has any real plans to cater to the adult marketplace, but I doubt it.
The Intel Chip is 32 bit, you wouldn't be running an accurate benchmark suite if you compared 32 to 64 bit applications.
Windows does have a 64 bit OS, Windows XP 64. Its been around for a while. Unfortunately, 64bit performance under Windows suffers greatly over 32 bit applications, so you don't want it.
Lastly, your confusing what it means to use 64 bit. 64 bit isn't twice the power of 32 bit applications. 64 bit really describes the address space allowing for bigger numbers and the ability to address larger memory and storage sizes. 64 bit doesn't double 32 bit performance. In fact, without any compiler optimization, 64bit applications would perform the same as 32 bit applications in reality. The only time a 64 bit application will outperform a 32 bit application is if you highly optimize a 32bit application to work with 64 bits, for instance, take a math intensive application using 32bit arithmetic and optimize it so that multiple operations can be performed at the same time in a 64 bit address environment (double load the registers with 32 bit numbers). In reality, few general use applications benefit from this level of optimization.
In all honestly, AMD jumped the gun going to 64 bit because in reality there is few benefits of moving to 64bit except in enterprise servers where you need to address more then 8gb of memory and terabytes of disk storage.
Honestly, if Google was truely serious about creating a Linux based GOOS then why do a half assed "port" of picasa using Wine. Wine has always resulted in half assed implementations of Windows software, often lacking real performance and often many features disabled. I am surprise Google with all their newly minted billions would not just higher a bunch of Linux Developers and make a native Linux version of Picasa.
And don't fool yourselves, Wine IS an emulator. Anything that has to mediate between native software code and native OS/Hardware code is an emulator. It may not be a hardware emulator (i.e. not translating to machine code the software code wasn't written for), but it is a software emulator translating windows calls to Linux calls. And in any case, emulators are slow.
Actually, I think they just dramatically underestimated their performance and life cycle.
Lets face it, Nasa hasn't had a lot of success as of late. If they sent a couple of rovers to Mars and suggested they would last 3 years, and then they died 2 days into the mission, it would be egg on Nasa's face. Instead, they said the rovers had a 3 month life expectancy, and everyone is slapping Nasa on the back after 2 years into the mission. I think Nasa purposely make the 3 months comment just to reap the benefits of finally having a successful mission to mars.
Nasa over designs things, so I was dubious when they said the Mars rovers would only last 3 months. Barring any significant dust or wind storms, there is no reason why the rovers should not have lasted this long if they are solar powered and reasonably well engineered.
What is unbelievable is that Nasa designed something that didn't f*ck up in the first 3 months, or even on landing. But I would take the whole "only designed for a 3 month mission" with a big spoon full of sugar, internally the rovers were probably designed to last a decade. Your car would last a century if some company put 800+ million into creating it, I would expect the same from a couple of 400 million dollar platforms with wheels on them. Remember, the mars rovers we over budget and delayed, so lowering expectations is Nasa's typical method for covering up budget overruns and delays. Once something demonstrates apparently unexpected success, everybody forgets about the price tag.
I am all for someone's freedom of speech, but I should also have the freedom to listen, or not. Filling my email inbox with unsolicited "free speech" is a problem.
If I was truly interested in someone's opinion, let me subscribe to a mailing list, or make some form of indication that I want to receive their freedom of speech, or go to their blog and read it at my leisure.
Forcing someone to have to wade through garbage free speech is almost as repressive as censorship. Forcing someone to listen to "free speech" is a dictatorship.
Anybody that can't see the benefits and cool factor of this need to go back to their caves and pull out some charcoal.
Someone said they can't see the average user wanting this? Did you see the video? I could see about a dozen areas that the average end user would wan this display for:
Multimedia organization( group photos quickly and in a more native concept) Multimedia editing. More robust UI interaction and quicker access. Believe it or not, the computer mouse is not intuitive compared to point and touch. Video games, more interaction and unique game play possibilities.
