The thing you are overlooking is your needs aren't a significant part of the market.
How do you know that since this is one of the first serious contenders to offer these features in the post-iPad market?
A stylus and all that other stuff? If those were major selling points then Microsoft would have been successful with tablets say... 15 years ago.
All of Microsoft's previous attempts to make tablets were half-assed. Microsoft didn't make the hardware, so they couldn't offer a tightly integrated experience. And from the software perspective, Microsoft's previous attempts at tablets involved slapping a few shoddy apps onto an OS that wasn't designed for touch input. I'm not particularly enamored by Windows 8, but I have to admit that Microsoft's latest attempt at a tablet has a significantly larger amount of effort behind it and at least they are attempting to deliver an intriguing product that crosses the boundaries of laptops and tablets.
Nobody doubts that Unity developers think it's "a much better UI then Gnome ever was". And for your purposes, it may very well be objectively better than Gnome. But there are many people that may not use their computer in the same way as you and for them Unity is objectively worse. I happen to be one of those people and for me, the thought of using Unity was enough for me to give Xubuntu a shot. So far, it's almost as enjoyable as my Gnome 2.8 desktop on my workstation at work.
I mean, fixing security vulnerabilities is never good for business.. at all. You spend money fixing something that doesn't affect you directly but definitely affects your customers(which indirectly affects you). It's developer time that could have been spent on the next version's new shiny feature.
Have you used Java lately? It hasn't had any killer new features in quite a long time and that stagnation has been there for a period even before Oracle bought Sun. That stagnation looks even worse when you compare it to.Net languages like C# which have surpassed most of Java's language features and is now ahead. And before everyone jumps down my throat for advocating a Microsoft technology, I use absolutely none of their technologies for software development. I'm just objective enough to recognize that they're putting a lot of effort into creating new features for their languages and as a Java developer, I have to say that I'm a bit jealous (but not jealous enough to switch to Microsoft's single-platform development environment).
Yes, this is anecdotal evidence, so feel free to take with with a grain of salt, but here is the story of how I became desensitized to real-world violence.
It starts, but not ends, with violent video games. As a teen, I can't even count the number of heads I ripped off and hearts I tore out in Mortal Kombat, nor the number of aliens or Nazis I killed in Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. Several years after I started playing these violent games, my Dad started coming home from work earlier and putting on the evening news while my family ate dinner. Despite all of the violent video games I had been playing, I was horrified at the graphic scenes that were being described as my family and I attempted to enjoy our meal. Tales of people being stabbed more than a hundred times, parents murdering their spouses and children before turning a gun on themselves, and children killed in the crossfire of gang shootouts were told on a daily basis by a pair of attractive news anchors. Despite all of my years of video game violence, the accounts delivered by the evening news were by far the most horrific and violent things I have experienced in my life (and I am fortunate that for me, these are just the accounts and that I was not the actual victim).
However, after a while of hearing the same horror stories night after night, I remember one evening in which a husband had killed his wife and children. I also remember my mom's reaction of horror, yet I was so jaded that I found myself saying, "big deal, this sort of thing happens every night." I immediately felt shame at what I had said and I realized that that moment was the most desensitized to violence I have ever been and it had nothing to do with the video games I had been playing. So if people feel the need to ban something because they hold the irrational fear that it makes children and teenagers desensitized to violence, start with the evening news. Either that, or realize that we are a species with members who have still not transcended past our urge to force our own turmoil onto an innocent group of people. Horrible things happen and in some cases, such as the shootings in Connecticut, we will never understand why they happen, but banning violent video games or music or movies would not have changed a single thing about the situation. For once, let's blame the assailant and not the assailant's hobbies.
I have a "Smart" TV and I've never attempted to use it other than a monitor because I assume the "Smart" features are difficult to set up as well as broken and/or crippled. For instance, my TV may have access to Hulu, but I know for a fact that some networks prevent devices other than PCs from accessing their content. That is one of many reasons why I set up an HTPC with a four-tuner card running MythBackend and XBMC. Yes, it was incredibly painful to set up, mostly thanks to confusion and quirks in mythtv-setup, but now that it is running, it is incredibly slick. Live TV, DVR, downloaded movies, TV shows, and music, YouTube, Hulu, and Pandora all running through a slick and responsive interface. The next step is to buy some Roku HDs and install a Plex client to hook into MythBackend and sling live TV to remote televisions (and say goodbye to renting cable boxes).
