This only covers the companies that already have penetration down to a partcular user, so it hides newer companies (especially since a lot of loyalty tends to accrue in this unless you're referring strictly to dialup-to-DSL conversion).
Extensions allow you to turn on and off features at will.
For example, I use: - Forecastfox (Great when you can't use the weather channel) - Morning Coffee (Excellent if you read a lot of webcomics or other weekly features) - Download Statusbar (I find it less intrusive than the downloads window thing, but remembering what you picked up half an hour ago is harder) - ChromaTabs (Just picked it up a few minutes ago to see the colors, but the added distinction between tabs is a plus - I wish the damn thing let you set the colors yourself though. I don't mind colorful tabs, but a lot of stuff is in the same shade of green.)
Not everyone WANTS colorful tabs though, or an icon that lets them read webcomics, or even to know what the forecast outside is. This way, everyone can get the user experience they want.
Literally almost everyone who's going to be in this market already has a DS, and it's about the right size... a small cartridge loaded with a PDA-style application or three could clean up nicely. It's not going to be a laptop, but it's a nice cheap in-between that with a few key features could clean up big time.
BUT, all those women who end up vaccinated (myself included... and motherfucker, you better BELIEVE I want to be a part of this!) will make pap smears and contraction of this cancer not just obsolete, but rare. Ergo all the women who don't get in on this will still need pap smears and (a now rarer chance) of getting cancer.
Wal-mart logic says that the rarer something is, the price goes up.
So... let's throw some random numbers around. Let's say a population of 10 million women will see about 250,000 get some form of HPV, And 200,000 of those get some form of cervical cancer, and of them, 150,000 die of it (and the 50,000 that don't will have a hell of time, including hysterectomies and chemo and all sorts of non-fun). Let's then say that Pap smears are about $40/year, HPV treatment is $300 the first year and $150 for flare-ups, and Cancer's $50,000 to have (and $100,000 to die from, cause dying's a medical bitch).
Everyone who gets the vaccine spends $400 up front, but their pap smear costs drop to something like $40 every five years (if needed at all), and their odds of HPV drop from 2.5% to 0.25%, or statistically negligible rates. With goverment intervention and HMO coverage, the cost can either drop to nothing (up front) or go down to $250 with insurance eating a lot of the cost.
Now, strictly playing the numbers game, it's a lot better to be the person paying $400/$250/nothing than it is to be the sucker paying $100,000 for something that kills you. And even at the 2.5% infection rate (which may be over-or-underestimating, I'm not sure) we already see a cost of 4 billion to vaccinate the whole group, or 150 billion to let cancer kill 1.5% of the group, not including the ongoing costs of pap smears and treatment for the rest.
Even if I'm grossly overestimating the rate of infection (as I doubt I'm overestimating the cost of goddamned cancer), it's easy to see how economical $400 a vaccine can be.
Now, since I have a iPod to begin with, buying into Apple's system is fine by me. If I had a different player, then I wouldn't be.
The fact of the matter is that a) Not all material is available via Apple, and b) even if it was, the entire notion of buying into Apple's system to screw the **AA is still robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Adobe may not be able to 'code out of a wet paper bag', but they don't need to. Their software is some of the best examples of intuitive, easy-to-use software out there, and when we're talking about art software, that's saying something.
GIMP does virtually anything most people use Photoshop for, and yet Photoshop is supreme because Gimp's interface is cluttered beyond reason, among other things. You pay for the interface foremost in art software, but when you use it constantly, it's worth that payment.
Perplexcity involved a series of puzzle cards, which somehow lead to a cube buried somewhere in the damned ground, and a big cash prize to whoever could find it. This also involved some online puzzling and drama, in the usual fashion of these types of games.
From the looks of things (and the whole Cube 2/3 bit), there's multiple cubes buried so that potentially an American player could win without traveling to England. This guy just happened to pull it off first.
Nobody forces them to look at any given CRT, and the frequency is adjustible as opposed to, say, that on a lightbulb. (which is only 'adjustible' if you get a different bulb.)
