Why not just give these kids cheap desktops? You can get a decent computer, likely more powerful than that OLPC, from Dell for maybe $200-$300. It doesn't have to be from Dell. I'm sure most of these nations have computer vendors assembling machines from low-cost Chinese components. Set up a deal with Microsoft for cheap copies of Windows, although I'm sure there are already these kinds of programs in place. I realize that the idea of running Windows on these machines is offensive to some, but the fact is that most of the developed world still runs Windows. So why not get these kids familiarized with what most people are using? If that prospect is so troublesome, go ahead and install and open source OS. It doesn't really matter. The point is just keep things simple.
If there are problems with getting a computer in these parents' home keep them in a lab at school where they can be better managed. That's where the learning is going on anyway. Going with desktops would probably be the true low-cost approach, but notebooks have gotten so cheap that I suspect it would be trivial to undercut the cost of an OLPC by setting up a deal with some Chinese or Taiwanese manufacturer. And a multi-touch screen is completely superfluous. I sure hope there aren't kids being denied computers because of some administrators somewhere stupidly waiting for OLPC's.
These OLPC's may be a noble idea but they're unnecessarily complicating things. I personally think it's a big waste of money and resources trying to solve a problem that already has plenty of better solutions. Hell, for all the effort and expense being expended they probably would be better off just shipping these kids iPads.
None in New England? I can immediately think of two stretches of highway in Connecticut that are concrete and quite a few bridges that are surfaced in concrete.
Haha! I guess you buy the crap the Chinese government feeds you. You don't know what corruption is until you've gone to China. That's one of the biggest problems, hands down, with doing business in China. And if you're friends with government officials then you've got it made in the shade.
In principle a dictatorship should be able to keep these problems under control, but it reality it almost never works out that way. Usually it's the government and anyone tied to them raping the nation for their own gain. The big difference between a dictatorship and democracy or republic is that a dictatorship is far more effective in controlling the flow of information and thus hiding how bad things actually are.
You clearly don't know what you're talking about. Chinese banks can get away with being quite a bit more abusive than American banks. Get into debt and collectors will start calling your family, friends and employer in order to intimidate you into paying. Debtors have been known to have their homes defaced. That's when they don't hire a thug to physically rough you up. It's like dealing with gangsters.
There have long been concerns about various economic bubbles there. Either the Chinese government has done an impressive job of keeping their economy in check or they've managed to hide the cracks from the west. There's a crazy real estate bubble growing there and banks have generally been loose with lending standards, although the government has kept that in check to some extent.
Chinese are just as materialistic as the rest of us and I'd argue that they love to flaunt their wealth even more than most Americans outside of Hollywood. Everyone's got to have Louis Vuitton bags, wear rolex watches and drive around in a black S-class Mercedes.
Of course, what the hell do Americans know about how the average person lives in China when news gets filtered through the perspective of wealthy Chinese or politicians?
I don't understand why some many Americans have this stupid tendency to place foreigners on this pedestal, like they're somehow more noble and enlightened than we are and that we're the source of all evil in the world.
Every goddamn little personality quirk today is considered a personality disorder. And I see two serious consequences due to this mentality. First, if you're not a materialistic, gullible, image conscious drone like everyone else there's something wrong with you. This is not only a problem from a consumerist standpoint but it makes for a very malleable population who will eat whatever crap the government or special interests feed them. Second, blaming everything on a disorder absolves individuals of responsibility. I taught a course a couple of years ago and a few weeks in I get a letter informing me that one of my students had attention deficit disorder. I'm convinced he used that as an excuse to slack off in class because when he was doing something he enjoyed he sure could focus.
So I'm not surprised in the least that we're being told we're the ones with the disorder because we're selective about the crap companies would like to shovel down our throats. GM foods may be perfectly safe, but it's going to take a generation, likely two to be sure. And given all the on-going changes what is safe now may not be when some new modified foods hit the market a few years from now.
I've got to problem whatsoever with all the research being conducted. It's a good thing, who knows what benefits we may yet reap. But I do have a real problem with what I consider untested foods being sold to us and us being expected to blindly trust corporations and governments that the foods are safe.
