Prior OS updates from Microsoft only achieved solid adoption when they had the stability/compatibility problems ironed out and were a notable improvement over the last version. 95 languished until 95B and OSR2.5 trimmed and tightened up its problems. 98 adoption was fairly slow until SP1 and 98SE was so good that people refused ME altogether.
And that's a pretty strong analogue to where we are now. XP SP2 is so good for the average user that Vista is simply a downgrade with a steep price tag.
Topping it all off is that there aren't compelling reasons for most users to upgrade their desktop hardware, shaving off quite a bit of the automatic adoption that compelled vendors and developers to update their products for the new platform.
I really thought they 'got it' with winFS (a feature that could've solved very real problems with consumer computing). It's a shame to see that languish and die. If they repacked it in a rebadged Vista variant, with some bug fixes and new file system metaphor, I think they'd have a real product. It wouldn't hurt them to fix Live for Windows to be more like Live on the 360. And cut out the damn price-tag. Give that kind of unified gaming system to the masses of home users and adoption would be off the chart.
The difference is that adding more heatsinks to the design already in production would be quite different.
In your car analogy, what people are calling for is more like Ford retooling their assembly line to fix the Taurus' water pump during the first year make/model run, or pushing out a mid-year Taurus 1.5 model to address the issues, even though normal competition isn't exerting any pressure to do so (people are still buying them, and your primary competitor is flailing around ineffectually) and will exert pressure to release the normal 2.0 model on the normal schedule.
It's very similar to the situations of the launch model of the PS2. As you'll note, Sony didn't fix the optical drive problem when it became apparent either. They waited until economics justified the redesigned slimline PS2, and slipped a 'fix' into that model, some 20 million console sales later. Similarly, it's quite likely the '360 elite' has already addressed the problem and the redesigned core/premium boxes will certainly have a 'fix' when they roll around.
Frankly, it's just unrealistic to expect a consumer electronics manufacturer to retool production for a product that's selling pretty well and has a fairly normal failure rate. It's on the high side, sure. But if the failure rate was anywhere near as high as the internet suggests, it'd have been worth Microsoft's time and money to fix production long ago. Arguably, they already have to an extent - as the failures are disproportionately reported from the batch of consoles sold at launch.
Mostly, I blame consumers for the state of affairs. If we avoided shoddy electronics (PS2, 360) with half the fervor that we avoid expensive electronics (Neo Geo, PS3), things would undoubtedly be different.
I'm also an n800 owner. And if the iPhone wasn't tied to AT&T I'd probably buy one when my current phone contract runs out in about 9 months, just to have a single device again.
But as it is, i'll just keep my small 'free' phone in my pocket, leave bluetooth on and use the n800 through that. I wouldn't consider the n800 a 'phone', but it's 10x the mobile internet platform that the iphone will be. (bigger screen, better screen, replacable battery, expandable memory, cheaper, infinitely hackable) And for me personally, that's more important than the phone stuff. It's easy enough to leave the 'free' small phone in my pocket.
Besides, by the time I can even get an iPhone without AT&T, I'll probably be comparing at least an n900 to a second gen iPhone. And who knows how that'll shake out.
Because other quality producers won't work for the better licensing terms.
And when you get down to only unproven or shakey characters willing to sign on to your blockbuster, it's a far riskier proposition -- particularly when crap movies have the very real ability to damage your franchise. So why not just pick up a fairly competent producer or two and make your own studio?
Marvel wanted a better deal and they did just about the only thing they could to get it.
Yeah, Blockbuster still 'offers' all those old faults that drove us into the arms of Netflix in the first place.
I must be odd - I don't find the process of driving to the video store, shuffling through the poor selection, finding something that's actually in stock and waiting in line to check out and driving home all that appealing.
I suppose they're still relevant in much the same way Blu-ray vs HD-DVD is relevant. Other people might see value there - but all I see are the limitations that far outweigh the benefits.
Hey, we can keep picking countries, and inevitably all of them will have tradeoffs in order to facilitate universal healthcare.
I don't even buy the conceit that government run health-care will be necessarily worse.
We trust government-run firefighters, police and military. Why is it that a government-run firefighting system can be trusted to rescue people from a burning building, but somehow government-run healthcare can't be trusted to treat them? Are firefighter EMTs worse at their job than hospital EMTs?
