Except they're using that SAME copper still, just with upgraded equipment along the lines, and they pocketed most of the money from the government.
P.S. It cost them nothing but network equipment to hook all those that already had cable up to the Internet, and while not exactly cheap, network equipment isn't exactly expensive either.
No one is saying that your niche product X doesn't have a niche use.
They're just saying that they have something better(much better) already for general use that costs about the same or less.
On another note, and pardon the language but:
I have no fucking idea what kind of "people with disabilites" you're working with, but I have worked with people with disabilities, everything from Down Syndrome to Blindness and I have no idea how this would make a good product for those people.
At best its a good toy for Down Syndrome folks to attempt to get them processing information in extreme cases but even then, there are better products, that don't cost 5-6000. If you've been spending 5-6000 you've been getting ripped off pretty badly...
I admit, I'm not an expert in the field, but I have worked with a wide range of disabilities and still can't see how the iPad would be superior to a number of things that have been available for 10 years or more and are in the same price range.
Oh, god, I think I just broke a rib from laughing so hard.
The iPhone doesn't have a dominant market share anywhere on the entire planet and its even MORE disgustingly trounced everywhere outside the US. Nokia actually has a massive lead in many countries outside the US
I looked at one and dismissed it immediately. Even if my phone weren't used for business, a lot of the features I use on a regular basis for business are handy as hell to have for my personal use as well. On the ranking scale of usefulness, the iPhone falls flat on its face.
Its very easy to tell if someone is interested in what they're doing or not when you spend 6 months sitting 20 feet away from them. Its also pretty easy to tell how gullible someone is. Hint: Marketing works really really well on gullible people.
The engineering bit I've gotten from a few friends. So again, anecdotal, but I already cited that part.
Though, if someone wants to use a Mac thats entirely up to them. There are superior choices out there for ME but perhaps for them thats the best thing.
The meme isn't true for some, but it is true for the majority. I've lost track of how many people I've met that bought a mac "because its pretty and the guy on the TV said it was way better than a PC"
What do you think he's using to post you insensitive clod!
On the other hand I've heard similar stories from my Grandfather. Made especially hilarious by the fact that he was already married to my grandmother in the 70's and he says this stuff in front of her.
In my experience, many CS and Engineering students these days sort of just fell out of the MBA class because they thought they would make more money with the CS or Engineering Degree.
Anecdotal but:
Of the 30 people I started my programming curriculum with, about 6 were competent, intelligent genuinely interested computer geeks. This includes 2 that may not necessarily be dubbed "smart" all of the time but they worked hard and were genuinely interested in what they were doing. The rest were a mixture of people who should have been doing MBAs(or getting a step ahead of the game and applying for that supervisor postion at McDonalds or Wal-Mart right away) and people who were taking majors in leisurely studies. This leaves you with a majority of folks that would be highly susceptible to the marketing tactics of apple, and there you have your majority of CS/Engineering folks now using Macs.
I mean, if they did all that work to turn it into a TV at all they could have released it to compete against Plasma TVs. If I could get CRT quality in LCD weight and size I'd be all over that. $5000 for a 36" TV that does that? Yes please.
Yeah, which makes it more believable that it was good and smallwood didn't have as much of a problem as the other guy. As a former WoW addict, 11 hours a day is totally believable. I'm a bit ashamed to admit it but somehow I held down a decent job and had a/played in WoW of 340 days over a 3 year period. No girlfriend of course, but I have one now and sometimes I wonder which version of me was actually better off...
Hi honey. No no no, I love you way more than any video game!
You're right. The free market doesn't lead to the betterment of the species, it leads to the betterment of a few insignificant specks lives. In the grand scheme of things and working towards the betterment of the human species, the free market is the worst possible way to go about it. Hard line socialism doesn't work either because the idiots breed still, living off of government welfare. The answer is somewhere in the middle. Business needs to be fairly heavily regulated, because lets face it, even the regs you put into place are NOT going to be followed to the letter, so you have to overshoot a bit.
The rest of society? Let them do what they please as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. Anyone stupid enough to go skydiving without a parachute because there weren't any regulations saying they "Had to have one" isn't an asset to the species overall and should be allowed to jump off of that plane. Nor should we have welfare, we should have a low income support system but it should be heavily heavily based around educating these people rather than having them continue to leach off of the government as the system is currently designed to do.
an idiot thats handed 100 million because he lucked into having a good father is still an idiot. Certain parts of that genetic code may be good but you lose all darwinism as soon as the idiot procreates off his fathers efforts.