Did you watch the video?
As a UI interface designer, I could easily see how some fairly complex interaction is handled quickly by being able to use multiple points of contact. Trying to duplicate the same interaction with mouse and keyboard is ancient and slow by comparison.
In the end, this is an interactive display that the average end users WANT. Get rid of the keyboard and mouse! This will allow computers to be setup as interactive displays on walls, or the coffee table or counter or desktop top allowing quick and easy access without cumbersome external interfaces forced on us.
While many consider the PC the center of their worlds, sitting in front of a PC to listen to music or watch videos is not my cup of tea.
My PC at home is in my home office, and I do listen to internet radio when I am working there, but I don't generally spend my entire day there. Internet radio needs to find solutions to make the content available on any home media device.
I am anxiously waiting for the TuneDock from Griffin Technology, which will allow both iPod playback on your home theater system (with onscreen television display) AND integrated with internet radio as a standalone receiver.
This is what internet radio needs to catch on, a cheap appliance that can integrate with people's home theater and stereo systems.
Also, Internet Radio needs to step up an improve the quality. I am tired of 24, 48, 56, and 64 kbps feeds that sound like your listening to radio from a tin box in the subway. If its not at least 128kbps (i.e. CD quality), then don't bother. Also, internet radio seems to suffer if there is any network traffic at your end. Perhaps its just the poor way most Internet radio software is implemented, but when the radio cuts in an out and drops connection frequently, its just annoying. Better standards are needed for the delivery and quality of internet radio. Something, BTW, Satellite Radio both excels at.
I can see that perhaps subscription rates might be beneficial for many internet radio providers, but MANY of them are just live feeds of their regular FM radio broadcasts. THESE SHOULD NEVER BE PAID FOR. FM radio stations make money by selling advertising and kickbacks from music companies, they should not expect a revenue stream from streaming their FREE LIVE radio.
But those internet only feeds, if they got together and formed a subscription based service like XFM or Sirius, then I could see how a subscription revenue would improve quality.
In the end, though, Internet Radio needs to become a consumer electronics product, not tied to the computer. If they don't break out of the beige box, then it will never catch on and they cannot remain viable as a solution to FM and Satellite radio. Hopefully more solutions like the TuneDock will become available allowing more ubiquitous access to Internet Radio.
BTW, Griffin Technology also has an excellent product called iFill, which allows you to record Internet Radio streams and fill the iPod with new content. No, I am not a sales associate.
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If you want to turn around profits, then stop selling the house-brand crappy electronics that are made in China that you can buy at a Dollar Store for a buck (but RadioShack sells for $20). People recognize quality when they see it, and RadioShack doesn't represent quality.
Even the name brands they sell tend to be the low end economy models that Sony, Panasonic, etc will sell at Walmart or grocery stores, of course for a far cheaper price then RadioShack.
There may have been a time when you can pass off a cheap Chinese boom box for $100, and that is when RadioShack raked in the money, but these days people are a little more discriminating in the quality of electronics they buy, and RadioShack hasn't offered those better quality products. They still insist on selling that cheap Chinese boom boxes for $100.
RadioShack should simply refocus on selling batteries and remote control cars, its about all they do well. Stop trying to sell cheap home theater and stereo equipment and televisions, drop computers period, and focus on smaller electronic gadgets that you can't find elsewhere. Either that, our start offering high end stuff you can't find anywhere else, open up a niche market that walmart, Best Buy and Target can't touch.
Just, don't go on as business as usual. It obviously isn't working, and those no-name brands you keep carrying and selling for the same price as name brands are not making you money.
The portable document format was really established to facilitate the paper-less office, by taking content that normally would be printed (like word documents or spreadsheets) and turn them into an electronic version that is standardized across multiple platforms. Eventually, manufactures realized that instead of the wasted expense and resources of printing brochures and manuals on paper, they published these documents in electronic form as a PDF and distributed them online or on installation CD's.
