What a load of guff. In fact, I'm sat in hospital in central London, the largest and most connected city in western europe and I can't get a decent 3g or wifi signal good enough to stream low bitrate radio without breaking up never mind anything else.
Streaming will never, repeat, never take over me popping a cd in my laptop or playing my mp3 player unless we have guaranteed super-fast-never-failing broadband connections.
You do know that you can offline sync all your Spotify playlists and play without any connection at all, on smartphones and PC/Mac.
For 100 points, does your browser run on the huge installed base of WindowsXP?
Dang, we'll be limited to IE8 features until at least 2013...
Windows XP is very much like IE6 -- both are decade old systems that should have been left behind a long time ago. If not for lack of features so for lack of modern security.
They would have gone absolutely crazy about the iPad! I'm only kind of joking. After checking out my inlaw's Kindle, I'm unimpressed.
These are very different devices. I can effortlessly hold my Kindle in one hand for hours while reading, the screen is amazing to read for long periods, and battery last for weeks (weeks!). It's library+book in an amazing package, when you get over not being able to touch the screen. iPad is a cool couch/cafe surfing device, but something very different from the Kindle.
Is there any way to get your spotify tunes in your car without a smartphone?
There is this: http://www.applian.com/replay-music/ . I use that for exactly same purpose, works great. Converting Spotify playlists this way is as easy as any other method of getting music to your car. An as legal (at least where I live).
In addition to smartphone line og FM connectors to car stereo.
Actually, the big 4 (Sony BMG, EMI, Warner and Universal who account for something like 99% of the content on the big subscription services) together only make about 5 million songs available. Together they have a back-catalogue of about 200 million songs, most of which you'll never see again in any shape and form because they deem the cost of media transfer and meta-data editing to high in relation to how many they'll sell of each.
I don't know about the 200 mill number, but Spotify have over 10 million tracks. There are some holes in the catalogue, but very few. And those 10 mill tracks are available to me right now, for almost nothing - around half a dollar per day in a high-cost country, where do I go to buy the 200 mill and at what cost?
/yeah, I like Spotify, but not in any way connected with them
No one cares Jones. Subscriptions are a waste of money!
I used to think this. Then Spotify came along. It changed everything, and represent to me the new model for music everybody is asking for.
Not only the streaming promise of having access to unlimited music, but so elegantly, user friendly, fast and easy implemented. Plus sharing with friends, social playlists and offline syncing to mobile devices. One day I suddenly relalized I even preferred using it to play tracks I already had on the harddisk. So damn convenient is it.
When you have friends over, you have most any music anybody would like to play. I know I don't "own" it, but the amount of Spotify music I've played already, it would have cost me a fortune to own it. And I would have thought of the per-track cost every time, instead of just adding any music I and friends feel like playing. The small sub fee is a damn good deal for enjoying this, even if I don't own it.
And for me, discovery of new music have increased as well. And since most people I know take for granted that everybody has Spotify, you can easily share direct links to tracks and playlists.
Reading over this sounds like a hallelujah sales pitch, but I'll stand by it god damnit, Spotify have change how I buy and consume music for me and very many people I know.
Marketing will only get you so far. You have to back it up with actual product quality too.
After this amount of time, even with sometimes fantastical (some say magical!) marketing, if they were selling polished turds people would stop buying.
Not long ago Opera and Chrome seemed unbeatable on Javascript speed (Sunspider). Quite impressive speed on IE9, coming out and beating them all, even for the people not caring about hardware accellerated graphics.
No matter what your browser of choice is right now, IE9 is adding to the competition in a good way - even following standards more strictly than some others (eg. not implementing non-standards/unfinished standards).
I have the simplest, cheapest phone you can imagine - doesn't text, doesn't GPS, doesn't do anything but 1 single thing, and that's make and receive phone calls. I think I'll keep it.
Good for you. For me, going back to non-smartphone would be the same as going back to desktop PC without Internet connection. Yes, it can still do what it was originally was meant to do (and no worry about being tracked). But I do enjoy what this new functionality makes possible. Like reading Slashdot on the subway:)
Actually when it comes to press freedom, the US still looks better than most countries. In fact, even after 230 years of the US example, I don't know of any other governments whose core founding and/or legal principles include the explicit recognition of the citizenry's inalienable right to freedom of speech, it seems to genuinely be something exceptional. Oh sure, many governments have begrudgingly given a nod to what they see as "granting" of similar rights (and in fact even that much is due to the positive influence of the US historically) - but saying "OK, we grant you freedom of speech" is actually fundamentally vastly different to inalienable rights, which are not considered granted, but exist independent of government and cannot morally be taken away. Sure, in practice lawmakers pee on the constitution with abandon, as lawmakers will do, but I'll take the US any day. Trying to block citizens' practice of liberties such as free speech is something all governments do anyway, but only one government in the world at least formally recognizes this as wrong (and gives the citizens other rights, such as the 2nd amendment, in order to enforce the 1st amendment).
