Better get used to having your goat got. The practice of tacking silly little fees onto monthly bills seems to be common practice. Started with credit card companies, but now it seems to be spreading. Sometimes they don't even have an excuse like "service change". Just throw a "field upgrade fee" or "klatu barata nikto charge" on the bill, reverse for the 10% of customers who bother to complain, and presto! another $1 million to your bottom line.
The "Sharper Image" (glossy, overpriced, not particularly original) theme doesn't come from Japan. It comes from the poor PCWorld writer, tasked to create yet another "top 10" list, and straining to find stuff to fit on it.
The big name web sites seem to be on a "top 10 binge" lately. I guess it's an easy way to fill up space and provoke reader interest. It's getting old, though.
Less customization is never going to make a punter go "oh, I'll buy that because it's not as customizable". True. But how many people buy computers because they're customizable? Computers have become commodity items. Corporate buyers (where most of the profits are) buy hundreds or thousands of identical systems. Consumers buy based on advertising, word of mouth and branding. A few geeks buy custom-built systems, but how much money does Dell make off them?
I work for one of Dell's competitors, and I've always been a little surprised that Dell still builds its own systems. If we had to go back to doing that, we'd be out of business in a week. It's expensive. Part of it is lower offshore labor costs (though some of the companies we outsource to actually have their factories in the U. S.) but it's mainly a matter of specialization.
To make a profit selling computers you have to grab market share and control costs. Getting out of the custom build business wont have much effect on Dell's market share, but it will lower their costs. Lower costs = higher profits + happier investors.
Companies often do stupid things to tweak their costs and other numbers. (Some of the things my employers do makes me want to tear my hair out.) But this isn't one of them.
I'm not a Mac person, but I do work for another computer system manufacturer, and from where I sit, Apple's behavior is neither unusual nor "secret just to be secret".
First of all, you can't make promises about unreleased products. The legal issues are mind-boggling. Right now I'm involved in releasing — well, I better not say, but if you've followed the x64 server news lately, you can probably guess what I'm talking about. I know what the release schedule is for this product and how firm it is. Our customers are clamoring for this information. If I let any of this info slip, I'd get fired and sued. And I'd deserve it, because I'd have seriously screwed over my employer, opening them up to a vaporware lawsuit.
If Apple promised Carbon-64 (is that radioactive?) this year, they were really stupid. But I doubt that. More likely what you're reading as promises were just statements that they were working on Carbon-64.
Nor is it particularly unusual for a company to suddenly abandon a project. Sometimes it becomes obvious after a project starts that the numbers just don't add up. It's particularly unsurprising in this case. Apple is basically competing with Microsoft. They have a fraction of MS's customers, fewer resources, and a much more complex product.
Until I looked on Wikipedia just now, I didn't realize how complex. OS/X supports five distinct, complete application programming interfaces. This number gets bigger if you count the 64-bit versions as separate APIs (and you should). If you have to scale back, support for a legacy API like Carbon is the logical place.
If you're looking for someone to blame, maybe Adobe is a better choice. To me, it seems really dumb for them to assume that Apple would continue to upgrade Carbon in tandem with Cocoa forever. Then again, the Mac version of Photoshop can't be a big profit center, and moving the product from Carbon to Cocoa has to be expensive. So it would be natural for them to avoid the change as long as they could.
If you're going to blame anybody, you should probably blame the economics of the computer marketplace. That's what limited the options for both Adobe and Apple.
Even if you were to blame Apple and/or Adobe, this is not exactly worth getting bent out of shape over. The number of users affected is tiny. When was the last time you edited a gigabit photo? Of course, the coolness factor of having all your apps 64-bit is huge. I guess reducing the CF for a Mac product is a major thing with for its more religious users. Me, I judge a product on how well it does the job.
I have to admit I like the new posting interface, and the ability to see any given post in its context in the thread. But there's still no easy way to skip lame threads.
Well, my point was that this issue is an invitation to flamefesting, and one symptom of a flamefest is people reading stuff into each other's posts. And right now you and I flaming each other over who misread what....
There is a considerable difference between driving like an idiot, i.e. recklessly, and driving fast, i.e. above the speed limit when conditions allow. I never said there was no difference. I drive that way myself.
