OS RAM usage hasn't gone up in a while. From XP to Vista, there was a jump from about 128Min/1Gb recommended to 1GbMin/2Gb Recommended. Windows 7 has the same requirements as Vista (And tends to run better on the same hardware). Windows 8 is slated to have the same requirements again and Microsoft has actually reduced memory usage by the OS. This means that there's a very real chance that OS RAM requirements won't have changed in a decade.
Yes, I'm aware that I neglected to mention other OS's but we're talking about mr average here, who will likely be running a Windows machine. He may be running Mac OS, but he sure as hell isn't running Linux.
Can't argue with program requirements though, those are steadily rising but once again Mr Average doesn't run that many programs side by side. They'll have a web browser, possibly email and/or IM clients and perhaps a media player. They won't be running VM's and will only occasionally be doing any kind of video editing, if at all.
When I said "the cloud", I'm talking about streaming services such as netflix. Why should someone clutter up their hard drive with films when they can just steam what they want?
Well of course, but you're one of the many who could make use of such space - I'm talking about average only-does-email-and-facebook joe kind of person.
Ok, there's never going to be a hard drive big enough to suit everyone's needs - that's a given. But average joe consumer must have a limit of some kind - what is it? I can't see how an average person will use more than about 1TB of space any time soon and even then that's probably overkill. At one point maybe it would have been to store music and films, but that's going to the cloud rather than local storage. Average joe doesn't rip his blu-rays. In the same way that RAM has probably hit a peak with consumers who simply don't need more than 3 or 4Gb for what they want to do, I wonder how Hard drives will fare?
Now as for myself, I could definitely fill 60Tb of space with stuff I'd like to keep - sign me up, but with the price of SSD's seemingly halving over the last couple of months, it's only a matter of time before average joe customer starts to realise that for the same price of a 60Tb HDD, they could probably have a 1Tb SSD that's a lot faster.
That depends on too many different factors to list. Sometimes you don't have a choice and you're stuck with using a company you don't necessarily agree with - many slashdotters here hate Microsoft but have to use Windows in some form because their views don't warrant them moving jobs. Using my original analogy, I wouldn't befriend that person because I have many friends and don't need any more. If he and I were the last people alive, I'd probably have to make an exception and work with him.
You don't have to be affected by someone's ideals in order to be against them. I wouldn't make friends with someone who went out to beat up people of a certain skin colour, even though I'm not liable to be one of his "targets". Why should it be any different for companies?
I can easily be described as a google fanboy - I have (and love) my Android Phone (a Galaxy Nexus, in fact). I signed up to Gmail back when it was invite-only and people only had about 6 invites to give out (or sell/trade, as was the case back then) and I even use Google+. However, I completely agree with what the above poster is saying. Fanboyism aside, no company should be able to abuse its position in the marketplace. Even if Google isn't entirely guilty or found to not be doing anything deliberately that harms competition, its still absolutely appropriate that they're investigated and regulated accordingly. The same should apply to any and all businesses with a large hold on the market, be they software companies, banks, pharmaceuticals, governments and so on.
I like Google on the whole and I genuinely believe that the founders were genuine in their model of "Do no Evil", but its a huge company now with a lot of power - I find it hard to believe that every single employee, every manager, every executive is entirely altruistic and doing what's best for everyone rather than what's just best for them/Google.
In the same boat as you, my friend. I have had this 24" 1920x1200 monitor for quite some time now for the same reasons. I could get a bigger screen, but actually lose real-estate - it's mental.
I think the real reasoning behind this is that Manufacturers were probably getting somewhat disillusioned with Google's favouritism for the big Nexus device. It's not hard to see why, either - when HTC did the Nexus One, even though the N1 wasn't a huge success, HTC's other phones (particularly the HTC Desire, which is practically the same phone in a different design) garnered them record profits. When Samsung did the Nexus S, their next phone was the Galaxy S II - another runaway success. No doubt getting a sneak peek at what's coming allows you to really plan ahead and hit the market with some leading devices. I'm sure LG, Motorola, ZTE and anyone else worth their salt would love a piece of that. Or at the very least, they'd love for Google to stop giving a major competitive advantage to one of their competitors.
