This is reasonable. If a product does not work, return it, and find a product that does. This is much more reasonable than complaining that a product does not meet every need of every user.
Beyond this the issue we are seeing is that Apple is one again trying to compete on specifications instead of overall performance. It is like buying a computer based on processor speed and memory and the number of USB ports, but ignoring bus speed and the fact that USB is the slow version 2.0. Apple knows that for consumer products it can't compete on overall performance, because consumers will inevitable choose the cheaper product that has the biggest penis/cup size.
What this means in this case is that Apple probably put out the 3g stuff earlier than it should have because the consumer market demanded cool specifications even if it meant worse overall performance. Even thought the iPhone worked well, few wanted it because it was not buzzword complaint. So now we have a phone that does not work so well, eats the battery, and is a less satisfying experience. Oh well, at least it still looks cool and has the proper features listed on the box.
Absolutely. This is nothing more than someone's attempt to subvert science to foster their own action. The first thing I thought of was the misapplication of Darwin's Origin of Species, and the attempt by some to use it to justify the oppression of the workers. The argument went that the strongest naturally controlled things, and the weakest naturally were subservient, or some such poppycock. In fact science creates certain models that covers certain phenomenon over certain domains. Newtons physics only works for |v|
Free will is a construct we impose on social dealing to insure that we can hold people accountable. Determinacy is a construct we impose on the physical world to help us do physics. As our math and observations got better, determinacy was not so tightly held. As out society becomes more sympathetic to the individual, free will is not so tightly held. That these two things seem to be decaying contemporaneously does not imply a cause and effect relationship.
So what has changed. He still thinks he is better than anyone else, and still cannot conceive that someone who got into school without legacy and made a success of themselves without their daddy's help and without divorcing their first wife so they could marry into money might be more qualified as a role model to those of us who were not born into a legacy and had to work for a living. Pretty much he still seems to that ignorance, inexperienced, little boy who chooses not to believe that the world can be so much greater than is dreamt of in his philosophy.
Of course 90% of what is said on blogs is crap, just like 100% of what McCain has said since winning the nomination is crap. But that does not mean that he does not have the right to say it.
It all comes back to the rule of law or the rule of arbitrary enforcement. We see where the later has gotten us. If he was not violating policy, then he should not be questioned or ejected. I know the US considers the opportunity to eject or not serve anyone I do not like, and for a private business there is some defense, I mean if someone comes in badly dressed in a geeky t-shirt I should be able to forcible eject him, even have him arrested, but for publicly funded enterprises it is different.
So, the issue seems to be where and of what to take pictures. Many respectable museums solve this problem as not allowing pictures at all. The reason for this is that the average shutterbug is too stupid to turn of the flash, and the flash, over time, harms the art. Other restrict the photos in some way, even, in the old days, limiting to black and white. If one is to allow photos, and there is problem with perverts taking pictures of scantily clad persons, then perhaps there is a policy to prevent that. In any case, it does come down to the rule of law versus enforcing arbitrary policy on people you don't like.
That is about the level that discourse has taken. We no longer use reason and logic. We use superstition and fear and violence to force our opinions on other people. Security is no based on movie plot threats, not credible scenarios. We prosecute based on whether we like the persons beliefs, not what kind of threat they are.
Recall that while the 9/11 plot likely being planed while our government was embroiled in the investigation of blowjob. Recall that the state and federal government were falling over each other to who was going to prosecute John Allen Muhammad and hopefully execute them for the murder of 10 people, each target by the killers, but were besides themselves to cut a plea agreement Eric Robert Rudolph(arrested 2003), who planted bombs around the country, so he would only receive life sentences. One has to wonder how much of this is based on the rule of law, and how much is based on faith based enforcement.
Pictures certainly pose some minimal level of security threat for some high risk locations. The issue to me is that if someone is going to get photos of a location, there are many ways to do so without being noticed. Camera phones spring to mind. Therefore, such restrictions, like the limiting on liquid on flights, is simply making people feel like you are doing something without actually having to do anything.
OTOH, owners of private property do have right to control their property.It is the security theater of the government that concerns me, as they are really doing very little than the acquisition and concentration of power, and with every emergency that they allow to happen, the power becomes more centralized.
I thought that netflix took your money every month and then occasionally mailed you a CD as it is able. The more money you pay the more CDs you can have at one time, so this delay might push people from their basic $5 plan to a higher plan, espcially since you stream movies when you have no CDs.
So, is it that they are having a problem, or simply pushing people to more expensive plans. Sure, some of the low end customers might leave, but so what? A top end customer bills for 3X the revenue, but likely more than 3X the profit.
Though your points are clear, they do not imply a necessity of Wii having games based on explicit violence.
First, I do not see how the time spent playing games translates into profit. The only thing that translates to profit is number of games sold. Now, if a game is lame, then the next version is unlikely to bought, but lame does not translate into lack of opportunities to knock on the honest working women of the world. In fact sports related, where both the violence and competition is highly stylized, appear to be the most popular games.
Second, not every successful product has to market to the same people. We see this on free TV where every show is targeted to the 18-35 year old, as they are the ones that spend the most money, and we see that free TV is barely surviving, both as an advertising and creative median. OTOH, cable TV which targets to other niches, seems to be doing fine. The Wii is a highly succesful machine, targeted to a certain audience. To say that they are nannies preventing it from expanding into other markets is simplistic. They sell consoles, they have some of the top games, and if people want violent video games, there are other consoles available.
In the end, the entertainment industry has been decimated by the cult of teen age boys. In fact, society in general has been harmed by the idea that teen aged boys must be coddled to, even at the expense of the rest of society. In many ways life may have been better before that advent of adolescent, when the primary purpose of a teen age boy was to work the field, or in some other way help support the family that took care of him for all the years. Certainly making entertainment knowing that he act like a pussy and throw a tantrum until his parents buy it for him has lead to some pretty shitty product. In the end if the Wii concentrated on teen aged boys we see the same shit we see every where else, and what would be the point of that?
