I've seen this rumor floating around from enough sources that I won't be surprised if it happens. That said, even though other rumored apple products have turned out to be true, it seems that the only thing that is off is the price -- apple prices these things for about 20% more than what analysts predict.
If Apple comes out w/ a tablet, I can easily see them pricing it at $999.
That's kinda the point. Jobs' take was that powerpc core surrounded by umpteen signal processors was *inferrior* to simply a powerpc cpu for the general purpose computing role Apple needed it for.
If anything it would have made more sense for Apple to go with the Xbox 360's tri-core version of the powerpc, but even that wasn't very well geared towards general purpose environment. Similar to a Pentium4, the they increased the number of pipeline stage so they could jack up the clock speed and theoretical maximum performance. The problem is that to achieve that performance you need to minimize the use of branching logic.
Also, Jobs kinda hates Microsoft and using a Microsoft-designed cpu would be an admission of defeat.
Mr. Jobs rejected the idea, telling Mr. Kutaragi that he was disappointed with the Cell design, which he believes will be even less effective than the PowerPC.
And this was way back in 2005. The Cell is arguably good in it's role as the cpu for a game console / blu-ray playback device, but that doesn't mean that is the best choice for a general-purpose computing device.
Hmm... that is a very good rebuttal. I like your pricing model better. Interestingly, Cox in my area is experimenting with this model: you can pay more for higher bandwidth. To be honest though I'm so suspicious of cox that I haven't looked into it.
And I think we're both in agreement that TWC was much more concerned about the threat of iptv and downloaded movies than anything else.
Thanks for the taking the time laying out a good argument.
I'm torn on this one. Personally I think that metered bandwidth is the most equitable way charge customers, but I think that the way TWC went about it was a shameless money-grab.
We're already accustomed to consumption-based pricing. We see it all the time: electicity, water, gas, food, etc. Same should go for internet access. And in fact, metered bandwidth is the pricing model that many ISP's use for hosting companies and other ISP's.
But here's the catch, if TWC went to a per-GB model with the aim to keep their revenues the same as when they had per-month pricing, 95% of their customers would pay less. A LOT LESS.
But that's not what they were proposing. They wanted that 95% of customers' costs to stay the same, and have 5% of high-usage customers to pay more. Under that scenario, TWC would make TONS MORE MONEY. Essentially they wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
If somebody wants to do metered pricing right, here's what they gotta do. Send each of your customers a letter saying "based on your monthly usage, we predict that your bill would be $AMOUNT under our new pricing model". However, seeing as how the cable companies have totally pissed away consumer trust, I doubt anyone would believe them.
You're confusing this with a copyright issue. It's not. Also, we're not talking about some offline operating system. Blizzard's API's utilize Blizzard's server resources. If somebody makes an addon to facilitate goldfarming or causes disproportionate amount of server load, you can be sure that Blizzard will make whatever efforts they can to prevent that addon from running. And I'm not talking about taking legal action. They may simply revoke your API key so your addon doesn't, or maybe they simply pull your application from an official listing. And, yeah, they do have every right to do that.
I ANAL, of course, but I don't think Blizzard really can do much but engage in manually trying to identify and disable mods they dislike.
I think we're in agreement. Sorry if implied that Blizzard has some sort of legal recourse (they may, but ianal either). I think what's most likely is that they're going to just start yanking api keys (do they use api keys? i dunno how it works) or otherwise blocking authors that don't cooperate.
If someone takes the time to code the addon they should be able to ask for whatever they want for it
Nope, when you live under someones roof you play by their rules. It might be kindof a dick move, but it's their API and they have every right to control how it's used. And it's not like this stipulation is unheard of; Microsoft has similar rules surrounding use of their GamerTag API as well as Google Maps with their free API (this is an oversimplification, but in general you are not allowed to use GMap mashups in for-pay websites).
It is their labor not Blizzard's.
Not to belittle the work of modders, but the fact that they can write add-ons at all is due to the substantial amount of resources that Blizzard has invested not only in the development of the API, but also the game itself and the massive server infrastructure.
I may not like it (I haven't decide either way yet whether it's a good or bad move - I'm very wary of Blizzard ever since the bnetd fiasco). But they are absolutely within their rights to do this.
If a feature is deselected, it is not available for use. This means the files (binaries and data) are not loaded by the operating system (for security-conscious customers) and not available to users on the computer. These same files are staged so that the features can easily be added back to the running OS without additional media. This staging is important feedback we have received from customers who definitely do not like to dig up the installation DVD.
Best of both worlds in my opinion. I also like that there is one unified interface for managing features. This is just one example, but in vista you could use 'add/remove components' for IIS, but if you wanted to disable Media Center, you had to do it from the group policy editor. Extremely frustrating.
