True, but Blockbuster has been dying for years. I don't think this will be anything but a (very) temporary reprieve. If they can't turn themselves around, I'll be quite impressed, I wrote them off years ago.
But I doubt it will happen.
This isn't "we've been struggling but we suddenly our market found us", this is "we've been struggling for years and now we can remind people why they abandoned us the first time".
That's not a sign of a healthy business, it just means they are in the right place at the right time. Look at the last few years, they've been diving.
Netflix, online video, and Pay-Per-View have been killing their main business.
Game rentals are being killed by expense, digital distribution, and lower cost games (in the form of things like XBox Live Arcade games to entertain for a weekend).
They jumped into consumer electronics to try to prop up profits, because it's worked so well for Borders in the last few years.
They've been annoying their mail-in customers with raised rates, reduced service, and other service changes.
They've got TONS of overhead in all those stores (land, inventory, employees, etc.).
Any failing business could raise profits by hiking prices. The problem is that it only works for a short while. Once customers notice and stop shopping, profits dive faster than before.
One quarter of growth doesn't mean they are in good shape.
Amazing isn't it? When I first moved here about 10 years ago you could rent games from Blockbuster for like $4, the same as movies. They've hiked the prices at least 2 or 3 times since then, and game rentals are now quite expensive. Combine that with their moronic selection (we'll buy 2 copies of some great game, and 300 of The Matrix game, even after we haven't been able to rent the last 300 out) and they're terrible.
They have made it convenient to just buy games I want to play and sell them back to GameStop later. It may be a little more expensive but it's so much more convenient (since I get unlimited time).
They used to be my game quality solution. Rent the game, see if it was good, buy if it was. I didn't buy many games because they were so expensive. Now trying to rent games to see if they are good costs a ton too. So I buy fewer games.
Luckily demos are becoming more and more common and easy to get thanks to digital distribution.
Just like failing to adapt with movies, BB shot themselves in the foot with games. "Games are popular" means "raise the price on games" means "more money".
Of course in real life it was "games are popular" means "raise the price" means "drive away customers" means "much less money".
That was on news that they were going to announce bankruptcy. It didn't happen, but the market took it seriously.
The market took it seriously because everyone knows that BB has been in deep trouble for years (see recent Circuit City / BB talks last year) and many expect them to go bankrupt any time now.
It's not a loophole, it was calculated to get you into the store where they could sell new movies, used movies, new and used games, and consumer electronics (because that's never a desperate move to start selling CE stuff).
The fact that this didn't work out well enough is why they are stopping, but it wasn't a loophole. They used to advertise the fact.
Now the fact that Blockbuster has been dead for at lest 6 years and just doesn't realize it yet is kind of sad. But then again I lost what little respect I had left for them years ago, and they've only managed to baffle me with some of their stupid decisions since.
The ONLY reason I have left to go into BB is to rent games, but it's so expensive and such a pain, I only do it about once or twice a year max. With GameFly possibly opening RedBox style kiosks, I may never need to go in again.
Not that I've heard great things about GameFly. But soon digital distribution will make renting console games irrelevant anyway.
For me that is really fast. I remember when it would take 2 or 3 minutes for one of my very recent computers (at the time) to boot into XP. 20-30s is a big improvement from that and fast feeling.
My XP box that I'm using now at work (2 core 2.33 GHz Xeon) boot Windows REALLY fast. It is under 30 seconds to get to the "Ctrl-Alt-Del to login" screen. It's great.
Then you log in.
Then you wait 5 minutes or so for it to finish loading everything and settle down enough to be usable (the desktop comes up nearly instantly but can't be used). If you open Outlook (as I have to), you're waiting another 5 minutes for that too.
I'm disk limited (a faster disk would help things) but it's just terrible. I can get in quick, but I can't do anything for minutes afterwords (like a simple Firefox open and search).