(BTW, I really like sin city, but it was not just the naked women and violence, as any pornographer can do that, as most of the major media outlets has shown, but because Robert Rodriguez is quite possible the only fim maker of this generation to fully utilize the technology to create a unique product.)
IBM fell to a radically changing computing environment. This also negatively effected Apple, i.e. the Mac was overnight an overpriced machine, and positively effected MS as the supplier of a cheap clone OS and easily pirated ancillary software.
As mentioned elsewhere, the key issue was the Compaq whiteroom creation of a clone bios and compatible hardware. These machines were not super cheap, but they opened to door to super cheap machines and created the market for standard commodity hardware. Throw the MS OS in the mix, and businesses did not have to go to IBM unless they needed complete solutions.
What is interesting is this same thing is now threatening MS. Businesses need long term solutions, not innovative eye candy. Consumers want ever cheaper computers, but, like IBM, MS has become too bloated and inefficient to deliver a cheap product at a profit. Would there be any complaints against Vista if am ultimate upgrade were $100 instead of $200+? That and forcing businesses to honor the MS business plan instead of their own is quite a bold move.
So what does this mean for Apple? Not much. If MS can enforce the EULA that says the home edition cannot be virtualized, or OEM editions cannot be transfered to a new machine, then it seems that Apple should be able to limit the use of it's OS to Apple branded machines. I see no problem with shipping a computer that can run the current version of Mac OS X, but it would be shipped as a 'naked pc', which, of course MS would then file lawsuit against as encouraging piracy.
In any case as long as such machine had a warning that Apple would likely upgrade the OS so it would no longer run on the machine, I think companies should be able to sell as many Apple compatible machines as they want. As I mentioned before, the only problem would be that users would then call Apple for tech support, reveal they were running a clone, and Apple would give not support. This would create a cost for Apple, which they would then sue the clone manufacturer to recover.
The issue is the young athletes. This is not a 'think about the children' rant, just a matter of public policy, and a proven trend of kids destroying their body to become star athletes. Parents and schools are allowing kids to engage in sports at early ages that damage their bodies. And what for? A maybe 5% chance of getting a partial scholarship to college, or a not more than 0.05% of making it into a pro sport?
Now some might state that if a parent wants to damage a kid, then that is ok, but who pays for it? It is us that pays the insurance rates and fund the school special services. I don't think that any parent intentionally damages a kid, but who many think that the level of practice is going to tear and ACL, and an ACl is not easily repaired in a prescription steroid, especially when their kids is never getting picked for the team?
We can go even further. In many places simple sports like soccer and baseball and track are simply not funded. Though these are very excited and meet all exercise requirements for kids, and soccer in particular can be played with minimal gear, schools spend huge amounts of money funding the most expensive and dangerous sport: football. Then they complain that there is not enough funding to buy enough safety equipment and kids get hurt. Kids getting hurt apparently does not increase the funding or shift sports to equally beneficial and cheaper sports. I am not saying these sports are safe,and if pushed kids will still risk injury, but they are somewhat safer.
So, in this environment when a significant percentage of pediatric injuries are sports related, and there seems little desire to limit these injuries, is there any doubt that coaches and parents will dope the kids? And while such doping may not do significant harm in adults, I think it will likely do significant harm in kids. And do we want to the schools that have to accommodate these kids?
The corollary to this is that anti-piracy measures does not mean additional sales. For instance, I stopped buying and playing games when the copy protect stuff became prevalent, particularly the lack ability to install on a computer and play without the CD. I am a very casual gamer. I enjoyed having a few games install on my laptop, and my desktop computer. I would play them a few times, then buy another. I am not so hardocre as to want to deal with disks, or accept the insult of being considered a pirate of a game I bought simply because I owned two machines and did not want pay for two licenses.
As a result various software firms lost my custom and my dollars. I say this not to whine, as I firmly believe that businesses should have the right to run as they wish, and my life is less because I do not play games, but simply to state that if your aim is to sell general entertainment, you can't piss off your audience. That is not entertainment. It is like the whiny pussy stuntman they used to run before movies complaining that his family cannot eat because of piracy. Well, if no one wants to pay for the product, perhaps one needs to think about why, and not feel all entitled to a profit for a product few are willing to pay for. Perhaps a whiny stunt men, or silly ads, or expensive food is why people do not go to see movies and instead resort to piracy so that they can see the movie that is so heavily advertised that if they don't see it they feel culturally insufficient. Just a possibility.
But in the end, I think most people who pirate games are young people, because young people are the ones who play games, and young people often yet do not have a lot of money, or at least enough sense to budget their money, or at least enough money to fill all their wants, or at least enough, or likely not enough maturity to distinguish between a want and a need, so they end up doing arguably unwise things like breaking into cars for beer money and pirating games.
The solution to this may be developing games for the just-out-of-young-adult age range, when money tends to be available, and some wisdom has set in. Of course, it can't be so copy protected as to add to the daily annoyance of kids and the hated job.
But the issue here is fear, not security. Any technology is a threat to those elite who hope to maintain power based on past accomplishments rather than current value to society. There, one critical component of fear based control, along with draining the government coffers through random acts of war and irrelevant government departments, is to make people fear technology. This is nothing new. Why else would our culture so many kids into sports, where they have a 1% chance of success, rather than innovation, where they have a order of magnitude greater chance of success. Why else would we make air travel more difficult, thus limiting the educational opportunities of travel. It is not just security theatre, it is the barrier protecting the economic opportunities of the elite.
Fortunately the US is still enough of a free country where we like to treat the aristocracy the traditional manner of our founding principles. So, even though we have mickey mouse copyright laws to insure that the heirs are rich even though they contribute nothing to society, laptop rules to insure that the productivity of those that do contribute to society is limited, and other civil list type concessions, we at least have the freedom to call a spade a spade, and remember that this country was founded on the principles of taking things from aristocrats, not coddling them.
