I sometimes wonder if physical intimidation isn't actually more effective than "high tech" stuff like Tasers and mace. Back in the old days, cops knew exactly how to hit people to gain compliance with minimal physical impact -- they knew where it hurt. Guys who took a baton to the solar plexus or a rabbit punch certainly knew that obeying made sense.
Now I'm *not* talking about insane, Rodney King style beatings where baton blows are delivered windmill style, but directed physical blows designed to inflict maximum pain on non-compliant subjects.
What's most disturbing about this video is how utterly ineffective a mass of cops are at subduing a single person, despite having him on the ground. Why couldn't they handcuff him? How did it ever become necessary to hold him down and taser him?
Not all American-centric arguments are inherently chauvinistic.
He said Apple's primary market was the U.S., which must means where they intend/want/try to sell most of their machines, and thus its market share in the U.S. vs. Wintel is the more valid statistic since its where they try harder and thus where the results should be gauged. Apple probably likes global sales and probably has some strong regional markets in Western Europe and perhaps 1st-world Asia, but the point was that they invest their energy in the U.S. market.
Now, its an open question where this is a B.S. argument to pump up figures or a legitimate critique of global share numbers. I think its myopic to think of the computing universe to be American-centric, but the key to understanding Jobs is that he isn't interested in the global computing market, he's interested in selling Apple products.
And at the end of the day selling all you make at a price you decide is pretty much the bottom-line definition of business success, and that's pretty much what Apple's focus is -- business success. Gaining market share, beating Wintel, etc -- that's just for fanboys and advocacy fans who only see it as a horse race.
Why is the users of these sites believe they have stumbled across some "unavoidable phenomenon"? It sounds to me like a self-justifying phenomenon (or, more precisely, a phenomenon of self-justification).
And here's the part I *don't* get -- all the comments from people saying "I don't have time to keep up with friends and family, but since I joined {Facebook/Myspace/etc} we can keep in touch and make new friends..." WTF? Maybe if you peeled your fat ass away from the computer and spent time with family and friends and maybe got involved with some activities you could make new friends.
Maybe its just Wall Street greed coupled with the myopia of 20 somethings.
Let's hope Sarkozy is smart enough not to get too caught up in any central African adventures or blow up any Greenpeace ships in third-country harbors, something his predecessors have had problems with.
A city bus is another good choice; some might switch routes from day-day, making an apparently random set of non-random patterns, as well as driving the cops bonkers if they try to tail the car based on the location data -- "we couldn't catch up, this bus kept getting in the way.."
I also like the idea of driving to the mall and putting them on someone else's car, as well as putting them on a neighbor's car, which might never get found since the car would keep returning "home".
What happens is these people think that there's some new miracle computer technology that magically solves their problems. When they find out that behind the shiny new Flash/JavaScript/ActiveX user interface they've really just got yet another information storage and retrieval system like their old one and making it useful requires real work by real people, they stop being interested because, heck, they could have done real work with the LAST system.
Where it gets really fun is when just enough work goes into the new thingy that the low-level office droids end up using it regularly and can't live without it BUT upgrading and maintaining it to sane levels doesn't get funded because the shiny exciting part that appeals to management is long gone.
It's *all* just another symptom of management's love of short-term/free-ride thinking. I'm surprised we don't hear more about these same people losing money to perpetual motion machines.
The only thing thats not to love is the fact that it stores its settings in the fscking registry instead of in the same directory as the.exe. The registry method is acceptable for home destktops, I guess, but it'd be nice if it was setup as a purely portable application.
(yeah, I know about the portable apps version, which I use with USB keys, but it'd be nice to have that functionality built in)
I'm having a really hard time with the idea that you can change the cultural behavior (large families) of an entire continent in a single generation, not to mention larger basic problem of "solving" infant mortality or any other large-scale problem within the context of Africa's broken political environment.
Just today the Times had an article about Zimbabwe's largest baker running out flour because there's no foreign reserves to buy it -- Zimbabwe used to be a net exporter of food before Mugabe's disastrous campaign to redistribute farmland (ie, prop up his corrupt government by bribing idle thugs who might otherwise riot). You're going to "fix" infant mortality in a country whose LOCAL leadership is basically destroying the economy and risking famine?
