You're already paying the price, it's just in a different form. Rather than being baked into the cost of competent software, you pay it when somebody steals your credit card info or a sound looking bit of software crashes your computer or fails to perform.
Personally, I'd rather pay a bit more if I have to and know that I'm getting what I paid for or at least have some recourse in the matter.
21.75 isn't low. The tech industry typically has unreasonably high valuations due to the tendency of the industry to capture the imagination of know nothing investors.
Right now, MSFT is trading at an 11.86 P/E ration and Google at a 24.21, but MSFT despite all the ill will I personally have against them, has done a better job over time maintaining its income and I don't expect that to change any time soon.
You'd have to be an idiot to think that APPL is genuinely worth about double what MSFT is.
To be honest, I think that Sony ought to be smacked for removing the functionality without advertising it on the box. The PS3 Slim has less functionality than the original PS3. Since consoles normally can do all of what the older models of that line could do, Sony should have advertised on the box that they had removed functionality from it which the original PS3 could.
Not surprised that they didn't have the balls to do it, advertising the thing properly would've cost them sales. It shouldn't fall on the shoulders of the buyer to figure out whether or not a particular console has been stealth downgraded.
Pricing seems to be an industry wide problem right now. You get DRM and they typically charge you more for the privilege. It's a shame, but that's how it is at present, hopefully it will change in the future.
Indeed. I haven't tried it, but I'm somewhat intrigued by B&N's Newstand. At present it's only supported by Nook Color, but it does seem to be an interesting way of addressing that problem.
In the long run it does look interesting, but for the time being I'm definitely not buying into it without being able to use it on my Nook.
I disagree. If you buy your books from a publisher like O'Reilly, you get your copies without DRM and can install them on pretty much any device you like. Plus, despite the protests from book fanbois, the reality is that the book was always a bad design. Sure for nearly its entire lifetime it was the best anybody could do, but the form factor was never particularly good, and thankfully we now have an alternative.
There are degrees, and ultimately at this point, you don't even have to go online yourself to have your privacy violated by some company that's too cheap to properly secure their servers.
I take it you don't read for long periods of time. E-ink definitely causes less strain on the eyes than when I try to read on a monitor. It's not a matter of stockholm syndrome, it's that trying to read for long periods of time on a monitor sucks. Sure it's workable, but it isn't the same as ink standard or electronic.
That's probably because the format sucks for reading. I'm sure it's great for cruising the web, watching videos and gaming, but actual reading isn't so good with it.
But, E-ink readers like Kindle and Nook are great for reading, but marginal at best for gaming and web surfing. And not at all suitable for videos. I could be wrong, but somehow I suspect that people buying iPads weren't doing so for the purposes of reading books.
They used to do that. I remember when I was first looking at broadband a decade or so ago, it was typical for DSL providers to have a cap of 1 or 2 gigabytes per month included.
I think the only improvement I've seen to ISP performance here is that the cap doesn't exist. Of course without that they haven't been able to figure out how to provide the promised bandwidth.
Probably the only way that this will change is if the laws are changed to make them liable for their own incompetence. As it is software developers can release software without the ability to return it for a refund or any particular guarantee that it does what they claim it to do. Meaning that you could very well end up in the situation where you've paid for software that's badly broken and they're not liable, going to give you a refund or fix it.
Like I said a similiar incident did happen with them. I don't recall that making press. Plus, I'd be surprised if the commercial side of Gmail didn't have additional safeguards in place, otherwise it would be a bit silly to use it.
Don't forget that these days there's a lot more scrutiny than there was in the past. There's more labs and research institutions world wide, and more people studying it than there used to be.
And don't forget that while in the past an academic scandal involving falsified results probably wouldn't get much beyond the academic community, these days with all the people in opposition to science, it ends up all over the media, justified or not.
It's not just that, if you're doing research which isn't convenient, you can very easily find yourself in a position where there's no funding to cover further research. If you manage to get a Nobel prize in your field, that helps a lot, but just look what the right did to NASA because of those experiments and observations related to climate change.
She herself is basically a scientist, she engages in testing hypotheses in order to determine their validity and has been willing to set aside ones that were demonstrated to be false in favor of better ones. But, unfortunately, most in her field are charlatans.
Indeed, you rarely hear of trouble caused by the core function of providing a document across platforms. All the trouble I hear about is the javascript and the other features tacked on to make it cooler and more exciting.
Unfortunately, those features also make it a lot harder to secure and a lot easier to use for malicious purposes. Word documents had a similar problem. Macro viruses didn't come on to the scene until MS decided that a document should be more than just text and mark up.
What's worse is when developers decide that you have to play the entire game. I stopped playing Kingdom of Loathing largely because they felt the need to make zones that suck mandatory for a run through. Rather than accepting that those zones suck and serve little to no strategic interest and addressing that, the solution was to put a quest item there. The Hidden areas were probably the worst, as there wasn't any strategy involved and the areas weren't interesting, didn't change ascension to ascension and were basically just there as a turn sink. If you're going to do a turn sink, either make it interesting or make it instantaneous. A turn sink that wastes real life time to do isn't going to win any friends unless it's actually fun.
