The problem is the the dumb customer doesn't know what 1366x768 means, it's all gibberish random numbers to them. Digital cameras had that same issue also a long time ago, people just couldn't grasp the difference between 320x240 digital cameras and 640x480 cameras (or higher) - they kept asking dumb questions and the explanation resulted in the person getting even more confused - "what do you mean the picture is made of little dots?"
We all know what happened next: the word "megapixel" revolutionized the industry, and the more megapixel meant better camera (higher megapixel doesn't make better camera! but that's beside the point). The dumb masses had a variable to look for, and they associated higher value with more advanced. Even if they didn't know what a pixel was, they stuck with it and that's probably why you see 8 megapixel cameras on things like phones that really would be just fine with 3.
Computer monitors and TV's should start using the word "megapixel" also, like cameras do. Right now they're using the word "HD" - which makes the monitor either HD or Not HD. If you start using megapixel to refer to monitors, things will start to become clearer to consumers.
Here's a list:
0.3 megapixels: regular VGA mode (640x480)
0.5 megapixels: iPod "retina" (960x480)
1.0 megapixels: a 1366x768 monitor (standard laptop display)
2.1 megapixels: a "high definition" television/monitor (1920x1080)
3.7 megapixels: the monitor I am using right now (2560x1440)
4.1 megapixels: the Nexus 10 (2650x1600)
Then there's the IPS vs. crappy TN. That's a whole other can of worms.
What did you expect from Apple, an admission of wrongdoing? This is the company that said for decades that their computers are immune to viruses, even while they had half a million infected computers. This is the company that released a phone with the antennas that jam each other, and their response was: you're not supposed to hold it. This is the company that said PC's are Profusely Complicated and released a product called PowerPC.
A lot of people still don't see it... in their eyes Apple can do no wrong. Give me a break, if you still don't see it... go away.
they implemented a feature FTP sites had implemented twenty years ago. Back then it wasn't called poking or friend requesting, it was called hammering, and you got temporarily (or sometimes permanently) banned for it.
Back then it was a common sense solution to a common problem. Ever since common sense died out in the 90's, people think common sense solutions are novel and deserve patent.
The OS is just a platform to run your apps. Why are they making it seem like the OS is more than just a platform to run your apps? My software uses Windows, and I use my software, doesn't mean I use windows.
This whole idiotic notion of the OS being important started when Microsoft realized Windows was the most used desktop OS in the world, they figured people must love Windows. Nobody loves Windows! We all cope with it because it runs our god damn software. The only way Windows could be better is if it got out of the way and made our software run better and faster. Microsoft doesn't seem to understand that, they somehow think people care about the OS. I'm sure a huge majority of the users don't even know what an OS is.
Admit it, if you use Windows, it's only because it runs your software. The majority of my software runs only on Windows... but that's changing. Linux has lots of great software, and the moment when Linux has the majority of my software will be the moment when I ditch Windows for good and never look back, and I can see that date in the horizon already and there's nothing Microsoft can do to stop it. (except anti-competitiveness)
People go to court because there is a genuine disagreement over something
Yea... I doubt anyone would ever take someone to court just to drag them through a lengthy court battle to cause financial ruin... nah, surely that wouldn't happen.. right? wrong, happens all the time.
Given competent counsel, you would expect that each side wins about 50% of the time (i.e., a coin flip)
bullshit... in reality the side with more $$ to throw at the lawyers wins.
Settlements happen because one side knows they have a loser case and are trying to mitigate the damages
If you don't want to settle, have to keep paying the lawyers somehow to represent the case - lawyer firms don't run a charity. You have no choice but to settle most of the time, even if you've done nothing wrong. There is no way in hell you can pay your lawyers to defend your case if you have a small business to defend. Small business means even if you win the case, there's no way in hell you can recoup the money you wasted on lawyers. As for the patent trolls, they can keep suing the hell out of everyone and they have nothing to lose.
invalidating an already issued patent (with good prior art) is much less expensive than most patent settlements
bull shit. Apple. several dozens of prior art. Samsung still lost the case because idiot jury thinks "prior art runs on a different cpu hence must not apply". That's like saying you patented window hinge? ooh that must be completely valid brand new patent even though it's the same exact hinge used in a door, the door hinge doesn't count as prior art because it's attached to a door, and this is totally brand new because it's attached to a window. zomg, idiotic shit likes this makes it to court and despite being laughable, it is a crippling nightmare. It's a total waste.