I would hardly consider PDF to be a content distribution mechanism for web pages. Most HTML based web pages print horribly and usually require a stripped down simpler version of them, or an actual PDF version.
Unipage sounds like it has its merits, condensing a web page into a single element instead of a file linked to other sources and files. But Unipage and PDF are mostly mutually exclusive document formats.
I can easily see unipage become the standard for distributing dynamic content. "Hey, have you seen this website?". Instead of linking to a website whose content has either already changed, or the page is no longer available, sending the content as a single file would be more ideal then linking to web content. It certainly would be beneficial for Slashdot to implement this technology rather then linking to servers that can't handle the slashdot effect and effectively having dead links everywhere.
But, for printed material, PDF is still king and it was never intended to distribute dynamic content. I doubt there is any real ability for unipage to be used as a printed document format, only if the content provider carefully constructed their HTML page to print nicely.
I like the idea of Unipage, but it is hardly a PDF killer. Both are intended for entirely different worlds, one of dynamic online content, the other for printed materials.
Could we stop chauking up the lack of virii to the quality of the OS?
I mean, honestly, no OS/2 virii? Is there any reason to target the 10 people out there still running OS/2 Warp with a virus?
While I will agree that good OS design will prevent the kind of zombie take over of a machine that allow viruses to propogate and activate without user intervention, I don't believe for a second that ANY OS is virus proof.
Virii are weapons of mass desctruction, that is, they want to have the greatest number of targets. An OS/2 virus, even if it had a 100% infection rate, would not make the news rounds, and might get a quick blurb on Slashdot. Virus writers are not going to waste time exploiting OS/2.
We have seen a virus launched against OSX recently, probably due to the higher profile Apple has been getting recently with their new Macintel machines. Before this, people assumed OSX was virus proof, but its just that it wouldn't make an impact to write an OSX virus unless the writer can claim some fame by having it affect the greatest number of people and be talked about in the news.
Also, when it comes to OS/2 having lower system requirements, it WAS written for computers designed about 15 years ago. I doubt OS/2 Warp server would be able to run or peform well with the typical client load that most servers today have to contend with. Email spam filtering alone can bring a modern server to its knees, I doubt OS/2 Warp Server would be able to function properly with 256mb of RAM, 10 gb hard drive space running on a Pentium class CPU even handling the email load a typical small business puts on today's servers.
Anyways, I don't believe that OS/2 has any better ability to fight off virii then any other OS, just that its been forgotten about except by those too cheap to upgrade to a new computer and OS.
When I first accessed the internet, over 15 years ago, I thought, wow, eventually all computers would become thin clients and our data will be stored in server facilities that could offer fast, large capacity storage and ensure our data is always backed up, safe and secure.
How naive was I?
I still feel that I would prefer to have offsite storage for data. I have lost entire music libraries, personal digital pictures and videos simply because the 80 then 120 then 250 gb hard drive in my computer failed.
I have taken to backing up data, but how does one back up 200+ gb of data without spending a fortune on tape backup which never has proven to be really that secure? Buy a second 200+ gb hard drive and hope for the best I guess? Or, you could implement a redundant RAID system, if money wasn't an issue.
In the end, I have been longing for an online service that would offer 100's of GB of storage, not just 100mb or 2gb of email storage, but 100's of gigabytes of online storage available at a reasonable monthly rate where I could save my important data file in a safe and secure environment. This service would ensure the data is backed up and kept safe by implementing RAID systems and backup technologies that I can't afford. Then I could know that regardless of my local hard drive crapping out, or a house fire, or theft, my important data is always kept safe on an offsite server.
Security and privacy issues aside, I think the problem is that it is still too costly to offer millions of subscribers 100+ gigabytes of data storage online. While the internet is fast enough to access offsite storage, there simply isn't enough capacity in desktop hard drives to both provide the required storage AND make sure the storage is redundant and safe using RAID systems.
