How about we let the American public vote on these important offices rather than let a president that over 47% of the population opposed appoint them?
Its time we demanded to be able to elect those who seem so worried about taking away our rights. Those who are nominating, appointing and approving them won't have do deal with the consequences of their actions. We, the people of the US, will.
Not really. The Mars Polar lander was lost, Deep Space 2 was lost, and Europe lost Beagle 2. Russia lost the landers of Mars 2, 3 and 6. Really, Spirit, Opportunity and Phoenix are the only rovers to make it.
Yeah, but the Pandora isn't unique. The GP2x before it (and the GP2x Wiz) both tried to do about the same thing. Yeah, the Pandora has more features and is more powerful but I think it will end up the same: A fun platform for developers, a good platform for emulators... but little else. That being said, I have a GP2x and love it, the ability to emulate just about any console, a lot of good other games, lots of videos and a good audio player makes it fun. However, the fact it chews through batteries like theres no tomorrow and the quality of the homebrew games aren't spectacular makes it kinda hard to recommend to the average non-retrogamer Joe.
Why wasn't this an issue for certain media outlets when the PATRIOT Act was signed the day it was first printed?
Because of a few things.
A) Most congressmen, the news media and most everyone else was scared after 9/11. They didn't know that it would be a 1 day attack. For all they could tell there was a terrorist on every single flight, that 9/11 would be a weekly occurrence. They didn't want it to happen again.
B) Most everyone thought that the PATRIOT act was going to be used sparingly, and would only be used to stop terrorism acts in progress. However, we all know that didn't happen.
C) The PATRIOT act was a lot more time critical than health care will ever be. In the minds of a lot of the people who voted for it, the ability to stop another terrorism attack that could take place tomorrow was a big deal. The health care bill on the other hand, isn't time critical for anything other than political moves. Even if you think this health care bill is the best thing in the world, you have to at least see that it won't be enacted immediately like the PATRIOT act was.
It's already an option. The hospitals never get their money. The patient is bankrupted for life. Everyone loses.
Then that means that we need to make health care cheaper for the hospitals. Its a lot more sane and cost effective to provide universal malpractice insurance to hospitals that wish to be inspected and tested by the government than to provide universal individual insurance.
to enforce minimum wage
You do realize that in the big picture, all minimum wage does is increase the price of goods relative to the amount it is right? People are willing to spend X percentage to buy a loaf of bread. If they get more money, a loaf of bread will increase in price. If they get less money the loaf of bread will decrease in price. About the only thing that is an exception to this rule is things such as technology that the price to produce goes down regardless of the amount that people are willing to pay and therefore a price war will allow consumers to get the lowest price.
stop giving tax breaks to the Fortune 500 when they are the ones who own the assets and have the means to pay more than the 10% they pay now (after loopholes
The thing is though, generally they use less government help. With the exception of the bailouts, generally the Fortune 500 companies can make it without government help (yeah, they still try to lobby for everything they can get, and try to use extortion to get their agenda pushed in city councils). But simply don't give them government help and they will still be successful, on the other hand, many small businesses need a lot of government help to give them the momentum.
And in the end, taxing corporations simply put more pressure on them to raise prices and cut employees.
There's a simple test you can perform to see if it has Republican support. Does it increase profit for private corporations? If the answer is yes, there is Republican support. If the answer is no, there is no Republican support. Tell me if you can think of an interesting counter example to this fact.
Increasing economic freedom almost always has the side effect of helping private corporations which in turn also helps the consumer. Its hard to argue that increasing economic freedom for everyone isn't going to help private corporations.
I'll give you that one. They love to make it easy to kill people.
Yeah, because we all know that due to concealed carry crime rates have just skyrocketed. Lets see, in a city where handguns and some other types of guns were banned (Washington DC) homicide rates are among the highest in the country! I haven't been able to see any reliable post-ban statistics, but during the ban (1975-2008) Washington DC's homicide rate was one of the worst in the
People want cheap laptops. Thats all they want. Yeah, netbooks are good because at the time they were -cheap-. Is there a market for ultra-portables? Yeah, there was before the netbook fad and will be afterwards. The thing is, at this time last year, if you wanted a $350 laptop, it would have to be a netbook. Today, you can get a laptop with a 15 inch screen and a CD/DVD drive for the same price.