Wait, you can't keep your number when you move networks? Is that like a US thing? In the UK, there's loads of legally binding things to make sure you can keep your number. In fact, it has to be transferred to your new provider within 48hours and I think that time frame is getting shorter.
Well done, you've managed to sum up the article even more succinctly than the summary by using an analogy. "If you don't like it, don't use it!" is exactly what's happening here, people are using other, free or cheaper services such as Facebook Messenger instead of SMS. Clap clap for you.
Despite my above post, I do actually agree with the opinion that sending and receiving a message does cost a sum of money greater than zero as you have to take into account the cost of building and maintaining the network. So what if it uses a part of the signal that otherwise goes unused, it still costs money to keep that signal broadcasting 24 hours a day, 365.25 days a year. To the guy above who feel's he's being ripped off for this, I wonder if he keeps his home connection running 24/7, or his telephone off the hook 24/7 since he's paying a fixed monthly sum for something that "isn't being used". Still, whatever it costs is trivial so the markup is obscene. At 1c a message, they'd still make a huge profit and I dare say free services like those in the article would make less of an impact.
SMS has a ridiculous markup, in the thousands of percent - sorry, telcos, but the gig is up. You've had your free lunch and it's over, how about instead you give us better data options so you can at least make some money out of all these free services? Face it - SMS and phone calls are a dying business, data is the future so invest in your infrastructure, encourage its use and profit from the fact that nobody's likely to offer free universal data any time soon.
I've just tried it in Firefox 12 and it was working fine, poor controls aside. I am running a decent dev machine with a Quad Core Sandy Bridge under the hood and 12Gb of RAM though - so it might be down to that.
You really need to watch the Bethesda "video podcast" of John Carmack playing Wolfenstein 3D and commenting on it - it's fascinating stuff. Particularly as he brings up exactly the point you're talking about and how the big studios, with multi-year plans for a single game can make really epic stuff but loose out on a lot of the ingenuity and flexibility a small group of people can have. If you plan to make a game in just a couple of months, you can perfect the gameplay or pull and scrap "features" as necessary to make the game truly fun, whereas on a big AAA title you can't really do that without potentially pushing the project back years - assuming it gets released at all.
From reading the comments, some people seem to misunderstand what actually happened. Yes, Anonymous DDoS'd Virgin Media, an ISP in the UK. However what they did was take down the main website, www.virginmedia.com - customer's broadband connections were NOT affected in any way. I know this as I am one of their customers.
Incidentally, despite being an ISP their website is pretty shoddy. I shared the link about the attack with a friend of mine who used to work for them, her response? "Well that doesn't surprise me, the bloody web site goes down if there's a stiff breeze or a bank holiday". Slight exaggeration, yes, but the point is clear.
I think it's less like a grenade and more like a shitload of spitballs. I mean, get hit with enough of those and it's going to be pretty unpleasant, plus a few are bound to miss and hit some other poor sod to the point where he's going to fell grossed out and maybe want to wipe his face a bit. But er....yeah I'm not really sure where I'm going with this analogy but I think the point I'm trying to make is that it's crude, only somewhat effective and those it "harms" aren't really harmed in a particularly dangerous way - it's more an irritant.
So basically, what you're saying is that bad films get affected by piracy in a negative way while good films get affected in a positive way. Sound about right? I've yet to see a single film do terrible at the box office yet be a critical success. All the films that caused the most uproar over piracy have been terrible.
What makes you so sure that it actually causes a loss? You don't think that maybe some of the downloaders flicked through it, watched a bit of it or perhaps even the whole thing and thought to themselves "Hey that was pretty damn good, I want to go see it in the cinema and get the full experience!"? Maybe if it wasn't for piracy, Avengers would have made $5million less. Or maybe, just maybe, it would not have made a difference at all.
In the middle of one of our courtyards, we had a small shrine with a statue of Mary, depicting the appearance of her at Lourdes. There was also a lot of rocks and plants for decoration.
One day, we came into school and one of the larger boulders had been moved across the yard to the other side. It had a note attached to it saying "It's a miracle, it moved!".
Chinese Anti-access? That's easy, just set your build systems to only support ASCII and all those chinese unicode symbols they have on their keyboards won't work.
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Never underestimate the stubbornness of sheer ignorance.