In the end, frivolous patents and their trolls cost everyone billions, and the only people who make a profit are lawyers... and that's exactly why the patent system isn't going to change - because the lawyers profit from it. We have a country run by lawyers. They wouldn't dare change the law in a way that could hurt their college buddies. The whole thing is mind numbingly idiotic, yet there's nothing anyone can do about it. Then there's idiots like you who say patent abuse is somehow alright. Bull shit.
Is this a joke? People go to great lengths to be in Google's search results, and these idiots want the opposite? I suggest Google remove them altogether from the search engine. Why stop there? Remove their servers from the DNS, disconnect them from the ISP, and unplug the servers. Because if they don't want their information shared, they shouldn't put it in a public place where information is shared. Stupid ignorant trolls.
I am offended that they are requesting global Internet censorship. I demand that their request for global Internet censorship be censored because it deeply offends me. If we censor everything that anyone is offended by then we might as well not have Internet because somewhere there's someone who is offended by something.
Nuclear fusion holds the top spot on my list. Once we can achieve controlled nuclear fusion that provides more energy than goes into it, it will be a paradigm shift from the two centuries of being dependent on fossil fuels.
Sure, nuclear fusion is being actively researched right now, but funding given to nuclear fusion research is a tiny fraction (in the single digit percents) of the welfare money handed out to oil industry every year (in tax breaks and direct subsidies)
I don't mean cold fusion - there's no telling if that's even possible right now. Hot fusion already works and we know it works. It's just a matter of harnessing it for energy.
Name one application that needs multi-gigabit connection speeds on the client? Name one purely theoretical application that needs that kind of bandwidth? (Don't just propose insanely high res video, that's easy.)
This is a very shortsighted statement. There are no applications that need multi-gigabit connection speeds because there are no multi-gigabit connections. Name a single computer program that requires more than a gigabyte of ram... (pretend it's 1989 and most computers have 2MB at most)
even if they made it so you can authenticate by video card, it doesn't mean it's forgery proof, you can always hack the software to report the same result that someone else's video card generated and bypass the entire thing altogether.
I never understood the hoopla about the whole gun thing... the ammo is the part that does the actual launching of the bullet, the gun is just to hold the ammo+bullet together while they're being fired.
It's kinda like putting serial numbers on hypodermic needles and making heroin legal enough to sell at Walmart.
What slap on the wrist? There was no slap on the wrist at all, they had to pay no fines, no punishment. I'm not sure how they got away with this.
This is gross invasion of privacy. A slap on the wrist would be a small fine, or some monetary award to their customers... or at the very least a letter of apology to their customers. No, they didn't get a slap on the wrist, they got the equivalent of: "you should stop doing that".
Here's how I see it: you rent a room or house to someone, and install cameras to watch the person doing private things, record all their phone calls... you get caught.... the police come over and say "you should stop doing that" and they leave. There is not even a slap on the wrist, this is simply unacceptable. Who did they bribe to get this?
COP: Have you seen anyone here selling counterfeit Rolex?
Pedestrian: Yeah I saw a guy holding a suitcase of watches just five minutes ago.
COP: Can you point in his direction?
(Pedestrian points)
COP: You are under arrest for copyright infringement! ...
Judge: GUILTY!
You see the image on your computer means that it's already been copied to your computer and you can do whatever you want with it. Use a packet sniffer to get the data being passed, reverse engineer the applet to see what method/key it uses for decryption... or just run in a VM and take a screenshot. McAfee has reached a new low....