Because the ability to then mooch off other people? Literature has exploded in recent years, the ability to draw from lots and lots of works helps increase Disney's productivity. For most Disney films, there is a small window of profitability, yeah, there are a few that keep their profit, but I don't think anyone is going to want to pick up a copy of Disney's The Sword and the Rose, or Big Red, compared to the number of people who would watch a newer Disney film.
Exactly. And its really odd that Disney has been so strongly for copyright extensions yet its entire classic film library is public domain tales. Lets see, based on a Wiki list: Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi, Cinderella, Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, Some parts of Davie Crockett, Sleeping Beauty, Swiss Family Robinson and many, many, many, many, many other films are all based off of public domain books. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disney_Films has a list if you would like to see)
Yeah, and that still means nothing for the rest of us. Yeah, he wants Guantanamo bay closed and I applaud him for that, but its still open, its causing a mess because he has no decent proposal on to where to put the people.
You don't have the right to drive without auto insurance in most states.
Which, honestly is a restriction of economic rights that shouldn't be tolerated, but its about the only thing they can do because they can't simply make other people pay for the things they have done while driving. Ideally, it should be if you don't have insurance and hit someone you simply pay for their repairs and everything is alright. That, is how it should be done.
The real fear from the lobbyists generating the massively misinformed hysteria is that we will have the same efficient, mostly socialized systems that they've had in Europe for decades.
The real fear is the fact that people are blindly voting for it based on party lines and aren't reading the fucking bill. In Europe it wasn't a political move, it was a reasonable, civilized law passing. Not "oh lets try to force a vote over a major holiday to show how "committed" we are to the American public when even half of us can't understand or haven't read the bill" The last time I looked, the bill was over 700 pages of legal words. I think a drunk college student trying to finish Plato's Republic before a final would have a better understanding over that than our congressmen have over this bill.
Follow me on this thought experiment: an uninsured woman, 55 years old, shows up to a hospital dying of kidney failure from diabetes. In a model where you must have have insurance to receive care, the hospital would have to let her die in the parking lot. In our current model where only emergency services are covered, we spend a few hundred thousand on dialysis, various medications, possibly a transplant, and take up space in the ICU. In a model where all care is covered, she has no incentive to wait to see the doctor, and hopefully they'd catch the problem early and we'd all pay far less for her care.
Ok, your argument fails for a few reasons if we assume a sane economy and a sane healthcare systems.
A) It should be an option to pay for care out of your own pocket. Hospitals should recognize this and give emergency care with the promise of paying back later. For example, I don't walk onto the car lot with $30K in my pocket, I have a bit of money to pay a down payment, then I pay for the rest of the car. What hospitals should do in this case is go for no down payment, then work with the person to pay off the rest of the bills plus perhaps a bit of interest.
B) This legislation is being passed during a recession which is a -bad thing- for example, if someone was making $25,000 a year working for X Corporation, and suddenly X Corporation had to spend $5,000 more on each employee because of healthcare and lets say that X Corporation had about $100,000 to pay employees, suddenly they can't afford 4 employees and have to cut one of them. Yeah, it might be a good thing for the 3 who stayed, but for the one person who had to be let go, it sucks.
C) I believe that the bill also requires (or did) even low-wage, family or full-time part time (such as students) to receive health care. This is a bad thing for young people who are trying to pay their way through college, tech school, or simply trying to make ends meet. Yeah, it would be nice if everyone could make $100,000 a year, be perfectly healthy, live in a 4 bedroom house in the suburbs, and drive a nice, new eco-friendly car, have a Core i7 desktop and all the other things that make us happy. But guess what? That isn't the case. Its a lot nicer to be making a small income and not have health care or only have basic care than to be broke but be able to go to the doctor for most people. Now, granted, for some people with terminal or chronic illness, that isn't the case. But for most
Which is why I said sort of free. It seems with every year that goes by, the western world keeps slipping into the very sort of tyranny that the world thought they got rid of in the 1800s.
What are you talking about? Rights are something that it is harder to take away than to add. How many more freedoms do we have now that Obama is president? Zero. How many freedoms have been taken away? Lets see here... Obama wants to eliminate economic freedom of choice in the health care plan (I should have the right to choose my health care plan, be it an expensive plan, or I also have the right to have no health care), eliminate various freedoms when traveling, and now this and other stories which seek to eliminate freedom of expression.
