Updates all software. (any distro with repositories)
Unfortunately, the odds are that MS will never be able to instate a repository system in any desirable manner. If they attempt to curate, they'll likely be brought to court, even though they pruned out some toolbar that no one really wants on their machine and is one step away from real spyware. Yes, Linux wins here.
Sanely configured user accounts (UAC is leaps and bounds, though)
I personally haven't had an issue here. Can you elaborate?
Sets up wifi/ethernet stuff (without having to go online for the drivers)
Every computer I've purchased has had their LAN/WLAN drivers included out of the box. Regarding a fresh install, about half the time Windows is able to identify at least one of the network interfaces and have it up and running by time I'm at the desktop (Vista and 7 were better at this than XP; I sincerely doubt Ubuntu 5.04 contains the drivers for the latest Broadcom chipset). Conversely, I've had Linux distros that have also been hit or miss with regards to NICs running out of the box. The difference I've seen is that while Windows requires one to go to the vendor website on another machine, download an installshield wizard to a flash drive, and run it on the other computer, Linux procedures haven't been as simple.
sftp access, ssh for that matter
Sure, these don't require third party utilities on Ubuntu, but it's not like downloading/installing Putty takes more than a minute. It's not a first party solution, but it's fairly elegant and worth the download if you require this sort of functionality.
I don't have to start IE up that one time to go grab Firefox/chrome.
If it's that much of a chore, keep the executable handy on removable media. There's also a command line FTP program that comes bundled with Windows you can use. But seriously, you're not going to fry your GPU if you start IE one time.
Also my linux desktop doesn't set my background black and constantly tell met hat my windows copy may not be genuine...
Neither does mine. It helps to have a product key that wasn't keygenned.
It's not like a year after XP's introduction that it managed to have half the market share, either. People have traditionally replaced their computers every 3-6 years, and stick with what they've got until the next hardware cycle. The version of Windows is largely irrelevant to the masses, and yes, anyone who was planning on upgrading their current machine's software independently of a hardware refresh has likely already done so. Getting a third of MS's user base to upgrade in a year is, IMO, an accomplishment, not a problem.
I, for one, would need to reference Wikipedia to put those three storage media in the correct order. However, there is a bit of a difference. Back when ferrite core memory was in regular use in the computer field, few people actually had computers. I remember my 9th grade math teacher telling us that when she was in 9th grade, she took a field trip to see a computer at a regional university. 95% of people couldn't identify a mercury delay line (myself included), but also consider that 95% of people didn't interact with a computer at all when they were a viable storage medium. By contrast, CD-R and flash media are sold at Staples. Virtually every college kid has one. Teens, while not necessarily vinyl owners themselves, are likely aware of what vinyl is simply because their parents were vinyl owners and they told them what it was. Is it considered a regular, every day audio storage medium? not really. But it's still well known simply because the technology had hit the consumer level when it did fit that category.
...because governments are required to go through all 285 rules of acquisition before finally obtaining the parts they need. When dealing with Ferengi, surely that must be a time consuming process.
they're made by commercial entities, and it's those companies that charge "$30,000 for a hammer".
Pffft. Area 51 was built by companies that charged $400 for hammers, and $3,000 for toilet seats. Surely the economy hasn't gotten THAT bad since 1996.
I'm a mobile jock who's getting into vinyl a bit. I still do my parties digital, but got a copy of Torq (and later Serato), and the occasional vinyl record inevitably followed.
The last couple vinyl releases I've gotten seemed to be a win-win-win situation. Last one I paid for cost $20 shipped. That includes a yellow-colored vinyl copy of the planned radio singles with instrumentals on the back, a ripped/encoded/tagged digital MP3 copy of the full album, and MP3s of every acapella and instrumental for every track on the full album. The one before that cost $35, but included all of that, plus a CD copy of the album, a T-shirt, and a pair of really nice slipmats.