I do believe there will come a time when people actually use features of Smart TVs, but first they will need to be convinced that the setup process is easy and that the features aren't broken due to poor implementation or greed from the networks.
That said, I have a Lumia 920 and really, really like it. OS aside, it takes amazingly good pictures and I can beat a person to death with it and not have to worry about whether it works afterwards. Those also, were my requirements for buying a phone... good camera and durable. I have kids, kind of a necessity.
Note to self: when I have kids, it will become necessary to buy electronic devices durable enough to beat them to death.:)
FLAC has a verify mode when encoding which, in parallel, decodes the encoded output and compares it against the original input to make sure they're identical. Every once in a while I'd get a report that there were verification failures, implying FLAC had a bug.
While hardware could definitely be at fault, have you considered the possibility of a race condition causing the error? Race conditions may occur very infrequently and can be incredibly difficult to discover. I'm not trying to disparage the FLAC codebase (FLAC is one of my favorite open source projects), but this could be another possibility for the behavior users are experiencing.
Apparently, ATLAS used this last month to search for the systematic errors that might be responsible for the discrepancy but, having found nothing, they decided to go public.
It looks like ATLAS...
puts on sunglasses shrugged YEEEEAAAAHHH!!!!!!
Perhaps, but do you really believe the summary? Maybe the cost has decreased, but I find it hard to believe that the cost has come down 80% in only five years. That number probably only includes the cost of the panels, which is only one of several expensive components required to pump power back into the grid as this summary describes. And I'm sure the labor is a significant portion of the cost as well and I doubt that it has decreased in price at all, let alone 80%. I can't wait to have a home powered by clean energy and independent of the grid, but there still don't seem to be any financially viable options at the moment. Maybe we could get an X-prize or DOE prize for this?
I don't think you're lying. I just don't think that solar power scales well. It may work great and be cost-efficient for a barn, but powering a house full of power-hungry appliances is a different story. And this is coming from someone who would really love to see more renewable sources of energy used to create a less centralized power grid.
I am fine with the scumbags building and maintaining the network. The problem I have is that our government pays money to the scumbags to build and maintain the network and then allows the scumbags to hold OWNERSHIP of the network. The creation of the network should be a work-for-hire job in which the government pays a company for the materials and the process of assembling those materials into a working network. At all times, those materials and the finished network should remain property of the people just like how we own all of the other parts of our infrastructure. Then our local governments can contract out the maintenance of the network equipment to the company that built the network or other competent companies. If the performance of the company serving the maintenance contract is not up to the satisfaction of the people they serve, then their local government can choose another company after the current contract expires. This system would save us from the current system of regulated monopolies that everyone rightfully hates.
As others have pointed out in the comments of previous articles, the other reason for not releasing the Surface through resellers is so that no one else will know the actual number of units sold.
I would recommend something like $150,000 per false request, but I think that most legislators, judges, and lawyers would surely find that figure to be absurd for a minor civil offense.
And then people use Bing because they can't get to RottenTomatoes or IMDB through Google? And everyone says "Google is broken" and they show just how flippant they are when it comes to searching?
What's a Bing? Sorry, I'm just too lazy to Google it.
I didn't have time to read the full patent since I'm at work, but in the Background section of the patent, Apple cites a scientific publication from 2008 that describes the technique for this wireless charging system. The rest of the patent appears to describe using this technology "in a computing environment". So basically, Apple is describing the process of slapping someone else's technology into a computer and preventing anyone else, including the original discoverers of this technology, from doing this.
I realize this patent has not been approved yet and if there is any shred of decency in the patent office, it will be decisively rejected. As other people have pointed out, this patent is obvious to other people in this field. Furthermore, if patents are supposed to encourage innovation, then patents that wrap existing technology, such as this, need to be struck down. After all, what is the purpose of putting a ton of money and effort into discovering new technologies if other companies can come along and patent obvious uses of your technology and, in a sense, lock you out of uses for your own technology?
