I suppose the real question is how well did the company do? If they were a success, that might indicate that society is tolerant of poor grammar and copying mistakes. I've noticed myself that the more I write, the more I pay attention to grammar. For example, I know precisely what split infinitives and dangling participles are, or why you shouldn't end your sentence with a preposition (it's because there is a desire to make english more like what some dead romans wrote). When I was in college I hadn't the foggiest idea what those things were. Now that I mostly write for a living, I pay attention.
Maybe that's the secret: most people these days don't need to write well, so they don't. Coupled to that is that I'm not sure there ever was a perfect grammar era. I've read texts from the 19th century and their use of commas and long, flowery sentences is horrible to read sometimes (read The Last of The Mohicans, or Moby Dick, and look at how it is written, people nowadays would complain about their writing-style). If professional writers are writing poorly (at least, by our standards) and those people are supposedly the professionals, I can't imagine that the general populace back then was speaking perfect prose either. I don't think that "kids these days" are necessarily doing more poorly, it could be that our conceptions of the past are distorted and "grammar" for most people has always been atrocious.
Learning a programming language 20 years ago was trivial. If you owned a PC, BASIC was probably staring you right in the face. Today if you want to learn a language you gotta go hunting.
Our current supposedly untinkerable macs come with gcc in the developer tools that come with your mac. All you need then is the terminal.app. gcc and a text editor, of which you get your pick of three that come with the mac: textedit.app, vim and emacs. You can also use xcode if you want to write guis, and that is so trivial for simple exercises it's basically point and click in xcode.
The point is that you can still do a lot of those beginning programming exercises that you used to do with your tinkering computers using the built-in tools with either OS X or linux, you don't really have to hunt to get this stuff, just buy a self-help book and it will show you how to do this.
The U.S. made all this noise about the missile defense system, which the Russians said would escalate an arms race and this thing is suppose to compete with the F-22 which the U.S. already created in order to better fight the last war. The question though, if the U.S. hadn't restarted the arms race, would Russia have bothered making this plane? Maybe, maybe not. I agree though, regardless of who started the arms race this time, there will be calls for more planes to compete, more than likely from Republicans or Democrats trying to appear centrist. Not sure if there is really a threat though. I guess I'd prefer it if we'd wait and see how many planes the Russians produce first. If it's just enough to compete with the 187 the U.S. already has procured, why bother making more planes? It'll only escalate the arms race.
That's true, but I think a good name can get people to talk about it just as much as a making fun of a bad name. Remember squirting songs at each other using your Zune? Arguably, people who failed to see the benefits of squirting at each other did so not because of the name, but because the feature itself was pretty much crippled and you had a hard time finding other zune owners to with which to squirt. I don't think it helped their case to build mind-share however that doing a google search for squirting reveals some results that aren't completely safe for work. It crossed the line between making fun of it over to something you wouldn't really feel comfortable describing to your mother. I think a better name would have done just as well, e.g. people talked quite a bit about the kindle but weren't making fun of it.
As a long time Mac user, I can confidently say that your friend has not learned how to use his computer efficiently. It's getting to be well known now amongst the old-school mac users that Apple is "dumbing down" their OS to make it more palatable for the masses. These include more flags and messages asking, "are you sure you want to do so-and-so?" For those of us who know what we're doing, these things get in our way as really pisses us off, just as the GP suggested. There is awholesubsetofusers who regularly find the command line settings or hacks to disable this irritating behavior.
Moreover, the entire article is based on a mistaken premise. The fact that Apple is favored by "creative people" has absolutely nothing to do with their company profile or habits of secrecy. The whole reason is because Apple has a design philosophy whose goal is to make the computer a tool for accomplishing what you want to do rather and having the "computing" be as transparent as possible. Microsoft just isn't good at doing this, the OS and the software interjects itself into the user experience far, far too often. This disrupts thought patterns and focus and leads to a hindering of the ability to get useful work done. Case in point, the little animated dog in XP whenever you want to search for something. When I want to search, I want to type a search string into a search field and get rapid, relevant results I do not want to look at animated images asking me cute phrases, it's distracting.
