I thought that '040 was all-around competitive with PPC until much later in the Apple product cycle, primarily due to the dependence on 68k code in the OS.
This was from a work-and-feel mindset. Once everything was all PPC based, '040 ceased to be competitive, but it wasn't until far too late in the product cycle.
I always thought Apple would have been in a better place if they had focused a lot more on making MacOS available in 100% PPC version at the time they released PPC machines.
If using a PPC had actually been much faster than an '040, PPC would have had more momentum, especially as the clocks ramped up. As it was, it didn't seem like you got ahead with PPC until way later in the game.
One of the things that made "Star Wars" such a challenge at the time was hardware. Look at what people were running in those days -- ISA, VLB, EISA, Microchannel. Zero if any hardware autoconfiguration or even autoconfiguration standards. ISA PnP and PCI were maybe on the drawing board but nowhere near reality at that time.
Apple had NuBus which was pretty slick in comparison to the lame bus standards on the PC.
I think PC hardware has come a long way since then to being OS friendly, but at the time it would have been a nightmare for Apple to support PC hardware and I can see why they didn't pursue it. It'd be amusing to see it up and running all the same.
It looks like business wins out over the quest for knowledge once again.
I symphathize with you, but I think its kind of unrealistic to expect valuable tech (and I don't mean just this one) to go unused because a very small group wants to do some pretty abstract science. It'd be one thing if we were holding a conversation with another galaxy and deploying a new tech would stop it, it's quite another for basic sciences which has no short term payoff.
In Texas, not having an A/C on a hot day kills older folks.
How is having your A/C *compressor* turned off for approximately 15-20 minutes once in a while the same as not having A/C? In a typical forced-air system you still have an internal blower which is not regulated this way which is still blowing past the still-cold condensor coil. For the period of the shutoff this provides some added cooling, and the air circulation provided by the blower prevents that dead air sensation.
Regardless, they seldom use the cutoff capability except when demand is high, and demand isn't very high except when the temperatures are like those in Texas, so the impact here is no different than it would be in Texas.
All in all, it's like any other bargain -- if the gain wasn't worth the pain, I wouldn't bother.
The most disturbing part of the story is that they claim deleting commercials is violating the copyright.
It kind of is breaking the deal, isn't it? I mean, "We agree to broadcast this program, you agree to watch the commercials." I know, its not entirely enforceable -- you can run to the fridge, hit mute, hit FF or hit "Skip:30" (or whatever the Tivo button is), but for the vast majority of people watching realtime or on VCRs it is enforceable -- they watch most commercials or at least see them briefly as they zip past*.
A "paradigm shift" of everyone watching all their shows on PVR would kind of be a something for nothing deal, eliminating the financial value of the commercials and the production revenue stream.
I think its total paranoia to think that this paradigm shift will happen. Most people are two fsck'n stupid to run anything more complicated than a microwave, and even most of them can't set the clock on them.
*Offtopic UL: In the late 80s major advertisers began to test their commercials for effectiveness at VCR "scan" speeds in addition to the usual testing done at realtime speeds. Commercials with too many jump cuts or too few still shots were required to be recut to make sense at high speed.
Alienation is a personal value, not a business value, and typically doesn't matter in most business situations. There *may* be a place for it in personal relationships tangental to business (ie, salesman/customer).
But I don't think that Microsoft the company is ever alienated. Certain people within Microsoft may allow themselves to be manipulated into feeling this way, but the smart ones remember that the goal is making a profit, and as long as you do well at that personal emotions don't count for much.
Futurists are full of crap. They've been predicting a techno utopia where technology actually breaks ahead of itself and solves problems that it created.
Instead what we end up with a distopia that looks more like "Blade Runner" and less like "The Jetsons".
But what if this "feature" was included whether you wanted it or not? It would not be as popular...
I only do it because I get discounted electricity and because it happens when I'm not home. If it was a manditory 24x7 thing to combat electricity shortages, I'd be unhappy -- we're talking my air conditioning here, fer chrissakes.