Not only does the production of gambling games patently exceed the scope of defendants' rights, but this infringing conduct has outraged Tolkien's devoted fan base, causing irreparable harm to Tolkien's legacy and reputation and the valuable goodwill generated by his works
I can't claim to be the biggest fan of Tolkien novels, but does anyone believe for a second that there are a significant number of fans that are outraged over the release of a LotR slot machine to the point of causing "irreparable harm to Tolkien's legacy"? I would say that the greed of the owners of the Tolkien estate is doing more irreparable harm to the Tolkien legacy than the release of a fucking slot machine. After this, I would rather put $10 into a LotR slot machine than towards a ticket to see the upcoming Hobbit movie.
Thanks for the information, but I am already well aware of Apple's fast development cycles and their eagerness to abandon "old" OS versions. However, I am not interested in paying money for an upgrade that will likely remove or change features that I depend upon to be productive. I also do not feel like backing up all of my data before upgrading, let alone reinstalling all of my apps if the OS upgrade goes south. I realize I am at the point where I have to choose between upgrading my OS or losing support for apps and I am choosing the latter. Most of my ire is directed at Apple for fast update cycles that I do not want as well as abandoning support for my hardware in their latest OS. However, just because Apple abandons their users at a certain OS version doesn't mean app developers are required to follow suit.
Given all of this frustration, I am quickly moving towards installing Linux on my Macbook and breaking the last of my software ties to Apple. I do depend on some apps written for Mac OS, but those apps also support Windows and I may be able to get them to work under Wine.
Have you tried upgrading to at least Snow Leopard, or failing that, replacing your over six-year-old PowerPC Mac with an Intel Mac?
I do have an Intel Mac (second-gen) and it has already been delisted from their supported devices in OS 10.8. Say what you want about Microsoft, but XP apps still get half-decent support over 11 years after the OS was released.
It was within the last week. The version of Firefox is the latest one that was available for my OS as of one month ago, but maybe that's the problem. I left Chrome because they no longer supported my OS, but maybe Mozilla is pulling the same crap with Firefox and I am stuck with an old version. I'll have to investigate when I get home.
I tend to leave my browser open all of the time with quite a few open tabs. A few weeks after my switch to Firefox, my computer started slowing down while I was browsing the web. I figured one of the tabs had a JS proc that was running away with the processor, so I started closing tabs. After all of the tabs were closed, the computer was still slow, so I started the Task Manager. I couldn't determine why it was spinning the processor, but I did notice it was using 800 MB of RAM with no open tabs. I closed the browser down and restarted it and it ran fine, but I never need to do that crap in Chrome.
The smartphone market already has a ton of operating systems, each with their own ecosystem of applications. What is to be gained by introducing another this late in the game? I would much rather Mozilla focus all of their development efforts on making Firefox better. I just switched from Chrome back to Firefox and the memory management of Firefox still leaves a LOT to be desired.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you know that since this is one of the first serious contenders to offer these features in the post-iPad market?
All of Microsoft's previous attempts to make tablets were half-assed. Microsoft didn't make the hardware, so they couldn't offer a tightly integrated experience. And from the software perspective, Microsoft's previous attempts at tablets involved slapping a few shoddy apps onto an OS that wasn't designed for touch input. I'm not particularly enamored by Windows 8, but I have to admit that Microsoft's latest attempt at a tablet has a significantly larger amount of effort behind it and at least they are attempting to deliver an intriguing product that crosses the boundaries of laptops and tablets.
Nobody doubts that Unity developers think it's "a much better UI then Gnome ever was". And for your purposes, it may very well be objectively better than Gnome. But there are many people that may not use their computer in the same way as you and for them Unity is objectively worse. I happen to be one of those people and for me, the thought of using Unity was enough for me to give Xubuntu a shot. So far, it's almost as enjoyable as my Gnome 2.8 desktop on my workstation at work.
