Blue Ray is not just competing against DVDs. It's competing against networks and hard drives.
You start with an $80 up front cost for a Blu-Ray writer, but then have to buy the discs, which have come down to $1 per disc, so $.040 per gigabyte.
Meanwhile. you can get a 1.5 TB external hard drive for $70, which winds up being $.051 per gigabyte.
So if you look at these costs, you'll have to use 290 Blu Ray discs before Blu Ray is cheaper storage than external hard drives. Yes, if you are just putting movies on those Blu Ray discs, you will be able to able to play those in a FEW more devices, but many DVD/Blu Ray/Consoles/etc. can read from an external hard drive. But access to a few extra devices comes at the cost of not being able to reuse that storage, where you certainly can with an external hard drive. Also, if you are needing high amounts of storage, you are almost certainly doing video, and will wind up using a lot more than 25 GB. An external is far more compact (and easier to deal with) than 60 Blu Ray discs.
Sure, there are cases when you want to transfer smaller amounts of data, but that's what flash drives are for.
According to the figures that I've found by a quick search, the unemployment rate 5 years ago was around 5%. It's now around 10%. With a US workforce size of about 150 million, that's about 7.5 million more people without jobs. So that's a good chunk of their lost customers right there. Even those with jobs may be watching their budget more closely (especially with the price of food and a lot of other more important things going up, while salaries have kept stagnant) considering that we are in a recession.
So yeah, they may have lost 20 million customers, but it's beyond ridiculous to blame it on places like Pandora (that may even be helping their sales).
In some cases, the opposite almost seems to be happening with BBC America. Less British stuff, and strangely more Sci Fi. You've got Doctor Who, Torchwood and Primeval, but then strangely you also have ST:TNG and the X-Files.
There were two main criteria that he used for describing if something is easily forgotten or not: ease of reading visually and complexity of writing.
It seems as if he's advocating making fonts and such harder to read, so that we are more likely to remember what we read, regardless of whether what we are reading is some trashy novel or a manual that we need to know to save lives. This seems wrong. We should be remembering details from what we read based on the quality and importance of the writing, not the font.
The other day while coding I realized that I was typing waaaay faster than I normally do while typing.
Then I realized that it was because I was writing an IM.
After that I went back to coding and my typing slowed down tremendously.
Thinking about this, it's probably because over time I've learned that it saves a lot of time to slow down and consider the structure that you are creating when coding, and making sure that you have very few typos/switched variable names. Sometimes the tools can help you catch those, but in other cases (such as using the wrong variable), you can far more time looking for a mistake than the time lost by slowing down a bit and not making the mistake in the first place.
From what I've seen of this, the flip side of this is that such people are also much more likely to be checking work email, etc. after hours. So if something suddenly comes up during non-normal hours, it's more likely to be dealt with quickly as part of a give-and-take approach. It's a blending of personal and working life. Yes, you do have to accept that some personal matters will be dealt with during work hours, but work matters will then sometimes be dealt with during personal hours.
Although honestly, I think the larger danger to the consoles is not the PC market, but the mobile market with the iPad and such. I've been surprised at how much the iPad can actually pull off for not being just a gaming device (N.O.V.A., etc).
This article reminds me a bit of some of the early predictions where the people couldn't see the need for more than a few computers in the world. It reeks of something that will come around and bite them in the ass for not progressing quick enough.
No, you weren't. Beyond just reading USCG as the United States Coast Guard, given that context, I initially interpreted "Copyright Defense Lawyer" as a lawyer for the Department of Defense who specialized in copyright law.
'All the mathematics one needs in real life can be learned in early years without much fuss,'
Wow, what a load of BS.
My wife taught "College Algebra" for a few semesters.
She was astounded when early on, she was working with a student during office hours on a fairly simple problem. A shirt costs 29.50. You have a coupon for 15% off. How much will the shirt cost you? The resulting answer was more than the original price.
Additionally, she was working with a student, and reduced the problem down to seven times four. The student's response? "Hold on, let me get my calculator"
While the current teaching methods being experimented with may not be working, I think that the professor is wrong in his suggestion that we basically throw up our hands and give up. It just means that we have to try other things to reach such students.