It's difficult to impossible to make an entire game fun, so forcing people to play the entire thing every time is pointless for all involved. Once a person knows the story, there really isn't a particularly compelling reason to make them repeat it.
Just because it's known to be satire doesn't mean that you're not going to be found to be harming somebody. Which is the whole reason this is such a serious violation of the 1st amendment. Fraud and harm aren't always obvious or in the power of the individual doing whatever to control. Sure this could be used in cases where the person has really defrauded somebody or caused obvious harm, but without addressing parody and legitimate reasons for impersonation, I see no reason to be so optimistic. CA government is pretty fucked up.
The problem is that the phrase is vague. Sure intimidate and threaten have specific definitions under the law which should be solid enough that people don't accidentally violate that. But defraud and harm are pretty wishy washy meaning all sorts of things which they apparently didn't feel like defining for the purposes of the bill.
Unfortunately, pretending to be somebody else for the purposes of parody could be seen as a form of either fraud or harm, without the person doing the impersonation intending to do so.
Personally, I like Mailstore Home when I'm using Windows. It's convenient, backs up only unique emails and allows for convenient archive. With the ability to search for and restore individual emails as well.
I don't trust Gmail not to lose my email, that's why I download all of it to my computer via imap. The nice thing about gmail is that they allow you to upload emails back to the server if need be.
I learned that lesson that time that Google lost those emails and couldn't back them up. Fortunately, I wasn't affected by that.
Even with good design and careful management there's always the possibility of something being lost. Even in the idealized constant backups scenario it might mean that you're without a particular email for a period of time.
Not really, I'm not sure about these days, but there was a point where the cost to the retailer was about half what they were going for, and Apple wasn't allowing any retailer to sell them for less than the list price.
I can't imagine the margins having shrunk by that much over the years.
I don't understand why the iPod ever got to the top. It was never the best player, never had the best features and the audio quality was never particularly great. Not that any iPod owner would know seeing as most of them seem to use the included ear buds.
As far as I can tell the only thing they did right was make it idiot proof with the lack of software to put music on and a huge marketing campaign.
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You're already paying the price, it's just in a different form. Rather than being baked into the cost of competent software, you pay it when somebody steals your credit card info or a sound looking bit of software crashes your computer or fails to perform.
Personally, I'd rather pay a bit more if I have to and know that I'm getting what I paid for or at least have some recourse in the matter.
21.75 isn't low. The tech industry typically has unreasonably high valuations due to the tendency of the industry to capture the imagination of know nothing investors.
Right now, MSFT is trading at an 11.86 P/E ration and Google at a 24.21, but MSFT despite all the ill will I personally have against them, has done a better job over time maintaining its income and I don't expect that to change any time soon.
You'd have to be an idiot to think that APPL is genuinely worth about double what MSFT is.
To be honest, I think that Sony ought to be smacked for removing the functionality without advertising it on the box. The PS3 Slim has less functionality than the original PS3. Since consoles normally can do all of what the older models of that line could do, Sony should have advertised on the box that they had removed functionality from it which the original PS3 could.
Not surprised that they didn't have the balls to do it, advertising the thing properly would've cost them sales. It shouldn't fall on the shoulders of the buyer to figure out whether or not a particular console has been stealth downgraded.
Pricing seems to be an industry wide problem right now. You get DRM and they typically charge you more for the privilege. It's a shame, but that's how it is at present, hopefully it will change in the future.
Indeed. I haven't tried it, but I'm somewhat intrigued by B&N's Newstand. At present it's only supported by Nook Color, but it does seem to be an interesting way of addressing that problem.
In the long run it does look interesting, but for the time being I'm definitely not buying into it without being able to use it on my Nook.
I disagree. If you buy your books from a publisher like O'Reilly, you get your copies without DRM and can install them on pretty much any device you like. Plus, despite the protests from book fanbois, the reality is that the book was always a bad design. Sure for nearly its entire lifetime it was the best anybody could do, but the form factor was never particularly good, and thankfully we now have an alternative.
There are degrees, and ultimately at this point, you don't even have to go online yourself to have your privacy violated by some company that's too cheap to properly secure their servers.
I take it you don't read for long periods of time. E-ink definitely causes less strain on the eyes than when I try to read on a monitor. It's not a matter of stockholm syndrome, it's that trying to read for long periods of time on a monitor sucks. Sure it's workable, but it isn't the same as ink standard or electronic.
That's probably because the format sucks for reading. I'm sure it's great for cruising the web, watching videos and gaming, but actual reading isn't so good with it.
But, E-ink readers like Kindle and Nook are great for reading, but marginal at best for gaming and web surfing. And not at all suitable for videos. I could be wrong, but somehow I suspect that people buying iPads weren't doing so for the purposes of reading books.