Obama is also held back by the democrats, the "lesser evil" party.
Yeah, because we all know that democrats aren't hostile at all to a free economy, the second amendment, and freedom of expression.... I think I'm with the creators of South Park when they said "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals".
Except for the fact that this "leak" is something that all Americans should know to begin with. If the average American doesn't know what the policies of the TSA are, they can't check for abuses. The right and responsibility to check for abuses in government is critical in any sort of a free government.
Yeah, but for example where I work, the typical way of filling out something is go to a fileserver, go to the templates directory, find the template of what your are going to fill out, and fill it out. Most things are done this way, from letters, to labels, etc. When it works well, it works well. People are always able to get the most recent templates, don't have to spend all their time typing, and it can be updated when needed without needing retraining. Its a lot harder to update 200 local copies of templates than 1 on the server.
Thats why you do the sane thing and you know, isolate those systems. Guess what? Development boxes aren't mission critical, if 5 of them go down you just shrug and run to the local computer store and buy the components or a new system for them. Usually development systems are a bit faster than the typical workstation (you don't want http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/compiling.png to happen do you?), but can usually be hacked together from spare parts and not maintain uniformity that is critical for the rest of them. In general, other than software development stuff, not much else should be saved on a development machine. Same with testing. The way its set up for me (and I helped design some of it) is there are three classes of machines: Development, Testing, and Typical. On development machines they usually have generic, cheap and fast hardware, nothing saved onto the computer thats important, and developers have total admin rights over it, but they are isolated on a different network. Testing machines have the same hardware as the typical machines, the typical developer does not have admin rights except to install pre-approved things, and its hooked up to a network very similar to the one the typical machines are on. This lets us test patches, new software and other things before doing a company-wide rollout. And typical machines all have identical hardware, no admin rights for the users, and are hooked up to our main network.
Sure, but you also have survivor bias for older products. I'm sure in 2040 we will say that X brand made great TVs/Computers/Games because we see some surviving. In reality though, the stuff from the 60s that have broken down has long been replaced or forgotten. Today though, even the failing of one little thing is blogged about and tweeted.
And also, Live sucks. The only reason why MS can get away with charging for it is because the competition, well, sucks even more. Between Nintendo's brain-dead approach to online gaming (no one wants to talk online right? and everyone can remember a "code" that is about as complex as an MD5 hash right?) and Sony's "lets have promising ideas and fill it only with ads!" approach. MS's is the only one that hasn't turned into a complete suckfest yet.
The big thing about being an admin now, is that time is critical. One security exploit left unpatched for just an hour on a server facing the internet could be compromised. If something as small as a fileserver goes offline for an hour that could mean one hour that a lot of people, not just one or two, can't do their job. Back in the '90s, if the computer was down most people would just shrug and work on the things that didn't require the computer. Today there is very little that doesn't require a computer in an office setting. Entire meetings can be done over video conferencing, bills can be paid online, even trivial errands people might be sent on can be done over the internet. Most offices, schools, hospitals and even homes simply can't function without the internet today. Every bit of down time is now mission critical.
At least Engadget does two things right. They keep their stories on one page and don't have a "wait 30 seconds to enter our site" like some tech sites out there.
The one killer "gadget" of this decade is price. Everything is cheap. Back in 1999, even a cheap desktop would have cost you a lot of money. Today, you can buy a new desktop with HDMI out for $200. You can buy a cheap laptop for $300, or less if you catch a good sale. An iPod touch that would have cost you over $1,000 back in 1999, now is a typical Christmas gift. HDTVs are now cheaper than their standard def tube equivalents were. Storage is now dirt cheap, back in 1999 1 TB of HD space would have cost a lot of money, yet now many desktops ship with that much. RAM is cheap with a gig of RAM costing no more than $15. Software is even cheaper, back in 1999, your choices were either to buy (or pirate, but again, it being 1999 it was a lot harder to pirate it than it is now) Windows, or get an expensive Mac. Today, you can have Linux which is actually easy to use and detects most hardware quickly and easily. Torrent sites are also a killer "gadget", the ability for decentralized downloads have made things much easier to download than back on shady Usenet groups. Openness has also shown to be a quickly rising killer "gadget" with an explosion in open or simi-open phones such as Android, WebOS and even Symbian is opening up.
