I'm not sure they will get into the core systems anyway. I think this is a likely move toward getting their media formats everywhere they can.
They know it's going to be hard to compete with Apple because the I-pod already captured the mindshare of the important people. (The cool ones.)
If they get their stuff built into the car, then they can tie that, their OS, delivery formats and services into a delivery chain that does not leave room for I-pod.
video games too, though they are getting damn good. (It's not a shutout anymore.)
It helps an awful lot to have been born right near the start of the whole video/computer thing.
My favorites happens to be Tekken and SSX. One can get out a lot of frustration playing the former, nothing but pure fun, plenty of trash talk and attitude on the latter.
The worst, for me, are the puzzlers. My days are numbered on those.
The sick part is that a good win against the kids still feels damn good and I suppose it shouldn't. Their time will come though. We all get old, they will have younger fish to fry in due time.
If enough parents actually did provide Neopets with some feedback, things might change. I am not sure they need to however because enough parental involvement really diminishes the problem.
Go ahead and mail them. Tell your friends to as well.
Be sure and check the site out and decide for yourself before doing so however.
These are bad trends because people are not making the right choices.
New car, or sports fees? Fast food or cook at home. Premium television or broadband? Time off to do what you want or meet with the school people to discuss things. (This one is a biggie and will make a world of difference to your kids education.)
I am having to make one of those choices right now in fact. Riding the IT wave of the 90's was a lot of fun. Now I need to figure out how to live cheaper, or give up some ability to keep the kids involved along with myself. Already did the used car and modest house thing. Maybe it't time for a move or career change.
We could have nicer things, but we don't. I am not sure I would give up a winning sports season for any car.
Will children always be prey to corps? Absolutely, unless parents do their part. Today it's pretty easy to just spend your money making life easy. The cost of doing so is high however.
Those trends you speak of simply mean more folks are making poor choices.
Companies are a problem however. Today they have the same rights as one of us, but don't have the disadvantages. That does need to change in order to put people on more solid ground.
Waiting for this to happen because it's the right thing to do is a bad choice though. Kids only grow up once.
I have my view today because my parents, well my father anyway, didn't have them. My introduction to the world was pretty ugly. Got through it ok, but almost didn't.
Figured my kids ought to have better.
Looks all blue sky right now. The older ones are now teenagers. I think they have it pretty rough these days. The next 10 years is going to be very interesting...
For all their marketing, I just don't see that many Neopets laying around. In fact, around here they are hard to find.
I actually had to look in a few different Clairs stores to find a decent selection of them. They are not as common as the action toys tied to the cartoons and the kids get more education from the site than they would from the toons.
Seems to be a decent tradeoff to me. My kids could be finding far worse things to do. And yes, there are better things to do outside.
Guess I am one of those parents you had better be worrying about. My kids get the same connection I do. The catch: I must remain involved and I log their traffic.
Just knowing the log is there does more to reinforce good behaviour than any lame, easily cracked censorware does.
THE PARENTS THAT DO USE CENSORWARE ARE THE PROBLEM.
You have to surf with your kids plain 'n simple; otherwise, they are going to be adopting some one elses value system, not yours. This makes me believe parents who use censorware have a weak value system composed mostly of fear and ignorance. Baah....
Funny too, when they know there is a log, they will be happy to come and talk about what happened. This is always better than not.
I'm probably going to get flamed for this, but what the hell....
All of my kids are getting near straight A grades in school. No crime, no drugs, well respected in their peer groups.
Our family has no taboo becuase ignorance is weakness and places those that subscribe to it at a clear disadvantage to those that don't. Tough subjects are important to young people. They *will* get the information. Who better to set the primary expectations than you?
The real world is not always a nice place. Thugs, porn, disease, scammers, you name it, it's all there right? Who do these people pray on? The naive, ignorant, and fearful, and sometimes the unlucky. The net is the exact same way.