The director himself considers that his most important mission. I don't have a problem at all with feel-good campaigns. But first, it's not the responsibility of the United States to remind Muslims of their own history. And second, it even less the responsibility of an agency like NASA to get involved in any of this.
And it's nonsense anyway. It's like thanking Christianity for America's achievements. I mean, if you're going to argue that Islam is not responsible for terrorism, individual nuts are, then you can't go and argue that Islam is responsible for academic advancements.
Regarding the game... It looks cool and it's no different than Space Camp. It's a marketing tool designed to make kids interested in space exploration. It is unfortunate that it's Windows only and that I need Steam in order to download it.
That's the thing with soccer. The favorites don't always win. It's not like American sports where outcomes tend to be more predictable. Although, I also games at the World Cup level are less predictable than at the club level because the players don't play together enough for people to be able to make a clear assessment. Most predictions seemed to be based on past performance despite the fact we were looking at a lot of new players.
Starting with that very first game against North Korea I felt that Brazil was overrated. And with American commentators they also pass the Brazilians off as these happy-go-lucky guys who just love the game and play for fun. But in every game where they've actually been challenged, meaning everyone they've played except North Korea players were getting openly pissed. In all their other games it looked like it was going to come to blows.
With the other so-called favorites, Italy, France and England people had already been saying for quite a while that they were quite a bit weaker than they had been in the past. It's a lot harder to make clear predictions because there are so many players from different countries playing in competitive leagues around the world. So I think performance comes down to who has more good players interacting extremely well in competition.
My prediction for the final is Netherlands vs Germany with Germany winning. Uruguay shouldn't have gotten this far and I think Spain has been overrated. Spain has great players and they have impressive individual plays but they always seem to just barely get by. Germany has been great, perhaps the most cohesive team of the World Cup. Either that or they haven't been adequately challenged.
Unfortunately, with Netherlands and Germany it's going to be a smaller corner of the world truly interested. Not the best match up for ratings.
I have to say I don't like this one bit. It pretty much guarantees that sites with Chinese domains are essentially blocked off to the rest of the world. With Pinyin, at least a non-Chinese can visit a Chinese site without too much difficulty. Good luck trying to enter an address for a Chinese site given that you wont even have a clue how type in the address. And I'm curious to know how they will deal Japanese or Korean input. I mean, if someone in Japan uses Japanese input methods to enter the same characters, will the address work?
I'm also curious to know how they're going deal with the matter of names which are phonetically the same but use different characters. In writing it's not an issue, but if I tell someone a web address, at least in some cases, I'm going to have to point out which character I'm using.
I have to say, and this comes from years of living in Asia and having studied Chinese, that the written language is just not all that practical on a computer. Certainly it works reasonably well but it's not ideal. That's why they've got so many input methods. China's Pinyin, and Taiwan's vastly superior Zhuyin Fuhao are easy to pick up because they're phonetic. But they're also inefficient; you've still got tone to deal with and you're choosing from a list of a good 10-20 characters. There are better input methods which are much harder for people, even many Chinese to use. But these other methods let you narrow down the character you want more quickly. My wife, who's Taiwanese, finds it much quicker to use the Latin alphabet than to type in Chinese. She sees this is a big inconvenience.
Then there's the matter of Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters. It wont be so bad for someone coming from Traditional as the simplifications are fairly standard. But for someone coming from simplified they're going to have a harder time. Aesthetically China made a mess of a lot of characters in trying to simplify things, and the push was mostly political, but that's another story.
I can't help but feel that this approval was also political. ICANN wanted to show that they were culturally sensitive at the expense of global accessibility. Anyone using a computer in China can obviously the Latin alphabet. It's a necessity and will continue to be so even with this change. So there shouldn't be any Chinese unable to get online because of the inability to use Chinese addresses. This is ICANN trying to show that they're culturally sensitive and China taking advantage to get what they want for their own ends.
