Yeah, but as Apple itself has shown with OSX, you don't need to be the most profitable, you just need to make more than you spent to stay in the market. And if Google can't turn their share into a profit by this point, they've got far more serious issues than just their penetration rates.
HTML5 poses as much threat to Apple as Flash does.
Not really. HTML5 must be parsed by Apple's Safari, giving Apple an easy way to ensure it remains as a second-class citizen on the iLine. They hold no such control over Flash, since if they allow v1.0 there'll be significant consumer pressure to support v2.0 with all the hooks required to make it competitive vs Apple's own dev platform.
And the same applies to programming in every language other than C for desktop apps, yet if you dared suggest that Python, Ruby and the rest should be banned you'd be laughed out of the room even by C developers.
Sorry, but your argument still doesn't make sense.
Who in their right mind is actually opening PDFs with Adobe Reader? just get Evince, Foxit and whatever OSX comes bundled with and forget Adobe was ever involved with the format.
Given that the alternative is forcing everybody looking to implement the standard to follow the published information from all patent issuing bodies, and scour them on the astronomical chance that somebody has patented SOMETHING belonging to the standard, SOMEWHERE, for which you could be potentially liable, I'd say the GP's option is far better.
Exactly, and who will develop these technologies and put millions in to them if they can't get it back and/or profit from it?
Corporations that don't push for their technologies to become part of international standards.
To make an analogy, you're still free to write and sell Windows, you just can't push it to become part of POSIX unless you drop all your patents over it. Sounds fair to me.
Have you seriously ask you this. Do you already have a PC of some sort? If so, why would you want to spend any amount of money to run the same types of applications as you main machine only significantly slower than a laptop?
Why do people buy laptops when they already own desktops? the answer: portability, portability and portability.
With an iPad, you can have access to your files on the LAN through different third party apps, SD card access with the adapter, A USB port with the adapter and video out with a cable.
Different third-party apps, all non-free (and not only in the FSF) and wholly unsupported by the device manufacturer. And your 'adapter' solutions all fail at the single thing the iPad has for it: portability!
Unlike a netbook, you are not struggling to run applications meant for a faster PC on an underpowered device but rather applications specifically written the iPad. Games will run at full speed rather than slowly or not at all like a PC game would on a netbook.
Unlike an iPad, you *can* run applications meant for PCs on a portable device. And I guarantee you, every single game that runs slowly on a netbook won't run at all on an iPad, with many that'd run perfectly fine (ie, most Flash and indie games) *also* won't run at all on an iPad. You're trying to twist "is wholly uncompatible with the software most people want to run" in an advantage of the iPad, and that's simply idiotic, sorry.
That's as much the fault of AGW denialists as it is of the fanatics. Just look a few posts above yours, how somebody who's merely expressing his concern for the measures proposed to combat AGW is used to prop up the validity of the denialist movement.
If nothing else, I would expect the/. crowd to be at least a little skeptical of *anything* that causes vast sums of money to change hands.
Sure. But the mark of a true skeptic (as opposed to a denialist) is that a skeptic can eventually be convinced, and this has been going long enough that true skeptics are somewhat scarce these days.
Many of those points are in fact being refuted by the "naysayers".
Cite them.
The debate is being quashed by those who agree with the points you've just made, instead of being debated.
Prove it. And I do mean proof, not just a random conspiracy theory.
Do good science or suffer the consequences. In this case I'd argue the climatologists didn't do good science. In fact, as far as I've read, they're not even documenting their assumptions.
Perhaps because he's *really* thinking about upgrading? not all of us feel a physiological need to purchase every newest-and-shiniest the moment it's announced, but sometimes we do like to have shiny toys to play with and perhaps he just believes that this provides an affordable way to get a nice, sizeable upgrade from his current machine.
Hell, I'm hardly a ricer l337 g4m3rz yet if all I need is a couple hundred bucks and a BIOS update to run this chip, even *I* may be tempted in spite of my current dual-core still serving me well.
Not *all* posts here on Slashdot are sarcastic, though I can see why you'd get confused.
Let me just ask you this: in 3 years, when h.265 is finally released, will you be able to stand up and say "no, don't switch to this, h.264 support is everywhere already and we can't afford to throw all those devices away merely because a technically-superior format came around"?
If you answer "yes", congrats, you'll be going against the hordes of foaming-at-the-mouth nerds currently backing h.264 up. Good luck, you'll need it.
And if you answer "no", well, 'hope you like Flash because that's where the ensuing market fragmentation will lead us back to.
And, just to be clear, an open source program can, according to a few well placed people, infringe upon patents.
Everything non-trivial can infringe upon somebody else's patents, and probably does.