Ultimately, that seems to be the best way for the record industry to get consumers to pay for things from the artists they like. I paid twice the price for the album that would be paid on iTunes, but got plenty of value for it. I try to get sets like this whenever I can. Some are just too expensive (Kaskade did a similar bundle that, while it included the full album on wax, didn't include acapellas or instrumentals, but cost $60), but if it's a sane price, vinyl + MP3 album/acapella/instrumental download is worth the retail cost of a CD to procure.
As long as it ends up a standard though, who cares? There's nothing nefarious about that.
Which kind of standard? the official, written down by the standards bodies type of standard, or the de facto standard? What the GP is saying is that it's easy for two types of standards to exist - the one that is on paper, and the one that the majority of people can use. Ideally, these coincide. MP3 is a great example. Sure there are different encoders, and a handful of flavors (MP3Pro being the most notable), but ultimately any program that conforms to MP3 decoding standards can read any encoder. Sometimes they don't though, and the one that comes to mind (keep in mind it's late for me right now) is the ODF format for Excel that left formula storage/calculation/rendering up to the software implementation. There was a heated article about this nearly a year ago, and the skeptics basically argued along a similar line - Microsoft was yes, implementing the standard, but in a way that wasn't seamlessly shareable with ODF editors at large.
If SJ gets to say what the internet looks like, it's a matter of time before he *does* get nefarious. Nefarious at lower levels is both avoidable and humorous. It is dangerous beyond that.
It does bother me when people engage in an extended SMS dialogue with someone else when I'm physically present, so yes I do see your point to an extent. The flip side of it is that when I'm with my friends, I have the "two text rule". If I receive a text from someone*, I'll send them a single text to attempt to answer their question. If they pursue it, I'll tell them I'll contact them at my next convenience, but am busy at the moment. My cell phone is for MY convenience, not theirs, seeing as I pay the bill and they do not. If it's important enough to go beyond two texts, I'll call the person and have the discussion. Either it's going to be quicker to say what needs to be said than texting it (i.e. tech support), or it's too serious for texts (i.e. family emergency) and supersedes SMS.
It also depends on who it is. I have a mental "whitelist" of family members and close friends who are allowed to interrupt things. If it's someone I don't want to speak with, the first look is at the caller ID to see who it is, and if I don't want to talk to them, my phone goes into silent mode out of respect to the person i'm with. A first look at the phone is a cultural norm at this point, a second is generally acceptable as well. A third look**, IMO, is still rude.
*Certain exceptions exist, for example when I'm with a group of friends and someone is running late and needs directions, I'll carry on a text discussion so that they have record of the directions. My friends are generally cool with this because it's pertinent to the current gathering, and they know I give the best directions out of anyone.
**If I have to give a third look to my phone, I'll address it with the person I'm with "Oh, it's my boss, a server is down" or "My mom can't get her netbook online", usually in conjunction with an apology. What bothers me the most is when I'm with a friend, physically, in person, usually the one providing transportation, and they're casually texting another friend who isn't physically present. I personally feel it comes across as "I don't value your company as much as I value theirs".
Manual Mod +1 insightful. If I hadn't posted earlier, I'd have modded you up.
The issue is that ultimately, getting into the cell phone game at any level (tower production, network management, protocol software, retail distribution, handset production, handset OS production, and the other 1,001 areas I'm completely unaware of) has an extremely high barrier of entry, and no matter where you start, you're going up against decade-old incumbents or more. At this point it takes companies with the cavernous pockets of Apple or Google to actually generate any sort of competition.
Novell got big, they charged stupid amounts for software and support, which gave Microsoft an edge. Microsoft got big, they ended up with the IE antitrust debacle. Apple got big, and they started adding hardware to their phones to prevent jailbreaking. Google got big and SO FAR hasn't had any problematically huge PR/legal issues, but when you have Google's insane amount of cash and data on as many users as they do, it's just a matter of time before they end up doing something that will get them problematic amounts of bad press.