If you're looking for a generic UI than I suppose easy to recognize generic symbols are the best. However, my dream is to make the UIs that actually mimic reality but the trick is keeping them fairly usuable still. I don't want it to be cartoonish, I want you to look at the UI and mistake it for a fantastic physical machine rather than a monitor. For example, if you look at the themes on the exchange site for e17, a lot of these not what you'd call an every day sort of theme but appeal to a particular aesthetic. Examples include steampunk, grunge, and baroque that incorporate photo realistic elements with varying efficacy (e.g. baroque is a cool concept but very hard on the eyes). The idea is to make the living-room computer more than just a tool, but a functional piece of art.
What I'd love to do is make a theme that looks like the 1960s version of futuristic computers and space ship aesthetic from the movie 2001, with light-bulb lit buttons of different colored plastic, lots of milled metal highlights and dark plastic everywhere.
In any case, handbrake started as an application for BeOS and didn't even have a windows gui until version 0.8.5. I was using it on macs way back in the day when 700 Mb was your practical limit because hard drive space was still more precious than blank CDs and writable DVDs were hugely expensive.
Why would they care about what windows does? It survived without windows before it was famous, it'll survive without divx -- h264 is so incredible you don't need divx anyway.
Further reasons the administration might not like what China is doing right now are economic. China ties their currency exchange rate to the U.S. dollar in a way that keeps theirs low relative to ours. This essentially creates a permanent trade imbalance between the exporter (CHina) and the importers (U.S. mostly, also Europe). I hear people say all the time that China owns a huge portion of the U.S. debt and it would be a big disaster economically if they sold that debt. This is incorrect, if the Chinese sold their U.S. debt they'd be doing us a favor because it would depress the value of the dollar and make our manufacturing more competitive. In the past when unemployment has been rock-bottom in the U.S., this wouldn't help us much. Right now it would help our economy a lot to create manufacturing jobs because our unemployment is 10%. Paul Krugman quantified this by saying that China's exchange rate policy amounts to 1.4 million lost jobs in the U.S. The people at the federal reserve and the treasury know this. Ben Bernake himself has been quoted as saying chaiman-speak equivalent for the Chinese are playing with fire.
The conclusion here is that I suspect that if Clinton is mentioning this, the administration is planning on using this as leverage to get economic or other concessions out of the Chinese.
Don't you think she knows that? It's called protocol. Either A) she's just putting up a strong showing for american audiences and has said something completely different to the Chinese, or B) she really is going to do something. Who knows what? So far Obama has not shown much interest in rocking the boat any (see Wall Street bail out for evidence) but Hillary Clinton is not exactly the kind to shy away from a fight.
It'll be interesting -- I would like to see some tougher trade policies with China. For me personally, I'm really tired of importing Chinese goods that are made with no pollution controls, especially when those goods are laced with cadmium or melamine. I'm also annoyed that they sabotaged the Copenhagen talks on climate change. In fact, this could be exactly what the administration is reacting to, maybe Obama et al. got burned and are in no mood to play nice with China the way past presidents have done.
ONe thing I forgot to point out that is that there was a landmark decision by the Supreme court in 2001 that decided that utility patents could be granted to cover a modification to a plant, which Clarence Thomas (the Bush appointee) wrote the majority opinion for. If you think patenting software is bad, the Supreme Court decided that it's no problem patenting some corn:
J.E.M. Ag Supply, Inc. v. Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Inc.
A case decided before the United States Supreme Court in 2001. In this case the court decided that utility patents could be issued for plants, even though some protections on plants are already available through the Plant Patent Act and the Plant Variety Protection Act.
That is why we Monsanto poisoning us and suing any farmer who ends up with GMO pollen in his corn or saving seeds.
And you don't think that GW Bush appointing a former Monsanto lawyer to the Supreme Court had nothing to do with it? Democrats are just as bad at appointing lobbyists for industries to oversee federal organization that they're supposed to be regulating, but look at this chart here. Look at that chart and tell me with a straight face that the Republican party is trying to remove government interference in markets. If you do, you are arguing to me that the same political party that is supposed to stand for unregulated capitalism is also contributing to that regulation necessary by giving out the subsidies that created the environment for Monsanto to poison our beloved rat population (and maybe us too, the article was short on that).
I have to correct myself, it was first written down in 1750, but the earliest known mention of Barbara Allen was 1666 by Samuel Pepys. There you go, 344 years of teenagers whining about breaking up with their boy- and girlfriends.