My Mac (MBP, 2.4GHz) doesn't boot as fast, maybe a minute to get to the desktop? But when the desktop comes up the computer is usable. It feels slow as it finishes loading stuff, but as soon as I get to the desktop I can start issuing commands (open Safari, etc.) and they happen. I doesn't feel "stuck" like XP does just after start-up.
As others have said, there is a simple solution to all this. My Mac is almost never off, it sleeps when I move it. It comes up and ready in like 3 seconds. By the time I finish opening the display, it's ready. My XP box is never turned off or logged off, I lock it. It unlocks in 2-3 seconds. If it were to hibernate, it'd only take a few seconds longer, still light years ahead of a boot.
I can tell you that these kind of things (little fast OSes) can get obnoxious. As soon as you run into a limitation (say you want to access something you don't have setup it in, or a program like Quicken) you have to suffer the full reboot. When you want to transition there is no easy way. You can't take your surfing from the fast-boot environment with you into Windows. All that rebooting gets really annoying. Now that I have a phone that can do a quick look-up on the 'net, I have even less reason to boot into this to see that "one quick thing".
I wish. It's a quote from The Prisoner, one of the little mantras of The Village designed to reinforce that you aren't supposed to ask questions and your life will be better if you don't.
They were released that way. They were made to be cut up into 6 episodes each (or was it 4?) to be aired a few months later on Comedy Central.
They had their moments. "Bender's Game" had quite a few.
I agree with some of the others here that the show just doesn't work in a long format like that.
I'll watch again. Better than most stuff out there. Heck, with stuff like "Kath & Kim", old fashioned static or holding patterns are better than some of the stuff out there.
Right. We wanted to run an Ethernet cable from the basement up to a room on the 2nd floor. I poked around for quite a while with fish-tape and wasn't able to find a way to get the cable down easily without drilling more holes. So we ran it down through the air return duct. One end sneaks out the register cover, the other is pulled out of the heating ducts through a small hole (which was resealed with duct-tape) near the furnace and it runs over to the equipment.
You don't always have to make new holes. There are often existing holes that will work quite well.
When your router/modem is "here" and you have one or more computers either upstairs or downstairs from that location -- or both! -- life begins to get complex. Hardwiring your network is fast and efficient, but it's often not a practical answer, especially for homes and small offices.
What kind of small office wouldn't be able to run a piece of CAT5? If you can't afford to do that (and I'm including the done by hand up through the ceiling by the CEO method) then your company has bigger problems.
Renters may have difficulty convincing their landlords to let them rewire a home or apartment that they don't own themselves. Even wiring your own place may not be fiscally feasible.
$20 of CAT5, $10 of jacks, and a $20 fish-tape isn't fiscally feasible, but these gizmos are?
In testing the power-line devices, I started with a room-to-room test where I plugged one of the modules into a [...] electrical outlet downstairs and the other module into [an older] electrical outlet upstairs.
These real world speeds are pretty bad. The D-Link didn't even finish the test. It looks like they came out at about 2.4 MBps. His WiFi was 4x faster. Ethernet was 10x faster.
I also set up the power-line equipment using a 90-foot extension cord into which one of the modules was connected downstairs; that extension cord was then plugged into the same outlet upstairs as the second module.
Oh, yeah, that's a common test. Why is it you can't let the Ethernet cable hang through the hall again?
Basically, this represented a connection through a length of electrical wire in which there were no phase leg, aging or wire condition problems. In a new home, or if you had an electrician run two outlets from your breaker box, you would probably find transmission times similar to these.
Wanna bet? I've seen new houses where it was dumb luck (and incredible fault tolerance) that let the phone jacks work. When you try to go from one end of a new house to the other, or across floors, I doubt this will be representative of anything.
(This was the setup I used when testing the power-line devices with video streams.)
So these things can't stream video under real world conditions. Excellent.
Finally, I plugged the two modules into the same outlet. In theory, with little to no electrical wire between them, this would be the fastest they could communicate with each other under any network load condition, offering performance under what would pass for ideal conditions.