Hey, look on the bright side, if you manage to get access to the admin side of the copier (or perhaps if you've found that they never set it up, but your copier has this functionality), you can have loads of fun. Imagine if the copier wouldn't copy anything with the letter a in it, and if someone tried to, it would email your manager (or their boss). All the fun of shutting down the copier and spamming someone at the same time!
1.1 million deaths at Auschwitz. At the end, there were 7,000 people freed from the actual camp itself. 20,000 more survived the death march from the camp.
Ignoring those who might have escaped or been transferred, that still leaves a pet given to PETA with a pretty similar survival rate to a Jew in Auschwitz.
Care to still deny that there might be a bit of a problem?
Unfortunately, while I wish I could say the rest of his claims are entirely without merit (due to the horrible implications), I cannot. His claims are exaggerated to some degree (PETA does not snatch the pets), the kernel of the accusation about euthanizing pets seems to be true.
In 2009, PETA euthanized 2,301 cats and dogs brought into it's headquarters and only adopted out 8 cats and dogs.
Hmm, I'm guessing large subsidies for improving broadband, but with strings attached, such that the businesses receiving the money have to abide by net neutrality and respect the FCC.
Without net-neutrality, Comcast's purchase of NBC (and Hulu) could start raising some major questions about whether it is forming a monopoly, especially when the government is already looking at the broadband situation in the US (and possibly unhappy about it).
Additionally, the FCC has made it pretty clear that they want some authority over the net, so far assuming implicitly that they have such authority. With this ruling, we may yet see them given such authority explicitly.
I almost wonder if this may be a pyrrhic victory for Comcast. Imagine them having the NBC/Hulu sale blocked, and then later the FCC gets it's authority specifically created, enforcing Net Neutrality (perhaps with some fangs), and having a bit of a grudge against Comcast.
There are pictures, and even nice videos that come out every few months from folks playing around with high altitude balloons. It seems kind of unlikely to me that NASA would have just suddenly discovered this and been amazed. Until there is confirmation from NASA, I'm just going to assume this is BS, either made up by the guy, or some prankster called him.
Chances are pretty good that this outage was simply due to incompetence.
That said, it raises a rather interesting issue. It really demonstrates that there is a single point at which the game can be brought down.
I have to wonder if in the future, if other games include even more draconian DRM schemes that also require constant Internet access, if pirates might just intentionally attacking the servers involved (probably DDoS). I could see them doing this just to discourage such DRM (that may be harder to crack in the future, such as if more of the game data is held on the servers).
DRM could really be turned against the publishers. Ironically, by trying too hard to stop the pirates at launch, they may just be making it easy for pirates to destroy the launch.
I wouldn't say that the development of new, faster hardware has stalled. The hardware is there, it's just a matter of most PC makers not bothering to use it, instead going with the older technology to instead make cheaper computers (which does make sense to a degree with the economy being down).
Back in January, I build an i7 system for myself at home. I was going to build my system regardless, but I did take a look at Dell/etc., and they weren't really offering i7 systems. At the time, I just chalked this up to the i7 being so new.
A month or two ago, my department actually had extra end of year money, so I was looking for a new computer. I've been highly impressed by the i7, so I was definitely looking for i7 systems. When I checked out Dell again, I was rather shocked to find that there were very few Dell computers that used the i7, even 5-6 months after I had last looked. Nearly all of the systems were Core 2 Duo, and cheap systems at that. Only Apple seemed to really be bothering with the i7.
The other odd thing was that eventually I did find a Dell computer with somewhat similar specs to what I eventually got from Apple, but the Dell system had far less memory, and cost over $1000 more than the Apple. That really shocked me to see that in this case, Apple was CHEAPER. Never thought I'd see that.
So at the moment, it really seems that if you are paying above $1500, Apple is really your only choice at the moment, until you get to a price a couple times that, at which point Apples are actually cheaper anyway.
I had a similar experience with my wife. Whenever I utter "Star Trek" or "Star Wars" she just rolls her eyes and comments that I'm such a geek.
After seeing some of the trailers, I really, really wanted to see the movie (far more than previous Trek movies), and mentioned that a number of times to her.
She's busy with projects at the end of the semester in grad school, so I was half way thinking that I'd go see it on my own at some point.
Saturday evening she was really tired of working on her projects and I half jokingly suggested that we go see the new Star Trek movie. I was surprised when she agreed.
