Posts by Drat 78 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2010
Ads don't drive the economy. Ads either make people buy one brand over another, buy something for more than it is worth because it is branded, or encourage you to buy something useless. On rare occasions they might inform you of a new product, but that is very rare.
Content related Ads are an acceptable evil if we want to consume content for free, targeted Ads are an unnecessary evil designed to exploit the gullible IMO
The $68.7 billion goes to the stockholders of Activision Blizzard, not to the company itself.
Of course, it is possible that MS will invest more into Activision Blizzard to make new games than the company could have done on its own, but certainly the $68.7 billion makes some people very rich rather than going into games
Patents are used to create nation state commercial advantage but each states patent office granting generously to local companies/inventors, then due to the globalisation this can cause ripples in all other markets. It is a bit of a battle, why make your own patent authority more rigorous when your overseas competitors make theirs more lenient for their own local businesses.
Getting rid of the whole patent system might make people less willing to share ideas and breakthroughs. Perhaps a better solution would be to have one global patenting authority that can offer the required amount of rigour on examination (and thus reduce the number of spurious patents) and at the same time reduce drastically the costs of patenting?
"As part of the deal, LinkedIn got to retain its independence and Weiner remained in charge. Weiner received a spot on Microsoft’s senior leadership team and started reporting directly to Nadella, while keeping his CEO title."
So MS didn't replace the CEO of Linkedin with one of their own, instead they turned the CEO of Linkedin into one of their own. Assimilation instead of usurpation....
For me and several colleagues now working from home this would be useful (assuming it works well and image quality is good). Why? Well, my makeshift office space only has room enough for one monitor and a laptop, and even then it is squeezed in. A couple of my colleagues work on the dining room table and so can't add an external monitor (mealtimes, kids home schooling etc). So even just using it to display ONE virtual monitor becomes very useful, more would be heaven.
And also:
"Pesce also pointed out that it’s unclear how users will see their keyboards when wearing the glasses"
I thought these are AR glasses, so you still see the world through them?
"Not if they are on the public footpath outside my office, and I am inside with the doors and windows on that side firmly shut."
Better to send a few people into 2 week isolation by error than keep the whole of the population in self isolation for months, which is the alternative (if you rule out letting the virus rip through the population)
When I was a kid my parents sent off for a pack so I could join the Marvin Depreciation Society. It came with a badge with a sad Marvin face on, and a grey Marvin jumper. Except in my pack, they sent a too large jumper with little note saying something like "We are sorry to say we have run out of small jumpers, so have had to send you a large one instead. If you are unhappy please send it back for a full refund". My parents sent it back, but I have always wondered if the wrong size jumper and the note where part of the joke..
Is there anyone out there with inside information, I would love to know (it is something I ponder on once a year when the rotation of the earth makes my head spin)
"In my experience exactly the same prevails (mutatis mutandis) in the world of business. Managers who believe that "management" is a sublime talent, and those who possess it can manage anything."
Managing is an art form for for sure. However the best managers know they have to take counsel from experts
It is a question of focus. If you just stick a transparent screen on to some glasses, you will not be able to focus on the text, it will just be a blur (you can test this out for yourself if you hold something transparent with text on, such as a sweet wrapper, right in front of your eye).
Currently you need some form of optics to change the focal distance of the text/image. To remove the need of optics you would need to have light from the image travelling roughly parallel, I don't know, some form of hologram technology to collimate the light?
I couldn't agree more. I was on a free google apps account and was finding I was missing out on more and more functionality. So, about 2 years ago I took the drastic step of moving to a gmail account. It was a long hard process.
I managed to move all my emails over, but of course they all ended up in the inbox and not the nicely organised folders I had
I shared my photos with my new account, but I seem to have lost all the location info. I need to get round to exporting them all from the old account, recombining them with the exif data and then importing them into the new account
And of course I lost access to all my paid for apps and media
I am glad I made the change, but it has left a bad taste behind...