Nice to know the top speed, but obviously you'll never run into this case except in the same room. And if both boxes are in the same room... run the Ethernet cable hanging from the ceiling.
If you really want to these kind of gizmos for your little office, how well do they work with 3 computers? How about 5? What happens if your 2.4 MBps goes to 0.3 when you add the 3rd computer? He mentioned that at least one has some kind of security. How good is it? Does it compare with WPA2? What are the chances the next office over is close enough (though the power lines) they could be on my network?
Pull a wire. We fussed with WiFi for years, and it is often problematic. If you are in a house or office, pull the wire. It's no that hard (for the simple cases he is listing, like two rooms above one another). Get the land lord's permission if you don't own the place. It's not worth all the fussing you may end up having to do with WiFi (thanks to neighbor access points, cheap $30 APs, etc).
I think Zak and Wiki did this well. As you played through the game you earned coins that you could trade for hints. The thing is that hints got progressivly more expensive, and not slowly. If you used many hints early on in the game, you wouldn't be able to buy them later. You had to really weigh the decision on if you wanted to use those coins.
Also, predictably, your score for the level would be lower if you used hints.
It seems like a very good compromise for this kind of problem.
From the various discussions that have shown up here on/. an in other places (like Ars Technica) it seems like there are a two reasons.
The main one, by far, is cost. USB is cheap to implement (economies of scale only make this worse). USB doesn't need nearly as much logic (being polling based, one master) where as FireWire has quite a bit (each device is a peer, supports DMA). Then there is the fact that no one made a free controller available (as far as I know) so you had to come up with your own. You have to pay money for the name (Apple owns it) or use a different one (IEEE.1394 is free, Sony made up iLink as their name for it).
Secondly (and less importantly), FireWire isn't designed for everything. It's not designed for small things like keyboards and mice (which USB was designed for), only high bandwidth applications like digital video, audio, scanning, and storage. Basically even if FW had won for high-bandwidth devices, everyone would still have USB for their mice, keyboards, and probably things like printers.
The install base is really killer. There are SO MANY computers with USB that people could sell USB hard drives easily, where as with FireWire everyone (except for many Mac users) had to buy a FireWire card. This drove USB 2 to be more high bandwidth to work well with things like hard drives (even though the CPU is still used too much).
As recently as a year or two ago Intel wasn't including FireWire on it's chipsets, so it was a extra cost and took extra engineering (since you'd have to hang a chip off the bus). I don't know if they have it built in yet.
In short: USB was everywhere and cheap and had pre-made customers. FireWire was superior (in speed/CPU usage) but cost more and had to added by the end user in most cases.
I love FW though. FW400 is about twice as fast with hard drives I've tried compared to USB 2 (same drive with extra ports) and my FW800 drive is even faster yet.
USB stuff was hard to find and expensive. There were some specialty stores on the internet that sold all USB stuff but at local computer stores USB stuff was here or there. Most people seemed to still use PS2 mice, modems were mostly serial, printers were mostly parallel, and so were most scanners.
Then Apple released the iMac.
Within a few months it became trivial to find USB peripherals. They started to have different price points (low, medium, and high end market segments for things like modems). USB mice were everywhere, USB video cameras showed up, things improved.
It was increasing in use, but it was no where near critical mass until Apple forced the issue. It was like SATA. Motherboards came with both (IDE and SATA) but IDE stuff was available for quite a long time after (especially in optical drives). I'm of the opinion that Apple took what was going to be a normal transition (things slowly speed up, pick up momentum, and eventually take over) and put it in hyper drive (made adoption look more exponential that it would have for probably a year or two, if not more).
USB was around for years, but it didn't explode until Apple forced the issue with the iMac.
I'd say there are two reasons USB took off. The first is Intel. It started putting it on all it's chipsets which made it in most Wintel computers by default. I believe they also didn't charge licensing fees on their controller implementation so others could copy/improve it for free and not have to start from scratch. They just recently did the same thing with their USB3 controller.
