It's all part of the "wear a helmet" safety paranoia.
When I was a kid, nobody wore a bike helmet and nobody ever knew anyone who sustained a serious head injury from a bike accident, either.
OK, it does happen -- but we're reached this point where you can't do anything without wearing a helmet. WTF?
I get it when riding a motorcycle and for some kinds of bike riding, but it seems like the risks of everything get so amped up it's like sitting on a pile of sand can't be done without safety equipment.
Anyone with a full-time job should be able to afford to buy/lease something more compact with reasonable fuel efficiency
Of course they should, because satisfying the green/environmental/anti-SUV/anti-car movement should be their first and only financial priority.
It's unlikely that they or a family member would have a medical condition requiring expensive treatments, children with special needs who require paid support, be assisting a family member with financial difficulties or any of the dozens of reasons that never occurs to zealous, single-minded advocates of "obvious" solutions who demand other people change their behavior.
First we had the CRT rear projections, which had limited penetration due to cost and size.
When rear projection (LCD and DLP) and plasma came out and the sets became almost flat panel and more flexible, people upgraded from tubes and CRT rear projection. They gained better pictures, bigger size, wide screen and high def capabilities.
When LCD panels came out they quickly dropped in price, allowing pretty much everyone to justify an upgrade -- CRT-RP, glass tube owners and people wanting an upgrade from their older/smaller LCD/DLP RP sets. Similar quality gains for most people -- better picture, widescreen (for some), bigger picture, no burn in (for people dropping cheap plasmas), etc.
Not long after that came 3D. Content was slim and most people had already upgraded and had a 1-3 year old set that did everything they wanted and the new set offered 3D with glasses, little content and not much else, maybe Netflix or something integrated.
IMHO, it will take no-glasses 3D with amazing quality to get people to upgrade to 3D but even then only if the content is there (like major name TV shows).
I agree on the competent, but I think you're stretching "competent sysadmin" to "skilled systems developer" if you're including the ability to write I/O interfaces to enable copy-on-write file dedupe.
As for dedupe, I see the situational advantage to file dedupe but it seems most products I run across with dedupe are based on block level dedupe, I guess because it can effectively dedupe files without the overhead of copy-on-write for a whole file.
I, like many people, treat the "you could get fired if your boss thinks you're looking for another job" as kind of axiomatic, but what's the employer motivation for this?
I'll exclude poor performance, where the employee basically comes in and does nothing but use the company PC to create resumes and cover letters, faxes them with the company fax machine and then goes home, his current job's work undone, mainly because that's being fired for poor performance, the cause of the poor performance is immaterial.
"Because I have to hire a new employee" -- OK, you just *fired* your current employee, you're going to hire someone else anyway, and with zero cooperation from the existing employee who is now job hunting AND doing it while enjoying unemployment benefits because "looking for a job" isn't termination for cause.
"I don't want them to take my secrets/customers" -- the good ones already have your secrets, customer lists, etc. Firing them now gives them moral justification to utilize these in their new job.
I'm lost on where it benefits the employer other than vague claims of weak performance (working well enough not to be reprimanded but not at peak output) or nearly unmeasurable claims of impacting morale.
About the only rationale that seems to make any sense is pure spite -- the employer is pissed that a good employee (high output at sub-market wages) has to be replaced with one with unknown or only average output at market prices, and firing the employee is a good way to sow chaos in their life and possibly make their new job search more complicated.
I think file-level de-dupe is usually a lot less effective because it can't accomodate files that differ only slightly but are otherwise the same, whereas block-level de-dupe works with everything.
I also don't know what happens in your scheme when you have "de-duped" a file that's the same in 4 different directories but then one application wants to change "its" version of the file. It sounds like it trashes the file for the three other uses of it since there's no way to automate copy-on-write with your shell script but maybe my clue isn't working.
China may still suffer a Japanese meltdown. You can't swing a dead cat these days without reading about the risks inherent in the Chinese economy and how those risks are made worse by the Chinese political system.