If this guy were smart he'd take the money and use it to sustain himself in a way that would completely enable him to be free to pursue his interests. If it bothers him that much just take the damn money and donate it to some charity.
Say what you will, I think him refusing the money comes down to him being eccentric. Perhaps in his mind he's decided he's not going to live by human conventions. I'll give him credit in that regard. People are constantly being told, "be yourself". But what that actually means is be like everyone else, go mountain climbing and have a prolific nightlife. If anyone is a case study in free will it's this guy.
That said, I can't help but think that this guy would be more productive if he weren't so reclusive and eccentric. I'm reminded of those geniuses who end up spending their lives as a janitor or something. They don't owe anything to anyone. But at the same time I feel like it's a complete waste of their abilities. I tend to think if they were as smart as they supposedly are they would have taken advantage of their abilities. At least Perelman has these guys beat in that regard.
I see a lot of people claiming that companies didn't used to operate this way, that we're witnessing the decline of corporate American and capitalism in general. When hasn't business been conducted this way? There have been guys selling radioactive tonics as panaceas. Automakers have covered up the fact that their cars exploded in an accident. I'm sure at some point in history some unscrupulous individual has tried passing off sickly cattle as healthy. This is not a failing of capitalism. This is a failing of humanity. There have always been and probably will always be people trying to take advantage of other people. I'm not making excuses, simply pointing out reality.
It looks to me like thanks to lawsuits and public attention the market is indeed sorting out the problem. Look at the situation unfolding with the new iPhone. And the examples you cite are a perfect example of the market sorting out the problems.
A situation like we had with Microsoft is one that required government intervention. Certainly government involvement helped things along and likely helped prevent some real potential for problems But even then, over time the market helped sort that out too. Google and Apple's successes, for example, weren't due to the government's rulings on Microsoft but they clearly did bring about real competition.
I'm guessing someone could address this issue themselves by affixing a piece of tape where it's needed. Clear tape to preserve the aesthetic of the phone. Or maybe a strip of screen protector plastic. I'm guessing if a coating would address the issue tape would work as well. At least it's a temporary fix until Apple addresses the problem.
How long before we see some obnoxious, overly complicated guide on Youtube suggesting this very thing?
I'd say they were smart in that they capitalized on this video's popularity but stupid in that they seem to believe they're going to be able to live off this.
What I find surprising is that something so relatively uninteresting is able to garner this much attention. It's like on America's Funniest Home Videos when some crappy video would win $10,000 simply because it featured a baby. What kid doesn't say something cute or funny? The people compelled to buy a lame t-shirt about some random Youtube video are arguably the stupid ones.
About 10 years ago I interviewed with a few companies in Taiwan. There were several who pretty much wanted to hire me as the token foreigner. One or two of them thought I might bring new ideas to the table, but I'm sure their corporate culture would pretty much squash any new ideas. One company in particular was more direct about what they wanted. They wanted to convey a more international image to make themselves more appealing to investors.
A lot of companies in Asia have this obsession with passing themselves off as an international corporation. Every two-bit company has the word "international" in their name. Their English name, because the vast majority of companies in Taiwan and China have an English and Chinese name. I guess it's aspirational in some ways. It's not simply that they want to impress, it's the belief that doing these things will lead to the perception turning into reality and I think some of it is linked to how Japanese companies became successful. It's like they think success will just happen without looking at the fundamentals.
In hindsight maybe I should have taken that job. I probably would have done little to no work and there were a bunch of cute girls working there.
I noticed my seat and desk shaking, not significantly but definitely noticeable. I wondered if it might be an earthquake as the monitor began shaking as well. It persisted for a good 15 seconds, maybe longer. It was persisted enough that there was no question it was anything but an earthquake.
It took a while for it to show up on the USGS site.
That was true when peripherals weren't particularly good and there wasn't an industry wide push in a particular direction. But we've reached a point in gaming where good motion controls are a reality and there is a strong push towards more motion-controlled gaming.
The price point for Sony and Microsoft's devices is the big question. At the right price there will potentially be a big market here meaning that game developers will be very interested in supporting these devices. And of course a library of good games will also be important. But without a doubt now is the ideal time to get these devices to market.