There's no such thing as a corporation acting in the consumer's best interest once that corporation is actually big enough to compete in the mobile space. Among the barriers of entry is the patent-sharing collusion that is required from basically everyone already there, so even if a garage startup came out with SuperPhoneOS_Ultra, getting it into the hands of consumers necessarily requires getting one's hands dirty.
The best we can hope for here is that each company provides enough competition to keep the others on their toes, while simultaneously not being anticompetitive, and not ending up as an oligopoly like the telecoms themselves. Each telecom has X amount of subscribers, and people shift from one to another every so often, but at this point the policies are largely the same because of the collusion. Paradoxically though, each entrant would slowly raise the bar on the others. No one company would independently continue innovating without pressure from the others.
I'd wager that Microsoft would put the most pressure on RIM, and to a lesser extent Apple, but all four major smartphone OSs would basically move at more-or-less the same speed unless someone else entered the mobile phone business. Personally, I'd find it quite amusing if there was an Oracle phone.
Just to be fair, that's what many said about Apple; they were going up against incumbents like RIM and Windows Mobile on the smartphone side (recall that at the time, WinMo had more apps available than most other mobile platforms, and while it didn't do much with the polish of the iPhone, it did have a pretty solid feature list at the time), and a bevy of LG and Samsung feature phones that were quite popular. In 2006, many thought Apple would occupy a similar niche in the mobile space as they did on the desktop. I'm not saying that WinMo will have the same results as Apple did, but I am saying that predicting that $VENDOR isn't going to succeed has been said before.
That said, Microsoft seems to be doing something right in that it's actually targeting both business users AND consumer users in the first round. Home users get the much-touted Xbox and Zune integration, while business users get Exchange support, Office Mobile, and Sharepoint integration. Again, I'm not saying that this will necessarily equate to success in the enterprise market, but I am saying that both segments seem to be in Microsoft's sights.
What will really help their enterprise install base would be something similar to Blackberry Enterprise Server Express, where admins can perform fine-grained security and software deployment operations from a tightly integrated AD/Exchange environment.
I'm not entirely certain that requiring parental consent will do much more than it is now. At present, most video game retailers require ID to purchase M-Rated games, but requiring parental consent does not equate to requiring INFORMED parental consent. Plenty of minors I know who have copies of violent video games got them from their parents as gifts. I'd wager that the overwhelming majority of the parents who bought the games would reconsider if they sat down and actually played the game for 20 minutes. No chance of that happening though.
That's not really a fair comparison though. Yes, you're getting a higher speed for less money, but speed is only a piece of what you're paying for. The other $240/month went to the fact that you were paying for internet access that was government regulated to hell so you were guaranteed a full 1.544Mbps 24/7 with 99.999% guaranteed uptime and low latency, and the ISP had to credit your account if you got anything less.
Your DSL line shares a CO with a few dozen/hundred of your neighbors. Even if it's not a single node for your block, at some point you're going to feel the load if everyone is trying to stream the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show simultaneously, and you've got no guarantee other than "best effort" that you're going to get the advertised bandwidth, or what uptime you're going to have. Also, odds are very good that incoming connections to ports 80 and 25 are blocked at the ISP leve. For home users paying $30-$60/month, that's alright. For businesses running their web servers and Exchange servers on a line, DSL simply won't cut it.
Add me to the list as well. My dad bought CFL's for our bathroom at $15 a pop. They all died within a year, and the lighting in there was terrible. Maybe they don't like the humidity or something, but last time I went to Home Depot I bought bathroom bulbs, dining room bulbs, kitchen bulbs, and bedroom bulbs for less than the cost of the CFL bathroom bulbs. Those who want to argue energy cost aren't wrong, but the difference is in "felt energy cost". The savings were nominal when we switched to CFL in the bathroom, and certainly weren't enough to offset the additional cost for the bulbs themselves during their lifetime. My last bulb run was nearly a year ago, and I haven't swapped out a single one of them. Maybe the CFL guys are right and there was a power issue or something that ONLY affected those bulbs, but ultimately I'm not willing to drop another $60 to find out. If I, as a fellow slashdotter, feel that way, heck if you're going to get the general public to feel otherwise.
