Yeah, there's a big difference, but real criminals don't pick locks, they just bust the door open or break a window (sometimes not even noticing that the door is unlocked!). Unless you're talking about the Watergate breakin.
It's no different than computer security, you can talk about all sorts of high-tech hacking tools, but most criminals just buy a list of credit cards or go dumpster diving. Cracking some high-powered encryption is pointless when there are much simpler ways to steal information.
Lockpicking is still used 99.9% of the time by locksmiths, because people with nefarious motives have no need to keep the lock intact.
You never watched a skilled lock picker opening a lock in 20 seconds
You never watched someone knock open a door with their shoulder. Or just break a window.
Locks are there to keep honest people honest. Making it electronic will have no effect whatsoever on whether dishonest people can break into your house.
Well, regardless of when the announcement was, it was superior in every way, so you'd think after a few years of the stupid technical limitations of Memory Stick, it wouldn have gotten through Sony's head that they really screwed up. It didn't, because they wanted their own format.
The other point I would make is that SD/MMC was superior in every way to SmartMedia (the currently reigning champion of media at the time, with CF), but Memory Stick was...not as wide. That's it -- in every other way, SmartMedia was better than Memory Stick. I was able to buy 512MB SmartMedia for years before I could buy 512 MB Memory Stick -- of course you could buy 512MB ANYTHING before you could buy a Memory Stick.
It was a lousy format, had no reason for existing past the blueprint stage, and that's the answer to the original poster's question. Sony made nice devices that used MS, I own several, but the format itself was one of the lousiest technical decisions made by a major company in the 90s.
Even with a large HDTV, and really good speakers, it would be hard to notice a quality difference.
What are you basing this on? Watching a DVD on a normal HDTV set today, and watching over the air HDTV broadcast shows a huge difference in quality (so much so that it actually feels like you're getting ripped off watching DVDs sometimes!). Moving from DVD to some form of HDDVD will be a no-brainer, once substantial numbers of people own ED/HDTV sets.
The quality difference is huge and easily noticable, completely unlike CD and SACD -- many people can't tell the difference between 160kbps MP3s and a CD original, but you'd be hard pressed to find someone who couldn't tell the difference between an image with 345,600 pixels (standard TV) and an image with 2,073,600 pixels (1080i HDTV).
And memory stick ? Why do people bitch about memory stick and not SD, or MMC or compact flash ?
Because the memory stick didn't have any advantage whatsoever over any other format, Sony only introduced it for the sole purpose of being able to control the technology. That it was hideously expensive compared to the other memory formats was just adding insult to injury for the first few years it was out. Every other memory format had some REASON for its introduction -- it was smaller, lower power, or had higher capacities.
Yeah, except that when taken too far, consistency across realms is counter-intuitive.
Witness the Quicktime player that used a volume "knob" that required rotation -- knobs are great and easy to use on physical companents, but liner sliders are much easier (both to control and judge) on-screen, whether controlled by mouse or keyboard.
Heck, witness the confusing mess of technologies that MS put out for kiosk/home threater computers and palmtops in the 90s -- they were all based on the same metaphors that the desktop systems were, which made them completely impossible to use and 1000x more complex than they needed to be. It took Palm and TiVo to show them how you build a relatively complex system without having to go through twelve menus to turn the thing off.
It's the same way that there's "no loss" if I hire you for some job and fail to pay once things are done. There's no physical loss, but you'd be pissed, I'm sure.
Um, haven't you lost time? Time is the most valuable commodity we have -- nobody is making more of it, and we all only get a certain amount before we die. We sell some of it to people to support the rest of our lives.
Loss does not require something to be tangible to be valuable or nonreplaceable.
It's the customer's responsibility to make sure their their system meets the requirements that you specify. If they don't that's their responsibility, not yours.
In Marketing-land, yes. In the real world of development, you have to deal with the irregularities of hardware and their different support for different standards, and bugs that pop up when things interact. And your company still has to have tech support people answer the phones when someone calls up with hardware that doesn't work, even though your company has nothing to do with it.
I always thought the big problem with Burnout's soundtracks were that it was CONSTANTLY restarting the songs. It might have 300+ songs for all I know, but I knew the first 30 seconds of every damn one of them and never heard a single one all the way through.