Stupid things like this are on par with perpetual motion machines when it comes to stupidity and shortsightedness.
I'm having mixed feelings about this. On one hand, phishing and defrauding is bad. On the other hand, this is money that would otherwise have gone to the already thickly lined pockets of the Taliban-Embracing-Americans party (aka TEA Party).
Yes, I said Taliban-Embracing-Americans party, because TEA party stands for religious fundamentalism - the same motivator that the Taliban uses. Religious fundamentalism must not be allowed to exist because it is harmful to human existence. Yet these people want religious fundamentalism to be the ruling style of the government. They would be happy with the equivalent of the Ayatollah ruling this country, making laws based religious principles.
Blizzard was never any good when it came to programming. Their games are always extremely slow, so you can tell in the back the code is doing some pretty funky inefficient stuff, and the bugs are a glimpse at the underlying spaghetti code. Blizzard's coding should be taught in classes as: What not to do. They're still horrible programmers: UT3 renders ultra-realistic scenes 60fps flawlessly with all the settings on max, while Diablo 3 struggles to draw some top-down view... and that's just the optimization! Looking at bugs, they have some weird funky bugs, for example pressing two keys simultaneously in Diablo 3 made the wizard completely invulnerable. What kind of crappy coder lets that get in there?
The guy mentions "armed men are free men"... it's a good sound bite, but it really doesn't mean anything. You can have a kitchen knife, and you will be considered armed... it's is not going to help defend you against someone with a gun.
Even the best fully automatic firearm you can print is nothing but a kitchen knife compared to the destructive power a modern military has at its disposal. You don't have tanks, planes, bombs, rockets, missiles, artillery, drones, gunships, submarines, helicopters, radars etc. In the grand scheme of things you might as well be considered unarmed even if you're holding an AK-47 in each arm.
I'd like to know if they used off-the-shelf hard drives for this. I find it hard to believe that a hard drive would work in oil. They usually have breathing holes, wouldn't oil get into the drive and interfere with the moving parts?
Some businesses will keep using Windows XP because there are always factory floor computers that simply are a pain in the ass to upgrade - for all practical purposes it's impossible to upgrade, and the OS will get updated only when the old hardware gets dumped and they get a new computer... and that might never happen because factory managers are not likely to invest in fixing something that's not broken.
And there are personal users who use their computer entirely for facebook/email - they really don't care if their OS supports the latest industry standard features or not. Expect those to be still using windows xp, and maybe eventually switch to an internet appliance device (like ipad) and get rid of the computer altogether. For a great majority of people out there, an ipad does everything they expect from a computer: browse facebook, write email, play farmville. Remember it was only 20 years ago that computers still were not a household item, computers were for geeks. The computer became mainstream only because it started appealing to the dumb masses, it's not because all of a sudden there's a surge in computer geek population. It will eventually go back to what it was - computers one day will return to being a geeky thing, and general population will move to using locked-down internet appliances instead of general purpose computing devices.
As for me, I would rather use a decade old general purpose computer rather than an iPad. I would rather use Linux than OS X. I used computers before they were cool, and I will use computers after they stop being cool. I am the minority, I am a geek. Internet used to be a place where we could find like-minded people, but now it's eternal September.
"If you want to know how Apple's epic run turns out or how its ongoing battle with longtime rival Microsoft is resolved, you can watch the series, which ends its current half-season of eight episodes with a finale Sunday night."
It sure sounds like an advertisement to me... either that or CNN really has completely run out of news to create. My expectations from CNN are very low, so this doesn't surprise me much. What surprises me is that this is on Slashdot. Perhaps the story title should be "CNN ran out of news" instead.
My favorite part on the CNN page, on top it reads: Filed under: Innovations... How this is innovation?
Slashdot Mirror
it was me.