I'm definitely not saying it's perfect, or that we shouldn't strive for better. On the contrary, we should continually strive for better. We have to.
Press Freedom Index 2010: US at #20. With the Nordic countries, Netherlands and Switzerland at the top.
Just yesterday I wanted to download VLC media player. Top link on Bing: repackaged with junk seach engine and crapware newsletters. Top link on Google: the home site which linked to the sourceforge download.
Of course Microsoft could be doing that on purpose for Open Source software...
What country are you in? It's really only US that have Bing yet (rebranding old Live Search in all the other countries to Bing without actually having the product is an amazing decision btw..) and a search for VLC on Bing US gives me a very useful and relevant top result. With direct links to download even for Mac and Ubuntu versions:
On one hand, Microsoft managed to produce an excellent product that's almost fully compatible with the latest standards.
On the other hand, they're the same people who's responsible for summoning the Devil's own child into this world (under the trademark of IE6).
I honestly don't know what to feel about them right now.
I'm curious, did you actually experience Netscape 6 (the alternative at the time) as something better?
Your comment doesn't really apply. Microsoft is the only company with enough balls to ignore certain aspects of Acid 3 that aren't official specifications of HTML/CSS/JS.
Mozilla also ignores SVG fonts, as they should (enter WOFF), but you are right in that they are not a company. They are both right, and both deserve kudos for standing up to the hysteria of artificial 100 score on Acid3.
This is eerily similar to Microsoft being praised for Windows 7 after pushing Vista. Sure the situation is completely different, but praising a company for finally listening to consumers is the wrong way to go about it.
You could argue that they didn't listen to consumers, or developers, but did it because they were under investigation for anti-competitive behavior on this, both in US and EU. A conviction on this would be tough on the image, even for Apple.
I seem to be missing something here. Somebody please remind me what Windows Malicious software remover and all those antivirus programs are supposed to be doing.
The biggest problem is people not using them - not using automatic windows update (or very frequently manual) and not having up-to date malware and antivirus (it's free and some, like this one, are not the resource hogs fx old Norton was infamous for.)
Nothing is 100% secure, but boy to this take care of most of it, as you correctly are saying (when I turn my sarcasm detector off:)
fx Windows had actually Conficker patched quite early, in Windows Update, it became the big ongoing epidemic because of unpatched machines (people not doing auto- or frequent updates, for some reason or other).
And some people are probably going to suggest Mac or Linux at this point, fair enough, but for people that wants or needs to use Windows, it isn't that hard to have a quite secure and trouble free Windows 7 setup (decade old XP is starting to be another story).
So why are cell phone cameras (still and video) so popular?
They aren't. From my experience, hardly anybody actually uses phone cameras, unless they are really desperate and have no alternative camera at hand.
I could say my experience is the complete opposite, which it is, but since both are just anecdotal it made me curious to find out if there are any data on this.
Just one datapoint, I know. But seems at the very least to disprove the hardly used by anybody theory. I would guess, but have no data, that the complete different experiences people have on this comes down to demographic differences (mobile markets and usage very different from country to country, and age group to age group, etc).
Myself I find I'm using my mobile camera more, they have gotten quite good, and regular camera less. But I could still agree with your claim it is just because I don't have another camera with me, because that is mostly true, I usually don't go around with a camera, but I absolutely always have my mobile with me (currently a HTC HD2, so not in the iPhone group myself)
This, and the left side search refinement panel Google have introduced, are both directly lifted from Bing. Google adopting it is probably going to make it tougher for Bing, having to come up with other differentiators to compete with Google, but nice to see that competition is working and driving innovation in the search space.
Slashdot Mirror
What a load of guff. In fact, I'm sat in hospital in central London, the largest and most connected city in western europe and I can't get a decent 3g or wifi signal good enough to stream low bitrate radio without breaking up never mind anything else. Streaming will never, repeat, never take over me popping a cd in my laptop or playing my mp3 player unless we have guaranteed super-fast-never-failing broadband connections.
You do know that you can offline sync all your Spotify playlists and play without any connection at all, on smartphones and PC/Mac.
It isn't easy to "pwn" unless you leave it sitting around unlocked and let strangers use it. These are local exploits.
Are you sure about that? The winner is quoted in the linked article: “The victim visits a web page, he gets owned. No other interaction is needed.”
It's called "Pwn2Own": the hackers win the machines they hack.