I think the best place for LEDs to start penetrating the market is in outdoor fixtures and halogen lights. those things get ridiculously hot, and the bulbs aren't terribly cheap either. If halogen could be replaced with LED, it's the easiest place to start with among the best return.
What I'd really like to do would be to do what my friend Rob did in his new workshop - instead of one or two central fixtures in the room, he put nearly a dozen small 3W LED fixtures around the office. In addition to the cost savings, it's simple redundancy so that the room isn't dark if the bulb goes. The issue with his plan is that it worked well when he was a part of the design process and the fixtures were chosen as opposed to different fixtures, but the cost of doing it this way needs to account for the retrofitting of the room, which can easily require several thousand dollars to rip out ceilings and walls, and that cost will take YEARS to recoup over incandescent bulbs.
As I'm writing this, I looked up and saw a bulk out in the fixture above me. It wasn't one of the ones I bought, but I do need to change it...
Manual mod +1 insightful. GoDaddy's advertising isn't necessarily direct like soap and gatorade, but it does breed familiarity so when people go to make a website, "Godaddy" is the only name they've heard of.
While I agree with most of your post, I feel the need to get pedantic on one point...
Think back to the early days of USB: Slow, virtually nothing to plug in to it and what there was was buggy, not even supported by the OSes that most people were running; but Intel put it in their chipsets, so it cost the motherboard maker peanuts to drop the passives and the connector on the board. Everybody had it before anybody cared.
In the early days of USB, the choices were either serial (really really slow), parallel (regular slow), or SCSI (fast, but expensive, and manual mapping wasn't for the faint of heart). They all required reboots after installing things, and the number of expansion ports were quite limited. I remember sharing the serial port between my mouse and my Cybiko. Keyboard only syncing taught the keyboard commands REAL fast!
USB was indeed buggy, but also remember that there really wasn't such a thing as a class compliant driver at the time. Every USB flash drive of the era required a driver install, but it was a heck of a lot faster than a parallel Zip drive. When you have that many people writing a driver for a first(ish) gen technology for the Win98SE driver stack, that's inevitably a house of cards (especially since in my case my first USB experience involved a PCI card on top of it). USB really came into its own when USB storage, imaging devices, and other more generic types of devices started to work well with generic drivers.
was iTunes Lite. iTunes doesn't need to be a 100MB behemoth; Red Chair Software had great iPod syncing software that fit within 5MB, a streamlined Winamp install can take less than 10MB, and you can't POSSIBLY lead me to believe that the other 85MB is required to make purchases. Cut it down to a manageable size, remove the networking crap, and stay the HELL out of my startup entries. Am I being unreasonable here?
ergo the qualification of "as an effect". I don't mind using Autotune as a correction tool. The difference between Autotune as a correction tool and as an effect is that in the case of the former, as you pointed out, it's not noticeable - as it should be. In the latter, it's use is intended to be audible, and THAT is annoying.
-Since every CD I buy today says that downloading music has the same effect as stealing a disc, make the punishment for downloading the disc the same as physical theft.
-Hold Rapidshare responsible for their hosting of copyrighted content, but you pay double if the content is found to be uninfringing.
-Allow me to write my own music to which I own the copyright and stream it over the internet without having to pay you royalties.
-Show that monies collected from copyright infringement cases (less court fees) literally go to pad the pockets of the artists you claim to protect. For added sympathy, use some to fund school music programs to encourage the next generation of musicians.
Slashdot Mirror
Updates all software. (any distro with repositories)
Unfortunately, the odds are that MS will never be able to instate a repository system in any desirable manner. If they attempt to curate, they'll likely be brought to court, even though they pruned out some toolbar that no one really wants on their machine and is one step away from real spyware. Yes, Linux wins here.
Sanely configured user accounts (UAC is leaps and bounds, though)
I personally haven't had an issue here. Can you elaborate?