And just look at our military. Is it wasteful? Without a doubt. But does it have the tradeoffs that Canadian/European militaries have? Not by a long shot. So why should government-run health care in America automatically be a disaster? Why should we even expect to have to make the same tradeoffs that other nations make? This is America ffs; we've got a ridiculously large national ego. If Canucks and Euros can make it work, why the hell wouldn't we be able to do it better?
It seems to me that we should expect American government-run health care would still be the best on the planet.
And last I checked, I'm already paying about twice as much for less healthcare today than a decade ago when our nation last talked about healthcare. Private healthcare clearly hasn't protected us from massive increases in costs and cutbacks in service.
So why again, are we defending a system that's built to incentivize denial of service? Why again are we defending a system that is clearly incompatible with free-market assumptions? (Healthcare is not a good the consumer can walk away from, so the consumer will always lose.)
I simply don't see how it is that American government-run police, firefighting, emergency response, and national defense can be trusted -- can be the best in the world at what they do -- but government-run healthcare is still a boogeyman.
Beyond that, it'd really only work with architectural security faults. You can't go out and patent "IE, but without these four buffer overflows". So 'patches' aren't at risk.
Further, the concept of boxing in a software vendor with patents on architectural security improvements implies that these guys can cover a sufficiently wide range of improved architectural security implementations - which is far trickier and more expensive than the summary makes it sound. Particularly when you're trying to pin large corporations.
These stated targets (huge corporations) are exactly the ones who would easily sidestep these patents. (They're already doing similar things on a daily basis) Smaller companies who unknowingly invest in potentially infringing upgrades and simply can't afford to start over are really the only ones at risk from being pressured into a licensing agreement this way.
In the end, it's too late to sue and win with a patent covering "Software running in a sandbox". (I'd say it's too late to get that patent in the first place, but who knows anymore). So the ability of this to actually impact big business, even pursued malevolently with near-infinite resources, isn't that great.
Or, and this is a crazy thought: don't rely on printed copies of digital photos. Just pass around the bits themselves, and back those bits up.
I don't understand people's fascination with printing photos. And supposing you did really want a printed copy, who cares if it disappears? It costs almost nothing to make another.
I've inherited stacks and stacks of family photos and slides - and I can't get them through the film scanner nearly fast enough. I worry far more about those physical boxes and their handling, than I value their ability to hold up over time compared to inkjet printing.
Fucking over "the other guy", writ large, is not a socially acceptable way of life.
You're right. Unfortunately, getting people to agree on a definition of what 'fucking over the other guy' really is, is far trickier than passing judgement.
When we all agree on a definition of immoral interaction, we codify it into law. Prior to that, it's up for debate.
You and I agree that Monsanto is horribly wrong, but I also believe it the acme of naivete to expect corporations to avoid legal but potentially immoral activities. PETA considers all sorts of industries immoral. Should we expect corporations to avoid those 'immoral' products, prior to PETA showing that it holds the consensus view by having those industries outlawed?
The only functional limit to corporate activity is the law.
if you want to extend moral liability to management, then why not the farmers who bought the seeds? Why not crusade against those farmers? If they didn't purchase the immoral product, the Monsanto problem would solve itself.
It's not their job to rape and pillage the world for profit. Being a corporation does not give you a free pass to put money ahead of morals. That is not their job. Their job is to offer a product to a market.
The limits they operate within can only be defined by the government for the public good. It's impractical to expect corporations to act 'morally' when there is no consensus on morality, until it's coded into law. If their actions are so clearly immoral, they should be illegal.
Playing corporate whack-a-mole, hating and blaming and boycotting corporations one-at-a-time for acting legally but immorally is truly a Sisyphean endeavor.
1. Pirate Bay makes thousands off advertising. Ok. CNN makes millions. Does that mean CNN is charging me for news? No. Just because it's not a charity doesn't mean it isn't free to the user.
2. What does Allofmp3 have to do with file sharing? Allofmp3 was a for-pay site; that's fundamentally distinct from file-sharing.
3. Who cares if organized criminals make money off selling pirated disks? File-sharing is defined by not paying for bits. If you're a file-sharer, you're not supporting terrorists. Unless, of course, the Pirate Bay are funding terrorism with their mind boggling 'thousands' of dollars of ad revenue.
4. Yes, file-sharers don't care about copyright, regardless of who holds it. That's not exactly an inconvenient truth - that's the core conceit.