Being a good citizen means knowing your rights and responsibilities and setting the right expectations for those you interact with. Depending on other entities, to exhibit good behaviour is so totally passive aggressive as to make me sick frankly.
How to cope and make a difference in the world? Vote with your feet. Don't like the value proposition Neopets brings to the table? Don't visit and let others know why. That is your right and responsibility to do so.
However, don't ask Neopets to give up their rights too.
Everybody knows Neopets wants you to buy their toys. Instead of blaring their message in a passive mind-numbing cartoon, they choose to put up a fun, educational and interactive community almost anyone can enjoy.
What's wrong with that? Seems to me they are honoring their obligations as a citizen as well as they can be frankly.
You need to take a more active role in things along with just about everyone else that says what you just did. My family knows their rights and how to set expectations. When those are not met, we move on to where they are and let others know why, just as I did here. Making clear choices is one of the most important skills young people can learn. Empowering them to actually make those choices is the difference between future leaders and everybody else.
Sadly, the only real check on corporations today is your dollars. Vote with your feet early and often and talk about why to your family and friends. It works. More people should be doing it.
I don't mean to flame you with the above. Don't take it personal. This is important stuff. Consider my view and contrast it with your own and get something good from it. Might do you some good, might not...
After they are feeling the joy of being broke, a little extra work just might reinforce the responsibility issues while giving them some hope of that next trip to the movies with their friends...
I got hooked on this for a while, playing with my daughters. We had a neopoint contest and it was good fun.
That site is pretty educational as far as I am concerned. Sure there is gambling, but there are plenty of other things too.
You can play games of skill to get your points and avoid the gambling ones.
The educational part for my family came after I won the Neopoint contest. (It was first to get 250,000) My kids lost because they did not understand how the whole Neopia thing worked.
Things we talked about:
Investments: How the bank was different from the stock market. What is compound interest and how does it benefit you. Keeping your money liquid vs tied up in investments and how that affects your ability to build wealth.
Marketing, buying and selling: Setting up a shop. How to make your shop stand out, what are people buying, how to take advantage of trends in the marketplace. Ripping people off and getting ripped off.
Gambling: Scratch cards, games of chance, how investments are similar to gambling and how they are different.
As far as I am concerned, Neopets is one of the very best sites on the net for parents to talk to their kids about money matters.
the weather has been interesting. Very warm summers, but more extreme winters. (How does that play into the picture?)
My 80 year old Grandmother has an interesting take having to do with cycles. She does not see anything different yet, unless the current cycle does not end...
She says it works on about 11 year swings.
I know, not scientific, but I thought her perspective interesting. (Yes, we did talk about this 'whole dang global warmin thing' a while back. She is old, but still very interesting to talk to. Her favorite new tech: Cell Phones and VCR +. Does not use the computer at all however. "Why bother when you can just call?"
My own take is that we don't really have a good picture of our environmental trends yet. For all we know, we could just be living in a brief (on cosmic scale timelines) period of stability that we have little control over. Of course common sense says burning lots of things combined with the diminished forests has got to do something...
Guess I am just rambling this morning --need coffee... I don't see a warming trend, but I do see greater temp. extremes similar to those about 10 years ago here. (Hmmm.. maybe grammy might be right)
I really hate this guy. Apple is doing the right things, striking a balance between both interests that promotes the right behaviours. The Apple platform allows the music industry to compete and look cool at the same time. People are buying and trading --as it should be.
He turns the whole thing negative because he is looking for more food to feed the gorilla!
The nerve! For one who continues to build their fortune on casual piracy, his position takes balls.
Ever notice how the rich get treated with kid gloves? It is because they can afford to be well represented. Money talks in our legal system, and most of us don't have much of it.
If the masses accept this new level proposal then they won't be learning about actual computing bits. They will learn the marketing bits they are wrapped in. This layer of indirection allows for easy manupulation of whoever buys into it.
(warning computers and cars analogy ahead!)
What if cars had levels?