I unwittingly nabbed it as part of the autoupdates, but only keep it around for Windows updates and MAYBE Maple Story (which refuses to display on anything else).
My Dad picked it up, and finally switched TO FireFox because it sucked so badly. As a bonus I also got him to switch to Thunderbird.
You have no idea what kind of minor miracle those accomplishments are.
I see this as the sign of at least one (maybe both) of the following:
1) MS is finally seeing that trusting third parties to do the important stuff is bogus, and like Mac & Nintendo before it, is attempting to monopolize on the software so that the end-user experience is owed to MS:
2) Vista is such a drastic new paradigm that nothing works on it, ergo they want to hide this problem as long as possible.
Second Life is catching on as more computers are able to handle 3D-Rendering. A good friend of mine who'll be working at Google shortly got completely hooked on it a couple months ago and won't shut up about it now.
So, sure, I'll buy the whole second-life prediction.
I have Thunderbird between both computers, and it works as follows:
1) Everything of 'true' importance stays on the webmail (like school meetings, etc.)
2) All the stuff that is of less importance (LiveJournal, Facebook, and *gasp* even Slashdot) gets sorted with the filters and pulled from the webmail to sit on the client. Yes, it means that mail is now on a specific machine, but because it's of less importance, you're not missing anything (and it's probably also saner).
But my fangirlism for Insomniac Games will not allow you to badmouth Resistance! Even if Sony is completely insane, Insomniac knows what they're doing, and the detail of theirs being the best game for the console right now proves that.
I have no reason to believe that this game isn't top-notch, except for the detail of "I haven't played it yet". That should be corrected over the next few weeks at minimum.
Sky Dancers shocked me too - I LOVED those things.
Course, I knew better than to let gyrating helicopters loose in the house - come on, I learned that with the little fifty-cent whirligigs that you spun by hand. The difference was that when Sky Dancers went, they went HARD, so the trouble was moreso.
Anyone who was dumb enough to let this thing loose indoors or aim them at their little brother should've had it coming, but hey, I guess that's why it made the list - Not enough parents letting their girls have their hands on 'tough' toys.
My Sister went for the DS for the games. She's been playing since the SuperNES (and had a GameGear), but had migrated to PC games up until the DS. The reason? The DS's games require less involved play, and the genres she likes don't show up on home consoles, at least not without a crappy port.
My brother, on the other hand, is an avoid sports fan and is likely to stick with Sony regardless of anything else, as long as he can actually GET one, because he's addicted to his football. He wants a PS3, but because he can't get it and the PS2 is (preusmably) borked right now, he's on his PSP.
Me? I stick to the DS a) Because the only game I even knew was out and liked for the PSP was Daxter, and b) a 'true' console for me is useless while I'm at college. If I want the XBOX 360, it's in the school's arcade, and if I want anything else, it's at the local frat house. The DS makes SENSE for me.
Sure, they're two different markets, and they can't really compete with each other, unless by 'competition' you mean the second-console market. Anything else is crazy talk.
'Pi' in a scarf would basically just be unary representations of the numbers: Three rows of black, one row of color, four rows of black, one of color, five black, nine color...
It'd look pretty random when I'd finish, sure, but it'd still have pi in it. Still, switching rows up is a far cry from being able to knit pixelated pictures, especially if you're purling or crocheting versus knitting (because knitting has crisper boundaries per stitch)
Still, hooray for the merging of textiles and geekdom!
Slashdot Mirror
This only covers the companies that already have penetration down to a partcular user, so it hides newer companies (especially since a lot of loyalty tends to accrue in this unless you're referring strictly to dialup-to-DSL conversion).
Extensions allow you to turn on and off features at will.
For example, I use:
- Forecastfox (Great when you can't use the weather channel)
- Morning Coffee (Excellent if you read a lot of webcomics or other weekly features)
- Download Statusbar (I find it less intrusive than the downloads window thing, but remembering what you picked up half an hour ago is harder)
- ChromaTabs (Just picked it up a few minutes ago to see the colors, but the added distinction between tabs is a plus - I wish the damn thing let you set the colors yourself though. I don't mind colorful tabs, but a lot of stuff is in the same shade of green.)