.mac, does serve one important function of a data retention plan. It provides multiple multiple and offsite backups of data. I can say it works pretty well. I have not lost much data since using it. I have data stored on my computer, on my phone, and on Apple servers. I am not sure what changes with Mobileme, though my suspicion is that data might become more susceptible to loss. This is because Apple does not provide a system to insure data integrity. I have lost individual files and bits of data over the years. Apple will warn you if whole swaths of data is to be deleted, but that does not prevent the occasional missing bit. If you catch it, or have local backup, the data can be maintained. But noticing a obscure bit of data is gone is a challenge.
Which means that a paranoid keeps really critical stuff backed up another way. I have chosen to move to text based solutions, and then keep a off site SVN repository. This maintain a somewhat audit-able trail for data integrity. Since I assume that Google is backing data, and it that part of it probably more secure than the single local copy most people maintain, the issue would be data integrity. I wonder if there is something in the API that might allow an version control type solution so that changes made would be stored to another site. Of course, such a solution might costs money, and the beauty of google is that it allows users to trade privacy and control for free-to-them services, so such a solution may be out of the domain.
That said a changed name does not imply that we must refer to the entity by the new name. In fact, using the most known name is good etiquette for the readers. As long as the changed name appears somewhere, there is not problem.
My Freely offered Blog entry. Copy as you see fit. I need no rewards.
I admit it is a bit over the op, but if we are in a world where millions of dollars can be spent comparing a magna cum laude Havard Graduate to Paris Hiton, anything goes.
McCain was not born in the US but is considered a US citizen anyway, unlike many who are born in the US that the republican party wants to consider foreign.
As a proud third generation employee of the government, McCain is uniquely experienced to be president. His third generation military status uniquely places him to find the best government military solutions for every problem, without the distractions of diplomacy or allowing the free market to work. Like the current president, he entered higher education on a legacy, thus putting him in touch with the problems of the elite he represents. Also like the current president, he has a storied military carreer, flying planes around the world. At one point his plane got shot down and he no longer flew planes, but was kept in a POW camp. He was tortured for some time during the captivity. This experience wad apparently not bad enough to make him unconditionally opposed to torture.
He also has a unique perspective on government medical care. As a third generation government employee, he has spent his entire life with free access to the government medical facilities. Although he is 71, and claims to be in good health, he experience has shown him that government medical care is not good enough for the general populous, so is absolutely opposed to it.
Some might think a third generation government employee may not be the best president for a country based on free enterprise, but wait. His second wife, whom he married soon after divorcing his first wife, is the chair of one of the largest beer distributors in the country. As such, McCain has experience with the perks of the corporate life, like luxury corporate jets, which he used to ferry himself between campaign stops during his bid to become president. He understands the compromises that must be made when growing a business, like how many alcohol related teen deaths are acceptable to maintain a certain profit margin.
As we can see McCain is uniquely qualified to understand the needs of the nation. The military can solve all problems. The health care system that has kept him so healthy is not adequate of capable of doing the same for the masses. American Corporations has special problems and must be given significant leeway in their right to earn a profit.
My switch to DVD was practical. I could play the discs on my computer, so did not need another TV DVD setup. If it were not for that, I likely would have switched much later. The extra features of the DVD, 'better' video quality and multiple tracks were the only thing that were ever widely used, did not out weigh the inconveniences. Boilerplate and previews that could not fastwarded or sometimes even skipped. Whiz bang stupid juvenile quality graphics that had to be tolerated to get to the movie. A lack of duplication feature. A lack of low price given that the disc could not be duplicated.
Blu ray drives will play DVD, so there will no be impetus to buy old or new movies on Bluray except for the additional 'quality', which will require an expensive display. Bluray discs are being sold again at hugely high price points even though, according to the industry, 1 billion is lost a year to piracy, something that is increasing difficult with blu ray. And, of course, given that blurays retail for $30, even old sotck, they are certainly not priced to sell.
First, a firm has to make money. At some point during the first years the firm has decide what the so-called core business is that will generate a profit. For google, that is advertising. The search technology is there to get clicks for advertising, just like the stories in a newspaper is there to get people to read the ads in the newspaper. This is why the newspaper are so pissed of at Google. It is not so much a copyright thing as a stealing advertising thing.
Honestly if this was a major point in the book, then the authors have missed the whole deal, and are certainly part of the problem, A business has to provide a service that the public will directly or indirectly pay for, while the customers who create the profit are those that need to be served. Additionally, restrictive models create short term firms.
So, where are these people not part fo the solution. First, kodak, like so many other companies, in business to sell consumables. Not really an optics firm like Nikon. Consumables go, they fall with it. But they succeeded not by making things emotional, but by focusing on customers needs rather than being a slave to the tech. Kodaks fall was forestalled by several years with the introduction of the arguably inferior advantix film, that gave people the simplicity they want with enough quality.
This then leads to usability. Even now Kodak focuses more on usability, leaving the whiz bang stuff to others. So does Apple. The Old G4 cases had handles. The on switch is up front or on the keyboard, so you don't have to look around. But usability is a compromise, and like the G4, people were no so concerned about that usability issue to buy it instead of cheap PC.
So product design is about meeting customers needs and profitability. These are not always the same thing. My bank now puts in interstitials and other adverts when I am logged into my account. These have not only security implications, but reduce the usability of the site. However, the site needs to make a profit, and I have a free account, so this is what they do. Every design issue costs money, not only to build, but also ancillary earning opportunities. The person using the service is not always the primary customer, i.e. profit generating entity.
The dot com boom shows that no product, no matter how cool or well designed, hangs around if a profit is not earned. Buzz word compliance, like AJAX, is not enough. Apple, or Kodak, or Sony, hangs around because it finds good compromises in design. The same holds for MS, though I think if they don't get a bit schizophrenic about the core business they may have issues.
In fact, the conspiracy of new laptop bag is simply a silly distraction that makes us looks like lunatics. Most people have all sorts of fancy kit for the airplane. Roller carry ons, roller suitcase, special accessory bags. Very few people I know simply throw stuff into a back, put a pillow under their arm, and fly.
I may be the person that other flyers hate, but I make little effort to encourage this security threatre by conforming to the silly checkpoints. If they want my to empty my pockets, everything gets emptied into one bucket. Then my laptop needs to be pulled out, maybe out of two layers. I may end up with three evern four trays. Hey, it is their rules.