PGR was muach better about that, partly because the races were longer but also because every menu selection didn't start a whole new song.
There are a lot of more technical and professional questions already, but I'm curious about the mindset you get into when making a new game. The Civ franchise (and offshoots) is one of the most successful ever, it has almost a dozen games in it and has made your name well-known to even many casual computer gamers.
When you sit down to make a new game, how much of the previous success weighs on your mind? Do you get concerned that you have to "live up to" some set of expectations of success just because of who you are? Do you feel boxed in, that you HAVE to make certain decisions because they are "what people expect from a Sid Meier game"? Or do you do the opposite and try to find specific things that you want to do very differently, just because you know players and critics will be expecting ABC, and you want to throw a curve and deliver XYZ?
The original "bondi blue" iMac was the first computer to offer USB ports without offering "legacy" ports. That's right -- no serial ports, no ADB. This changes the network effects. Before the iMac showed up, there were many millions of PC users who had no USB ports and perhaps a couple of million who had a USB port and also legacy ports. The biggest market in 1998 was in serial and parallel ports (or joystick ports, PS/2 ports, and so on) -- there was no reason to target the USB market. That would just restrict your audience.
The iMac presented a ready-made market of users who chose the Mac line for its graphics capability. In turn, the iMac offered a captive audience of users who would buy a USB peripheral but would not buy any other kind of peripheral. These users provided a market for USB peripherals that wasn't facing competition from other port choices. The result was a flood of USB devices in white-and-blue plastic. This was a crucial turning point that created a reason (tied to a proven system choice) to prefer USB to non-USB ports.
Okay, let me get this straight. You're asserting that the peripheral USB market exploded because Apple, a 2% market share, started including USB ports on its computers?
I'm asserting that Apple was the first computer manufacturer to REQUIRE that peripherals be USB, and that in abandoning their older interfaces they solved the chicken-and-egg problem of every new technology, which gave the hardware companies the confidence that this newfangled USB stuff wouldn't sit on a shelf because nobody wanted it.
They created an instant, high-profit market for devices that manufacturers had previously been loathe to invest in, because hey, PS/2 and DB9 interfaces work fine, why risk spending money on engineering and marketing a USB version if nobody NEEDS it? The iMac came out, sold better than any other computer on Earth for several years, and lots of people were trying to buy USB floppy drives and other things -- *boom*, slap on a USB interface and your $10 floppy drive becomes a $99 peripheral.
And you're basing this on the fact that the peripherals are/were made out of plastic? That's just absurd.
Yes, that would be absurd if it were what I was saying. I'm basing it on the fact that the peripherals did not exist at all before Apple announed that their next computer wouldn't have ANYTHING but USB (and firewire) on it. The fact that all the USB devices in that huge wave were sold with translucent colored plastic only goes to prove that they were ALL designed and manufactured AFTER Apple's announcements. Since the timeline is what we're arguing about, I would think that clear evidence of which came first, the computer or the peripherals, would be important.
Apple was chasing the USB market, not the other way around.
What USB market? Until Win98SE Microsoft couldn't even get anything more advanced than a USB mouse and keyboard working simultaneously without bringing the whole system down -- forget about trying to hot-plug a hard drive on the same bus as something else! They didn't release USB "stability" updates every few months just for shits and giggles.
1) The fact that Apple wanted a cross-platform standard is evident in the fact that they developed FireWire. 2) They couldn't ignore USB because a protocol that nobody makes peripherials for (FireWire) isn't very cross-platform. 3) Apple led the FireWire parade, and nobody showed up. Hence they jumped on the USB bandwagon. If they wanted to make a protocol successful, they would have done it with FireWire, not USB.
Yes, if they had the ability to consciously control the future, they would have preferred FireWire have a greater success. But that doesn't change the fact that they were perfectly happy to have USB replace ADB. They never intended for their mice and keyboards to run over FW, just as they never intended for hard drives and scanners to run over USB.