Not everyone WANTS colorful tabs though, or an icon that lets them read webcomics, or even to know what the forecast outside is. This way, everyone can get the user experience they want.
A LOT of the fuel in the laptop market is aimed at college students and young professionals. So yes, I think it's a reasonable statement to make.
Literally almost everyone who's going to be in this market already has a DS, and it's about the right size... a small cartridge loaded with a PDA-style application or three could clean up nicely. It's not going to be a laptop, but it's a nice cheap in-between that with a few key features could clean up big time.
BUT, all those women who end up vaccinated (myself included... and motherfucker, you better BELIEVE I want to be a part of this!) will make pap smears and contraction of this cancer not just obsolete, but rare. Ergo all the women who don't get in on this will still need pap smears and (a now rarer chance) of getting cancer.
Wal-mart logic says that the rarer something is, the price goes up.
So... let's throw some random numbers around. Let's say a population of 10 million women will see about 250,000 get some form of HPV, And 200,000 of those get some form of cervical cancer, and of them, 150,000 die of it (and the 50,000 that don't will have a hell of time, including hysterectomies and chemo and all sorts of non-fun). Let's then say that Pap smears are about $40/year, HPV treatment is $300 the first year and $150 for flare-ups, and Cancer's $50,000 to have (and $100,000 to die from, cause dying's a medical bitch).
Everyone who gets the vaccine spends $400 up front, but their pap smear costs drop to something like $40 every five years (if needed at all), and their odds of HPV drop from 2.5% to 0.25%, or statistically negligible rates. With goverment intervention and HMO coverage, the cost can either drop to nothing (up front) or go down to $250 with insurance eating a lot of the cost.
Now, strictly playing the numbers game, it's a lot better to be the person paying $400/$250/nothing than it is to be the sucker paying $100,000 for something that kills you. And even at the 2.5% infection rate (which may be over-or-underestimating, I'm not sure) we already see a cost of 4 billion to vaccinate the whole group, or 150 billion to let cancer kill 1.5% of the group, not including the ongoing costs of pap smears and treatment for the rest.
Even if I'm grossly overestimating the rate of infection (as I doubt I'm overestimating the cost of goddamned cancer), it's easy to see how economical $400 a vaccine can be.
Now, since I have a iPod to begin with, buying into Apple's system is fine by me. If I had a different player, then I wouldn't be.
The fact of the matter is that a) Not all material is available via Apple, and b) even if it was, the entire notion of buying into Apple's system to screw the **AA is still robbing Peter to pay Paul.
And while we're at it, Apple isn't innovative. They just made a slick GUI and called it an iPod.
Adobe may not be able to 'code out of a wet paper bag', but they don't need to. Their software is some of the best examples of intuitive, easy-to-use software out there, and when we're talking about art software, that's saying something.
GIMP does virtually anything most people use Photoshop for, and yet Photoshop is supreme because Gimp's interface is cluttered beyond reason, among other things. You pay for the interface foremost in art software, but when you use it constantly, it's worth that payment.
As a perplexcity player, I'll fill in the rest:
Perplexcity involved a series of puzzle cards, which somehow lead to a cube buried somewhere in the damned ground, and a big cash prize to whoever could find it. This also involved some online puzzling and drama, in the usual fashion of these types of games.
From the looks of things (and the whole Cube 2/3 bit), there's multiple cubes buried so that potentially an American player could win without traveling to England. This guy just happened to pull it off first.
Kudos.
Nobody forces them to look at any given CRT, and the frequency is adjustible as opposed to, say, that on a lightbulb. (which is only 'adjustible' if you get a different bulb.)
I fail to see the similarity.
The Frequency of the bulbs is detectable by some but not all human eyes - specifically, autistics/aspies and other hypersensory humans.
I don't know how much you need to up the frequency to make them happy, but I get the feeling this legislation won't help them.
Or, ya know, teach the kid how to hack.
pet.togglePaid(true);
Why 'just' the DS? The Wii is just as first-party supported by Nintendo as the DS (maybe more) and it's a damn strong part of Nintendo's market too.