Whether it's bad lending practices, how the domestic economy is basically built on real estate and construction, the currency pegging and under-valuation, inflation -- there's all kinds of naysayers pointing out disturbing facts, often with the disclaimer that they're basing it on the official Chinese numbers which are surely sunnier than the reality.
Then there's a lot of questions about social and political issues in China -- official corruption, an increasingly bold citizenry willing to stand up to local officials, as well as how far the party is willing to go to maintain a hold on its citizens (even if it means crushing the economy).
A higher international profile is something they "want" but this often exposes them to world issues they've been able to avoid participating in which they would now have to participate in.
But its not like the conditions of Rome in 380 AD were the conditions of Rome for all the years prior. It took a lot going wrong to get there.
IMHO the "decline" really starts with the death of Hadrian or Marcus Aurelius, depending on your perspective. Some people even think it starts earlier, with the end of the Republic and the start of the empire.
I think the old-school Bell System technicians had a couple of advantages over the Comcast guys.
One, was the "Bell System" -- they were working with a completely designed vertical infrastructure. There was no mystery equipment, bought at the lowest price, from a Taiwanese manufacturer. And for many installs there wasn't much to do besides check cross-connects, make a few test calls with a butt set and ensure that the phone placed was the correct color for the homemaker's interior and the dial label had the right phone number. The harder installs were multiline extensions at small businesses.
Two, was the union, which made the job decent paying, with reasonable work rules. This attracted better quality people to the job and probably did divert some technically minded guys that might have otherwise become electricians (or who WERE electricians) or other decent paying trade union jobs.
Three, was being part of a state-sanctioned monopoly with a small, but legislatively guaranteed profit margin. This meant the company could create training programs and provide tools and so forth and not care about the money they spent since they could count on CWA and/or IBEW backing when they went to the government for a rate increase.
I've had good experiences with Comcast technicians, but I haven't asked much of them. Most of them seem to be blue-collar kids with weak high school educations and pink collar aspirations of some kind of computer technician career. They've usually been nice, made their equipment work and even fixed a couple of my DIY coax issues with improved splitters.
Ruinous bombardment would be an option if we would quit with the "hearts and minds" nation building philosophy and get back to the basics of total warfare that has worked since the Roman era. Do what we say or we will destroy your cities, kill your people, sow your fields with salt and bring an end to your civilization as you know it. It worked in Carthage, it worked in Gaul, it worked in Germany and Japan.
And it would be effective. In a few short days the US could make electricity, clean water and sewage treatment a distant memory for the majority of urban Iranians. What little fuel refining capacity they have could be destroyed and exposed stockpiles destroyed. Ports and harbors wrecked, airfields unusable. And that's just getting warmed up and fairly tightly targeted.
At that point we could get into the kind of spirit-crushing air power that makes the Blitz look like a mild thunderstorm, like indiscriminate carpet bombing of civilian areas. Did someone say firebombing? Hit a couple of second-tier cities early so that word gets around -- nothing makes the evening news more riveting for residents of Tehran than watching a firestorm consume Shiraz and wondering when it can be their turn to roast.
After six months of this, the Iranian people will have totally lost their will to fight and instead will be completely absorbed with wondering who will be next to die of cholera in whatever bombed-out ruin they and the other survivors have managed to huddle in.
This is how you defeat your enemy and make him surrender.
I found that exercise mainly improves my conditioning and stamina for longer-duration activities like walks over 5 miles.
On a day to day basis, it really doesn't feel like it does that much other than cost me an hour or so four days a week.
Even a my peak of unfitness, I could walk 4-5 miles, ski in the mountains, etc without feeling like I was killing myself. It might have helped that I enjoyed those activities and pursued them, leaving me even passably conditioned even though I didn't 'exercise' and I smoked (which was for me about a pack and a half a week at most).
It's really all about quality of life in the last 1/4 to 1/5th of your lifespan.
You can make it to 55 or so with a really bad lifestyle -- cigarettes, bad food, no exercise. But at the point and onward, it becomes really obvious who worked at keeping up with a better diet, exercise and not indulging in really bad vices.
