MTV took the music labels by surprise, in much the same way that Napster did. Much of what MTV did many labels thought of as illegal, and once the content owners realized how much money they could be making, they turned on MTV. This was considered to be the absolute proof of the stupidity of the content owners because it was the general consensus that MTV was what drove the revitalization of the music business. In the end MTV never got any thanks. The saddest part is that absolute greed of the music labels means that Beavis and Butthead cannot be released in their original form, even though the show introduced and reintroduced many bands to the public. People like to laugh that MTV does not play videos anymore, but that is mostly because the content providers do not want them to.
Music videos do cost a lot to produce, and not all those costs can be charged to marketing. OTOH, perhaps music videos do not need unlimited budgets.
The powerbook bricks, of which I have had a few, can be a potential problems. The original adapters were not attached well on the DC side, and mine eventually shorted out, with the sparks noted in the blog. Apple seemed to have fixed this in later releases. They also beefed up the AC cord. This was good as the old cord tended to run hot. Honestly in my incident some misuse was involved, but I like that Apple improved the design to allow the rougher use.
At this point, I have two or three adapters in use, all bought at different times. The only consistent issue I notice is that they sometimes get very hot when charging a battery, especially if the computer is in use. Therefore I tend to keep the adapter away from flameable material. If it is plugged directly into the wall this is not an issue. I would never leave an adaptor on paper.
I am sure there will be many MS copied Apple, which in a way is true, and Apple copies others, which is true but is not as most people think, so I want to add this beforehand.
Having seen and used most of these interfaces, the driving force seems to be the hardware to run them and then an API to make them cheap enough to implement for consumer applications. System 1 was a basic GUI built run on a relatively simple hardware and in a small footprint. The innovation was in fact in the separate GPU, something that was not widely used. This allowed the complex graphics. The big software innovation was WYSIWYG. Despite what people say about Xerox, the concept existed, but the bundle did not. Furthermore, the problem MS had was that it had no control over the hardware, and therefor could a tight OS, much less an OS built with specialized processors that no one had, so MS Windows 1.0 was the best it could do for the given hardware.
Once the initial concept of the GUI was developed, and the methodology developed, the software itself became rather simple. Over time hardware has been the biggest constraint on MS. MS software must run on cheap hardware, so the OS has been necessarily inferior. For instance, it was 10 years before excel on the PC was as good as the Mac. Conversely, companies like SGI had much more powerful hardware to play with, so the X-Windows experience blew System 7, 8, 9, and everything else, out of the water.
It is unclear what vista is going to look like. Mac OS X has some incredible high quality hardware at the base, hardware the sells for at least 1K, so apple has fewer constraints that MS that has to run on $300 junk. This might explain the fork in MS Vista. The point is that the comparison between MS and Apple makes as much since as comparing Apple and SGI. No one has ever said that Apple should run like a SGI. Likewise, MS cannot really run an Apple, even if they both use x86. Mac OS is basically being optimized for Intel dual core chips, and how long until the GPC is going be standard dual core?
Of course, even though Apple is "closed", the documentation and developer tools always seem more open to me. I recall the old Apple MAC bookd and the details, and compare that to the third party MS development books, and all the asterisks warning the user that MS did not support use of the hook or API. It did not make the Mac and easier to develop with, and it still seems easier to throw something together on the PC, but that is only if one is willing to use questionable strategies.
The problem with profiling is that (1) it tends to be ineffective in the long term and (2) it tends to harrass a bunch of innocent people. In the first case, profiling is based on what has been attempted in the past, and is ineffective defense against innovation in terror or other crime. For instance, we may be looking for young single impresenable males because those are who have in the past been terrorists, and therefore miss the innovation of using older married men. Or in the drug trade, we miss the young women who appears to be on legitimate bussiness, but has rubber encased cocaine in her stomach. In the second case, we may know that 90% of the crimes are committed by persons of the wrong color, and therefore feel justified in harrassing every person of that wrong color, even without probable cause. And we can say that such a person merely needs avoid areas where they do not belong, but at minimum this is indirect harassment.
To speak specifically to your example, perhaps your mother was not chosen accidently. Perhaps she was of a color that was suspicious, or she was nervous, or in some other way peaked security personnel. Perhpas "the man" legitimately believed she was a mule. Just because she was "your mother" does not mean that she did not fit the profile. Given my personal high opinion of most security personnel, and my mostly postive experience in airports, I have been detained twice, both with reasonable cause, even if I was doing nothing wrong, I must wonder why you are so upset that your mother was "harassed". It is, like the person who has just robbed a bank, getting dramatically upset because they were stopped for speeding? After all, if you have done nothing wrong, what are you afraid of? And why would your mother be so unpatriotic as to not be willing to submit to a simple search if that was going to help us all be safer? Was it because she was on her way to do something? As you mention, the war on terror is going to have casualties, and you are either with or against us. If we let everyones mother through without checks, then all the terrorist have to do is start using mothers.
It seems to me that everything in programing, or really any process type thing, is managing resources. Any project has a certain amount of human power, a certain amount of time, and a certain amount of mechanical or electrical power. And while a competent programmer should be able to manage memory, when we have all these tight deadlines and all these cheap cycles, why take the time or pay the extra money? In the end, except for application where there is no excess power, it makes a lot of sense to utilize the technological innovation of garbage collection. I myself think not managing my own memory is boring, but I do realize that most people simply do not want to deal with it.
I think we really have to accept and embrace real innovations to productivity. Things such as compilers, optimizers, high level interfaces, has brought us great benefit. If we look at it in real terms the advancements are awesome. In the Mythical Man Month I seem to recall that coding speeds were cited as dozens of lines per day. Compare that to what we can do now. The down side is that we perhaps waste resources, and in many ways the computer industry is crushing itself under the weight of wasted resources, but that is merely another management issue.