The fact that you read something that I didn't actually say kind of proves my point.
I am so not participating in this discussion. When folks defend their god-given right to drive like idiots, all rational thought flies out the window, and all discussions turn into flamefests.
Yes it is, as I just now discovered. I had experimented with the NDS previous, and thought it was a klunky exercise in AJAX for its own sake. But maybe this new reply system makes it worth while. And they just implemented a set of hide-show messages clicks that might be close to what I'm looking for.
The two words are aimed at everybody; I really dislike this use of the word meme. I'm not trying to play Usage Nazi — language is meant to be played with. But "meme" instead of "joke" is lame and trite, like saying "automagically" instead of "automatically".
I was about to say that your quote from the CDE just represents usage, as all dictionaries and other language references do. Being cited in a reference doesn't make a lame usage non-lame.
But then I looked at your quote and realized that it actually documents my use of the word "meme". (That makes it out of date, since your usage, however lame, is common among computer folk.) You highlighted "phrase that is passed from generation to generation through imitation and behavioral replication." But if you read the whole entry, you'll see that there's more to a meme than imitation and replication:
Dawkins observed that human cultures evolve via "contagious" communications in a manner similar to the gene pool of populations over time. So it's all about cultural evolution. Does inventing a new joke count as evolution? I think not.
Now, inventing a new kind of joke counts as cultural evolution — provided the new kind of joke catches on. Judging from the followups to your post, that's not going to happen with black hole jokes; all the replies are just rehashes of existing joke genres.
On the other hand, LOLcats definitely represent a new meme. Though you have to be a cat person (like me) to enjoy them.
The Bush administration doesn't speak for every Republican or Conservative in America. I agree that the great mass of Conservatives don't deserve to be blamed for the excesses of the Bush administration. But there's a hard core of "neocon" ideologues that do. And until very recently, this group dominated the Republican party, marginalizing anybody who had the faintest whiff of "liberalism" (as they defined it) about them. I think it's perfectly reasonable to blame the Republican party for their excesses, and indeed most voters have done so.
And these excesses go beyond supporting Bush's insane, unconstitutional policies. They actually tried to bring about an end to the two-party system. This goal displays a totalitarian contempt for the marketplace of ideas; ironic from a bunch who claimed credit for bringing down the Soviet Union.
Only if it's the second amendment, apparently. Sigh. Can we get a little perspective on this issue? People who believe private weapons are our last guarantee of freedom (that's an argument I'm not even going to touch) treat every little restriction on gun ownership as a trashing of the second amendment. This ignore two big facts:
First, there's the personal-versus-collective rights issue. Does the second amendment protect our right to private arsenals, or does it just protect the rights of the states to form militias? Intelligent people can disagree on this point. The Supreme Court may well make a decision in favor of the "individual right" argument, and soon. But until that happens and the IR argument is the law of the of the land, show some respect for differing viewpoints.
Second, no right is absolute. A printer has to get a business license; if you want to hold a demonstration you have to get a parade permit; a speech inciting violence can get you arrested. These aren't considered violations of the first amendment. And yet any regulation of gun ownership seems to represent contempt for the second amendment. Did you miss the "well regulated" part?
"Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 2.0)." Oh please. OK, here's some random garbage to satisfy the input nanny. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Mare eat oats; does eat oats; little lambs eat ivy. A kid will eat ivy too (wouldn't you?). Xenu (also Xemu), pronounced/zinu/, according to Scientology founder (and speculative fiction writer) L. Ron Hubbard, was the dictator of the "Galactic Confederacy" who, 75 million years ago, brought billions[1] of his people to Earth in DC-8-like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes and killed them using hydrogen bombs. Scientology holds that their essences remained, and that they form around people in modern times, causing them spiritual harm.[2][3] Members of the Church of Scientology widely deny or try to hide the Xenu story.
A minor issue. The big waste of vertical space is meandering, clueless, "who cares" subthreads.
We need to have a way to just jump past long threads we're not interested in. The Slashdotter Firefox plugin used to provide this, in the form of a "hide replies" feature. But that plugin is pretty much dead -- I guess the author got tired of trying to keep up with endless HTML tweaks.