Obviously there is a huge potential for for Valve to cut costs and maintain the same level of profits by selling direct to the customer, and they would probably *love* to do just that. The problem is that retailers tend to get pissed off when they are getting undercut by the wholesaler.
Think about it: you pay valve $32 for a copy of L4D, and you turn around and mark it up to $50. A month later valve turns around and sells that game --directly to the consumer-- for $25. Hell, that's $7 less than what you paid! You'd be a tad pissed, right?
I imagine that valve is walking a bit of a tightrope here. Pricing L4D at $25 wasn't so much a gamble in terms of whether it would boost sales (thats obvious), but of how retailers would react. It may be a test of whether valve can just write off retail altogether and go it alone with digital distribution.
True poetic justice would be for these corrupt, callous judges to serve their sentences in the same kind of environment to which they were happy to dispatch juvenile defendants.
I dunno, man. I'd imagine that being a former judge in a prison is right up there with being a former prosecutor. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to keep him on 24-hour isolation and/or suicide watch. He deserves much worse, but I suspect this will not be a cakewalk for him either.
Honestly, this is one of the worst-written front page stories on I've seen on./ in quite some time. No citation, no proof, nothing. Not even a fucking link to a story? Please.
Win7 might very well be Evil Incarnate. But it's not like your gonna convince anyone with 'journalism' that reads along the line of "yeah this one guy I know says that win7 totally sucks".
No offense, I think hacking a DTV converter is a neat idea, but I think you've unwittingly highlighted a major problem with the DTV coupon program. I think the program was generally intended to ensure that people in fixed/low income situations would be able to receive television signals after the transition. Instead, the majority of coupons have been redeemed by early adopters/geeks who generally do not need a dtv converter in the first place or would have been able to afford one without a coupon. In my experience, most of the people I know that need a converter did not even know about the program -- the only ones who knew about it were fellow techs who haven't had an analog TV in years.
Now we have people (most notably the Obama administration) stating that the DTV deadline because the coupon program is out of funds and those very people that program was designed for *still* do not have a coupon or a converter.
So my question is: if this is just some "for the fun of it" lark that you're going on with these DTV converters, don't you feel like it was at least slightly unethical (or at least a violation of the spirit of the program) to get a hand-out from the government?
That was because Opera forced them to [opera.com], not because they wanted to look like nice guys.
Sorry, but this is laughable. With a marketshare that is measured in fractions of a percent, Opera isn't going to force anybody to do anything. It might have something to do with threats from the EU. And before you start: no, Opera didn't force the EU to do that either.
I do like Javascript, and agree that it has suprising depth. That said, I think that Brendon probably didn't anticipate how large some of these javascript codebases would become. Well over a decade ago you never saw anything like the javascript frameworks like what you have today. Sure there are ways to mitigate javascript's scalability issues but it's not formalized and explicit.
I really like some of Brendon Eich's proposals for JS2, and they seem to address some of the issues of the grandparent's post: packages, visibility qualifiers, (optional) static type checking. @AKAImBatman: I've come to really respect your comments here on slashdot, so I'd be keen to get your take on JS2.
I worked as a cashier in the Circuit City music department for the first couple years I was in college. It was a pretty low-key job and since CD's were really just a loss-leader to get people into the store there was really no pressure on me to sell. As long as I kept my work area clean and provided good customer service my boss was happy and life was cool. And every month I was able to take home any of the promotional CD's from the previous month - so on the plus side it gave me a chance to appreciate music I wouldn't normally be inclined to purchase (this was pre-napster, mind you). On top of that, the employee discount was pretty substantial. Overall it was a pretty decent gig as far as joe-jobs go.
The other departments were a different story. The salespeople were borderline sociopaths. There was tremendous pressure on them to sale -- and I would even see salespeople chewed out in public for underperforming -- but because they were usually such raging assholes it was hard to feel any sympathy for them.
After I quit (due to getting an internship) I never set a foot back in the store. I knew how much the markups were on were on everything, and I couldn't bring myself to actually pay for music.
Also, if you regularly drink French Press coffee, you're ingesting a significant amount of cafestol [wikipedia.org] which is shown to significantly raise cholesterol.
Damnit... I got a french press for christmas and was lovin it.
Tina Fey was right: if you're feeling too good about yourself, the internet is always there to bring you back down.
I think that your DVD drive is on it's way out. I have the same issues, even on games that are scratch free. I suggest transferring the game to the 360 hard drive (you *do* have a 360 hard drive, don't you?). I was having the same exact issues as you until I did that. Never any read errors and the game loads up much faster too.
