The article was all-around useless for the stuff that actually mattered. So here's a link to the specs page for the device on their official website: http://www.kobobooks.com/kobovox_tech
Most important:
Device Size 192.4 mm X 128.4 mm (7.57 in. 5.06 in.)
Device Depth 13.4 mm (0.53 in.)
Weight 402.6 g (14.2 oz.)
Diagonal Display Size 7" FFS+ multimedia display; 1024 x 600 resolution
Screen Qualities Multi-touch screen with exceptional +/- 89 viewing angle
Processor 800 Mhz; 512 RAM
Operating System Full open access to Android 2.3
Storage 8GB of internal storage, holds 8,000 books** and unlimited Kobo eBook cloud storage
Memory Expansion Option to add a 32 GB SD Memory Card
Battery Life 7 hours***
...Well, there's a namespace collision. There's Slashem and roguelike as referenced in the summary, and Slash'em and Roguelike as-in the Nethack-based game and the game genre. There's no way that wasn't intentional, and whoever's brilliant idea it was needs to be shot.
...Let me get this straight. From the summary, Google ran out of disk space on the server that keeps track of notifications. Something that would only happen if there's a very large number of notifications to track. And your conclusion is that there's absolutely no interest in Google+. Are you serious?
Coming from wikipedia, the volume of the moon is 2.1958x10^10 km, or 2.1958x10^13 m. A hole of 1.2x10^7 m will power one reactor for one year. Which means that mining the entirety of the moon for 1,829,833.33. So not bad at all.
Or, perhaps, academics don't see any reasons to contribute to something that'll erase anything they might add because of Wikipedia's No Original Research clause?
Even more than this. I actually read the article (surprise!) and, while the article calls sales a double-edged sword, nothing in there seemed to actually support that claim. The biggest claim seemed to be that lowering the price drives the average price per game down. Which is... bad, supposedly? It didn't explain how. The rest of the article talked about how lowering the price attracted more eyes and more sales, which shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's taken a basic econ course. It also talks briefly about how a sales chart, such as for the iPhone app store or Xbox live, can be self-sustaining. Which makes sense... but I'm not sure I see the problem. The games gets on the charts, people buy it, the game goes higher, more people buy it, after enough time has passed everyone interested has it and the game sinks off the chart. All that should show up as is a bubble in a chart of revenue.
The other comments were how lower prices can actually generate the same, or even higher, revenue which, once again, shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's taken a basic econ class.
Honestly, the most interesting thing I got out of there was the comments about just how well Valve knows their market as far as price-points go. The actual argument about sales being double-edged seems... rather vacuous.
This has come up a few times in this thread so far and, while it'd be technically right, I can't help but think it's missing the forest for the trees. Yes, in an ideal situation, an external antenna will be better than an internal one. But, as Apple has kindly demonstrated, it's far easier to mess with an external antenna.
Basically, while the maximum reception for an external antenna may be greater than the maximum reception for an internal antenna, the range of values for reception on the external antenna, combined with the ease of dragging the actual reception closer to the minimum number on that range for an external antenna, might make an internal antenna far more functional; especially if the difference in maximums isn't really that large.
That's the thing, though. As far as I'm aware, they've absolutely failed to set any kind of precedent that might even be remotely in their favor and they've completely failed in instilling any type of fear in anyone who might think about pirating music. All they've really done is cost themselves a good chunk of money while flushing any type of good reputation they had down the toilet.
The reason this hasn't been looked into, is because it's far cheaper to mine it out of the ground or extract it from coal and shale. Assuming those processes become impossibly expensive, then making our own using production plants powered by renewable energy, or even nuclear, is a distinct possibility.
If I had to guess, the reason we're not looking into it is because the law of conservation of energy would smack anyone who tried. If you're expending energy to make energy, at best you'll break even. For all practical purposes, you'll probably have something like a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio of energy expended to energy created, if not something far worse.
Is this really a surprise to anyone? I'd wager the day for the vast majority of people goes something like "wake up, work/school, home, sleep", with the removal of work on Saturdays and Sundays and the possible addition of church or something on Sundays. It's not really that hard to predict something that consistent.