The other thing is what it was competing again. There really wasn't that much other there. If you wanted low bandwidth, you'd either hijack the PS2 port or one of the serial ports. If you wanted high bandwidth you either had your own expansion card (tough), piggybacked on the printer port (often didn't work as pass though), or used SCSI (expensive). You couldn't have multiple parallel devices, so you'd need extra cards if you wanted to do that. If you had many serial devices (like a modem, a tablet, etc) you might need an extra serial card. It was a mess. USB just simplified everything, and the hub concept was a nice addition.
Intel forced availability before it became popular, and Intel made it a relatively cheap option. It was a huge improvement over the mishmash of old connectors for the consumer. Then Apple came along and made it mandatory forcing a huge number of devices on the market (where many weren't before since USB wasn't popular).
No application should be asking for privileges that much, unless it accesses special hardware (easy example: something akin to WireShark). A normal application (like FireFox) shouldn't need to ask for permission all the time. If it does, it probably has a design flaw.
If you grant full permissions in the way you are suggesting be made possible, then if a new version of the application alters it's functionality (or some time-bomb kicks in) then it can do things you didn't authorize (like erase other programs) because it was given blanket authorization by you so you wouldn't be nagged about some stupid thing it was doing (like changing your wallpaper).
You want the "always" button to be more granular? So now I have to check 5 different "always" boxes on 5 different prompts so some poorly written application won't bug me... until I use some new function and it asks for a 6th time. Having the "always" box not mean "always for everything" will confuse a great many users.
Well written programs don't have this problem. I've been using OS X for years and the only two applications that prompt me on any kind of regular basis are Software Update (which has to touch all sorts of software and the system software, I'm going to include MS's Office Update in here too) and the Installer used by some applications (because they may need to install libraries or check for other installed software). User space applications almost never trigger these questions. They don't NEED to.
It's no coincidence that oil prices tripled during his stay in the office. Now they're back down, and we'll see how long that GDP growth will last.
I'm not saying he didn't have a hand in it (Iraq war, for example), but it's not like it was all his fault (see: hurricanes, inability to build new refineries, inability to tap into our own sources (ANOIR, the gulf, etc), rising foreign demand (China, India, et. all)).
Unsustainable, yes, but at the current interest rate they are paying, they'd be silly NOT to borrow.
Isn't that the argument that many people used to borrow against their homes to go on vacations to the Caribbean they couldn't afford? Isn't that how they bought the two brand new SUVs that later just got repossessed a few months ago?
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True, but Blockbuster has been dying for years. I don't think this will be anything but a (very) temporary reprieve. If they can't turn themselves around, I'll be quite impressed, I wrote them off years ago.
But I doubt it will happen.
This isn't "we've been struggling but we suddenly our market found us", this is "we've been struggling for years and now we can remind people why they abandoned us the first time".
That's not a sign of a healthy business, it just means they are in the right place at the right time. Look at the last few years, they've been diving.
Any failing business could raise profits by hiking prices. The problem is that it only works for a short while. Once customers notice and stop shopping, profits dive faster than before.
One quarter of growth doesn't mean they are in good shape.
Amazing isn't it? When I first moved here about 10 years ago you could rent games from Blockbuster for like $4, the same as movies. They've hiked the prices at least 2 or 3 times since then, and game rentals are now quite expensive. Combine that with their moronic selection (we'll buy 2 copies of some great game, and 300 of The Matrix game, even after we haven't been able to rent the last 300 out) and they're terrible.
They have made it convenient to just buy games I want to play and sell them back to GameStop later. It may be a little more expensive but it's so much more convenient (since I get unlimited time).
They used to be my game quality solution. Rent the game, see if it was good, buy if it was. I didn't buy many games because they were so expensive. Now trying to rent games to see if they are good costs a ton too. So I buy fewer games.
Luckily demos are becoming more and more common and easy to get thanks to digital distribution.
Just like failing to adapt with movies, BB shot themselves in the foot with games. "Games are popular" means "raise the price on games" means "more money".