I would do it for other incentives though -- if they were giving out 5KVa utility-provided UPS systems or something I'd consider it as well.
Shutting down services on your panel selectivly MY ASS.
Its not that bad, really - Xcel Energy in Minnesota has a summertime power saver option which is basically a box that attaches to your central AC compressor power tap and control line. It listens for a "shut off" signal from the power company and cuts the control line which actually switches the compressor.
The advantage is they promise a minimum amount of downtime (like 15-20 minutes per) and only during peak energy hours (8-5 or something). I've been home when they've done this and unless its the hottest day of the year (high humidity, lots of sun) you don't even notice -- the blower on your AC keeps running inside air past the condensor coil, so it feels "on" even though its not. I've heard some people say that notice a slight uptick in internal temperature, but I haven't.
The major bonus is a 15% discount on ALL electrical power for the summer months. That's like getting free AC as infrequently as I use it, or an excuse to run it twice as often for the same money.
It'd suck to have your dryer or something else shut down at random, but AC during the day is not a big deal, trust me.
Re:Why does google get a slashdot-patent-pass?
on
Google's Search Appliance
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Because they don't do evil or annoying things. That isn't a tremendous excuse, but it just works in practice. No intrusive ads, performance is always great for a free service, etc.
Tremendous excuse? I'd say its a future model for all businesses.
Forget the tedious absolutism of the neosocialists -- that model will never be implemented anywhere (except at the barrel of a gun), and anyone who won't be happy until they get there will never be satisified. However, a company that does a good job at what they do and produces something that they can either give away or appear to give away something without doing the annoying, evil greedy things that other companies do should be the benchmark.
For example, Mercedes Benz -- what if they still sold their really expensive cars to rich guys who would pay for them BUT they would also sell a car that went 200,000 miles without major service for $10k?
I think the list goes on -- subsidize basic, honest products and services with expensive stuff that others are willing and able to pay for. It makes you a saint. I don't see why so many other businesses hold onto the "rape everyone" philosophy.
Those with ambition and drive will ultimately leave plodders like yourself in the dust.
The wheel turns, but in corporate America/internal IT it turns REALLY slowly. Pace of change and decision making aren't fast, get it done yesterday, and I think a lot of people who are turned on by that don't last long in internal IT jobs because things don't change fast enough for them (management doesn't care enough to make the HR system a big priority and you keep fixing the old one) or the work is just too boring (migrating users from one platform to another).
And I think there were a lot of people who went for dot-coms not because they were interested in technology, but because they liked playing with computers and the dot-com lifestyle as portrayed on TV. The working reality at most businesses is much more "Office Space" than these people can put up with. Ambition and drive are often bested by perseverence and patience.
Dull old internal IT vs dot-bomb
on
The Laid-off Techie
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Here, here, I agree!
I took a slightly different (and slightly more profitable, in the short run at least) tack. I stuck with a dull internal IT network management job. We're about as far as you can get from high-tech, dot-com, but I've managed to keep my hands involved on internet tech and UNIX (Linux, FreeBSD) in addition to the typical Windows stuff, whiny end users, and so on.
I *did* have a state University job before I came here, and I kind of regret not getting a full lifecycle on that gravy train. 25 year retirement w/full bennies sounds awesome. But when I had that job, I felt kind of trapped -- the money absolutely *sucked* relative to my living expenses. And too many people I worked with said "private industry while they'll still take you", since they felt that too long in a state job meant weak private industry hiring prospects. Glad I made the switch -- a slight reduction in security for a definite increase in earnings..
I always felt a touch jealous of the dot-com people, the money they were making and the whole dot-com lifestyle. Now that these people are delivering my interoffice mail or whatever, I don't feel so bad anymore.
You would think so. FreeBSD's natd can rewrite to a specific address rather than the named address, but there was nothing in my cursory inspection that said it could do so when operating in pure bridged mode.
Indeed, what if kernel modules were added to handle non-firewalling tasks instead? Could a kernel module provide a useful network service? You start the machine up, it loads the kernel and "halts" but still provides the service. Something goes wrong? Just power cycle; there's no disk access, no way for an attack or malfunction to make a persistant alteration in the machine.
