As the "fellow co-founder" line points out, this guy is an excellent self-promoter. Hopefully for Sun, he'll be just as effective promoting the company.
If you want to get technical, neither is McNealy. He was one of the first people recruited by Khosla and Bechtolsheim, but he had nothing to do with the initial creation of the company.
Schwartz actually did found a company: Lighthouse Design, a NextStep application developer that Sun bought out in 1996, and turned into the core of their Java Applications Group, which was supposed to develop applications for those Java-based network computers that were going to put Microsoft out of business.
What's always bugged me is that McNealy spent a ton of money to acquire LD and the other companies that got folded into JAG — all of which was wasted, because it soon became obvious that nobody was going to buy network computers, and there was no reason to keep JAG going. JAG wasn't the first, and it wasn't the last ill-conceived attempt by Sun to win the desktop war with Microsoft, and McNealy has never been called to account for all the money he wasted on that war — a war that already a conspicuous victory for Microsoft long before Sun even got involved.
Instead, McNealy is being forced out for failing to sell high-end computers at a time when nobody's buying them. Wall Street is stupid.
The problem with the pre-subscription Netflix was that they were losing money hand over fist. They were just an online video store, and not enough people thought that was an improvement over the B&M kind.
Netflix can be a pain, but if you stop and think about it, there's no way a business like this could possibly work except the way they're doing it. If they used better envelopes, they'd have to charge more. If they didn't throttle heavy users, they'd have to charge more. (Though they never should have pretended they weren't doing it.) And if, like me, you rent about 11 movies a month for $15 a month, yo're getting a pretty good deal. Though maybe I wouldn't think that way if I got as many damaged discs as some people seem to get.
It wouldn't be so bad if people would move beyond that crap and actually talk about the rest of the article. Which goes on to talk about real stuff, like optical filtering and latency. The later is an issue with me: I naively replace my dying CRT with a Dell LCD — and now I have to switch my video to low resolution before I can watch DVDs or MPEGs.
How do you know the movie hasn't gotten there? I have a movie in transit as we speak (put it in the mail yesterday) and it's still listed as "At Home".
So you return three movies at once? That means either you wait until you've watched all three movies before you return any of them — in which case you're cheating yourself, because Netflix could be replacing the first movie while you're watching the other two. Or else you watch all three movies in one sitting and return them all in the next mail — in which case you need to get a life!
Who says gold doesn't require exertion? It doesn't require a lot, but then neither does shuffleboard or lawn bowing. My dictionary says that sport consists of "physical activity" and "competition". Note that it doesn't say "extreme physical activity."
You just reminded me of why I despise Ken Burns. I was about halfway through The Civil War, which I had mostly enjoyed up til then. Then I realized I was watching a hyper-sentimental set of images from a veterans' reunion for the third time. Not the same reunion all three times, of course, but all three sets of images pretty much said the same thing. Then I realized I wasn't watching history, I was watching sentiment porn.
But this sort of crap plays well with the big corporations that underwrite Burns's projects. After all, it's not that different from the corny TV commercials they spend even more money on. And that's the audience Burns is playing to, not TV viewers. When something generates money, yeah, people are proud of it!
It isn't really Ken Burnsy unless there's corny and/or maudlin music playing in the background. Also, the pictures have to be so goddamn sentimental, you want to puke.
I object to using the word "perfection" in this context. The current
envelope is more cost-effective, but it's a lot less effective
in protecting the DVD than some older designs. From Netflix's point of
view, it's cheaper to accept that some DVDs will be damaged in transit
— especially since they don't bother replacing titles more than
a year or two old when the last copy is damaged or lost. But from the
customer's point of view, it's damned frustrating to sit down to relax
and watch a DVD, only to find that it's split or cracked.
I accept this, because I hate video stores, and because paying only
$1.40 (my average cost per DVD) allows me to see a lot more DVDs than
I could afford otherwise. But it's hardly "perfect".
Who said anything about bans? This is a rating system, and would only apply to people who choose to use it. I'm sure there are people who don't want their kids look at any nudes, even if they're by Michelangelo. I don't agree with such folks, but requiring art sites to honestly label their work isn't going to lock out anybody who doesn't use a filter.
Come to think of it, such a rating system would actually draw traffic in many cases. Right now, you can't search for specific kinds of porn, because porn sites spam the search engines with every keyword they can think of. So if you Google "softcore", you'll get tons of explicit stuff that is anything but softcore. A mandatory ratings system would help me find exactly the kind of depravity I enjoy.
What do you mean "could be"? The angst-ridden teenager formula has been successful over and over. If they're making a show where the main characters are teenagers, then it's a given that they're going to use the formula. The fact that the formula induces nausea in us older trekkies is neither here nor there: we're not a profitable demographic.
It's a DAMN SHAME that they didn't allow Enterprise (when it finally got good) to continue to explore the founding of the Federation.
Jeez, you actually thought the "founding of the federation" arc was non-nauseating? I'm afraid you're in the minority.
Not funny. Combining "tried and true" formulas ("it's Terminator meets Home Alone") is standard in movie and TV pitch meetings. That's why movies and shows tend to be so unoriginal. The original Star Trek was supposedly pitched as "Wagon Train in space." It's not unlikely that "Harry Potter in space" was exactly the pitch that got this project off the shelves.