On an even playing field that jackass wouldn't have been more fit to survive. You can't have an even playing field in a free market. In a properly regulated market the idiot would squander his fathers fortunes while not being able to play bully in his market and the other guy would keep trucking along and eventually be a great success, advancing the species more than the idiot ever could have.
I agree to a point, but I feel the regs should still be in place to prevent an unfair advantage. a man with an IQ of 100 who inherits 100 million will inevitably trounce a man with an IQ of 140 who inherits nothing when they attempt to compete with each other.
Basically I think they should remove most safety regulations, but keep the business ones and add to them. Mostly because social IQ is a different metric, and business almost exclusively promotes social IQ, and a society left in an endless circle jerk isn't going to get anywhere. We're already seeing effects of this at work in some areas.
All of you folks trumpeting free market and people thinking for themselves need to remember one thing:
Think about how dumb the average person is. Now remember that half the people are even dumber than that.
Theres a reason for all the regulations, and most of them started out with the intent of keeping some of those sub average folks from sticking forks into electrical outlets. I'm not saying its right, I'm saying their hearts were originally in the right place.
In addition, as a free thinking person that can "think for themselves" the greatest example of a purely free market at work can be found in multiple areas over the last few thousands years, rampant with slavery, all of the wealth being focused in a few people and used to gain power, or power being used to accumulate wealth. At some point, someone gets an advantage in cash flow, it probably isn't even from their primary market, or if it is its used on something that isn't their primary market to gain an additional cash flow. Now with this advantage they use it to slowly damage the competition, because they can afford to do so. Either by selling below cost for awhile, forcing the competition to do the same while they can't afford to do so but you can, or if they manage to make the gap wide enough fast enough then they just buy the competition. Anything new springs up and bam, bought. A new idea? Oh, shit you'd rather ride it out than just sell to me now?... Oh, wait, screw that, I'll do it too but I have so much more money to pour into it right now that it'll be better than yours, available faster than yours, and I'll sell it below your cost, then I'll buy whats left of you for next to nothing after you're broken and just go right back to gouging the people for however much I want. Hell, in your "omg regulations" system right NOW this happens on a regular basis, its partly made easier in some cases but mostly made harder and there are laws in place to attempt to prevent it, but most of them don't go far enough.
Theres your free market theory at work, thats what happens in a pure free market. The money eventually all aggregates at the top creating an oligarchy or plutocracy, which in turn makes almost all of the people under them their indentured slaves, except for a select few of course.
I can provide specific, recent examples of things that have happened simply because of a cash disparity and not enough regulation in place to stop it from happening, but if you still think a free market is a good idea then likely you have your fingers in your ears going "la la la I'm not listening"
This is actually accurate. I have a subwoofer now that hates my cheap HDMI cables but plays nicely with my extra shielded $50 ones. On the other hand they don't show any difference at all between my $50 well shielded cable and the one a friend of mine paid $200 for, and I am a bit of an audiophile, but I'm a cheap bastard on top of it so I always look for the exact reason something isn't quite right and go with the cheapest thing that will grant me my desired performance.
paying someone $1000 to post a good review of a cable that sells for $1000 is just about made up for in one sale, the paid-for review only has to convince two people to buy one and they're in money since the cable cost $20 max to make.
Agreed. If it was a true mac fan, that was just embarrassing (and this coming from me, a true Mac user). If it was a troll pretending to be a mac fan, it was still just embarrassing.
This scares me, the language apple fanboys use more and more resembles a religious following rather than a techie following. Someone needs to stop Jobs before its too late!
I don't cheat most of the time because I like the challenge of the game, but once you're its fun as hell to go back and cheat the pants off it running around like a god sometimes.
I want my up down up down a b a b start + select back dammit!
You speak truth, but at the same time those exploits were fixed a lot faster than the year+ that MS often takes. Of the two I've dealt with a lot more machines compromised by MS's apathy towards browser fixes than flash/pdf exploits, but YMMV obviously.
Slashdot Mirror
Except they're using that SAME copper still, just with upgraded equipment along the lines, and they pocketed most of the money from the government.
P.S. It cost them nothing but network equipment to hook all those that already had cable up to the Internet, and while not exactly cheap, network equipment isn't exactly expensive either.
