When many people believe that the continued success of a large company depends on one individual, his health becomes news.
An entire hockey team can depend on the performance of one player. A religion can lean on just one character/thing. Apple is obviously not successful only because of Steve Jobs, but you have to admit that his performance in recent years changed the way we look at things.
It is easy to sit here and look at Apple's products and think "yeah, I would approve that product too, and make millions". It's an entirely different thing to have a deep understanding of how the industry works, predict products, functionality, timing and investments.
So, yes, I would say that Apple needs Jobs because Steve is Apple and Apple is Steve.
I have to ask...why? I thought Microsoft was massively profitable, even today. Surely they don't have to fire all these people to prevent losses?
Profit has nothing to do with layoffs. If they get rid of 17% of their work force, they also have more money to spend on other projects, which in turn lead to an increase in work force. This is just a clean-up of a company that has grown so massive.
I also suspect that outsourcing plays a big role here.
Last but not least, remember that only a fragment of the 90,000 employees play a key role in the company. Windows is developed by a team of 1,000 people, XBox by roughly 170 plus outsource staff, etc. I suspect applications like Office require a not so significant work force.
I agree. Nobody is selling 32-bit processors anymore.
That's sort of the point with Windows 7. It is designed to run on older machines too. You think they get crap for going 32 and 64-bit, but imagine how much crap they'd get if they didn't.
You're a little too paranoid.
I trust the pirates and torrents FAR more than the software companys.
That's just not right. I've been doing similar things in the past when I spent countless hours with new releases for warez groups. The thing is, they have an agenda just like Microsoft, and both organizations consist of more than just one individual. If you believe that piracy stands for justice (unlike Microsoft), then you're just plain wrong.
Having said that, I'm not saying that you can trust Microsoft more in this case, but pirates can be just as dishonest as anyone else (if not more).
I don't see why this is surprising. This is just Windows Vista service pack 3 after all. Naturally the beta is going to be more stable than the initial Vista beta.
The changes and additions that Windows 7 brings are more significant than you think. It's hardly a service pack because, as the name suggests, it would only pack services that need fixes. Although Vista isn't what many expected it to be, it's still fully functional. Windows 7 looks similar because it takes the best ideas of Vista and makes the rest of it better.
This is another example of the broken patent system. No government should be able to patent something--that technology was funded by the taxpayer and should thus be owned by the taxpayer, meaning that it is public and thus not patentable.
I fully agree, but at the same time, it also prevents some company to claim that it has the copyright of something that belongs to the "people".
It will never be effective. The average Joe coulden't tell you what DRM stood for let alone boycott it.
The average Joe must not know what DRM means to experience the implications of it. I hate car analogies, but you don't have to be a greasemonkey to understand that something is wrong with your car.
The average Joe will run into DRM restrictions, and;
..ask a friend about it (or) ..google it (or) ..curse and never use the service again
I too had a BP6 and was very satisfied with it. Having said that, I challenge you to name a single motherboard maker without any faulty motherboards. If I had to, I could list two-digit numbers of corrupted motherboards from Asus, MSI, Foxconn, Chieftec, AOpen and Intel.
It also sounds like a great healing tool in battle. I'm sure many amputations can be avoided in the future if trained medics know where to apply it when it really matters.
In fact, Gartner analyst Steve Prentice told the BBC recently that the mouse will be dead in three to five years.
I know Steve has 33 years of IT experience, but such claim is anything but probable. The only true mouse replacement would be a thought-based medium and I doubt that any commercialization of such technology is here within 5 years. For web surfing, touch and movement works just fine, but when you go for precision like gaming, Photoshop and programming.
A movement tracker for laptops would be a great touchpad replacement, however.
You're missing my entire point, which is that when you (for example) send money to someone, the documents of this transaction is on both ends (the sender and the receiver). Votes basically go one way.
The point is that there is room for voter frauds simply because of this. If it was a money transaction, it would never work simply because the documentation had to match on both ends.
Don't dig too deep into my comment, because I was only making an obvious point about why financial security systems are far more complex and secure than voting systems.