There appear to be two separate points here. The first here is the issue of fundamentalist organizations, or those that some consider fundamentalist. These organizations believe that they know the truth, with so much conviction, that they are willing to do whatever it takes to convince others to follow that truth. Their means can involve intimidation, such as blockade a family clinics, or adult stores, or sea harbors. Their means can involve misinformation, such as spreading gossip about the drug dealings of a president, the intentions of a country, or the existence of dangerous products. Thier means can involve violence, such as killing public figures, suicide bombs, or mass killing. These fundamentalist organization often will do anything, and feel perfectly justified to do anything, because it will bring forth the desired truth.
Which brings us to the second point. An organization that believes it is working toward truth is not going hide that work. The organizations that attack women in front of clinics do not do so in secret. The organizations that behead American soldiers post notices of it on the internet. Although some may think Al Gore is a fundamentalist, he has the integrity to stand behind his beliefs. And this is the metric that must be used. A person or organization that stands behind their actions at least has the ability to say they are willing to face full disclosure and any consequences. A person or organization that is not willing to stand behind their actions has nothing. Not integrity. Not humility. They are merely mercenaries, willing to work for whatever cause will get them a buck, with no personal beliefs or faith. Lying is bad enough. Denying the lie reserves a special place in purgatory.
So the story here is not that someone lied, that happens all the time. The story is that some people are getting so desperate, they are using mercenaries to do the work that they themselves to not have the courage to enact.
At the uni level the proxy situation is a bit vague. It can be argued that the student is paying for education, and if the student wishes to waste the money, so be it. It is kind of like a filtering mechanism. Those with discipline will graduate. The trouble begins when the student is on grants or even scholarships, though with the later the amount of wasted money tends to be self limiting.
Below the uni level, where in most cases the school is expected to actively structure education so the kids will be more likely to learn, proxies lead to an arms race. In much the same way that abuses by past generation has lead to the banning of lockers and backpacks, the abuse of the web is going to lead to white lists. This is not good as kids probably would be better off with an unfiltered internet, but little learning happens if the kid spends the entire day looking at crumpet on cars or adolescent chests. It is really no one fault. Kids will be kids, and schools will be schools. Everyone is doing the best they can.
I do appreciate the creativity that goes into bypassing the limits. Hopefully as the kids ages that creativity will be used for things slightly less narcissistic.
This is the kind of subtlety that people seem to miss in science. Just because something could be true, does not mean it is true. In this case the samples in question could have been formed by an organic process, but they did not have to be. And since the overwhelming evidence is that there is no life on mars, and in fact we have no real process as yet that would have developed life on mars, the reasonable person still concludes that life probably does not exist. Now some people just are going to believe for personal reasons, and that is cool. Those people need to look for evidence in an attempt to prove their case. But this particular piece of evidence appears to have been taken out of contention.
Is this a situation of young people moving into a old area. There are two common situations. First, the old area may be differently configured than the young people are used to. For instance smaller streets, less insulated houses, or the like. Are the roads narrow and now there are huge cars? Are you driving fast? Are you playing music loud like was acceptable at the apartment building? I hate to mention it, but are there beer cans on the lawn? Some people are just hypersensitive, and nothing can be done, but sometimes we have to adjust to live in civilized society.
I also wonder if this person is just lonely. Has all this persons friend moved out so the young generation can live there? Does this person resent that fact? Did the young people move in like they were settlers, remaking the neighborhood in a new image, dismissing all that came before, or did they respect the effort it took to build the place that they now live.
I have seen rational neighbors and irrational neighbors. I have seen neighbors intent on changing the culture of a place simply because they have the money to so do, and neighbors who take the time to talk to and help their elders. So I do not want to pass judgement, but as in world politics, a bit of genuine humble diplomacy can make problems disappear.
Some of the value of a place has to do with herd mentality. Take a look at the rise and fall of the SUV. A few movie stars start driving them and everyone wants one. Now the dealers have to practically give them away. And gas is not even that high.
Many of the places people want to live is the same way. I live in a particular area of town where everyone want to live, so prices are very high. OTOH, there is a bunch of land not far from where I live that is completely undeveloped, and has remained so for a very long time.
Certainly herd mentality leads to some irrational decisions. Several years ago I knew of one company that wanted to move from Texas to california. They had a good real estate deal in texas, all the workers they needed, and extremely good connectivity. More importantly, they had electricity. Cheap. And reliable. You see Texas does not connect to the eastern or western power grid, so it is not so easy to finagle the interconnects and cut off supply with phantom transactions.. Likewise, a hiccup in the middle of nowhere, for instance ohio, is not going to take down entire regions.
By the same argument, MS Windows 3.11 was very popular for a number of years. Up until last year I knew a number of machines that was running MS Windows 98.
The place where your argument fails is that (1) a computer comes with whatever OS is currently available and (2) when a previous version is nearly useless, the next version is extremely welcomed. MS Vista will be popular because next year it will be on every new PC. But the popularity won't be like 95 or XP because it is not following a basically flawed line of products, such as MS WIndows 3.11, 98, ME. Recall that one reason that 95 was popular for so long was not that it was a good OS, it had many problems, but those problems were not fixed until XP completed the integration that MS began with 2000. In fact many of us who were more concerned about getting work done, and not games, left 95 in favor of NT, and in many cases did not upgrade until XP.
2.5 years is not a long time. The normal consumer has to set aside money to pay for the device, see that desired titles are not easily available in the old format, wait for christmas sales, and then buy.
I to this day do not have a standalone DVD player. The only reason I switched to DVD was because I started using my powermac to watch movies. That would have put me around 1999 as well. In fact I am so often offended by the studios abuse of the DVD format to force me to watch commercials that I miss the simple ability fast forward to the movie. Not to mention the cheesy menus that I must fight to earn the right to watch the movie I paid for.