Long story short, she also really liked it, which was something both of us were surprised by (she commented that she found it funny).
Swedish authorities discover that ISPs deleting cutomer ID info has led to them being unable to determine the ID of file sharers, but also child pornographers, terrorists, people threatening suicide, etc.
New laws will be up for debate trying to outlaw deleting this kind of customer ID info, with privacy groups outraged.
(Not advocating anything here, just figuring this is where this is going.)
I think part of the issue is that methods of interactions with games are still fairly clunky.
Keyboards with lots of different buttons can take some time to navigate. Moving appropriately with mice is also not super efficient. Even special gaming devices for the PC are not that great. Game controllers for the Wii, Xbox 360, and PS3 are not super great either.
With controls for interacting with games that are not all that great, designing great computer AI that can potentially react as well as or better than a person would react if they were really in that environment is unfair to a human player.
I too have actually had a dream in text. It was back when I was playing MUDs a lot (text multiplayer games). The dream was in text in a MUD. I took that as a sign that I was playing too much and cut back on the hours.
Now if only I could get this Undead Rogue out of my dreams...
You may have been aiming for humor, but I actually pretty much see it like this. Part of this is to destroy decent quality streaming video. The reason for this is that you don't need to pay for their expensive cable TV if you can get the shows you are interested in over the internet in good quality.
This is really an anti-competitive measure.
They already have a mechanism in place to handle those who are doing a ridiculous amount of file sharing/mass uploading/downloading (kicking them off after they hit 250 GB in a month).
So then once you ask yourself why they really need this additional step, stopping streaming video from competing with their services seems to be the most likely reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Blue Ray is not just competing against DVDs. It's competing against networks and hard drives.
You start with an $80 up front cost for a Blu-Ray writer, but then have to buy the discs, which have come down to $1 per disc, so $.040 per gigabyte.
Meanwhile. you can get a 1.5 TB external hard drive for $70, which winds up being $.051 per gigabyte.
So if you look at these costs, you'll have to use 290 Blu Ray discs before Blu Ray is cheaper storage than external hard drives. Yes, if you are just putting movies on those Blu Ray discs, you will be able to able to play those in a FEW more devices, but many DVD/Blu Ray/Consoles/etc. can read from an external hard drive. But access to a few extra devices comes at the cost of not being able to reuse that storage, where you certainly can with an external hard drive.
Also, if you are needing high amounts of storage, you are almost certainly doing video, and will wind up using a lot more than 25 GB. An external is far more compact (and easier to deal with) than 60 Blu Ray discs.
Sure, there are cases when you want to transfer smaller amounts of data, but that's what flash drives are for.
According to the figures that I've found by a quick search, the unemployment rate 5 years ago was around 5%. It's now around 10%. With a US workforce size of about 150 million, that's about 7.5 million more people without jobs. So that's a good chunk of their lost customers right there. Even those with jobs may be watching their budget more closely (especially with the price of food and a lot of other more important things going up, while salaries have kept stagnant) considering that we are in a recession.
So yeah, they may have lost 20 million customers, but it's beyond ridiculous to blame it on places like Pandora (that may even be helping their sales).
In some cases, the opposite almost seems to be happening with BBC America. Less British stuff, and strangely more Sci Fi. You've got Doctor Who, Torchwood and Primeval, but then strangely you also have ST:TNG and the X-Files.
There were two main criteria that he used for describing if something is easily forgotten or not: ease of reading visually and complexity of writing.
It seems as if he's advocating making fonts and such harder to read, so that we are more likely to remember what we read, regardless of whether what we are reading is some trashy novel or a manual that we need to know to save lives. This seems wrong. We should be remembering details from what we read based on the quality and importance of the writing, not the font.
I'm the same way.
The other day while coding I realized that I was typing waaaay faster than I normally do while typing.
Then I realized that it was because I was writing an IM.
After that I went back to coding and my typing slowed down tremendously.
Thinking about this, it's probably because over time I've learned that it saves a lot of time to slow down and consider the structure that you are creating when coding, and making sure that you have very few typos/switched variable names. Sometimes the tools can help you catch those, but in other cases (such as using the wrong variable), you can far more time looking for a mistake than the time lost by slowing down a bit and not making the mistake in the first place.