I almost never rent movies when I return them. Usually returning them is a job performed when I'm making a trip elsewhere. Of the two closest video stores to my house, one has a drop box in the parking lot (you don't even have to get out of the car) and one has a slot in the front of the building (you don't even have to go in).
I think this combination of errands routine is pretty common, and cuts into the claims of fewer trips. Also, both stores are within walking distance from my house, meaning even special trips to/from can be done on foot. Probably also common in many urban areas.
It would only work if you could get Nielsen/Arbitron to agree that the collected demographics were valid and use them in determining shares for the shows. If they won't do that, then it won't work. Low share numbers = low ad value. If you are pulling a 4 share in reality (TV + web) but you only get compensated for your TV-only 3 share, how is this any advantage to the affiliate? They want people to always watch when they broadcast it to increase their share numbers so they can charge more for the overall advertising space.
Even worse, they may see their TV-only share *drop* which causes them a loss in revenue.
If you can get the share number people to buy into self-reported demographics (good luck!) then it would work since the spots would be sold to advertisers for the full (TV+web) share.
I'm sure there's a revenue sharing model that would work, but I don't think eroding local shares is the answer.
It's a clever idea, but the affiliates also make money off the shows.
Example: A certain number of spots are reserved for the local affiliates, who sell them to whoever, often its local businesses like the car dealership. There are some businesses that actually go around buying local time in large regions for regional products or for companies that want to be more discriminating about their media buys.
Anyway, the point is that UPN couldn't stream the content to end users without pissing off affiliates -- this is part of the reason that its taken so long to get networks on satellite dishes and why you can't get, say, LA affiliates if you live in Minnesota.
They may be able to do something that compensates the local affiliate for the spot views they lose, but it'd be complex math as the value of the spot time is directly related to the Nielsen/Arbitron numbers they get for that show. Ideally they would just show you the local spots, but that would be really complicated (insuring that all stations sent digital versions of their local spots for merging into the stream, etc). Another way may be to do a national spot and divide the revenue by the number of local station regions that had streamed viewers.
Let's pretend the RIAA did adopt a Doom-type shareware business model and that it was successful (ie, they generated profitable sales). After sales had plateaued, the RIAA business leaders would become hopelessly obsessed with the business demands for increased "growth" in profits and would seize the idea of capturing the "lost" sales that were downloaded but didn't lead to a purchase. They would come up with a way to eliminate or corrupt the shareware component (encryption, standards compromises, etc etc).
As it stands now, the RIAA is *already* obsessed with the idea of capturing sales "lost" to piracy/home taping/sharing/RIPs/etc, which is why they're so eager to try copy protecting CDs, embracing encryption/limited use and so on. Their goal is to get a percentage of every recorded musical experience people have.
The Business Software people are kind of the same way -- they're obsessed with 'piracy' as lost retail sales, at least in public. In private they probably acknowledge they cannot reclaim more than 20% of these sales since they're products that people simply wouldn't purchase at their retail prices but will use for free.
The RIAA, on the other hand, looks at ALL recording use they weren't paid directly for as a potential lost sale and this is what will never allow them to give anything away.
Apple's tower design is OK, but I think that they could have done the external drive bays more conveniently. I think there's one too many screws or not enough room for getting at the power/audio/IDE connectors because of the PSU, or something.
The big name PCs at work seem to be able to pop the drive without screws (the attached rails have them, natch, but don't have to be screwed in the case) and there's loads of room in the case behnd the drives for getting at cables.
The mainboards are often obfuscated, but the DRAM slots aren't and that's all you normally tweak on a mainboard unless you're an overclocker and then you got it mounted on plywood...
I've personally noticed that pop music has hitten a real low in the last few years -- and I really think I'm being somewhat objective in this, not just square and living in the past. Pop music is being recycled longer, and bands aren't being cycled in as fast. Even three or four years ago it seemed considerably better than now.