They didn't "want to make a protocol successful" and pick USB over FW to bestow their pixie dust on, they wanted to abandon legacy interfaces to show what computers SHOULD be, and used USB AND FW, beacause they both made sense for different things. Sucks to be them, because the one they make a royalty off of didn't catch on as much as the other one.
very well may have been following the Apple design strategy, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the internal mechanisms and protocols
Following implies that Apple's design came before those devices came to market, the only point I was making. Nobody has claimed that Apple had anything to do with the internal mechanisms and protocols of USB or the devices -- just the sudden market success after years of being a "someday it will happen" interface on the PC side. MS and Intel all wanted USB to be successful, but they had no mechanism to make OEMs support it or force customers to use it. Apple had, and used, both.
I forgot to mention cost, quality, and timeliness. The same reason...
Yes, there are many reasons Apple liked USB. Again, you're arguing something nobody is disagreeing with. Everyone knows Apple wants cheaper hardware (if only so they can have a higher profit margin on it at retail).
Your original statement was that Apple grudgingly supported USB late in the game to avoid the outcry of their users, which was nonsensical, since their users had never previously expected to use PC peripherals.
In the end, they had to get onboard with USB or explain to their customers why they couldn't use most new perhiperials on the market.
That doesn't even make sense anyways. Macs used ADB for everything before USB -- Mac users had never expected to be able to use PC peripherals, why would Apple suddenly start having to explain to their customers that things would remain the way they had been for years already? Apple could have ignored USB completely if they'd so desired, and their users wouldn't have even noticed it existed. Of course, most PC users wouldn't have noticed it, either, as the only benefit we'd seen from USB before Apple got on the bandwagon is that it eliminated the problem of mixing up the mouse and keyboard PS/2 connectors when we plugged things in.
Where did anyone claim that Apple pushed USB to the exclusion of Firewire? I don't see that in any comments. Of course they wanted firewire to be the high-speed expansion mechanism. They still do, and they're still fighting an uphill battle.
What does any of that have to do with the complete dearth of decent USB peripherals on the market prior to the Apple hardware switchover? USB Mice, yes. USB hard drives, joysticks, drawing tablets, modems, printers, etc? No, no, no, no, and hell no.
The technical history of the standard is meaningless when the question is "who made USB successful?". As your own wikipedia link on USB points out, the attractiveness of finally having a single physical/electrical interface in USB that worked on both platforms is what finally made many manufacturers jump onboard, and it was Apple's iMac announcement that made it happen. It was the abysmal, buggy, and crash-prone support at the Windows OS level that made it continue to drag out for a few extra years on the PC side, not the lack of technical specs or financial backing.
You can claim it was mere coincidence that the USB explosion was all of devices in transparent colored plastic, but history has already judged otherwise.
I don't know if you were asleep for the latter half of the 90s or just too young to know anything about the computer industry at the time.
Apple single-handedly made USB successful, period. It doesn't matter who invented what, or what any specs said. Nobody was manufacturing USB peripherals, and few computer manufacturers were making systems with USB built-in. USB was a decent technology with a huge chicken and egg problem that dragged on for YEARS until one day Apple released the iMac, removed every other interface, and said from on high "Computers will now use USB".
Immediately, everyone said Apple was crazy, that nobody was making USB devices (other than mice), that it was the stupidest decision ever made in the industry. PC Pundits were laughing at yet another boneheaded decision by the dumbest computer company ever.
Within months, store shelves were filling up with USB devices now that manufacturers had a market to sell to (and one where they could charge a nice price premium, to boot!). Microsoft had to play catchup and actually start releasing USB support in patches so that Windows OSes could actually use all this cool new stuff.
Apple Made USB what it is today. Without Apple's completely unrestrained technical and marketing support of USB, we'd all be using the vastly superior FireWire today and USB would still be "that square plug for your mouse". Hmm, that wouldn't really be so bad.:(
Well, trying to still avoid the politics, I don't think many people are complaining that the gov't didn't protect them from Katrina.
What they are (mostly) complaining about is that they've paid hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes to folks in positions of gov't (like FEMA) for the specific purpose of mitigating the disastrous afteraffects of such unavoidable disasters. You're right, nothing guarantees somebody safety, but to pay someone money for the specific purpose of preparing, and see them not do a very good job of it when they finally have to step up, is infuriating.