And then just look at the U.S. as an example -- we've been POURING money into social welfare programs since the 1960s without *any* of the problems that Africa has and we can't "fix" our own problems with poverty, infant mortality, etc among our own poor.
And what's with all the "Iraq" comments? Africa was in trouble WAY BEFORE Iraq was even an issue; its fantasy to believe that one red cent of money spent in Iraq would have been spent on Africa anyway. It's the biggest straw man ever or just an attempt to troll someone into an unwinnable argument on Iraq policy.
WTF does that have to do with feel-good Western paternalism creating more havoc than it causes? Am I supposed to be baited into supporting US military adventures? Or some weird AIDS-isn't-our-problem response?
Until Africa stabilizes itself politically, improving public health feels good and makes everyone look humanitarian, but it really just creates a much larger problem involving overpopulation and ecological disaster.
I read this again just the other day in the Times -- all the feel-good Western "help" programs that "improve" the lives of Africans have largely just increased the population to the extent that there is no longer farmland that can be meaningfully subdivided in Africa, forcing people into urban areas where they live in poverty and join in whatever military coup that comes down the pike (free drugs, an AK-47 and a chance to kill your rivals).
And this is when the programs *work* -- when they don't work, all we end up doing is lining the pockets of thugs like Robert Mugabe, Daniel Arap Moi, and enabling proto-thugs like Thabo "AIDS is a conspiracy, take this folk remedy" Mbeki.
Repeat After Me: Westerns Cannot Save Africans. Only Africans can Save Africans. When Africans have a stable political system they can (easily!) solve many of these basic problems like clean water, healthcare, etc. Until then, "solving" these problems by Africans means dying by machete/mortar/7.62x39 round in political infighting instead of malaria.
And while I'm on my soap box, where are all the Westerners (generally leftists) who were so behind all the African "freedom fighters" in the 1960s and 70s? Shouldn't they be accepting some of the blame for putting into power some of these unbelievably corrupt African regimes?
(Thanks, I'll gladly repost for the next Western-geek-tech-saves-Africa article).
The SIM only provides the network authentication, it doesn't provide the radio or other cell network functionality. The SIM chip is kind of like a boot prom for a NIC, it's not enough to network enable something, you need the whole NIC.
The closest actual example are the PC/Express Cards that the wireless vendors sell that have basically all the radio function built in. Why can't I just slap one of those (or a reduced size one) into handset/PDA hardware and go?
I'll agree that I don't get the trend towards making a fcsking iPod (errm, music player) out of every bit of electronics, but I do appreciate the phone/PDA hybrid and appreciate the fact I don't need two devices.
I also appreciate the massive overlap -- a PDA is orders of magnitudes more useful if it can communicate with the internet (email, sync, etc) and a phone is orders of magnitude more useful if it organizes phone numbers and contact information. Bluetooth linking doesn't cut it and its not worth the inevitable bullshoot and reliability problems that it would come with it. I love my BT headset and mouse, but the rest of it has been more hassle than carrying an 8" USB cable in my laptop bag.
I do like the sub-sub-notebook ("paperback"?) form factor, but its not truly useful without good 3G or better networking, and phone tethering while useful doesn't cut it.
What we really need is a CF-card sized "phone module" we can move between various devices (phone, notebook, PDA, etc) that gives them network access without creating a hardware dependency (eg, the phone handset/carrier tie-in) AND a much-better-than-bluetooth wireless standard that provides more robust and higher speed connectivity.
My guess is that the manufacturers are gambling that a failed HDD won't happen until late in the game (2+ years) and most people will just buy a new machine for $600 since having it repaired out of warranty + parts + hassle factor is more "expensive" than that.
I haven't seen recovery discs in a while, at least not at the "budget" level my clients seem to want to operate at. Its almost always a recovery partition + some lame utility that will burn 1-3 ISOs to CD for you.
The "good" news is the recovery partition is live and usable (ie, you don't need to make discs to use it), the bad news is that you're fscked if you don't and the HDD goes south.