From what I've seen of this, the flip side of this is that such people are also much more likely to be checking work email, etc. after hours. So if something suddenly comes up during non-normal hours, it's more likely to be dealt with quickly as part of a give-and-take approach. It's a blending of personal and working life. Yes, you do have to accept that some personal matters will be dealt with during work hours, but work matters will then sometimes be dealt with during personal hours.
Indeed. Slashdot has a very, very short memory. Just a few days ago there was an article featured on the consoles being too slow.
http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/11/25/2126215/PC-Gaming-a-Generation-Ahead-of-Consoles-Says-Crytek-Boss
Although honestly, I think the larger danger to the consoles is not the PC market, but the mobile market with the iPad and such. I've been surprised at how much the iPad can actually pull off for not being just a gaming device (N.O.V.A., etc).
This article reminds me a bit of some of the early predictions where the people couldn't see the need for more than a few computers in the world. It reeks of something that will come around and bite them in the ass for not progressing quick enough.
No, you weren't. Beyond just reading USCG as the United States Coast Guard, given that context, I initially interpreted "Copyright Defense Lawyer" as a lawyer for the Department of Defense who specialized in copyright law.
'All the mathematics one needs in real life can be learned in early years without much fuss,'
Wow, what a load of BS.
My wife taught "College Algebra" for a few semesters.
She was astounded when early on, she was working with a student during office hours on a fairly simple problem. A shirt costs 29.50. You have a coupon for 15% off. How much will the shirt cost you? The resulting answer was more than the original price.
Additionally, she was working with a student, and reduced the problem down to seven times four. The student's response? "Hold on, let me get my calculator"
While the current teaching methods being experimented with may not be working, I think that the professor is wrong in his suggestion that we basically throw up our hands and give up. It just means that we have to try other things to reach such students.
Hey, look on the bright side, if you manage to get access to the admin side of the copier (or perhaps if you've found that they never set it up, but your copier has this functionality), you can have loads of fun. Imagine if the copier wouldn't copy anything with the letter a in it, and if someone tried to, it would email your manager (or their boss). All the fun of shutting down the copier and spamming someone at the same time!
Let's see.
1.1 million deaths at Auschwitz.
At the end, there were 7,000 people freed from the actual camp itself. 20,000 more survived the death march from the camp.
Ignoring those who might have escaped or been transferred, that still leaves a pet given to PETA with a pretty similar survival rate to a Jew in Auschwitz.
Care to still deny that there might be a bit of a problem?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aushwitz#Evacuation.2C_death_marches.2C_and_liberation
Unfortunately, while I wish I could say the rest of his claims are entirely without merit (due to the horrible implications), I cannot. His claims are exaggerated to some degree (PETA does not snatch the pets), the kernel of the accusation about euthanizing pets seems to be true.
In 2009, PETA euthanized 2,301 cats and dogs brought into it's headquarters and only adopted out 8 cats and dogs.
http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/petas-euthanasia-rates-have-critics-fuming/19384880
Hmm, I'm guessing large subsidies for improving broadband, but with strings attached, such that the businesses receiving the money have to abide by net neutrality and respect the FCC.
Without net-neutrality, Comcast's purchase of NBC (and Hulu) could start raising some major questions about whether it is forming a monopoly, especially when the government is already looking at the broadband situation in the US (and possibly unhappy about it).
Additionally, the FCC has made it pretty clear that they want some authority over the net, so far assuming implicitly that they have such authority. With this ruling, we may yet see them given such authority explicitly.
I almost wonder if this may be a pyrrhic victory for Comcast. Imagine them having the NBC/Hulu sale blocked, and then later the FCC gets it's authority specifically created, enforcing Net Neutrality (perhaps with some fangs), and having a bit of a grudge against Comcast.
The trackpads on the Macbooks are multi-touch.
There are pictures, and even nice videos that come out every few months from folks playing around with high altitude balloons. It seems kind of unlikely to me that NASA would have just suddenly discovered this and been amazed. Until there is confirmation from NASA, I'm just going to assume this is BS, either made up by the guy, or some prankster called him.
Chances are pretty good that this outage was simply due to incompetence.
That said, it raises a rather interesting issue. It really demonstrates that there is a single point at which the game can be brought down.