I agree that we as a society are overmedicated, but I think that the blame for that rests solely on the shoulders of the people taking the medications (or parents in this case) and the medical/pharmaceutical industry and has nothing to do with "kids these days" being whiny or whatever. I don't think this has anything to do with the children themselves or their state of mind, its the society as a whole, we've been led to believe that the solution to life's problems is more big pharma and taking more drugs and more powerful drugs with cleverly marketed names to make them sound innocuous. Moreover, from your post:
but sometimes I encounter a youth who says, "My boyfriend just broke up with me and now I sit in my room and listen to depressing music."
This sort of thing has been happening as long as people have been writing this stuff down. For a reference from the 80s generation, go watch High Fidelity.
Rob: What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?
Secondly, you can see this type of thing happening in ballades and chansons that were literally written hundreds of years ago. E.g. in the song Barbara Allen, the two kids both die of depression because their relationship wasn't working the way they wanted it to. Granted it's an exaggeration, but you can't say a song like that, written in 1750, doesn't reflect similar sentiments as what you wrote.
So I don't think that there's anything especially wrong with people nowadays, or that the study has really any merit, it's just our society has developed this weird idea that more and more powerful drugs are better. Even if you don't take drugs yourself, there may be some effect from all the chemicals in the drinking water, like estrogen. The only way to stop that is to reign in the medical industry, and have more powerful water quality laws.
Thus far, Google has not displayed this sort of lack of taste. We'll see though. What I'm guessing is that it will be the form of a little transparent pop-up window with text ads relevant to whatever your looking at, e.g. if you're looking at a Border's, it will give you ads for a B&N or something. The kind of metadata to make these types of context specific ads has been creeping into google maps for some time. E.g., just look at this link. You can clearly see the name of each business and an icon about just what kind of business it is there (hotels get a little stick person in a bed, restaurants get a knife and fork, etc.). Hopefully they would put them in a transparent window and somewhere unobtrusive, like on the street or in the sky.
Though, it does kind of give new meaning to the Futurama quote, "Behold.... the Internet." "My God! It's full of ads!"
There is a huge body of law in the U.S. that protects the consumer from unfair or deceptive trade practices. How is what comcast doing a fair trade practice? You most often see this with credit cards and banks. IANAL, but I imagine there is something similar for ANY regulated corporation.
You can't get an unbridled, roving commission to go about doing good
Yes, god forbid someone in the government actually try and help people. We must put a stop to this at once! The U.S. government should only work to protect the corporate profit, as it has been for the last thirty years.
I mean really, why don't these judges just go out and admit they're on comcast's payroll already? Somebody should tar and feather those judges. Gah, I'm so sick and tired of regulatory capture. When will it all end? S
You're weakening your point in writing this because it shows that you don't know very much about Apple products if you think they are known for feature creep. Case in point: the most recent version of OS X (snow leopard) removed a substantial number of additional features. Or do you not remember the touted 7Gb savings when upgrading? The most consequential being the ability to run on powerpc architectures. Secondly, they also streamlined the OS substantially. While this makes my laptop nice and fast, it breaks a lot of functionality. (E.g. the linker doesn't allow duplicate symbols in linked files any more like the old ones did, this breaks a substantial number of programs.) Coupled to this is that up until 10.5 when they started optimizing for Intel chips, every new release of OS X ran faster on the same hardware than the previous release. I was just using my girlfriend's 1.3 Ghz PPC that ran 10.4 easily. For the Intel chips, that rule is still true, every release is faster than the previous one. The point is that none of these things are "feature creep" like you say. Maybe itunes has some additional stuff like the genius recommendations but show me a software package that doesn't add features.
Very true, but you do get some benefit from the larger battery on a tablet and netbook versus an e-book reader. One thought though, in OS 10.6, apple has made waking from sleep seemingly more rapid than in previous versions. If in a specialized device like a tablet, they could work the same magic for hiberation, i.e. writing the memory contents to disk prior to sleep, it might alleviate a lot of the battery drain while sleeping. You're right though in that you'll never be able to get the same battery-life and e-book reader, but then e-book readers can't play movies, or check e-mail or surf the web.:)
The GP's link is precisely what they need. The dominant battery drainer for an LCD screen is the backlight. The e-book readers get their tremendous battery-life in part because they don't have a back-light. It seems like if you could design any tablet, you would want an LCD that could act as e-paper, i.e. still get a decent readable image in direct sunlight without a back-light, but have the option to turn the back-light on for low-light or situations where a higher intensity color (e.g., watching a movie) would be beneficial that would be the best of both worlds. If Apple has somehow managed to do that, I would be very impressed and it really would revolutionize the tablet market and compete well with the kindle to boot.