I'd agree completely, but I wonder if its a function of the music industry per se or a function of the lack of a "new thing" generally in popular music. One of the last great upswings in popular music was "alternative"* and that phenomenon seems to have been completely played out -- there's nothing left there that doesn't feel like its been done before by someone else. There's still good bands, but the overall feeling is that they've been there, done that and they aren't charting new areas anymore.
It took the record companies *years* to realize that the "classic rock" trend of the late 60s and early 70s was dead and that "new" artists of the alternative vein should be picked up on. How long were radio stations in many places only playing 70s hard rock? Until the late 80s/early 90s?
I think we're at that same point with alternative -- the record companies don't have an idea what the next big thing is, and I don't think the new zeitgeist has been found yet. The question is, is it because the Media Machine, in coopting alternative scenes so quickly, has squelched them to the point they can incubate anything new? Or are we just in the end days of the alternative scenes and they have to die completely before we can find anything new?
(* Yes, I realize that anal-retentive music categorization goes far beyond that label, but for my purposes its a broad category.)
There was an article in the Minneapolis paper a few years ago (when even ISDN availability in big cities was sketchy) about how advanced many small towns and rural communities were in terms of telecomm infrastructure. One of the examples given was a 2 or 3 location drugstore business that had high speed data connectivity between all the stores for inventory, POS and billing systems at a rate a small-town business could afford.
The reason? Small-time telcos didn't have the big-time infrastructure, economics and profitability issues that big time telcos did in providing services like this. There are some economic constraints (probably cost-prohibitive to extend a lot of technologies to dwellings outside of towns), but the local guys could react and add services much faster than the big boys.
Makes me wonder what would happen if you could buy a telco exchange in a populated area from a major carrier and make it a stand-alone phone company. You could potentially offer newer services because you weren't having to overcome the central infrastructure inertia that the big ILECs have to deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
Did the baloons lift her up and carry her off to neverneverland? Is she still a known figure in German/European popular culture?
I thought that '040 was all-around competitive with PPC until much later in the Apple product cycle, primarily due to the dependence on 68k code in the OS.
This was from a work-and-feel mindset. Once everything was all PPC based, '040 ceased to be competitive, but it wasn't until far too late in the product cycle.
I always thought Apple would have been in a better place if they had focused a lot more on making MacOS available in 100% PPC version at the time they released PPC machines.
If using a PPC had actually been much faster than an '040, PPC would have had more momentum, especially as the clocks ramped up. As it was, it didn't seem like you got ahead with PPC until way later in the game.
Disks are free, storage is not.
We still do this, just to keep the mail system managable. Without it, everyone keeps everying for a really long time.
One of the things that made "Star Wars" such a challenge at the time was hardware. Look at what people were running in those days -- ISA, VLB, EISA, Microchannel. Zero if any hardware autoconfiguration or even autoconfiguration standards. ISA PnP and PCI were maybe on the drawing board but nowhere near reality at that time.
Apple had NuBus which was pretty slick in comparison to the lame bus standards on the PC.
I think PC hardware has come a long way since then to being OS friendly, but at the time it would have been a nightmare for Apple to support PC hardware and I can see why they didn't pursue it. It'd be amusing to see it up and running all the same.
It looks like business wins out over the quest for knowledge once again.
I symphathize with you, but I think its kind of unrealistic to expect valuable tech (and I don't mean just this one) to go unused because a very small group wants to do some pretty abstract science. It'd be one thing if we were holding a conversation with another galaxy and deploying a new tech would stop it, it's quite another for basic sciences which has no short term payoff.
In Texas, not having an A/C on a hot day kills older folks.
How is having your A/C *compressor* turned off for approximately 15-20 minutes once in a while the same as not having A/C? In a typical forced-air system you still have an internal blower which is not regulated this way which is still blowing past the still-cold condensor coil. For the period of the shutoff this provides some added cooling, and the air circulation provided by the blower prevents that dead air sensation.