OS RAM usage hasn't gone up in a while. From XP to Vista, there was a jump from about 128Min/1Gb recommended to 1GbMin/2Gb Recommended. Windows 7 has the same requirements as Vista (And tends to run better on the same hardware). Windows 8 is slated to have the same requirements again and Microsoft has actually reduced memory usage by the OS. This means that there's a very real chance that OS RAM requirements won't have changed in a decade.
Yes, I'm aware that I neglected to mention other OS's but we're talking about mr average here, who will likely be running a Windows machine. He may be running Mac OS, but he sure as hell isn't running Linux.
Can't argue with program requirements though, those are steadily rising but once again Mr Average doesn't run that many programs side by side. They'll have a web browser, possibly email and/or IM clients and perhaps a media player. They won't be running VM's and will only occasionally be doing any kind of video editing, if at all.
When I said "the cloud", I'm talking about streaming services such as netflix. Why should someone clutter up their hard drive with films when they can just steam what they want?
Well of course, but you're one of the many who could make use of such space - I'm talking about average only-does-email-and-facebook joe kind of person.
Ok, there's never going to be a hard drive big enough to suit everyone's needs - that's a given. But average joe consumer must have a limit of some kind - what is it?
I can't see how an average person will use more than about 1TB of space any time soon and even then that's probably overkill. At one point maybe it would have been to store music and films, but that's going to the cloud rather than local storage. Average joe doesn't rip his blu-rays.
In the same way that RAM has probably hit a peak with consumers who simply don't need more than 3 or 4Gb for what they want to do, I wonder how Hard drives will fare?
Now as for myself, I could definitely fill 60Tb of space with stuff I'd like to keep - sign me up, but with the price of SSD's seemingly halving over the last couple of months, it's only a matter of time before average joe customer starts to realise that for the same price of a 60Tb HDD, they could probably have a 1Tb SSD that's a lot faster.
That depends on too many different factors to list. Sometimes you don't have a choice and you're stuck with using a company you don't necessarily agree with - many slashdotters here hate Microsoft but have to use Windows in some form because their views don't warrant them moving jobs.
Using my original analogy, I wouldn't befriend that person because I have many friends and don't need any more. If he and I were the last people alive, I'd probably have to make an exception and work with him.
You don't have to be affected by someone's ideals in order to be against them. I wouldn't make friends with someone who went out to beat up people of a certain skin colour, even though I'm not liable to be one of his "targets".
Why should it be any different for companies?
Thank you for your thought-provoking contribution to this discussion.
I can easily be described as a google fanboy - I have (and love) my Android Phone (a Galaxy Nexus, in fact). I signed up to Gmail back when it was invite-only and people only had about 6 invites to give out (or sell/trade, as was the case back then) and I even use Google+. However, I completely agree with what the above poster is saying. Fanboyism aside, no company should be able to abuse its position in the marketplace. Even if Google isn't entirely guilty or found to not be doing anything deliberately that harms competition, its still absolutely appropriate that they're investigated and regulated accordingly.
The same should apply to any and all businesses with a large hold on the market, be they software companies, banks, pharmaceuticals, governments and so on.
I like Google on the whole and I genuinely believe that the founders were genuine in their model of "Do no Evil", but its a huge company now with a lot of power - I find it hard to believe that every single employee, every manager, every executive is entirely altruistic and doing what's best for everyone rather than what's just best for them/Google.
In the same boat as you, my friend. I have had this 24" 1920x1200 monitor for quite some time now for the same reasons. I could get a bigger screen, but actually lose real-estate - it's mental.
You'll be hard pushed to find anything that's 16:10 these days, even desktop monitors.
I think the real reasoning behind this is that Manufacturers were probably getting somewhat disillusioned with Google's favouritism for the big Nexus device. It's not hard to see why, either - when HTC did the Nexus One, even though the N1 wasn't a huge success, HTC's other phones (particularly the HTC Desire, which is practically the same phone in a different design) garnered them record profits. When Samsung did the Nexus S, their next phone was the Galaxy S II - another runaway success.
No doubt getting a sneak peek at what's coming allows you to really plan ahead and hit the market with some leading devices. I'm sure LG, Motorola, ZTE and anyone else worth their salt would love a piece of that. Or at the very least, they'd love for Google to stop giving a major competitive advantage to one of their competitors.
Wait, you can't keep your number when you move networks? Is that like a US thing?