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The thing with this new laptop rule is it is made to satisfy one of the norms of security. Security efforts will fail if they are too onerous. Overly aggressive password rules will lead to less secure passwords. Security checks that take too long will lead to less security as people try to speed it up. The laptop rule is a way to speed up security to make it more effective. But it is meaningless as I know that the Homeland Security and TSA is simply a way for the socialists to further their plans of big government, and higher taxation.
It sounds to me like they add this to a customer affinity card. I, personally, agree with you. I have no tolerance for carrying around these affinity cards, and do not shop at any store that relies heavily on such cards. I consider a waste of my time to either find the card or state that I do not have one. In fact, now that I think about it, I am shopping less at stores that demand I apply for a credit card every time I check out.
OTOH, a large portion of the population do go for affinity cards. They think that they are getting a good deal on two litres of coke that is marked down from $3 when they present their cards, and this is the type of establishment that the patent is likely targeting. If one is going to take the time to keep track of an affinity card so the store will charge what other stores charge normally, then this automatic choice of bags is an added benefit of this.
The patent does sound obvious, but if IBM is going to use it in conjunction with current services, it will be a way for them to differentiate from the competition.
This is always the first thing I try. Just rip it into iTunes. I don't bother to clean the CD. Most of the time even if it won't play on a dedicated CD player, I can usually get most of it into the computer and then burn a new copy. I just did this to repair an audio book CD that would not play on any CD player.
In any case, burning CDs was my SOP for several years. I would never carry the original in the car, for, as you mentioned, the heat, vibrations, etc would invariable kill the CD.
Because working the problem is sometimes all the fun. It is not just about being given toys and playing games. Sometimes the game is making the toy. It is no wonder that GM cars put out less than 20 HP per cylinder. No one wants to work the problem.
In fact this is interesting. Most of the Apple ][ is now in a chip, We know that. But what if for $12 we can have a computer that kids can learn on. Not play on the internet. not play ready made games, but actually code, in assembly, in C. Not fun for most people, not even most people on/., but I can think of many people in the world who would find this interesting. Get the Apple ][ Kit. Build it. Code on it. Extend it. This, BTW, is how many people leaned Vacuum Tubes then electronics, from Heathkits. It is not for the market where kids think a computer is to find sex on the internet. It is for the market where the computer is cool piece of electronics, inherently interesting.
The danger of course is that they will be more aware of the fundamentals than the kids just given a MS Windows and told to code in Design Studio, which might mean that more jobs move offshore as American programmers become robots to the IDE.
For the most part, MS has bought what is mostly mature technology and made it accessible to the mass market. This is useful, but not innovation. Most of it's problems come from the fact that it is not a super high tech company. It is a medium tech company that provides good components for inexpensive solutions to common problems. This is the second problem. MS does not provide solutions. It is up to third parties to hack together solution to common problems from proprietary MS components and commodity third party components. This can be an efficient method to problem solve, but can be expensive as the MS proprietary solutions are becoming less competitive, and the cost savings are increasingly coming from third party commodity products, products that can run non-proprietary software. A MS certified team to make everything work is not cheap either.
So what MS is and has been saying is that it acquired the IP fair in square, and is properly selling it on the market, while others are just copying. Let us not dwell on the fact that is where MS was 20 years ago when Apple acquired the WIMP interface fair and square and MS copied it to run on cheaper hardware, which let us remember that Compaq created at no small expense fair and square. No, let's just look at the claims as they stand using a classic example, SQL
SQL server was aquired acquired from sybase. Is there technology here that MS can claim was part of that deal, and stolen by the OSS community. I think not. SQL was developed by IBM and what is now Oracle, and was standardized, I believe, in the mid 80's. The two big OSS competitors, mSQL and PostreSQL were both independently developed by teams concurrently with the Sybase product and opensourced, partly or otherwise, by their creator. I am sure that both not include features that MS SQL has, but I would also guess that Oracle or IBM has the features first.
In the end MS problem is simply that they are not 2-3 years ahead of the curve. When this happened to SGI, they went bankrupt. A firm simply cannot charge a premium for this years technology. In the case of software, this is because the OSS people can do the same thing, for free. MS Office is simply too mature to be a profit center. MS Server is simply relatively too low tech. Even the X Box is not at the front of the pack, at least not by more than six months.MS has some traction through collaboration, and they can continue to make money there, but complaining about the loss os MS Windows market share is silly. They had the chance the database file system, but for some reason they did not provide enough resources. This in itself proves that they are not innovative.
MS will lose customers because they are lazy. They will continue to have enterprise customers, they will continue to have the gaming market. We will see the general desktop and server market move away from them unless they come up with something big or go back to their roots as the cheap solution. We see this in the emerging $100-$200 portable market. If this will provide the growth the stock market wants is yet to be seen.
The attack on libraries is really an attack on education, innovation, and the basis of what makes the United States great. I can go into a library and read whatever I wish, with no repercussions At least that is the way it used to be. No more enterprising student going to the library to learn beyond what is taught in school. No more entrepreneurs going to the library to check out opportunities in the fertilizer trade. No more anyone going to the library with the freedom of reading whatever he or she wishes.
Not to be melodramatic, but any Librarian(real MLS), who gives up patron records without a fight would really have a tought time justifying their existence in that capacity. If librarians are just going to be glorified shop attendants, we can get them for a whole lot less, and with much less investment in education, than we do know.
We might agree to give up some peripheral rights for perceived safety thinking it is a good deal. However, the greatest risk to the elite is that the at-risk servants might become educated. Therefore, the primary objective of the elite is to minimize the educational opportunities for said servants. Recall that many citizens of Texas, partly because they could not read, were held up to four years after slavery because illegal.
Biology, certainly not chemistry of physics. Dogma is mostly used today by those who wish push science back into the realm of superstition so they can mutilate and burn. Those enlightened by the scientific method use different terminology.