I think the 2000s will be remembered for cheap (in both meanings of the word) tech.
Well, at about the same time both Garmin and TomTom started making easy to use GPS systems for use in cars, so I'd imagine it would be harder than you would think. I sure don't remember any single model that everyone started to have.
Really, the 360 as the video game console of the decade? The PS2 really changed things more than the 360 for the simple reason of the DVD player. Before the PS2 most people didn't have a DVD player, why switch? The VHS format was still going strong and while it was clear that DVD was the way of the future, most players were simply too expensive. Then the PS2 came along and changed that. Similarly, the PS2s library is -still being added to- giving it a pretty long shelf life. Of all the current-gen consoles the Wii defined and changed the decade the most, and one could argue that the PS3 changed more than the 360 did.
Engadget's justification is rather lame
but Microsoft's audacious approach to charging people to play online with Xbox Live Gold actually ended up as the console's greatest strength, and a key to its staying power
Charging people wasn't its strength. Its strength was it was the one online service that didn't totally suck. Lets see, Nintendo's online service lets you play with friends if you send them a random string of letters and numbers as a "friend code", won't let you type messages on most games, oh and the one game that would have had online as a killer feature, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the online mode is so messed up because it compensates for lag on one player's end by making the entire match laggy for everyone. Yeah Nintendo sure raised the bar high. PSN is good, but has too many flawed features. For example, PlayStation Home. The idea is good, take human avatars to a new level, the implementation is flawed. It is nothing but ads.
Engadget also manages to glance over the RRoD issue that plagued early Xbox owners.
I mean, is Microsoft buying Engadget off? The 360 as the console of the decade? Hardly. The 360 as the console of this generation? Possibly. But not the console of the decade, not by a long shot.
Yeah, not going to happen. The problem is, who is going to fund all of it? Russia's space agency is operating at a shoestring budget, NASA since the cold war ended isn't getting tons of money, and I'm not sure about the ESA but it seems kinda tiny when compared to NASA and the Russian space agencies. The problem with global cooperation is that if Russia has the best idea according to say, the ESA, but NASA has more money but has an idea no one likes, they might end up having to do it because they aren't going to finance the ESA/Russia's idea.
Because vim is supposed to be nice, lean and fast. Basically, this person wants emacs but doesn't want to admit it because he thinks that emacs is too bloated.
Slashdot Mirror
How about we let the American public vote on these important offices rather than let a president that over 47% of the population opposed appoint them?
Its time we demanded to be able to elect those who seem so worried about taking away our rights. Those who are nominating, appointing and approving them won't have do deal with the consequences of their actions. We, the people of the US, will.
Not really. The Mars Polar lander was lost, Deep Space 2 was lost, and Europe lost Beagle 2. Russia lost the landers of Mars 2, 3 and 6. Really, Spirit, Opportunity and Phoenix are the only rovers to make it.
Yeah, but the Pandora isn't unique. The GP2x before it (and the GP2x Wiz) both tried to do about the same thing. Yeah, the Pandora has more features and is more powerful but I think it will end up the same: A fun platform for developers, a good platform for emulators... but little else. That being said, I have a GP2x and love it, the ability to emulate just about any console, a lot of good other games, lots of videos and a good audio player makes it fun. However, the fact it chews through batteries like theres no tomorrow and the quality of the homebrew games aren't spectacular makes it kinda hard to recommend to the average non-retrogamer Joe.
Yes, but getting them to mars intact is still a big problem.
Why wasn't this an issue for certain media outlets when the PATRIOT Act was signed the day it was first printed?
Because of a few things.
A) Most congressmen, the news media and most everyone else was scared after 9/11. They didn't know that it would be a 1 day attack. For all they could tell there was a terrorist on every single flight, that 9/11 would be a weekly occurrence. They didn't want it to happen again.
B) Most everyone thought that the PATRIOT act was going to be used sparingly, and would only be used to stop terrorism acts in progress. However, we all know that didn't happen.
