You know, I'd have to agree with that. I was actually thinking the same thing about music the other day. Sure there's a fair number of 'good' records out lately, but none of them are iconic masterpieces that are really going to retain the same feeling over time as say a 'Dark Side of the Moon' album.
I tend to think it's a shift in a number of directions. Games are being cranked out due to demand, expectations, and greed. Less time is spent on being awesome in a way other than 'check out these cool new graphics'. Sure there are a few, but it seems like there is a smaller percentage now compared to years past.
On the flip side, there are low number of games that have come out recently that I would put in my 'will play for years to come' category, and some that I worry will be playable in years to come. For instance, World in Conflict. Sure it's still current now, but it depends on a central server when I want to host games. If they pull support, it now becomes local only and the majority of the time I play it is with one or two friends over the internet. So it now becomes a waste. Sure I'd have had my fun with it, but if it's truly a good game, then it shouldn't be able to be cast aside that easily. For instance, I still play Rise of Nations. It allows me to host my own games (what a concept). Other people join my IP and we're up and running quickly and I know that even if they stop patching it or even caring about it, I'll still be able to play it when I feel like being nostalgic. This seems like a simple thing to me.
It also seems like it would make it have lower upkeep costs from the developer's point of view... Sure it doesn't work for MMO's (which I really don't like much anyway), and it probably makes the purchaser have some sort of clue how to configure their router or use UPNP, and maybe that's why they migrated away from it. Management thought it was a good idea. Well, it's not. Let me host my game locally and I'll be a happier man.
And don't forget that yelling is the universal way to make someone understand what you're saying. Even if they don't speak English you can just raise your voice a bit and they'll understand...
I'd have to say that I text a lot more often that I thought I would. Mostly because there are many areas where I don't want to announce my business to everyone in the joint. I can have a quiet conversation, with no yelling, trouble understanding each other, or reception issues if I just text message.
At the same point, looking at my bill, I'd say that 95% of all of my conversations are under a minute, with most (not on the bill but from looking at my phone logs) under 30 seconds.
Usually it's "We're here and we got a table" "cool see you in a few minutes" or "Wanna meet tonight at 6? get some sushi?" "Usual place like 7?" "Sure." "cool, see you there"
That's it. I figure if I have more to discuss, then I'll see them in person. I don't see much point in more than that on ANY phone, let alone a cell phone while out and about.
In most states letting your car start or run without you present is illegal. (yes, this includes starting your car and running back inside while the ice melts or the air cools). Also, it's not exactly the safest idea if you live in an area with high theft. I read a story a while back about some thieves that would cruise a nearby rich neighborhood and pop a door on a car 'warming up in the drive way' drive off and surprise the owner when there was no car there anymore. This made even easier by people who leave their car UNLOCKED AND RUNNING in the driveway.
So you freeze your butt off for like 5 min, oh darn. If it's that big of a deal, get a garage or heated seats, or an engine block heater.
Actually, here in Virginia (and a number of other states) We have a law in place that says that the employees need not have a reason to leave. The other side of the law is that employers need not have a reason to drop you. They do not, by law, need to give you advance notice, pensions, severance, or even an explanation. Either party can simply walk up to your desk and say "Have a nice life".
Of course most people give 2 weeks notice because they don't want to burn bridges, and most employers give a reason because they want to make it clear to the other employees what the reason was... sometimes.
Sure, them canning you will make more work for them, but you know they'll just dump it on 'the team'. Have that happen a few times and it reminds me of the Star Wars quote "Fear will keep the local systems in line". People like having a job, and they like not being fired on the spot for insubordination or someone's whim. However, the law remains because it's expected that the employers sorta like having employees that don't just leave. So it basically makes the employers a bit more wary of what they do to their employees.
Is this a windows thing, because it works perfectly in firefox for linux. And it works in lynx/elinks... (couldn't test it on IE as I'm not about to try to put that on my Ubuntu machine here at work and it's not on my iPhone (thankfully))
I honestly would pay a few dollars a month to have full stores that were JUST a concise listing of pertinent info with no ads or fluff. So many sites today have the article in a thin column down the middle of the page, somehow stretch things out to multiple pages and have nothing but ads on the right and links on the left. And to make it worse, are formatted with screens stuck in the late 90's at 800px wide. There's no wonder people won't click through to them.