Regardless, they seldom use the cutoff capability except when demand is high, and demand isn't very high except when the temperatures are like those in Texas, so the impact here is no different than it would be in Texas.
All in all, it's like any other bargain -- if the gain wasn't worth the pain, I wouldn't bother.
The most disturbing part of the story is that they claim deleting commercials is violating the copyright.
It kind of is breaking the deal, isn't it? I mean, "We agree to broadcast this program, you agree to watch the commercials." I know, its not entirely enforceable -- you can run to the fridge, hit mute, hit FF or hit "Skip:30" (or whatever the Tivo button is), but for the vast majority of people watching realtime or on VCRs it is enforceable -- they watch most commercials or at least see them briefly as they zip past*.
A "paradigm shift" of everyone watching all their shows on PVR would kind of be a something for nothing deal, eliminating the financial value of the commercials and the production revenue stream.
I think its total paranoia to think that this paradigm shift will happen. Most people are two fsck'n stupid to run anything more complicated than a microwave, and even most of them can't set the clock on them.
*Offtopic UL:
In the late 80s major advertisers began to test their commercials for effectiveness at VCR "scan" speeds in addition to the usual testing done at realtime speeds. Commercials with too many jump cuts or too few still shots were required to be recut to make sense at high speed.
Alienation is a personal value, not a business value, and typically doesn't matter in most business situations. There *may* be a place for it in personal relationships tangental to business (ie, salesman/customer).
But I don't think that Microsoft the company is ever alienated. Certain people within Microsoft may allow themselves to be manipulated into feeling this way, but the smart ones remember that the goal is making a profit, and as long as you do well at that personal emotions don't count for much.
Futurists are full of crap. They've been predicting a techno utopia where technology actually breaks ahead of itself and solves problems that it created.
Instead what we end up with a distopia that looks more like "Blade Runner" and less like "The Jetsons".
But what if this "feature" was included whether you wanted it or not? It would not be as popular...
I only do it because I get discounted electricity and because it happens when I'm not home. If it was a manditory 24x7 thing to combat electricity shortages, I'd be unhappy -- we're talking my air conditioning here, fer chrissakes.
I would do it for other incentives though -- if they were giving out 5KVa utility-provided UPS systems or something I'd consider it as well.
Shutting down services on your panel selectivly MY ASS.
Its not that bad, really - Xcel Energy in Minnesota has a summertime power saver option which is basically a box that attaches to your central AC compressor power tap and control line. It listens for a "shut off" signal from the power company and cuts the control line which actually switches the compressor.
The advantage is they promise a minimum amount of downtime (like 15-20 minutes per) and only during peak energy hours (8-5 or something). I've been home when they've done this and unless its the hottest day of the year (high humidity, lots of sun) you don't even notice -- the blower on your AC keeps running inside air past the condensor coil, so it feels "on" even though its not. I've heard some people say that notice a slight uptick in internal temperature, but I haven't.
The major bonus is a 15% discount on ALL electrical power for the summer months. That's like getting free AC as infrequently as I use it, or an excuse to run it twice as often for the same money.
It'd suck to have your dryer or something else shut down at random, but AC during the day is not a big deal, trust me.
Because they don't do evil or annoying things. That isn't a tremendous excuse, but it just works in practice. No intrusive ads, performance is always great for a free service, etc.
Tremendous excuse? I'd say its a future model for all businesses.
Forget the tedious absolutism of the neosocialists -- that model will never be implemented anywhere (except at the barrel of a gun), and anyone who won't be happy until they get there will never be satisified. However, a company that does a good job at what they do and produces something that they can either give away or appear to give away something without doing the annoying, evil greedy things that other companies do should be the benchmark.
For example, Mercedes Benz -- what if they still sold their really expensive cars to rich guys who would pay for them BUT they would also sell a car that went 200,000 miles without major service for $10k?
I think the list goes on -- subsidize basic, honest products and services with expensive stuff that others are willing and able to pay for. It makes you a saint. I don't see why so many other businesses hold onto the "rape everyone" philosophy.
The wheel will turn my friend.