It's usually correct to not blame on malice what can be explained by incompetence. But I do find it hard to understand how a seemingly-simple requirement (essentially, count the number of times a button has been pressed) can be so badly botched by a company whose other "secure terminal" products (eg, ATMs) seem trustworthy and reliable, without the implication of a sinister motive.
That's because money is heavily monitored and tracked wherever it goes. Votes are registered and received, but not monitored and traced on two ends.
And apparently, Microsoft thinks people like being forced to use their software.
Microsoft may not have the best reputation, but they aren't ignorant.
Having said that, no one is forced to use Microsoft's software. Microsoft simply requires IE to get the full feature set for Thumbtack. That doesn't make it incompatible with FF.
I have a few issues with this decision, but I certainly don't think it's wrong. No one is forced to use Thumbtack; there are alternatives to it.
I haven't been back home for almost 5 years, but it saddens me to see that only 7000 people were in protest.
Come on, there was 1/2 a million for the anti Iraq rallies, I guess since the public couldn't stop the government on that one they just can't be bothered anymore.
I agree that the number is rather low, but keep in mind that a war based on false intelligence is something more people can understand, as opposed to internet regulations that only (well mostly) internet techies really care about.
The question is, what do you really need it for? You would need peripherals with USB3 to benefit from it and most USB items don't even need such raw speed. Keyboards, mice, printers and many other things do just fine.
Don't wait for USB3. When you really need USB3, just get a PCI card with two or three ports and voila. These things hardly cost more than 20 to 30 bucks.
Riiiight. And the Playstation 4 and Nintendo Wii part 2 will abandon discs in favor of cartridges again. Just our of curiosity I looked-up how much it would cost to replace my standard disk drive:
300 GB disk drive - I spent $90.
256 GB solid state - $7,426 to $9,125 online
Ouch.
To be fair, a turning point in this case would mean that SSDs are finally getting enough attention to grab significant portions of the market. It's not like they'll outsell HDDs in the next three to four years.
And quite frankly, I don't need more than 128 GB on a laptop. For videos, I would use a portable 2.5" drive at 320 GB. They are small, powered by USB and extremely cheap.
As far as your price comparison goes, that one is extremely unfair. I bought a 256 GB for 700 bucks two months ago and by the mid of next year, I'm sure prices will drop below $400. Once they do that, I can guarantee you that a LOT of people will start considering these.
I also suspect that many laptops will come with SSD/HDD combos during this transition. Maybe 64 GB for speed, 320 GB for storage. It requires very little extra room and it makes sense.
[..] claiming that 18% of consumers who are watching standard definition channels on a HDTV think that the feed is in hi-def.
There's a big difference between comparing HD vs. SD and watching an SD broadcast only and decide whether it is HD or not. The title is rather misleading.
I don't want to sound like a brat, but I actually wanted to test my 1 Gbit home connection to its full extent. I had two identical computers with 1 Gbit cards and wiring, RAID configurations that surpass the 1 Gbit barrier and whatnot.
I was actually very satisfied with the 544 Mbit throughput that I reached, but I wanted to see if I could get more. I phoned the ISP, explained the problem and had it fixed two days later. Now I'm peaking at 978 Mbit. Still, it's interesting that ISP:s of such high speed connections care so much about the extra excessiveness.
Anyway, that was about a year ago and since then I've moved to another country. Nowadays, I have a 30 Mbit over cable, effective bandwidth of some 25 Mbit, but I'm not complaining.
"Cloverfield" was hardly deep. Lots of running and screaming and destroying of cities by monsters and not much else.
I doubt that JJ Abrams had the intention of making Cloverfield deep. It's simply a Blair Witch Project copy with fancy effects and a story about love. It was basically just footage, but it worked incredibly well.
The experience I have with JJ Abrams previous work is that he enjoys tasteful action and a deep storyline, filled with surprises. I think he has far too much integrity and good taste to jump on a mindless movie.
Having said that, I don't think "re-imagined darker movies" is a bad thing. It worked well in Nolan's Batman movies and I can bet that it works for older, softer movies. I had that problem with the latest Superman movie, which was just too soft. I enjoy superhero movies, but I picture villains as a little more blood thirsty beings and that's what I want to see.