Personally I find that a story can be summed up in 100-250 characters and be just as useful 90% of the time. Sure there are cases that more info might be intersting, and links could be given to that effect (like a link to the actual study for instance), but when I'm reading news I'd like more than the short summaries on Google News or RSS feed titles, but less than the full, fluff laden articles. I don't care what Joe Blow on the street thinks. I don't care what other reporters say. In fact, I don't even want opinions most of the time, I just want the story, short and sweet. Title: "Is Apple working on ____?" Article: "Yes, but we don't have any details." Nuff Said.
If he and a number of other people, as stated in his report (and I'll throw my experience in there as well), don't have the problems, it calls into question the original report of overwhelming issues.
Personally, I'd have to say that I use firefox for an average of 12 hours a day. I use it quite a bit at work and again when I get home. If you add in the time that my friends and relatives use firefox without on going crashing issues (ESPECIALLY those that take down windows, I've NEVER even heard of Firefox itself bringing down properly patched XP, and I know I've not had it take down either my Ubuntu, Gentoo or Fedora systems). I'd have to say that daily useage of Firefox in my circle has to be aproaching 80 or 90 hours per day.
I'm also saying that the "Automatically Generated Crash Reports" "Didn't happen" because, well, they didn't. mostly because there was no need for firefox to automatically generate a report on an event that didn't take place.
Is Firefox perfect? No, far from it. But I have found as many other people, that crashes, when they do occur are almost never caused by firefox itself, but one of the extensions. In the times I've heard of someone with a crash or two, they uninstall the last extension they put on there and they're back to stable. It's that easy. Same goes for slow load times, large memory usage, high CPU usage, etc.
Also, that originating post says that 91% of the Mozilla Foundation's income is $68M, and complains that we haven't seen $200M in development... Well, did you ever think that calculation is a bit off? after all, that'd only mean we'd see $75M which, last I checked is less than $200 by quite a bit.
You really should think about these things more before you post. If you bought that info, you might want a refund...
You mean for gimmicks and population segments? I mean seriously, the 360 and the PS3 fought over the same group of people. the 360 with HDDVD, the PS3 with BluRay, but both cater to more hardcore gamers and didn't really use any 'new cutting edge user interation' like the Wii did. The Wii-mote, the Wii-Fit all were completely new at the time for a console and drove sales. Coupled with the gamer demographics the Wii aimed at (not hard core gamers so much as kids, older adults, etc...) and the game genre's released for the Wii (proving once again that blood and gore are not the only good things in games by warping back to days of Mario and puzzles), the Wii really didn't have direct competition and that fact drove the adoption rates through the roof.
I highly doubt that the insinuation you make (that people don't want to watch movies on their consoles) was the driving force behind the purchase of the Wii.
They could just have bluetooth in them. Use a bluetooth keyboard/mouse and a nice little angled holder to use it as a screen at your desk, then just pick it up and walk around. Even an oversized plate display holder would work for that!
Wow, I'm the opposite. As a programmer at my previous job, I had the ability to work from home now and then. Many times I remember cranking out what would have been a weeks worth of code in 4-6 hours at home. Even my managers noticed that I was more productive. However, they wouldn't let me stay home more often because they wanted me to take part in meetings and such.
Now for me, working from home meant I was the only one there, no distractions, my music on and no one looking over my shoulder. I'm sure that ability will go right out the window after our first kid shows up.
And I'll never get one of those because I've found here at work, were we use a fairly high end system for scanning fingerprints, that my index fingers cannot be reliably read, and my thumb prints apparently have changed over time... enough that it's had to be re-entered 3 times now, each after failing to recognize me reliably on numerous occasions. I don't want to be locked out of my own data because of something I have no control over (biometrics are horrible for this).
I mean, seriously, that title is kinda pointless. If it never left the Antarctic, there's a darn good chance it's 'In Ice'. It would have been more newsworthy if it was found somewhere else.
Exactly. I don't see how that's so hard for people to grasp, but it apparently is. It's also hard to grasp that just because John Doe downloads a song from bittorrent, doesn't mean it's lost revenue; Both because a.) if he didn't get it for free, he might not have bought it at all, and b.) just because he got it for free, doesn't mean he doesn't either own a legal copy himself, or will own a legal copy if he deems it to be worthy of purchase.