Those with ambition and drive will ultimately leave plodders like yourself in the dust.
The wheel turns, but in corporate America/internal IT it turns REALLY slowly. Pace of change and decision making aren't fast, get it done yesterday, and I think a lot of people who are turned on by that don't last long in internal IT jobs because things don't change fast enough for them (management doesn't care enough to make the HR system a big priority and you keep fixing the old one) or the work is just too boring (migrating users from one platform to another).
And I think there were a lot of people who went for dot-coms not because they were interested in technology, but because they liked playing with computers and the dot-com lifestyle as portrayed on TV. The working reality at most businesses is much more "Office Space" than these people can put up with. Ambition and drive are often bested by perseverence and patience.
Here, here, I agree!
I took a slightly different (and slightly more profitable, in the short run at least) tack. I stuck with a dull internal IT network management job. We're about as far as you can get from high-tech, dot-com, but I've managed to keep my hands involved on internet tech and UNIX (Linux, FreeBSD) in addition to the typical Windows stuff, whiny end users, and so on.
I *did* have a state University job before I came here, and I kind of regret not getting a full lifecycle on that gravy train. 25 year retirement w/full bennies sounds awesome. But when I had that job, I felt kind of trapped -- the money absolutely *sucked* relative to my living expenses. And too many people I worked with said "private industry while they'll still take you", since they felt that too long in a state job meant weak private industry hiring prospects. Glad I made the switch -- a slight reduction in security for a definite increase in earnings..
I always felt a touch jealous of the dot-com people, the money they were making and the whole dot-com lifestyle. Now that these people are delivering my interoffice mail or whatever, I don't feel so bad anymore.
You would think so. FreeBSD's natd can rewrite to a specific address rather than the named address, but there was nothing in my cursory inspection that said it could do so when operating in pure bridged mode.
Indeed, what if kernel modules were added to handle non-firewalling tasks instead? Could a kernel module provide a useful network service? You start the machine up, it loads the kernel and "halts" but still provides the service. Something goes wrong? Just power cycle; there's no disk access, no way for an attack or malfunction to make a persistant alteration in the machine.
I think you just reinvented the embedded system.
I almost never rent movies when I return them. Usually returning them is a job performed when I'm making a trip elsewhere. Of the two closest video stores to my house, one has a drop box in the parking lot (you don't even have to get out of the car) and one has a slot in the front of the building (you don't even have to go in).
I think this combination of errands routine is pretty common, and cuts into the claims of fewer trips. Also, both stores are within walking distance from my house, meaning even special trips to/from can be done on foot. Probably also common in many urban areas.
c/GPS/GEForce/
c/On-board video/21" Display/
c/IP Network/Low-Ping Only/
c/JSTARS/GameSpy/
Wow, sounds like my free time already...
It would only work if you could get Nielsen/Arbitron to agree that the collected demographics were valid and use them in determining shares for the shows. If they won't do that, then it won't work. Low share numbers = low ad value. If you are pulling a 4 share in reality (TV + web) but you only get compensated for your TV-only 3 share, how is this any advantage to the affiliate? They want people to always watch when they broadcast it to increase their share numbers so they can charge more for the overall advertising space.
Even worse, they may see their TV-only share *drop* which causes them a loss in revenue.
If you can get the share number people to buy into self-reported demographics (good luck!) then it would work since the spots would be sold to advertisers for the full (TV+web) share.
I'm sure there's a revenue sharing model that would work, but I don't think eroding local shares is the answer.
It's a clever idea, but the affiliates also make money off the shows.
Example: A certain number of spots are reserved for the local affiliates, who sell them to whoever, often its local businesses like the car dealership. There are some businesses that actually go around buying local time in large regions for regional products or for companies that want to be more discriminating about their media buys.
Anyway, the point is that UPN couldn't stream the content to end users without pissing off affiliates -- this is part of the reason that its taken so long to get networks on satellite dishes and why you can't get, say, LA affiliates if you live in Minnesota.