So, perhaps we shouldn't laugh at the idea of a Petabyte hard drive. I don't see any reason why anyone would need that amount of storage at home. But perhaps this would enable a service that is sorely missing from the internet, the idea of ubiquitous access to your personal data, the thousands of music files, photos, videos and other data that can be kept safe and secure and always available regardless of how many times your local hard drive dies or damages or looses that important data. I for one say, bring it ON!
Windows Vista (which seems to have been easily ported to run on Macintels), will be a highly skinnable OS and integrate features for far more expressive UI then what OSX is capable of. Windows is basically building into its presentation layer a Flash like interface that will allow for animated and highly customized UI. With this presentation foundation, Apple could easily make Windows look good with fancy Apple widgets and even the OSX look and feel.
Think it crazy? Remember that Apple dropped its own proprietary OS in favour of a Unix derivative. OSX is simply Free BSD skinned by Apple. Also, Apple hasn't really done anything to prevent Windows from running on Macintels. It is very possible that if Apple sees a huge campaign of PC users buying Mac toys to run Windows on, why fight it?
Anyways, back to reality, I doubt Apple would give up that readily, but the points made in the article are truths that Mac diehards find hard to swallow. Whether Apple would want to continue to make their own OS, or possibly cave into Microsoft is yet to be seen, but Apple has to do something dramatic to get PC users to switch. NOTHING they have done to date has allowed them to grab more marketshare. Its the old "If you can't beat em, join em!" adage.
Canada is the US's single largest supplier of oil. I think we actually product the same amount of oil as the Middle East combined. The Alberta Tar Sands have an estimated 1700 - 2500 Billion barrels of oil locked away in clay and minerals, and current technologies are unlocking that trapped oil and making it economical to extract and process. By contrast, Saudi Arabia has only about 240 billion barrels in reserve. Currently, Canada has about 300 billion barrels of oil available to be easily processed.
While I believe we should be weening ourselves off of oil as a fuel, I can't believe how reports like this suggest we are in a dire state with oil production slowing down and we are nearing saturation of the oil we use. I can only imagine these reports are funded by the oil companies to ensure that the price of oil remains artificially high and keep the prices rising.
This is good in the long run because it will drive consumers to find alternatives, such as ethanol which is cleaner burning and renewable. You will know when the oil companies feel the blow back of keeping the price of oil too high when you can suddenly fill up a tank of gas for 40 cents a litre again because everyone else is running ethanol or bio-diesel or electric or hydrogen (not from oil sources) powered vehicles, the oil companies are just screwing themselves.
Whore: "I promise to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth."
...
Attorney: "Are you a prostitute?"
Whore: "Yes, I am"
CNN's Anderson Cooper: "And in today's news, the 1000th prostitute was thrown in jail for admitting they were in the illegal sex trade. Thousands more are lining up around the block to give their testimony to the supreme court...."
I mean, we are all geeks and nerds, so we of all people should support this science.
Its something I will have to see to believe, but in theory, it all sounds quite practical. The only "IF" in the whole concept is if we can actually manufacture a carbon nanotube ribbon 62,000 miles long and how exactly are we going to get it in place. A smaller if is whether we should actually do it. Something falling out of the sky with 62,000miles of cord attached to it could mess things up around the equator pretty bad. (BTW, read the Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy)
I think this is one of those things that while we try and pursue it, even if its natural end is failure, much new technology and science will result from it. An effective, cheap and efficient way to generating carbon nanotube structures is what I hope will result from the endeavour, if not an actual space elevator. It just seems they are working on the elevator part before working on the part that will actually make the concept work.
The edge of space is around the 50 mile mark, an astronaut is one that exceeds the atmospher of our planet.
I.e. lots of common sense things that anyone with a brain should understand, but feel they need the comfort of reading it in a book first before they feel comfortable exercising their God given intellect, or rather, being ripped of $40 to find out you already know everything the book feels the need to explain.