Have you used Java lately? It hasn't had any killer new features in quite a long time and that stagnation has been there for a period even before Oracle bought Sun. That stagnation looks even worse when you compare it to .Net languages like C# which have surpassed most of Java's language features and is now ahead. And before everyone jumps down my throat for advocating a Microsoft technology, I use absolutely none of their technologies for software development. I'm just objective enough to recognize that they're putting a lot of effort into creating new features for their languages and as a Java developer, I have to say that I'm a bit jealous (but not jealous enough to switch to Microsoft's single-platform development environment).
No more playing Angry Birds at a mere 500 fps like a damn cave man!
Yes, this is anecdotal evidence, so feel free to take with with a grain of salt, but here is the story of how I became desensitized to real-world violence.
It starts, but not ends, with violent video games. As a teen, I can't even count the number of heads I ripped off and hearts I tore out in Mortal Kombat, nor the number of aliens or Nazis I killed in Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. Several years after I started playing these violent games, my Dad started coming home from work earlier and putting on the evening news while my family ate dinner. Despite all of the violent video games I had been playing, I was horrified at the graphic scenes that were being described as my family and I attempted to enjoy our meal. Tales of people being stabbed more than a hundred times, parents murdering their spouses and children before turning a gun on themselves, and children killed in the crossfire of gang shootouts were told on a daily basis by a pair of attractive news anchors. Despite all of my years of video game violence, the accounts delivered by the evening news were by far the most horrific and violent things I have experienced in my life (and I am fortunate that for me, these are just the accounts and that I was not the actual victim).
However, after a while of hearing the same horror stories night after night, I remember one evening in which a husband had killed his wife and children. I also remember my mom's reaction of horror, yet I was so jaded that I found myself saying, "big deal, this sort of thing happens every night." I immediately felt shame at what I had said and I realized that that moment was the most desensitized to violence I have ever been and it had nothing to do with the video games I had been playing. So if people feel the need to ban something because they hold the irrational fear that it makes children and teenagers desensitized to violence, start with the evening news. Either that, or realize that we are a species with members who have still not transcended past our urge to force our own turmoil onto an innocent group of people. Horrible things happen and in some cases, such as the shootings in Connecticut, we will never understand why they happen, but banning violent video games or music or movies would not have changed a single thing about the situation. For once, let's blame the assailant and not the assailant's hobbies.
I have a "Smart" TV and I've never attempted to use it other than a monitor because I assume the "Smart" features are difficult to set up as well as broken and/or crippled. For instance, my TV may have access to Hulu, but I know for a fact that some networks prevent devices other than PCs from accessing their content. That is one of many reasons why I set up an HTPC with a four-tuner card running MythBackend and XBMC. Yes, it was incredibly painful to set up, mostly thanks to confusion and quirks in mythtv-setup, but now that it is running, it is incredibly slick. Live TV, DVR, downloaded movies, TV shows, and music, YouTube, Hulu, and Pandora all running through a slick and responsive interface. The next step is to buy some Roku HDs and install a Plex client to hook into MythBackend and sling live TV to remote televisions (and say goodbye to renting cable boxes).
I do believe there will come a time when people actually use features of Smart TVs, but first they will need to be convinced that the setup process is easy and that the features aren't broken due to poor implementation or greed from the networks.
Note to self: when I have kids, it will become necessary to buy electronic devices durable enough to beat them to death. :)
While hardware could definitely be at fault, have you considered the possibility of a race condition causing the error? Race conditions may occur very infrequently and can be incredibly difficult to discover. I'm not trying to disparage the FLAC codebase (FLAC is one of my favorite open source projects), but this could be another possibility for the behavior users are experiencing.
It looks like ATLAS...
puts on sunglasses
shrugged
YEEEEAAAAHHH!!!!!!
Perhaps, but do you really believe the summary? Maybe the cost has decreased, but I find it hard to believe that the cost has come down 80% in only five years. That number probably only includes the cost of the panels, which is only one of several expensive components required to pump power back into the grid as this summary describes. And I'm sure the labor is a significant portion of the cost as well and I doubt that it has decreased in price at all, let alone 80%. I can't wait to have a home powered by clean energy and independent of the grid, but there still don't seem to be any financially viable options at the moment. Maybe we could get an X-prize or DOE prize for this?