A direct injection engine in your every day sedan can spray fuel at well over 20,000 psi. That pressure isn't some insurmountable force for which we have no recourse to handle.
Outside of a programming class why the hell do high school, hell even college students, need a laptop for school? I guess it's because of idiocies like this that we spend more, by far, per student than the rest of the world.
I don't like ads myself and I use adblock on my browsers. That said, piss and moan all you want, but companies need to pay for the products, services and content they provide. Either you deal with ads or things get more expensive and you'll be looking at more subscriptions. I realize in fantasy land everything is free and people are willing to work for nothing. But that's not how the real world works.
I realize there are situations where companies may be trying to squeeze a few extra bucks out of us and this may or may not be one of those situations. But the fact remains that everything costs money and things aren't getting cheaper.
Analytics of some form or another have always been used. They simply didn't provide the robustness and up-to-date feedback that they do today. Talk to any company running advertising and tell me analytics aren't critical.
Not to repeat myself, but 300DPI is not an ancient publishing standard. It is the standard for virtually every current publication out there. Except for the cheap ones which print at lower resolution and a few high quality magazines which go even higher. It became a standard in home printers simply because it was the standard in offset printing.
300DPI isn't going to cut it for photography. And while you can't make a direct comparison to traditional photographs, both film-based and digital photo prints are significantly higher resolution. They can run in the thousands of DPI.
As for 20kHz, I assume you're referring to frequency. Sound systems have been capable of reproducing those frequencies for decades. Virtually no one can hear 20kHz and the frequency is used primarily as a benchmark. Otherwise it's irrelevant to this argument; it would be more relevant if we were discussing color gamut.
An apples to apples comparison is sampling frequency or maybe bitrate. And that's another one of those things where people argue you can't notice a difference above X and yet I, and many others, can.
For what it's worth, the highest resolution photographs are typically printed ~300ppi. This is the standard used by glossy magazines (Playboy is the canonical reference mag here). Higher than that, most people don't see any difference at all.
That's the standard quality you'll find in OFFSET printing, which is what is found in virtually all magazines. That is a very important distinction because it is not the process used for printing photographs. It's rare, especially nowadays, but there are magazines printed at an even higher DPI. Dots per inch is the standard used in printing, by the way, not pixels per inch. Newspapers tend to print at lower DPI and some cheap magazines might even go as low as 150DPI. It's serviceable but the quality is crap.
Photographs are significantly higher DPI, potentially in the range of 1200 and up. And you wont even find a direct analog to traditional photographs because the process is totally different, photos consisting of grains versus dots.
But really, the difference between 300DPI and higher is dramatic. The next time you head down to a bookstore take a photograph with you and compare it against any magazine on the stand. Then tell me the difference isn't significant.
This is the same nonsense I hear every so often that people can't distinguish 720p and 1080p. If you can't see the difference you either need glasses or you're not paying attention. It could be that the nature of my work makes me more attuned to these things but every time I've ever seen this come up people notice a difference.
I predict manufacturing will gradually move east-ward around the globe. First it will head into Southeast Asia. It may also move into India, which is a natural move given we already outsource so much to India. The catch there is that it may already be too expensive to do manufacturing there by the time there is any real push to move. So I think ultimately we're going to be seeing manufacturing in Africa. And I wont be surprise if the Chinese are among the first to move there given how much business they're already doing on the continent. There may be a day that manufacturing is so expensive in any country that we might as well do it domestically, but we're still a long, long way off from seeing that.
I do think, however, that even with these shifts we're going to be seeing the cost of goods continue to rise. Whether our own incomes rise as well is another story. It's possible we'll end up being forced to live more modest lifestyles, back to a sort of 50's era standard of living. 900sq-ft average homes versus over 2000sq-ft today, single-car families, a single tv in the home, etc. It's unreal how much the standard of living has improved for people not just in the west, but around the world, contrary to what a lot of people like to claim. Given the way things are going I wouldn't be surprised if there's a move backwards.