I always thought that as it was such a stupid idea, that they had a real and different plan: Get 20+ gullable people to sign up, build a fake rocket, put them to sleep for a few hours and then wake them up in a "Mars" habitat that is out in a desert somewhere, or in a studio (the story being they had been in months of suspended animation). Then you have a reality TV show of people who really think they are on mars and on their own for every, could have made interesting TV. Could have really messed with their minds (people dressed as martians in the distance, fake an airleak, pretend earth has been demolished) in case you needed to spice it up. Oh well, I was wrong then, but would have been a more sensible idea...
What have density or colour to do with volume? Liter is a measure of volume. 500 ml of helium is the same volume as 500 ml of water, just the mass is different. So it doesn't matter if one beer has a higher density than the other. I suspect the staff of your craft beer bar consists of young hipsters who have no clue how to pour a beer properly from a tap.
The point was I believe, other properties may have an impact depending on the measurement method. I have a jug than can measure 500ml of water just fine, but I would really struggle to use it to measure 500ml of helium
Having an Amazon Prime subscription I am much much more likely to buy stuff through Amazon. I am also more likely to keep my Prime subscription if I can cast Prime Video through my chromecast (80% of our TV watching is through the chromecast). We did get a fire stick but the interface is so clunky compared to using a phone we can't be bothered to use it.
I _probably_ won't drop Amazon Prime due to no chromecast support, but it does annoy the hell out of me
"Yep. Can't have Ordinary People diluting Murdoch's power now, can we?"
Totally agree that Murdoch et al have been playing us ordinary people, and it is good to see their power reduce. Sadly, this is about other powerful people/states/organisations at work, and as usual it is the ordinary people who get played once again.
This is the logic most people currently use
1) Does the news content conflict with your views? Then assume it is fake and produced by the global elite/revolutionary guard/evil puppets from the planet Zog
2) Does the news content support your views? Then assume it is the holy truth written by honest defenders of mankind who would help old ladies cross the road if they weren't too busy distributing blankets for small furry animals who have fallen on hard times
Two things I took from this:
1) Not many people are using (and paying for) music streaming services
2) The music industry + artists aren't earning much money from music streaming services
Well isn't the second point mainly caused by the first? Why would anyone expect to earn much from something that isn't been used much?
I have to admit I like the look of this, just a shame the functionality is a bit lacking. Make something like this running android wear and I would be very interested. I like the idea of instant information on a wrist mounted device, a band like this seem to look less bulky than a watch styled device.
The Moto E 2nd gen is close to that with a 4.5 screen and a 2390 mAh battery. Typically my battery drops to 50 to 40% by the end of the day (normal use for me is messaging, news, playing music to my BT headphones, selecting stuff for the chromecast, a bit of web browsing. NOT playing games however) Only downsides are just 1GB RAM (can be a bit sluggish switching apps), no Qi and a weak camera. Only cost £108 however, but would pay more to fix those three quibbles. Oh, I really want a USB-C port on my next phone too...
Typically there is much much more of interest in the latest vanilla Android updates then there is in the device specific modified Androids. Therefore it is a much better consumer proposition to be able to offer faster updates to the latest Android version than it is to offer some unique feature. This is one reason I have preferred a Nexus to a Samsung. I hope in the future my device choice is widened (fingers crossed)
From a successful artists point of view this makes sense, I am sure she can get more money in the short term from album sales, and later on she can always add the albums back to Spotify for future income.
From a consumer’s point of view, Spotify is much better value, a fixed fee gives you access to a huge range of music, whereas buying albums costs more for less listening choice, and has the big chance of buying an album you listen to once or twice and then it sits idle.
So whose point of view is the most important, the multi-millionaire supplier or the average consumer, which in this case is probably a school kid saving up their pocket money.
"But there’s no integer ratio between a pixel designed by the software developer and a pixel on your iPhone 6 Plus screen. That’s something the fragmented Android world has long tolerated, but it’s new to perfectionist Apple."
I thought android forced app developers to cater for all size/shape screens by changing the layout not by scaling anything? This was always seen as a major hurdle for programmers (have to consider multiple views), but the argument for is that all apps are rendered cripsly on any display?
The Apple solution seems clunky in comparison, seems Android got that one right IMO.
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