The lack of lead in solder is a technological issue and as such is solved by more advanced technology. Certainly there are few people here who are opposed to higher technology?
Sure we can whine about the extra work we are forced to do, or the fact that we have to pay for higher technology, but what good does that do. As technologically savvy people we live for the chance to advance the technology. We see these opportunities all over the place. Smaller cars require innovate means to increase safety and power. Smaller computers require more power efficient components and better batteries. Have one type of plastic go away just opens up a space for innovative new plastics. this is what makes the world exciting.
So, if some company can't keep up, then they just suck as technologist and need to go away. A car company can't make technologically advanced cars, screw them. A video card manufacturer can't keep up with the trends and make a reliable video card, screw them too. I have involved in a number of situations where the process had to be rethought. Someone whines that a baby might be born with defect and we can't use this chemical. Someone complains that the dust will give them cancer and we must use a hood. Someone complains that we can't reliably dispose of an agent, and we must switch agents. Sure, we could say who cares if some worker dies. So what? But in each case the change was made, and technology gave us an equal or better solution.
It is always easier to blame failure of the external forces rather than taking responsibility for a personal lack of creativity. This change is solder is not the first scape goat used by the those that lack innovative solutions, and won't be the last. There will always be firms that say a problem can't be solved, and they will be generally over thrown by those who then find the solution. I think that any number of lazy American firms are discovering that right now, while others are riding the way of can-do innovations.
It is about money. Mostly people don't care if the money is there. People were OK with Regan, because even though he was a no tax and spen fiscal liberal, the money he spent was on conservative acceptable WMDs and he solved a problem. The fact that the he rose the national debt from around 40% of GDP to perhaps around 70% of GDP seemed necessary to get us out of economic difficulties and win the cold war, which did happen.
The economy good, Clinton was able to enact fiscally conservative policies which reduced the total national debt to probably below 60% GDP. It might have been lower, but the fiscally irresponsible conservatives continued to waste money on frivolous things like investigating whether he got a blow job. Certainly important for the sexually spurred, but not an issue for those of us who ever irregularly are allowed to play in such reindeer games.
The issue is that Bush has really fucked up. The economy is tanking. He is forced to adopt socialist methods such as tax rebates and public financing or the private home equity market in order to keep the US from sliding to oblivion. Such socialist methods are quite reasonable to him as is shown by the first this he did when take office is use the French model to ruin an educational system that was admired throughout the world, not for the ability of the students to pass test, but for the universal access to a decent education by all students.
By surrounding himself with yes men, he has created a space where bad decisions were made, and money was wasted. We are now seeing the dollar slip and credit market dry up because, at least in part, the deficit will likely hit 80% GDP before his socialist policies can be rescinded. Two trillion dollars are being spend every week to provide corporate welfare to his friends, and we do not see any benefit. The national defense is disintegrating, and we are paying to train foreign forces to fight against our forces. And oil is still going up, and we are reaching a national energy crisis, even though Carter gave us the solution all those many years ago. Those solutions were good, I know because I see real conservatives use them all the time. And, to add insults to injury, Afghanistan, the state that provided safe haven for those that attacked the US, and Saudi Arabia, the State where many of the attackers originated, remains exactly at the same level as in 2000, which means such attacks are exactly as likely.
So it is not a matter or corruption or scoundrels. It is a matter of taking the job seriously, and believing that you can play it just like you did back in frat house, or if you need to grow up a little. We are not talking much, but realizing that there are valid views other than your own, a key learning outcome of the college experience, would be nice.
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Beyond this the issue we are seeing is that Apple is one again trying to compete on specifications instead of overall performance. It is like buying a computer based on processor speed and memory and the number of USB ports, but ignoring bus speed and the fact that USB is the slow version 2.0. Apple knows that for consumer products it can't compete on overall performance, because consumers will inevitable choose the cheaper product that has the biggest penis/cup size.
What this means in this case is that Apple probably put out the 3g stuff earlier than it should have because the consumer market demanded cool specifications even if it meant worse overall performance. Even thought the iPhone worked well, few wanted it because it was not buzzword complaint. So now we have a phone that does not work so well, eats the battery, and is a less satisfying experience. Oh well, at least it still looks cool and has the proper features listed on the box.
Absolutely. This is nothing more than someone's attempt to subvert science to foster their own action. The first thing I thought of was the misapplication of Darwin's Origin of Species, and the attempt by some to use it to justify the oppression of the workers. The argument went that the strongest naturally controlled things, and the weakest naturally were subservient, or some such poppycock. In fact science creates certain models that covers certain phenomenon over certain domains. Newtons physics only works for |v| Free will is a construct we impose on social dealing to insure that we can hold people accountable. Determinacy is a construct we impose on the physical world to help us do physics. As our math and observations got better, determinacy was not so tightly held. As out society becomes more sympathetic to the individual, free will is not so tightly held. That these two things seem to be decaying contemporaneously does not imply a cause and effect relationship.
Of course 90% of what is said on blogs is crap, just like 100% of what McCain has said since winning the nomination is crap. But that does not mean that he does not have the right to say it.
So, the issue seems to be where and of what to take pictures. Many respectable museums solve this problem as not allowing pictures at all. The reason for this is that the average shutterbug is too stupid to turn of the flash, and the flash, over time, harms the art. Other restrict the photos in some way, even, in the old days, limiting to black and white. If one is to allow photos, and there is problem with perverts taking pictures of scantily clad persons, then perhaps there is a policy to prevent that. In any case, it does come down to the rule of law versus enforcing arbitrary policy on people you don't like.
Recall that while the 9/11 plot likely being planed while our government was embroiled in the investigation of blowjob. Recall that the state and federal government were falling over each other to who was going to prosecute John Allen Muhammad and hopefully execute them for the murder of 10 people, each target by the killers, but were besides themselves to cut a plea agreement Eric Robert Rudolph(arrested 2003), who planted bombs around the country, so he would only receive life sentences. One has to wonder how much of this is based on the rule of law, and how much is based on faith based enforcement.