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It's a cultural problem. The fault goes to parents for raising their kids to be self-centered idiots with no respect for anyone or anything.
Why not just give these kids cheap desktops? You can get a decent computer, likely more powerful than that OLPC, from Dell for maybe $200-$300. It doesn't have to be from Dell. I'm sure most of these nations have computer vendors assembling machines from low-cost Chinese components. Set up a deal with Microsoft for cheap copies of Windows, although I'm sure there are already these kinds of programs in place. I realize that the idea of running Windows on these machines is offensive to some, but the fact is that most of the developed world still runs Windows. So why not get these kids familiarized with what most people are using? If that prospect is so troublesome, go ahead and install and open source OS. It doesn't really matter. The point is just keep things simple.
If there are problems with getting a computer in these parents' home keep them in a lab at school where they can be better managed. That's where the learning is going on anyway. Going with desktops would probably be the true low-cost approach, but notebooks have gotten so cheap that I suspect it would be trivial to undercut the cost of an OLPC by setting up a deal with some Chinese or Taiwanese manufacturer. And a multi-touch screen is completely superfluous. I sure hope there aren't kids being denied computers because of some administrators somewhere stupidly waiting for OLPC's.
These OLPC's may be a noble idea but they're unnecessarily complicating things. I personally think it's a big waste of money and resources trying to solve a problem that already has plenty of better solutions. Hell, for all the effort and expense being expended they probably would be better off just shipping these kids iPads.
None in New England? I can immediately think of two stretches of highway in Connecticut that are concrete and quite a few bridges that are surfaced in concrete.
Haha! I guess you buy the crap the Chinese government feeds you. You don't know what corruption is until you've gone to China. That's one of the biggest problems, hands down, with doing business in China. And if you're friends with government officials then you've got it made in the shade.
In principle a dictatorship should be able to keep these problems under control, but it reality it almost never works out that way. Usually it's the government and anyone tied to them raping the nation for their own gain. The big difference between a dictatorship and democracy or republic is that a dictatorship is far more effective in controlling the flow of information and thus hiding how bad things actually are.
You clearly don't know what you're talking about. Chinese banks can get away with being quite a bit more abusive than American banks. Get into debt and collectors will start calling your family, friends and employer in order to intimidate you into paying. Debtors have been known to have their homes defaced. That's when they don't hire a thug to physically rough you up. It's like dealing with gangsters.
There have long been concerns about various economic bubbles there. Either the Chinese government has done an impressive job of keeping their economy in check or they've managed to hide the cracks from the west. There's a crazy real estate bubble growing there and banks have generally been loose with lending standards, although the government has kept that in check to some extent.
Chinese are just as materialistic as the rest of us and I'd argue that they love to flaunt their wealth even more than most Americans outside of Hollywood. Everyone's got to have Louis Vuitton bags, wear rolex watches and drive around in a black S-class Mercedes.
Of course, what the hell do Americans know about how the average person lives in China when news gets filtered through the perspective of wealthy Chinese or politicians?
I don't understand why some many Americans have this stupid tendency to place foreigners on this pedestal, like they're somehow more noble and enlightened than we are and that we're the source of all evil in the world.
Every goddamn little personality quirk today is considered a personality disorder. And I see two serious consequences due to this mentality. First, if you're not a materialistic, gullible, image conscious drone like everyone else there's something wrong with you. This is not only a problem from a consumerist standpoint but it makes for a very malleable population who will eat whatever crap the government or special interests feed them. Second, blaming everything on a disorder absolves individuals of responsibility. I taught a course a couple of years ago and a few weeks in I get a letter informing me that one of my students had attention deficit disorder. I'm convinced he used that as an excuse to slack off in class because when he was doing something he enjoyed he sure could focus.
So I'm not surprised in the least that we're being told we're the ones with the disorder because we're selective about the crap companies would like to shovel down our throats. GM foods may be perfectly safe, but it's going to take a generation, likely two to be sure. And given all the on-going changes what is safe now may not be when some new modified foods hit the market a few years from now.