5. Increased revenue from the CD boom back in the 90s didn't result in more 'underground' artists, so I don't see why anyone should be worried about less of them because of file-sharing.
6. Why is ISP advertisement of 'music' an incovenient truth for file-sharing? It sounds like an inconvenient truth for ISP advertising.
7. What anti-copyright movement? It's a file-sharing movement. No-one's standing up for a pirate's right to make cash off a $2 bootleg of Hostel 2.
8. Black and grey markets are never really caused by poverty. They're caused by the primary market simply failing to meet consumers demands. As soon as an alternative to the $20 CD market existed, consumers flocked to it. That isn't a reflection on the populace being destitute. It's a reflection on the market offered by the multiply-convicted-of-anti-competitive-practices RIAA.
9. 'Wrong' is a curious word to use. Most people know file-sharing is against the law. But they say that it's 'wrong' the same way they say getting drunk or high or gambling or swearing or watching porn is 'wrong'. It being 'wrong' doesn't affect their behavior; they say that it's 'wrong' because society expects them to parrot back "it's wrong".
10. Honestly, this is the only 'inconvenient truth' that actually works. Vocal file-sharing proponents love to rail against major-label artists and 'hollywood' movies, all the while most file-sharers are trading almost exclusively major-label artists and hollywood movies. Frankly the vocal file-sharing proponents aren't moving the majority of shared files, so they aren't necessarily being hypocritical. But it is one of those truths that file-sharing proponents tend to gloss over.
If the diagnostics are on another bootable partition / downloadable bootable ISO image - then Dell doesn't even need to cross-train their techs or invest in new software or beg/borrow/bribe the community.
It sounds to me like a lack of Linux diagnostic tools has no bearing on the situation whatsoever.
These corporate folks are putting greed ahead of public responsibility.
That's their job.
It's the government's job to watch out for the public and slap down such reckless and exploitative practices. Don't blame Monsanto, blame the legislators and bureaucrats who have so shamelessly violated the public trust.
Honestly, an Agriculture Minister standing up for t-genes... it's so transparently corrupt you'd swear it was American politics.
My phone, a crappy LG that came with my Verizon plan can technically do nearly everything the iphone can do, touchscreen excepted. it can play music, videos, pics, browse, check email, etc. But how well does it do any of that? Yeah, that's right: it sucks, horribly. (there's a reason I have a crappy 'free' phone: I have an n800 for actual mobile stuff.)
Putting good UI on a device is a hell of a trick alright - but it's not being pulled at the expense of the audience. Like most apple products: it's not for me, but i can't recommend my tech devices to my parents either.
If Apple merely put its customary UI polish on the features many of us have had for a few years, the only problem left is AT&T exclusivity. AT&T/Cingular can DIAF. I hope they pick a better provider for Europe. It'd be a shame for a good device
I've been troubled for years on how generational improvements in computation equipment don't seem to result in improved USER experience.
Improved USER experience almost always comes from new software/features, rather than improvements to old software/features. The new features are where your clock cycles go. It's where they've always gone.
Word isn't opening any faster twenty years on. But it is spell-/grammar-checking the document, importing multimedia, rendering a cleartype font, looking for online collaborators, refreshing relevant Research tab tools, etc.
Those tools wouldn't be possible, in-line, on-demand, without those few billion new clock cycles. It'd be nice if things worked faster, and they undoubtedly could. But let's not short-change the user experience advancements that all the features they enabled.
Also, let's not gloss over browsers and email. Those two have resulted in absurd quantities of user enrichment.
Who cares if Word doesn't open any faster if John Doe has instant access to every reference material known to man? What saves him more time: a document opening a half-second sooner? Or less time spent dealing with interoffice mail, less phone interruptions and less hunting down, storing, sorting and searching through physical reference volumes?
your personal machine might not be making the best use of all those cycles, but that doesn't mean your user experience isn't being enriched by them.
As TFA notes, the 9/11 commission said the attacks were a result, in part, of the government's "failure of imagination".
How exactly did the government fail to imagine this type of attack?
Doesn't the military have training exercises designed around terrorists ramming civilian planes into buildings? Didn't the intelligence community know for almost a decade that KSM was obsessed with the idea of flying passenger planes into buildings? Hasn't the head structural engineer of the WTC project gone on the record as stating that the towers were designed to withstand a jet impact? (albeit, smaller.) Aren't nuclear power plants also designed to withstand impact and fire from passenger jets?