Everyone wants Macs. They hack them first. The other computers come down minutes later.
First one wins 15k$ cash. You are saying they risk this by not going after the easiest target first because they so desperately want a Mac?
For 100 points, does your browser run on the huge installed base of WindowsXP?
Dang, we'll be limited to IE8 features until at least 2013...
Windows XP is very much like IE6 -- both are decade old systems that should have been left behind a long time ago. If not for lack of features so for lack of modern security.
They would have gone absolutely crazy about the iPad! I'm only kind of joking. After checking out my inlaw's Kindle, I'm unimpressed.
These are very different devices. I can effortlessly hold my Kindle in one hand for hours while reading, the screen is amazing to read for long periods, and battery last for weeks (weeks!). It's library+book in an amazing package, when you get over not being able to touch the screen. iPad is a cool couch/cafe surfing device, but something very different from the Kindle.
Kind of ironic when Apple is the company that is most vocal about HTML5 replacing Flash. http://developers.facebook.com/attachment/scores.png
Is there any way to get your spotify tunes in your car without a smartphone?
There is this: http://www.applian.com/replay-music/ . I use that for exactly same purpose, works great. Converting Spotify playlists this way is as easy as any other method of getting music to your car. An as legal (at least where I live).
In addition to smartphone line og FM connectors to car stereo.
Actually, the big 4 (Sony BMG, EMI, Warner and Universal who account for something like 99% of the content on the big subscription services) together only make about 5 million songs available. Together they have a back-catalogue of about 200 million songs, most of which you'll never see again in any shape and form because they deem the cost of media transfer and meta-data editing to high in relation to how many they'll sell of each.
I don't know about the 200 mill number, but Spotify have over 10 million tracks. There are some holes in the catalogue, but very few. And those 10 mill tracks are available to me right now, for almost nothing - around half a dollar per day in a high-cost country, where do I go to buy the 200 mill and at what cost?
/yeah, I like Spotify, but not in any way connected with them
No one cares Jones. Subscriptions are a waste of money!
I used to think this. Then Spotify came along. It changed everything, and represent to me the new model for music everybody is asking for.
Not only the streaming promise of having access to unlimited music, but so elegantly, user friendly, fast and easy implemented. Plus sharing with friends, social playlists and offline syncing to mobile devices. One day I suddenly relalized I even preferred using it to play tracks I already had on the harddisk. So damn convenient is it.
When you have friends over, you have most any music anybody would like to play. I know I don't "own" it, but the amount of Spotify music I've played already, it would have cost me a fortune to own it. And I would have thought of the per-track cost every time, instead of just adding any music I and friends feel like playing. The small sub fee is a damn good deal for enjoying this, even if I don't own it.
And for me, discovery of new music have increased as well. And since most people I know take for granted that everybody has Spotify, you can easily share direct links to tracks and playlists.
Reading over this sounds like a hallelujah sales pitch, but I'll stand by it god damnit, Spotify have change how I buy and consume music for me and very many people I know.
Marketing will only get you so far. You have to back it up with actual product quality too.
After this amount of time, even with sometimes fantastical (some say magical!) marketing, if they were selling polished turds people would stop buying.
Obligatory Mythbusters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI
Not long ago Opera and Chrome seemed unbeatable on Javascript speed (Sunspider). Quite impressive speed on IE9, coming out and beating them all, even for the people not caring about hardware accellerated graphics.
No matter what your browser of choice is right now, IE9 is adding to the competition in a good way - even following standards more strictly than some others (eg. not implementing non-standards/unfinished standards).
I have the simplest, cheapest phone you can imagine - doesn't text, doesn't GPS, doesn't do anything but 1 single thing, and that's make and receive phone calls. I think I'll keep it.
Good for you. For me, going back to non-smartphone would be the same as going back to desktop PC without Internet connection. Yes, it can still do what it was originally was meant to do (and no worry about being tracked). But I do enjoy what this new functionality makes possible. Like reading Slashdot on the subway :)
When MS adopts .MKV file container I'll give it mind share.
Default support would certainly be nice, but you can play .MKV on Windows 7, also in MCE, quite easily with the codec from DivX.
Atlantis wasn't bad thanks to Dr McKay!
Agree, SG-1 was great fun, a classic, Atlantis was ok fun, Stargate Universe is boooooring. I blame BSG.
