You could accuse Netflix of lots of things, but good recommendations is not one of them. It seems they have done their level best to make it impossible for me to browse their catalog with their ridiculously over-defined category structure and their appalling recommendations. The only thing worse than that is their selection, which is downright awful.
It's bad enough that I canceled my subscription a year ago, and I only have Netflix now because a one-year subscription came free with my TV. When the year is up, I'll be canceling again.
Which is a shame, because the pricing is reasonable if only the content selection wasn't so bad (and the content deliberately hidden so I can't easily see how poor the selection is.)
A hell of a lot more reasonable than my Comcast subscription, given that I watch precisely two channels and about four shows, but I am forced to subscribe to something like 150 channels to get them, PLUS an extra $8-10 a month to get them in HD.
No, that's not the beauty of it. Allow me to repeat: I have not seen anybody using it or even providing the ability to use it locally. And far from my "existing scanners... just [working] with it", I would need to replace almost anything I own to get any real use out of it even at home, let alone in the real world.
It's a minority app designed for a minority operating system.
And I've yet to see Passbook in the wild, but NFC is used by my TV (hold my phone or tablet next to a tag and whatever content it is displaying will near-instantly appear on my TV), it is used by every phone and tablet in my house apart from one intended for kids and one made by Apple (and makes transfer of data between phone and tablet ludicrously simple), and it is also used by the Octopus cards that are ubiquitous in Hong Kong (so when I travel in Hong Kong I can monitor my car balance, track recent purchases, etc. simply by holding the card next to my phone).
Add to that many other recently-announced devices such as cameras supporting NFC as a seamless, intuitive way to establish a Wi-Fi connection with no user action required beyond simply holding two devices next to each other, and I think you'll agree Apple are onto a non-starter by refusing to adopt NFC. Eventually, they'll come around, because it is a superb technology in terms of ease of use, and adoption is growing extremely quickly.
Hong Kong is nowhere NEAR that low population density. (I've lived there, and anybody who had even visited would know that for a fact.)
What you've nicely demonstrated -- albeit unintentionally -- is that simple population density is a meaningless metric.
Is the area of Hong Kong 426 square miles? Yes. Is the population evenly distributed across that area? No. Almost 5% is water, which has low habitation. (Boat people are quite rare, these days.) About 40% is country parks and nature reserves. There may well be some overlap between these two categories.
Much of what remains is too steep to build on.
The long and the short of it is that somewhere around 75% of Hong Kong's land area is undeveloped. Even of that which is developed, much of it is in the New Territories, and has relatively low population density. The overwhelming majority of the population is found in Kowloon, parts of Hong Kong Island, and a handful of new towns in the New Territories.
I'd wager that for these most-inhabited areas, the population density is more like 6-8 times your estimate, perhaps more. And the numbers for LA, CT, etc. will be equally meaningless. All of which is to say, you're comparing worm-filled apples to moldy oranges, and it's a waste of time. Someone out there likely has the real data with which to make a comparison. This isn't it.
Oh, and as proof that I'm not talking out of my rear, consider this:
http://www.dickclarkproductionstheater.com/facility.html
Just one example found on Google in less than five minutes. Twenty seats, *extremely* sophisticated setup (it might even be considered overkill), and the cost? According to:
http://www.refinery29.com/best-screening-rooms-la?page=2...that runs you just US$24 per person, for 20 people. Reduce the size, reduce the seating from leather lounge chairs, and take away the free drinks and popcorn, and even retaining the majority of the opulence that proves you could easily manage an eight-seat room for under $50 a person. Likely well under, if you dialed back the opulence (while still offering something far better than a full-sized cinema does.)
Wrong. A screen for 6-8 people is not going to cost anywhere near $100k. There are already companies doing *most* of this, they're just few and far between. But there is very definitely a market, and people who would pay the cost, which would be nowhere near $50/person.
This. I will support with my money any cinema that forcibly removes patrons who use their phones or other gadgets during the movie, or who loudly talk during the movie. If somebody makes a cinema without popcorn -- it smells to me like burnt rubber -- I'll happily pay twice as much.