Anyways, my digital camera cost $1200, so I don't think I will go near it with a Dremel tool just to make it work with some tripod that wasn't designed to use as universal camera adapter. About the closest thing I did to hack my Digital Rebel was to update its firmware with one from a more expensive Canon digital camera, only to find out that while most of the menu options from the more expensive camera are available, most of the features are not supported in the Rebel.
I found it interesting that the book had to explain the math and concepts behind photography. This is analogous to the editor saying that you need to write a 500 page book, and you found out you only have 200 pages of real content, so throw in some superfluous information that you can find in an encyclopedia so you can fill in the void. I bet the book also features lots of full color picture pages showing all the neat things a camera can do (like take pictures of pretty things).
I find most how to manuals and "hacker" guides to be generally lacking in anything practical and filled with information you could probably think of if you took the time to think of it. The author hopes you don't think too hard and would drop $40 on the book. The only two "how to" guides I found ever useful and worth the money was "101 things to do with a dead cat" and "Everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten".
BTW, I hear Opera is bitter and doing an expose on the author of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" because apparently the author lied and the truth is that men and women are both born on Earth.
It would be very quick to assume that interrupting current flow would be a definite consideration, but your talking about billions of tonnes of water moving at a very strong flow. There is just TOO much energy involved to worry about whether a turbine will stop ocean currents. Turbines are also passive, allowing water to pass through them. The amount of energy they remove is negligible compared to what is needed to make the water move past it.
Some news stories don't need them, but anytime a press release comes out about some new visual technology (eInk, laser projectors, etc), I get annoyed that they can't show the technology being demonstrated. Sounds more like vaporware and a company trying to get investors excited to dump millions into them before finding out the technology isn't feasible and walk away with those millions leaving the company bankrupt.
Rant aside, if this technology DOES exist, it is very cool. Integrating a projector into mobile devices or notebooks is great, but considering the resolution, it would a great Home Theater projector as well. Laser light remains strong and bright over long distances, so in theory, you should be able to get big screens in the home without worrying about dimming the image.
The only thing I worry about is that while having a high resolution, laser is such a highly focused light that will these "pixels" be too separated to offer a decent image? Even at 2000+ points across, if those points are spread out too far apart, then you won't get a decent projected image. Chances are, mobile applications where you can shine the image a few inches or feet away is probably all that laser projectors are good for. Throwing the image across 20 feet, while still bright, might separate the pixels too much and make for a poor image.
So far, it looks like this company is just looking for investors, and as such, I would consider this vaporware. They are definitely looking to bank off the success of iPod video devices as well as the current fad of displaying television on Cell phones.
You agree then that the cable companies should monopolize digital cable, forcing second rate digital boxes on the masses, forcing them to pay more for something that should work better, instead of buying potentially excellent 3rd party options.
You also agree that I am forced to use some poorly implemented interface to navigate digital cable content instead of allowing 3rd party developers to create more rich and robust interfaces allowing for quicker searching and selecting of digital cable content.
I don't agree, and I think that as long as cable companies INSIST on keeping digital cable proprietary, FORCING solutions like CableCards which only protect the cable companies interest, that there will never be an ideal solution for digital cable access.
Its the cable companies that have ruined digital cable and HDTV, they rolled it out poorly and now are trying to prevent companies like TIVO or Microsoft to enter their turf by offering better and cheaper solutions for PVR/DVR and digital cable interactive displays.
What needs to happen is the Cable companies open up digital cable standards, allowing 3rd parties to access digital cable streams WITHOUT authorization from cable companies, thus allowing televisions, DVD Recorders and DVR's and TIVO devices to offer native digital cable support unencumbered without having the end user buy or rent a cable company provided solution and paying through the nose for it.
Your a cable technician, you string wires out of the wall into a box. CableCards might be a hassle, but they are at least offering consumers a choice in how they want to access and view and record their digital cable, which they pay $80+ a month for and have to use second rate expensive equipemnt to access it on the terms of the cable company.