The problem is the the dumb customer doesn't know what 1366x768 means, it's all gibberish random numbers to them. Digital cameras had that same issue also a long time ago, people just couldn't grasp the difference between 320x240 digital cameras and 640x480 cameras (or higher) - they kept asking dumb questions and the explanation resulted in the person getting even more confused - "what do you mean the picture is made of little dots?"
We all know what happened next: the word "megapixel" revolutionized the industry, and the more megapixel meant better camera (higher megapixel doesn't make better camera! but that's beside the point). The dumb masses had a variable to look for, and they associated higher value with more advanced. Even if they didn't know what a pixel was, they stuck with it and that's probably why you see 8 megapixel cameras on things like phones that really would be just fine with 3.
Computer monitors and TV's should start using the word "megapixel" also, like cameras do. Right now they're using the word "HD" - which makes the monitor either HD or Not HD. If you start using megapixel to refer to monitors, things will start to become clearer to consumers.
Here's a list:
0.3 megapixels: regular VGA mode (640x480)
0.5 megapixels: iPod "retina" (960x480)
1.0 megapixels: a 1366x768 monitor (standard laptop display)
2.1 megapixels: a "high definition" television/monitor (1920x1080)
3.7 megapixels: the monitor I am using right now (2560x1440)
4.1 megapixels: the Nexus 10 (2650x1600)
Then there's the IPS vs. crappy TN. That's a whole other can of worms.
What did you expect from Apple, an admission of wrongdoing? This is the company that said for decades that their computers are immune to viruses, even while they had half a million infected computers. This is the company that released a phone with the antennas that jam each other, and their response was: you're not supposed to hold it. This is the company that said PC's are Profusely Complicated and released a product called PowerPC.
A lot of people still don't see it... in their eyes Apple can do no wrong. Give me a break, if you still don't see it ... go away.
they implemented a feature FTP sites had implemented twenty years ago. Back then it wasn't called poking or friend requesting, it was called hammering, and you got temporarily (or sometimes permanently) banned for it.
Back then it was a common sense solution to a common problem. Ever since common sense died out in the 90's, people think common sense solutions are novel and deserve patent.
The OS is just a platform to run your apps. Why are they making it seem like the OS is more than just a platform to run your apps? My software uses Windows, and I use my software, doesn't mean I use windows.
This whole idiotic notion of the OS being important started when Microsoft realized Windows was the most used desktop OS in the world, they figured people must love Windows. Nobody loves Windows! We all cope with it because it runs our god damn software. The only way Windows could be better is if it got out of the way and made our software run better and faster. Microsoft doesn't seem to understand that, they somehow think people care about the OS. I'm sure a huge majority of the users don't even know what an OS is.
Admit it, if you use Windows, it's only because it runs your software. The majority of my software runs only on Windows... but that's changing. Linux has lots of great software, and the moment when Linux has the majority of my software will be the moment when I ditch Windows for good and never look back, and I can see that date in the horizon already and there's nothing Microsoft can do to stop it. (except anti-competitiveness)
Your statements are so retarded.
People go to court because there is a genuine disagreement over something
Yea... I doubt anyone would ever take someone to court just to drag them through a lengthy court battle to cause financial ruin... nah, surely that wouldn't happen.. right? wrong, happens all the time.
Given competent counsel, you would expect that each side wins about 50% of the time (i.e., a coin flip)
bullshit... in reality the side with more $$ to throw at the lawyers wins.
Settlements happen because one side knows they have a loser case and are trying to mitigate the damages
If you don't want to settle, have to keep paying the lawyers somehow to represent the case - lawyer firms don't run a charity. You have no choice but to settle most of the time, even if you've done nothing wrong. There is no way in hell you can pay your lawyers to defend your case if you have a small business to defend. Small business means even if you win the case, there's no way in hell you can recoup the money you wasted on lawyers. As for the patent trolls, they can keep suing the hell out of everyone and they have nothing to lose.
invalidating an already issued patent (with good prior art) is much less expensive than most patent settlements
bull shit. Apple. several dozens of prior art. Samsung still lost the case because idiot jury thinks "prior art runs on a different cpu hence must not apply". That's like saying you patented window hinge? ooh that must be completely valid brand new patent even though it's the same exact hinge used in a door, the door hinge doesn't count as prior art because it's attached to a door, and this is totally brand new because it's attached to a window. zomg, idiotic shit likes this makes it to court and despite being laughable, it is a crippling nightmare. It's a total waste.