People do not NEED to buy every song out there. Someone not doing so doesn't necessarily constitute lost profits.
I really don't see the issue with this article. So what if they patch things, to me, that's a good thing. it shows the company cares AFTER they released the product. It's when they STOP coming out with patches that the game tends to go down hill. You know their authentication servers are going down soon and you'll be stuck with an obsolete piece of junk that no one will patch. It should fall into the public domain at that point.
I guess I haven't had any really bad game issues that weren't addressed quickly with patches, or that weren't fixed by the time I bought the game (So I don't always buy them when they're new and $60. I wait until they're $30 or less and even then I think it's a bit much. $20 is my sweet spot). I don't have to worry about being gouged at the store, and I don't have to worry about huge bugs that they missed when pushing for release.
I will have to say, having a QA background, testing for all possible things is not an easy task at all. You can test most things, fairly easily (though sometimes time consuming), but when you get down to fringe cases, you have to realize that sometimes it's not possible to test it, sometimes it's very time consuming for something that 0.01% of customers may hit, and sometimes there's just no good Return on Investment when spending the time to not only test but to FIX those fringe case issues. Sure, this is where good code will typically have less problems than "let's just let some foreign country pump out a bunch of code for this game as quick as possible" code will, but I'd have to argue that video games aren't in the life or death setting. Do I want to offshore the programming of the space shuttle or commercial jetliner? No. Am I ok having a few glitches in a game that will be eventually patched? yes. I think I'll live. Especially because I know, to get the good guys to work on that game, we're all going to pay for it. The price will start at $100 instead of $60. Good code isn't free, and the gaming industry has taken a big enough hit as it is.
Alright, I read your sarcasm and I hate to say it, but capitalism only goes so far.
Sure, you were being sarcastic saying that you'd ditch your HOA and move if you're neighbors were loud, though in most cases, that's exactly what I'd do. After a number of police complaints and such. If the area is that crappy that they can't enforce their own HOA, I'd have to start a lawsuit to get it dropped as it's clearly not worth paying for if they feel it's not worth enforcing.
All of that aside, I've spent my life doing a darn good job of not buying products that I disagree with or that are backed by companies with policies I don't agree with. So far it hasn't really worked. But you have to think about why.
I don't buy CD's. RIAA just assumes I'm pirating it. (I'm not, I just listen to a lot of Pandora). I've never bought a My Little Pony. The company probably just assumes I'm not, nor do I have a little girl. I've never bought illegal drugs. Street Pharmacists seem to be doing just fine without me.
I mean, honestly, you really can't assume that you not buying something actually makes a difference. If it does make a difference, (like the CD example) you're 'vote' by not buying something could mean many different things. I mean, just in the CD case, I could be pirating it, I could be listening to a lot of radio, I could be against antiquated digital storage, I could like vinyl, perhaps I hate the president of the RIAA, or maybe I heard once that he was for some sort of policy I didn't like. Or maybe I think the music sucks, or perhaps I won't buy it because of their stance on Fair Use. Can they tell the difference? No. Not at all.
So what's to make Billy Mays or Vince with Slap Chop turn down the volume when I don't buy their product? maybe they'll just assume that I don't need to get skinny again, one slap at a time. Or perhaps they'll realize I really DO like making salads.
This is why there are certain areas where FCC regulation makes sense. If they assumed everything else and kept screaming at me, they'd never get the point.
You also forgot that the slow-refreshing screen is incapable of doing full screen video for any period of time, let alone keep their battery life while doing it.
A e-book reader is a different thing entirely than a tablet PC.
But I still think this is a bit too much for what it does. If they could make it the thickness of a iPhone 3G, with full HD resolution, a touch screen interface, and still have 6 hours of battery life (While using those things with WiFi and 3D to boot), then it'll be a contender. Until then, there are laptops that have most of that and a full keyboard/port array/expandability/etc...
"Never go to party's with metal detectors,
Sure it feels safe inside, but what about all those guys waiting outside with guns...
They know you ain't got one" - Chris Rock
Actually, the problem that I have is not so much when out of service, it's when too close to the wrong tower...
I was out of town and in another highly populated area (Knoxville I believe) a while back. The city is right near the boarder of the next time zone and what I found that kept happening is that my cell phone would update it's time according to which tower it connected to, often times the one in the wrong timezone. I had to shut off it's auto syncing and let it drift on it's own during that period.