It's similar to knowing that police have no legal responsibility to protect you -- that would be frought with unintended consequences! But that doesn't mean you would be unreasanable for getting pissed off if you called 911 and screamed that somebody is stabbing you, and have it take 3 hours for the police and ambulance to arrive. Sure, legally they can take their time, but morally (and financially!) it's reprehensible if they didn't have some even more disastrous emergency to deal with.
someone who wants terrorists to be able to bomb up whoever they want because they can't be searched
That was your comment, not mine. You're the one who was being a knee-jerk reactionist by deliberately caricaturing the views of someone else for the sole purpose of easily knocking over a straw man argument.
Nobody is claiming the police should never be able to search people, nor is there anyone who "wants terrorists to be able to bomb up whoever they want".
We just don't think it is cowardice to state publically that some searches are unreasonable, nor is it courage to think that someone with a badge is always right and should be able to do whatever they want. As usual, the truth is somewhere in-between.
How dare you play the knee-jerk reactionist card to get modded up, that's abusing the system.
"Abusing the system" because I disagreed with your silly statement on cowardice? What are you, 12?
Much of the funding for the IRA came from the US. Lots of interesting conspiracies involving the Kennedy family and lots of other powerful American politicians working "under the table" with a foreign terror group if you want to google it:)
That's simple. We think killing babies is always wrong. And killing violent criminals is sometimes okay.
You seem to hazy on what the idea of life is, then. Understand, I'm not talking about abortion -- but executing a person is pretty clearly NOT "pro-life". Calling yourself anti-abortion makes sense, but pro-life is just silly, as you clearly are in favor of forcibly ending SOME lives.
This is the opposite of the Liberal 'Pro-Choice' mob who insist that killing violent criminals is always wrong and killing babies is everyone's rightful freedom of choice.
You must have been sleeping through the last few decades of political discourse. Being pro-choice is hardly exclusive to "Liberals Mobs" or even people against the death penalty. Reagan Republicans, etc. Depending on how you phrase the question, anywhere from 30-90% of Americans believe in SOME legal access to abortion (even if only for incest/rape, which is the 90%+ end). Not surprisingly with such a large group, a lot of those people also think that killing Really Bad Criminals is also a good idea.
I think that being a coward would be someone who is scared of being searched, someone who wants terrorists to be able to bomb up whoever they want because they can't be searched.
I think someone would be a coward if they were so willing to hand over control of their daily life to the "authorities" in the vain hopes that somehow they would be protected from all danger.
It doesn't take a lot of courage to bend over in front of any authority figure who claims to be "keeping the children safe".
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Yeah, there's a big difference, but real criminals don't pick locks, they just bust the door open or break a window (sometimes not even noticing that the door is unlocked!). Unless you're talking about the Watergate breakin.
It's no different than computer security, you can talk about all sorts of high-tech hacking tools, but most criminals just buy a list of credit cards or go dumpster diving. Cracking some high-powered encryption is pointless when there are much simpler ways to steal information.
Lockpicking is still used 99.9% of the time by locksmiths, because people with nefarious motives have no need to keep the lock intact.
You never watched a skilled lock picker opening a lock in 20 seconds
You never watched someone knock open a door with their shoulder. Or just break a window.
Locks are there to keep honest people honest. Making it electronic will have no effect whatsoever on whether dishonest people can break into your house.
Well, regardless of when the announcement was, it was superior in every way, so you'd think after a few years of the stupid technical limitations of Memory Stick, it wouldn have gotten through Sony's head that they really screwed up. It didn't, because they wanted their own format.
The other point I would make is that SD/MMC was superior in every way to SmartMedia (the currently reigning champion of media at the time, with CF), but Memory Stick was...not as wide. That's it -- in every other way, SmartMedia was better than Memory Stick. I was able to buy 512MB SmartMedia for years before I could buy 512 MB Memory Stick -- of course you could buy 512MB ANYTHING before you could buy a Memory Stick.
It was a lousy format, had no reason for existing past the blueprint stage, and that's the answer to the original poster's question. Sony made nice devices that used MS, I own several, but the format itself was one of the lousiest technical decisions made by a major company in the 90s.
Even with a large HDTV, and really good speakers, it would be hard to notice a quality difference.
What are you basing this on? Watching a DVD on a normal HDTV set today, and watching over the air HDTV broadcast shows a huge difference in quality (so much so that it actually feels like you're getting ripped off watching DVDs sometimes!). Moving from DVD to some form of HDDVD will be a no-brainer, once substantial numbers of people own ED/HDTV sets.