Of course in real life it was "games are popular" means "raise the price" means "drive away customers" means "much less money".
That was on news that they were going to announce bankruptcy. It didn't happen, but the market took it seriously.
The market took it seriously because everyone knows that BB has been in deep trouble for years (see recent Circuit City / BB talks last year) and many expect them to go bankrupt any time now.
It's not a loophole, it was calculated to get you into the store where they could sell new movies, used movies, new and used games, and consumer electronics (because that's never a desperate move to start selling CE stuff).
The fact that this didn't work out well enough is why they are stopping, but it wasn't a loophole. They used to advertise the fact.
Now the fact that Blockbuster has been dead for at lest 6 years and just doesn't realize it yet is kind of sad. But then again I lost what little respect I had left for them years ago, and they've only managed to baffle me with some of their stupid decisions since.
The ONLY reason I have left to go into BB is to rent games, but it's so expensive and such a pain, I only do it about once or twice a year max. With GameFly possibly opening RedBox style kiosks, I may never need to go in again.
Not that I've heard great things about GameFly. But soon digital distribution will make renting console games irrelevant anyway.
For me that is really fast. I remember when it would take 2 or 3 minutes for one of my very recent computers (at the time) to boot into XP. 20-30s is a big improvement from that and fast feeling.
My XP box that I'm using now at work (2 core 2.33 GHz Xeon) boot Windows REALLY fast. It is under 30 seconds to get to the "Ctrl-Alt-Del to login" screen. It's great.
Then you log in.
Then you wait 5 minutes or so for it to finish loading everything and settle down enough to be usable (the desktop comes up nearly instantly but can't be used). If you open Outlook (as I have to), you're waiting another 5 minutes for that too.
I'm disk limited (a faster disk would help things) but it's just terrible. I can get in quick, but I can't do anything for minutes afterwords (like a simple Firefox open and search).
My Mac (MBP, 2.4GHz) doesn't boot as fast, maybe a minute to get to the desktop? But when the desktop comes up the computer is usable. It feels slow as it finishes loading stuff, but as soon as I get to the desktop I can start issuing commands (open Safari, etc.) and they happen. I doesn't feel "stuck" like XP does just after start-up.
As others have said, there is a simple solution to all this. My Mac is almost never off, it sleeps when I move it. It comes up and ready in like 3 seconds. By the time I finish opening the display, it's ready. My XP box is never turned off or logged off, I lock it. It unlocks in 2-3 seconds. If it were to hibernate, it'd only take a few seconds longer, still light years ahead of a boot.
I can tell you that these kind of things (little fast OSes) can get obnoxious. As soon as you run into a limitation (say you want to access something you don't have setup it in, or a program like Quicken) you have to suffer the full reboot. When you want to transition there is no easy way. You can't take your surfing from the fast-boot environment with you into Windows. All that rebooting gets really annoying. Now that I have a phone that can do a quick look-up on the 'net, I have even less reason to boot into this to see that "one quick thing".
I wish. It's a quote from The Prisoner, one of the little mantras of The Village designed to reinforce that you aren't supposed to ask questions and your life will be better if you don't.
Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.
Hopefully not too much.
If I die before my Hambuger Earmuffs are finished thought, I may get the opportunity to find out though.
*glaven* warm ears...
Do other countries/languages use the "-gate" nomenclature for every government scandal/complaint/event too?
They were released that way. They were made to be cut up into 6 episodes each (or was it 4?) to be aired a few months later on Comedy Central.
They had their moments. "Bender's Game" had quite a few.
I agree with some of the others here that the show just doesn't work in a long format like that.
I'll watch again. Better than most stuff out there. Heck, with stuff like "Kath & Kim", old fashioned static or holding patterns are better than some of the stuff out there.
IE did that, at least back in the 6 days. I don't know if it still does.
It trained users to click "don't warn me again".
Since there was (and still is) no way to discern what is being sent (important stuff or just a Google search) that box is obnoxious and useless.