The future for me is cinemas with a large number of comparitively small but extremely high quality screens, good audio, properly calibrated and using equipment I cannot afford at home, and at most 6-8 seats which I can reserve in full. (And better still, I can start the movie at my chosen time, pause it if there's a distraction, rewind it, and so forth, simply paying by the hour.)
Sadly, the movie industry is a dinosaur, and this kind of change will not happen on a large scale any time soon -- and so they will continue to very seldom receive my money.
That would still be a Firefox problem, not an OS problem. The app should be coded to work properly on every platform it is released on. If it can't be made stable on a platform, it shouldn't be released on it. That simple.
Basically anything I used to do with Firefox, I do today with Chrome -- and more. And for an added bonus, it doesn't collapse to its knees if I go without a reboot or closing my browser for a few days, let alone having a few dozen windows and tabs open.
This just in -- any input on your compromised device can potentially be used as a trigger for malware to launch its preprogrammed attack. News at 11!
Seriously, what kind of nonsense is this? They *could* also use your GPS / network location to activate only in a specific location, or the compass to activate only when the phone faces Mecca, or the tilt sensor and camera together to activate only when you're trying to shoot a level picture, or... well, anything, really.
It makes not one jot of difference what they use as a trigger once your phone is compromised. The point is, it's already been compromised, and it's effectively wide-open to anything the hardware is physically capable of. How it was compromised in the first place is what's important, not meaningless conjecture on how the exploit's eventual activation can be timed in the least efficient way possible. (All this nonsensical idea would do is drain your battery in no time by holding the mic and processor active all the time, thereby ensuring the phone runs out of battery before the exploit activates.)
I mourn for the days when Slashdot posted intelligent tech articles, instead of a stream of PR puff pieces designed to spread FUD and generate clicks. There is not one useful or non-obvious piece of info in this "research".
Go look at the typical business near you and see how much light pollution they're already producing all night long, lighting a car park nobody's using, signs nobody is reading, and quite often the store itself when nobody -- not even stocktakers -- is in it.
Now imagine how much they'll waste when it's even cheaper to do so. They won't even bother with light switches, they'll just wire the place to be floodlit 24/7/365 in the hopes of reducing insurance and maybe attracting one extra customer.
From the summary: "The U.S. Department of Energy recently estimated that the widespread replacement of incandescent and fluorescent lights by LEDs in the U.S. could save electricity equal to the total output of fifty 1 GW power plants."
Now, raise your hands, everybody who thinks we'll save energy. Nobody? OK, now raise your hands if you think what we'll actually do is use this as an excuse to leave the lights on 24/7, thereby expending the same or greater amount of energy, AND increasing light pollution as a handy bonus. Great, thanks. You can all put your hands down now.
Ever paid attention to how many businesses around you leave much or all of their outdoor lighting and signage on, all night? Multiply that nationally or globally, and you've almost certainly located a lot more energy waste than 50 measly power plants. And as a double win, you can get rid of all that waste without creating even more landfill-fodder in the process. Just persuade everybody to switch their lights off when their business is closed, by removing incentives for leaving them on (insurance), and adding incentives for turning them off (fines for closed businesses with the lights on, perhaps.)
The whole "criminals avoid your business when the lights are on" thing might hold true when only a few businesses leave their lights on, but when we all do... that's a theory that no longer holds true. It's just a waste of resources, and a major source of light pollution.
I'm well aware that quadcopters can get out of ground effect; I own two. However, I'd wager the reason they don't do it here has more to do with a) weight issues, if the dummy is supposed to have similar weight to the average human, and b) control issues, because once they get out of ground effect handling that many props and balancing the craft is going to be a doozy.
Which never got more than a handful of feet off the ground. That, to put things in perspective, is not even a quarter of its own width. And just as I'm guessing is the case with this, it wasn't capable of getting out of ground effect.
And it can only lift a mannequin when it's in ground effect. I'd be willing to bet it's not actually capable of getting out of ground effect, let alone flying for any meaningful distance.
...is that the Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 being labeled as a standout was released getting on for a year ago now. Was this year's CES really so underwhelming, with so few interesting products, that the best we can cite are products that aren't even new?