What new reply system? I don't see anything really different.
In other words, you have a policy that locks down thousands of desktops and leaves thousands more under control of their users. That's not a "balancing act", that's a total absence of policy.
There are better ways to deal with piracy than locking down computers. Nowadays, companies face all kinds of legal issues: discrimination suits, corruption investigations, export control laws... The standard solution is to force your employees to attend a bunch of brief classes covering these issues. I had to work through a half-dozen online lessons when I got my current job.
Piracy has nothing to do with the fondness of IT departments for locking down user computers. Really, it's a response to nitwits who fancy themselves experts and know just enough to get them into trouble. Of course, it's pretty frustrating for those of us who really do know what they're doing, but face it, we're a tiny minority.
let's just say that if every candidate spoke out like Steve, we'd have a much clearer view of our choices and would be able to cast our votes a lot more rationally. Rob, do you get all your news from cable TV or what? Novick's answers are reasonably intelligent and straightforward (if I lived in Oregon he'd probably get my vote) but not more so than a lot of other politicos.
If you compare him to the sound byte cowboys on the political talk shows, he sounds like a genius. But the same can be said for my cat.
Indeed, the writer was just a little clueless. I did enjoy learning about SCART, a connector I never heard of before. But the writer first says that it was a good idea (a single cable for all AV signals), then complains that it was impossible to identify which signals a SCART cable carried. Maybe the not such a good idea after all?
Media folks like firewire because it actually performs better for the kind of data transfers they do than USB. If you look at the plain consumer-level specs of USB and Firewire, it seems obvious that USB is "faster", but that is not always the case. Which is why many ignorant folk (including, alas, myself) have asserted that USB had superseded firewire.
As for MIDI, that sort of thing isn't peculiar to the recording industry. Sometimes a bad design continues to be used just because it isn't worth upgrading. The QWERTY keyboard is a prime example.
Of course, how to really use that much VLSI is another matter entirely. Chip scale has increased by a factor of 1,000 since the first commercial microprocessor was introduced in 1971. And yet developers still are screaming for more power. I think we can count on them to use up all that extra logic.
I take that to mean that you think that future improvements will come from better design, instead of squeezing more transistors onto the chips. Somehow, I doubt that chip designers have been sitting on their hands for the last three decades. The fact is, all that die shrink is useless without clever designers. And there's a pretty big limit on what those designers can do without more transistors.
So if we want better chips, we have to continue to cram in those transistors. Since we're coming up against the 16nm limit, we can't keep doing it by shrinking the chips. All the discussions I've seen have talked about fundamentally new technologies, like spintronics. But one simple idea seems to be ignored: bigger chips.
This idea had some followers in the 80s. There was even a startup based on the idea; they went out of business because the discard rate was too high. But I suspect that it might have been profitable to solve that problem if it hadn't been possible to cram in more transistors by shrinking the die. Now that we've reached the limit on CMOS die shrink, perhaps it's time to revisit the big chip approach.
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Better get used to having your goat got. The practice of tacking silly little fees onto monthly bills seems to be common practice. Started with credit card companies, but now it seems to be spreading. Sometimes they don't even have an excuse like "service change". Just throw a "field upgrade fee" or "klatu barata nikto charge" on the bill, reverse for the 10% of customers who bother to complain, and presto! another $1 million to your bottom line.
We can but hope. But now you'll never know how Battlestar Galactica turns out. That's a high price to pay!
If we RTFA, we won't be outraged. Without outrage, who are we?
The "Sharper Image" (glossy, overpriced, not particularly original) theme doesn't come from Japan. It comes from the poor PCWorld writer, tasked to create yet another "top 10" list, and straining to find stuff to fit on it.
The big name web sites seem to be on a "top 10 binge" lately. I guess it's an easy way to fill up space and provoke reader interest. It's getting old, though.
I work for one of Dell's competitors, and I've always been a little surprised that Dell still builds its own systems. If we had to go back to doing that, we'd be out of business in a week. It's expensive. Part of it is lower offshore labor costs (though some of the companies we outsource to actually have their factories in the U. S.) but it's mainly a matter of specialization.