I've also found that there are certain towers that just don't sync time, or don't do it well. In these times I'm glad I've got a watch on. I'll also have to agree with the grandparent... I can flick my wrist and check the time in under a second. It takes a good 10 seconds to fish my phone out of my pocket and unlock it, esp if I'm in a car and the pocket isn't at a great angle for phone removal.
I've had this problem in the past... it's not usually Firefox, the two times I've had the issue it's been a plugin, or Xorg (well, specifically Xorg using the close source proprietary ATI driver). I've dropped my extra plugin number down and have found it to be a much better browsing experience. The only things I regularly run now are Adblock, No Script and Forecastbar Enhanced. With about 20 tabs open and two windows, it's running at about 300MB now.
Really the biggest way to speed up browsing speed is to disable ads. There's no real way around that fact, it takes time to display complex flash animations and java script light boxes asking you to buy crap and take part in surveys... blocking that speeds it up by quite a bit!
Wouldn't that hurt the problem by taking developers off getting the project done to talk about what needs to be done?
Tell that to the managers who set-up and require attendance at the meetings. Meetings are one of the most misunderstood problems in modern software development. They're both very important for the vision and requirements in the beginning, and the worst thing for productivity during what were productive times. I agree, some short stand up meetings can be useful, and even a few bug scrubs or update meetings, but by in large, the meetings with developers need to happen as closely to the beginning of the project as possible, and then infrequently afterwords. Management doesn't always understand that meetings may help them understand what's going on, but really screw up the focus and forward movement of the project as a whole when used as noted above.
Viable? Definitely. Practical, probably not. but any work that can be done in this arena can funnel down to the practical cars in the future. Just like the people that bought DVD players for $1k when they came out. They caught on, were mass produced, simplified, and came down in price.
I know if I was rich, I'd get one. ('cause not being rich means my wife wouldn't quite go along with that purchase)
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You know, I'd have to agree with that. I was actually thinking the same thing about music the other day. Sure there's a fair number of 'good' records out lately, but none of them are iconic masterpieces that are really going to retain the same feeling over time as say a 'Dark Side of the Moon' album.
I tend to think it's a shift in a number of directions. Games are being cranked out due to demand, expectations, and greed. Less time is spent on being awesome in a way other than 'check out these cool new graphics'. Sure there are a few, but it seems like there is a smaller percentage now compared to years past.
On the flip side, there are low number of games that have come out recently that I would put in my 'will play for years to come' category, and some that I worry will be playable in years to come. For instance, World in Conflict. Sure it's still current now, but it depends on a central server when I want to host games. If they pull support, it now becomes local only and the majority of the time I play it is with one or two friends over the internet. So it now becomes a waste. Sure I'd have had my fun with it, but if it's truly a good game, then it shouldn't be able to be cast aside that easily. For instance, I still play Rise of Nations. It allows me to host my own games (what a concept). Other people join my IP and we're up and running quickly and I know that even if they stop patching it or even caring about it, I'll still be able to play it when I feel like being nostalgic. This seems like a simple thing to me.
It also seems like it would make it have lower upkeep costs from the developer's point of view... Sure it doesn't work for MMO's (which I really don't like much anyway), and it probably makes the purchaser have some sort of clue how to configure their router or use UPNP, and maybe that's why they migrated away from it. Management thought it was a good idea. Well, it's not. Let me host my game locally and I'll be a happier man.
And don't forget that yelling is the universal way to make someone understand what you're saying. Even if they don't speak English you can just raise your voice a bit and they'll understand...
or at least that's what people seem to think.
I'd have to say that I text a lot more often that I thought I would. Mostly because there are many areas where I don't want to announce my business to everyone in the joint. I can have a quiet conversation, with no yelling, trouble understanding each other, or reception issues if I just text message.
At the same point, looking at my bill, I'd say that 95% of all of my conversations are under a minute, with most (not on the bill but from looking at my phone logs) under 30 seconds.
Usually it's "We're here and we got a table" "cool see you in a few minutes" or "Wanna meet tonight at 6? get some sushi?" "Usual place like 7?" "Sure." "cool, see you there"
That's it. I figure if I have more to discuss, then I'll see them in person. I don't see much point in more than that on ANY phone, let alone a cell phone while out and about.