No one is saying that your niche product X doesn't have a niche use.
They're just saying that they have something better(much better) already for general use that costs about the same or less.
On another note, and pardon the language but:
I have no fucking idea what kind of "people with disabilites" you're working with, but I have worked with people with disabilities, everything from Down Syndrome to Blindness and I have no idea how this would make a good product for those people.
At best its a good toy for Down Syndrome folks to attempt to get them processing information in extreme cases but even then, there are better products, that don't cost 5-6000. If you've been spending 5-6000 you've been getting ripped off pretty badly...
I admit, I'm not an expert in the field, but I have worked with a wide range of disabilities and still can't see how the iPad would be superior to a number of things that have been available for 10 years or more and are in the same price range.
Oh, god, I think I just broke a rib from laughing so hard.
The iPhone doesn't have a dominant market share anywhere on the entire planet and its even MORE disgustingly trounced everywhere outside the US. Nokia actually has a massive lead in many countries outside the US
I looked at one and dismissed it immediately. Even if my phone weren't used for business, a lot of the features I use on a regular basis for business are handy as hell to have for my personal use as well. On the ranking scale of usefulness, the iPhone falls flat on its face.
Its very easy to tell if someone is interested in what they're doing or not when you spend 6 months sitting 20 feet away from them. Its also pretty easy to tell how gullible someone is. Hint: Marketing works really really well on gullible people.
The engineering bit I've gotten from a few friends. So again, anecdotal, but I already cited that part.
Though, if someone wants to use a Mac thats entirely up to them. There are superior choices out there for ME but perhaps for them thats the best thing.
The meme isn't true for some, but it is true for the majority. I've lost track of how many people I've met that bought a mac "because its pretty and the guy on the TV said it was way better than a PC"
What do you think he's using to post you insensitive clod!
On the other hand I've heard similar stories from my Grandfather. Made especially hilarious by the fact that he was already married to my grandmother in the 70's and he says this stuff in front of her.
In my experience, many CS and Engineering students these days sort of just fell out of the MBA class because they thought they would make more money with the CS or Engineering Degree.
Anecdotal but:
Of the 30 people I started my programming curriculum with, about 6 were competent, intelligent genuinely interested computer geeks. This includes 2 that may not necessarily be dubbed "smart" all of the time but they worked hard and were genuinely interested in what they were doing. The rest were a mixture of people who should have been doing MBAs(or getting a step ahead of the game and applying for that supervisor postion at McDonalds or Wal-Mart right away) and people who were taking majors in leisurely studies. This leaves you with a majority of folks that would be highly susceptible to the marketing tactics of apple, and there you have your majority of CS/Engineering folks now using Macs.
I mean, if they did all that work to turn it into a TV at all they could have released it to compete against Plasma TVs. If I could get CRT quality in LCD weight and size I'd be all over that. $5000 for a 36" TV that does that? Yes please.
Yeah, which makes it more believable that it was good and smallwood didn't have as much of a problem as the other guy. As a former WoW addict, 11 hours a day is totally believable. I'm a bit ashamed to admit it but somehow I held down a decent job and had a /played in WoW of 340 days over a 3 year period. No girlfriend of course, but I have one now and sometimes I wonder which version of me was actually better off...
Hi honey. No no no, I love you way more than any video game!
My first thought was "Hmm, I haven't played lineage, apparently I should."
You're right. The free market doesn't lead to the betterment of the species, it leads to the betterment of a few insignificant specks lives. In the grand scheme of things and working towards the betterment of the human species, the free market is the worst possible way to go about it. Hard line socialism doesn't work either because the idiots breed still, living off of government welfare. The answer is somewhere in the middle. Business needs to be fairly heavily regulated, because lets face it, even the regs you put into place are NOT going to be followed to the letter, so you have to overshoot a bit.
The rest of society? Let them do what they please as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. Anyone stupid enough to go skydiving without a parachute because there weren't any regulations saying they "Had to have one" isn't an asset to the species overall and should be allowed to jump off of that plane. Nor should we have welfare, we should have a low income support system but it should be heavily heavily based around educating these people rather than having them continue to leach off of the government as the system is currently designed to do.
an idiot thats handed 100 million because he lucked into having a good father is still an idiot. Certain parts of that genetic code may be good but you lose all darwinism as soon as the idiot procreates off his fathers efforts.