Lets say you determined you need a level 2 car. You go to the lot and buy a level 2. Is that car really a level one car that has been tweaked to perform at level 2, but really should be a level 1. What if the level 2 performance was at the cost of car life because you would be running the crap out of it?
How would you know?
I suppose you could use testimonials & such, but wouldn't it be better to just know a bit about cars to decide for yourself?
Your second comment makes pretty good sense. I think they will just put dates on them. This makes for nice and clear incentives as to how to upgrade and when.
With cars, people that don't know either drive them to try to learn, or they find somebody who does know to help them decide. Computers should be the same way.
The PC industry is about making the fastest machines at the lowest dollars. Personally I wish somebody would do a little design at the expense of speed, but that is another story.
Getting back to the levels. This is an attempt to qualtify what you are doing, then sell you a computer that fits. --The problem is that they all fit for almost everybody.
If Microsoft can get folks to buy into the level system, they can then certify hardware as being level 3 compliant, or some other such thing. Each year, they will put out little charts and graphs that equate their current bloat to the level guides. Hardware makers will get something new to talk about.
Most of us will get screwed because the level system will hide the actual specs and reduce the average persons awareness of what they are buying. They want to dumb this down because uninformed people more easily part with their money.
The current status quo looks bad for everyone really. Good hardware can be had for about $300. Legal software for that machine can easily triple that. More people are learning this lesson so something has to change to keep the dollars flowing.
Almost nobody in the industry wants people making their own PC's. The way things are right now, you can buy "made for windows" hardware, throw it into a cool case and you are good to go. (Of course, you should be running Linux, but that too is another story.) Specs are specs. People see a bundle and can shop around pretty easily.
Now lets talk about a Level 3 computer? What's inside? How does it compare to my P4 2Ghz.... ? Will hardware makers sell Level 3 kits? What if people want to choose different vendors?
It's all about the bundle. Microsoft has made their fortune bundling things together in ways that encourage people to buy. This bundling of hardware and terminology will simply allow them to better leverage their already strong dominant position in the hardware end of things.
It will be at our expense. (It always is.) Bundles limit choice. Where there is limited choice, people pay more.
No thanks, people are learning now. Might as well just let them continue to get smarter so they can make their own choices.
I do give Microsoft credit though. --It's a good move. Creative. Hope most folks know better.
He says the conversations are predictable, he says they are saying those things.
THIS DOES NOT MEAN IT IS HAPPENING EVERYWHERE.
Just because this guy says there is a trend toward these FUD items, does not make it so. What else is he going to say?
Don't get me wrong, I think the FUD is having a negative effect. However, you can't simply take his word for anything really. He is a paid spin doctor. The first interview posted here demonstrated that.
No big deal. Seems to me, one can just remove it, unless it is required for the attractions. (Still can break the tags, I guess.)
Theme parks are all about control anyway. The better ones have good control which results in a good experience. (That is what you pay for.) The poor ones have not thought everything out resulting in problems. (Which is what you don't pay for.)
It's a good feature. Pay cash if you don't want your prefs tracked to your identity.
Slashdot Mirror
Kerry cannot be a worse alternative than Bush currently is. The binary nature of American politics demands we either stay, or bet.
I've seen 4 years staying the course. Betting for change seems to be a sure thing to me at this point.
Kerry in a landslide.
I'm not sure they will get into the core systems anyway. I think this is a likely move toward getting their media formats everywhere they can.
They know it's going to be hard to compete with Apple because the I-pod already captured the mindshare of the important people. (The cool ones.)
If they get their stuff built into the car, then they can tie that, their OS, delivery formats and services into a delivery chain that does not leave room for I-pod.
video games too, though they are getting damn good. (It's not a shutout anymore.)
It helps an awful lot to have been born right near the start of the whole video/computer thing.
My favorites happens to be Tekken and SSX. One can get out a lot of frustration playing the former, nothing but pure fun, plenty of trash talk and attitude on the latter.