Quantum of Solace is a good movie. It's not as good as Casino Royale was, but I guess a lot of people had too high expectations of this one. I don't think it has too much action, but rather just a lack of surprising moments and depth. It's just as dark as it should be, however.
Now that Microsoft are feeling the pinch of competition, they no longer have hardware manufacturers over a barrel. The hardware manufacturers now have the power to control the public perception of Windows, rather than Windows controlling the perception of hardware.
How did you come to this conclusion? The number of Windows users is still growing. OS X is taking a small percentage from that share, but their software is still restricted to their own hardware, making it very uninteresting for hardware manufacturers.
It's the fact that Windows is open to any hardware that makes manufacturers prefer this operating system. Also, the two factions live in symbiosis since none would exist without the other. Basically, Microsoft wants their software to work well and the manufacturers surely want their hardware to work well in what is to become the next major operating system that over 90% of the world's population uses.
The problem is that your ISP is using bandwidth schemes that belonged years back. You ask what you can do to minimize your bandwidth usage, but aside from ad block programs, there's nothing you can do.
I wonder how an ISP can defend such pricing in 2008 where a simple Youtube video can set you back 100 MB. I've noticed that my everyday usage goes beyond 500 MB on a slow day, but it's usually well over 1000 MB per day considering the fact that I watch some videos and such.
Anyway, install an ad blocker, set your browser cache to 50 GB and install two browsers; one displaying images and one that won't. So every time you check your e-mail, use the one that has images disabled.
There's really nothing you can do beyond that, unless there's a nifty program that could download JPG files in really low quality. This is possible and utilized by some older browsers back when JPG files were loaded on 56k connections. The images would first load in compressed low quality and continue until it was 100%.
One of the main reasons this might work in Australia is because it is an island. Cars don't get on and off this country, so buying a car and worrying about going to "non-compatible" countries won't be a problem.
This is why their initiative may have a bigger effect than, say, a European country surrounded by differently positioned countries.
Slashdot Mirror
In that case, expect a reverse-reverse: a virus that redirects piratebay to a site that downloads Troj/Qhost-AC for you.
Except on April 1st when it's actually June 23rd.
When many people believe that the continued success of a large company depends on one individual, his health becomes news.
An entire hockey team can depend on the performance of one player. A religion can lean on just one character/thing. Apple is obviously not successful only because of Steve Jobs, but you have to admit that his performance in recent years changed the way we look at things.
It is easy to sit here and look at Apple's products and think "yeah, I would approve that product too, and make millions". It's an entirely different thing to have a deep understanding of how the industry works, predict products, functionality, timing and investments.
So, yes, I would say that Apple needs Jobs because Steve is Apple and Apple is Steve.
I have to ask...why? I thought Microsoft was massively profitable, even today. Surely they don't have to fire all these people to prevent losses?
Profit has nothing to do with layoffs. If they get rid of 17% of their work force, they also have more money to spend on other projects, which in turn lead to an increase in work force. This is just a clean-up of a company that has grown so massive.
I also suspect that outsourcing plays a big role here.
Last but not least, remember that only a fragment of the 90,000 employees play a key role in the company. Windows is developed by a team of 1,000 people, XBox by roughly 170 plus outsource staff, etc. I suspect applications like Office require a not so significant work force.
I agree. Nobody is selling 32-bit processors anymore.
That's sort of the point with Windows 7. It is designed to run on older machines too. You think they get crap for going 32 and 64-bit, but imagine how much crap they'd get if they didn't.
You're a little too paranoid. I trust the pirates and torrents FAR more than the software companys.
That's just not right. I've been doing similar things in the past when I spent countless hours with new releases for warez groups. The thing is, they have an agenda just like Microsoft, and both organizations consist of more than just one individual. If you believe that piracy stands for justice (unlike Microsoft), then you're just plain wrong.
Having said that, I'm not saying that you can trust Microsoft more in this case, but pirates can be just as dishonest as anyone else (if not more).
I don't see why this is surprising. This is just Windows Vista service pack 3 after all. Naturally the beta is going to be more stable than the initial Vista beta.