To make a profit selling computers you have to grab market share and control costs. Getting out of the custom build business wont have much effect on Dell's market share, but it will lower their costs. Lower costs = higher profits + happier investors.
Companies often do stupid things to tweak their costs and other numbers. (Some of the things my employers do makes me want to tear my hair out.) But this isn't one of them.
I'm not a Mac person, but I do work for another computer system manufacturer, and from where I sit, Apple's behavior is neither unusual nor "secret just to be secret".
First of all, you can't make promises about unreleased products. The legal issues are mind-boggling. Right now I'm involved in releasing — well, I better not say, but if you've followed the x64 server news lately, you can probably guess what I'm talking about. I know what the release schedule is for this product and how firm it is. Our customers are clamoring for this information. If I let any of this info slip, I'd get fired and sued. And I'd deserve it, because I'd have seriously screwed over my employer, opening them up to a vaporware lawsuit.
If Apple promised Carbon-64 (is that radioactive?) this year, they were really stupid. But I doubt that. More likely what you're reading as promises were just statements that they were working on Carbon-64.
Nor is it particularly unusual for a company to suddenly abandon a project. Sometimes it becomes obvious after a project starts that the numbers just don't add up. It's particularly unsurprising in this case. Apple is basically competing with Microsoft. They have a fraction of MS's customers, fewer resources, and a much more complex product.
Until I looked on Wikipedia just now, I didn't realize how complex. OS/X supports five distinct, complete application programming interfaces. This number gets bigger if you count the 64-bit versions as separate APIs (and you should). If you have to scale back, support for a legacy API like Carbon is the logical place.
If you're looking for someone to blame, maybe Adobe is a better choice. To me, it seems really dumb for them to assume that Apple would continue to upgrade Carbon in tandem with Cocoa forever. Then again, the Mac version of Photoshop can't be a big profit center, and moving the product from Carbon to Cocoa has to be expensive. So it would be natural for them to avoid the change as long as they could.
If you're going to blame anybody, you should probably blame the economics of the computer marketplace. That's what limited the options for both Adobe and Apple.
Even if you were to blame Apple and/or Adobe, this is not exactly worth getting bent out of shape over. The number of users affected is tiny. When was the last time you edited a gigabit photo? Of course, the coolness factor of having all your apps 64-bit is huge. I guess reducing the CF for a Mac product is a major thing with for its more religious users. Me, I judge a product on how well it does the job.
Come to think of it, there is an organization that would do just that. Maybe we should hear them out.
I have to admit I like the new posting interface, and the ability to see any given post in its context in the thread. But there's still no easy way to skip lame threads.
Well, my point was that this issue is an invitation to flamefesting, and one symptom of a flamefest is people reading stuff into each other's posts. And right now you and I flaming each other over who misread what....
The fact that you read something that I didn't actually say kind of proves my point.
Oops, I'm getting sucked in...
I am so not participating in this discussion. When folks defend their god-given right to drive like idiots, all rational thought flies out the window, and all discussions turn into flamefests.
Yes it is, as I just now discovered. I had experimented with the NDS previous, and thought it was a klunky exercise in AJAX for its own sake. But maybe this new reply system makes it worth while. And they just implemented a set of hide-show messages clicks that might be close to what I'm looking for.
I was about to say that your quote from the CDE just represents usage, as all dictionaries and other language references do. Being cited in a reference doesn't make a lame usage non-lame.
But then I looked at your quote and realized that it actually documents my use of the word "meme". (That makes it out of date, since your usage, however lame, is common among computer folk.) You highlighted "phrase that is passed from generation to generation through imitation and behavioral replication." But if you read the whole entry, you'll see that there's more to a meme than imitation and replication: Dawkins observed that human cultures evolve via "contagious" communications in a manner similar to the gene pool of populations over time. So it's all about cultural evolution. Does inventing a new joke count as evolution? I think not.
Now, inventing a new kind of joke counts as cultural evolution — provided the new kind of joke catches on. Judging from the followups to your post, that's not going to happen with black hole jokes; all the replies are just rehashes of existing joke genres.
On the other hand, LOLcats definitely represent a new meme. Though you have to be a cat person (like me) to enjoy them.