I keep trying to convince my customers they'll pay me less money in the long run to do clean setups on new machines versus the time spent both uninstalling conflicting software they won't/can't use (ie, Symantec AV, PDF Complete, etc) and the problems they inevitably run into down the road when the factory installed crapware craps the machine out, requiring a clean load anyway.
I've pretty much quit gaming due to all the copy protection crap that gets installed with most modern games (and interferes with legitimate software).
Another followup to your post mentions migrating to OS X/Linux, where I guess you're less victim to this kind of nonsense, but you're still locked in (to Jobs/Apple) or dealing with a lot less functionality (Linux zealots aside).
That doesn't make sense; Microsoft allows you to buy a device to steal software (ie, a computer), why should the cable company be in the hardware business *at all*?
I read a comparison/benchmark someplace (Ars? Who can remember..) that showed the E6700 only a touch better at a narrow range of applications and getting its hat handed to it on media encoding applications, so I went with the Q6600 since that accounts for my "heavy" computing.
I see MPEG-2 renders running better than real time on single pass encodes in TMPGEnc.
Depends on what you do "at home". Grandma who only sends email and orders flowers will see zero benefits.
But the rest of "normal" home users who own things like camcorders, make DVDs, rip movies, etc all see a huge benefit. I just put together a Q6600 system and couldn't be happier, but I've been a dual CPU workstation user since the PII days.
The big problem is all the incompatible networks. Sure, AT&T and T-Mobile are GSM compatible, but I would guess that there are vendor specific things about Sprint/Verizon CDMA networks that would keep an open phone from working. And even if they did, any "good" open phone would have to be GSM and CDMA compatible to really benefit from all the networks.
Slashdot Mirror
I sometimes wonder if physical intimidation isn't actually more effective than "high tech" stuff like Tasers and mace. Back in the old days, cops knew exactly how to hit people to gain compliance with minimal physical impact -- they knew where it hurt. Guys who took a baton to the solar plexus or a rabbit punch certainly knew that obeying made sense.
Now I'm *not* talking about insane, Rodney King style beatings where baton blows are delivered windmill style, but directed physical blows designed to inflict maximum pain on non-compliant subjects.
What's most disturbing about this video is how utterly ineffective a mass of cops are at subduing a single person, despite having him on the ground. Why couldn't they handcuff him? How did it ever become necessary to hold him down and taser him?
Not all American-centric arguments are inherently chauvinistic.
He said Apple's primary market was the U.S., which must means where they intend/want/try to sell most of their machines, and thus its market share in the U.S. vs. Wintel is the more valid statistic since its where they try harder and thus where the results should be gauged. Apple probably likes global sales and probably has some strong regional markets in Western Europe and perhaps 1st-world Asia, but the point was that they invest their energy in the U.S. market.
Now, its an open question where this is a B.S. argument to pump up figures or a legitimate critique of global share numbers. I think its myopic to think of the computing universe to be American-centric, but the key to understanding Jobs is that he isn't interested in the global computing market, he's interested in selling Apple products.
And at the end of the day selling all you make at a price you decide is pretty much the bottom-line definition of business success, and that's pretty much what Apple's focus is -- business success. Gaining market share, beating Wintel, etc -- that's just for fanboys and advocacy fans who only see it as a horse race.
Why is the users of these sites believe they have stumbled across some "unavoidable phenomenon"? It sounds to me like a self-justifying phenomenon (or, more precisely, a phenomenon of self-justification).
And here's the part I *don't* get -- all the comments from people saying "I don't have time to keep up with friends and family, but since I joined {Facebook/Myspace/etc} we can keep in touch and make new friends..." WTF? Maybe if you peeled your fat ass away from the computer and spent time with family and friends and maybe got involved with some activities you could make new friends.
Maybe its just Wall Street greed coupled with the myopia of 20 somethings.
Let's hope Sarkozy is smart enough not to get too caught up in any central African adventures or blow up any Greenpeace ships in third-country harbors, something his predecessors have had problems with.