They used to do that. I remember when I was first looking at broadband a decade or so ago, it was typical for DSL providers to have a cap of 1 or 2 gigabytes per month included.
I think the only improvement I've seen to ISP performance here is that the cap doesn't exist. Of course without that they haven't been able to figure out how to provide the promised bandwidth.
Probably the only way that this will change is if the laws are changed to make them liable for their own incompetence. As it is software developers can release software without the ability to return it for a refund or any particular guarantee that it does what they claim it to do. Meaning that you could very well end up in the situation where you've paid for software that's badly broken and they're not liable, going to give you a refund or fix it.
Step 0: Convince voters to vote for politicians that actually care about change.
Like I said a similiar incident did happen with them. I don't recall that making press. Plus, I'd be surprised if the commercial side of Gmail didn't have additional safeguards in place, otherwise it would be a bit silly to use it.
Don't forget that these days there's a lot more scrutiny than there was in the past. There's more labs and research institutions world wide, and more people studying it than there used to be.
And don't forget that while in the past an academic scandal involving falsified results probably wouldn't get much beyond the academic community, these days with all the people in opposition to science, it ends up all over the media, justified or not.
Sure they do, the p-value is what determines whether or not to slap him with a paternity suit, duh. Haven't you ever had sex ed?
It's not just that, if you're doing research which isn't convenient, you can very easily find yourself in a position where there's no funding to cover further research. If you manage to get a Nobel prize in your field, that helps a lot, but just look what the right did to NASA because of those experiments and observations related to climate change.
I'm not sure about ecology, but psychology and medicine are definitely not science, nor have they ever been science.
Probably the best indictment of psychology as a pseudo-science I've ever seen is: Trauma Myth The Truth About the Sexual Abuse of Children--and its Aftermath by Susan Clancy
She herself is basically a scientist, she engages in testing hypotheses in order to determine their validity and has been willing to set aside ones that were demonstrated to be false in favor of better ones. But, unfortunately, most in her field are charlatans.
Indeed, you rarely hear of trouble caused by the core function of providing a document across platforms. All the trouble I hear about is the javascript and the other features tacked on to make it cooler and more exciting.
Unfortunately, those features also make it a lot harder to secure and a lot easier to use for malicious purposes. Word documents had a similar problem. Macro viruses didn't come on to the scene until MS decided that a document should be more than just text and mark up.
What's worse is when developers decide that you have to play the entire game. I stopped playing Kingdom of Loathing largely because they felt the need to make zones that suck mandatory for a run through. Rather than accepting that those zones suck and serve little to no strategic interest and addressing that, the solution was to put a quest item there. The Hidden areas were probably the worst, as there wasn't any strategy involved and the areas weren't interesting, didn't change ascension to ascension and were basically just there as a turn sink. If you're going to do a turn sink, either make it interesting or make it instantaneous. A turn sink that wastes real life time to do isn't going to win any friends unless it's actually fun.
It's difficult to impossible to make an entire game fun, so forcing people to play the entire thing every time is pointless for all involved. Once a person knows the story, there really isn't a particularly compelling reason to make them repeat it.
Just because it's known to be satire doesn't mean that you're not going to be found to be harming somebody. Which is the whole reason this is such a serious violation of the 1st amendment. Fraud and harm aren't always obvious or in the power of the individual doing whatever to control. Sure this could be used in cases where the person has really defrauded somebody or caused obvious harm, but without addressing parody and legitimate reasons for impersonation, I see no reason to be so optimistic. CA government is pretty fucked up.
The problem is that the phrase is vague. Sure intimidate and threaten have specific definitions under the law which should be solid enough that people don't accidentally violate that. But defraud and harm are pretty wishy washy meaning all sorts of things which they apparently didn't feel like defining for the purposes of the bill.
Unfortunately, pretending to be somebody else for the purposes of parody could be seen as a form of either fraud or harm, without the person doing the impersonation intending to do so.
Personally, I like Mailstore Home when I'm using Windows. It's convenient, backs up only unique emails and allows for convenient archive. With the ability to search for and restore individual emails as well.
I don't trust Gmail not to lose my email, that's why I download all of it to my computer via imap. The nice thing about gmail is that they allow you to upload emails back to the server if need be.
I learned that lesson that time that Google lost those emails and couldn't back them up. Fortunately, I wasn't affected by that.
Even with good design and careful management there's always the possibility of something being lost. Even in the idealized constant backups scenario it might mean that you're without a particular email for a period of time.
Not really, I'm not sure about these days, but there was a point where the cost to the retailer was about half what they were going for, and Apple wasn't allowing any retailer to sell them for less than the list price.
I can't imagine the margins having shrunk by that much over the years.
I don't understand why the iPod ever got to the top. It was never the best player, never had the best features and the audio quality was never particularly great. Not that any iPod owner would know seeing as most of them seem to use the included ear buds.
As far as I can tell the only thing they did right was make it idiot proof with the lack of software to put music on and a huge marketing campaign.