The worst, for me, are the puzzlers. My days are numbered on those.
The sick part is that a good win against the kids still feels damn good and I suppose it shouldn't. Their time will come though. We all get old, they will have younger fish to fry in due time.
If enough parents actually did provide Neopets with some feedback, things might change. I am not sure they need to however because enough parental involvement really diminishes the problem.
Go ahead and mail them. Tell your friends to as well.
Be sure and check the site out and decide for yourself before doing so however.
These are bad trends because people are not making the right choices.
New car, or sports fees? Fast food or cook at home. Premium television or broadband? Time off to do what you want or meet with the school people to discuss things. (This one is a biggie and will make a world of difference to your kids education.)
I am having to make one of those choices right now in fact. Riding the IT wave of the 90's was a lot of fun. Now I need to figure out how to live cheaper, or give up some ability to keep the kids involved along with myself. Already did the used car and modest house thing. Maybe it't time for a move or career change.
We could have nicer things, but we don't. I am not sure I would give up a winning sports season for any car.
Will children always be prey to corps? Absolutely, unless parents do their part. Today it's pretty easy to just spend your money making life easy. The cost of doing so is high however.
Those trends you speak of simply mean more folks are making poor choices.
Companies are a problem however. Today they have the same rights as one of us, but don't have the disadvantages. That does need to change in order to put people on more solid ground.
Waiting for this to happen because it's the right thing to do is a bad choice though. Kids only grow up once.
I have my view today because my parents, well my father anyway, didn't have them. My introduction to the world was pretty ugly. Got through it ok, but almost didn't.
Figured my kids ought to have better.
Looks all blue sky right now. The older ones are now teenagers. I think they have it pretty rough these days. The next 10 years is going to be very interesting...
Best of luck with your own.
Man, you have no idea...
Live freely while you can. Get experiences to talk about because you are going to need every last one of them!
For all their marketing, I just don't see that many Neopets laying around. In fact, around here they are hard to find.
I actually had to look in a few different Clairs stores to find a decent selection of them. They are not as common as the action toys tied to the cartoons and the kids get more education from the site than they would from the toons.
Seems to be a decent tradeoff to me. My kids could be finding far worse things to do. And yes, there are better things to do outside.
Guess I am one of those parents you had better be worrying about. My kids get the same connection I do. The catch: I must remain involved and I log their traffic.
Just knowing the log is there does more to reinforce good behaviour than any lame, easily cracked censorware does.
THE PARENTS THAT DO USE CENSORWARE ARE THE PROBLEM.
You have to surf with your kids plain 'n simple; otherwise, they are going to be adopting some one elses value system, not yours. This makes me believe parents who use censorware have a weak value system composed mostly of fear and ignorance. Baah....
Funny too, when they know there is a log, they will be happy to come and talk about what happened. This is always better than not.
I'm probably going to get flamed for this, but what the hell....
All of my kids are getting near straight A grades in school. No crime, no drugs, well respected in their peer groups.
Our family has no taboo becuase ignorance is weakness and places those that subscribe to it at a clear disadvantage to those that don't. Tough subjects are important to young people. They *will* get the information. Who better to set the primary expectations than you?
The real world is not always a nice place. Thugs, porn, disease, scammers, you name it, it's all there right? Who do these people pray on? The naive, ignorant, and fearful, and sometimes the unlucky. The net is the exact same way.
Being a good citizen means knowing your rights and responsibilities and setting the right expectations for those you interact with. Depending on other entities, to exhibit good behaviour is so totally passive aggressive as to make me sick frankly.
How to cope and make a difference in the world? Vote with your feet. Don't like the value proposition Neopets brings to the table? Don't visit and let others know why. That is your right and responsibility to do so.
However, don't ask Neopets to give up their rights too.
Everybody knows Neopets wants you to buy their toys. Instead of blaring their message in a passive mind-numbing cartoon, they choose to put up a fun, educational and interactive community almost anyone can enjoy.