Unless of course it's the 8% that makes you bald as you get older, or makes you susceptible to heart disease or diabetes, or any number of inherited undesirables. Remember, things like sickle cell anemia originated as a defense against malaria. In fact, in TFA it actually suggests an hypothesis:
"These data yield a testable hypothesis for the alleged, but still controversial, causative association of BDV infection with schizophrenia and mood disorders," Feschotte said.
where BDV here is the virus whose DNA they were searching for in the human genome. There you go, if you're depressed, manic or schizophrenic, it could be one of your ancestors got a brain virus.
Just to attempt to quantify what a "metric-butt-ton" is: According to wikipedia, MS had lost about $4 billion on the xboxes by the end of 2005 and about $1 billion to replace bricked xbox 360s. Their most recent quarterly report from Q1 2010 (Oct. 23rd) showed that their entire entertainment division posted a $312 million profit. I have no idea what the total take is, but just to recoup the $5 billion we know they lost would take over four years of quarters like Q1 2010. If every quarter has been like Q1 2010, that would mean they would be breaking even just about now, except the entertainment division at MS never posted a profit until 2008! So it's a good bet that MS has even now not yet recouped the losses from developing the xbox. They're rich though, they can afford to wait for years and years to recoup an investment.
Insider trades are in the public domain. Yahoo stocks has a nice list. According to them, the last trade by an insider was December 2nd, 2009. I wouldn't know how these things go down, but my guess is that's too early to be able to easily pin as illegal behavior without some direct evidence. Also, I'd guess that a lot of the big shots are in it for the long haul and aren't interested in gaming their own stock (I could surely be wrong if the iSlate turns out to be a dud and there's a whole bunch of insider trades before the 27th). I would hope that the SEC would look pretty hard at the trades of reporters who report on stocks in addition to the insiders though.
The iSlate is sort of a big iPod, but not really. It performs a lot of notebook-like functions, but it's not really a notebook either.
And the author knows this how? How do we know it will be a "big iPod", it could be completely different for all we know because nobody has seen it who is allowed to talk about it. Regardless, of what it actually does, the idea that Apple will predict that it will sell 10 million tablets in the first year is hooey. If anything, I would guess they will do the opposite and order too few units in order to increase the demand for the product by creating scarcity. Just ask the Nintendo when the Wii came out or whoever made tickle me elmo how this works...
I read that portion of TFA and what he conveniently doesn't mention is that lesser-known artists get some benefit from the increased exposure by having their songs available to millions. By just ignoring any positive effects of file sharing, he's oversimplifying the problem and inviting the very criticism that the preceding poster commented on. File sharing hurts acts like U2, not necessarily the lesser known artists.
Also, look at the chart in this article. It clearly shows that revenue from live acts is increasing, which goes directly to artists. Couple that to the second chart that shows that revenues to actual artists in the UK are increasing, you can safely make the conclusions that the ones who are suffering under the internet are the labels, who are (were) the distributors of content, NOT the artists.
And don't forget their track record with voice recognition. I wonder what the muscle activated equivalent of "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all" is?
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose the real question is how well did the company do? If they were a success, that might indicate that society is tolerant of poor grammar and copying mistakes. I've noticed myself that the more I write, the more I pay attention to grammar. For example, I know precisely what split infinitives and dangling participles are, or why you shouldn't end your sentence with a preposition (it's because there is a desire to make english more like what some dead romans wrote). When I was in college I hadn't the foggiest idea what those things were. Now that I mostly write for a living, I pay attention.
Maybe that's the secret: most people these days don't need to write well, so they don't. Coupled to that is that I'm not sure there ever was a perfect grammar era. I've read texts from the 19th century and their use of commas and long, flowery sentences is horrible to read sometimes (read The Last of The Mohicans, or Moby Dick, and look at how it is written, people nowadays would complain about their writing-style). If professional writers are writing poorly (at least, by our standards) and those people are supposedly the professionals, I can't imagine that the general populace back then was speaking perfect prose either. I don't think that "kids these days" are necessarily doing more poorly, it could be that our conceptions of the past are distorted and "grammar" for most people has always been atrocious.