But after that, your risks of cancer, heart disease, etc are really high and while you may not actually get any one disease so bad it kills you right away, you may have many of them bad enough that day-day living is a burden -- hauling an oxygen bottle, being heavy enough that you can't get around easily (ie, walking a block wipes you out) or needing bypass surgery.
And then there's the medication that keeps you going but has all kinds of side effects that slows you down, makes you nauseous, keeps you from sleeping, prevents you from eating what you like or from holding down a decent job (you think you'll stop working at 65?! Ha!)
And at least in the US, who will pay for your medical care, too? That's the one that keeps me up at night -- I figure my conversion to a better lifestyle at 40 came a little late to do me good the rest of my life (ie, it buys me into my mid-60s), but I worry about how the fuck I pay for a bypass or the pharmacopoeia of medicines I might need for blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.
Well, isn't adding a dual-core CPU something like doubling CPU power? The kind of thing that OS an App enhancements would take advantage of and the lack of which on older handsets would make the system sluggish?
I'd agree that handsets need a longer lifespan, but it seems like the handset hardware development moves pretty fast and the software seems to follow, using up the capabilities of the new hardware that I'm not sure what the workaround for this is outside of totally remaking handset software so that its modular enough to jettison high-performance features to run on older hardware.
My sense is that it's kind of a fact of life in the smartphone world that whatever you have now is kind of obsolete 12-18 months later, at least if you expect all the features for the current OS release to work on older hardware.
I agree that properly used, credit cards seem to make a ton of sense. In 6 months, I think I made nearly $400 off my Costco card (this is in addition to the money I made back on the Costco rebate itself).
But, I have read that these cash-back/benefits programs are all subsidized by us. In effect, we pay more for goods and services overall to accommodate the merchant fees that subsidize the benefit programs. Although I've also read that the group that REALLY pays are people who pay cash, which is surprise, surprise, a lot of low-income people who don't have or can't get a credit card. I like to taunt my friends that pay only cash that they're putting money in my pocket.
To be fair to the states, there's usually budgets for state departments tied directly to the cost of a license. Since the money is already 100% spoken for, a credit card transaction actually cuts the money for the state by 2% or whatever the swipe fee is and they may not statutorily be able to do that the same way a store just eats the cost of a credit card transaction.
The new office fee is just a way to cover the budget in the face of "no new taxes" or budget deficits without raising the cost of the fee itself (which they may not be able to do and claim the money to cover their internal costs).
Very insightful. You probably don't need to read it, but there's a fascinating (if somewhat dated book) by Barbara Ehrenreich called "Fear of Falling" and it largely outlines how society is structured to let people "into" the middle class with some ease but then basically makes them walk a tightrope forever to "stay" middle class.
IMHO, none of the cable entities should have been allowed any ownership of content creators -- ie, Comcast should never have been allowed to buy/merge with NBC.
Now, if no cable company owned a TV channel, then it might be possible to see Apple do something revolutionary, like negotiate distribution deals with the networks and bypass cable completely. I doubt Comcast would go for that now, but who knows -- maybe they're smart enough to see the traditional cable delivery model vulnerable.
I'm not sure a streaming only solution would work based on my experience with Netflix, but with 128 gig of flash in the set, they could probably do something interesting with 'subscriptions' that would auto-download chosen shows so that you had your shows available to watch when they were "on" without any of the drawbacks of streaming. I don't know how you'd do live, high quality HD content -- it strikes me cable has the advantage here, especially when they can dial back compression on marquee events like the SuperBowl.
Comcast is in the content (NBC) and distribution (cable, broadcast) business. Like every other cable provider, they see their proprietary box as both lock-in device (cheap, inhibits cable piracy), a strategic advantage (enables end-end Layer2/3 network management) and a business advantage (rental income exceeds costs, provides high-dollar, high-resolution viewing data for internal use and sale to third parties, complete with detailed and accurate demographics, likely to include credit info/SSN).
Now WHY ON EARTH would they cede this to Apple?
Unlike the cell phone business, there's no cable competition -- they can't work Comcast against TWC against VZW. They found a weak and willing partner in AT&T for their phone strategy, but a weak and willing cable partner is a small-time regional player that prevents a national distribution strategy.