BTW, I certainly am a first adopter of toys. It is just that I know what I am adopting, and make decisions based on my needs, not to impress the world.
The PC market is governed by extreme price sensitivity. This is what has forced all PCs to look the same, and what has forced MS to produce a scaled back version of windows, which they effectively give to OEMs that play by MS rules. The situation is getting so extreme that the OS might be the most expensive component of many computers.
So the question is can OEMs create and manufacture these pretty PCs at no additional cost. If not can they absorb the cost. I would say that margins are already so thin, designing a line of stylish computers with no markup is out of the question.
Passing the cost onto the consumer is not an option either. Just look at how people already whine that they have to pay $100 more for a mac(and don't tell me it is more, I check comparable macs and dells every couple weeks, remember to include XP pro, and iLife, of course you can a computer with fewer features for less), and how people complained that the black mac is $100 more than a white. And what is going to happen when Dell starts getting complaints of discolored product? From my experience, they barely handle the technical issues.
What I think is going to be the downfall of this, though, is the temptation just to pile on colors and nick nacks. Right now the PC market uses a very safe palette. Every time they try to do something cool, like a pulsing light to simulate sleep mode, they royally screw up because they do not understand that the purpose is not effect, but affect. Even the most hardened PC user admits that 'architectural details' on the mac are more affective than the lame attempts on most PCs. What this means is that the OEMs will attempt to use these details as selling points, but they won't be authentic. Sure they may seem cool to the person who buys the dogs playing poker, but since that person is also looking for the $400 computer, I hardly think it will matter.
The best example of this is sony, the only OEM that is pushing style, and charging for it. The market share of computer and laptops are perhaps comparable as Apples, and the markup might be even more. Overall PC users want cheap computers, not cute ones.
This is pretty much it. With a minor in math you probably have enough credits to become a highly qualified teacher under NCLB. If you take some hard science classes, you can probably pass the composite science certification tests as well. And being a CS major, you might be able to do AP computer courses, which appear to all be in Java. It is not so bad, as such teachers are in high demand so not so disrespected.
As far as other jobs, I find that for long term employment most people are looking for a masters degree. As far as I can tell, the resume filter tend to spit out anything without and engineering of CS degree on it, unless there is also a masters degree. A MS even helps if you are a teacher, and will allow you make some extra money teaching community college.
You could even go over to the dark side and get a masters of education in educational assessment. Due to NCLB, huge amounts of money are being funneled to the test makers, and they cannot get enough people to make the tests. It is a mathematical and computer based situation no matter what subject is being assessed. Who knows how long the gravy train will last, but at least until 2008, when all the bought and paid for elected officials get booted out of office. It is not that testing does not have it's good points, but a lot of parents are pissed off that their kid isn't graduating just because they can't pass a single assessment. One thing that I learned about assessment, and in my science classes, is that a single measurement is merely a guess.
A smart person will find a way to make a living no matter what degree they have. Some of it just has to do with luck. If you do teach, there are programs that will give some extra benefits if you go through them.
From the web site, it looks like all this guy has in an engine attached to a backpack. This is no simple design feat, and kudos goes out to him for getting this far.
But it look like the publicity is not so much to sell units, which don't exist and may not ever exist, but to search for a partner, probably to help work though the regulatory process.
The technical detail that fails me is how controlled flight is possible when all you have is a rocket pack. I mean you go up when there is thrust, and then come back down when there is no thrust. How do you orient to go forwards. How do you turn?Is simply bending sufficient? I know this has been done before, but only with highly trained persons. Would a small aircraft not be a better value at 200K.
A sprawling headquarters building for a non-profit research group in West Virginia created by U.S. Rep. Alan Mollohan. The Democrat is now subject of a broader congressional ethics probe.
Since 2001, Congress has directed the space agency to spend more than $3 billion on special projects, most of them small endeavors sought by individual lawmakers for the benefit of their home districts, according to NASA and congressional records.
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The cost of congressional add-ins has grown to about a half-billion dollars a year, or five times the total of a decade ago.
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So, Griffin is imploring Congress to ease up on pet projects, and he has some influential allies on Capitol Hill.
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Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a potential presidential candidate and chairman of the committee that oversees NASA, railed against earmarks in the NASA budget during the investigation of the 2003 shuttle Columbia disaster that killed seven astronauts. McCain said money used to pay for politicians' pet projects would be better spent on safety measures to reduce the chance of such accidents.
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U.S. Rep. David Weldon, R-Indialantic, has earmarked money in the NASA budget for hand-picked projects in Brevard, Florida. He has landed several million dollars for Florida Tech, the Space Life Sciences Lab at Kennedy Space Center and hydrogen fuel research. Weldon defends his projects as well-connected to NASA's overall mission.
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Citizens Against Government Waste, in preparing its annual "Pig Book" of pork-barrel projects, does not count projects such as Hubble and the Pluto mission. The reasoning: That is Congress exercising its authority to help guide agency priorities.
So the article mentions 'pet projects' many times, and specifically lists questionable expenditures. To be fair, just because a project is a congressman's pet does not mean it is intrinsically bad, but what it usually means is that it is not part of a consistent plan to better the country, and often is intended to enrich a individual contributor or help a congressperson get elected by funneling money back home.
The big picture is that money is not equally distributed around the county. On average, each states receives about $7000 per person from the federal government. On reason the 'bridge to nowhere' is such an issue is not just because it is a useless bridge, but because it is one of the projects that allows Alaska to receive around $12,000 per capita, at the expense of the rest of the country. Equally scary are those die-hard self reliant folks in the dakotas and wyoming who suckle around $9,000 off the teats of the federal mother. So much for individual success.