Our current supposedly untinkerable macs come with gcc in the developer tools that come with your mac. All you need then is the terminal.app. gcc and a text editor, of which you get your pick of three that come with the mac: textedit.app, vim and emacs. You can also use xcode if you want to write guis, and that is so trivial for simple exercises it's basically point and click in xcode. The point is that you can still do a lot of those beginning programming exercises that you used to do with your tinkering computers using the built-in tools with either OS X or linux, you don't really have to hunt to get this stuff, just buy a self-help book and it will show you how to do this.
The U.S. made all this noise about the missile defense system, which the Russians said would escalate an arms race and this thing is suppose to compete with the F-22 which the U.S. already created in order to better fight the last war. The question though, if the U.S. hadn't restarted the arms race, would Russia have bothered making this plane? Maybe, maybe not. I agree though, regardless of who started the arms race this time, there will be calls for more planes to compete, more than likely from Republicans or Democrats trying to appear centrist. Not sure if there is really a threat though. I guess I'd prefer it if we'd wait and see how many planes the Russians produce first. If it's just enough to compete with the 187 the U.S. already has procured, why bother making more planes? It'll only escalate the arms race.
That's true, but I think a good name can get people to talk about it just as much as a making fun of a bad name. Remember squirting songs at each other using your Zune? Arguably, people who failed to see the benefits of squirting at each other did so not because of the name, but because the feature itself was pretty much crippled and you had a hard time finding other zune owners to with which to squirt. I don't think it helped their case to build mind-share however that doing a google search for squirting reveals some results that aren't completely safe for work. It crossed the line between making fun of it over to something you wouldn't really feel comfortable describing to your mother. I think a better name would have done just as well, e.g. people talked quite a bit about the kindle but weren't making fun of it.
As a long time Mac user, I can confidently say that your friend has not learned how to use his computer efficiently. It's getting to be well known now amongst the old-school mac users that Apple is "dumbing down" their OS to make it more palatable for the masses. These include more flags and messages asking, "are you sure you want to do so-and-so?" For those of us who know what we're doing, these things get in our way as really pisses us off, just as the GP suggested. There is a whole subset of users who regularly find the command line settings or hacks to disable this irritating behavior.
Moreover, the entire article is based on a mistaken premise. The fact that Apple is favored by "creative people" has absolutely nothing to do with their company profile or habits of secrecy. The whole reason is because Apple has a design philosophy whose goal is to make the computer a tool for accomplishing what you want to do rather and having the "computing" be as transparent as possible. Microsoft just isn't good at doing this, the OS and the software interjects itself into the user experience far, far too often. This disrupts thought patterns and focus and leads to a hindering of the ability to get useful work done. Case in point, the little animated dog in XP whenever you want to search for something. When I want to search, I want to type a search string into a search field and get rapid, relevant results I do not want to look at animated images asking me cute phrases, it's distracting.
If you're looking for a generic UI than I suppose easy to recognize generic symbols are the best. However, my dream is to make the UIs that actually mimic reality but the trick is keeping them fairly usuable still. I don't want it to be cartoonish, I want you to look at the UI and mistake it for a fantastic physical machine rather than a monitor. For example, if you look at the themes on the exchange site for e17, a lot of these not what you'd call an every day sort of theme but appeal to a particular aesthetic. Examples include steampunk, grunge, and baroque that incorporate photo realistic elements with varying efficacy (e.g. baroque is a cool concept but very hard on the eyes). The idea is to make the living-room computer more than just a tool, but a functional piece of art.
What I'd love to do is make a theme that looks like the 1960s version of futuristic computers and space ship aesthetic from the movie 2001, with light-bulb lit buttons of different colored plastic, lots of milled metal highlights and dark plastic everywhere.
In any case, handbrake started as an application for BeOS and didn't even have a windows gui until version 0.8.5. I was using it on macs way back in the day when 700 Mb was your practical limit because hard drive space was still more precious than blank CDs and writable DVDs were hugely expensive.
Why would they care about what windows does? It survived without windows before it was famous, it'll survive without divx -- h264 is so incredible you don't need divx anyway.
Further reasons the administration might not like what China is doing right now are economic. China ties their currency exchange rate to the U.S. dollar in a way that keeps theirs low relative to ours. This essentially creates a permanent trade imbalance between the exporter (CHina) and the importers (U.S. mostly, also Europe). I hear people say all the time that China owns a huge portion of the U.S. debt and it would be a big disaster economically if they sold that debt. This is incorrect, if the Chinese sold their U.S. debt they'd be doing us a favor because it would depress the value of the dollar and make our manufacturing more competitive. In the past when unemployment has been rock-bottom in the U.S., this wouldn't help us much. Right now it would help our economy a lot to create manufacturing jobs because our unemployment is 10%. Paul Krugman quantified this by saying that China's exchange rate policy amounts to 1.4 million lost jobs in the U.S. The people at the federal reserve and the treasury know this. Ben Bernake himself has been quoted as saying chaiman-speak equivalent for the Chinese are playing with fire.