As a standalone device, capable of cablecard, maybe it would stand a chance, especially if it came with some kind of "bypass cable TV option" that gave you access to cable programming via download/Apple store at some kind of competitive subscription pricing.
I agree that the sizes are too small for many applications, but I have a 32" in my bedroom that's just fine -- it's mounted perfectly dead-center on the bed, high enough you can lay in bed and see it fine. As it is with TVs, the next size up seems more attractive, but the bedroom isn't huge and a 42" or larger would get in the way.
Overall, though, I think Apple would want some of the living room market. My living room TV (Sony Grand Wega, 42", LCD rear projection, circa 2003) IS too small and I don't think anything under 60" sounds at all appealing for the space (which is far from huge). I really don't consider myself a videophile and the set that interests me most is the 70" Sharp I see every time I walk in the door at Costco.
While your educational experience may have been one of loneliness, hostility and bullying, mine wasn't. Did I experience any of those things? Sure, I think most people do, but none of them scarred me and all of them were definite learning experiences.
If you think that bullying is a school-age experience only, you're wrong. I've had to deal with bullies every place I've ever worked and it would have been much harder to deal with it constructively as a young adult in the workplace if that had been my first experience.
I guess speak for yourself -- I'm repeating the actual real-life experience my wife and I have had with our own children. No one has ever told me that, it's revealed knowledge.
Maybe we're bad/misinformed parents, although daily experience suggests otherwise.
It just seems that your kids know all the emotional buttons to push with their parents, but with third parties those don't work and the kids seem to know it.
We both worked hard on some basic skills like shoe-tying (something of a lost art with so many non-tie shoe closures) and bike riding and were dumbfounded when a summer sitter managed to teach BOTH skills in a short period of time.
Out of sheer coincidence, I happened to be driving home during the bike part and was able to anonymously watch. The level of intensity shown despite frustrating failure after failure was WAY past where he would have gone with his parents.
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It's all part of the "wear a helmet" safety paranoia.
When I was a kid, nobody wore a bike helmet and nobody ever knew anyone who sustained a serious head injury from a bike accident, either.
OK, it does happen -- but we're reached this point where you can't do anything without wearing a helmet. WTF?
I get it when riding a motorcycle and for some kinds of bike riding, but it seems like the risks of everything get so amped up it's like sitting on a pile of sand can't be done without safety equipment.
Really.
That those fucking rocks are really spiders!!
Anyone with a full-time job should be able to afford to buy/lease something more compact with reasonable fuel efficiency
Of course they should, because satisfying the green/environmental/anti-SUV/anti-car movement should be their first and only financial priority.
It's unlikely that they or a family member would have a medical condition requiring expensive treatments, children with special needs who require paid support, be assisting a family member with financial difficulties or any of the dozens of reasons that never occurs to zealous, single-minded advocates of "obvious" solutions who demand other people change their behavior.
Jules Verne is an example of prior art.
First we had the CRT rear projections, which had limited penetration due to cost and size.
When rear projection (LCD and DLP) and plasma came out and the sets became almost flat panel and more flexible, people upgraded from tubes and CRT rear projection. They gained better pictures, bigger size, wide screen and high def capabilities.
When LCD panels came out they quickly dropped in price, allowing pretty much everyone to justify an upgrade -- CRT-RP, glass tube owners and people wanting an upgrade from their older/smaller LCD/DLP RP sets. Similar quality gains for most people -- better picture, widescreen (for some), bigger picture, no burn in (for people dropping cheap plasmas), etc.
Not long after that came 3D. Content was slim and most people had already upgraded and had a 1-3 year old set that did everything they wanted and the new set offered 3D with glasses, little content and not much else, maybe Netflix or something integrated.
IMHO, it will take no-glasses 3D with amazing quality to get people to upgrade to 3D but even then only if the content is there (like major name TV shows).
I agree on the competent, but I think you're stretching "competent sysadmin" to "skilled systems developer" if you're including the ability to write I/O interfaces to enable copy-on-write file dedupe.