Another pet peeve of mine is Windows' driver support. It's atrocious. Answer me why I can't install Windows and have all my hardware just work? Linux is capable of doing this. But with Windows, I can't even expect my networking to work out of the box. I have to hunt for a driver CD and install the drivers from there. Granted, I'm talking about Windows XP, which is presumably the decade old OS you are talking about. But I've heard plenty of horror stories about Vista/7 from coworkers. (Primarily that even once the drivers are installed, the network is unreliable at best).
The problem with using anecdotal evidence for things like this is everyone has a different story, solely because everyone has what essentially amounts to a different computer. My laptop, a Lenovo Ideapad Y530, has issues with the brightness controls in Ubuntu and OpenSuse. Fedora ran perfectly fine, surprisingly. OpenSuse couldn't even connect to my wireless network correctly, though I'm not entirely sure whether that was a PEBKAC or OpenSuse itself.
Contrast this with Windows 7, which installed perfectly fine, found every single device on the laptop, and then promptly went out and handed me a program that handles energy-usage more efficiently, straight from Lenovo. And people who say Linux works perfectly fine with any hardware you can throw at it have quite clearly not spent any time trying to get obscure wireless cards working or printers that CUPS doesn't handle perfectly working.
Obviously that's all anecdotal, but it's worth showing just how much it contrasts with your story. In reality, both OSes have issues with hardware. At least with Windows, all you generally need to do is hunt down a driver, whereas with Linux it can easily amount to a weeks worth of work.
Also, on VLC, when I try playing an MP3, I have to reset the damned EQ every time the song changes - that gets annoying as hell.
Most people I've talked to tend to use one program to watch movies and another separate one to play music. Mostly because, as you noticed, most programs designed to play movies tend to have annoying quirks when playing music and vice versa.
I'm just assuming the April Fools Joke is that it isn't one and that it'll be left in place. Of course, if they don't leave it in place, they'll have fooled me, too.
Because I use OpenDNS I figured I'd look into this. Apparently the intent of this was to prevent spyware on some Dell computers from completely filling up any typoed addresses with ads. This link goes into more detail: http://blog.opendns.com/2007/05/22/google-turns-the-page/
Admittedly, while it doesn't directly relate to the mathematical analysis of language the ideas behind the study of them are similar. After all, before now mapping out the general patterns of human civilization through mathematical formulas sounded just as absurd as mapping out language patterns using math. And yet, here's an article describing how scientists may have discovered patterns to language. Any thoughts?
Brief history of psychohistory for those who haven't read The Foundation Trilogy by Asimov:
Psychohistory is the name of a fictional science, which combined history, sociology, and mathematical statistics, in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe, to create a (nearly) exact science of the actions of very large groups of people, such as the Galactic Empire.
No, seriously. This is news to me. Yeah, I can understand why everyone would want there search terms anonymous and not linked together, but then again most people seem to only really know about Google and all google has been trumpeting is more indexing as a new feature. All I've seen after I search with them is "New! View and manage your web history" in the upper-right-hand corner as if it's a feature everyone would want. And gmail. Your email all sitting there, archived potentially forever depending on just how honest Google is with there deletion policy, and this is touted as a feature. I still have yet to hear bad things about Google, or about people switching from Google to another search engine, except in this article. So what exactly is the truth behind this, then?
A spaceship is just that. A spaceship. It probably wouldn't, and I assume this is what the summary meant with its comment on the shape, fly very well when not in space. Whether "not very well" is so poorly that P-51 Mustang could shoot it down or not is debatable.
In any case, if an interstellar ship could reach the earth once, why wouldn't they have sent a rescue party looking for their fallen comrades?
Now this has some fairly obvious answers. One, as someone else mentioned, is the time requirement for the aliens to get here, the planet they came from learning of them not returning, and then the planet sending out a rescue fleet. Another is just simply no one expected them to return. If we were to pack six astronauts into a rocket and send them off towards, say, Alpha Centauri in search of life or something, would you expect them to return whether they discovered something or not?
Slashdot Mirror
The article was all-around useless for the stuff that actually mattered. So here's a link to the specs page for the device on their official website:
http://www.kobobooks.com/kobovox_tech
Most important:
Device Size 192.4 mm X 128.4 mm (7.57 in. 5.06 in.)
Device Depth 13.4 mm (0.53 in.)
Weight 402.6 g (14.2 oz.)