Pictures certainly pose some minimal level of security threat for some high risk locations. The issue to me is that if someone is going to get photos of a location, there are many ways to do so without being noticed. Camera phones spring to mind. Therefore, such restrictions, like the limiting on liquid on flights, is simply making people feel like you are doing something without actually having to do anything.
OTOH, owners of private property do have right to control their property.It is the security theater of the government that concerns me, as they are really doing very little than the acquisition and concentration of power, and with every emergency that they allow to happen, the power becomes more centralized.
So, is it that they are having a problem, or simply pushing people to more expensive plans. Sure, some of the low end customers might leave, but so what? A top end customer bills for 3X the revenue, but likely more than 3X the profit.
First, I do not see how the time spent playing games translates into profit. The only thing that translates to profit is number of games sold. Now, if a game is lame, then the next version is unlikely to bought, but lame does not translate into lack of opportunities to knock on the honest working women of the world. In fact sports related, where both the violence and competition is highly stylized, appear to be the most popular games.
Second, not every successful product has to market to the same people. We see this on free TV where every show is targeted to the 18-35 year old, as they are the ones that spend the most money, and we see that free TV is barely surviving, both as an advertising and creative median. OTOH, cable TV which targets to other niches, seems to be doing fine. The Wii is a highly succesful machine, targeted to a certain audience. To say that they are nannies preventing it from expanding into other markets is simplistic. They sell consoles, they have some of the top games, and if people want violent video games, there are other consoles available.
In the end, the entertainment industry has been decimated by the cult of teen age boys. In fact, society in general has been harmed by the idea that teen aged boys must be coddled to, even at the expense of the rest of society. In many ways life may have been better before that advent of adolescent, when the primary purpose of a teen age boy was to work the field, or in some other way help support the family that took care of him for all the years. Certainly making entertainment knowing that he act like a pussy and throw a tantrum until his parents buy it for him has lead to some pretty shitty product. In the end if the Wii concentrated on teen aged boys we see the same shit we see every where else, and what would be the point of that?
(BTW, I really like sin city, but it was not just the naked women and violence, as any pornographer can do that, as most of the major media outlets has shown, but because Robert Rodriguez is quite possible the only fim maker of this generation to fully utilize the technology to create a unique product.)
As mentioned elsewhere, the key issue was the Compaq whiteroom creation of a clone bios and compatible hardware. These machines were not super cheap, but they opened to door to super cheap machines and created the market for standard commodity hardware. Throw the MS OS in the mix, and businesses did not have to go to IBM unless they needed complete solutions.
What is interesting is this same thing is now threatening MS. Businesses need long term solutions, not innovative eye candy. Consumers want ever cheaper computers, but, like IBM, MS has become too bloated and inefficient to deliver a cheap product at a profit. Would there be any complaints against Vista if am ultimate upgrade were $100 instead of $200+? That and forcing businesses to honor the MS business plan instead of their own is quite a bold move.
So what does this mean for Apple? Not much. If MS can enforce the EULA that says the home edition cannot be virtualized, or OEM editions cannot be transfered to a new machine, then it seems that Apple should be able to limit the use of it's OS to Apple branded machines. I see no problem with shipping a computer that can run the current version of Mac OS X, but it would be shipped as a 'naked pc', which, of course MS would then file lawsuit against as encouraging piracy.
In any case as long as such machine had a warning that Apple would likely upgrade the OS so it would no longer run on the machine, I think companies should be able to sell as many Apple compatible machines as they want. As I mentioned before, the only problem would be that users would then call Apple for tech support, reveal they were running a clone, and Apple would give not support. This would create a cost for Apple, which they would then sue the clone manufacturer to recover.
Now some might state that if a parent wants to damage a kid, then that is ok, but who pays for it? It is us that pays the insurance rates and fund the school special services. I don't think that any parent intentionally damages a kid, but who many think that the level of practice is going to tear and ACL, and an ACl is not easily repaired in a prescription steroid, especially when their kids is never getting picked for the team?
We can go even further. In many places simple sports like soccer and baseball and track are simply not funded. Though these are very excited and meet all exercise requirements for kids, and soccer in particular can be played with minimal gear, schools spend huge amounts of money funding the most expensive and dangerous sport: football. Then they complain that there is not enough funding to buy enough safety equipment and kids get hurt. Kids getting hurt apparently does not increase the funding or shift sports to equally beneficial and cheaper sports. I am not saying these sports are safe,and if pushed kids will still risk injury, but they are somewhat safer.
So, in this environment when a significant percentage of pediatric injuries are sports related, and there seems little desire to limit these injuries, is there any doubt that coaches and parents will dope the kids? And while such doping may not do significant harm in adults, I think it will likely do significant harm in kids. And do we want to the schools that have to accommodate these kids?
As a result various software firms lost my custom and my dollars. I say this not to whine, as I firmly believe that businesses should have the right to run as they wish, and my life is less because I do not play games, but simply to state that if your aim is to sell general entertainment, you can't piss off your audience. That is not entertainment. It is like the whiny pussy stuntman they used to run before movies complaining that his family cannot eat because of piracy. Well, if no one wants to pay for the product, perhaps one needs to think about why, and not feel all entitled to a profit for a product few are willing to pay for. Perhaps a whiny stunt men, or silly ads, or expensive food is why people do not go to see movies and instead resort to piracy so that they can see the movie that is so heavily advertised that if they don't see it they feel culturally insufficient. Just a possibility.
But in the end, I think most people who pirate games are young people, because young people are the ones who play games, and young people often yet do not have a lot of money, or at least enough sense to budget their money, or at least enough money to fill all their wants, or at least enough, or likely not enough maturity to distinguish between a want and a need, so they end up doing arguably unwise things like breaking into cars for beer money and pirating games.
The solution to this may be developing games for the just-out-of-young-adult age range, when money tends to be available, and some wisdom has set in. Of course, it can't be so copy protected as to add to the daily annoyance of kids and the hated job.