In most states letting your car start or run without you present is illegal. (yes, this includes starting your car and running back inside while the ice melts or the air cools). Also, it's not exactly the safest idea if you live in an area with high theft. I read a story a while back about some thieves that would cruise a nearby rich neighborhood and pop a door on a car 'warming up in the drive way' drive off and surprise the owner when there was no car there anymore. This made even easier by people who leave their car UNLOCKED AND RUNNING in the driveway.
So you freeze your butt off for like 5 min, oh darn. If it's that big of a deal, get a garage or heated seats, or an engine block heater.
Actually, here in Virginia (and a number of other states) We have a law in place that says that the employees need not have a reason to leave. The other side of the law is that employers need not have a reason to drop you. They do not, by law, need to give you advance notice, pensions, severance, or even an explanation. Either party can simply walk up to your desk and say "Have a nice life".
Of course most people give 2 weeks notice because they don't want to burn bridges, and most employers give a reason because they want to make it clear to the other employees what the reason was... sometimes.
Sure, them canning you will make more work for them, but you know they'll just dump it on 'the team'. Have that happen a few times and it reminds me of the Star Wars quote "Fear will keep the local systems in line". People like having a job, and they like not being fired on the spot for insubordination or someone's whim. However, the law remains because it's expected that the employers sorta like having employees that don't just leave. So it basically makes the employers a bit more wary of what they do to their employees.
Is this a windows thing, because it works perfectly in firefox for linux. And it works in lynx/elinks... (couldn't test it on IE as I'm not about to try to put that on my Ubuntu machine here at work and it's not on my iPhone (thankfully))
I honestly would pay a few dollars a month to have full stores that were JUST a concise listing of pertinent info with no ads or fluff. So many sites today have the article in a thin column down the middle of the page, somehow stretch things out to multiple pages and have nothing but ads on the right and links on the left. And to make it worse, are formatted with screens stuck in the late 90's at 800px wide. There's no wonder people won't click through to them.
Personally I find that a story can be summed up in 100-250 characters and be just as useful 90% of the time. Sure there are cases that more info might be intersting, and links could be given to that effect (like a link to the actual study for instance), but when I'm reading news I'd like more than the short summaries on Google News or RSS feed titles, but less than the full, fluff laden articles. I don't care what Joe Blow on the street thinks. I don't care what other reporters say. In fact, I don't even want opinions most of the time, I just want the story, short and sweet. Title: "Is Apple working on ____?" Article: "Yes, but we don't have any details." Nuff Said.
Not to feed a troll, but...
If he and a number of other people, as stated in his report (and I'll throw my experience in there as well), don't have the problems, it calls into question the original report of overwhelming issues.
Personally, I'd have to say that I use firefox for an average of 12 hours a day. I use it quite a bit at work and again when I get home. If you add in the time that my friends and relatives use firefox without on going crashing issues (ESPECIALLY those that take down windows, I've NEVER even heard of Firefox itself bringing down properly patched XP, and I know I've not had it take down either my Ubuntu, Gentoo or Fedora systems). I'd have to say that daily useage of Firefox in my circle has to be aproaching 80 or 90 hours per day.
I'm also saying that the "Automatically Generated Crash Reports" "Didn't happen" because, well, they didn't. mostly because there was no need for firefox to automatically generate a report on an event that didn't take place.
Is Firefox perfect? No, far from it. But I have found as many other people, that crashes, when they do occur are almost never caused by firefox itself, but one of the extensions. In the times I've heard of someone with a crash or two, they uninstall the last extension they put on there and they're back to stable. It's that easy. Same goes for slow load times, large memory usage, high CPU usage, etc.
Also, that originating post says that 91% of the Mozilla Foundation's income is $68M, and complains that we haven't seen $200M in development... Well, did you ever think that calculation is a bit off? after all, that'd only mean we'd see $75M which, last I checked is less than $200 by quite a bit.
You really should think about these things more before you post. If you bought that info, you might want a refund...
Couldn't they just do this with a wish spell?