What's wrong with that? Seems to me they are honoring their obligations as a citizen as well as they can be frankly.
You need to take a more active role in things along with just about everyone else that says what you just did. My family knows their rights and how to set expectations. When those are not met, we move on to where they are and let others know why, just as I did here. Making clear choices is one of the most important skills young people can learn. Empowering them to actually make those choices is the difference between future leaders and everybody else.
Sadly, the only real check on corporations today is your dollars. Vote with your feet early and often and talk about why to your family and friends. It works. More people should be doing it.
I don't mean to flame you with the above. Don't take it personal. This is important stuff. Consider my view and contrast it with your own and get something good from it. Might do you some good, might not...
That's not so bad really.
After they are feeling the joy of being broke, a little extra work just might reinforce the responsibility issues while giving them some hope of that next trip to the movies with their friends...
and a bit too much sacrifice at times. (Right now happens to be one of those times dammit!)
So, the bigger question is what to do with Neopets?
Just because parents are lazy and their kids might get into gambling on Neopets, does that mean Neopets should have to do something about it?
Worried parents could just add the site to their censorware and call it good I suppose.
I got hooked on this for a while, playing with my daughters. We had a neopoint contest and it was good fun.
That site is pretty educational as far as I am concerned. Sure there is gambling, but there are plenty of other things too.
You can play games of skill to get your points and avoid the gambling ones.
The educational part for my family came after I won the Neopoint contest. (It was first to get 250,000) My kids lost because they did not understand how the whole Neopia thing worked.
Things we talked about:
Investments: How the bank was different from the stock market. What is compound interest and how does it benefit you. Keeping your money liquid vs tied up in investments and how that affects your ability to build wealth.
Marketing, buying and selling: Setting up a shop. How to make your shop stand out, what are people buying, how to take advantage of trends in the marketplace. Ripping people off and getting ripped off.
Gambling: Scratch cards, games of chance, how investments are similar to gambling and how they are different.
As far as I am concerned, Neopets is one of the very best sites on the net for parents to talk to their kids about money matters.
Highly Recommended, IMHO.
Win32 actually ran great. The machine was fast and stable. Primary problem:
No applications. Same problem Linux has.
Yeah, that is what I think too. Anyway, it was a pretty cool observation from grannie.
the weather has been interesting. Very warm summers, but more extreme winters. (How does that play into the picture?)
My 80 year old Grandmother has an interesting take having to do with cycles. She does not see anything different yet, unless the current cycle does not end...
She says it works on about 11 year swings.
I know, not scientific, but I thought her perspective interesting. (Yes, we did talk about this 'whole dang global warmin thing' a while back. She is old, but still very interesting to talk to. Her favorite new tech: Cell Phones and VCR +. Does not use the computer at all however. "Why bother when you can just call?"
My own take is that we don't really have a good picture of our environmental trends yet. For all we know, we could just be living in a brief (on cosmic scale timelines) period of stability that we have little control over. Of course common sense says burning lots of things combined with the diminished forests has got to do something...
Guess I am just rambling this morning --need coffee... I don't see a warming trend, but I do see greater temp. extremes similar to those about 10 years ago here. (Hmmm.. maybe grammy might be right)
I really hate this guy. Apple is doing the right things, striking a balance between both interests that promotes the right behaviours. The Apple platform allows the music industry to compete and look cool at the same time. People are buying and trading --as it should be.
He turns the whole thing negative because he is looking for more food to feed the gorilla!
The nerve! For one who continues to build their fortune on casual piracy, his position takes balls.
Would be nice to see more. I just don't think changing the vote is realistic at this time.
Do I want change in this area? Yes. Will it happen? Not in the near future.
I want to see some serious change before I get old.
However, our existing system has it's merits, given it is run properly.
Making each vote cast added to a fair and unbiased tally is the top concern right now.
It is possible for third parties to gain traction, as the Libertarian party has been doing, within our current system.
the problem is they have far more power.