Hell, even a bunch of trivialities are patented so even in that case you aren't entirely safe either. Ahh well, that's what happens when you allow people to 'own' mathematics, the world warned you all about it yet you still went and did it. Sucks to be you.
So is Microsoft. After all, they don't prevent you from installing another browser, they just make it *damned* hard to remove the one they put in there first.
Let me get this straight: you have to go to a third-party website and download a plugin unsupported by Apple to play MPEG-2 files on MacOSX? a codec that fucking Windows 98 over a decade ago could play out of the box? and this is the OS that's allegedly "so easy grandma can use it"?
I understand it with some Linux distros that prefer to maintain the legal freedom of its distro rather than support legally-encumbered codecs and, as such, don't support many of the popular formats out there, but OSX is closed-source and maintained by an extremely wealthy business so they really have no excuse.
Worse yet, it only works for 10.4.7 and above, so anybody with hardware outside the very small list of hardware Apple approves for it is screwed. Yay for closed-source!
I have been using Netbooks since the HP Jornada and I'll let you in on a secret: they suck.
Allow me to quote:
Are you really that arrogant that you really think you know what is better for most people?
For most people netbooks work and work well, and given their relative sales figures, they work better than an iPad would in its place. Or would you be so arrogant to believe you know what's better for them?
They don't want to know about CPU and RAM and GPU and so on, it's kind of like asking them to assemble a car by what engine, transmission, brakes and exhaust system go together. They want a car that solves a transportation problem. => limited models
Personally, I believe that if we took anybody who didn't know how an engine, transmission, brakes and exhaust system work off the roads, the world would be a far better place. And if you're wondering, no I don't know the first thing about it, which is why I'm a happy pedestrian.
It's not "geekery" to know how to use the tools you own, it's simply being a rational human being and it's sad people are trying to pretend otherwise. The drive of Joe Average to try and compensate for his ignorance with money is just pitiful, in the computing industry as well as everywhere else.
Apart from recognizable trademark-style fonts that people use for a title page or a logo (Coca-cola, Snickers, Pacman) - do most people even care what font they are looking at?
They don't, but they should: a good, quality fontface makes a world of difference in legibility vs a poorly-chosen one, and while the difference may be small for short works such as your typical Slashdot post, it becomes much more noticeable as the work becomes longer to the point that book editors pay thousands of dollars to get the perfect font for their books, because readers may *believe* it has no effect, but there's enough scientific studies proving that it does and quite measurably so.
With that said, however, the defaults on OSX, Linux/BSD and Windows are fairly good so as long as you stick to the old rule of "sans serif for screens, serif for print" you should get 90% of the way with 1% of the effort. Sadly designers are a snobbish and wasteful sort, so here we go with all this crap polluting the CSS standard only to allow morons to make entire websites in Comic Sans MS. Ahh well, at least we can still disable it.
Weird. I remember an interview with the founder of Magnatune, back before they went subscription-only and still had the "pay what you want" model for albums, and he said that the average was also between $7-8, though the minimum was $5 rather than zero.
I wonder, is it a coincidence or is the $7-8 price range somehow special? a balance between "low enough to throw away on a whim" and "high enough to be worth dealing with the bureocracies of actually paying", perhaps?
Ahh well, two data points is far too small to be drawing conclusions in any case, but I still think it's interesting.
It may not make sense, but for me there is a sense with the console that I'm getting the same experience as everyone else out there, that I'm not missing out on anything.
If it has a PC port, no you're not. And if it doesn't... well, you still had to pay for that 62" HDTV, didn't you?
In gaming, like in everything else, the moment you start feeling you must compete with other people on equipment (ie, "e-peen") is the moment your wallet falls down the drain and you become another poster-child for that famous phrase, "a fool and his money are soon parted". It happens to the best of us, though, some with videogames, some with guitars and some with photo cameras (as did to me), but the solution isn't to pretend everybody else is the same as you, they aren't and they won't. The solution is to simply grow out of it.
I laughed all the way through Resident Evil 2 and found Dead Space no scarier than a bag of kittens, yet I played an hour of Penumbra and had to stop because I was closing my eyes everytime I heard a sound and was scared of even turning a corner. In fact, I still haven't finished the game in spite of owning the entire series for about a year now.
If you like horror games you really can do no better than Penumbra, though those with heart conditions may wish to stay with World of Goo and Aquaria instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but as Apple itself has shown with OSX, you don't need to be the most profitable, you just need to make more than you spent to stay in the market. And if Google can't turn their share into a profit by this point, they've got far more serious issues than just their penetration rates.