Also, don't form your buying decisions based on a few complainers. Those who have problems complain. Those who don't have problems tend to say nothing. That leads to problems seeming far bigger than they really are. There are plenty of us--me included--who bought pretty much on launch day and have no WiFi problems. HTC is great with firmware updates, supports the development community (albeit you have no warranty once you unlock, but they're upfront about that), and frankly the HTC One X (well, now the One X+) is the best phone on the market. Everybody who sees mine raves about the screen, and for a high-powered smartphone the battery life is great too.
This. I've only been with T-Mobile for a little under a year, but that gives an idea of their current thinking--and they have actually *helped* me get both of my devices, neither of which was purchased from T-Mobile and one if which isn't even sold in the US market--onto their US network.
The grandparent strikes me as fearmongering for the sake of it.
Exactly, and I would add that I've been on Win7 on multiple machines for... well, since not long after it came out, and I've never (intentionally) pinned anything to the task bar on any machine, nor will I ever do so. (Pinning things by accident and then having to unpin them, that happens all the time.) Nor do I know a single Win7 user who has ever intentionally pinned anything.
This is the (*@^#$ Office ribbon all over again... Microsoft trying to ram worse, even less intuitive GUI down our throats in a desperate attempt to shift us to something new that can be patented, and we can be forced to buy all over again.
When you type a query into a search engine, it's fairly unlikely that somebody else's unrelated typed conversation will also be recorded and transmitted along with it. That's quite possible when using an audio-based search on a device with a sensitive microphone. Likewise as you note, it's unlikely that you'll accidentally type a conversation with your phone in your pocket, but pretty feasible that you'll accidentally record your own conversation.
Again, I didn't make a claim that any particular percentage of the market was DD, just that DD was large enough to have an impact. You made a very specific claim, that "the majority" of sales weren't DD. Specific claims need to be held to a higher standard. Providing an example of one single cherry-picked game does not meet that standard. Since you can't be bothered to provide a citation, I went and found one myself, but it was just the first I found and is hence three years out of date and doesn't have an overall global figure. Nor does it count smartphone / tablet gaming, where DD is by far the dominant distibution method.
According to http://www.gamesindustry.com/about-newzoo/todaysgamers_graphs_international as of 2009, in the US market some 23% of PC games were DD in the US market, and 14% in the UK. For consoles, 16% were DD in the US, and 7% were DD in the UK. No, that's nowhere near dominant, but it is certainly enough to put some hurt on retail, especially when one considers that non-DD online sales are also taking a huge chunk out of brick-and-mortar retail.
Care to offer a citation to back up your assertion? (Yeah, I know, I didn't either, but then I didn't make a claim that "the majority" of sales were DD, and you [i]did[/i] claim the opposite. I simply said DD was a big factor, not that it was the dominant buying method.) Pretty-much everybody I know who still games at all buys almost entirely online, now.
I would wager that, as much as it is to do with GAME's own failings, it is also down to two other things: the industry-wide switch to digital distribution (Steam, Xbox Live Marketplace, Playstation Store, Wii Shop Channel, App Store, Google Play, etc.), coupled with the engineered death of second-hand sales caused both by digital distribution and the game publishers and console makers alike actively taking steps to prevent resale, effectively turning your "purchase" into a "rental".
Where's the abuse of being in public? You're in public, that means you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. What next, you're not allowed to look at the famous while they're in a public place, without prior written permission?
The famous are very happy to take the positive aspects of fame. Along with that comes a responsibility to put up with the negatives. I like Russell Brand, actually. Find him bl**dy hilarious. That doesn't mean I think he has the right to steal one person's property, then damage that person's property *and* the property of the completely innocent person whose window he threw it through, just to make a childish point.
If the paparazzo was breaking any law, Brand would be within his rights to call the cops, just like the rest of us. If they weren't, then he wouldn't. Either way, he doesn't have the right to dish out vigilante justice and expect to get away scot free.
The arms, they bend at the elbows and shoulders. Or is that too challenging a concept for you? You tend to use a tablet at arm's length, and a phone from a distance significantly less than that, of necessity due to the much smaller screen size of a phone.