OTOH we have a bunch of states like texas, california, new hampshire, that show with a bit of fiscal responsibility, a state can survive on much less than $7,000 per capita.
VMS lived in a different world. A world in which an elite controlled the computer in every respect, a world in which one often had to beg for an old tape to be put in so that one could access data. A world in which every bit data was not scrutinized by a forensic team with almost unlimited resources. A world in which data was not transmitted willy nilly to unknown parties. A world in which mysterious metadata hardly existed.
All the flavors of DOS in the 80's were way cool because it allowed us to control our own computer. In the 90's all went to hell as we became connected and the computer started doing more and more things no one really understood. A huge concern MS has not addressed is how to protect confidential information, and more importantly help companies not expose disruptive metadata. For instance, I do not believe they have a setting in outlook to scrub MS Office files as are mailed to external addresses. Nor have the implemented the DRM that would allow firms to track users violate border policy. MS adds features that makes systems less secure, without thought of how to compensate for the breech.
This is clearly an awesome feature. So was the command line shortcuts. But features do not exist in a vacuum. There is only so much that can be done to help careless users. If MS is to provide business class systems, and not just toys that can be used as business systems, they have to get serious about making systems that businesses need. I think that if MS would develop a core competency in business, and leave the consumer side to others, MS would be in much better shape. Imagine how wonderful Vista would be if it did not have to worry about they toys that home user need.
It seems to me that most of the problem is with allowing these huge firms to do whatever they wish with little consequences. Bechtel does not have to do a good job because their is simply no incentive. I mean even in the hugely irrational frenzy after 911, Bechtel was and still is allowed to do security work despite ties to Bin Laden. Even with all it's past problems, Bechtel was allowed to do no bid contracts for Katrina. And now we are going to see some public officials reprimanded, but how much is Bechtel going to suffer?
In a capitalist economy one assumes that good work only gets done in the presence of competition and in an environment where the consumer knows who is a good agent and who is a bad agent. The practices used with firms like Bechtel are more like what one would expect to see in a command economy, in which products are generally less suitable. For instance, due to the past competition in the aerospace industry, the US tends to have superior aircraft. Other countries buy our aircraft even though it is more expensive. We will see if this continues now that a decade+ of republican congressional rule has turned US aerospace into a psuedo governmental agency.
First and foremost, dialog is hard to write. Second, a well put together story is hard to create, and excessive use of plot devices, which are so popular, kill the story. It is this combination, breaking of the story, writing the story,and pushing the dialog, that is the difference between a good movie and a bad one. In fact I believe that it is the later, the dialog, that leads to an over abundance of action films, in which the fx are a technical problem and not a creative one. As you mention, huge advances in technology has made the technical work the best it ever has been.
But really, I think the biggest issue is that movies are expected to fill huge theaters in huge megaplexes. I see three or four theaters in one location showing the same movie. I see movies rated not on their technical caliber, but their first weekend ticket sales. A horrible movie is going to do well because it has the advertising budget and the power to open in enough locations to pull in the first week sales. Movies that have actually spent money on scripts, but not on publicity, are doomed to failure. And this has not really changed. Casablanca, a movie that is well written and has contributed many idioms to the english language isn't even up to the ticket sales of smokey and the bandit. What we see now is nothing new.
Pretty much good movies are being made, and do pretty well. I see several good movies, both indie and mainstream, a year. I think one has to open to new experiences to appreciate some movies, and the irrational tie to traditional forms limits the reach of some fine movies. OTOH, most people seem to happy with nicely presented tripe, and that is ok. But I must admit that I shudder to think of what they have done to miami vice.
Similiar configured V300T is $1150, or $1050 if you mail in your rebate. Going with an AMD solo will save another $50. Software such as MS Works, a photo editor, and virus checker will add $100+. System ready to use will run 1200 after rebate.
Macbook with iLife included is $1199, iWorks adds $79. System ready to use will run about 1300. For education customers, the price of the Macbook and VS300t are all but identical.
The advantage of the PC is that one does not have to pay for extras that may not be needed. But when comparing name brand machine to name brand machine, the 30% markup has not existed for a decade, and apple does not promote excessive annoyware like MS.
Certainly the $850 base price for the compaq will draw customers in, and they will probably assume that the base is comparable to the $1200 Macbook. Ther compaq customer may purchase the underpowered machine to save some initial cash, only to spend much more money later to retrofit. I know that some people need to believe that the PC provides the best value, in the same way that many needed to believe the mainframe provided the best value, and in many cases they were correct. But the value goes beyond simple price of the machine to suitability for the task, which is what Apple addressed by moving to the Intel stuff, no matter how negatively it affects other parts of the system.
Even, I, a long time Payless shoe consumer, wanted to get a pair of nikes, but i don't have $200 to drop on a pair of shown. Damn me not having much money!
This is really a tired and quite frankly useless argument. If I had money for a computer, I had money for an Apple. Perhaps I chose to use the money for something else, and buy a cheaper computer, but that is no different from buying a cheaper pair of shoes, cheaper car, cheaper whatever. If you need a PC, fine get one. But as in everything else, value is a personal and variable quantity. It is kind of like the kid that has plenty of money for potato chips, but no money for a pencil.
The real problem here is that MS has lost control of it's supply chain, and as a result has been reduced to forcing the customer to act as an uncompensated QC agent. I see no overall benefit to the enduser, it is not like these things can't be checked at registration, and I see not program like 'your purchase is free if you get no receipt.'