On an even playing field that jackass wouldn't have been more fit to survive. You can't have an even playing field in a free market. In a properly regulated market the idiot would squander his fathers fortunes while not being able to play bully in his market and the other guy would keep trucking along and eventually be a great success, advancing the species more than the idiot ever could have.
I agree to a point, but I feel the regs should still be in place to prevent an unfair advantage. a man with an IQ of 100 who inherits 100 million will inevitably trounce a man with an IQ of 140 who inherits nothing when they attempt to compete with each other.
Basically I think they should remove most safety regulations, but keep the business ones and add to them. Mostly because social IQ is a different metric, and business almost exclusively promotes social IQ, and a society left in an endless circle jerk isn't going to get anywhere. We're already seeing effects of this at work in some areas.
It was actually the wire, the closer the wire was to the sub the worse this little whiny sound got.
**gasp**
All of you folks trumpeting free market and people thinking for themselves need to remember one thing:
Think about how dumb the average person is. Now remember that half the people are even dumber than that.
Theres a reason for all the regulations, and most of them started out with the intent of keeping some of those sub average folks from sticking forks into electrical outlets. I'm not saying its right, I'm saying their hearts were originally in the right place.
In addition, as a free thinking person that can "think for themselves" the greatest example of a purely free market at work can be found in multiple areas over the last few thousands years, rampant with slavery, all of the wealth being focused in a few people and used to gain power, or power being used to accumulate wealth. At some point, someone gets an advantage in cash flow, it probably isn't even from their primary market, or if it is its used on something that isn't their primary market to gain an additional cash flow. Now with this advantage they use it to slowly damage the competition, because they can afford to do so. Either by selling below cost for awhile, forcing the competition to do the same while they can't afford to do so but you can, or if they manage to make the gap wide enough fast enough then they just buy the competition. Anything new springs up and bam, bought. A new idea? Oh, shit you'd rather ride it out than just sell to me now?... Oh, wait, screw that, I'll do it too but I have so much more money to pour into it right now that it'll be better than yours, available faster than yours, and I'll sell it below your cost, then I'll buy whats left of you for next to nothing after you're broken and just go right back to gouging the people for however much I want. Hell, in your "omg regulations" system right NOW this happens on a regular basis, its partly made easier in some cases but mostly made harder and there are laws in place to attempt to prevent it, but most of them don't go far enough.
Theres your free market theory at work, thats what happens in a pure free market. The money eventually all aggregates at the top creating an oligarchy or plutocracy, which in turn makes almost all of the people under them their indentured slaves, except for a select few of course.
I can provide specific, recent examples of things that have happened simply because of a cash disparity and not enough regulation in place to stop it from happening, but if you still think a free market is a good idea then likely you have your fingers in your ears going "la la la I'm not listening"
2-300k? Jebus, I'm in the wrong business!
Well, you never know, maybe you DO want some of those sommeliers to drink one or both of those!
This is actually accurate. I have a subwoofer now that hates my cheap HDMI cables but plays nicely with my extra shielded $50 ones. On the other hand they don't show any difference at all between my $50 well shielded cable and the one a friend of mine paid $200 for, and I am a bit of an audiophile, but I'm a cheap bastard on top of it so I always look for the exact reason something isn't quite right and go with the cheapest thing that will grant me my desired performance.
paying someone $1000 to post a good review of a cable that sells for $1000 is just about made up for in one sale, the paid-for review only has to convince two people to buy one and they're in money since the cable cost $20 max to make.
Agreed. If it was a true mac fan, that was just embarrassing (and this coming from me, a true Mac user). If it was a troll pretending to be a mac fan, it was still just embarrassing.
This scares me, the language apple fanboys use more and more resembles a religious following rather than a techie following. Someone needs to stop Jobs before its too late!
A lot of people need to learn the phrase : "Common sense is not so common".
Wait, is skateboards the new slang term for 4chan?
Hmm, bad typing day, there was supposed to be a "done" in there somewhere.
I don't cheat most of the time because I like the challenge of the game, but once you're its fun as hell to go back and cheat the pants off it running around like a god sometimes.
I want my up down up down a b a b start + select back dammit!
You speak truth, but at the same time those exploits were fixed a lot faster than the year+ that MS often takes. Of the two I've dealt with a lot more machines compromised by MS's apathy towards browser fixes than flash/pdf exploits, but YMMV obviously.