Fortunately the US is still enough of a free country where we like to treat the aristocracy the traditional manner of our founding principles. So, even though we have mickey mouse copyright laws to insure that the heirs are rich even though they contribute nothing to society, laptop rules to insure that the productivity of those that do contribute to society is limited, and other civil list type concessions, we at least have the freedom to call a spade a spade, and remember that this country was founded on the principles of taking things from aristocrats, not coddling them.
Which means that a paranoid keeps really critical stuff backed up another way. I have chosen to move to text based solutions, and then keep a off site SVN repository. This maintain a somewhat audit-able trail for data integrity. Since I assume that Google is backing data, and it that part of it probably more secure than the single local copy most people maintain, the issue would be data integrity. I wonder if there is something in the API that might allow an version control type solution so that changes made would be stored to another site. Of course, such a solution might costs money, and the beauty of google is that it allows users to trade privacy and control for free-to-them services, so such a solution may be out of the domain.
That said a changed name does not imply that we must refer to the entity by the new name. In fact, using the most known name is good etiquette for the readers. As long as the changed name appears somewhere, there is not problem.
I admit it is a bit over the op, but if we are in a world where millions of dollars can be spent comparing a magna cum laude Havard Graduate to Paris Hiton, anything goes.
McCain was not born in the US but is considered a US citizen anyway, unlike many who are born in the US that the republican party wants to consider foreign.
As a proud third generation employee of the government, McCain is uniquely experienced to be president. His third generation military status uniquely places him to find the best government military solutions for every problem, without the distractions of diplomacy or allowing the free market to work. Like the current president, he entered higher education on a legacy, thus putting him in touch with the problems of the elite he represents. Also like the current president, he has a storied military carreer, flying planes around the world. At one point his plane got shot down and he no longer flew planes, but was kept in a POW camp. He was tortured for some time during the captivity. This experience wad apparently not bad enough to make him unconditionally opposed to torture.
He also has a unique perspective on government medical care. As a third generation government employee, he has spent his entire life with free access to the government medical facilities. Although he is 71, and claims to be in good health, he experience has shown him that government medical care is not good enough for the general populous, so is absolutely opposed to it.
Some might think a third generation government employee may not be the best president for a country based on free enterprise, but wait. His second wife, whom he married soon after divorcing his first wife, is the chair of one of the largest beer distributors in the country. As such, McCain has experience with the perks of the corporate life, like luxury corporate jets, which he used to ferry himself between campaign stops during his bid to become president. He understands the compromises that must be made when growing a business, like how many alcohol related teen deaths are acceptable to maintain a certain profit margin.
As we can see McCain is uniquely qualified to understand the needs of the nation. The military can solve all problems. The health care system that has kept him so healthy is not adequate of capable of doing the same for the masses. American Corporations has special problems and must be given significant leeway in their right to earn a profit.
Blu ray drives will play DVD, so there will no be impetus to buy old or new movies on Bluray except for the additional 'quality', which will require an expensive display. Bluray discs are being sold again at hugely high price points even though, according to the industry, 1 billion is lost a year to piracy, something that is increasing difficult with blu ray. And, of course, given that blurays retail for $30, even old sotck, they are certainly not priced to sell.
Honestly if this was a major point in the book, then the authors have missed the whole deal, and are certainly part of the problem, A business has to provide a service that the public will directly or indirectly pay for, while the customers who create the profit are those that need to be served. Additionally, restrictive models create short term firms.
So, where are these people not part fo the solution. First, kodak, like so many other companies, in business to sell consumables. Not really an optics firm like Nikon. Consumables go, they fall with it. But they succeeded not by making things emotional, but by focusing on customers needs rather than being a slave to the tech. Kodaks fall was forestalled by several years with the introduction of the arguably inferior advantix film, that gave people the simplicity they want with enough quality.
This then leads to usability. Even now Kodak focuses more on usability, leaving the whiz bang stuff to others. So does Apple. The Old G4 cases had handles. The on switch is up front or on the keyboard, so you don't have to look around. But usability is a compromise, and like the G4, people were no so concerned about that usability issue to buy it instead of cheap PC.
So product design is about meeting customers needs and profitability. These are not always the same thing. My bank now puts in interstitials and other adverts when I am logged into my account. These have not only security implications, but reduce the usability of the site. However, the site needs to make a profit, and I have a free account, so this is what they do. Every design issue costs money, not only to build, but also ancillary earning opportunities. The person using the service is not always the primary customer, i.e. profit generating entity.
The dot com boom shows that no product, no matter how cool or well designed, hangs around if a profit is not earned. Buzz word compliance, like AJAX, is not enough. Apple, or Kodak, or Sony, hangs around because it finds good compromises in design. The same holds for MS, though I think if they don't get a bit schizophrenic about the core business they may have issues.
I may be the person that other flyers hate, but I make little effort to encourage this security threatre by conforming to the silly checkpoints. If they want my to empty my pockets, everything gets emptied into one bucket. Then my laptop needs to be pulled out, maybe out of two layers. I may end up with three evern four trays. Hey, it is their rules. p? The thing with this new laptop rule is it is made to satisfy one of the norms of security. Security efforts will fail if they are too onerous. Overly aggressive password rules will lead to less secure passwords. Security checks that take too long will lead to less security as people try to speed it up. The laptop rule is a way to speed up security to make it more effective. But it is meaningless as I know that the Homeland Security and TSA is simply a way for the socialists to further their plans of big government, and higher taxation.
OTOH, a large portion of the population do go for affinity cards. They think that they are getting a good deal on two litres of coke that is marked down from $3 when they present their cards, and this is the type of establishment that the patent is likely targeting. If one is going to take the time to keep track of an affinity card so the store will charge what other stores charge normally, then this automatic choice of bags is an added benefit of this.
The patent does sound obvious, but if IBM is going to use it in conjunction with current services, it will be a way for them to differentiate from the competition.
In any case, burning CDs was my SOP for several years. I would never carry the original in the car, for, as you mentioned, the heat, vibrations, etc would invariable kill the CD.