No, all that is happening here is MS creating such a complex system of distribution and prices, with registration codes that are long and difficult, all while trying to personalize a commodity product. Start with the first item. MS fought for regulations that mean that any manufactured PC must, for all intents and purposes, have Windows installed. So, even if a site license exists, you are still paying for windows. Yet even in light of this, MS still insists on selling upgrade and full products, even though the percentage of people who have not bought a previous copy of windows is small. Of course a copy of windows is linked to a machine, which is another senseless complication. Such complications as upgrade versions, home versions, pro versions, etc, simply allows the crooks an opportunity to manipulate the already confused end user.
Which leads to the second issue. MS Windows is now a fully commoditized product. It owes it's success to being part of fully interchangeable system, which allows beneficial cost reductions for all concerned. The problem is, of course, that MS does not want MS Windows to be a commodity, and therefore treats it as a vertical market application. So, I can't take my copy of MS windows and choose to install it on a single given machine. I am told which machine it belongs to. This does not happen with any other component of the system. OTOH, every copy of MS Windows is all but identical, so the machinations necessary to create this leads to a rube goldberg machine.
If MS would just sell MS Windows for $100 and get over all the hubris that somehow MS WIndows is a special thing would go away. If they want to continue the fantasy that somehow MS WIndows is not a cheap commodity, then they should do something like individualized DVDs, each encoded with their own ID.
The thing is that the Newton was a very cool machine. The fundamentals of the machine would not have to change. Advances in technology would mean the screen would be smaller with the same resolution, PCMCIA is replaced with a CF card one PC , one mini usb connector, bluetooth, and wireless. We are talking basically the same machine at half the size. TCP/IP was already built is, as was full internet access.
In fact the only big thing that would be different, and the thing that will make it useful, is.mac synchronization. It would be then be the mac.
My hope, as always, is that we see such a machine if an when Apple introduces a phone. While a minimal iPod mini type phone would be wonderful, a Newton like treo competitor would be awesome.
Secondly, Apple doesn't keep selling the old generation of products for very long, so if you use your Mac for work, and you suddenly need a new one, then you have no choice but to purchase a first-gen machine.
It really depends on how your works work. If you are spending other peoples money, perhaps the other people demand new top of line machines. This is often an irrational requirement, especially for apples, but hey if other people hold the purse strings, what can we do?
But the reality is that one can get old product for a long time after new product is introduced. Stores keep stock, and apple has refurbished items. I was able to get an original airport card, new, from retail, two years after the new card was introduced. Apple is still selling refurbished ipods minis. I suspect PowerPC computers will be available retail for a while, and then as refurbished.
Here is the deal. If I buy a PC I want the latest because that is the only way to make sure that the current technology is there, and it will expand to meet my needs in a year. It is not a big deal because the latest and greatest PC is not going to be 2K. However, I can get an apple that is a year or so old, still get great speed, still get dvd-rw-dl, still get firewire 800, high speed USB 2.0, expandable to at least 2 gig, and on desktop multiple HD connections, including SCSI.
So I am not saying that Apple should not make a better first generation product, just that purchasing of that product is a choice. It is surely the case that valid business reasons exist to need the latest apple product, in which case the physical defects are probably not critical as they do not really effect performance. But for the most part good G5 and G4 machines can still be had, and they should still be useful for another year or two, at least until 10.7 comes out and runs on a PowerPC only in emulation mode.
It was absolutely an amazing show, if for no other reason than the physics and fx. However, JMS has already made some significant mistakes, c.f. Crusade, and this sounds like another. Sort of a demented muppet babies, or perhaps a reaction to the upcoming star trek babies.
This is will just serve to diminish the future respect of basically OK show. Think about what giligan's island might have been like if they had not done 100 reunion shows.
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Music videos do cost a lot to produce, and not all those costs can be charged to marketing. OTOH, perhaps music videos do not need unlimited budgets.
At this point, I have two or three adapters in use, all bought at different times. The only consistent issue I notice is that they sometimes get very hot when charging a battery, especially if the computer is in use. Therefore I tend to keep the adapter away from flameable material. If it is plugged directly into the wall this is not an issue. I would never leave an adaptor on paper.
Having seen and used most of these interfaces, the driving force seems to be the hardware to run them and then an API to make them cheap enough to implement for consumer applications. System 1 was a basic GUI built run on a relatively simple hardware and in a small footprint. The innovation was in fact in the separate GPU, something that was not widely used. This allowed the complex graphics. The big software innovation was WYSIWYG. Despite what people say about Xerox, the concept existed, but the bundle did not. Furthermore, the problem MS had was that it had no control over the hardware, and therefor could a tight OS, much less an OS built with specialized processors that no one had, so MS Windows 1.0 was the best it could do for the given hardware.
Once the initial concept of the GUI was developed, and the methodology developed, the software itself became rather simple. Over time hardware has been the biggest constraint on MS. MS software must run on cheap hardware, so the OS has been necessarily inferior. For instance, it was 10 years before excel on the PC was as good as the Mac. Conversely, companies like SGI had much more powerful hardware to play with, so the X-Windows experience blew System 7, 8, 9, and everything else, out of the water.
It is unclear what vista is going to look like. Mac OS X has some incredible high quality hardware at the base, hardware the sells for at least 1K, so apple has fewer constraints that MS that has to run on $300 junk. This might explain the fork in MS Vista. The point is that the comparison between MS and Apple makes as much since as comparing Apple and SGI. No one has ever said that Apple should run like a SGI. Likewise, MS cannot really run an Apple, even if they both use x86. Mac OS is basically being optimized for Intel dual core chips, and how long until the GPC is going be standard dual core?
Of course, even though Apple is "closed", the documentation and developer tools always seem more open to me. I recall the old Apple MAC bookd and the details, and compare that to the third party MS development books, and all the asterisks warning the user that MS did not support use of the hook or API. It did not make the Mac and easier to develop with, and it still seems easier to throw something together on the PC, but that is only if one is willing to use questionable strategies.