Slashdot Mirror
Except for movies. And TV shows. And audiobooks. Oh, and applications.
But yeah, besides those things, *totally* DRM free.
I've seen this rumor floating around from enough sources that I won't be surprised if it happens. That said, even though other rumored apple products have turned out to be true, it seems that the only thing that is off is the price -- apple prices these things for about 20% more than what analysts predict.
If Apple comes out w/ a tablet, I can easily see them pricing it at $999.
That's kinda the point. Jobs' take was that powerpc core surrounded by umpteen signal processors was *inferrior* to simply a powerpc cpu for the general purpose computing role Apple needed it for.
If anything it would have made more sense for Apple to go with the Xbox 360's tri-core version of the powerpc, but even that wasn't very well geared towards general purpose environment. Similar to a Pentium4, the they increased the number of pipeline stage so they could jack up the clock speed and theoretical maximum performance. The problem is that to achieve that performance you need to minimize the use of branching logic.
Also, Jobs kinda hates Microsoft and using a Microsoft-designed cpu would be an admission of defeat.
You are mistaken. It's not as though Apple didn't see the Cell coming. Sony shopped it to them but they simply weren't interested.
And this was way back in 2005. The Cell is arguably good in it's role as the cpu for a game console / blu-ray playback device, but that doesn't mean that is the best choice for a general-purpose computing device.
...about ten years ago. Of course, they were calling it "the gigalapse" back then.
Hmm... that is a very good rebuttal. I like your pricing model better. Interestingly, Cox in my area is experimenting with this model: you can pay more for higher bandwidth. To be honest though I'm so suspicious of cox that I haven't looked into it.
And I think we're both in agreement that TWC was much more concerned about the threat of iptv and downloaded movies than anything else.
Thanks for the taking the time laying out a good argument.
Through my (admittedly limited) experience with updating another team's perl scripts, I've discovered the design philosophy of perl:
I'm torn on this one. Personally I think that metered bandwidth is the most equitable way charge customers, but I think that the way TWC went about it was a shameless money-grab.
We're already accustomed to consumption-based pricing. We see it all the time: electicity, water, gas, food, etc. Same should go for internet access. And in fact, metered bandwidth is the pricing model that many ISP's use for hosting companies and other ISP's.
But here's the catch, if TWC went to a per-GB model with the aim to keep their revenues the same as when they had per-month pricing, 95% of their customers would pay less. A LOT LESS.
But that's not what they were proposing. They wanted that 95% of customers' costs to stay the same, and have 5% of high-usage customers to pay more. Under that scenario, TWC would make TONS MORE MONEY. Essentially they wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
If somebody wants to do metered pricing right, here's what they gotta do. Send each of your customers a letter saying "based on your monthly usage, we predict that your bill would be $AMOUNT under our new pricing model". However, seeing as how the cable companies have totally pissed away consumer trust, I doubt anyone would believe them.
You're confusing this with a copyright issue. It's not. Also, we're not talking about some offline operating system. Blizzard's API's utilize Blizzard's server resources. If somebody makes an addon to facilitate goldfarming or causes disproportionate amount of server load, you can be sure that Blizzard will make whatever efforts they can to prevent that addon from running. And I'm not talking about taking legal action. They may simply revoke your API key so your addon doesn't, or maybe they simply pull your application from an official listing. And, yeah, they do have every right to do that.
I think we're in agreement. Sorry if implied that Blizzard has some sort of legal recourse (they may, but ianal either). I think what's most likely is that they're going to just start yanking api keys (do they use api keys? i dunno how it works) or otherwise blocking authors that don't cooperate.
Nope, when you live under someones roof you play by their rules. It might be kindof a dick move, but it's their API and they have every right to control how it's used. And it's not like this stipulation is unheard of; Microsoft has similar rules surrounding use of their GamerTag API as well as Google Maps with their free API (this is an oversimplification, but in general you are not allowed to use GMap mashups in for-pay websites).
Not to belittle the work of modders, but the fact that they can write add-ons at all is due to the substantial amount of resources that Blizzard has invested not only in the development of the API, but also the game itself and the massive server infrastructure.
I may not like it (I haven't decide either way yet whether it's a good or bad move - I'm very wary of Blizzard ever since the bnetd fiasco). But they are absolutely within their rights to do this.
Yeah, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and state that people do *not* rush out and replace their standard iPhone headphones with a $100-300 pair.
On the other hand, I found some $7,250 speaker cables that you may be interested in!
From the article:
Best of both worlds in my opinion. I also like that there is one unified interface for managing features. This is just one example, but in vista you could use 'add/remove components' for IIS, but if you wanted to disable Media Center, you had to do it from the group policy editor. Extremely frustrating.