I've got to problem whatsoever with all the research being conducted. It's a good thing, who knows what benefits we may yet reap. But I do have a real problem with what I consider untested foods being sold to us and us being expected to blindly trust corporations and governments that the foods are safe.
The director himself considers that his most important mission. I don't have a problem at all with feel-good campaigns. But first, it's not the responsibility of the United States to remind Muslims of their own history. And second, it even less the responsibility of an agency like NASA to get involved in any of this.
And it's nonsense anyway. It's like thanking Christianity for America's achievements. I mean, if you're going to argue that Islam is not responsible for terrorism, individual nuts are, then you can't go and argue that Islam is responsible for academic advancements.
Regarding the game... It looks cool and it's no different than Space Camp. It's a marketing tool designed to make kids interested in space exploration. It is unfortunate that it's Windows only and that I need Steam in order to download it.
That's the thing with soccer. The favorites don't always win. It's not like American sports where outcomes tend to be more predictable. Although, I also games at the World Cup level are less predictable than at the club level because the players don't play together enough for people to be able to make a clear assessment. Most predictions seemed to be based on past performance despite the fact we were looking at a lot of new players.
Starting with that very first game against North Korea I felt that Brazil was overrated. And with American commentators they also pass the Brazilians off as these happy-go-lucky guys who just love the game and play for fun. But in every game where they've actually been challenged, meaning everyone they've played except North Korea players were getting openly pissed. In all their other games it looked like it was going to come to blows.
With the other so-called favorites, Italy, France and England people had already been saying for quite a while that they were quite a bit weaker than they had been in the past. It's a lot harder to make clear predictions because there are so many players from different countries playing in competitive leagues around the world. So I think performance comes down to who has more good players interacting extremely well in competition.
My prediction for the final is Netherlands vs Germany with Germany winning. Uruguay shouldn't have gotten this far and I think Spain has been overrated. Spain has great players and they have impressive individual plays but they always seem to just barely get by. Germany has been great, perhaps the most cohesive team of the World Cup. Either that or they haven't been adequately challenged.
Unfortunately, with Netherlands and Germany it's going to be a smaller corner of the world truly interested. Not the best match up for ratings.
I have to say I don't like this one bit. It pretty much guarantees that sites with Chinese domains are essentially blocked off to the rest of the world. With Pinyin, at least a non-Chinese can visit a Chinese site without too much difficulty. Good luck trying to enter an address for a Chinese site given that you wont even have a clue how type in the address. And I'm curious to know how they will deal Japanese or Korean input. I mean, if someone in Japan uses Japanese input methods to enter the same characters, will the address work?
I'm also curious to know how they're going deal with the matter of names which are phonetically the same but use different characters. In writing it's not an issue, but if I tell someone a web address, at least in some cases, I'm going to have to point out which character I'm using.
I have to say, and this comes from years of living in Asia and having studied Chinese, that the written language is just not all that practical on a computer. Certainly it works reasonably well but it's not ideal. That's why they've got so many input methods. China's Pinyin, and Taiwan's vastly superior Zhuyin Fuhao are easy to pick up because they're phonetic. But they're also inefficient; you've still got tone to deal with and you're choosing from a list of a good 10-20 characters. There are better input methods which are much harder for people, even many Chinese to use. But these other methods let you narrow down the character you want more quickly. My wife, who's Taiwanese, finds it much quicker to use the Latin alphabet than to type in Chinese. She sees this is a big inconvenience.
Then there's the matter of Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters. It wont be so bad for someone coming from Traditional as the simplifications are fairly standard. But for someone coming from simplified they're going to have a harder time. Aesthetically China made a mess of a lot of characters in trying to simplify things, and the push was mostly political, but that's another story.
I can't help but feel that this approval was also political. ICANN wanted to show that they were culturally sensitive at the expense of global accessibility. Anyone using a computer in China can obviously the Latin alphabet. It's a necessity and will continue to be so even with this change. So there shouldn't be any Chinese unable to get online because of the inability to use Chinese addresses. This is ICANN trying to show that they're culturally sensitive and China taking advantage to get what they want for their own ends.