In the end, frivolous patents and their trolls cost everyone billions, and the only people who make a profit are lawyers... and that's exactly why the patent system isn't going to change - because the lawyers profit from it. We have a country run by lawyers. They wouldn't dare change the law in a way that could hurt their college buddies. The whole thing is mind numbingly idiotic, yet there's nothing anyone can do about it. Then there's idiots like you who say patent abuse is somehow alright. Bull shit.
Is this a joke? People go to great lengths to be in Google's search results, and these idiots want the opposite? I suggest Google remove them altogether from the search engine. Why stop there? Remove their servers from the DNS, disconnect them from the ISP, and unplug the servers. Because if they don't want their information shared, they shouldn't put it in a public place where information is shared. Stupid ignorant trolls.
I am offended that they are requesting global Internet censorship. I demand that their request for global Internet censorship be censored because it deeply offends me. If we censor everything that anyone is offended by then we might as well not have Internet because somewhere there's someone who is offended by something.
Nuclear fusion holds the top spot on my list. Once we can achieve controlled nuclear fusion that provides more energy than goes into it, it will be a paradigm shift from the two centuries of being dependent on fossil fuels.
Sure, nuclear fusion is being actively researched right now, but funding given to nuclear fusion research is a tiny fraction (in the single digit percents) of the welfare money handed out to oil industry every year (in tax breaks and direct subsidies)
I don't mean cold fusion - there's no telling if that's even possible right now. Hot fusion already works and we know it works. It's just a matter of harnessing it for energy.
What the hell did I ever do to you?
Name one application that needs multi-gigabit connection speeds on the client? Name one purely theoretical application that needs that kind of bandwidth? (Don't just propose insanely high res video, that's easy.)
This is a very shortsighted statement. There are no applications that need multi-gigabit connection speeds because there are no multi-gigabit connections. Name a single computer program that requires more than a gigabyte of ram... (pretend it's 1989 and most computers have 2MB at most)
even if they made it so you can authenticate by video card, it doesn't mean it's forgery proof, you can always hack the software to report the same result that someone else's video card generated and bypass the entire thing altogether.
I never understood the hoopla about the whole gun thing... the ammo is the part that does the actual launching of the bullet, the gun is just to hold the ammo+bullet together while they're being fired.
It's kinda like putting serial numbers on hypodermic needles and making heroin legal enough to sell at Walmart.
What slap on the wrist? There was no slap on the wrist at all, they had to pay no fines, no punishment. I'm not sure how they got away with this.
This is gross invasion of privacy. A slap on the wrist would be a small fine, or some monetary award to their customers... or at the very least a letter of apology to their customers. No, they didn't get a slap on the wrist, they got the equivalent of: "you should stop doing that".
Here's how I see it: you rent a room or house to someone, and install cameras to watch the person doing private things, record all their phone calls... you get caught.... the police come over and say "you should stop doing that" and they leave. There is not even a slap on the wrist, this is simply unacceptable. Who did they bribe to get this?
but a different way of doing the same thing as this: http://www.google.com/patents?id=_I4WAAAAEBAJ
COP: Have you seen anyone here selling counterfeit Rolex?
...
Pedestrian: Yeah I saw a guy holding a suitcase of watches just five minutes ago.
COP: Can you point in his direction?
(Pedestrian points)
COP: You are under arrest for copyright infringement!
Judge: GUILTY!
You see the image on your computer means that it's already been copied to your computer and you can do whatever you want with it. Use a packet sniffer to get the data being passed, reverse engineer the applet to see what method/key it uses for decryption... or just run in a VM and take a screenshot. McAfee has reached a new low....