I have to wonder if in the future, if other games include even more draconian DRM schemes that also require constant Internet access, if pirates might just intentionally attacking the servers involved (probably DDoS). I could see them doing this just to discourage such DRM (that may be harder to crack in the future, such as if more of the game data is held on the servers).
DRM could really be turned against the publishers. Ironically, by trying too hard to stop the pirates at launch, they may just be making it easy for pirates to destroy the launch.
It's a photo editor, not an image editor. If you want an image editor, you might try Splashup http://www.splashup.com/
Just remember folks, if you do have a friend in WoW who is showing signs of heavy WoW addiction, there is a fairly simple way for you to help them.
Make them your 25 man raid leader.
This always seems to (fairly quickly) reduce the amount of time that they player in question is online playing WoW.
I wouldn't say that the development of new, faster hardware has stalled. The hardware is there, it's just a matter of most PC makers not bothering to use it, instead going with the older technology to instead make cheaper computers (which does make sense to a degree with the economy being down).
/Two Quad-Core 2.66 GhZ i7s (well, Nehalem based Xeons actually), 12 GB RAM
Back in January, I build an i7 system for myself at home. I was going to build my system regardless, but I did take a look at Dell/etc., and they weren't really offering i7 systems. At the time, I just chalked this up to the i7 being so new.
A month or two ago, my department actually had extra end of year money, so I was looking for a new computer. I've been highly impressed by the i7, so I was definitely looking for i7 systems. When I checked out Dell again, I was rather shocked to find that there were very few Dell computers that used the i7, even 5-6 months after I had last looked. Nearly all of the systems were Core 2 Duo, and cheap systems at that. Only Apple seemed to really be bothering with the i7.
The other odd thing was that eventually I did find a Dell computer with somewhat similar specs to what I eventually got from Apple, but the Dell system had far less memory, and cost over $1000 more than the Apple. That really shocked me to see that in this case, Apple was CHEAPER. Never thought I'd see that.
So at the moment, it really seems that if you are paying above $1500, Apple is really your only choice at the moment, until you get to a price a couple times that, at which point Apples are actually cheaper anyway.
I had a similar experience with my wife. Whenever I utter "Star Trek" or "Star Wars" she just rolls her eyes and comments that I'm such a geek.
After seeing some of the trailers, I really, really wanted to see the movie (far more than previous Trek movies), and mentioned that a number of times to her.
She's busy with projects at the end of the semester in grad school, so I was half way thinking that I'd go see it on my own at some point.
Saturday evening she was really tired of working on her projects and I half jokingly suggested that we go see the new Star Trek movie. I was surprised when she agreed.
Long story short, she also really liked it, which was something both of us were surprised by (she commented that she found it funny).
Preview of next months news:
Swedish authorities discover that ISPs deleting cutomer ID info has led to them being unable to determine the ID of file sharers, but also child pornographers, terrorists, people threatening suicide, etc.
New laws will be up for debate trying to outlaw deleting this kind of customer ID info, with privacy groups outraged.
(Not advocating anything here, just figuring this is where this is going.)
I think part of the issue is that methods of interactions with games are still fairly clunky.
Keyboards with lots of different buttons can take some time to navigate. Moving appropriately with mice is also not super efficient. Even special gaming devices for the PC are not that great. Game controllers for the Wii, Xbox 360, and PS3 are not super great either.
With controls for interacting with games that are not all that great, designing great computer AI that can potentially react as well as or better than a person would react if they were really in that environment is unfair to a human player.
I too have actually had a dream in text. It was back when I was playing MUDs a lot (text multiplayer games). The dream was in text in a MUD. I took that as a sign that I was playing too much and cut back on the hours.
Now if only I could get this Undead Rogue out of my dreams...
You may have been aiming for humor, but I actually pretty much see it like this. Part of this is to destroy decent quality streaming video. The reason for this is that you don't need to pay for their expensive cable TV if you can get the shows you are interested in over the internet in good quality.
This is really an anti-competitive measure.
They already have a mechanism in place to handle those who are doing a ridiculous amount of file sharing/mass uploading/downloading (kicking them off after they hit 250 GB in a month).
So then once you ask yourself why they really need this additional step, stopping streaming video from competing with their services seems to be the most likely reason.