A city bus is another good choice; some might switch routes from day-day, making an apparently random set of non-random patterns, as well as driving the cops bonkers if they try to tail the car based on the location data -- "we couldn't catch up, this bus kept getting in the way.."
I also like the idea of driving to the mall and putting them on someone else's car, as well as putting them on a neighbor's car, which might never get found since the car would keep returning "home".
Haha, that's so true.
What happens is these people think that there's some new miracle computer technology that magically solves their problems. When they find out that behind the shiny new Flash/JavaScript/ActiveX user interface they've really just got yet another information storage and retrieval system like their old one and making it useful requires real work by real people, they stop being interested because, heck, they could have done real work with the LAST system.
Where it gets really fun is when just enough work goes into the new thingy that the low-level office droids end up using it regularly and can't live without it BUT upgrading and maintaining it to sane levels doesn't get funded because the shiny exciting part that appeals to management is long gone.
It's *all* just another symptom of management's love of short-term/free-ride thinking. I'm surprised we don't hear more about these same people losing money to perpetual motion machines.
I took my portability one step further and put my iPod up my ass so I can shit to the beat.
The only thing thats not to love is the fact that it stores its settings in the fscking registry instead of in the same directory as the .exe. The registry method is acceptable for home destktops, I guess, but it'd be nice if it was setup as a purely portable application.
(yeah, I know about the portable apps version, which I use with USB keys, but it'd be nice to have that functionality built in)
I'm having a really hard time with the idea that you can change the cultural behavior (large families) of an entire continent in a single generation, not to mention larger basic problem of "solving" infant mortality or any other large-scale problem within the context of Africa's broken political environment.
Just today the Times had an article about Zimbabwe's largest baker running out flour because there's no foreign reserves to buy it -- Zimbabwe used to be a net exporter of food before Mugabe's disastrous campaign to redistribute farmland (ie, prop up his corrupt government by bribing idle thugs who might otherwise riot). You're going to "fix" infant mortality in a country whose LOCAL leadership is basically destroying the economy and risking famine?
And then just look at the U.S. as an example -- we've been POURING money into social welfare programs since the 1960s without *any* of the problems that Africa has and we can't "fix" our own problems with poverty, infant mortality, etc among our own poor.
And what's with all the "Iraq" comments? Africa was in trouble WAY BEFORE Iraq was even an issue; its fantasy to believe that one red cent of money spent in Iraq would have been spent on Africa anyway. It's the biggest straw man ever or just an attempt to troll someone into an unwinnable argument on Iraq policy.
WTF does that have to do with feel-good Western paternalism creating more havoc than it causes? Am I supposed to be baited into supporting US military adventures? Or some weird AIDS-isn't-our-problem response?
Here's your expected comment:
Until Africa stabilizes itself politically, improving public health feels good and makes everyone look humanitarian, but it really just creates a much larger problem involving overpopulation and ecological disaster.
I read this again just the other day in the Times -- all the feel-good Western "help" programs that "improve" the lives of Africans have largely just increased the population to the extent that there is no longer farmland that can be meaningfully subdivided in Africa, forcing people into urban areas where they live in poverty and join in whatever military coup that comes down the pike (free drugs, an AK-47 and a chance to kill your rivals).
And this is when the programs *work* -- when they don't work, all we end up doing is lining the pockets of thugs like Robert Mugabe, Daniel Arap Moi, and enabling proto-thugs like Thabo "AIDS is a conspiracy, take this folk remedy" Mbeki.
Repeat After Me: Westerns Cannot Save Africans. Only Africans can Save Africans. When Africans have a stable political system they can (easily!) solve many of these basic problems like clean water, healthcare, etc. Until then, "solving" these problems by Africans means dying by machete/mortar/7.62x39 round in political infighting instead of malaria.
And while I'm on my soap box, where are all the Westerners (generally leftists) who were so behind all the African "freedom fighters" in the 1960s and 70s? Shouldn't they be accepting some of the blame for putting into power some of these unbelievably corrupt African regimes?
(Thanks, I'll gladly repost for the next Western-geek-tech-saves-Africa article).