To speak specifically to your example, perhaps your mother was not chosen accidently. Perhaps she was of a color that was suspicious, or she was nervous, or in some other way peaked security personnel. Perhpas "the man" legitimately believed she was a mule. Just because she was "your mother" does not mean that she did not fit the profile. Given my personal high opinion of most security personnel, and my mostly postive experience in airports, I have been detained twice, both with reasonable cause, even if I was doing nothing wrong, I must wonder why you are so upset that your mother was "harassed". It is, like the person who has just robbed a bank, getting dramatically upset because they were stopped for speeding? After all, if you have done nothing wrong, what are you afraid of? And why would your mother be so unpatriotic as to not be willing to submit to a simple search if that was going to help us all be safer? Was it because she was on her way to do something? As you mention, the war on terror is going to have casualties, and you are either with or against us. If we let everyones mother through without checks, then all the terrorist have to do is start using mothers.
I think we really have to accept and embrace real innovations to productivity. Things such as compilers, optimizers, high level interfaces, has brought us great benefit. If we look at it in real terms the advancements are awesome. In the Mythical Man Month I seem to recall that coding speeds were cited as dozens of lines per day. Compare that to what we can do now. The down side is that we perhaps waste resources, and in many ways the computer industry is crushing itself under the weight of wasted resources, but that is merely another management issue.
Which brings us to the second point. An organization that believes it is working toward truth is not going hide that work. The organizations that attack women in front of clinics do not do so in secret. The organizations that behead American soldiers post notices of it on the internet. Although some may think Al Gore is a fundamentalist, he has the integrity to stand behind his beliefs. And this is the metric that must be used. A person or organization that stands behind their actions at least has the ability to say they are willing to face full disclosure and any consequences. A person or organization that is not willing to stand behind their actions has nothing. Not integrity. Not humility. They are merely mercenaries, willing to work for whatever cause will get them a buck, with no personal beliefs or faith. Lying is bad enough. Denying the lie reserves a special place in purgatory.
So the story here is not that someone lied, that happens all the time. The story is that some people are getting so desperate, they are using mercenaries to do the work that they themselves to not have the courage to enact.
Below the uni level, where in most cases the school is expected to actively structure education so the kids will be more likely to learn, proxies lead to an arms race. In much the same way that abuses by past generation has lead to the banning of lockers and backpacks, the abuse of the web is going to lead to white lists. This is not good as kids probably would be better off with an unfiltered internet, but little learning happens if the kid spends the entire day looking at crumpet on cars or adolescent chests. It is really no one fault. Kids will be kids, and schools will be schools. Everyone is doing the best they can.
I do appreciate the creativity that goes into bypassing the limits. Hopefully as the kids ages that creativity will be used for things slightly less narcissistic.
This is the kind of subtlety that people seem to miss in science. Just because something could be true, does not mean it is true. In this case the samples in question could have been formed by an organic process, but they did not have to be. And since the overwhelming evidence is that there is no life on mars, and in fact we have no real process as yet that would have developed life on mars, the reasonable person still concludes that life probably does not exist. Now some people just are going to believe for personal reasons, and that is cool. Those people need to look for evidence in an attempt to prove their case. But this particular piece of evidence appears to have been taken out of contention.
I also wonder if this person is just lonely. Has all this persons friend moved out so the young generation can live there? Does this person resent that fact? Did the young people move in like they were settlers, remaking the neighborhood in a new image, dismissing all that came before, or did they respect the effort it took to build the place that they now live.
I have seen rational neighbors and irrational neighbors. I have seen neighbors intent on changing the culture of a place simply because they have the money to so do, and neighbors who take the time to talk to and help their elders. So I do not want to pass judgement, but as in world politics, a bit of genuine humble diplomacy can make problems disappear.
Many of the places people want to live is the same way. I live in a particular area of town where everyone want to live, so prices are very high. OTOH, there is a bunch of land not far from where I live that is completely undeveloped, and has remained so for a very long time.
Certainly herd mentality leads to some irrational decisions. Several years ago I knew of one company that wanted to move from Texas to california. They had a good real estate deal in texas, all the workers they needed, and extremely good connectivity. More importantly, they had electricity. Cheap. And reliable. You see Texas does not connect to the eastern or western power grid, so it is not so easy to finagle the interconnects and cut off supply with phantom transactions.. Likewise, a hiccup in the middle of nowhere, for instance ohio, is not going to take down entire regions.
The place where your argument fails is that (1) a computer comes with whatever OS is currently available and (2) when a previous version is nearly useless, the next version is extremely welcomed. MS Vista will be popular because next year it will be on every new PC. But the popularity won't be like 95 or XP because it is not following a basically flawed line of products, such as MS WIndows 3.11, 98, ME. Recall that one reason that 95 was popular for so long was not that it was a good OS, it had many problems, but those problems were not fixed until XP completed the integration that MS began with 2000. In fact many of us who were more concerned about getting work done, and not games, left 95 in favor of NT, and in many cases did not upgrade until XP.
I to this day do not have a standalone DVD player. The only reason I switched to DVD was because I started using my powermac to watch movies. That would have put me around 1999 as well. In fact I am so often offended by the studios abuse of the DVD format to force me to watch commercials that I miss the simple ability fast forward to the movie. Not to mention the cheesy menus that I must fight to earn the right to watch the movie I paid for.
BTW, I certainly am a first adopter of toys. It is just that I know what I am adopting, and make decisions based on my needs, not to impress the world.
So the question is can OEMs create and manufacture these pretty PCs at no additional cost. If not can they absorb the cost. I would say that margins are already so thin, designing a line of stylish computers with no markup is out of the question.