As for dedupe, I see the situational advantage to file dedupe but it seems most products I run across with dedupe are based on block level dedupe, I guess because it can effectively dedupe files without the overhead of copy-on-write for a whole file.
I, like many people, treat the "you could get fired if your boss thinks you're looking for another job" as kind of axiomatic, but what's the employer motivation for this?
I'll exclude poor performance, where the employee basically comes in and does nothing but use the company PC to create resumes and cover letters, faxes them with the company fax machine and then goes home, his current job's work undone, mainly because that's being fired for poor performance, the cause of the poor performance is immaterial.
"Because I have to hire a new employee" -- OK, you just *fired* your current employee, you're going to hire someone else anyway, and with zero cooperation from the existing employee who is now job hunting AND doing it while enjoying unemployment benefits because "looking for a job" isn't termination for cause.
"I don't want them to take my secrets/customers" -- the good ones already have your secrets, customer lists, etc. Firing them now gives them moral justification to utilize these in their new job.
I'm lost on where it benefits the employer other than vague claims of weak performance (working well enough not to be reprimanded but not at peak output) or nearly unmeasurable claims of impacting morale.
About the only rationale that seems to make any sense is pure spite -- the employer is pissed that a good employee (high output at sub-market wages) has to be replaced with one with unknown or only average output at market prices, and firing the employee is a good way to sow chaos in their life and possibly make their new job search more complicated.
I think file-level de-dupe is usually a lot less effective because it can't accomodate files that differ only slightly but are otherwise the same, whereas block-level de-dupe works with everything.
I also don't know what happens in your scheme when you have "de-duped" a file that's the same in 4 different directories but then one application wants to change "its" version of the file. It sounds like it trashes the file for the three other uses of it since there's no way to automate copy-on-write with your shell script but maybe my clue isn't working.
China may still suffer a Japanese meltdown. You can't swing a dead cat these days without reading about the risks inherent in the Chinese economy and how those risks are made worse by the Chinese political system.
Whether it's bad lending practices, how the domestic economy is basically built on real estate and construction, the currency pegging and under-valuation, inflation -- there's all kinds of naysayers pointing out disturbing facts, often with the disclaimer that they're basing it on the official Chinese numbers which are surely sunnier than the reality.
Then there's a lot of questions about social and political issues in China -- official corruption, an increasingly bold citizenry willing to stand up to local officials, as well as how far the party is willing to go to maintain a hold on its citizens (even if it means crushing the economy).
A higher international profile is something they "want" but this often exposes them to world issues they've been able to avoid participating in which they would now have to participate in.
China's place as a world leader isn't guaranteed.
But its not like the conditions of Rome in 380 AD were the conditions of Rome for all the years prior. It took a lot going wrong to get there.
IMHO the "decline" really starts with the death of Hadrian or Marcus Aurelius, depending on your perspective. Some people even think it starts earlier, with the end of the Republic and the start of the empire.
I think the old-school Bell System technicians had a couple of advantages over the Comcast guys.
One, was the "Bell System" -- they were working with a completely designed vertical infrastructure. There was no mystery equipment, bought at the lowest price, from a Taiwanese manufacturer. And for many installs there wasn't much to do besides check cross-connects, make a few test calls with a butt set and ensure that the phone placed was the correct color for the homemaker's interior and the dial label had the right phone number. The harder installs were multiline extensions at small businesses.
Two, was the union, which made the job decent paying, with reasonable work rules. This attracted better quality people to the job and probably did divert some technically minded guys that might have otherwise become electricians (or who WERE electricians) or other decent paying trade union jobs.
Three, was being part of a state-sanctioned monopoly with a small, but legislatively guaranteed profit margin. This meant the company could create training programs and provide tools and so forth and not care about the money they spent since they could count on CWA and/or IBEW backing when they went to the government for a rate increase.
I've had good experiences with Comcast technicians, but I haven't asked much of them. Most of them seem to be blue-collar kids with weak high school educations and pink collar aspirations of some kind of computer technician career. They've usually been nice, made their equipment work and even fixed a couple of my DIY coax issues with improved splitters.