In fact this is interesting. Most of the Apple ][ is now in a chip, We know that. But what if for $12 we can have a computer that kids can learn on. Not play on the internet. not play ready made games, but actually code, in assembly, in C. Not fun for most people, not even most people on /., but I can think of many people in the world who would find this interesting. Get the Apple ][ Kit. Build it. Code on it. Extend it. This, BTW, is how many people leaned Vacuum Tubes then electronics, from Heathkits. It is not for the market where kids think a computer is to find sex on the internet. It is for the market where the computer is cool piece of electronics, inherently interesting.
The danger of course is that they will be more aware of the fundamentals than the kids just given a MS Windows and told to code in Design Studio, which might mean that more jobs move offshore as American programmers become robots to the IDE.
So what MS is and has been saying is that it acquired the IP fair in square, and is properly selling it on the market, while others are just copying. Let us not dwell on the fact that is where MS was 20 years ago when Apple acquired the WIMP interface fair and square and MS copied it to run on cheaper hardware, which let us remember that Compaq created at no small expense fair and square. No, let's just look at the claims as they stand using a classic example, SQL
SQL server was aquired acquired from sybase. Is there technology here that MS can claim was part of that deal, and stolen by the OSS community. I think not. SQL was developed by IBM and what is now Oracle, and was standardized, I believe, in the mid 80's. The two big OSS competitors, mSQL and PostreSQL were both independently developed by teams concurrently with the Sybase product and opensourced, partly or otherwise, by their creator. I am sure that both not include features that MS SQL has, but I would also guess that Oracle or IBM has the features first.
In the end MS problem is simply that they are not 2-3 years ahead of the curve. When this happened to SGI, they went bankrupt. A firm simply cannot charge a premium for this years technology. In the case of software, this is because the OSS people can do the same thing, for free. MS Office is simply too mature to be a profit center. MS Server is simply relatively too low tech. Even the X Box is not at the front of the pack, at least not by more than six months.MS has some traction through collaboration, and they can continue to make money there, but complaining about the loss os MS Windows market share is silly. They had the chance the database file system, but for some reason they did not provide enough resources. This in itself proves that they are not innovative.
MS will lose customers because they are lazy. They will continue to have enterprise customers, they will continue to have the gaming market. We will see the general desktop and server market move away from them unless they come up with something big or go back to their roots as the cheap solution. We see this in the emerging $100-$200 portable market. If this will provide the growth the stock market wants is yet to be seen.
Not to be melodramatic, but any Librarian(real MLS), who gives up patron records without a fight would really have a tought time justifying their existence in that capacity. If librarians are just going to be glorified shop attendants, we can get them for a whole lot less, and with much less investment in education, than we do know.
We might agree to give up some peripheral rights for perceived safety thinking it is a good deal. However, the greatest risk to the elite is that the at-risk servants might become educated. Therefore, the primary objective of the elite is to minimize the educational opportunities for said servants. Recall that many citizens of Texas, partly because they could not read, were held up to four years after slavery because illegal.
Biology, certainly not chemistry of physics. Dogma is mostly used today by those who wish push science back into the realm of superstition so they can mutilate and burn. Those enlightened by the scientific method use different terminology.
Sure we can whine about the extra work we are forced to do, or the fact that we have to pay for higher technology, but what good does that do. As technologically savvy people we live for the chance to advance the technology. We see these opportunities all over the place. Smaller cars require innovate means to increase safety and power. Smaller computers require more power efficient components and better batteries. Have one type of plastic go away just opens up a space for innovative new plastics. this is what makes the world exciting.
So, if some company can't keep up, then they just suck as technologist and need to go away. A car company can't make technologically advanced cars, screw them. A video card manufacturer can't keep up with the trends and make a reliable video card, screw them too. I have involved in a number of situations where the process had to be rethought. Someone whines that a baby might be born with defect and we can't use this chemical. Someone complains that the dust will give them cancer and we must use a hood. Someone complains that we can't reliably dispose of an agent, and we must switch agents. Sure, we could say who cares if some worker dies. So what? But in each case the change was made, and technology gave us an equal or better solution.
It is always easier to blame failure of the external forces rather than taking responsibility for a personal lack of creativity. This change is solder is not the first scape goat used by the those that lack innovative solutions, and won't be the last. There will always be firms that say a problem can't be solved, and they will be generally over thrown by those who then find the solution. I think that any number of lazy American firms are discovering that right now, while others are riding the way of can-do innovations.
The economy good, Clinton was able to enact fiscally conservative policies which reduced the total national debt to probably below 60% GDP. It might have been lower, but the fiscally irresponsible conservatives continued to waste money on frivolous things like investigating whether he got a blow job. Certainly important for the sexually spurred, but not an issue for those of us who ever irregularly are allowed to play in such reindeer games.
The issue is that Bush has really fucked up. The economy is tanking. He is forced to adopt socialist methods such as tax rebates and public financing or the private home equity market in order to keep the US from sliding to oblivion. Such socialist methods are quite reasonable to him as is shown by the first this he did when take office is use the French model to ruin an educational system that was admired throughout the world, not for the ability of the students to pass test, but for the universal access to a decent education by all students.
By surrounding himself with yes men, he has created a space where bad decisions were made, and money was wasted. We are now seeing the dollar slip and credit market dry up because, at least in part, the deficit will likely hit 80% GDP before his socialist policies can be rescinded. Two trillion dollars are being spend every week to provide corporate welfare to his friends, and we do not see any benefit. The national defense is disintegrating, and we are paying to train foreign forces to fight against our forces. And oil is still going up, and we are reaching a national energy crisis, even though Carter gave us the solution all those many years ago. Those solutions were good, I know because I see real conservatives use them all the time. And, to add insults to injury, Afghanistan, the state that provided safe haven for those that attacked the US, and Saudi Arabia, the State where many of the attackers originated, remains exactly at the same level as in 2000, which means such attacks are exactly as likely.
So it is not a matter or corruption or scoundrels. It is a matter of taking the job seriously, and believing that you can play it just like you did back in frat house, or if you need to grow up a little. We are not talking much, but realizing that there are valid views other than your own, a key learning outcome of the college experience, would be nice.