Passing the cost onto the consumer is not an option either. Just look at how people already whine that they have to pay $100 more for a mac(and don't tell me it is more, I check comparable macs and dells every couple weeks, remember to include XP pro, and iLife, of course you can a computer with fewer features for less), and how people complained that the black mac is $100 more than a white. And what is going to happen when Dell starts getting complaints of discolored product? From my experience, they barely handle the technical issues.
What I think is going to be the downfall of this, though, is the temptation just to pile on colors and nick nacks. Right now the PC market uses a very safe palette. Every time they try to do something cool, like a pulsing light to simulate sleep mode, they royally screw up because they do not understand that the purpose is not effect, but affect. Even the most hardened PC user admits that 'architectural details' on the mac are more affective than the lame attempts on most PCs. What this means is that the OEMs will attempt to use these details as selling points, but they won't be authentic. Sure they may seem cool to the person who buys the dogs playing poker, but since that person is also looking for the $400 computer, I hardly think it will matter.
The best example of this is sony, the only OEM that is pushing style, and charging for it. The market share of computer and laptops are perhaps comparable as Apples, and the markup might be even more. Overall PC users want cheap computers, not cute ones.
As far as other jobs, I find that for long term employment most people are looking for a masters degree. As far as I can tell, the resume filter tend to spit out anything without and engineering of CS degree on it, unless there is also a masters degree. A MS even helps if you are a teacher, and will allow you make some extra money teaching community college.
You could even go over to the dark side and get a masters of education in educational assessment. Due to NCLB, huge amounts of money are being funneled to the test makers, and they cannot get enough people to make the tests. It is a mathematical and computer based situation no matter what subject is being assessed. Who knows how long the gravy train will last, but at least until 2008, when all the bought and paid for elected officials get booted out of office. It is not that testing does not have it's good points, but a lot of parents are pissed off that their kid isn't graduating just because they can't pass a single assessment. One thing that I learned about assessment, and in my science classes, is that a single measurement is merely a guess.
A smart person will find a way to make a living no matter what degree they have. Some of it just has to do with luck. If you do teach, there are programs that will give some extra benefits if you go through them.
But it look like the publicity is not so much to sell units, which don't exist and may not ever exist, but to search for a partner, probably to help work though the regulatory process.
The technical detail that fails me is how controlled flight is possible when all you have is a rocket pack. I mean you go up when there is thrust, and then come back down when there is no thrust. How do you orient to go forwards. How do you turn?Is simply bending sufficient? I know this has been done before, but only with highly trained persons. Would a small aircraft not be a better value at 200K.
A sprawling headquarters building for a non-profit research group in West Virginia created by U.S. Rep. Alan Mollohan. The Democrat is now subject of a broader congressional ethics probe.
Since 2001, Congress has directed the space agency to spend more than $3 billion on special projects, most of them small endeavors sought by individual lawmakers for the benefit of their home districts, according to NASA and congressional records.
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The cost of congressional add-ins has grown to about a half-billion dollars a year, or five times the total of a decade ago.
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So, Griffin is imploring Congress to ease up on pet projects, and he has some influential allies on Capitol Hill.
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Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a potential presidential candidate and chairman of the committee that oversees NASA, railed against earmarks in the NASA budget during the investigation of the 2003 shuttle Columbia disaster that killed seven astronauts. McCain said money used to pay for politicians' pet projects would be better spent on safety measures to reduce the chance of such accidents.
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U.S. Rep. David Weldon, R-Indialantic, has earmarked money in the NASA budget for hand-picked projects in Brevard, Florida. He has landed several million dollars for Florida Tech, the Space Life Sciences Lab at Kennedy Space Center and hydrogen fuel research. Weldon defends his projects as well-connected to NASA's overall mission.
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Citizens Against Government Waste, in preparing its annual "Pig Book" of pork-barrel projects, does not count projects such as Hubble and the Pluto mission. The reasoning: That is Congress exercising its authority to help guide agency priorities.
So the article mentions 'pet projects' many times, and specifically lists questionable expenditures. To be fair, just because a project is a congressman's pet does not mean it is intrinsically bad, but what it usually means is that it is not part of a consistent plan to better the country, and often is intended to enrich a individual contributor or help a congressperson get elected by funneling money back home.
The big picture is that money is not equally distributed around the county. On average, each states receives about $7000 per person from the federal government. On reason the 'bridge to nowhere' is such an issue is not just because it is a useless bridge, but because it is one of the projects that allows Alaska to receive around $12,000 per capita, at the expense of the rest of the country. Equally scary are those die-hard self reliant folks in the dakotas and wyoming who suckle around $9,000 off the teats of the federal mother. So much for individual success.
OTOH we have a bunch of states like texas, california, new hampshire, that show with a bit of fiscal responsibility, a state can survive on much less than $7,000 per capita.
All the flavors of DOS in the 80's were way cool because it allowed us to control our own computer. In the 90's all went to hell as we became connected and the computer started doing more and more things no one really understood. A huge concern MS has not addressed is how to protect confidential information, and more importantly help companies not expose disruptive metadata. For instance, I do not believe they have a setting in outlook to scrub MS Office files as are mailed to external addresses. Nor have the implemented the DRM that would allow firms to track users violate border policy. MS adds features that makes systems less secure, without thought of how to compensate for the breech.
This is clearly an awesome feature. So was the command line shortcuts. But features do not exist in a vacuum. There is only so much that can be done to help careless users. If MS is to provide business class systems, and not just toys that can be used as business systems, they have to get serious about making systems that businesses need. I think that if MS would develop a core competency in business, and leave the consumer side to others, MS would be in much better shape. Imagine how wonderful Vista would be if it did not have to worry about they toys that home user need.