Diagonal Display Size 7" FFS+ multimedia display; 1024 x 600 resolution
Screen Qualities Multi-touch screen with exceptional +/- 89 viewing angle
Processor 800 Mhz; 512 RAM
Operating System Full open access to Android 2.3
Storage 8GB of internal storage, holds 8,000 books** and unlimited Kobo eBook cloud storage
Memory Expansion Option to add a 32 GB SD Memory Card
Battery Life 7 hours***
...Well, there's a namespace collision. There's Slashem and roguelike as referenced in the summary, and Slash'em and Roguelike as-in the Nethack-based game and the game genre. There's no way that wasn't intentional, and whoever's brilliant idea it was needs to be shot.
...Let me get this straight. From the summary, Google ran out of disk space on the server that keeps track of notifications. Something that would only happen if there's a very large number of notifications to track. And your conclusion is that there's absolutely no interest in Google+. Are you serious?
Coming from wikipedia, the volume of the moon is 2.1958x10^10 km, or 2.1958x10^13 m. A hole of 1.2x10^7 m will power one reactor for one year. Which means that mining the entirety of the moon for 1,829,833.33. So not bad at all.
Just ignore the crappy blog link. It's not really helpful at all. Here's a link to the actual results:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2011-April/032988.html
Or, perhaps, academics don't see any reasons to contribute to something that'll erase anything they might add because of Wikipedia's No Original Research clause?
It really is great timing. I now have a good reason to not RTFA.
Even more than this. I actually read the article (surprise!) and, while the article calls sales a double-edged sword, nothing in there seemed to actually support that claim. The biggest claim seemed to be that lowering the price drives the average price per game down. Which is... bad, supposedly? It didn't explain how. The rest of the article talked about how lowering the price attracted more eyes and more sales, which shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's taken a basic econ course. It also talks briefly about how a sales chart, such as for the iPhone app store or Xbox live, can be self-sustaining. Which makes sense... but I'm not sure I see the problem. The games gets on the charts, people buy it, the game goes higher, more people buy it, after enough time has passed everyone interested has it and the game sinks off the chart. All that should show up as is a bubble in a chart of revenue.
The other comments were how lower prices can actually generate the same, or even higher, revenue which, once again, shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's taken a basic econ class.
Honestly, the most interesting thing I got out of there was the comments about just how well Valve knows their market as far as price-points go. The actual argument about sales being double-edged seems... rather vacuous.
This has come up a few times in this thread so far and, while it'd be technically right, I can't help but think it's missing the forest for the trees. Yes, in an ideal situation, an external antenna will be better than an internal one. But, as Apple has kindly demonstrated, it's far easier to mess with an external antenna.
Basically, while the maximum reception for an external antenna may be greater than the maximum reception for an internal antenna, the range of values for reception on the external antenna, combined with the ease of dragging the actual reception closer to the minimum number on that range for an external antenna, might make an internal antenna far more functional; especially if the difference in maximums isn't really that large.
That's the thing, though. As far as I'm aware, they've absolutely failed to set any kind of precedent that might even be remotely in their favor and they've completely failed in instilling any type of fear in anyone who might think about pirating music. All they've really done is cost themselves a good chunk of money while flushing any type of good reputation they had down the toilet.
"
The reason this hasn't been looked into, is because it's far cheaper to mine it out of the ground or extract it from coal and shale. Assuming those processes become impossibly expensive, then making our own using production plants powered by renewable energy, or even nuclear, is a distinct possibility.
If I had to guess, the reason we're not looking into it is because the law of conservation of energy would smack anyone who tried. If you're expending energy to make energy, at best you'll break even. For all practical purposes, you'll probably have something like a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio of energy expended to energy created, if not something far worse.
Is this really a surprise to anyone? I'd wager the day for the vast majority of people goes something like "wake up, work/school, home, sleep", with the removal of work on Saturdays and Sundays and the possible addition of church or something on Sundays. It's not really that hard to predict something that consistent.
Another pet peeve of mine is Windows' driver support. It's atrocious. Answer me why I can't install Windows and have all my hardware just work? Linux is capable of doing this. But with Windows, I can't even expect my networking to work out of the box. I have to hunt for a driver CD and install the drivers from there. Granted, I'm talking about Windows XP, which is presumably the decade old OS you are talking about. But I've heard plenty of horror stories about Vista/7 from coworkers. (Primarily that even once the drivers are installed, the network is unreliable at best).