Slashdot Mirror
You could accuse Netflix of lots of things, but good recommendations is not one of them. It seems they have done their level best to make it impossible for me to browse their catalog with their ridiculously over-defined category structure and their appalling recommendations. The only thing worse than that is their selection, which is downright awful. It's bad enough that I canceled my subscription a year ago, and I only have Netflix now because a one-year subscription came free with my TV. When the year is up, I'll be canceling again. Which is a shame, because the pricing is reasonable if only the content selection wasn't so bad (and the content deliberately hidden so I can't easily see how poor the selection is.) A hell of a lot more reasonable than my Comcast subscription, given that I watch precisely two channels and about four shows, but I am forced to subscribe to something like 150 channels to get them, PLUS an extra $8-10 a month to get them in HD.
No, that's not the beauty of it. Allow me to repeat: I have not seen anybody using it or even providing the ability to use it locally. And far from my "existing scanners ... just [working] with it", I would need to replace almost anything I own to get any real use out of it even at home, let alone in the real world.
It's a minority app designed for a minority operating system.
And I've yet to see Passbook in the wild, but NFC is used by my TV (hold my phone or tablet next to a tag and whatever content it is displaying will near-instantly appear on my TV), it is used by every phone and tablet in my house apart from one intended for kids and one made by Apple (and makes transfer of data between phone and tablet ludicrously simple), and it is also used by the Octopus cards that are ubiquitous in Hong Kong (so when I travel in Hong Kong I can monitor my car balance, track recent purchases, etc. simply by holding the card next to my phone). Add to that many other recently-announced devices such as cameras supporting NFC as a seamless, intuitive way to establish a Wi-Fi connection with no user action required beyond simply holding two devices next to each other, and I think you'll agree Apple are onto a non-starter by refusing to adopt NFC. Eventually, they'll come around, because it is a superb technology in terms of ease of use, and adoption is growing extremely quickly.
Hong Kong is nowhere NEAR that low population density. (I've lived there, and anybody who had even visited would know that for a fact.)
What you've nicely demonstrated -- albeit unintentionally -- is that simple population density is a meaningless metric.
Is the area of Hong Kong 426 square miles? Yes. Is the population evenly distributed across that area? No. Almost 5% is water, which has low habitation. (Boat people are quite rare, these days.) About 40% is country parks and nature reserves. There may well be some overlap between these two categories.
Much of what remains is too steep to build on.
The long and the short of it is that somewhere around 75% of Hong Kong's land area is undeveloped. Even of that which is developed, much of it is in the New Territories, and has relatively low population density. The overwhelming majority of the population is found in Kowloon, parts of Hong Kong Island, and a handful of new towns in the New Territories.
I'd wager that for these most-inhabited areas, the population density is more like 6-8 times your estimate, perhaps more. And the numbers for LA, CT, etc. will be equally meaningless. All of which is to say, you're comparing worm-filled apples to moldy oranges, and it's a waste of time. Someone out there likely has the real data with which to make a comparison. This isn't it.
Oh, and as proof that I'm not talking out of my rear, consider this: http://www.dickclarkproductionstheater.com/facility.html Just one example found on Google in less than five minutes. Twenty seats, *extremely* sophisticated setup (it might even be considered overkill), and the cost? According to: http://www.refinery29.com/best-screening-rooms-la?page=2 ...that runs you just US$24 per person, for 20 people. Reduce the size, reduce the seating from leather lounge chairs, and take away the free drinks and popcorn, and even retaining the majority of the opulence that proves you could easily manage an eight-seat room for under $50 a person. Likely well under, if you dialed back the opulence (while still offering something far better than a full-sized cinema does.)
Wrong. A screen for 6-8 people is not going to cost anywhere near $100k. There are already companies doing *most* of this, they're just few and far between. But there is very definitely a market, and people who would pay the cost, which would be nowhere near $50/person.
This. I will support with my money any cinema that forcibly removes patrons who use their phones or other gadgets during the movie, or who loudly talk during the movie. If somebody makes a cinema without popcorn -- it smells to me like burnt rubber -- I'll happily pay twice as much. The future for me is cinemas with a large number of comparitively small but extremely high quality screens, good audio, properly calibrated and using equipment I cannot afford at home, and at most 6-8 seats which I can reserve in full. (And better still, I can start the movie at my chosen time, pause it if there's a distraction, rewind it, and so forth, simply paying by the hour.) Sadly, the movie industry is a dinosaur, and this kind of change will not happen on a large scale any time soon -- and so they will continue to very seldom receive my money.