You mean for gimmicks and population segments? I mean seriously, the 360 and the PS3 fought over the same group of people. the 360 with HDDVD, the PS3 with BluRay, but both cater to more hardcore gamers and didn't really use any 'new cutting edge user interation' like the Wii did. The Wii-mote, the Wii-Fit all were completely new at the time for a console and drove sales. Coupled with the gamer demographics the Wii aimed at (not hard core gamers so much as kids, older adults, etc...) and the game genre's released for the Wii (proving once again that blood and gore are not the only good things in games by warping back to days of Mario and puzzles), the Wii really didn't have direct competition and that fact drove the adoption rates through the roof.
I highly doubt that the insinuation you make (that people don't want to watch movies on their consoles) was the driving force behind the purchase of the Wii.
They could just have bluetooth in them. Use a bluetooth keyboard/mouse and a nice little angled holder to use it as a screen at your desk, then just pick it up and walk around. Even an oversized plate display holder would work for that!
Wow, I'm the opposite. As a programmer at my previous job, I had the ability to work from home now and then. Many times I remember cranking out what would have been a weeks worth of code in 4-6 hours at home. Even my managers noticed that I was more productive. However, they wouldn't let me stay home more often because they wanted me to take part in meetings and such.
Now for me, working from home meant I was the only one there, no distractions, my music on and no one looking over my shoulder. I'm sure that ability will go right out the window after our first kid shows up.
And I'll never get one of those because I've found here at work, were we use a fairly high end system for scanning fingerprints, that my index fingers cannot be reliably read, and my thumb prints apparently have changed over time... enough that it's had to be re-entered 3 times now, each after failing to recognize me reliably on numerous occasions. I don't want to be locked out of my own data because of something I have no control over (biometrics are horrible for this).
I mean, seriously, that title is kinda pointless. If it never left the Antarctic, there's a darn good chance it's 'In Ice'. It would have been more newsworthy if it was found somewhere else.
Exactly. I don't see how that's so hard for people to grasp, but it apparently is. It's also hard to grasp that just because John Doe downloads a song from bittorrent, doesn't mean it's lost revenue; Both because a.) if he didn't get it for free, he might not have bought it at all, and b.) just because he got it for free, doesn't mean he doesn't either own a legal copy himself, or will own a legal copy if he deems it to be worthy of purchase.
People do not NEED to buy every song out there. Someone not doing so doesn't necessarily constitute lost profits.
And they still do patches on Console games.
I really don't see the issue with this article. So what if they patch things, to me, that's a good thing. it shows the company cares AFTER they released the product. It's when they STOP coming out with patches that the game tends to go down hill. You know their authentication servers are going down soon and you'll be stuck with an obsolete piece of junk that no one will patch. It should fall into the public domain at that point.
I guess I haven't had any really bad game issues that weren't addressed quickly with patches, or that weren't fixed by the time I bought the game (So I don't always buy them when they're new and $60. I wait until they're $30 or less and even then I think it's a bit much. $20 is my sweet spot). I don't have to worry about being gouged at the store, and I don't have to worry about huge bugs that they missed when pushing for release.
I will have to say, having a QA background, testing for all possible things is not an easy task at all. You can test most things, fairly easily (though sometimes time consuming), but when you get down to fringe cases, you have to realize that sometimes it's not possible to test it, sometimes it's very time consuming for something that 0.01% of customers may hit, and sometimes there's just no good Return on Investment when spending the time to not only test but to FIX those fringe case issues. Sure, this is where good code will typically have less problems than "let's just let some foreign country pump out a bunch of code for this game as quick as possible" code will, but I'd have to argue that video games aren't in the life or death setting. Do I want to offshore the programming of the space shuttle or commercial jetliner? No. Am I ok having a few glitches in a game that will be eventually patched? yes. I think I'll live. Especially because I know, to get the good guys to work on that game, we're all going to pay for it. The price will start at $100 instead of $60. Good code isn't free, and the gaming industry has taken a big enough hit as it is.
Alright, I read your sarcasm and I hate to say it, but capitalism only goes so far.
Sure, you were being sarcastic saying that you'd ditch your HOA and move if you're neighbors were loud, though in most cases, that's exactly what I'd do. After a number of police complaints and such. If the area is that crappy that they can't enforce their own HOA, I'd have to start a lawsuit to get it dropped as it's clearly not worth paying for if they feel it's not worth enforcing.
All of that aside, I've spent my life doing a darn good job of not buying products that I disagree with or that are backed by companies with policies I don't agree with. So far it hasn't really worked. But you have to think about why.