Stupid things like this are on par with perpetual motion machines when it comes to stupidity and shortsightedness.
I'm having mixed feelings about this. On one hand, phishing and defrauding is bad. On the other hand, this is money that would otherwise have gone to the already thickly lined pockets of the Taliban-Embracing-Americans party (aka TEA Party).
Yes, I said Taliban-Embracing-Americans party, because TEA party stands for religious fundamentalism - the same motivator that the Taliban uses. Religious fundamentalism must not be allowed to exist because it is harmful to human existence. Yet these people want religious fundamentalism to be the ruling style of the government. They would be happy with the equivalent of the Ayatollah ruling this country, making laws based religious principles.
$300 for 10Mbps for 10 years is $2.5/mo. That's less than a penny a day.
Blizzard was never any good when it came to programming. Their games are always extremely slow, so you can tell in the back the code is doing some pretty funky inefficient stuff, and the bugs are a glimpse at the underlying spaghetti code. Blizzard's coding should be taught in classes as: What not to do. They're still horrible programmers: UT3 renders ultra-realistic scenes 60fps flawlessly with all the settings on max, while Diablo 3 struggles to draw some top-down view... and that's just the optimization! Looking at bugs, they have some weird funky bugs, for example pressing two keys simultaneously in Diablo 3 made the wizard completely invulnerable. What kind of crappy coder lets that get in there?
Did Google just pull an Apple?
The guy mentions "armed men are free men"... it's a good sound bite, but it really doesn't mean anything. You can have a kitchen knife, and you will be considered armed... it's is not going to help defend you against someone with a gun.
Even the best fully automatic firearm you can print is nothing but a kitchen knife compared to the destructive power a modern military has at its disposal. You don't have tanks, planes, bombs, rockets, missiles, artillery, drones, gunships, submarines, helicopters, radars etc. In the grand scheme of things you might as well be considered unarmed even if you're holding an AK-47 in each arm.
"hard drives [...] withstood the oil just fine"
I'd like to know if they used off-the-shelf hard drives for this. I find it hard to believe that a hard drive would work in oil. They usually have breathing holes, wouldn't oil get into the drive and interfere with the moving parts?
Some businesses will keep using Windows XP because there are always factory floor computers that simply are a pain in the ass to upgrade - for all practical purposes it's impossible to upgrade, and the OS will get updated only when the old hardware gets dumped and they get a new computer... and that might never happen because factory managers are not likely to invest in fixing something that's not broken.
And there are personal users who use their computer entirely for facebook/email - they really don't care if their OS supports the latest industry standard features or not. Expect those to be still using windows xp, and maybe eventually switch to an internet appliance device (like ipad) and get rid of the computer altogether. For a great majority of people out there, an ipad does everything they expect from a computer: browse facebook, write email, play farmville. Remember it was only 20 years ago that computers still were not a household item, computers were for geeks. The computer became mainstream only because it started appealing to the dumb masses, it's not because all of a sudden there's a surge in computer geek population. It will eventually go back to what it was - computers one day will return to being a geeky thing, and general population will move to using locked-down internet appliances instead of general purpose computing devices.
As for me, I would rather use a decade old general purpose computer rather than an iPad. I would rather use Linux than OS X. I used computers before they were cool, and I will use computers after they stop being cool. I am the minority, I am a geek. Internet used to be a place where we could find like-minded people, but now it's eternal September.
"If you want to know how Apple's epic run turns out or how its ongoing battle with longtime rival Microsoft is resolved, you can watch the series, which ends its current half-season of eight episodes with a finale Sunday night."
It sure sounds like an advertisement to me... either that or CNN really has completely run out of news to create. My expectations from CNN are very low, so this doesn't surprise me much. What surprises me is that this is on Slashdot. Perhaps the story title should be "CNN ran out of news" instead.
My favorite part on the CNN page, on top it reads: Filed under: Innovations ... How this is innovation?