The changes and additions that Windows 7 brings are more significant than you think. It's hardly a service pack because, as the name suggests, it would only pack services that need fixes. Although Vista isn't what many expected it to be, it's still fully functional. Windows 7 looks similar because it takes the best ideas of Vista and makes the rest of it better.
This is another example of the broken patent system. No government should be able to patent something--that technology was funded by the taxpayer and should thus be owned by the taxpayer, meaning that it is public and thus not patentable.
I fully agree, but at the same time, it also prevents some company to claim that it has the copyright of something that belongs to the "people".
It will never be effective. The average Joe coulden't tell you what DRM stood for let alone boycott it.
The average Joe must not know what DRM means to experience the implications of it. I hate car analogies, but you don't have to be a greasemonkey to understand that something is wrong with your car.
..ask a friend about it (or)
..google it (or)
..curse and never use the service again
The average Joe will run into DRM restrictions, and;
I too had a BP6 and was very satisfied with it. Having said that, I challenge you to name a single motherboard maker without any faulty motherboards. If I had to, I could list two-digit numbers of corrupted motherboards from Asus, MSI, Foxconn, Chieftec, AOpen and Intel.
It also sounds like a great healing tool in battle. I'm sure many amputations can be avoided in the future if trained medics know where to apply it when it really matters.
In fact, Gartner analyst Steve Prentice told the BBC recently that the mouse will be dead in three to five years.
I know Steve has 33 years of IT experience, but such claim is anything but probable. The only true mouse replacement would be a thought-based medium and I doubt that any commercialization of such technology is here within 5 years. For web surfing, touch and movement works just fine, but when you go for precision like gaming, Photoshop and programming.
A movement tracker for laptops would be a great touchpad replacement, however.
You're missing my entire point, which is that when you (for example) send money to someone, the documents of this transaction is on both ends (the sender and the receiver). Votes basically go one way.
The point is that there is room for voter frauds simply because of this. If it was a money transaction, it would never work simply because the documentation had to match on both ends.
Don't dig too deep into my comment, because I was only making an obvious point about why financial security systems are far more complex and secure than voting systems.
It's usually correct to not blame on malice what can be explained by incompetence. But I do find it hard to understand how a seemingly-simple requirement (essentially, count the number of times a button has been pressed) can be so badly botched by a company whose other "secure terminal" products (eg, ATMs) seem trustworthy and reliable, without the implication of a sinister motive.
That's because money is heavily monitored and tracked wherever it goes. Votes are registered and received, but not monitored and traced on two ends.
And apparently, Microsoft thinks people like being forced to use their software.
Microsoft may not have the best reputation, but they aren't ignorant.
Having said that, no one is forced to use Microsoft's software. Microsoft simply requires IE to get the full feature set for Thumbtack. That doesn't make it incompatible with FF.
I have a few issues with this decision, but I certainly don't think it's wrong. No one is forced to use Thumbtack; there are alternatives to it.
I haven't been back home for almost 5 years, but it saddens me to see that only 7000 people were in protest. Come on, there was 1/2 a million for the anti Iraq rallies, I guess since the public couldn't stop the government on that one they just can't be bothered anymore.
I agree that the number is rather low, but keep in mind that a war based on false intelligence is something more people can understand, as opposed to internet regulations that only (well mostly) internet techies really care about.
The question is, what do you really need it for? You would need peripherals with USB3 to benefit from it and most USB items don't even need such raw speed. Keyboards, mice, printers and many other things do just fine.
Don't wait for USB3. When you really need USB3, just get a PCI card with two or three ports and voila. These things hardly cost more than 20 to 30 bucks.
Riiiight. And the Playstation 4 and Nintendo Wii part 2 will abandon discs in favor of cartridges again. Just our of curiosity I looked-up how much it would cost to replace my standard disk drive: 300 GB disk drive - I spent $90. 256 GB solid state - $7,426 to $9,125 online Ouch.
To be fair, a turning point in this case would mean that SSDs are finally getting enough attention to grab significant portions of the market. It's not like they'll outsell HDDs in the next three to four years.
And quite frankly, I don't need more than 128 GB on a laptop. For videos, I would use a portable 2.5" drive at 320 GB. They are small, powered by USB and extremely cheap.