The quality difference is huge and easily noticable, completely unlike CD and SACD -- many people can't tell the difference between 160kbps MP3s and a CD original, but you'd be hard pressed to find someone who couldn't tell the difference between an image with 345,600 pixels (standard TV) and an image with 2,073,600 pixels (1080i HDTV).
And memory stick ? Why do people bitch about memory stick and not SD, or MMC or compact flash ?
Because the memory stick didn't have any advantage whatsoever over any other format, Sony only introduced it for the sole purpose of being able to control the technology. That it was hideously expensive compared to the other memory formats was just adding insult to injury for the first few years it was out. Every other memory format had some REASON for its introduction -- it was smaller, lower power, or had higher capacities.
Yeah, except that when taken too far, consistency across realms is counter-intuitive.
Witness the Quicktime player that used a volume "knob" that required rotation -- knobs are great and easy to use on physical companents, but liner sliders are much easier (both to control and judge) on-screen, whether controlled by mouse or keyboard.
Heck, witness the confusing mess of technologies that MS put out for kiosk/home threater computers and palmtops in the 90s -- they were all based on the same metaphors that the desktop systems were, which made them completely impossible to use and 1000x more complex than they needed to be. It took Palm and TiVo to show them how you build a relatively complex system without having to go through twelve menus to turn the thing off.
That minibar is nice, and I particularly like that they note some people are "selection readers" (since I am one) and have taken them into account.
It's the same way that there's "no loss" if I hire you for some job and fail to pay once things are done. There's no physical loss, but you'd be pissed, I'm sure.
Um, haven't you lost time? Time is the most valuable commodity we have -- nobody is making more of it, and we all only get a certain amount before we die. We sell some of it to people to support the rest of our lives.
Loss does not require something to be tangible to be valuable or nonreplaceable.
It's the customer's responsibility to make sure their their system meets the requirements that you specify. If they don't that's their responsibility, not yours.
In Marketing-land, yes. In the real world of development, you have to deal with the irregularities of hardware and their different support for different standards, and bugs that pop up when things interact. And your company still has to have tech support people answer the phones when someone calls up with hardware that doesn't work, even though your company has nothing to do with it.
I always thought the big problem with Burnout's soundtracks were that it was CONSTANTLY restarting the songs. It might have 300+ songs for all I know, but I knew the first 30 seconds of every damn one of them and never heard a single one all the way through.
PGR was muach better about that, partly because the races were longer but also because every menu selection didn't start a whole new song.
No, for civil/criminal case, with prejudice means you're done forever.
I own multiple retail businesses, and when a child steals from me, I guess I "extort" the parent by saying "pay up or I'm calling the cops."
One critical difference -- do you demand the parents pay for the goods stolen, or do you demand the kid's entire college fund?
There are a lot of more technical and professional questions already, but I'm curious about the mindset you get into when making a new game. The Civ franchise (and offshoots) is one of the most successful ever, it has almost a dozen games in it and has made your name well-known to even many casual computer gamers.
When you sit down to make a new game, how much of the previous success weighs on your mind? Do you get concerned that you have to "live up to" some set of expectations of success just because of who you are? Do you feel boxed in, that you HAVE to make certain decisions because they are "what people expect from a Sid Meier game"? Or do you do the opposite and try to find specific things that you want to do very differently, just because you know players and critics will be expecting ABC, and you want to throw a curve and deliver XYZ?
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/libra
Okay, let me get this straight. You're asserting that the peripheral USB market exploded because Apple, a 2% market share, started including USB ports on its computers?
I'm asserting that Apple was the first computer manufacturer to REQUIRE that peripherals be USB, and that in abandoning their older interfaces they solved the chicken-and-egg problem of every new technology, which gave the hardware companies the confidence that this newfangled USB stuff wouldn't sit on a shelf because nobody wanted it.
They created an instant, high-profit market for devices that manufacturers had previously been loathe to invest in, because hey, PS/2 and DB9 interfaces work fine, why risk spending money on engineering and marketing a USB version if nobody NEEDS it? The iMac came out, sold better than any other computer on Earth for several years, and lots of people were trying to buy USB floppy drives and other things -- *boom*, slap on a USB interface and your $10 floppy drive becomes a $99 peripheral.