They may be able to do something that compensates the local affiliate for the spot views they lose, but it'd be complex math as the value of the spot time is directly related to the Nielsen/Arbitron numbers they get for that show. Ideally they would just show you the local spots, but that would be really complicated (insuring that all stations sent digital versions of their local spots for merging into the stream, etc). Another way may be to do a national spot and divide the revenue by the number of local station regions that had streamed viewers.
Let's pretend the RIAA did adopt a Doom-type shareware business model and that it was successful (ie, they generated profitable sales). After sales had plateaued, the RIAA business leaders would become hopelessly obsessed with the business demands for increased "growth" in profits and would seize the idea of capturing the "lost" sales that were downloaded but didn't lead to a purchase. They would come up with a way to eliminate or corrupt the shareware component (encryption, standards compromises, etc etc).
As it stands now, the RIAA is *already* obsessed with the idea of capturing sales "lost" to piracy/home taping/sharing/RIPs/etc, which is why they're so eager to try copy protecting CDs, embracing encryption/limited use and so on. Their goal is to get a percentage of every recorded musical experience people have.
The Business Software people are kind of the same way -- they're obsessed with 'piracy' as lost retail sales, at least in public. In private they probably acknowledge they cannot reclaim more than 20% of these sales since they're products that people simply wouldn't purchase at their retail prices but will use for free.
The RIAA, on the other hand, looks at ALL recording use they weren't paid directly for as a potential lost sale and this is what will never allow them to give anything away.
Apple's tower design is OK, but I think that they could have done the external drive bays more conveniently. I think there's one too many screws or not enough room for getting at the power/audio/IDE connectors because of the PSU, or something.
The big name PCs at work seem to be able to pop the drive without screws (the attached rails have them, natch, but don't have to be screwed in the case) and there's loads of room in the case behnd the drives for getting at cables.
The mainboards are often obfuscated, but the DRAM slots aren't and that's all you normally tweak on a mainboard unless you're an overclocker and then you got it mounted on plywood...
I've personally noticed that pop music has hitten a real low in the last few years -- and I really think I'm being somewhat objective in this, not just square and living in the past. Pop music is being recycled longer, and bands aren't being cycled in as fast. Even three or four years ago it seemed considerably better than now.
I'd agree completely, but I wonder if its a function of the music industry per se or a function of the lack of a "new thing" generally in popular music. One of the last great upswings in popular music was "alternative"* and that phenomenon seems to have been completely played out -- there's nothing left there that doesn't feel like its been done before by someone else. There's still good bands, but the overall feeling is that they've been there, done that and they aren't charting new areas anymore.
It took the record companies *years* to realize that the "classic rock" trend of the late 60s and early 70s was dead and that "new" artists of the alternative vein should be picked up on. How long were radio stations in many places only playing 70s hard rock? Until the late 80s/early 90s?
I think we're at that same point with alternative -- the record companies don't have an idea what the next big thing is, and I don't think the new zeitgeist has been found yet. The question is, is it because the Media Machine, in coopting alternative scenes so quickly, has squelched them to the point they can incubate anything new? Or are we just in the end days of the alternative scenes and they have to die completely before we can find anything new?
(* Yes, I realize that anal-retentive music categorization goes far beyond that label, but for my purposes its a broad category.)
There was an article in the Minneapolis paper a few years ago (when even ISDN availability in big cities was sketchy) about how advanced many small towns and rural communities were in terms of telecomm infrastructure. One of the examples given was a 2 or 3 location drugstore business that had high speed data connectivity between all the stores for inventory, POS and billing systems at a rate a small-town business could afford.
The reason? Small-time telcos didn't have the big-time infrastructure, economics and profitability issues that big time telcos did in providing services like this. There are some economic constraints (probably cost-prohibitive to extend a lot of technologies to dwellings outside of towns), but the local guys could react and add services much faster than the big boys.
Makes me wonder what would happen if you could buy a telco exchange in a populated area from a major carrier and make it a stand-alone phone company. You could potentially offer newer services because you weren't having to overcome the central infrastructure inertia that the big ILECs have to deal with.