I don't have a problem with the military getting free advice from creative types on outside-the-box attack vectors. But this particular attack seems to have been well-understood by people in the loop. It was the rest of us who were caught off-guard.
That's why cockpit door locks wouldn't have done anything on 9/11. The flightcrew let the hijackers in. The failure of 9/11 was one of protocol. Neither the flightcrew nor the passengers had any idea of just how bad it would be to surrender the cockpit. And that problem was patched right around 10:00 am that same day.
No future pilot is going to allow a hijacker into the cockpit. No future flight-crew or passenger load is going to idly sit and wait for the plane to 'return to the airport'.
Everything beyond reinforced cockpit doors and slightly better security at the airport has been an expensive waste of time.
If I could get a wireless Duke for my 360, with shoulder buttons replacing black/white, I'd buy four tomorrow. The 360 controller is definitely a big step up from last gens tiny controllers (dual shock, gamecube, xbox s-controller), but it's still nowhere near as great as the duke.
'imagine the worse smell' 'and your close to the smell of her class'
Screw model student (he's clearly a misfit), how the hell does this kid have a B average?
as for the rest of it... bunny ears, carrying a box of tissue across the room, 'smelly' pantomime and a few 'Tobey thrusts' is 40 days-worth of disruption? I don't get it. Oh, and he 'secreted in a video camera'... that appears to be a common camera phone.
Even if he is a jackass, 40 days is far, far too much for what he actually did.
The RIAA already pays the radio stations to tell people what to like. They have all but admitted to manipulating playlists via bribes because they acknowledge that radio play == sales. So I'm not entirely sure how they are now going to argue that radio play is suddenly detrimental. Particularly not when they're still actively engaged in it. (though now via a corporate shell-game to side-step the FCC)
My guess, is that the RIAAs is trying to put an end to payola. If the stations legally 'owe' the RIAA money for broadcasting, then they can negotiate airplay without having to write checks. They'll just grant the broadcasters performance rights 'coupons' for certain artists/tracks. Nothing really changes, the labels cut down some of the cost-of-doing business.
Slashdot Mirror
That's pretty much what I've been seeing.
Prior OS updates from Microsoft only achieved solid adoption when they had the stability/compatibility problems ironed out and were a notable improvement over the last version. 95 languished until 95B and OSR2.5 trimmed and tightened up its problems. 98 adoption was fairly slow until SP1 and 98SE was so good that people refused ME altogether.
And that's a pretty strong analogue to where we are now.
XP SP2 is so good for the average user that Vista is simply a downgrade with a steep price tag.
Topping it all off is that there aren't compelling reasons for most users to upgrade their desktop hardware, shaving off quite a bit of the automatic adoption that compelled vendors and developers to update their products for the new platform.
I really thought they 'got it' with winFS (a feature that could've solved very real problems with consumer computing). It's a shame to see that languish and die. If they repacked it in a rebadged Vista variant, with some bug fixes and new file system metaphor, I think they'd have a real product. It wouldn't hurt them to fix Live for Windows to be more like Live on the 360. And cut out the damn price-tag. Give that kind of unified gaming system to the masses of home users and adoption would be off the chart.
The difference is that adding more heatsinks to the design already in production would be quite different.
In your car analogy, what people are calling for is more like Ford retooling their assembly line to fix the Taurus' water pump during the first year make/model run, or pushing out a mid-year Taurus 1.5 model to address the issues, even though normal competition isn't exerting any pressure to do so (people are still buying them, and your primary competitor is flailing around ineffectually) and will exert pressure to release the normal 2.0 model on the normal schedule.
It's very similar to the situations of the launch model of the PS2. As you'll note, Sony didn't fix the optical drive problem when it became apparent either. They waited until economics justified the redesigned slimline PS2, and slipped a 'fix' into that model, some 20 million console sales later. Similarly, it's quite likely the '360 elite' has already addressed the problem and the redesigned core/premium boxes will certainly have a 'fix' when they roll around.
Frankly, it's just unrealistic to expect a consumer electronics manufacturer to retool production for a product that's selling pretty well and has a fairly normal failure rate. It's on the high side, sure. But if the failure rate was anywhere near as high as the internet suggests, it'd have been worth Microsoft's time and money to fix production long ago. Arguably, they already have to an extent - as the failures are disproportionately reported from the batch of consoles sold at launch.