And you're basing this on the fact that the peripherals are/were made out of plastic? That's just absurd.
Yes, that would be absurd if it were what I was saying. I'm basing it on the fact that the peripherals did not exist at all before Apple announed that their next computer wouldn't have ANYTHING but USB (and firewire) on it. The fact that all the USB devices in that huge wave were sold with translucent colored plastic only goes to prove that they were ALL designed and manufactured AFTER Apple's announcements. Since the timeline is what we're arguing about, I would think that clear evidence of which came first, the computer or the peripherals, would be important.
Apple was chasing the USB market, not the other way around.
What USB market? Until Win98SE Microsoft couldn't even get anything more advanced than a USB mouse and keyboard working simultaneously without bringing the whole system down -- forget about trying to hot-plug a hard drive on the same bus as something else! They didn't release USB "stability" updates every few months just for shits and giggles.
1) The fact that Apple wanted a cross-platform standard is evident in the fact that they developed FireWire.
2) They couldn't ignore USB because a protocol that nobody makes peripherials for (FireWire) isn't very cross-platform.
3) Apple led the FireWire parade, and nobody showed up. Hence they jumped on the USB bandwagon.
If they wanted to make a protocol successful, they would have done it with FireWire, not USB.
Yes, if they had the ability to consciously control the future, they would have preferred FireWire have a greater success. But that doesn't change the fact that they were perfectly happy to have USB replace ADB. They never intended for their mice and keyboards to run over FW, just as they never intended for hard drives and scanners to run over USB.
They didn't "want to make a protocol successful" and pick USB over FW to bestow their pixie dust on, they wanted to abandon legacy interfaces to show what computers SHOULD be, and used USB AND FW, beacause they both made sense for different things. Sucks to be them, because the one they make a royalty off of didn't catch on as much as the other one.
very well may have been following the Apple design strategy, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the internal mechanisms and protocols
Following implies that Apple's design came before those devices came to market, the only point I was making. Nobody has claimed that Apple had anything to do with the internal mechanisms and protocols of USB or the devices -- just the sudden market success after years of being a "someday it will happen" interface on the PC side. MS and Intel all wanted USB to be successful, but they had no mechanism to make OEMs support it or force customers to use it. Apple had, and used, both.
I forgot to mention cost, quality, and timeliness. The same reason...
Yes, there are many reasons Apple liked USB. Again, you're arguing something nobody is disagreeing with. Everyone knows Apple wants cheaper hardware (if only so they can have a higher profit margin on it at retail).
Your original statement was that Apple grudgingly supported USB late in the game to avoid the outcry of their users, which was nonsensical, since their users had never previously expected to use PC peripherals.
In the end, they had to get onboard with USB or explain to their customers why they couldn't use most new perhiperials on the market.
That doesn't even make sense anyways. Macs used ADB for everything before USB -- Mac users had never expected to be able to use PC peripherals, why would Apple suddenly start having to explain to their customers that things would remain the way they had been for years already? Apple could have ignored USB completely if they'd so desired, and their users wouldn't have even noticed it existed. Of course, most PC users wouldn't have noticed it, either, as the only benefit we'd seen from USB before Apple got on the bandwagon is that it eliminated the problem of mixing up the mouse and keyboard PS/2 connectors when we plugged things in.
Where did anyone claim that Apple pushed USB to the exclusion of Firewire? I don't see that in any comments. Of course they wanted firewire to be the high-speed expansion mechanism. They still do, and they're still fighting an uphill battle.
What does any of that have to do with the complete dearth of decent USB peripherals on the market prior to the Apple hardware switchover? USB Mice, yes. USB hard drives, joysticks, drawing tablets, modems, printers, etc? No, no, no, no, and hell no.
The technical history of the standard is meaningless when the question is "who made USB successful?". As your own wikipedia link on USB points out, the attractiveness of finally having a single physical/electrical interface in USB that worked on both platforms is what finally made many manufacturers jump onboard, and it was Apple's iMac announcement that made it happen. It was the abysmal, buggy, and crash-prone support at the Windows OS level that made it continue to drag out for a few extra years on the PC side, not the lack of technical specs or financial backing.
You can claim it was mere coincidence that the USB explosion was all of devices in transparent colored plastic, but history has already judged otherwise.