Ever notice how the rich get treated with kid gloves? It is because they can afford to be well represented. Money talks in our legal system, and most of us don't have much of it.
you are missing part of the point.
If the masses accept this new level proposal then they won't be learning about actual computing bits. They will learn the marketing bits they are wrapped in. This layer of indirection allows for easy manupulation of whoever buys into it.
(warning computers and cars analogy ahead!)
What if cars had levels?
Lets say you determined you need a level 2 car. You go to the lot and buy a level 2. Is that car really a level one car that has been tweaked to perform at level 2, but really should be a level 1. What if the level 2 performance was at the cost of car life because you would be running the crap out of it?
How would you know?
I suppose you could use testimonials & such, but wouldn't it be better to just know a bit about cars to decide for yourself?
Your second comment makes pretty good sense. I think they will just put dates on them. This makes for nice and clear incentives as to how to upgrade and when.
With cars, people that don't know either drive them to try to learn, or they find somebody who does know to help them decide. Computers should be the same way.
The PC industry is about making the fastest machines at the lowest dollars. Personally I wish somebody would do a little design at the expense of speed, but that is another story.
Getting back to the levels. This is an attempt to qualtify what you are doing, then sell you a computer that fits. --The problem is that they all fit for almost everybody.
If Microsoft can get folks to buy into the level system, they can then certify hardware as being level 3 compliant, or some other such thing. Each year, they will put out little charts and graphs that equate their current bloat to the level guides. Hardware makers will get something new to talk about.
Most of us will get screwed because the level system will hide the actual specs and reduce the average persons awareness of what they are buying. They want to dumb this down because uninformed people more easily part with their money.
The current status quo looks bad for everyone really. Good hardware can be had for about $300. Legal software for that machine can easily triple that. More people are learning this lesson so something has to change to keep the dollars flowing.
Almost nobody in the industry wants people making their own PC's. The way things are right now, you can buy "made for windows" hardware, throw it into a cool case and you are good to go. (Of course, you should be running Linux, but that too is another story.) Specs are specs. People see a bundle and can shop around pretty easily.
Now lets talk about a Level 3 computer? What's inside? How does it compare to my P4 2Ghz.... ? Will hardware makers sell Level 3 kits? What if people want to choose different vendors?
It's all about the bundle. Microsoft has made their fortune bundling things together in ways that encourage people to buy. This bundling of hardware and terminology will simply allow them to better leverage their already strong dominant position in the hardware end of things.
It will be at our expense. (It always is.) Bundles limit choice. Where there is limited choice, people pay more.
No thanks, people are learning now. Might as well just let them continue to get smarter so they can make their own choices.
I do give Microsoft credit though. --It's a good move. Creative. Hope most folks know better.
He says the conversations are predictable, he says they are saying those things.
THIS DOES NOT MEAN IT IS HAPPENING EVERYWHERE.
Just because this guy says there is a trend toward these FUD items, does not make it so. What else is he going to say?
Don't get me wrong, I think the FUD is having a negative effect. However, you can't simply take his word for anything really. He is a paid spin doctor. The first interview posted here demonstrated that.
Didn't surprise me any more than it did you, but my employer was pretty upset at the time.
Not about the documents, but the fact that his forgotten password really didn't matter!
No big deal. Seems to me, one can just remove it, unless it is required for the attractions. (Still can break the tags, I guess.)
Theme parks are all about control anyway. The better ones have good control which results in a good experience. (That is what you pay for.) The poor ones have not thought everything out resulting in problems. (Which is what you don't pay for.)
It's a good feature. Pay cash if you don't want your prefs tracked to your identity.
OO ignores password protection now. I have used it several times to open protected documents with forgotten passwords.
Your comments regarding glare are spot on.
The lights make sense for me combined with the watch program. Maybe it makes less sense in other situations --to each their own.
They were ideas afterall. Ones that have kept my home crime free for a long time in an area that is known for it..
Peace