I think John Gruber had it right. He pointed out the absurdity of Balmer's argument on his blog on Wednesday.
Right. We wanted to run an Ethernet cable from the basement up to a room on the 2nd floor. I poked around for quite a while with fish-tape and wasn't able to find a way to get the cable down easily without drilling more holes. So we ran it down through the air return duct. One end sneaks out the register cover, the other is pulled out of the heating ducts through a small hole (which was resealed with duct-tape) near the furnace and it runs over to the equipment.
You don't always have to make new holes. There are often existing holes that will work quite well.
What kind of small office wouldn't be able to run a piece of CAT5? If you can't afford to do that (and I'm including the done by hand up through the ceiling by the CEO method) then your company has bigger problems.
$20 of CAT5, $10 of jacks, and a $20 fish-tape isn't fiscally feasible, but these gizmos are?
These real world speeds are pretty bad. The D-Link didn't even finish the test. It looks like they came out at about 2.4 MBps. His WiFi was 4x faster. Ethernet was 10x faster.
Oh, yeah, that's a common test. Why is it you can't let the Ethernet cable hang through the hall again?
Wanna bet? I've seen new houses where it was dumb luck (and incredible fault tolerance) that let the phone jacks work. When you try to go from one end of a new house to the other, or across floors, I doubt this will be representative of anything.
So these things can't stream video under real world conditions. Excellent.
Nice to know the top speed, but obviously you'll never run into this case except in the same room. And if both boxes are in the same room... run the Ethernet cable hanging from the ceiling.
If you really want to these kind of gizmos for your little office, how well do they work with 3 computers? How about 5? What happens if your 2.4 MBps goes to 0.3 when you add the 3rd computer? He mentioned that at least one has some kind of security. How good is it? Does it compare with WPA2? What are the chances the next office over is close enough (though the power lines) they could be on my network?
Pull a wire. We fussed with WiFi for years, and it is often problematic. If you are in a house or office, pull the wire. It's no that hard (for the simple cases he is listing, like two rooms above one another). Get the land lord's permission if you don't own the place. It's not worth all the fussing you may end up having to do with WiFi (thanks to neighbor access points, cheap $30 APs, etc).
I think Zak and Wiki did this well. As you played through the game you earned coins that you could trade for hints. The thing is that hints got progressivly more expensive, and not slowly. If you used many hints early on in the game, you wouldn't be able to buy them later. You had to really weigh the decision on if you wanted to use those coins.
Also, predictably, your score for the level would be lower if you used hints.
It seems like a very good compromise for this kind of problem.
That's a good point, maybe it's just my perception.
I used USB stuff with 95 (you had to have OSR 2, which was hard to get). Windows 98 did improve that situation quite a bit.
From the various discussions that have shown up here on /. an in other places (like Ars Technica) it seems like there are a two reasons.
The main one, by far, is cost. USB is cheap to implement (economies of scale only make this worse). USB doesn't need nearly as much logic (being polling based, one master) where as FireWire has quite a bit (each device is a peer, supports DMA). Then there is the fact that no one made a free controller available (as far as I know) so you had to come up with your own. You have to pay money for the name (Apple owns it) or use a different one (IEEE.1394 is free, Sony made up iLink as their name for it).
Secondly (and less importantly), FireWire isn't designed for everything. It's not designed for small things like keyboards and mice (which USB was designed for), only high bandwidth applications like digital video, audio, scanning, and storage. Basically even if FW had won for high-bandwidth devices, everyone would still have USB for their mice, keyboards, and probably things like printers.
The install base is really killer. There are SO MANY computers with USB that people could sell USB hard drives easily, where as with FireWire everyone (except for many Mac users) had to buy a FireWire card. This drove USB 2 to be more high bandwidth to work well with things like hard drives (even though the CPU is still used too much).
As recently as a year or two ago Intel wasn't including FireWire on it's chipsets, so it was a extra cost and took extra engineering (since you'd have to hang a chip off the bus). I don't know if they have it built in yet.