The SIM only provides the network authentication, it doesn't provide the radio or other cell network functionality. The SIM chip is kind of like a boot prom for a NIC, it's not enough to network enable something, you need the whole NIC.
The closest actual example are the PC/Express Cards that the wireless vendors sell that have basically all the radio function built in. Why can't I just slap one of those (or a reduced size one) into handset/PDA hardware and go?
I'll agree that I don't get the trend towards making a fcsking iPod (errm, music player) out of every bit of electronics, but I do appreciate the phone/PDA hybrid and appreciate the fact I don't need two devices.
I also appreciate the massive overlap -- a PDA is orders of magnitudes more useful if it can communicate with the internet (email, sync, etc) and a phone is orders of magnitude more useful if it organizes phone numbers and contact information. Bluetooth linking doesn't cut it and its not worth the inevitable bullshoot and reliability problems that it would come with it. I love my BT headset and mouse, but the rest of it has been more hassle than carrying an 8" USB cable in my laptop bag.
I do like the sub-sub-notebook ("paperback"?) form factor, but its not truly useful without good 3G or better networking, and phone tethering while useful doesn't cut it.
What we really need is a CF-card sized "phone module" we can move between various devices (phone, notebook, PDA, etc) that gives them network access without creating a hardware dependency (eg, the phone handset/carrier tie-in) AND a much-better-than-bluetooth wireless standard that provides more robust and higher speed connectivity.
Norway has....Norwegians, oil and diplomats.
My guess is that the manufacturers are gambling that a failed HDD won't happen until late in the game (2+ years) and most people will just buy a new machine for $600 since having it repaired out of warranty + parts + hassle factor is more "expensive" than that.
I haven't seen recovery discs in a while, at least not at the "budget" level my clients seem to want to operate at. Its almost always a recovery partition + some lame utility that will burn 1-3 ISOs to CD for you.
The "good" news is the recovery partition is live and usable (ie, you don't need to make discs to use it), the bad news is that you're fscked if you don't and the HDD goes south.
In 8th grade, we had to sneak into theaters.
Some reasonable person with diverse real-world experience and generally balanced opinions.
What a refreshing change.
You're not kidding.
I keep trying to convince my customers they'll pay me less money in the long run to do clean setups on new machines versus the time spent both uninstalling conflicting software they won't/can't use (ie, Symantec AV, PDF Complete, etc) and the problems they inevitably run into down the road when the factory installed crapware craps the machine out, requiring a clean load anyway.
I've pretty much quit gaming due to all the copy protection crap that gets installed with most modern games (and interferes with legitimate software).
Another followup to your post mentions migrating to OS X/Linux, where I guess you're less victim to this kind of nonsense, but you're still locked in (to Jobs/Apple) or dealing with a lot less functionality (Linux zealots aside).
That doesn't make sense; Microsoft allows you to buy a device to steal software (ie, a computer), why should the cable company be in the hardware business *at all*?
You kind of get the feeling they want to own the network and the devices, which I guess is an appealing idea from a monopoly standpoint.
I'm curious, though, how much money they actually make on set top boxes vs. what has to be nearly constant breakage and wear and tear.
I read a comparison/benchmark someplace (Ars? Who can remember..) that showed the E6700 only a touch better at a narrow range of applications and getting its hat handed to it on media encoding applications, so I went with the Q6600 since that accounts for my "heavy" computing.
I see MPEG-2 renders running better than real time on single pass encodes in TMPGEnc.
Depends on what you do "at home". Grandma who only sends email and orders flowers will see zero benefits.
But the rest of "normal" home users who own things like camcorders, make DVDs, rip movies, etc all see a huge benefit. I just put together a Q6600 system and couldn't be happier, but I've been a dual CPU workstation user since the PII days.
I would guess that with software radios they could do pretty much anything.
The big problem is all the incompatible networks. Sure, AT&T and T-Mobile are GSM compatible, but I would guess that there are vendor specific things about Sprint/Verizon CDMA networks that would keep an open phone from working. And even if they did, any "good" open phone would have to be GSM and CDMA compatible to really benefit from all the networks.