Simple: the problem you describe happens every day in the desktop world and it hasn't affected it one bit.
HTML5 poses as much threat to Apple as Flash does.
Not really. HTML5 must be parsed by Apple's Safari, giving Apple an easy way to ensure it remains as a second-class citizen on the iLine. They hold no such control over Flash, since if they allow v1.0 there'll be significant consumer pressure to support v2.0 with all the hooks required to make it competitive vs Apple's own dev platform.
And the same applies to programming in every language other than C for desktop apps, yet if you dared suggest that Python, Ruby and the rest should be banned you'd be laughed out of the room even by C developers.
Sorry, but your argument still doesn't make sense.
Who in their right mind is actually opening PDFs with Adobe Reader? just get Evince, Foxit and whatever OSX comes bundled with and forget Adobe was ever involved with the format.
Given that the alternative is forcing everybody looking to implement the standard to follow the published information from all patent issuing bodies, and scour them on the astronomical chance that somebody has patented SOMETHING belonging to the standard, SOMEWHERE, for which you could be potentially liable, I'd say the GP's option is far better.
Because Times New Roman is boring, and they don't know you can change Notepad's default font to Comic Sans anyways.
And even that would be more reasonable than allowing people to "own" Mathematics.
Exactly, and who will develop these technologies and put millions in to them if they can't get it back and/or profit from it?
Corporations that don't push for their technologies to become part of international standards.
To make an analogy, you're still free to write and sell Windows, you just can't push it to become part of POSIX unless you drop all your patents over it. Sounds fair to me.
Have you seriously ask you this. Do you already have a PC of some sort? If so, why would you want to spend any amount of money to run the same types of applications as you main machine only significantly slower than a laptop?
Why do people buy laptops when they already own desktops? the answer: portability, portability and portability.
With an iPad, you can have access to your files on the LAN through different third party apps, SD card access with the adapter, A USB port with the adapter and video out with a cable.
Different third-party apps, all non-free (and not only in the FSF) and wholly unsupported by the device manufacturer. And your 'adapter' solutions all fail at the single thing the iPad has for it: portability!
Unlike a netbook, you are not struggling to run applications meant for a faster PC on an underpowered device but rather applications specifically written the iPad. Games will run at full speed rather than slowly or not at all like a PC game would on a netbook.
Unlike an iPad, you *can* run applications meant for PCs on a portable device. And I guarantee you, every single game that runs slowly on a netbook won't run at all on an iPad, with many that'd run perfectly fine (ie, most Flash and indie games) *also* won't run at all on an iPad. You're trying to twist "is wholly uncompatible with the software most people want to run" in an advantage of the iPad, and that's simply idiotic, sorry.
I can't imagine anything worse for their PR. No amount of advertisement can fix that.
Sadly, Blizzard has been proving you wrong for quite some time now.
That's as much the fault of AGW denialists as it is of the fanatics. Just look a few posts above yours, how somebody who's merely expressing his concern for the measures proposed to combat AGW is used to prop up the validity of the denialist movement.
If nothing else, I would expect the /. crowd to be at least a little skeptical of *anything* that causes vast sums of money to change hands.
Sure. But the mark of a true skeptic (as opposed to a denialist) is that a skeptic can eventually be convinced, and this has been going long enough that true skeptics are somewhat scarce these days.
Many of those points are in fact being refuted by the "naysayers".
Cite them.
The debate is being quashed by those who agree with the points you've just made, instead of being debated.
Prove it. And I do mean proof, not just a random conspiracy theory.
Do good science or suffer the consequences. In this case I'd argue the climatologists didn't do good science. In fact, as far as I've read, they're not even documenting their assumptions.
Then read some more.
Perhaps because he's *really* thinking about upgrading? not all of us feel a physiological need to purchase every newest-and-shiniest the moment it's announced, but sometimes we do like to have shiny toys to play with and perhaps he just believes that this provides an affordable way to get a nice, sizeable upgrade from his current machine.
Hell, I'm hardly a ricer l337 g4m3rz yet if all I need is a couple hundred bucks and a BIOS update to run this chip, even *I* may be tempted in spite of my current dual-core still serving me well.
Not *all* posts here on Slashdot are sarcastic, though I can see why you'd get confused.
Let me just ask you this: in 3 years, when h.265 is finally released, will you be able to stand up and say "no, don't switch to this, h.264 support is everywhere already and we can't afford to throw all those devices away merely because a technically-superior format came around"?
If you answer "yes", congrats, you'll be going against the hordes of foaming-at-the-mouth nerds currently backing h.264 up. Good luck, you'll need it.
And if you answer "no", well, 'hope you like Flash because that's where the ensuing market fragmentation will lead us back to.