If this guy were smart he'd take the money and use it to sustain himself in a way that would completely enable him to be free to pursue his interests. If it bothers him that much just take the damn money and donate it to some charity.
Say what you will, I think him refusing the money comes down to him being eccentric. Perhaps in his mind he's decided he's not going to live by human conventions. I'll give him credit in that regard. People are constantly being told, "be yourself". But what that actually means is be like everyone else, go mountain climbing and have a prolific nightlife. If anyone is a case study in free will it's this guy.
That said, I can't help but think that this guy would be more productive if he weren't so reclusive and eccentric. I'm reminded of those geniuses who end up spending their lives as a janitor or something. They don't owe anything to anyone. But at the same time I feel like it's a complete waste of their abilities. I tend to think if they were as smart as they supposedly are they would have taken advantage of their abilities. At least Perelman has these guys beat in that regard.
I see a lot of people claiming that companies didn't used to operate this way, that we're witnessing the decline of corporate American and capitalism in general. When hasn't business been conducted this way? There have been guys selling radioactive tonics as panaceas. Automakers have covered up the fact that their cars exploded in an accident. I'm sure at some point in history some unscrupulous individual has tried passing off sickly cattle as healthy. This is not a failing of capitalism. This is a failing of humanity. There have always been and probably will always be people trying to take advantage of other people. I'm not making excuses, simply pointing out reality.
It looks to me like thanks to lawsuits and public attention the market is indeed sorting out the problem. Look at the situation unfolding with the new iPhone. And the examples you cite are a perfect example of the market sorting out the problems.
A situation like we had with Microsoft is one that required government intervention. Certainly government involvement helped things along and likely helped prevent some real potential for problems But even then, over time the market helped sort that out too. Google and Apple's successes, for example, weren't due to the government's rulings on Microsoft but they clearly did bring about real competition.
I'm guessing someone could address this issue themselves by affixing a piece of tape where it's needed. Clear tape to preserve the aesthetic of the phone. Or maybe a strip of screen protector plastic. I'm guessing if a coating would address the issue tape would work as well. At least it's a temporary fix until Apple addresses the problem.
How long before we see some obnoxious, overly complicated guide on Youtube suggesting this very thing?
I'd say they were smart in that they capitalized on this video's popularity but stupid in that they seem to believe they're going to be able to live off this.
What I find surprising is that something so relatively uninteresting is able to garner this much attention. It's like on America's Funniest Home Videos when some crappy video would win $10,000 simply because it featured a baby. What kid doesn't say something cute or funny? The people compelled to buy a lame t-shirt about some random Youtube video are arguably the stupid ones.
This is nothing new.
About 10 years ago I interviewed with a few companies in Taiwan. There were several who pretty much wanted to hire me as the token foreigner. One or two of them thought I might bring new ideas to the table, but I'm sure their corporate culture would pretty much squash any new ideas. One company in particular was more direct about what they wanted. They wanted to convey a more international image to make themselves more appealing to investors.
A lot of companies in Asia have this obsession with passing themselves off as an international corporation. Every two-bit company has the word "international" in their name. Their English name, because the vast majority of companies in Taiwan and China have an English and Chinese name. I guess it's aspirational in some ways. It's not simply that they want to impress, it's the belief that doing these things will lead to the perception turning into reality and I think some of it is linked to how Japanese companies became successful. It's like they think success will just happen without looking at the fundamentals.
In hindsight maybe I should have taken that job. I probably would have done little to no work and there were a bunch of cute girls working there.
I noticed my seat and desk shaking, not significantly but definitely noticeable. I wondered if it might be an earthquake as the monitor began shaking as well. It persisted for a good 15 seconds, maybe longer. It was persisted enough that there was no question it was anything but an earthquake.
It took a while for it to show up on the USGS site.
That was true when peripherals weren't particularly good and there wasn't an industry wide push in a particular direction. But we've reached a point in gaming where good motion controls are a reality and there is a strong push towards more motion-controlled gaming.