Sets up wifi/ethernet stuff (without having to go online for the drivers)
Every computer I've purchased has had their LAN/WLAN drivers included out of the box. Regarding a fresh install, about half the time Windows is able to identify at least one of the network interfaces and have it up and running by time I'm at the desktop (Vista and 7 were better at this than XP; I sincerely doubt Ubuntu 5.04 contains the drivers for the latest Broadcom chipset). Conversely, I've had Linux distros that have also been hit or miss with regards to NICs running out of the box. The difference I've seen is that while Windows requires one to go to the vendor website on another machine, download an installshield wizard to a flash drive, and run it on the other computer, Linux procedures haven't been as simple.
sftp access, ssh for that matter
Sure, these don't require third party utilities on Ubuntu, but it's not like downloading/installing Putty takes more than a minute. It's not a first party solution, but it's fairly elegant and worth the download if you require this sort of functionality.
I don't have to start IE up that one time to go grab Firefox/chrome.
If it's that much of a chore, keep the executable handy on removable media. There's also a command line FTP program that comes bundled with Windows you can use. But seriously, you're not going to fry your GPU if you start IE one time.
Also my linux desktop doesn't set my background black and constantly tell met hat my windows copy may not be genuine...
Neither does mine. It helps to have a product key that wasn't keygenned.
It's not like a year after XP's introduction that it managed to have half the market share, either. People have traditionally replaced their computers every 3-6 years, and stick with what they've got until the next hardware cycle. The version of Windows is largely irrelevant to the masses, and yes, anyone who was planning on upgrading their current machine's software independently of a hardware refresh has likely already done so. Getting a third of MS's user base to upgrade in a year is, IMO, an accomplishment, not a problem.
I, for one, would need to reference Wikipedia to put those three storage media in the correct order. However, there is a bit of a difference. Back when ferrite core memory was in regular use in the computer field, few people actually had computers. I remember my 9th grade math teacher telling us that when she was in 9th grade, she took a field trip to see a computer at a regional university. 95% of people couldn't identify a mercury delay line (myself included), but also consider that 95% of people didn't interact with a computer at all when they were a viable storage medium. By contrast, CD-R and flash media are sold at Staples. Virtually every college kid has one. Teens, while not necessarily vinyl owners themselves, are likely aware of what vinyl is simply because their parents were vinyl owners and they told them what it was. Is it considered a regular, every day audio storage medium? not really. But it's still well known simply because the technology had hit the consumer level when it did fit that category.
It's called the ACQUISITION process for a reason.
...because governments are required to go through all 285 rules of acquisition before finally obtaining the parts they need. When dealing with Ferengi, surely that must be a time consuming process.
they're made by commercial entities, and it's those companies that charge "$30,000 for a hammer".
Pffft. Area 51 was built by companies that charged $400 for hammers, and $3,000 for toilet seats. Surely the economy hasn't gotten THAT bad since 1996.
I don't care if this is anonymous coward. MOD PARENT UP! I'd love nothing more than to see this happen.
I'm a mobile jock who's getting into vinyl a bit. I still do my parties digital, but got a copy of Torq (and later Serato), and the occasional vinyl record inevitably followed.
The last couple vinyl releases I've gotten seemed to be a win-win-win situation. Last one I paid for cost $20 shipped. That includes a yellow-colored vinyl copy of the planned radio singles with instrumentals on the back, a ripped/encoded/tagged digital MP3 copy of the full album, and MP3s of every acapella and instrumental for every track on the full album. The one before that cost $35, but included all of that, plus a CD copy of the album, a T-shirt, and a pair of really nice slipmats.
Ultimately, that seems to be the best way for the record industry to get consumers to pay for things from the artists they like. I paid twice the price for the album that would be paid on iTunes, but got plenty of value for it. I try to get sets like this whenever I can. Some are just too expensive (Kaskade did a similar bundle that, while it included the full album on wax, didn't include acapellas or instrumentals, but cost $60), but if it's a sane price, vinyl + MP3 album/acapella/instrumental download is worth the retail cost of a CD to procure.