Obviously there is a huge potential for for Valve to cut costs and maintain the same level of profits by selling direct to the customer, and they would probably *love* to do just that. The problem is that retailers tend to get pissed off when they are getting undercut by the wholesaler.
Think about it: you pay valve $32 for a copy of L4D, and you turn around and mark it up to $50. A month later valve turns around and sells that game --directly to the consumer-- for $25. Hell, that's $7 less than what you paid! You'd be a tad pissed, right?
I imagine that valve is walking a bit of a tightrope here. Pricing L4D at $25 wasn't so much a gamble in terms of whether it would boost sales (thats obvious), but of how retailers would react. It may be a test of whether valve can just write off retail altogether and go it alone with digital distribution.
I dunno, man. I'd imagine that being a former judge in a prison is right up there with being a former prosecutor. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to keep him on 24-hour isolation and/or suicide watch. He deserves much worse, but I suspect this will not be a cakewalk for him either.
Honestly, this is one of the worst-written front page stories on I've seen on ./ in quite some time. No citation, no proof, nothing. Not even a fucking link to a story? Please.
Win7 might very well be Evil Incarnate. But it's not like your gonna convince anyone with 'journalism' that reads along the line of "yeah this one guy I know says that win7 totally sucks".
Well shit, does this mean that I will need to pay state sales tax when I purchase Microsoft products online?
Tell me, when did it first dawn on you that this was a Pepsi ad?
Sorry, but it seems pretty obvious to me that this was an ad, so I don't understand why you are acting as though this is some big conspiracy.
No offense, I think hacking a DTV converter is a neat idea, but I think you've unwittingly highlighted a major problem with the DTV coupon program. I think the program was generally intended to ensure that people in fixed/low income situations would be able to receive television signals after the transition. Instead, the majority of coupons have been redeemed by early adopters/geeks who generally do not need a dtv converter in the first place or would have been able to afford one without a coupon. In my experience, most of the people I know that need a converter did not even know about the program -- the only ones who knew about it were fellow techs who haven't had an analog TV in years.
Now we have people (most notably the Obama administration) stating that the DTV deadline because the coupon program is out of funds and those very people that program was designed for *still* do not have a coupon or a converter.
So my question is: if this is just some "for the fun of it" lark that you're going on with these DTV converters, don't you feel like it was at least slightly unethical (or at least a violation of the spirit of the program) to get a hand-out from the government?
Sorry, but this is laughable. With a marketshare that is measured in fractions of a percent, Opera isn't going to force anybody to do anything. It might have something to do with threats from the EU. And before you start: no, Opera didn't force the EU to do that either.
I do like Javascript, and agree that it has suprising depth. That said, I think that Brendon probably didn't anticipate how large some of these javascript codebases would become. Well over a decade ago you never saw anything like the javascript frameworks like what you have today. Sure there are ways to mitigate javascript's scalability issues but it's not formalized and explicit.
I really like some of Brendon Eich's proposals for JS2, and they seem to address some of the issues of the grandparent's post: packages, visibility qualifiers, (optional) static type checking. @AKAImBatman: I've come to really respect your comments here on slashdot, so I'd be keen to get your take on JS2.
I worked as a cashier in the Circuit City music department for the first couple years I was in college. It was a pretty low-key job and since CD's were really just a loss-leader to get people into the store there was really no pressure on me to sell. As long as I kept my work area clean and provided good customer service my boss was happy and life was cool. And every month I was able to take home any of the promotional CD's from the previous month - so on the plus side it gave me a chance to appreciate music I wouldn't normally be inclined to purchase (this was pre-napster, mind you). On top of that, the employee discount was pretty substantial. Overall it was a pretty decent gig as far as joe-jobs go.
The other departments were a different story. The salespeople were borderline sociopaths. There was tremendous pressure on them to sale -- and I would even see salespeople chewed out in public for underperforming -- but because they were usually such raging assholes it was hard to feel any sympathy for them.
After I quit (due to getting an internship) I never set a foot back in the store. I knew how much the markups were on were on everything, and I couldn't bring myself to actually pay for music.
Damnit... I got a french press for christmas and was lovin it.
Tina Fey was right: if you're feeling too good about yourself, the internet is always there to bring you back down.
I think that your DVD drive is on it's way out. I have the same issues, even on games that are scratch free. I suggest transferring the game to the 360 hard drive (you *do* have a 360 hard drive, don't you?). I was having the same exact issues as you until I did that. Never any read errors and the game loads up much faster too.
Hey, do we really need to resort to these petty ad hominem attacks when referring to Ann Coulter?