Mostly, I blame consumers for the state of affairs. If we avoided shoddy electronics (PS2, 360) with half the fervor that we avoid expensive electronics (Neo Geo, PS3), things would undoubtedly be different.
I'm also an n800 owner.
And if the iPhone wasn't tied to AT&T I'd probably buy one when my current phone contract runs out in about 9 months, just to have a single device again.
But as it is, i'll just keep my small 'free' phone in my pocket, leave bluetooth on and use the n800 through that.
I wouldn't consider the n800 a 'phone', but it's 10x the mobile internet platform that the iphone will be. (bigger screen, better screen, replacable battery, expandable memory, cheaper, infinitely hackable) And for me personally, that's more important than the phone stuff. It's easy enough to leave the 'free' small phone in my pocket.
Besides, by the time I can even get an iPhone without AT&T, I'll probably be comparing at least an n900 to a second gen iPhone. And who knows how that'll shake out.
Because other quality producers won't work for the better licensing terms.
And when you get down to only unproven or shakey characters willing to sign on to your blockbuster, it's a far riskier proposition -- particularly when crap movies have the very real ability to damage your franchise.
So why not just pick up a fairly competent producer or two and make your own studio?
Marvel wanted a better deal and they did just about the only thing they could to get it.
Yeah, Blockbuster still 'offers' all those old faults that drove us into the arms of Netflix in the first place.
I must be odd - I don't find the process of driving to the video store, shuffling through the poor selection, finding something that's actually in stock and waiting in line to check out and driving home all that appealing.
I suppose they're still relevant in much the same way Blu-ray vs HD-DVD is relevant.
Other people might see value there - but all I see are the limitations that far outweigh the benefits.
We trust government-run firefighters, police and military. Why is it that a government-run firefighting system can be trusted to rescue people from a burning building, but somehow government-run healthcare can't be trusted to treat them? Are firefighter EMTs worse at their job than hospital EMTs?
And just look at our military. Is it wasteful? Without a doubt. But does it have the tradeoffs that Canadian/European militaries have? Not by a long shot. So why should government-run health care in America automatically be a disaster? Why should we even expect to have to make the same tradeoffs that other nations make? This is America ffs; we've got a ridiculously large national ego. If Canucks and Euros can make it work, why the hell wouldn't we be able to do it better?
It seems to me that we should expect American government-run health care would still be the best on the planet.
And last I checked, I'm already paying about twice as much for less healthcare today than a decade ago when our nation last talked about healthcare. Private healthcare clearly hasn't protected us from massive increases in costs and cutbacks in service.
So why again, are we defending a system that's built to incentivize denial of service? Why again are we defending a system that is clearly incompatible with free-market assumptions? (Healthcare is not a good the consumer can walk away from, so the consumer will always lose.)
I simply don't see how it is that American government-run police, firefighting, emergency response, and national defense can be trusted -- can be the best in the world at what they do -- but government-run healthcare is still a boogeyman.
Beyond that, it'd really only work with architectural security faults.
You can't go out and patent "IE, but without these four buffer overflows". So 'patches' aren't at risk.
Further, the concept of boxing in a software vendor with patents on architectural security improvements implies that these guys can cover a sufficiently wide range of improved architectural security implementations - which is far trickier and more expensive than the summary makes it sound. Particularly when you're trying to pin large corporations.
These stated targets (huge corporations) are exactly the ones who would easily sidestep these patents. (They're already doing similar things on a daily basis) Smaller companies who unknowingly invest in potentially infringing upgrades and simply can't afford to start over are really the only ones at risk from being pressured into a licensing agreement this way.
In the end, it's too late to sue and win with a patent covering "Software running in a sandbox". (I'd say it's too late to get that patent in the first place, but who knows anymore). So the ability of this to actually impact big business, even pursued malevolently with near-infinite resources, isn't that great.
Yes, if my family's photographic legacy were recorded with professional tools, I'd probably approach things differently. But they're not.
And even if they were, I still wouldn't care how long they last when printed from an inkjet.
Yeah, but charging $750 for the next 2 is pretty shameless.
Or, and this is a crazy thought: don't rely on printed copies of digital photos.
Just pass around the bits themselves, and back those bits up.
I don't understand people's fascination with printing photos.
And supposing you did really want a printed copy, who cares if it disappears?
It costs almost nothing to make another.