And, just to be clear, an open source program can, according to a few well placed people, infringe upon patents.
Everything non-trivial can infringe upon somebody else's patents, and probably does.
Hell, even a bunch of trivialities are patented so even in that case you aren't entirely safe either. Ahh well, that's what happens when you allow people to 'own' mathematics, the world warned you all about it yet you still went and did it. Sucks to be you.
So is Microsoft. After all, they don't prevent you from installing another browser, they just make it *damned* hard to remove the one they put in there first.
Let me get this straight: you have to go to a third-party website and download a plugin unsupported by Apple to play MPEG-2 files on MacOSX? a codec that fucking Windows 98 over a decade ago could play out of the box? and this is the OS that's allegedly "so easy grandma can use it"?
I understand it with some Linux distros that prefer to maintain the legal freedom of its distro rather than support legally-encumbered codecs and, as such, don't support many of the popular formats out there, but OSX is closed-source and maintained by an extremely wealthy business so they really have no excuse.
Worse yet, it only works for 10.4.7 and above, so anybody with hardware outside the very small list of hardware Apple approves for it is screwed. Yay for closed-source!
I have been using Netbooks since the HP Jornada and I'll let you in on a secret: they suck.
Allow me to quote:
Are you really that arrogant that you really think you know what is better for most people?
For most people netbooks work and work well, and given their relative sales figures, they work better than an iPad would in its place. Or would you be so arrogant to believe you know what's better for them?
They don't want to know about CPU and RAM and GPU and so on, it's kind of like asking them to assemble a car by what engine, transmission, brakes and exhaust system go together. They want a car that solves a transportation problem. => limited models
Personally, I believe that if we took anybody who didn't know how an engine, transmission, brakes and exhaust system work off the roads, the world would be a far better place. And if you're wondering, no I don't know the first thing about it, which is why I'm a happy pedestrian.
It's not "geekery" to know how to use the tools you own, it's simply being a rational human being and it's sad people are trying to pretend otherwise. The drive of Joe Average to try and compensate for his ignorance with money is just pitiful, in the computing industry as well as everywhere else.
And even if Sears was the only place to buy shoes, you could always wear hiking boots or sandals.
Your point?
Apart from recognizable trademark-style fonts that people use for a title page or a logo (Coca-cola, Snickers, Pacman) - do most people even care what font they are looking at?
They don't, but they should: a good, quality fontface makes a world of difference in legibility vs a poorly-chosen one, and while the difference may be small for short works such as your typical Slashdot post, it becomes much more noticeable as the work becomes longer to the point that book editors pay thousands of dollars to get the perfect font for their books, because readers may *believe* it has no effect, but there's enough scientific studies proving that it does and quite measurably so.
With that said, however, the defaults on OSX, Linux/BSD and Windows are fairly good so as long as you stick to the old rule of "sans serif for screens, serif for print" you should get 90% of the way with 1% of the effort. Sadly designers are a snobbish and wasteful sort, so here we go with all this crap polluting the CSS standard only to allow morons to make entire websites in Comic Sans MS. Ahh well, at least we can still disable it.
Weird. I remember an interview with the founder of Magnatune, back before they went subscription-only and still had the "pay what you want" model for albums, and he said that the average was also between $7-8, though the minimum was $5 rather than zero.
I wonder, is it a coincidence or is the $7-8 price range somehow special? a balance between "low enough to throw away on a whim" and "high enough to be worth dealing with the bureocracies of actually paying", perhaps?
Ahh well, two data points is far too small to be drawing conclusions in any case, but I still think it's interesting.
It may not make sense, but for me there is a sense with the console that I'm getting the same experience as everyone else out there, that I'm not missing out on anything.
If it has a PC port, no you're not. And if it doesn't... well, you still had to pay for that 62" HDTV, didn't you?
In gaming, like in everything else, the moment you start feeling you must compete with other people on equipment (ie, "e-peen") is the moment your wallet falls down the drain and you become another poster-child for that famous phrase, "a fool and his money are soon parted". It happens to the best of us, though, some with videogames, some with guitars and some with photo cameras (as did to me), but the solution isn't to pretend everybody else is the same as you, they aren't and they won't. The solution is to simply grow out of it.
I laughed all the way through Resident Evil 2 and found Dead Space no scarier than a bag of kittens, yet I played an hour of Penumbra and had to stop because I was closing my eyes everytime I heard a sound and was scared of even turning a corner. In fact, I still haven't finished the game in spite of owning the entire series for about a year now.
If you like horror games you really can do no better than Penumbra, though those with heart conditions may wish to stay with World of Goo and Aquaria instead.