The conclusion here is that I suspect that if Clinton is mentioning this, the administration is planning on using this as leverage to get economic or other concessions out of the Chinese.
Don't you think she knows that? It's called protocol. Either A) she's just putting up a strong showing for american audiences and has said something completely different to the Chinese, or B) she really is going to do something. Who knows what? So far Obama has not shown much interest in rocking the boat any (see Wall Street bail out for evidence) but Hillary Clinton is not exactly the kind to shy away from a fight.
It'll be interesting -- I would like to see some tougher trade policies with China. For me personally, I'm really tired of importing Chinese goods that are made with no pollution controls, especially when those goods are laced with cadmium or melamine. I'm also annoyed that they sabotaged the Copenhagen talks on climate change. In fact, this could be exactly what the administration is reacting to, maybe Obama et al. got burned and are in no mood to play nice with China the way past presidents have done.
That is why we Monsanto poisoning us and suing any farmer who ends up with GMO pollen in his corn or saving seeds.
And you don't think that GW Bush appointing a former Monsanto lawyer to the Supreme Court had nothing to do with it? Democrats are just as bad at appointing lobbyists for industries to oversee federal organization that they're supposed to be regulating, but look at this chart here. Look at that chart and tell me with a straight face that the Republican party is trying to remove government interference in markets. If you do, you are arguing to me that the same political party that is supposed to stand for unregulated capitalism is also contributing to that regulation necessary by giving out the subsidies that created the environment for Monsanto to poison our beloved rat population (and maybe us too, the article was short on that).
I have to correct myself, it was first written down in 1750, but the earliest known mention of Barbara Allen was 1666 by Samuel Pepys. There you go, 344 years of teenagers whining about breaking up with their boy- and girlfriends.
This sort of thing has been happening as long as people have been writing this stuff down. For a reference from the 80s generation, go watch High Fidelity.
Secondly, you can see this type of thing happening in ballades and chansons that were literally written hundreds of years ago. E.g. in the song Barbara Allen, the two kids both die of depression because their relationship wasn't working the way they wanted it to. Granted it's an exaggeration, but you can't say a song like that, written in 1750, doesn't reflect similar sentiments as what you wrote.
So I don't think that there's anything especially wrong with people nowadays, or that the study has really any merit, it's just our society has developed this weird idea that more and more powerful drugs are better. Even if you don't take drugs yourself, there may be some effect from all the chemicals in the drinking water, like estrogen. The only way to stop that is to reign in the medical industry, and have more powerful water quality laws.
Thus far, Google has not displayed this sort of lack of taste. We'll see though. What I'm guessing is that it will be the form of a little transparent pop-up window with text ads relevant to whatever your looking at, e.g. if you're looking at a Border's, it will give you ads for a B&N or something. The kind of metadata to make these types of context specific ads has been creeping into google maps for some time. E.g., just look at this link. You can clearly see the name of each business and an icon about just what kind of business it is there (hotels get a little stick person in a bed, restaurants get a knife and fork, etc.). Hopefully they would put them in a transparent window and somewhere unobtrusive, like on the street or in the sky.
Though, it does kind of give new meaning to the Futurama quote, "Behold.... the Internet." "My God! It's full of ads!"
There is a huge body of law in the U.S. that protects the consumer from unfair or deceptive trade practices. How is what comcast doing a fair trade practice? You most often see this with credit cards and banks. IANAL, but I imagine there is something similar for ANY regulated corporation.
Yes, god forbid someone in the government actually try and help people. We must put a stop to this at once! The U.S. government should only work to protect the corporate profit, as it has been for the last thirty years.
I mean really, why don't these judges just go out and admit they're on comcast's payroll already? Somebody should tar and feather those judges. Gah, I'm so sick and tired of regulatory capture. When will it all end? S
Here is a non-pay link with the same info.