I don't buy CD's. RIAA just assumes I'm pirating it. (I'm not, I just listen to a lot of Pandora).
I've never bought a My Little Pony. The company probably just assumes I'm not, nor do I have a little girl.
I've never bought illegal drugs. Street Pharmacists seem to be doing just fine without me.
I mean, honestly, you really can't assume that you not buying something actually makes a difference. If it does make a difference, (like the CD example) you're 'vote' by not buying something could mean many different things. I mean, just in the CD case, I could be pirating it, I could be listening to a lot of radio, I could be against antiquated digital storage, I could like vinyl, perhaps I hate the president of the RIAA, or maybe I heard once that he was for some sort of policy I didn't like. Or maybe I think the music sucks, or perhaps I won't buy it because of their stance on Fair Use. Can they tell the difference? No. Not at all.
So what's to make Billy Mays or Vince with Slap Chop turn down the volume when I don't buy their product? maybe they'll just assume that I don't need to get skinny again, one slap at a time. Or perhaps they'll realize I really DO like making salads.
This is why there are certain areas where FCC regulation makes sense. If they assumed everything else and kept screaming at me, they'd never get the point.
You also forgot that the slow-refreshing screen is incapable of doing full screen video for any period of time, let alone keep their battery life while doing it.
A e-book reader is a different thing entirely than a tablet PC.
But I still think this is a bit too much for what it does. If they could make it the thickness of a iPhone 3G, with full HD resolution, a touch screen interface, and still have 6 hours of battery life (While using those things with WiFi and 3D to boot), then it'll be a contender. Until then, there are laptops that have most of that and a full keyboard/port array/expandability/etc...
If we kill all the Pirates, then global warming is going to go up even faster!
http://seanbonner.com/blog/archives/001857.php
"Never go to party's with metal detectors,
Sure it feels safe inside, but what about all those guys waiting outside with guns...
They know you ain't got one" - Chris Rock
Actually, the problem that I have is not so much when out of service, it's when too close to the wrong tower...
I was out of town and in another highly populated area (Knoxville I believe) a while back. The city is right near the boarder of the next time zone and what I found that kept happening is that my cell phone would update it's time according to which tower it connected to, often times the one in the wrong timezone. I had to shut off it's auto syncing and let it drift on it's own during that period.
I've also found that there are certain towers that just don't sync time, or don't do it well. In these times I'm glad I've got a watch on. I'll also have to agree with the grandparent... I can flick my wrist and check the time in under a second. It takes a good 10 seconds to fish my phone out of my pocket and unlock it, esp if I'm in a car and the pocket isn't at a great angle for phone removal.
Wow, you mean they're not going to call it Internet Explorer 2012 and start throwing ribbons at us?
I've had this problem in the past... it's not usually Firefox, the two times I've had the issue it's been a plugin, or Xorg (well, specifically Xorg using the close source proprietary ATI driver). I've dropped my extra plugin number down and have found it to be a much better browsing experience. The only things I regularly run now are Adblock, No Script and Forecastbar Enhanced. With about 20 tabs open and two windows, it's running at about 300MB now.
Really the biggest way to speed up browsing speed is to disable ads. There's no real way around that fact, it takes time to display complex flash animations and java script light boxes asking you to buy crap and take part in surveys... blocking that speeds it up by quite a bit!
Wouldn't that hurt the problem by taking developers off getting the project done to talk about what needs to be done?
Tell that to the managers who set-up and require attendance at the meetings. Meetings are one of the most misunderstood problems in modern software development. They're both very important for the vision and requirements in the beginning, and the worst thing for productivity during what were productive times. I agree, some short stand up meetings can be useful, and even a few bug scrubs or update meetings, but by in large, the meetings with developers need to happen as closely to the beginning of the project as possible, and then infrequently afterwords. Management doesn't always understand that meetings may help them understand what's going on, but really screw up the focus and forward movement of the project as a whole when used as noted above.
Viable? Definitely. Practical, probably not. but any work that can be done in this arena can funnel down to the practical cars in the future. Just like the people that bought DVD players for $1k when they came out. They caught on, were mass produced, simplified, and came down in price.
I know if I was rich, I'd get one. ('cause not being rich means my wife wouldn't quite go along with that purchase)