That would still be a Firefox problem, not an OS problem. The app should be coded to work properly on every platform it is released on. If it can't be made stable on a platform, it shouldn't be released on it. That simple.
Codswallop. Chrome supports Greasemonkey scripts natively, and you'll find a vast selection of browser behavior-altering extensions here:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions
http://www.chromeextensions.org/
Basically anything I used to do with Firefox, I do today with Chrome -- and more. And for an added bonus, it doesn't collapse to its knees if I go without a reboot or closing my browser for a few days, let alone having a few dozen windows and tabs open.
This just in -- any input on your compromised device can potentially be used as a trigger for malware to launch its preprogrammed attack. News at 11!
... well, anything, really.
Seriously, what kind of nonsense is this? They *could* also use your GPS / network location to activate only in a specific location, or the compass to activate only when the phone faces Mecca, or the tilt sensor and camera together to activate only when you're trying to shoot a level picture, or
It makes not one jot of difference what they use as a trigger once your phone is compromised. The point is, it's already been compromised, and it's effectively wide-open to anything the hardware is physically capable of. How it was compromised in the first place is what's important, not meaningless conjecture on how the exploit's eventual activation can be timed in the least efficient way possible. (All this nonsensical idea would do is drain your battery in no time by holding the mic and processor active all the time, thereby ensuring the phone runs out of battery before the exploit activates.)
I mourn for the days when Slashdot posted intelligent tech articles, instead of a stream of PR puff pieces designed to spread FUD and generate clicks. There is not one useful or non-obvious piece of info in this "research".
The only reason? No. One reason? Yes.
Go look at the typical business near you and see how much light pollution they're already producing all night long, lighting a car park nobody's using, signs nobody is reading, and quite often the store itself when nobody -- not even stocktakers -- is in it.
Now imagine how much they'll waste when it's even cheaper to do so. They won't even bother with light switches, they'll just wire the place to be floodlit 24/7/365 in the hopes of reducing insurance and maybe attracting one extra customer.
...that we won't.
/rant off
From the summary: "The U.S. Department of Energy recently estimated that the widespread replacement of incandescent and fluorescent lights by LEDs in the U.S. could save electricity equal to the total output of fifty 1 GW power plants."
Now, raise your hands, everybody who thinks we'll save energy. Nobody? OK, now raise your hands if you think what we'll actually do is use this as an excuse to leave the lights on 24/7, thereby expending the same or greater amount of energy, AND increasing light pollution as a handy bonus. Great, thanks. You can all put your hands down now.
Ever paid attention to how many businesses around you leave much or all of their outdoor lighting and signage on, all night? Multiply that nationally or globally, and you've almost certainly located a lot more energy waste than 50 measly power plants. And as a double win, you can get rid of all that waste without creating even more landfill-fodder in the process. Just persuade everybody to switch their lights off when their business is closed, by removing incentives for leaving them on (insurance), and adding incentives for turning them off (fines for closed businesses with the lights on, perhaps.)
The whole "criminals avoid your business when the lights are on" thing might hold true when only a few businesses leave their lights on, but when we all do... that's a theory that no longer holds true. It's just a waste of resources, and a major source of light pollution.
I'm well aware that quadcopters can get out of ground effect; I own two. However, I'd wager the reason they don't do it here has more to do with a) weight issues, if the dummy is supposed to have similar weight to the average human, and b) control issues, because once they get out of ground effect handling that many props and balancing the craft is going to be a doozy.
Which never got more than a handful of feet off the ground. That, to put things in perspective, is not even a quarter of its own width. And just as I'm guessing is the case with this, it wasn't capable of getting out of ground effect.
And it can only lift a mannequin when it's in ground effect. I'd be willing to bet it's not actually capable of getting out of ground effect, let alone flying for any meaningful distance.
...is that the Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 being labeled as a standout was released getting on for a year ago now. Was this year's CES really so underwhelming, with so few interesting products, that the best we can cite are products that aren't even new?