I've inherited stacks and stacks of family photos and slides - and I can't get them through the film scanner nearly fast enough. I worry far more about those physical boxes and their handling, than I value their ability to hold up over time compared to inkjet printing.
You're right.
Unfortunately, getting people to agree on a definition of what 'fucking over the other guy' really is, is far trickier than passing judgement.
When we all agree on a definition of immoral interaction, we codify it into law. Prior to that, it's up for debate.
You and I agree that Monsanto is horribly wrong, but I also believe it the acme of naivete to expect corporations to avoid legal but potentially immoral activities. PETA considers all sorts of industries immoral. Should we expect corporations to avoid those 'immoral' products, prior to PETA showing that it holds the consensus view by having those industries outlawed?
The only functional limit to corporate activity is the law.
if you want to extend moral liability to management, then why not the farmers who bought the seeds?
Why not crusade against those farmers? If they didn't purchase the immoral product, the Monsanto problem would solve itself.
The limits they operate within can only be defined by the government for the public good.
It's impractical to expect corporations to act 'morally' when there is no consensus on morality, until it's coded into law. If their actions are so clearly immoral, they should be illegal.
Playing corporate whack-a-mole, hating and blaming and boycotting corporations one-at-a-time for acting legally but immorally is truly a Sisyphean endeavor.
1. Pirate Bay makes thousands off advertising. Ok.
CNN makes millions. Does that mean CNN is charging me for news? No.
Just because it's not a charity doesn't mean it isn't free to the user.
2. What does Allofmp3 have to do with file sharing?
Allofmp3 was a for-pay site; that's fundamentally distinct from file-sharing.
3. Who cares if organized criminals make money off selling pirated disks? File-sharing is defined by not paying for bits. If you're a file-sharer, you're not supporting terrorists. Unless, of course, the Pirate Bay are funding terrorism with their mind boggling 'thousands' of dollars of ad revenue.
4. Yes, file-sharers don't care about copyright, regardless of who holds it. That's not exactly an inconvenient truth - that's the core conceit.
5. Increased revenue from the CD boom back in the 90s didn't result in more 'underground' artists, so I don't see why anyone should be worried about less of them because of file-sharing.
6. Why is ISP advertisement of 'music' an incovenient truth for file-sharing? It sounds like an inconvenient truth for ISP advertising.
7. What anti-copyright movement? It's a file-sharing movement.
No-one's standing up for a pirate's right to make cash off a $2 bootleg of Hostel 2.
8. Black and grey markets are never really caused by poverty. They're caused by the primary market simply failing to meet consumers demands. As soon as an alternative to the $20 CD market existed, consumers flocked to it. That isn't a reflection on the populace being destitute. It's a reflection on the market offered by the multiply-convicted-of-anti-competitive-practices RIAA.
9. 'Wrong' is a curious word to use. Most people know file-sharing is against the law. But they say that it's 'wrong' the same way they say getting drunk or high or gambling or swearing or watching porn is 'wrong'. It being 'wrong' doesn't affect their behavior; they say that it's 'wrong' because society expects them to parrot back "it's wrong".
10. Honestly, this is the only 'inconvenient truth' that actually works. Vocal file-sharing proponents love to rail against major-label artists and 'hollywood' movies, all the while most file-sharers are trading almost exclusively major-label artists and hollywood movies. Frankly the vocal file-sharing proponents aren't moving the majority of shared files, so they aren't necessarily being hypocritical. But it is one of those truths that file-sharing proponents tend to gloss over.
If the diagnostics are on another bootable partition / downloadable bootable ISO image - then Dell doesn't even need to cross-train their techs or invest in new software or beg/borrow/bribe the community.
It sounds to me like a lack of Linux diagnostic tools has no bearing on the situation whatsoever.
That's their job.
It's the government's job to watch out for the public and slap down such reckless and exploitative practices.
Don't blame Monsanto, blame the legislators and bureaucrats who have so shamelessly violated the public trust.
Honestly, an Agriculture Minister standing up for t-genes... it's so transparently corrupt you'd swear it was American politics.
And adding 'new' hardware that's just off-the-shelf tech with a Nintendo logo is what they do.
We're far more likely to see a Nintendo-branded SSD solution than SMB drivers, USB HDD support, SD-support for VC titles, SDHC support, etc.
to die, due faults not its own.