In a capitalist economy one assumes that good work only gets done in the presence of competition and in an environment where the consumer knows who is a good agent and who is a bad agent. The practices used with firms like Bechtel are more like what one would expect to see in a command economy, in which products are generally less suitable. For instance, due to the past competition in the aerospace industry, the US tends to have superior aircraft. Other countries buy our aircraft even though it is more expensive. We will see if this continues now that a decade+ of republican congressional rule has turned US aerospace into a psuedo governmental agency.
But really, I think the biggest issue is that movies are expected to fill huge theaters in huge megaplexes. I see three or four theaters in one location showing the same movie. I see movies rated not on their technical caliber, but their first weekend ticket sales. A horrible movie is going to do well because it has the advertising budget and the power to open in enough locations to pull in the first week sales. Movies that have actually spent money on scripts, but not on publicity, are doomed to failure. And this has not really changed. Casablanca, a movie that is well written and has contributed many idioms to the english language isn't even up to the ticket sales of smokey and the bandit. What we see now is nothing new.
Pretty much good movies are being made, and do pretty well. I see several good movies, both indie and mainstream, a year. I think one has to open to new experiences to appreciate some movies, and the irrational tie to traditional forms limits the reach of some fine movies. OTOH, most people seem to happy with nicely presented tripe, and that is ok. But I must admit that I shudder to think of what they have done to miami vice.
Similiar configured V300T is $1150, or $1050 if you mail in your rebate. Going with an AMD solo will save another $50. Software such as MS Works, a photo editor, and virus checker will add $100+. System ready to use will run 1200 after rebate.
Macbook with iLife included is $1199, iWorks adds $79. System ready to use will run about 1300. For education customers, the price of the Macbook and VS300t are all but identical.
The advantage of the PC is that one does not have to pay for extras that may not be needed. But when comparing name brand machine to name brand machine, the 30% markup has not existed for a decade, and apple does not promote excessive annoyware like MS.
Certainly the $850 base price for the compaq will draw customers in, and they will probably assume that the base is comparable to the $1200 Macbook. Ther compaq customer may purchase the underpowered machine to save some initial cash, only to spend much more money later to retrofit. I know that some people need to believe that the PC provides the best value, in the same way that many needed to believe the mainframe provided the best value, and in many cases they were correct. But the value goes beyond simple price of the machine to suitability for the task, which is what Apple addressed by moving to the Intel stuff, no matter how negatively it affects other parts of the system.
This is really a tired and quite frankly useless argument. If I had money for a computer, I had money for an Apple. Perhaps I chose to use the money for something else, and buy a cheaper computer, but that is no different from buying a cheaper pair of shoes, cheaper car, cheaper whatever. If you need a PC, fine get one. But as in everything else, value is a personal and variable quantity. It is kind of like the kid that has plenty of money for potato chips, but no money for a pencil.
No, all that is happening here is MS creating such a complex system of distribution and prices, with registration codes that are long and difficult, all while trying to personalize a commodity product. Start with the first item. MS fought for regulations that mean that any manufactured PC must, for all intents and purposes, have Windows installed. So, even if a site license exists, you are still paying for windows. Yet even in light of this, MS still insists on selling upgrade and full products, even though the percentage of people who have not bought a previous copy of windows is small. Of course a copy of windows is linked to a machine, which is another senseless complication. Such complications as upgrade versions, home versions, pro versions, etc, simply allows the crooks an opportunity to manipulate the already confused end user.
Which leads to the second issue. MS Windows is now a fully commoditized product. It owes it's success to being part of fully interchangeable system, which allows beneficial cost reductions for all concerned. The problem is, of course, that MS does not want MS Windows to be a commodity, and therefore treats it as a vertical market application. So, I can't take my copy of MS windows and choose to install it on a single given machine. I am told which machine it belongs to. This does not happen with any other component of the system. OTOH, every copy of MS Windows is all but identical, so the machinations necessary to create this leads to a rube goldberg machine.
If MS would just sell MS Windows for $100 and get over all the hubris that somehow MS WIndows is a special thing would go away. If they want to continue the fantasy that somehow MS WIndows is not a cheap commodity, then they should do something like individualized DVDs, each encoded with their own ID.
In fact the only big thing that would be different, and the thing that will make it useful, is .mac synchronization. It would be then be the mac.
My hope, as always, is that we see such a machine if an when Apple introduces a phone. While a minimal iPod mini type phone would be wonderful, a Newton like treo competitor would be awesome.
It really depends on how your works work. If you are spending other peoples money, perhaps the other people demand new top of line machines. This is often an irrational requirement, especially for apples, but hey if other people hold the purse strings, what can we do?
But the reality is that one can get old product for a long time after new product is introduced. Stores keep stock, and apple has refurbished items. I was able to get an original airport card, new, from retail, two years after the new card was introduced. Apple is still selling refurbished ipods minis. I suspect PowerPC computers will be available retail for a while, and then as refurbished.
Here is the deal. If I buy a PC I want the latest because that is the only way to make sure that the current technology is there, and it will expand to meet my needs in a year. It is not a big deal because the latest and greatest PC is not going to be 2K. However, I can get an apple that is a year or so old, still get great speed, still get dvd-rw-dl, still get firewire 800, high speed USB 2.0, expandable to at least 2 gig, and on desktop multiple HD connections, including SCSI.
So I am not saying that Apple should not make a better first generation product, just that purchasing of that product is a choice. It is surely the case that valid business reasons exist to need the latest apple product, in which case the physical defects are probably not critical as they do not really effect performance. But for the most part good G5 and G4 machines can still be had, and they should still be useful for another year or two, at least until 10.7 comes out and runs on a PowerPC only in emulation mode.
This is will just serve to diminish the future respect of basically OK show. Think about what giligan's island might have been like if they had not done 100 reunion shows.