Sorry but a Clue by four does exist.
It's a 2"x4" with nails in the end you swing and hit people with.
It was Colnel Mustard in the Study with the Clue-by-Four!
As long as it ends up a standard though, who cares? There's nothing nefarious about that.
Which kind of standard? the official, written down by the standards bodies type of standard, or the de facto standard? What the GP is saying is that it's easy for two types of standards to exist - the one that is on paper, and the one that the majority of people can use. Ideally, these coincide. MP3 is a great example. Sure there are different encoders, and a handful of flavors (MP3Pro being the most notable), but ultimately any program that conforms to MP3 decoding standards can read any encoder. Sometimes they don't though, and the one that comes to mind (keep in mind it's late for me right now) is the ODF format for Excel that left formula storage/calculation/rendering up to the software implementation. There was a heated article about this nearly a year ago, and the skeptics basically argued along a similar line - Microsoft was yes, implementing the standard, but in a way that wasn't seamlessly shareable with ODF editors at large.
If SJ gets to say what the internet looks like, it's a matter of time before he *does* get nefarious. Nefarious at lower levels is both avoidable and humorous. It is dangerous beyond that.
It does bother me when people engage in an extended SMS dialogue with someone else when I'm physically present, so yes I do see your point to an extent. The flip side of it is that when I'm with my friends, I have the "two text rule". If I receive a text from someone*, I'll send them a single text to attempt to answer their question. If they pursue it, I'll tell them I'll contact them at my next convenience, but am busy at the moment. My cell phone is for MY convenience, not theirs, seeing as I pay the bill and they do not.
If it's important enough to go beyond two texts, I'll call the person and have the discussion. Either it's going to be quicker to say what needs to be said than texting it (i.e. tech support), or it's too serious for texts (i.e. family emergency) and supersedes SMS.
It also depends on who it is. I have a mental "whitelist" of family members and close friends who are allowed to interrupt things. If it's someone I don't want to speak with, the first look is at the caller ID to see who it is, and if I don't want to talk to them, my phone goes into silent mode out of respect to the person i'm with. A first look at the phone is a cultural norm at this point, a second is generally acceptable as well. A third look**, IMO, is still rude.
*Certain exceptions exist, for example when I'm with a group of friends and someone is running late and needs directions, I'll carry on a text discussion so that they have record of the directions. My friends are generally cool with this because it's pertinent to the current gathering, and they know I give the best directions out of anyone.
**If I have to give a third look to my phone, I'll address it with the person I'm with "Oh, it's my boss, a server is down" or "My mom can't get her netbook online", usually in conjunction with an apology. What bothers me the most is when I'm with a friend, physically, in person, usually the one providing transportation, and they're casually texting another friend who isn't physically present. I personally feel it comes across as "I don't value your company as much as I value theirs".
Fail at web server administration.
At least their success rate is consistent.
Manual Mod +1 insightful. If I hadn't posted earlier, I'd have modded you up.
The issue is that ultimately, getting into the cell phone game at any level (tower production, network management, protocol software, retail distribution, handset production, handset OS production, and the other 1,001 areas I'm completely unaware of) has an extremely high barrier of entry, and no matter where you start, you're going up against decade-old incumbents or more. At this point it takes companies with the cavernous pockets of Apple or Google to actually generate any sort of competition.
Novell got big, they charged stupid amounts for software and support, which gave Microsoft an edge. Microsoft got big, they ended up with the IE antitrust debacle. Apple got big, and they started adding hardware to their phones to prevent jailbreaking. Google got big and SO FAR hasn't had any problematically huge PR/legal issues, but when you have Google's insane amount of cash and data on as many users as they do, it's just a matter of time before they end up doing something that will get them problematic amounts of bad press.
There's no such thing as a corporation acting in the consumer's best interest once that corporation is actually big enough to compete in the mobile space. Among the barriers of entry is the patent-sharing collusion that is required from basically everyone already there, so even if a garage startup came out with SuperPhoneOS_Ultra, getting it into the hands of consumers necessarily requires getting one's hands dirty.