C) The PATRIOT act was a lot more time critical than health care will ever be. In the minds of a lot of the people who voted for it, the ability to stop another terrorism attack that could take place tomorrow was a big deal. The health care bill on the other hand, isn't time critical for anything other than political moves. Even if you think this health care bill is the best thing in the world, you have to at least see that it won't be enacted immediately like the PATRIOT act was.
It's already an option. The hospitals never get their money. The patient is bankrupted for life. Everyone loses.
Then that means that we need to make health care cheaper for the hospitals. Its a lot more sane and cost effective to provide universal malpractice insurance to hospitals that wish to be inspected and tested by the government than to provide universal individual insurance.
to enforce minimum wage
You do realize that in the big picture, all minimum wage does is increase the price of goods relative to the amount it is right? People are willing to spend X percentage to buy a loaf of bread. If they get more money, a loaf of bread will increase in price. If they get less money the loaf of bread will decrease in price. About the only thing that is an exception to this rule is things such as technology that the price to produce goes down regardless of the amount that people are willing to pay and therefore a price war will allow consumers to get the lowest price.
stop giving tax breaks to the Fortune 500 when they are the ones who own the assets and have the means to pay more than the 10% they pay now (after loopholes
The thing is though, generally they use less government help. With the exception of the bailouts, generally the Fortune 500 companies can make it without government help (yeah, they still try to lobby for everything they can get, and try to use extortion to get their agenda pushed in city councils). But simply don't give them government help and they will still be successful, on the other hand, many small businesses need a lot of government help to give them the momentum.
And in the end, taxing corporations simply put more pressure on them to raise prices and cut employees.
There's a simple test you can perform to see if it has Republican support. Does it increase profit for private corporations? If the answer is yes, there is Republican support. If the answer is no, there is no Republican support. Tell me if you can think of an interesting counter example to this fact.
Increasing economic freedom almost always has the side effect of helping private corporations which in turn also helps the consumer. Its hard to argue that increasing economic freedom for everyone isn't going to help private corporations.
I'll give you that one. They love to make it easy to kill people.
Yeah, because we all know that due to concealed carry crime rates have just skyrocketed. Lets see, in a city where handguns and some other types of guns were banned (Washington DC) homicide rates are among the highest in the country! I haven't been able to see any reliable post-ban statistics, but during the ban (1975-2008) Washington DC's homicide rate was one of the worst in the
People want cheap laptops. Thats all they want. Yeah, netbooks are good because at the time they were -cheap-. Is there a market for ultra-portables? Yeah, there was before the netbook fad and will be afterwards. The thing is, at this time last year, if you wanted a $350 laptop, it would have to be a netbook. Today, you can get a laptop with a 15 inch screen and a CD/DVD drive for the same price.
Because the ability to then mooch off other people? Literature has exploded in recent years, the ability to draw from lots and lots of works helps increase Disney's productivity. For most Disney films, there is a small window of profitability, yeah, there are a few that keep their profit, but I don't think anyone is going to want to pick up a copy of Disney's The Sword and the Rose, or Big Red, compared to the number of people who would watch a newer Disney film.
Exactly. And its really odd that Disney has been so strongly for copyright extensions yet its entire classic film library is public domain tales. Lets see, based on a Wiki list: Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi, Cinderella, Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, Some parts of Davie Crockett, Sleeping Beauty, Swiss Family Robinson and many, many, many, many, many other films are all based off of public domain books. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disney_Films has a list if you would like to see)
You don't have the right to drive without auto insurance in most states.
Which, honestly is a restriction of economic rights that shouldn't be tolerated, but its about the only thing they can do because they can't simply make other people pay for the things they have done while driving. Ideally, it should be if you don't have insurance and hit someone you simply pay for their repairs and everything is alright. That, is how it should be done.
The real fear from the lobbyists generating the massively misinformed hysteria is that we will have the same efficient, mostly socialized systems that they've had in Europe for decades.
The real fear is the fact that people are blindly voting for it based on party lines and aren't reading the fucking bill. In Europe it wasn't a political move, it was a reasonable, civilized law passing. Not "oh lets try to force a vote over a major holiday to show how "committed" we are to the American public when even half of us can't understand or haven't read the bill" The last time I looked, the bill was over 700 pages of legal words. I think a drunk college student trying to finish Plato's Republic before a final would have a better understanding over that than our congressmen have over this bill.