My phone, a crappy LG that came with my Verizon plan can technically do nearly everything the iphone can do, touchscreen excepted. it can play music, videos, pics, browse, check email, etc.
But how well does it do any of that?
Yeah, that's right: it sucks, horribly. (there's a reason I have a crappy 'free' phone: I have an n800 for actual mobile stuff.)
Putting good UI on a device is a hell of a trick alright - but it's not being pulled at the expense of the audience.
Like most apple products: it's not for me, but i can't recommend my tech devices to my parents either.
If Apple merely put its customary UI polish on the features many of us have had for a few years, the only problem left is AT&T exclusivity. AT&T/Cingular can DIAF. I hope they pick a better provider for Europe. It'd be a shame for a good device
Improved USER experience almost always comes from new software/features, rather than improvements to old software/features. The new features are where your clock cycles go. It's where they've always gone.
Word isn't opening any faster twenty years on. But it is spell-/grammar-checking the document, importing multimedia, rendering a cleartype font, looking for online collaborators, refreshing relevant Research tab tools, etc.
Those tools wouldn't be possible, in-line, on-demand, without those few billion new clock cycles. It'd be nice if things worked faster, and they undoubtedly could. But let's not short-change the user experience advancements that all the features they enabled.
Also, let's not gloss over browsers and email. Those two have resulted in absurd quantities of user enrichment.
Who cares if Word doesn't open any faster if John Doe has instant access to every reference material known to man? What saves him more time: a document opening a half-second sooner? Or less time spent dealing with interoffice mail, less phone interruptions and less hunting down, storing, sorting and searching through physical reference volumes?
your personal machine might not be making the best use of all those cycles, but that doesn't mean your user experience isn't being enriched by them.
How exactly did the government fail to imagine this type of attack?
Doesn't the military have training exercises designed around terrorists ramming civilian planes into buildings?
Didn't the intelligence community know for almost a decade that KSM was obsessed with the idea of flying passenger planes into buildings?
Hasn't the head structural engineer of the WTC project gone on the record as stating that the towers were designed to withstand a jet impact? (albeit, smaller.)
Aren't nuclear power plants also designed to withstand impact and fire from passenger jets?
I don't have a problem with the military getting free advice from creative types on outside-the-box attack vectors. But this particular attack seems to have been well-understood by people in the loop. It was the rest of us who were caught off-guard.
That's why cockpit door locks wouldn't have done anything on 9/11. The flightcrew let the hijackers in.
The failure of 9/11 was one of protocol. Neither the flightcrew nor the passengers had any idea of just how bad it would be to surrender the cockpit. And that problem was patched right around 10:00 am that same day.
No future pilot is going to allow a hijacker into the cockpit.
No future flight-crew or passenger load is going to idly sit and wait for the plane to 'return to the airport'.
Everything beyond reinforced cockpit doors and slightly better security at the airport has been an expensive waste of time.
If I could get a wireless Duke for my 360, with shoulder buttons replacing black/white, I'd buy four tomorrow. The 360 controller is definitely a big step up from last gens tiny controllers (dual shock, gamecube, xbox s-controller), but it's still nowhere near as great as the duke.
hey, keep it down.
if you actually get them to understand how absurd that idea is, they'll just propose a straight-up bandwidth tax.
'imagine the worse smell'
'and your close to the smell of her class'
Screw model student (he's clearly a misfit), how the hell does this kid have a B average?
as for the rest of it... bunny ears, carrying a box of tissue across the room, 'smelly' pantomime and a few 'Tobey thrusts' is 40 days-worth of disruption? I don't get it.
Oh, and he 'secreted in a video camera'... that appears to be a common camera phone.
Even if he is a jackass, 40 days is far, far too much for what he actually did.
Using buzzwords to hide the fact that they slipped 'lawn job' onto the feature list?
classic.
The RIAA already pays the radio stations to tell people what to like. They have all but admitted to manipulating playlists via bribes because they acknowledge that radio play == sales. So I'm not entirely sure how they are now going to argue that radio play is suddenly detrimental. Particularly not when they're still actively engaged in it. (though now via a corporate shell-game to side-step the FCC)
My guess, is that the RIAAs is trying to put an end to payola. If the stations legally 'owe' the RIAA money for broadcasting, then they can negotiate airplay without having to write checks. They'll just grant the broadcasters performance rights 'coupons' for certain artists/tracks. Nothing really changes, the labels cut down some of the cost-of-doing business.