CableCards might not be the solution, but they are poorly impelemented because of the cable companies not wanting to let go of the monopoly they hold in their tights fists.
While this is unusual and I wouldn't say typical, it does pay to look around and determine if the monitor you got was the best for the money, or if you should have spent a little more money.
Color calibration is important for those in the printing and graphics industry, but then, your talking about calibrating $1000 displays, ones designed and certified to offer highly accurate color display. There is a reason why those Apple displays are so pricey, they are certified for the graphics industry.
Any sub $500 LCD monitor doesn't fall into that category. While you may be able to get near accurate colors, spending too much time calibrating the display (or being too finicky about the accuracy) will just result in a head ache.
Sounds like either your LCD is defective, or that perhaps you set the color temperature without realizing it. If your color temperature (ViewMatch Color on Viewsonics) isn't set to 9300K, then your going to get a redder screen. If that isn't the problem, and brightness/contrast settings don't have an effect, return the monitor of get it serviced, it could be a problem with the backlighting.
Doing a quick search on Google for reviews of this monitor shows it to not have great image quality and middling overall appeal. It may be cheap, but it looks like you get what you pay for in this case.
My first impression upon hearing this was "did they speed it up"?
Using it early before FireFox came out, it wasn't my first, second, or thrid browser of choice on the Mac, I even prefered IE over it.
FireFox still is kind of slow on the OSX, so I won't hold my breath that Camino improves upon it much. Why wouldn't FireFox have the best tech in it compared to Camino?
But I will give it a try, neither FF or Safari I would say are wonders on the Mac platform. There is only room for improvment for web browsing on Mac's.
Throw enough money at any review website (or enough free Xbox360's and games) and your going to get nice reviews.
But real life numbers speak for themselves. The Xbox360's are not selling, you can't find them, and the games by independent and credible review sites say that they definitely don't shine, bugs and issues asside.
Microsoft rushed the Xbox360 out the door, and it shows. There is no trolling going on, just the truth.
As much as I love Tetris, there are only so many ways to skin a dead horse.
Making a cutesy, semi autonomous version of an NES game playing on one screen while you scramble to make lines on a Tetris board below is really lame, in my opinion.
I have been wanting to develop a version of Tetris that uses some novel ideas to the game play I haven't yet seen (although Tetris worlds and Tetris Elements have used some of the ideas I have had). I.e. I want to add to the Tetris experience, not just add some gimmicks to it. Of course I can't call it Tetris, but "That block falling game" has some appeal.
I don't know if the Tetris experience is improved with a touch screen, my guess is it just makes it annoying compared to the quick response of a gamepad and buttons.
In all, this is a childish gimmick, certainly not in keeping with Nintendo's supposed statement that they aim to target the 35+ year old market. Keep flogging the Mario, Donkey Kong and Zela franchises in hundreds of off-shoot games and your never going to get adults believing you are making games for them.
Missing one point.
Developing software for retail with an illegal copy of OSX is one way to get sued up the wazoo or even land in jail.
If your going to develop for OSX, then your going to own a Mac and own OSX as well.
All this will do is cause OSX to be distributed for free, run on PC's, and hurt Apple because it is currently expected every license of OSX is for a Mac sold by Apple. Without the ability to tie OSX to Mac based hardware, Apple cannot sustain OSX development.
Apple doesn't want to become an OS only vendor, they will fail. OSX hasn't inspired PC owners to switch, even with cheap Mac Mini's and other novel computers. If Apple dropped Mac hardware and simply sold another PC Windows competitor, they won't inspire much of a switch as well. Despite all the benefits and strengths of OSX, there still isn't great software support. Developing software for OSX isn't because of a lack of exposure, its because of a lack of good quality development tools, including Apple's own XCode which is that last tool I would want to work with.
In the end, Apple would love it if people ran Windows on Mac hardware, they want to sell more Mac hardware. But it is Apple's worst nightmare for OSX to become a novelty OS for PC's. I can't understand why the didn't think this would happen or take greater steps to prevent this from happening.