As far as your price comparison goes, that one is extremely unfair. I bought a 256 GB for 700 bucks two months ago and by the mid of next year, I'm sure prices will drop below $400. Once they do that, I can guarantee you that a LOT of people will start considering these.
I also suspect that many laptops will come with SSD/HDD combos during this transition. Maybe 64 GB for speed, 320 GB for storage. It requires very little extra room and it makes sense.
18% of Consumers Can't Tell HD From SD
And..
[..] claiming that 18% of consumers who are watching standard definition channels on a HDTV think that the feed is in hi-def.
There's a big difference between comparing HD vs. SD and watching an SD broadcast only and decide whether it is HD or not. The title is rather misleading.
I don't want to sound like a brat, but I actually wanted to test my 1 Gbit home connection to its full extent. I had two identical computers with 1 Gbit cards and wiring, RAID configurations that surpass the 1 Gbit barrier and whatnot.
I was actually very satisfied with the 544 Mbit throughput that I reached, but I wanted to see if I could get more. I phoned the ISP, explained the problem and had it fixed two days later. Now I'm peaking at 978 Mbit. Still, it's interesting that ISP:s of such high speed connections care so much about the extra excessiveness.
Anyway, that was about a year ago and since then I've moved to another country. Nowadays, I have a 30 Mbit over cable, effective bandwidth of some 25 Mbit, but I'm not complaining.
"Cloverfield" was hardly deep. Lots of running and screaming and destroying of cities by monsters and not much else.
I doubt that JJ Abrams had the intention of making Cloverfield deep. It's simply a Blair Witch Project copy with fancy effects and a story about love. It was basically just footage, but it worked incredibly well.
The experience I have with JJ Abrams previous work is that he enjoys tasteful action and a deep storyline, filled with surprises. I think he has far too much integrity and good taste to jump on a mindless movie.
Having said that, I don't think "re-imagined darker movies" is a bad thing. It worked well in Nolan's Batman movies and I can bet that it works for older, softer movies. I had that problem with the latest Superman movie, which was just too soft. I enjoy superhero movies, but I picture villains as a little more blood thirsty beings and that's what I want to see.
Quantum of Solace is a good movie. It's not as good as Casino Royale was, but I guess a lot of people had too high expectations of this one. I don't think it has too much action, but rather just a lack of surprising moments and depth. It's just as dark as it should be, however.
Now that Microsoft are feeling the pinch of competition, they no longer have hardware manufacturers over a barrel. The hardware manufacturers now have the power to control the public perception of Windows, rather than Windows controlling the perception of hardware.
How did you come to this conclusion? The number of Windows users is still growing. OS X is taking a small percentage from that share, but their software is still restricted to their own hardware, making it very uninteresting for hardware manufacturers.
It's the fact that Windows is open to any hardware that makes manufacturers prefer this operating system. Also, the two factions live in symbiosis since none would exist without the other. Basically, Microsoft wants their software to work well and the manufacturers surely want their hardware to work well in what is to become the next major operating system that over 90% of the world's population uses.
The problem is that your ISP is using bandwidth schemes that belonged years back. You ask what you can do to minimize your bandwidth usage, but aside from ad block programs, there's nothing you can do.
I wonder how an ISP can defend such pricing in 2008 where a simple Youtube video can set you back 100 MB. I've noticed that my everyday usage goes beyond 500 MB on a slow day, but it's usually well over 1000 MB per day considering the fact that I watch some videos and such.
Anyway, install an ad blocker, set your browser cache to 50 GB and install two browsers; one displaying images and one that won't. So every time you check your e-mail, use the one that has images disabled.
There's really nothing you can do beyond that, unless there's a nifty program that could download JPG files in really low quality. This is possible and utilized by some older browsers back when JPG files were loaded on 56k connections. The images would first load in compressed low quality and continue until it was 100%.
One of the main reasons this might work in Australia is because it is an island. Cars don't get on and off this country, so buying a car and worrying about going to "non-compatible" countries won't be a problem.
This is why their initiative may have a bigger effect than, say, a European country surrounded by differently positioned countries.