I don't think you're lying. I just don't think that solar power scales well. It may work great and be cost-efficient for a barn, but powering a house full of power-hungry appliances is a different story. And this is coming from someone who would really love to see more renewable sources of energy used to create a less centralized power grid.
I am fine with the scumbags building and maintaining the network. The problem I have is that our government pays money to the scumbags to build and maintain the network and then allows the scumbags to hold OWNERSHIP of the network. The creation of the network should be a work-for-hire job in which the government pays a company for the materials and the process of assembling those materials into a working network. At all times, those materials and the finished network should remain property of the people just like how we own all of the other parts of our infrastructure. Then our local governments can contract out the maintenance of the network equipment to the company that built the network or other competent companies. If the performance of the company serving the maintenance contract is not up to the satisfaction of the people they serve, then their local government can choose another company after the current contract expires. This system would save us from the current system of regulated monopolies that everyone rightfully hates.
Error: "There's" is not in scope "Hint".
As others have pointed out in the comments of previous articles, the other reason for not releasing the Surface through resellers is so that no one else will know the actual number of units sold.
I would recommend something like $150,000 per false request, but I think that most legislators, judges, and lawyers would surely find that figure to be absurd for a minor civil offense.
What's a Bing? Sorry, I'm just too lazy to Google it.
I didn't have time to read the full patent since I'm at work, but in the Background section of the patent, Apple cites a scientific publication from 2008 that describes the technique for this wireless charging system. The rest of the patent appears to describe using this technology "in a computing environment". So basically, Apple is describing the process of slapping someone else's technology into a computer and preventing anyone else, including the original discoverers of this technology, from doing this.
I realize this patent has not been approved yet and if there is any shred of decency in the patent office, it will be decisively rejected. As other people have pointed out, this patent is obvious to other people in this field. Furthermore, if patents are supposed to encourage innovation, then patents that wrap existing technology, such as this, need to be struck down. After all, what is the purpose of putting a ton of money and effort into discovering new technologies if other companies can come along and patent obvious uses of your technology and, in a sense, lock you out of uses for your own technology?
Nope. Now if it was a genuine Panaphonics...
I can't claim to be the biggest fan of Tolkien novels, but does anyone believe for a second that there are a significant number of fans that are outraged over the release of a LotR slot machine to the point of causing "irreparable harm to Tolkien's legacy"? I would say that the greed of the owners of the Tolkien estate is doing more irreparable harm to the Tolkien legacy than the release of a fucking slot machine. After this, I would rather put $10 into a LotR slot machine than towards a ticket to see the upcoming Hobbit movie.
Why didn't you warn us about this time-based bug, John Titor?!
Given all of this frustration, I am quickly moving towards installing Linux on my Macbook and breaking the last of my software ties to Apple. I do depend on some apps written for Mac OS, but those apps also support Windows and I may be able to get them to work under Wine.
I do have an Intel Mac (second-gen) and it has already been delisted from their supported devices in OS 10.8. Say what you want about Microsoft, but XP apps still get half-decent support over 11 years after the OS was released.
Mac OS X (10.5)
It was within the last week. The version of Firefox is the latest one that was available for my OS as of one month ago, but maybe that's the problem. I left Chrome because they no longer supported my OS, but maybe Mozilla is pulling the same crap with Firefox and I am stuck with an old version. I'll have to investigate when I get home.
I tend to leave my browser open all of the time with quite a few open tabs. A few weeks after my switch to Firefox, my computer started slowing down while I was browsing the web. I figured one of the tabs had a JS proc that was running away with the processor, so I started closing tabs. After all of the tabs were closed, the computer was still slow, so I started the Task Manager. I couldn't determine why it was spinning the processor, but I did notice it was using 800 MB of RAM with no open tabs. I closed the browser down and restarted it and it ran fine, but I never need to do that crap in Chrome.
The smartphone market already has a ton of operating systems, each with their own ecosystem of applications. What is to be gained by introducing another this late in the game? I would much rather Mozilla focus all of their development efforts on making Firefox better. I just switched from Chrome back to Firefox and the memory management of Firefox still leaves a LOT to be desired.