You're weakening your point in writing this because it shows that you don't know very much about Apple products if you think they are known for feature creep. Case in point: the most recent version of OS X (snow leopard) removed a substantial number of additional features. Or do you not remember the touted 7Gb savings when upgrading? The most consequential being the ability to run on powerpc architectures. Secondly, they also streamlined the OS substantially. While this makes my laptop nice and fast, it breaks a lot of functionality. (E.g. the linker doesn't allow duplicate symbols in linked files any more like the old ones did, this breaks a substantial number of programs.) Coupled to this is that up until 10.5 when they started optimizing for Intel chips, every new release of OS X ran faster on the same hardware than the previous release. I was just using my girlfriend's 1.3 Ghz PPC that ran 10.4 easily. For the Intel chips, that rule is still true, every release is faster than the previous one. The point is that none of these things are "feature creep" like you say. Maybe itunes has some additional stuff like the genius recommendations but show me a software package that doesn't add features.
Very true, but you do get some benefit from the larger battery on a tablet and netbook versus an e-book reader. One thought though, in OS 10.6, apple has made waking from sleep seemingly more rapid than in previous versions. If in a specialized device like a tablet, they could work the same magic for hiberation, i.e. writing the memory contents to disk prior to sleep, it might alleviate a lot of the battery drain while sleeping. You're right though in that you'll never be able to get the same battery-life and e-book reader, but then e-book readers can't play movies, or check e-mail or surf the web. :)
The GP's link is precisely what they need. The dominant battery drainer for an LCD screen is the backlight. The e-book readers get their tremendous battery-life in part because they don't have a back-light. It seems like if you could design any tablet, you would want an LCD that could act as e-paper, i.e. still get a decent readable image in direct sunlight without a back-light, but have the option to turn the back-light on for low-light or situations where a higher intensity color (e.g., watching a movie) would be beneficial that would be the best of both worlds. If Apple has somehow managed to do that, I would be very impressed and it really would revolutionize the tablet market and compete well with the kindle to boot.
where BDV here is the virus whose DNA they were searching for in the human genome. There you go, if you're depressed, manic or schizophrenic, it could be one of your ancestors got a brain virus.
Just to attempt to quantify what a "metric-butt-ton" is: According to wikipedia, MS had lost about $4 billion on the xboxes by the end of 2005 and about $1 billion to replace bricked xbox 360s. Their most recent quarterly report from Q1 2010 (Oct. 23rd) showed that their entire entertainment division posted a $312 million profit. I have no idea what the total take is, but just to recoup the $5 billion we know they lost would take over four years of quarters like Q1 2010. If every quarter has been like Q1 2010, that would mean they would be breaking even just about now, except the entertainment division at MS never posted a profit until 2008! So it's a good bet that MS has even now not yet recouped the losses from developing the xbox. They're rich though, they can afford to wait for years and years to recoup an investment.
Insider trades are in the public domain. Yahoo stocks has a nice list. According to them, the last trade by an insider was December 2nd, 2009. I wouldn't know how these things go down, but my guess is that's too early to be able to easily pin as illegal behavior without some direct evidence. Also, I'd guess that a lot of the big shots are in it for the long haul and aren't interested in gaming their own stock (I could surely be wrong if the iSlate turns out to be a dud and there's a whole bunch of insider trades before the 27th). I would hope that the SEC would look pretty hard at the trades of reporters who report on stocks in addition to the insiders though.
And the author knows this how? How do we know it will be a "big iPod", it could be completely different for all we know because nobody has seen it who is allowed to talk about it. Regardless, of what it actually does, the idea that Apple will predict that it will sell 10 million tablets in the first year is hooey. If anything, I would guess they will do the opposite and order too few units in order to increase the demand for the product by creating scarcity. Just ask the Nintendo when the Wii came out or whoever made tickle me elmo how this works...
I read that portion of TFA and what he conveniently doesn't mention is that lesser-known artists get some benefit from the increased exposure by having their songs available to millions. By just ignoring any positive effects of file sharing, he's oversimplifying the problem and inviting the very criticism that the preceding poster commented on. File sharing hurts acts like U2, not necessarily the lesser known artists.
Also, look at the chart in this article. It clearly shows that revenue from live acts is increasing, which goes directly to artists. Couple that to the second chart that shows that revenues to actual artists in the UK are increasing, you can safely make the conclusions that the ones who are suffering under the internet are the labels, who are (were) the distributors of content, NOT the artists.
And don't forget their track record with voice recognition. I wonder what the muscle activated equivalent of "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all" is?