Ruinous bombardment would be an option if we would quit with the "hearts and minds" nation building philosophy and get back to the basics of total warfare that has worked since the Roman era. Do what we say or we will destroy your cities, kill your people, sow your fields with salt and bring an end to your civilization as you know it. It worked in Carthage, it worked in Gaul, it worked in Germany and Japan.
And it would be effective. In a few short days the US could make electricity, clean water and sewage treatment a distant memory for the majority of urban Iranians. What little fuel refining capacity they have could be destroyed and exposed stockpiles destroyed. Ports and harbors wrecked, airfields unusable. And that's just getting warmed up and fairly tightly targeted.
At that point we could get into the kind of spirit-crushing air power that makes the Blitz look like a mild thunderstorm, like indiscriminate carpet bombing of civilian areas. Did someone say firebombing? Hit a couple of second-tier cities early so that word gets around -- nothing makes the evening news more riveting for residents of Tehran than watching a firestorm consume Shiraz and wondering when it can be their turn to roast.
After six months of this, the Iranian people will have totally lost their will to fight and instead will be completely absorbed with wondering who will be next to die of cholera in whatever bombed-out ruin they and the other survivors have managed to huddle in.
This is how you defeat your enemy and make him surrender.
I found that exercise mainly improves my conditioning and stamina for longer-duration activities like walks over 5 miles.
On a day to day basis, it really doesn't feel like it does that much other than cost me an hour or so four days a week.
Even a my peak of unfitness, I could walk 4-5 miles, ski in the mountains, etc without feeling like I was killing myself. It might have helped that I enjoyed those activities and pursued them, leaving me even passably conditioned even though I didn't 'exercise' and I smoked (which was for me about a pack and a half a week at most).
It's really all about quality of life in the last 1/4 to 1/5th of your lifespan.
You can make it to 55 or so with a really bad lifestyle -- cigarettes, bad food, no exercise. But at the point and onward, it becomes really obvious who worked at keeping up with a better diet, exercise and not indulging in really bad vices.
But after that, your risks of cancer, heart disease, etc are really high and while you may not actually get any one disease so bad it kills you right away, you may have many of them bad enough that day-day living is a burden -- hauling an oxygen bottle, being heavy enough that you can't get around easily (ie, walking a block wipes you out) or needing bypass surgery.
And then there's the medication that keeps you going but has all kinds of side effects that slows you down, makes you nauseous, keeps you from sleeping, prevents you from eating what you like or from holding down a decent job (you think you'll stop working at 65?! Ha!)
And at least in the US, who will pay for your medical care, too? That's the one that keeps me up at night -- I figure my conversion to a better lifestyle at 40 came a little late to do me good the rest of my life (ie, it buys me into my mid-60s), but I worry about how the fuck I pay for a bypass or the pharmacopoeia of medicines I might need for blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.
Well, isn't adding a dual-core CPU something like doubling CPU power? The kind of thing that OS an App enhancements would take advantage of and the lack of which on older handsets would make the system sluggish?
I'd agree that handsets need a longer lifespan, but it seems like the handset hardware development moves pretty fast and the software seems to follow, using up the capabilities of the new hardware that I'm not sure what the workaround for this is outside of totally remaking handset software so that its modular enough to jettison high-performance features to run on older hardware.
My sense is that it's kind of a fact of life in the smartphone world that whatever you have now is kind of obsolete 12-18 months later, at least if you expect all the features for the current OS release to work on older hardware.
I agree that properly used, credit cards seem to make a ton of sense. In 6 months, I think I made nearly $400 off my Costco card (this is in addition to the money I made back on the Costco rebate itself).
But, I have read that these cash-back/benefits programs are all subsidized by us. In effect, we pay more for goods and services overall to accommodate the merchant fees that subsidize the benefit programs. Although I've also read that the group that REALLY pays are people who pay cash, which is surprise, surprise, a lot of low-income people who don't have or can't get a credit card. I like to taunt my friends that pay only cash that they're putting money in my pocket.