The problem with using anecdotal evidence for things like this is everyone has a different story, solely because everyone has what essentially amounts to a different computer. My laptop, a Lenovo Ideapad Y530, has issues with the brightness controls in Ubuntu and OpenSuse. Fedora ran perfectly fine, surprisingly. OpenSuse couldn't even connect to my wireless network correctly, though I'm not entirely sure whether that was a PEBKAC or OpenSuse itself. Contrast this with Windows 7, which installed perfectly fine, found every single device on the laptop, and then promptly went out and handed me a program that handles energy-usage more efficiently, straight from Lenovo. And people who say Linux works perfectly fine with any hardware you can throw at it have quite clearly not spent any time trying to get obscure wireless cards working or printers that CUPS doesn't handle perfectly working. Obviously that's all anecdotal, but it's worth showing just how much it contrasts with your story. In reality, both OSes have issues with hardware. At least with Windows, all you generally need to do is hunt down a driver, whereas with Linux it can easily amount to a weeks worth of work.
That'd make you, what, 46ish? Give or take (probably give) 4 years? Should I get off your lawn? ;)
Also, on VLC, when I try playing an MP3, I have to reset the damned EQ every time the song changes - that gets annoying as hell.
Most people I've talked to tend to use one program to watch movies and another separate one to play music. Mostly because, as you noticed, most programs designed to play movies tend to have annoying quirks when playing music and vice versa.
Sounds about right.
I'm just assuming the April Fools Joke is that it isn't one and that it'll be left in place. Of course, if they don't leave it in place, they'll have fooled me, too.
I don't think I can come out of this a winner.
Because I use OpenDNS I figured I'd look into this. Apparently the intent of this was to prevent spyware on some Dell computers from completely filling up any typoed addresses with ads. This link goes into more detail:
http://blog.opendns.com/2007/05/22/google-turns-the-page/
Here's what I believe to be the correct link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/24/AR2007112400458_2.html?hpid=moreheadlines
Google.
And I broke the link. My bad. Here's what it should link to for those too lazy to delete the slash on the end of the above post.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory
Admittedly, while it doesn't directly relate to the mathematical analysis of language the ideas behind the study of them are similar. After all, before now mapping out the general patterns of human civilization through mathematical formulas sounded just as absurd as mapping out language patterns using math. And yet, here's an article describing how scientists may have discovered patterns to language. Any thoughts?
Brief history of psychohistory for those who haven't read The Foundation Trilogy by Asimov:
Psychohistory is the name of a fictional science, which combined history, sociology, and mathematical statistics, in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe, to create a (nearly) exact science of the actions of very large groups of people, such as the Galactic Empire.
From Wikipedia, obviously:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory/
I thought it meant it as in "stick of gum" and was trying to figure out why changing the shape changed how well it stuck to things. I'm an idiot. >_
No, seriously. This is news to me. Yeah, I can understand why everyone would want there search terms anonymous and not linked together, but then again most people seem to only really know about Google and all google has been trumpeting is more indexing as a new feature. All I've seen after I search with them is "New! View and manage your web history" in the upper-right-hand corner as if it's a feature everyone would want. And gmail. Your email all sitting there, archived potentially forever depending on just how honest Google is with there deletion policy, and this is touted as a feature. I still have yet to hear bad things about Google, or about people switching from Google to another search engine, except in this article. So what exactly is the truth behind this, then?
A spaceship is just that. A spaceship. It probably wouldn't, and I assume this is what the summary meant with its comment on the shape, fly very well when not in space. Whether "not very well" is so poorly that P-51 Mustang could shoot it down or not is debatable. In any case, if an interstellar ship could reach the earth once, why wouldn't they have sent a rescue party looking for their fallen comrades? Now this has some fairly obvious answers. One, as someone else mentioned, is the time requirement for the aliens to get here, the planet they came from learning of them not returning, and then the planet sending out a rescue fleet. Another is just simply no one expected them to return. If we were to pack six astronauts into a rocket and send them off towards, say, Alpha Centauri in search of life or something, would you expect them to return whether they discovered something or not?