Follow me on this thought experiment: an uninsured woman, 55 years old, shows up to a hospital dying of kidney failure from diabetes. In a model where you must have have insurance to receive care, the hospital would have to let her die in the parking lot. In our current model where only emergency services are covered, we spend a few hundred thousand on dialysis, various medications, possibly a transplant, and take up space in the ICU. In a model where all care is covered, she has no incentive to wait to see the doctor, and hopefully they'd catch the problem early and we'd all pay far less for her care.
Ok, your argument fails for a few reasons if we assume a sane economy and a sane healthcare systems.
A) It should be an option to pay for care out of your own pocket. Hospitals should recognize this and give emergency care with the promise of paying back later. For example, I don't walk onto the car lot with $30K in my pocket, I have a bit of money to pay a down payment, then I pay for the rest of the car. What hospitals should do in this case is go for no down payment, then work with the person to pay off the rest of the bills plus perhaps a bit of interest.
B) This legislation is being passed during a recession which is a -bad thing- for example, if someone was making $25,000 a year working for X Corporation, and suddenly X Corporation had to spend $5,000 more on each employee because of healthcare and lets say that X Corporation had about $100,000 to pay employees, suddenly they can't afford 4 employees and have to cut one of them. Yeah, it might be a good thing for the 3 who stayed, but for the one person who had to be let go, it sucks.
C) I believe that the bill also requires (or did) even low-wage, family or full-time part time (such as students) to receive health care. This is a bad thing for young people who are trying to pay their way through college, tech school, or simply trying to make ends meet. Yeah, it would be nice if everyone could make $100,000 a year, be perfectly healthy, live in a 4 bedroom house in the suburbs, and drive a nice, new eco-friendly car, have a Core i7 desktop and all the other things that make us happy. But guess what? That isn't the case. Its a lot nicer to be making a small income and not have health care or only have basic care than to be broke but be able to go to the doctor for most people. Now, granted, for some people with terminal or chronic illness, that isn't the case. But for most
You know, in this job market, threatening to get you out of a job isn't a tiny threat. Most people need every dollar they can.
Which is why I said sort of free. It seems with every year that goes by, the western world keeps slipping into the very sort of tyranny that the world thought they got rid of in the 1800s.
Obama is also held back by the democrats, the "lesser evil" party.
Yeah, because we all know that democrats aren't hostile at all to a free economy, the second amendment, and freedom of expression.... I think I'm with the creators of South Park when they said "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals".
Except for the fact that this "leak" is something that all Americans should know to begin with. If the average American doesn't know what the policies of the TSA are, they can't check for abuses. The right and responsibility to check for abuses in government is critical in any sort of a free government.
Yeah, but for example where I work, the typical way of filling out something is go to a fileserver, go to the templates directory, find the template of what your are going to fill out, and fill it out. Most things are done this way, from letters, to labels, etc. When it works well, it works well. People are always able to get the most recent templates, don't have to spend all their time typing, and it can be updated when needed without needing retraining. Its a lot harder to update 200 local copies of templates than 1 on the server.
Thats why you do the sane thing and you know, isolate those systems. Guess what? Development boxes aren't mission critical, if 5 of them go down you just shrug and run to the local computer store and buy the components or a new system for them. Usually development systems are a bit faster than the typical workstation (you don't want http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/compiling.png to happen do you?), but can usually be hacked together from spare parts and not maintain uniformity that is critical for the rest of them. In general, other than software development stuff, not much else should be saved on a development machine. Same with testing. The way its set up for me (and I helped design some of it) is there are three classes of machines: Development, Testing, and Typical. On development machines they usually have generic, cheap and fast hardware, nothing saved onto the computer thats important, and developers have total admin rights over it, but they are isolated on a different network. Testing machines have the same hardware as the typical machines, the typical developer does not have admin rights except to install pre-approved things, and its hooked up to a network very similar to the one the typical machines are on. This lets us test patches, new software and other things before doing a company-wide rollout. And typical machines all have identical hardware, no admin rights for the users, and are hooked up to our main network.
Sure, but you also have survivor bias for older products. I'm sure in 2040 we will say that X brand made great TVs/Computers/Games because we see some surviving. In reality though, the stuff from the 60s that have broken down has long been replaced or forgotten. Today though, even the failing of one little thing is blogged about and tweeted.