Nintendo hopes to gain the 35+ market, their spokesperson says so. ( I think its more they need to capture the 20+ market).
Then he goes on about Nintendogs, a game squarely marketed for juvenile girls.
I am all up for the new Revolution, hoping Nintendo will put their money where their mouth is, but I have no doubts that the new Revolution will cater to children with derivative Mario Party titles that will make novel use of the new motion based controller system. Nintendo has not yet focused on adult gaming, and one can only hope that Nintendo is finally realizing that adult gamers are making up a larger market with disposable income.
To say Sony and Microsoft failed suggest that Nintendo is trying to downplay the fact they have been underdogs in an industry that almost passed them buy. Without catering to an adult market, Nintendo allowed their once near 90% marketshare to slip to less then 20%.
We will see what Nintendo's goal is with the new Revolution. But I am sure that the first 6 Nintendo titles will be based on a Mario, Luigi, Wario, Kirby, Zelda, Metroid, or Nintendogs franchise. Probably throw in a Resident Evil just to say they are not entirely a G rated company. The rest of the release titles by 3rd party companies will be party based novelty games that make generous use of the remote controller. But, NONE of the games will cater to the adult market.
The only thing Nintendo has going for them in the Revolution is support for their entire backlibrary (hopefully this feature won't be dropped). Adult players will probably pick up the Revolution for nostalgic reasons, playing old favourites once again.
Only time will tell if Nintendo has any real plans to cater to the adult marketplace, but I doubt it.
The Intel Chip is 32 bit, you wouldn't be running an accurate benchmark suite if you compared 32 to 64 bit applications.
Windows does have a 64 bit OS, Windows XP 64. Its been around for a while. Unfortunately, 64bit performance under Windows suffers greatly over 32 bit applications, so you don't want it.
Lastly, your confusing what it means to use 64 bit. 64 bit isn't twice the power of 32 bit applications. 64 bit really describes the address space allowing for bigger numbers and the ability to address larger memory and storage sizes. 64 bit doesn't double 32 bit performance. In fact, without any compiler optimization, 64bit applications would perform the same as 32 bit applications in reality. The only time a 64 bit application will outperform a 32 bit application is if you highly optimize a 32bit application to work with 64 bits, for instance, take a math intensive application using 32bit arithmetic and optimize it so that multiple operations can be performed at the same time in a 64 bit address environment (double load the registers with 32 bit numbers). In reality, few general use applications benefit from this level of optimization.
In all honestly, AMD jumped the gun going to 64 bit because in reality there is few benefits of moving to 64bit except in enterprise servers where you need to address more then 8gb of memory and terabytes of disk storage.
Honestly, if Google was truely serious about creating a Linux based GOOS then why do a half assed "port" of picasa using Wine. Wine has always resulted in half assed implementations of Windows software, often lacking real performance and often many features disabled. I am surprise Google with all their newly minted billions would not just higher a bunch of Linux Developers and make a native Linux version of Picasa.
And don't fool yourselves, Wine IS an emulator. Anything that has to mediate between native software code and native OS/Hardware code is an emulator. It may not be a hardware emulator (i.e. not translating to machine code the software code wasn't written for), but it is a software emulator translating windows calls to Linux calls. And in any case, emulators are slow.
Actually, I think they just dramatically underestimated their performance and life cycle.
Lets face it, Nasa hasn't had a lot of success as of late. If they sent a couple of rovers to Mars and suggested they would last 3 years, and then they died 2 days into the mission, it would be egg on Nasa's face. Instead, they said the rovers had a 3 month life expectancy, and everyone is slapping Nasa on the back after 2 years into the mission. I think Nasa purposely make the 3 months comment just to reap the benefits of finally having a successful mission to mars.
Nasa over designs things, so I was dubious when they said the Mars rovers would only last 3 months. Barring any significant dust or wind storms, there is no reason why the rovers should not have lasted this long if they are solar powered and reasonably well engineered.