Also, don't form your buying decisions based on a few complainers. Those who have problems complain. Those who don't have problems tend to say nothing. That leads to problems seeming far bigger than they really are. There are plenty of us--me included--who bought pretty much on launch day and have no WiFi problems. HTC is great with firmware updates, supports the development community (albeit you have no warranty once you unlock, but they're upfront about that), and frankly the HTC One X (well, now the One X+) is the best phone on the market. Everybody who sees mine raves about the screen, and for a high-powered smartphone the battery life is great too.
This. I've only been with T-Mobile for a little under a year, but that gives an idea of their current thinking--and they have actually *helped* me get both of my devices, neither of which was purchased from T-Mobile and one if which isn't even sold in the US market--onto their US network. The grandparent strikes me as fearmongering for the sake of it.
Exactly, and I would add that I've been on Win7 on multiple machines for... well, since not long after it came out, and I've never (intentionally) pinned anything to the task bar on any machine, nor will I ever do so. (Pinning things by accident and then having to unpin them, that happens all the time.) Nor do I know a single Win7 user who has ever intentionally pinned anything.
This is the (*@^#$ Office ribbon all over again... Microsoft trying to ram worse, even less intuitive GUI down our throats in a desperate attempt to shift us to something new that can be patented, and we can be forced to buy all over again.
When you type a query into a search engine, it's fairly unlikely that somebody else's unrelated typed conversation will also be recorded and transmitted along with it. That's quite possible when using an audio-based search on a device with a sensitive microphone. Likewise as you note, it's unlikely that you'll accidentally type a conversation with your phone in your pocket, but pretty feasible that you'll accidentally record your own conversation.
Again, I didn't make a claim that any particular percentage of the market was DD, just that DD was large enough to have an impact. You made a very specific claim, that "the majority" of sales weren't DD. Specific claims need to be held to a higher standard. Providing an example of one single cherry-picked game does not meet that standard. Since you can't be bothered to provide a citation, I went and found one myself, but it was just the first I found and is hence three years out of date and doesn't have an overall global figure. Nor does it count smartphone / tablet gaming, where DD is by far the dominant distibution method.
According to http://www.gamesindustry.com/about-newzoo/todaysgamers_graphs_international as of 2009, in the US market some 23% of PC games were DD in the US market, and 14% in the UK. For consoles, 16% were DD in the US, and 7% were DD in the UK. No, that's nowhere near dominant, but it is certainly enough to put some hurt on retail, especially when one considers that non-DD online sales are also taking a huge chunk out of brick-and-mortar retail.
Care to offer a citation to back up your assertion? (Yeah, I know, I didn't either, but then I didn't make a claim that "the majority" of sales were DD, and you [i]did[/i] claim the opposite. I simply said DD was a big factor, not that it was the dominant buying method.) Pretty-much everybody I know who still games at all buys almost entirely online, now.
I would wager that, as much as it is to do with GAME's own failings, it is also down to two other things: the industry-wide switch to digital distribution (Steam, Xbox Live Marketplace, Playstation Store, Wii Shop Channel, App Store, Google Play, etc.), coupled with the engineered death of second-hand sales caused both by digital distribution and the game publishers and console makers alike actively taking steps to prevent resale, effectively turning your "purchase" into a "rental".
Where's the abuse of being in public? You're in public, that means you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. What next, you're not allowed to look at the famous while they're in a public place, without prior written permission?
The famous are very happy to take the positive aspects of fame. Along with that comes a responsibility to put up with the negatives. I like Russell Brand, actually. Find him bl**dy hilarious. That doesn't mean I think he has the right to steal one person's property, then damage that person's property *and* the property of the completely innocent person whose window he threw it through, just to make a childish point.
If the paparazzo was breaking any law, Brand would be within his rights to call the cops, just like the rest of us. If they weren't, then he wouldn't. Either way, he doesn't have the right to dish out vigilante justice and expect to get away scot free.
The arms, they bend at the elbows and shoulders. Or is that too challenging a concept for you? You tend to use a tablet at arm's length, and a phone from a distance significantly less than that, of necessity due to the much smaller screen size of a phone.