In short: USB was everywhere and cheap and had pre-made customers. FireWire was superior (in speed/CPU usage) but cost more and had to added by the end user in most cases.
I love FW though. FW400 is about twice as fast with hard drives I've tried compared to USB 2 (same drive with extra ports) and my FW800 drive is even faster yet.
Here is what I remember:
USB stuff was hard to find and expensive. There were some specialty stores on the internet that sold all USB stuff but at local computer stores USB stuff was here or there. Most people seemed to still use PS2 mice, modems were mostly serial, printers were mostly parallel, and so were most scanners.
Then Apple released the iMac.
Within a few months it became trivial to find USB peripherals. They started to have different price points (low, medium, and high end market segments for things like modems). USB mice were everywhere, USB video cameras showed up, things improved.
It was increasing in use, but it was no where near critical mass until Apple forced the issue. It was like SATA. Motherboards came with both (IDE and SATA) but IDE stuff was available for quite a long time after (especially in optical drives). I'm of the opinion that Apple took what was going to be a normal transition (things slowly speed up, pick up momentum, and eventually take over) and put it in hyper drive (made adoption look more exponential that it would have for probably a year or two, if not more).
USB was around for years, but it didn't explode until Apple forced the issue with the iMac.
I'd say there are two reasons USB took off. The first is Intel. It started putting it on all it's chipsets which made it in most Wintel computers by default. I believe they also didn't charge licensing fees on their controller implementation so others could copy/improve it for free and not have to start from scratch. They just recently did the same thing with their USB3 controller.
The other thing is what it was competing again. There really wasn't that much other there. If you wanted low bandwidth, you'd either hijack the PS2 port or one of the serial ports. If you wanted high bandwidth you either had your own expansion card (tough), piggybacked on the printer port (often didn't work as pass though), or used SCSI (expensive). You couldn't have multiple parallel devices, so you'd need extra cards if you wanted to do that. If you had many serial devices (like a modem, a tablet, etc) you might need an extra serial card. It was a mess. USB just simplified everything, and the hub concept was a nice addition.
Intel forced availability before it became popular, and Intel made it a relatively cheap option. It was a huge improvement over the mishmash of old connectors for the consumer. Then Apple came along and made it mandatory forcing a huge number of devices on the market (where many weren't before since USB wasn't popular).
Schrodingers? I've never had a problem with them.
Then again, I haven't open the box it's in yet either.
Why should any application need that checkbox?
No application should be asking for privileges that much, unless it accesses special hardware (easy example: something akin to WireShark). A normal application (like FireFox) shouldn't need to ask for permission all the time. If it does, it probably has a design flaw.
If you grant full permissions in the way you are suggesting be made possible, then if a new version of the application alters it's functionality (or some time-bomb kicks in) then it can do things you didn't authorize (like erase other programs) because it was given blanket authorization by you so you wouldn't be nagged about some stupid thing it was doing (like changing your wallpaper).
You want the "always" button to be more granular? So now I have to check 5 different "always" boxes on 5 different prompts so some poorly written application won't bug me... until I use some new function and it asks for a 6th time. Having the "always" box not mean "always for everything" will confuse a great many users.
Well written programs don't have this problem. I've been using OS X for years and the only two applications that prompt me on any kind of regular basis are Software Update (which has to touch all sorts of software and the system software, I'm going to include MS's Office Update in here too) and the Installer used by some applications (because they may need to install libraries or check for other installed software). User space applications almost never trigger these questions. They don't NEED to.
I'm not saying he didn't have a hand in it (Iraq war, for example), but it's not like it was all his fault (see: hurricanes, inability to build new refineries, inability to tap into our own sources (ANOIR, the gulf, etc), rising foreign demand (China, India, et. all)).
Isn't that the argument that many people used to borrow against their homes to go on vacations to the Caribbean they couldn't afford? Isn't that how they bought the two brand new SUVs that later just got repossessed a few months ago?