The irony there is that people drive their kids to school because they don't think they're safe on the street, by themselves. It's ironic because (a) as you observed, the SUVs themselves are as big a danger in a school zone as any pedophile (b) those kids are all going to die young because they don't get enough exercise.
The San Jose Mercury News has a map. Note to submitters: the San Francisco Chronicle isn't nearly as good as the MN on computer industry news. Try to find the MN link before submitting.
Dude, most Americans will get in the car to avoid walking across a parking lot! That's why most new malls in this country no longer have internal walkways.
I used to have a job about a mile from my house. I'd usually walk to work. All my co-workers thought I was very strange. And before you say, "lazy Americans" note that many of my co-workers were Asian immigrants.
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Schwartz actually did found a company: Lighthouse Design, a NextStep application developer that Sun bought out in 1996, and turned into the core of their Java Applications Group, which was supposed to develop applications for those Java-based network computers that were going to put Microsoft out of business.
What's always bugged me is that McNealy spent a ton of money to acquire LD and the other companies that got folded into JAG — all of which was wasted, because it soon became obvious that nobody was going to buy network computers, and there was no reason to keep JAG going. JAG wasn't the first, and it wasn't the last ill-conceived attempt by Sun to win the desktop war with Microsoft, and McNealy has never been called to account for all the money he wasted on that war — a war that already a conspicuous victory for Microsoft long before Sun even got involved.
Instead, McNealy is being forced out for failing to sell high-end computers at a time when nobody's buying them. Wall Street is stupid.
Joe's wife, this Jerry Fallwell. You know you're going to hell, right?
http://www.slidingzone.de/SLIDINGZONE/stones.html
Netflix can be a pain, but if you stop and think about it, there's no way a business like this could possibly work except the way they're doing it. If they used better envelopes, they'd have to charge more. If they didn't throttle heavy users, they'd have to charge more. (Though they never should have pretended they weren't doing it.) And if, like me, you rent about 11 movies a month for $15 a month, yo're getting a pretty good deal. Though maybe I wouldn't think that way if I got as many damaged discs as some people seem to get.
It wouldn't be so bad if people would move beyond that crap and actually talk about the rest of the article. Which goes on to talk about real stuff, like optical filtering and latency. The later is an issue with me: I naively replace my dying CRT with a Dell LCD — and now I have to switch my video to low resolution before I can watch DVDs or MPEGs.
How do you know the movie hasn't gotten there? I have a movie in transit as we speak (put it in the mail yesterday) and it's still listed as "At Home".
Unfortunately, Ken Burns stuff still mostly goes out over the air, and broadcast puke has been implemented for decades.
So you return three movies at once? That means either you wait until you've watched all three movies before you return any of them — in which case you're cheating yourself, because Netflix could be replacing the first movie while you're watching the other two. Or else you watch all three movies in one sitting and return them all in the next mail — in which case you need to get a life!
Because they're not logic nerds?
Who says gold doesn't require exertion? It doesn't require a lot, but then neither does shuffleboard or lawn bowing. My dictionary says that sport consists of "physical activity" and "competition". Note that it doesn't say "extreme physical activity."
But this sort of crap plays well with the big corporations that underwrite Burns's projects. After all, it's not that different from the corny TV commercials they spend even more money on. And that's the audience Burns is playing to, not TV viewers. When something generates money, yeah, people are proud of it!
It isn't really Ken Burnsy unless there's corny and/or maudlin music playing in the background. Also, the pictures have to be so goddamn sentimental, you want to puke.
Yeah, road rage is so much fun, especially when it's SUV versus bicycle.
I accept this, because I hate video stores, and because paying only $1.40 (my average cost per DVD) allows me to see a lot more DVDs than I could afford otherwise. But it's hardly "perfect".
Come to think of it, such a rating system would actually draw traffic in many cases. Right now, you can't search for specific kinds of porn, because porn sites spam the search engines with every keyword they can think of. So if you Google "softcore", you'll get tons of explicit stuff that is anything but softcore. A mandatory ratings system would help me find exactly the kind of depravity I enjoy.
Which was the premise of Generation. Gawd, that was a stinker.
Harry Mudd: Think positive, laddie-bucks!
You're confusing J.J. Abrams with Joss Whedon.
Not funny. Combining "tried and true" formulas ("it's Terminator meets Home Alone") is standard in movie and TV pitch meetings. That's why movies and shows tend to be so unoriginal. The original Star Trek was supposedly pitched as "Wagon Train in space." It's not unlikely that "Harry Potter in space" was exactly the pitch that got this project off the shelves.
The irony there is that people drive their kids to school because they don't think they're safe on the street, by themselves. It's ironic because (a) as you observed, the SUVs themselves are as big a danger in a school zone as any pedophile (b) those kids are all going to die young because they don't get enough exercise.
The San Jose Mercury News has a map. Note to submitters: the San Francisco Chronicle isn't nearly as good as the MN on computer industry news. Try to find the MN link before submitting.
I used to have a job about a mile from my house. I'd usually walk to work. All my co-workers thought I was very strange. And before you say, "lazy Americans" note that many of my co-workers were Asian immigrants.