The best we can hope for here is that each company provides enough competition to keep the others on their toes, while simultaneously not being anticompetitive, and not ending up as an oligopoly like the telecoms themselves. Each telecom has X amount of subscribers, and people shift from one to another every so often, but at this point the policies are largely the same because of the collusion. Paradoxically though, each entrant would slowly raise the bar on the others. No one company would independently continue innovating without pressure from the others.
I'd wager that Microsoft would put the most pressure on RIM, and to a lesser extent Apple, but all four major smartphone OSs would basically move at more-or-less the same speed unless someone else entered the mobile phone business. Personally, I'd find it quite amusing if there was an Oracle phone.
Just to be fair, that's what many said about Apple; they were going up against incumbents like RIM and Windows Mobile on the smartphone side (recall that at the time, WinMo had more apps available than most other mobile platforms, and while it didn't do much with the polish of the iPhone, it did have a pretty solid feature list at the time), and a bevy of LG and Samsung feature phones that were quite popular. In 2006, many thought Apple would occupy a similar niche in the mobile space as they did on the desktop. I'm not saying that WinMo will have the same results as Apple did, but I am saying that predicting that $VENDOR isn't going to succeed has been said before.
That said, Microsoft seems to be doing something right in that it's actually targeting both business users AND consumer users in the first round. Home users get the much-touted Xbox and Zune integration, while business users get Exchange support, Office Mobile, and Sharepoint integration. Again, I'm not saying that this will necessarily equate to success in the enterprise market, but I am saying that both segments seem to be in Microsoft's sights.
What will really help their enterprise install base would be something similar to Blackberry Enterprise Server Express, where admins can perform fine-grained security and software deployment operations from a tightly integrated AD/Exchange environment.
I took the screengrab personally - it's not a Photochop. The RTM version of Win7 fixed the error, but it was too funny during beta.
Sometimes the ratings can be misleading, like this fine example from the Windows 7 Game Center back when Win7 was in beta:
http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j14/voyager529/UT3_Fail.png
I'm not entirely certain that requiring parental consent will do much more than it is now. At present, most video game retailers require ID to purchase M-Rated games, but requiring parental consent does not equate to requiring INFORMED parental consent. Plenty of minors I know who have copies of violent video games got them from their parents as gifts. I'd wager that the overwhelming majority of the parents who bought the games would reconsider if they sat down and actually played the game for 20 minutes. No chance of that happening though.
That's not really a fair comparison though. Yes, you're getting a higher speed for less money, but speed is only a piece of what you're paying for. The other $240/month went to the fact that you were paying for internet access that was government regulated to hell so you were guaranteed a full 1.544Mbps 24/7 with 99.999% guaranteed uptime and low latency, and the ISP had to credit your account if you got anything less.
Your DSL line shares a CO with a few dozen/hundred of your neighbors. Even if it's not a single node for your block, at some point you're going to feel the load if everyone is trying to stream the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show simultaneously, and you've got no guarantee other than "best effort" that you're going to get the advertised bandwidth, or what uptime you're going to have. Also, odds are very good that incoming connections to ports 80 and 25 are blocked at the ISP leve. For home users paying $30-$60/month, that's alright. For businesses running their web servers and Exchange servers on a line, DSL simply won't cut it.
We'd be like the Linux of algae
I'll be right here waiting for the year of Algae on the Rooftop.
Add me to the list as well. My dad bought CFL's for our bathroom at $15 a pop. They all died within a year, and the lighting in there was terrible. Maybe they don't like the humidity or something, but last time I went to Home Depot I bought bathroom bulbs, dining room bulbs, kitchen bulbs, and bedroom bulbs for less than the cost of the CFL bathroom bulbs. Those who want to argue energy cost aren't wrong, but the difference is in "felt energy cost". The savings were nominal when we switched to CFL in the bathroom, and certainly weren't enough to offset the additional cost for the bulbs themselves during their lifetime. My last bulb run was nearly a year ago, and I haven't swapped out a single one of them. Maybe the CFL guys are right and there was a power issue or something that ONLY affected those bulbs, but ultimately I'm not willing to drop another $60 to find out. If I, as a fellow slashdotter, feel that way, heck if you're going to get the general public to feel otherwise.