To be fair to the states, there's usually budgets for state departments tied directly to the cost of a license. Since the money is already 100% spoken for, a credit card transaction actually cuts the money for the state by 2% or whatever the swipe fee is and they may not statutorily be able to do that the same way a store just eats the cost of a credit card transaction.
The new office fee is just a way to cover the budget in the face of "no new taxes" or budget deficits without raising the cost of the fee itself (which they may not be able to do and claim the money to cover their internal costs).
Very insightful. You probably don't need to read it, but there's a fascinating (if somewhat dated book) by Barbara Ehrenreich called "Fear of Falling" and it largely outlines how society is structured to let people "into" the middle class with some ease but then basically makes them walk a tightrope forever to "stay" middle class.
IMHO, none of the cable entities should have been allowed any ownership of content creators -- ie, Comcast should never have been allowed to buy/merge with NBC.
Now, if no cable company owned a TV channel, then it might be possible to see Apple do something revolutionary, like negotiate distribution deals with the networks and bypass cable completely. I doubt Comcast would go for that now, but who knows -- maybe they're smart enough to see the traditional cable delivery model vulnerable.
I'm not sure a streaming only solution would work based on my experience with Netflix, but with 128 gig of flash in the set, they could probably do something interesting with 'subscriptions' that would auto-download chosen shows so that you had your shows available to watch when they were "on" without any of the drawbacks of streaming. I don't know how you'd do live, high quality HD content -- it strikes me cable has the advantage here, especially when they can dial back compression on marquee events like the SuperBowl.
Comcast is in the content (NBC) and distribution (cable, broadcast) business. Like every other cable provider, they see their proprietary box as both lock-in device (cheap, inhibits cable piracy), a strategic advantage (enables end-end Layer2/3 network management) and a business advantage (rental income exceeds costs, provides high-dollar, high-resolution viewing data for internal use and sale to third parties, complete with detailed and accurate demographics, likely to include credit info/SSN).
Now WHY ON EARTH would they cede this to Apple?
Unlike the cell phone business, there's no cable competition -- they can't work Comcast against TWC against VZW. They found a weak and willing partner in AT&T for their phone strategy, but a weak and willing cable partner is a small-time regional player that prevents a national distribution strategy.
As a standalone device, capable of cablecard, maybe it would stand a chance, especially if it came with some kind of "bypass cable TV option" that gave you access to cable programming via download/Apple store at some kind of competitive subscription pricing.
I agree that the sizes are too small for many applications, but I have a 32" in my bedroom that's just fine -- it's mounted perfectly dead-center on the bed, high enough you can lay in bed and see it fine. As it is with TVs, the next size up seems more attractive, but the bedroom isn't huge and a 42" or larger would get in the way.
Overall, though, I think Apple would want some of the living room market. My living room TV (Sony Grand Wega, 42", LCD rear projection, circa 2003) IS too small and I don't think anything under 60" sounds at all appealing for the space (which is far from huge). I really don't consider myself a videophile and the set that interests me most is the 70" Sharp I see every time I walk in the door at Costco.
While your educational experience may have been one of loneliness, hostility and bullying, mine wasn't. Did I experience any of those things? Sure, I think most people do, but none of them scarred me and all of them were definite learning experiences.
If you think that bullying is a school-age experience only, you're wrong. I've had to deal with bullies every place I've ever worked and it would have been much harder to deal with it constructively as a young adult in the workplace if that had been my first experience.
I guess speak for yourself -- I'm repeating the actual real-life experience my wife and I have had with our own children. No one has ever told me that, it's revealed knowledge.
Maybe we're bad/misinformed parents, although daily experience suggests otherwise.
It just seems that your kids know all the emotional buttons to push with their parents, but with third parties those don't work and the kids seem to know it.
We both worked hard on some basic skills like shoe-tying (something of a lost art with so many non-tie shoe closures) and bike riding and were dumbfounded when a summer sitter managed to teach BOTH skills in a short period of time.
Out of sheer coincidence, I happened to be driving home during the bike part and was able to anonymously watch. The level of intensity shown despite frustrating failure after failure was WAY past where he would have gone with his parents.