In the UK, there's loads of legally binding things to make sure you can keep your number. In fact, it has to be transferred to your new provider within 48hours and I think that time frame is getting shorter.
This almost seems like justice is being served. What's the catch?
Well done, you've managed to sum up the article even more succinctly than the summary by using an analogy. "If you don't like it, don't use it!" is exactly what's happening here, people are using other, free or cheaper services such as Facebook Messenger instead of SMS. Clap clap for you.
Despite my above post, I do actually agree with the opinion that sending and receiving a message does cost a sum of money greater than zero as you have to take into account the cost of building and maintaining the network. So what if it uses a part of the signal that otherwise goes unused, it still costs money to keep that signal broadcasting 24 hours a day, 365.25 days a year. To the guy above who feel's he's being ripped off for this, I wonder if he keeps his home connection running 24/7, or his telephone off the hook 24/7 since he's paying a fixed monthly sum for something that "isn't being used".
Still, whatever it costs is trivial so the markup is obscene. At 1c a message, they'd still make a huge profit and I dare say free services like those in the article would make less of an impact.
SMS has a ridiculous markup, in the thousands of percent - sorry, telcos, but the gig is up. You've had your free lunch and it's over, how about instead you give us better data options so you can at least make some money out of all these free services?
Face it - SMS and phone calls are a dying business, data is the future so invest in your infrastructure, encourage its use and profit from the fact that nobody's likely to offer free universal data any time soon.
I've just tried it in Firefox 12 and it was working fine, poor controls aside. I am running a decent dev machine with a Quad Core Sandy Bridge under the hood and 12Gb of RAM though - so it might be down to that.
You really need to watch the Bethesda "video podcast" of John Carmack playing Wolfenstein 3D and commenting on it - it's fascinating stuff.
Particularly as he brings up exactly the point you're talking about and how the big studios, with multi-year plans for a single game can make really epic stuff but loose out on a lot of the ingenuity and flexibility a small group of people can have. If you plan to make a game in just a couple of months, you can perfect the gameplay or pull and scrap "features" as necessary to make the game truly fun, whereas on a big AAA title you can't really do that without potentially pushing the project back years - assuming it gets released at all.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amDtAPHH-zE
From reading the comments, some people seem to misunderstand what actually happened. Yes, Anonymous DDoS'd Virgin Media, an ISP in the UK. However what they did was take down the main website, www.virginmedia.com - customer's broadband connections were NOT affected in any way. I know this as I am one of their customers.
Incidentally, despite being an ISP their website is pretty shoddy. I shared the link about the attack with a friend of mine who used to work for them, her response? "Well that doesn't surprise me, the bloody web site goes down if there's a stiff breeze or a bank holiday". Slight exaggeration, yes, but the point is clear.
I think it's less like a grenade and more like a shitload of spitballs. I mean, get hit with enough of those and it's going to be pretty unpleasant, plus a few are bound to miss and hit some other poor sod to the point where he's going to fell grossed out and maybe want to wipe his face a bit. But er....yeah I'm not really sure where I'm going with this analogy but I think the point I'm trying to make is that it's crude, only somewhat effective and those it "harms" aren't really harmed in a particularly dangerous way - it's more an irritant.
So basically, what you're saying is that bad films get affected by piracy in a negative way while good films get affected in a positive way. Sound about right?
I've yet to see a single film do terrible at the box office yet be a critical success. All the films that caused the most uproar over piracy have been terrible.
What makes you so sure that it actually causes a loss? You don't think that maybe some of the downloaders flicked through it, watched a bit of it or perhaps even the whole thing and thought to themselves "Hey that was pretty damn good, I want to go see it in the cinema and get the full experience!"?
Maybe if it wasn't for piracy, Avengers would have made $5million less.
Or maybe, just maybe, it would not have made a difference at all.
In the middle of one of our courtyards, we had a small shrine with a statue of Mary, depicting the appearance of her at Lourdes. There was also a lot of rocks and plants for decoration.
One day, we came into school and one of the larger boulders had been moved across the yard to the other side. It had a note attached to it saying "It's a miracle, it moved!".
True story.
Chinese Anti-access? That's easy, just set your build systems to only support ASCII and all those chinese unicode symbols they have on their keyboards won't work.