The price point for Sony and Microsoft's devices is the big question. At the right price there will potentially be a big market here meaning that game developers will be very interested in supporting these devices. And of course a library of good games will also be important. But without a doubt now is the ideal time to get these devices to market.
A direct injection engine in your every day sedan can spray fuel at well over 20,000 psi. That pressure isn't some insurmountable force for which we have no recourse to handle.
Outside of a programming class why the hell do high school, hell even college students, need a laptop for school? I guess it's because of idiocies like this that we spend more, by far, per student than the rest of the world.
I don't like ads myself and I use adblock on my browsers. That said, piss and moan all you want, but companies need to pay for the products, services and content they provide. Either you deal with ads or things get more expensive and you'll be looking at more subscriptions. I realize in fantasy land everything is free and people are willing to work for nothing. But that's not how the real world works.
I realize there are situations where companies may be trying to squeeze a few extra bucks out of us and this may or may not be one of those situations. But the fact remains that everything costs money and things aren't getting cheaper.
That's been in use overseas for maybe a decade. Man, in some ways the US is really behind the times.
Analytics of some form or another have always been used. They simply didn't provide the robustness and up-to-date feedback that they do today. Talk to any company running advertising and tell me analytics aren't critical.
Not to repeat myself, but 300DPI is not an ancient publishing standard. It is the standard for virtually every current publication out there. Except for the cheap ones which print at lower resolution and a few high quality magazines which go even higher. It became a standard in home printers simply because it was the standard in offset printing.
300DPI isn't going to cut it for photography. And while you can't make a direct comparison to traditional photographs, both film-based and digital photo prints are significantly higher resolution. They can run in the thousands of DPI.
As for 20kHz, I assume you're referring to frequency. Sound systems have been capable of reproducing those frequencies for decades. Virtually no one can hear 20kHz and the frequency is used primarily as a benchmark. Otherwise it's irrelevant to this argument; it would be more relevant if we were discussing color gamut.
An apples to apples comparison is sampling frequency or maybe bitrate. And that's another one of those things where people argue you can't notice a difference above X and yet I, and many others, can.
That's the standard quality you'll find in OFFSET printing, which is what is found in virtually all magazines. That is a very important distinction because it is not the process used for printing photographs. It's rare, especially nowadays, but there are magazines printed at an even higher DPI. Dots per inch is the standard used in printing, by the way, not pixels per inch. Newspapers tend to print at lower DPI and some cheap magazines might even go as low as 150DPI. It's serviceable but the quality is crap.
Photographs are significantly higher DPI, potentially in the range of 1200 and up. And you wont even find a direct analog to traditional photographs because the process is totally different, photos consisting of grains versus dots.
But really, the difference between 300DPI and higher is dramatic. The next time you head down to a bookstore take a photograph with you and compare it against any magazine on the stand. Then tell me the difference isn't significant.
This is the same nonsense I hear every so often that people can't distinguish 720p and 1080p. If you can't see the difference you either need glasses or you're not paying attention. It could be that the nature of my work makes me more attuned to these things but every time I've ever seen this come up people notice a difference.
I predict manufacturing will gradually move east-ward around the globe. First it will head into Southeast Asia. It may also move into India, which is a natural move given we already outsource so much to India. The catch there is that it may already be too expensive to do manufacturing there by the time there is any real push to move. So I think ultimately we're going to be seeing manufacturing in Africa. And I wont be surprise if the Chinese are among the first to move there given how much business they're already doing on the continent. There may be a day that manufacturing is so expensive in any country that we might as well do it domestically, but we're still a long, long way off from seeing that.
I do think, however, that even with these shifts we're going to be seeing the cost of goods continue to rise. Whether our own incomes rise as well is another story. It's possible we'll end up being forced to live more modest lifestyles, back to a sort of 50's era standard of living. 900sq-ft average homes versus over 2000sq-ft today, single-car families, a single tv in the home, etc. It's unreal how much the standard of living has improved for people not just in the west, but around the world, contrary to what a lot of people like to claim. Given the way things are going I wouldn't be surprised if there's a move backwards.