I think the best place for LEDs to start penetrating the market is in outdoor fixtures and halogen lights. those things get ridiculously hot, and the bulbs aren't terribly cheap either. If halogen could be replaced with LED, it's the easiest place to start with among the best return.
What I'd really like to do would be to do what my friend Rob did in his new workshop - instead of one or two central fixtures in the room, he put nearly a dozen small 3W LED fixtures around the office. In addition to the cost savings, it's simple redundancy so that the room isn't dark if the bulb goes. The issue with his plan is that it worked well when he was a part of the design process and the fixtures were chosen as opposed to different fixtures, but the cost of doing it this way needs to account for the retrofitting of the room, which can easily require several thousand dollars to rip out ceilings and walls, and that cost will take YEARS to recoup over incandescent bulbs.
As I'm writing this, I looked up and saw a bulk out in the fixture above me. It wasn't one of the ones I bought, but I do need to change it...
Manual mod +1 insightful. GoDaddy's advertising isn't necessarily direct like soap and gatorade, but it does breed familiarity so when people go to make a website, "Godaddy" is the only name they've heard of.
While I agree with most of your post, I feel the need to get pedantic on one point...
Think back to the early days of USB: Slow, virtually nothing to plug in to it and what there was was buggy, not even supported by the OSes that most people were running; but Intel put it in their chipsets, so it cost the motherboard maker peanuts to drop the passives and the connector on the board. Everybody had it before anybody cared.
In the early days of USB, the choices were either serial (really really slow), parallel (regular slow), or SCSI (fast, but expensive, and manual mapping wasn't for the faint of heart). They all required reboots after installing things, and the number of expansion ports were quite limited. I remember sharing the serial port between my mouse and my Cybiko. Keyboard only syncing taught the keyboard commands REAL fast!
USB was indeed buggy, but also remember that there really wasn't such a thing as a class compliant driver at the time. Every USB flash drive of the era required a driver install, but it was a heck of a lot faster than a parallel Zip drive. When you have that many people writing a driver for a first(ish) gen technology for the Win98SE driver stack, that's inevitably a house of cards (especially since in my case my first USB experience involved a PCI card on top of it). USB really came into its own when USB storage, imaging devices, and other more generic types of devices started to work well with generic drivers.
was iTunes Lite. iTunes doesn't need to be a 100MB behemoth; Red Chair Software had great iPod syncing software that fit within 5MB, a streamlined Winamp install can take less than 10MB, and you can't POSSIBLY lead me to believe that the other 85MB is required to make purchases. Cut it down to a manageable size, remove the networking crap, and stay the HELL out of my startup entries. Am I being unreasonable here?
ergo the qualification of "as an effect". I don't mind using Autotune as a correction tool. The difference between Autotune as a correction tool and as an effect is that in the case of the former, as you pointed out, it's not noticeable - as it should be. In the latter, it's use is intended to be audible, and THAT is annoying.
Let's deal, Cary...
-Since every CD I buy today says that downloading music has the same effect as stealing a disc, make the punishment for downloading the disc the same as physical theft.
-Hold Rapidshare responsible for their hosting of copyrighted content, but you pay double if the content is found to be uninfringing.
-Allow me to write my own music to which I own the copyright and stream it over the internet without having to pay you royalties.
-Show that monies collected from copyright infringement cases (less court fees) literally go to pad the pockets of the artists you claim to protect. For added sympathy, use some to fund school music programs to encourage the next generation of musicians.
And, as a personal request:
-Stop using Autotune as an effect. It's annoying.
Wait, LIPA pays YOU? This isn't Soviet Russia.