And these excesses go beyond supporting Bush's insane, unconstitutional policies. They actually tried to bring about an end to the two-party system. This goal displays a totalitarian contempt for the marketplace of ideas; ironic from a bunch who claimed credit for bringing down the Soviet Union. Only if it's the second amendment, apparently. Sigh. Can we get a little perspective on this issue? People who believe private weapons are our last guarantee of freedom (that's an argument I'm not even going to touch) treat every little restriction on gun ownership as a trashing of the second amendment. This ignore two big facts:
First, there's the personal-versus-collective rights issue. Does the second amendment protect our right to private arsenals, or does it just protect the rights of the states to form militias? Intelligent people can disagree on this point. The Supreme Court may well make a decision in favor of the "individual right" argument, and soon. But until that happens and the IR argument is the law of the of the land, show some respect for differing viewpoints.
Second, no right is absolute. A printer has to get a business license; if you want to hold a demonstration you have to get a parade permit; a speech inciting violence can get you arrested. These aren't considered violations of the first amendment. And yet any regulation of gun ownership seems to represent contempt for the second amendment. Did you miss the "well regulated" part?
"Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 2.0)." Oh please. OK, here's some random garbage to satisfy the input nanny. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Mare eat oats; does eat oats; little lambs eat ivy. A kid will eat ivy too (wouldn't you?). Xenu (also Xemu), pronounced
A minor issue. The big waste of vertical space is meandering, clueless, "who cares" subthreads.
We need to have a way to just jump past long threads we're not interested in. The Slashdotter Firefox plugin used to provide this, in the form of a "hide replies" feature. But that plugin is pretty much dead -- I guess the author got tired of trying to keep up with endless HTML tweaks.
What new reply system? I don't see anything really different.
In other words, you have a policy that locks down thousands of desktops and leaves thousands more under control of their users. That's not a "balancing act", that's a total absence of policy.
There are better ways to deal with piracy than locking down computers. Nowadays, companies face all kinds of legal issues: discrimination suits, corruption investigations, export control laws... The standard solution is to force your employees to attend a bunch of brief classes covering these issues. I had to work through a half-dozen online lessons when I got my current job.
Piracy has nothing to do with the fondness of IT departments for locking down user computers. Really, it's a response to nitwits who fancy themselves experts and know just enough to get them into trouble. Of course, it's pretty frustrating for those of us who really do know what they're doing, but face it, we're a tiny minority.
Nobody will ever need more than 2 TB!
If you compare him to the sound byte cowboys on the political talk shows, he sounds like a genius. But the same can be said for my cat.
Indeed, the writer was just a little clueless. I did enjoy learning about SCART, a connector I never heard of before. But the writer first says that it was a good idea (a single cable for all AV signals), then complains that it was impossible to identify which signals a SCART cable carried. Maybe the not such a good idea after all?
Media folks like firewire because it actually performs better for the kind of data transfers they do than USB. If you look at the plain consumer-level specs of USB and Firewire, it seems obvious that USB is "faster", but that is not always the case. Which is why many ignorant folk (including, alas, myself) have asserted that USB had superseded firewire.
As for MIDI, that sort of thing isn't peculiar to the recording industry. Sometimes a bad design continues to be used just because it isn't worth upgrading. The QWERTY keyboard is a prime example.
I take that to mean that you think that future improvements will come from better design, instead of squeezing more transistors onto the chips. Somehow, I doubt that chip designers have been sitting on their hands for the last three decades. The fact is, all that die shrink is useless without clever designers. And there's a pretty big limit on what those designers can do without more transistors.
So if we want better chips, we have to continue to cram in those transistors. Since we're coming up against the 16nm limit, we can't keep doing it by shrinking the chips. All the discussions I've seen have talked about fundamentally new technologies, like spintronics. But one simple idea seems to be ignored: bigger chips.
This idea had some followers in the 80s. There was even a startup based on the idea; they went out of business because the discard rate was too high. But I suspect that it might have been profitable to solve that problem if it hadn't been possible to cram in more transistors by shrinking the die. Now that we've reached the limit on CMOS die shrink, perhaps it's time to revisit the big chip approach.