Well, hey, I hate to let historical market facts get in the way of your silly generalizations.
I don't know if you were asleep for the latter half of the 90s or just too young to know anything about the computer industry at the time.
:(
Apple single-handedly made USB successful, period. It doesn't matter who invented what, or what any specs said. Nobody was manufacturing USB peripherals, and few computer manufacturers were making systems with USB built-in. USB was a decent technology with a huge chicken and egg problem that dragged on for YEARS until one day Apple released the iMac, removed every other interface, and said from on high "Computers will now use USB".
Immediately, everyone said Apple was crazy, that nobody was making USB devices (other than mice), that it was the stupidest decision ever made in the industry. PC Pundits were laughing at yet another boneheaded decision by the dumbest computer company ever.
Within months, store shelves were filling up with USB devices now that manufacturers had a market to sell to (and one where they could charge a nice price premium, to boot!). Microsoft had to play catchup and actually start releasing USB support in patches so that Windows OSes could actually use all this cool new stuff.
Apple Made USB what it is today. Without Apple's completely unrestrained technical and marketing support of USB, we'd all be using the vastly superior FireWire today and USB would still be "that square plug for your mouse". Hmm, that wouldn't really be so bad.
Well, trying to still avoid the politics, I don't think many people are complaining that the gov't didn't protect them from Katrina.
What they are (mostly) complaining about is that they've paid hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes to folks in positions of gov't (like FEMA) for the specific purpose of mitigating the disastrous afteraffects of such unavoidable disasters. You're right, nothing guarantees somebody safety, but to pay someone money for the specific purpose of preparing, and see them not do a very good job of it when they finally have to step up, is infuriating.
It's similar to knowing that police have no legal responsibility to protect you -- that would be frought with unintended consequences! But that doesn't mean you would be unreasanable for getting pissed off if you called 911 and screamed that somebody is stabbing you, and have it take 3 hours for the police and ambulance to arrive. Sure, legally they can take their time, but morally (and financially!) it's reprehensible if they didn't have some even more disastrous emergency to deal with.
someone who wants terrorists to be able to bomb up whoever they want because they can't be searched
That was your comment, not mine. You're the one who was being a knee-jerk reactionist by deliberately caricaturing the views of someone else for the sole purpose of easily knocking over a straw man argument.
Nobody is claiming the police should never be able to search people, nor is there anyone who "wants terrorists to be able to bomb up whoever they want".
We just don't think it is cowardice to state publically that some searches are unreasonable, nor is it courage to think that someone with a badge is always right and should be able to do whatever they want. As usual, the truth is somewhere in-between.
How dare you play the knee-jerk reactionist card to get modded up, that's abusing the system.
"Abusing the system" because I disagreed with your silly statement on cowardice? What are you, 12?
Much of the funding for the IRA came from the US. Lots of interesting conspiracies involving the Kennedy family and lots of other powerful American politicians working "under the table" with a foreign terror group if you want to google it :)
That's simple. We think killing babies is always wrong. And killing violent criminals is sometimes okay.
You seem to hazy on what the idea of life is, then. Understand, I'm not talking about abortion -- but executing a person is pretty clearly NOT "pro-life". Calling yourself anti-abortion makes sense, but pro-life is just silly, as you clearly are in favor of forcibly ending SOME lives.
This is the opposite of the Liberal 'Pro-Choice' mob who insist that killing violent criminals is always wrong and killing babies is everyone's rightful freedom of choice.
You must have been sleeping through the last few decades of political discourse. Being pro-choice is hardly exclusive to "Liberals Mobs" or even people against the death penalty. Reagan Republicans, etc. Depending on how you phrase the question, anywhere from 30-90% of Americans believe in SOME legal access to abortion (even if only for incest/rape, which is the 90%+ end). Not surprisingly with such a large group, a lot of those people also think that killing Really Bad Criminals is also a good idea.
I think that being a coward would be someone who is scared of being searched, someone who wants terrorists to be able to bomb up whoever they want because they can't be searched.
I think someone would be a coward if they were so willing to hand over control of their daily life to the "authorities" in the vain hopes that somehow they would be protected from all danger.
It doesn't take a lot of courage to bend over in front of any authority figure who claims to be "keeping the children safe".