And also, Live sucks. The only reason why MS can get away with charging for it is because the competition, well, sucks even more. Between Nintendo's brain-dead approach to online gaming (no one wants to talk online right? and everyone can remember a "code" that is about as complex as an MD5 hash right?) and Sony's "lets have promising ideas and fill it only with ads!" approach. MS's is the only one that hasn't turned into a complete suckfest yet.
The big thing about being an admin now, is that time is critical. One security exploit left unpatched for just an hour on a server facing the internet could be compromised. If something as small as a fileserver goes offline for an hour that could mean one hour that a lot of people, not just one or two, can't do their job. Back in the '90s, if the computer was down most people would just shrug and work on the things that didn't require the computer. Today there is very little that doesn't require a computer in an office setting. Entire meetings can be done over video conferencing, bills can be paid online, even trivial errands people might be sent on can be done over the internet. Most offices, schools, hospitals and even homes simply can't function without the internet today. Every bit of down time is now mission critical.
At least Engadget does two things right. They keep their stories on one page and don't have a "wait 30 seconds to enter our site" like some tech sites out there.
Its Engadget though, they probably think that Apple invented the smartphone, multitouch, the trackpad and any other useful inventions.
The one killer "gadget" of this decade is price. Everything is cheap. Back in 1999, even a cheap desktop would have cost you a lot of money. Today, you can buy a new desktop with HDMI out for $200. You can buy a cheap laptop for $300, or less if you catch a good sale. An iPod touch that would have cost you over $1,000 back in 1999, now is a typical Christmas gift. HDTVs are now cheaper than their standard def tube equivalents were. Storage is now dirt cheap, back in 1999 1 TB of HD space would have cost a lot of money, yet now many desktops ship with that much. RAM is cheap with a gig of RAM costing no more than $15. Software is even cheaper, back in 1999, your choices were either to buy (or pirate, but again, it being 1999 it was a lot harder to pirate it than it is now) Windows, or get an expensive Mac. Today, you can have Linux which is actually easy to use and detects most hardware quickly and easily. Torrent sites are also a killer "gadget", the ability for decentralized downloads have made things much easier to download than back on shady Usenet groups. Openness has also shown to be a quickly rising killer "gadget" with an explosion in open or simi-open phones such as Android, WebOS and even Symbian is opening up.
I think the 2000s will be remembered for cheap (in both meanings of the word) tech.
Well, at about the same time both Garmin and TomTom started making easy to use GPS systems for use in cars, so I'd imagine it would be harder than you would think. I sure don't remember any single model that everyone started to have.
Engadget's justification is rather lame
but Microsoft's audacious approach to charging people to play online with Xbox Live Gold actually ended up as the console's greatest strength, and a key to its staying power
Charging people wasn't its strength. Its strength was it was the one online service that didn't totally suck. Lets see, Nintendo's online service lets you play with friends if you send them a random string of letters and numbers as a "friend code", won't let you type messages on most games, oh and the one game that would have had online as a killer feature, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the online mode is so messed up because it compensates for lag on one player's end by making the entire match laggy for everyone. Yeah Nintendo sure raised the bar high. PSN is good, but has too many flawed features. For example, PlayStation Home. The idea is good, take human avatars to a new level, the implementation is flawed. It is nothing but ads.
Engadget also manages to glance over the RRoD issue that plagued early Xbox owners.
I mean, is Microsoft buying Engadget off? The 360 as the console of the decade? Hardly. The 360 as the console of this generation? Possibly. But not the console of the decade, not by a long shot.
Yeah, not going to happen. The problem is, who is going to fund all of it? Russia's space agency is operating at a shoestring budget, NASA since the cold war ended isn't getting tons of money, and I'm not sure about the ESA but it seems kinda tiny when compared to NASA and the Russian space agencies. The problem with global cooperation is that if Russia has the best idea according to say, the ESA, but NASA has more money but has an idea no one likes, they might end up having to do it because they aren't going to finance the ESA/Russia's idea.
Because vim is supposed to be nice, lean and fast. Basically, this person wants emacs but doesn't want to admit it because he thinks that emacs is too bloated.