What is unbelievable is that Nasa designed something that didn't f*ck up in the first 3 months, or even on landing. But I would take the whole "only designed for a 3 month mission" with a big spoon full of sugar, internally the rovers were probably designed to last a decade. Your car would last a century if some company put 800+ million into creating it, I would expect the same from a couple of 400 million dollar platforms with wheels on them. Remember, the mars rovers we over budget and delayed, so lowering expectations is Nasa's typical method for covering up budget overruns and delays. Once something demonstrates apparently unexpected success, everybody forgets about the price tag.
Give me my Freedom to listen!
I am all for someone's freedom of speech, but I should also have the freedom to listen, or not. Filling my email inbox with unsolicited "free speech" is a problem.
If I was truly interested in someone's opinion, let me subscribe to a mailing list, or make some form of indication that I want to receive their freedom of speech, or go to their blog and read it at my leisure.
Forcing someone to have to wade through garbage free speech is almost as repressive as censorship. Forcing someone to listen to "free speech" is a dictatorship.
Anybody that can't see the benefits and cool factor of this need to go back to their caves and pull out some charcoal.
Someone said they can't see the average user wanting this? Did you see the video? I could see about a dozen areas that the average end user would wan this display for:
Multimedia organization( group photos quickly and in a more native concept)
Multimedia editing.
More robust UI interaction and quicker access. Believe it or not, the computer mouse is not intuitive compared to point and touch.
Video games, more interaction and unique game play possibilities.
Did you watch the video?
As a UI interface designer, I could easily see how some fairly complex interaction is handled quickly by being able to use multiple points of contact. Trying to duplicate the same interaction with mouse and keyboard is ancient and slow by comparison.
In the end, this is an interactive display that the average end users WANT. Get rid of the keyboard and mouse! This will allow computers to be setup as interactive displays on walls, or the coffee table or counter or desktop top allowing quick and easy access without cumbersome external interfaces forced on us.
While many consider the PC the center of their worlds, sitting in front of a PC to listen to music or watch videos is not my cup of tea.
My PC at home is in my home office, and I do listen to internet radio when I am working there, but I don't generally spend my entire day there. Internet radio needs to find solutions to make the content available on any home media device.
I am anxiously waiting for the TuneDock from Griffin Technology, which will allow both iPod playback on your home theater system (with onscreen television display) AND integrated with internet radio as a standalone receiver.
This is what internet radio needs to catch on, a cheap appliance that can integrate with people's home theater and stereo systems.
Also, Internet Radio needs to step up an improve the quality. I am tired of 24, 48, 56, and 64 kbps feeds that sound like your listening to radio from a tin box in the subway. If its not at least 128kbps (i.e. CD quality), then don't bother. Also, internet radio seems to suffer if there is any network traffic at your end. Perhaps its just the poor way most Internet radio software is implemented, but when the radio cuts in an out and drops connection frequently, its just annoying. Better standards are needed for the delivery and quality of internet radio. Something, BTW, Satellite Radio both excels at.
I can see that perhaps subscription rates might be beneficial for many internet radio providers, but MANY of them are just live feeds of their regular FM radio broadcasts. THESE SHOULD NEVER BE PAID FOR. FM radio stations make money by selling advertising and kickbacks from music companies, they should not expect a revenue stream from streaming their FREE LIVE radio.
But those internet only feeds, if they got together and formed a subscription based service like XFM or Sirius, then I could see how a subscription revenue would improve quality.
In the end, though, Internet Radio needs to become a consumer electronics product, not tied to the computer. If they don't break out of the beige box, then it will never catch on and they cannot remain viable as a solution to FM and Satellite radio. Hopefully more solutions like the TuneDock will become available allowing more ubiquitous access to Internet Radio.
BTW, Griffin Technology also has an excellent product called iFill, which allows you to record Internet Radio streams and fill the iPod with new content. No, I am not a sales associate.