Actually when it comes to press freedom, the US still looks better than most countries. In fact, even after 230 years of the US example, I don't know of any other governments whose core founding and/or legal principles include the explicit recognition of the citizenry's inalienable right to freedom of speech, it seems to genuinely be something exceptional. Oh sure, many governments have begrudgingly given a nod to what they see as "granting" of similar rights (and in fact even that much is due to the positive influence of the US historically) - but saying "OK, we grant you freedom of speech" is actually fundamentally vastly different to inalienable rights, which are not considered granted, but exist independent of government and cannot morally be taken away. Sure, in practice lawmakers pee on the constitution with abandon, as lawmakers will do, but I'll take the US any day. Trying to block citizens' practice of liberties such as free speech is something all governments do anyway, but only one government in the world at least formally recognizes this as wrong (and gives the citizens other rights, such as the 2nd amendment, in order to enforce the 1st amendment).
I'm definitely not saying it's perfect, or that we shouldn't strive for better. On the contrary, we should continually strive for better. We have to.
Press Freedom Index 2010: US at #20. With the Nordic countries, Netherlands and Switzerland at the top.
Just yesterday I wanted to download VLC media player. Top link on Bing: repackaged with junk seach engine and crapware newsletters. Top link on Google: the home site which linked to the sourceforge download. Of course Microsoft could be doing that on purpose for Open Source software...
What country are you in? It's really only US that have Bing yet (rebranding old Live Search in all the other countries to Bing without actually having the product is an amazing decision btw..) and a search for VLC on Bing US gives me a very useful and relevant top result. With direct links to download even for Mac and Ubuntu versions:
http://imgur.com/RGqtA.jpg
On one hand, Microsoft managed to produce an excellent product that's almost fully compatible with the latest standards. On the other hand, they're the same people who's responsible for summoning the Devil's own child into this world (under the trademark of IE6). I honestly don't know what to feel about them right now.
I'm curious, did you actually experience Netscape 6 (the alternative at the time) as something better?
Your comment doesn't really apply. Microsoft is the only company with enough balls to ignore certain aspects of Acid 3 that aren't official specifications of HTML/CSS/JS.
Mozilla also ignores SVG fonts, as they should (enter WOFF), but you are right in that they are not a company. They are both right, and both deserve kudos for standing up to the hysteria of artificial 100 score on Acid3.
If IE8 is any indication, Firefox comes a damn sight closer to passing.
Not perfectly in compliance, granted, but really rather close when compared to what it looked like in IE for me.
Firefox does 97, IE9 does 95 on Acid3.
This is eerily similar to Microsoft being praised for Windows 7 after pushing Vista. Sure the situation is completely different, but praising a company for finally listening to consumers is the wrong way to go about it.
You could argue that they didn't listen to consumers, or developers, but did it because they were under investigation for anti-competitive behavior on this, both in US and EU. A conviction on this would be tough on the image, even for Apple.
http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/
(when promoting being up to date, linking to an out of date version was a pretty ironic screw-up.. :)
I seem to be missing something here. Somebody please remind me what Windows Malicious software remover and all those antivirus programs are supposed to be doing.
The biggest problem is people not using them - not using automatic windows update (or very frequently manual) and not having up-to date malware and antivirus (it's free and some, like this one, are not the resource hogs fx old Norton was infamous for.)
Nothing is 100% secure, but boy to this take care of most of it, as you correctly are saying (when I turn my sarcasm detector off :)
fx Windows had actually Conficker patched quite early, in Windows Update, it became the big ongoing epidemic because of unpatched machines (people not doing auto- or frequent updates, for some reason or other).
And some people are probably going to suggest Mac or Linux at this point, fair enough, but for people that wants or needs to use Windows, it isn't that hard to have a quite secure and trouble free Windows 7 setup (decade old XP is starting to be another story).
but they did have it in the notes. the article is wrong.
Uhm.. can you point to where you see that? Here are the notes: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4188
So why are cell phone cameras (still and video) so popular?
They aren't. From my experience, hardly anybody actually uses phone cameras, unless they are really desperate and have no alternative camera at hand.
I could say my experience is the complete opposite, which it is, but since both are just anecdotal it made me curious to find out if there are any data on this.
According to Flickr usage statistics iPhone is the most used camera on Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/cameras/
Just one datapoint, I know. But seems at the very least to disprove the hardly used by anybody theory. I would guess, but have no data, that the complete different experiences people have on this comes down to demographic differences (mobile markets and usage very different from country to country, and age group to age group, etc).
Myself I find I'm using my mobile camera more, they have gotten quite good, and regular camera less. But I could still agree with your claim it is just because I don't have another camera with me, because that is mostly true, I usually don't go around with a camera, but I absolutely always have my mobile with me (currently a HTC HD2, so not in the iPhone group myself)
This, and the left side search refinement panel Google have introduced, are both directly lifted from Bing. Google adopting it is probably going to make it tougher for Bing, having to come up with other differentiators to compete with Google, but nice to see that competition is working and driving innovation in the search space.