Seconded and Thirded.
I unwittingly nabbed it as part of the autoupdates, but only keep it around for Windows updates and MAYBE Maple Story (which refuses to display on anything else).
My Dad picked it up, and finally switched TO FireFox because it sucked so badly. As a bonus I also got him to switch to Thunderbird.
You have no idea what kind of minor miracle those accomplishments are.
I see this as the sign of at least one (maybe both) of the following:
1) MS is finally seeing that trusting third parties to do the important stuff is bogus, and like Mac & Nintendo before it, is attempting to monopolize on the software so that the end-user experience is owed to MS:
2) Vista is such a drastic new paradigm that nothing works on it, ergo they want to hide this problem as long as possible.
If you want to be truly pedantic, any number with a leading '0' like that is meant to be octal. But I digress, it's still a 1.
Second Life is catching on as more computers are able to handle 3D-Rendering. A good friend of mine who'll be working at Google shortly got completely hooked on it a couple months ago and won't shut up about it now.
So, sure, I'll buy the whole second-life prediction.
I have Thunderbird between both computers, and it works as follows:
1) Everything of 'true' importance stays on the webmail (like school meetings, etc.)
2) All the stuff that is of less importance (LiveJournal, Facebook, and *gasp* even Slashdot) gets sorted with the filters and pulled from the webmail to sit on the client. Yes, it means that mail is now on a specific machine, but because it's of less importance, you're not missing anything (and it's probably also saner).
It's either this or gmail, but it suits me well.
But my fangirlism for Insomniac Games will not allow you to badmouth Resistance! Even if Sony is completely insane, Insomniac knows what they're doing, and the detail of theirs being the best game for the console right now proves that.
I have no reason to believe that this game isn't top-notch, except for the detail of "I haven't played it yet". That should be corrected over the next few weeks at minimum.
Given that Guitar Hero is already at PS3-level prices, I would damn well hope so.
Sky Dancers shocked me too - I LOVED those things.
Course, I knew better than to let gyrating helicopters loose in the house - come on, I learned that with the little fifty-cent whirligigs that you spun by hand. The difference was that when Sky Dancers went, they went HARD, so the trouble was moreso.
Anyone who was dumb enough to let this thing loose indoors or aim them at their little brother should've had it coming, but hey, I guess that's why it made the list - Not enough parents letting their girls have their hands on 'tough' toys.
Why would they? They only care if the woman was white + blonde + jailbait (and-or pregnant).
That or Hans just isn't a very interesting sort of guy.
My Sister went for the DS for the games. She's been playing since the SuperNES (and had a GameGear), but had migrated to PC games up until the DS. The reason? The DS's games require less involved play, and the genres she likes don't show up on home consoles, at least not without a crappy port.
My brother, on the other hand, is an avoid sports fan and is likely to stick with Sony regardless of anything else, as long as he can actually GET one, because he's addicted to his football. He wants a PS3, but because he can't get it and the PS2 is (preusmably) borked right now, he's on his PSP.
Me? I stick to the DS a) Because the only game I even knew was out and liked for the PSP was Daxter, and b) a 'true' console for me is useless while I'm at college. If I want the XBOX 360, it's in the school's arcade, and if I want anything else, it's at the local frat house. The DS makes SENSE for me.
Sure, they're two different markets, and they can't really compete with each other, unless by 'competition' you mean the second-console market. Anything else is crazy talk.
The gloves aren't mine, I'm in the midst of making a similar pair though. :-p I can't knit with needles. I just linked you to hers as an example.
I say Fibonacci and Pi, I mean 'rows relating to the numbers'. This pair of gloves here uses the Fibonacci sequence, for example: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/42623357/
'Pi' in a scarf would basically just be unary representations of the numbers: Three rows of black, one row of color, four rows of black, one of color, five black, nine color...
It'd look pretty random when I'd finish, sure, but it'd still have pi in it. Still, switching rows up is a far cry from being able to knit pixelated pictures, especially if you're purling or crocheting versus knitting (because knitting has crisper boundaries per stitch)
Still, hooray for the merging of textiles and geekdom!