Comment Re:micro-payments...$.01/article (Score 1) 608
Wikipedia would be dead within a month if they put up a paywall of any kind, even $0.01.
Wikipedia would be dead within a month if they put up a paywall of any kind, even $0.01.
I don't know what's the going definition of "monster" these days, but I do think getting three years worth of salary in a month and a buttload of free advertising on top is a pretty big success.
No, it's not insta-ticket to the billionnaire club but nobody ever made it out to be either.
Freeware/homebrew games? Sure, Sony could do that, but then the actual console would cost up to twice what it does now to be able to make a profit. Then nobody would buy it, and it would flop badly.
You've got to be kidding me. If you seriously believe that enough people would buy a fucking PS3 just for homebrew games to actually make a noticeable dent in licensed game sales, I have a bridge to sell you. Quite a few bridges, really. All in mint condition!
The problem I see with 'what it is worth' is that I can't tell that until after I play, and I have to pay before that.
Nothing prevents you from paying again after you've played them if feel like they were worth more than what you initially gave.
and you've got $30,000 per person per year - which is not very good money.
No, it's not "very good money", but it's not a very bad money either. All in all, it's pretty damn close to what most people get, "very average money" and enough to live quite comfortably on - that's absolutely nothing to sniff at for ONE sale.
Especially considering these people are most likely getting it from doing what they love, instead of toiling their lives away for some faceless megacorporation like the other 50% of the population who also earn $30k-or-less-a-year.
The KDE devs did try to get Akonadi recognized as a standard so resources (like an address book) would be recognized in Gnome applications as well. FreeDesktop.org did not accept it as a standard.
No, they didn't. There isn't such a proposal anywhere on the XDG lists.
Based on that thread, it looks like they talked about it themselves and then decided it won't be accepted without even actually trying, or that there would be too much hassle.
Just ONE false positive is enough to turn it from "yeah, well, fine" into "pure evil", and there WILL be false positives. There's a reason vigilantism is illegal, this is no different.
So how do we, as a culture, try to fix this?
The same way cultures so far out of whack with reality always do. It won't be pretty.
You've got to be kidding. Because of the ridiculous "half-installed" state, Debian package DB goes boom everytime something goes even a slightest bit wrong during installation. Been using Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora side by side for a long time, last time I've seen a broken RPM database was maybe in RH8 or FC1. Deb systems? Still all the time.
apt-get install -f
Yes, it's usually fixable. But it shouldn't break in the first place. And -f isn't always enough, it's still fixable by hand in those cases, but end-users can't do that.
You should really hope very hard this isn't one of their considerations, if it were, Windows Mobile would be the only logical choice.
Not sure if troll..?
It's not a troll. It's perfectly valid extrapolation of your argument. You claim it should be Debian because you use Debian. Well, vast majority of their potential customers don't use Debian on their desktop, they use Windows. Therefore, if the mobile platform should be influenced by users' desktop of choice, it should be windows.
1) You lose easy access to the largest repository on Earth (Debian's). And Debian has a dedicated ARMel distribution. This is _massive_
There's a kernel of truth in this one, but it's unlikely they would be directly usable because of library version differences, and even if they were, vast majority of the applications there are horribly suited for mobile devices.
2) When I still used RPM-based distros, I could make the package DB go boom by just installing/uninstalling stuff
You've got to be kidding. Because of the ridiculous "half-installed" state, Debian package DB goes boom everytime something goes even a slightest bit wrong during installation. Been using Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora side by side for a long time, last time I've seen a broken RPM database was maybe in RH8 or FC1. Deb systems? Still all the time.
3) I know how to package DEBs. Not true for RPM.
I know how to package RPM's. They're pretty damn simple, DEBs on the other hand require some arcane magic.
4) The decission was made behind closed doors.
Yes, pretty much just like every other company's every decision.
5) I use Debian for laptops, desktops, servers, I would prefer to use Debian-esque on my mobile.
You should really hope very hard this isn't one of their considerations, if it were, Windows Mobile would be the only logical choice.
Today, a decade and a half later, we have cell phones that are many hundreds of times faster than those Pentium and Pentium II systems
Citation needed. Top-end cell phones have CPU's with clock speeds about four times that of the P2 you mentioned, and I'm pretty damn sure ARM is not 50 times more effective clock-for-clock than P2.
Firefox's problem is not it's JavaScript speed, it's the fact that the whole browser is slow as HELL and unstable when you use a couple of addons.
What makes you think those are separate issues? Yes, it's true some addons can cause huge slowdowns, but what do you think most addons are written in? Yep, that's right, JavaScript - making it faster will help with them as well.
What we really need in the consumer market are good value for money 1920x1080 pixel displays for laptops in the 12"-16" range.
This. It seems that the resolutions on laptop displays not only have not improved recently, they've been getting steadily worse over the past few years - SXGA+ and WSXGA+ used to be common, and even UXGA and WUXGA displays were not that unusual, but nowadays it seems almost everyone is almost exclusively pitching horrifying WXGA panels with some WSXGA offerings and only a few having 1080p (which is still less resolution than WUXGA).
I suppose this is the price we pay for the commodization of laptops. They've only marketed at the half-blind.
It's unlikely that even if he tried, he could make a disease more lethal than what nature has produced before
While that may be true for "idiot roommate", there's no reason why it should be for evil geniuses. Nature favors less-lethal diseases, a pathogen that kills off all it's hosts or kills too fast to spread effectively is an evolutionary dead-end and obviously there are huge selection pressures against such behavior.
By the way, those people who think HIV was created in a government lab seriously underestimate how cleverly made HIV is. It's way beyond our best evil geniuses.
Building something like HIV from scratch is way beyond us, but taking something like it that already has the important clever parts and adding something nature doesn't think is clever - too much deadliness, may not be.
Homeopathy is a catch-all phrase which essentially boils down to "Remedies which have been passed down by word-of-mouth but have not been subjected to modern testing".
No, it isn't. The term you're looking for is "folk" or "traditional" medicine. Homeopathy is a very well defined term for a specific brand of quackery, and while some people may (ab)use it in the way you mean, it's a very ambiguous term at best, and mixing the two makes a huge disservice for both traditional medicine and modern medicine.
"And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- Spaceballs
