How about minimum driving ages being changed? It shouldn' surprise anyone that kids under the age of 18 account for a HUGELY disporportionate piece of the accident pie. How about something like a learners permit (requiring a licensed driver in the car until 17 instead of 16. How about a restricted license (to work and back, etc...) until 18. Give these kids a chance to learn how to drive before we shove them off on their own. Seriously, now we give them a permit at 15.5 yrs and by 16 we shove em out of the driving nest to fly on their own. Them we get outraged at the damage they cause.
Hate to burst your bubble, but several states already do this or are considering it. And while many teenagers don't like it, they also don't vote. The real opposition is the suburban parents who don't want to drive their kids everywhere, which is why such legislation often has caveats for driving to school or school related activities.
There was also a study some time ago showing that people who drive while talking on cellphones have the same penalty to their reaction time as someone 40 years older not talking on their cellphone, yet we don't ban driving while elderly.
Also, at least the study that I recall, compared talking on a cell phone to driving while just under the legal limit, although at the time and place that the study was done, the legal limit was 0.10, not 0.08 as it is pretty much everywhere now.
Side sensors on the car's side, for example, gauge if the car is about to roll over, and then activate the roll-over bar, which breaks through the glass of the back windshield.
Great, so now as well as trusting that I'm not going to have a built-in pyrotechnic device explode in my face if I brake too hard, I also have to worry about the car blowing out the rear window if I corner too sharply? To be honest, I'd rather not have too many of these devices be mandatory.
as well as cars which can parallel park themselves
Sure, if you can find a parking spot that's one and a half times the length of your car. If I had a car that could automatically find a parking spot one and a half times the length of the car, I wouldn't even need it to park for me.
Ahhh, how I miss tripmines. I remember how thrilled i was when I discovered that you could put them on the door tracks so that they would trigger immediately when somebody opened the door. Pipe bombs were fun, too.
More seriously, yes, I realize that some nice shirts have pockets, but I always assumed they were just decorative. I can't imagine using them to hold anything bigger than a business card. I certainly wouldn't ever consider keeping something as expensive and drop-sensitive as a PDA or cell phone in one.
Are we sure that this is being released under the GPL? I don't see any mention of the GPL on the press release or the product page. According to the licensing page (http://www.eiffel.com/licensing/licensing.html) it is only free if you agree to release all software written using it under a free license. If you intend to develop any commercial software, you still have to buy the commercial version. That doesn't sounds at all like the GPL to me. GCC certainly doesn't have that restriction. Moreover the GPL doesn't allow adding additional restrictions to the license either, so I don't think he has any ground to say that you can only distribute it under the GPL if you only use it to write free software.
Not that I am opposed to the guy who wrote the software choosing whatever licensing model he sees fit, but let's not be misleading about this announcement, shall we?
However, it's important to understand that without public backlash over this, the folks behind these machinations will continue forward
Backlash or no, if the idea tanks in the maket, it will go away. As far as I can tell, this is nothing more than a lot of people (or maybe only one?) making a mountain out of a molehill. This $2.50 add-on doesn't change the gameplay in anyway whatsoever. Yeah, go ahead, scream "slippery slope" all you want. If nobody buys this, then the publishers are looking at a decidedly uphill slippery slope.
I cannot believe that. Power for power's sake? Why?
Of course not. It's not power for power's sake, it's power for money's sake. Power of any kind, but especially power to control a consumer market, is easily translated into money.
Has anybody heard of any positive effects it would have had?
The US anti-trust trial was a joke from the start. Nothing would ever have come from it. I know Slashdotters love to complain about how the Bush administration dismantled the ruling and gave Microsoft a free pass, but it would have happened anyway (and was already starting to happen well before Bush took office). The trial was all show and bluster from start to finish.
You have to evaluate their whole product line and their behavior as a company, not just one product. I'd give XP a B as well, or maybe even an A-, but then you have to consider Internet Explorer (D if I'm felling generous), Windows Media Player (C-/D+), Office (C), their server products (mostly in the B to C range, but they do have a few standouts on either end of the spectrum), not to mention all of the methods they use to badger and bully not only their competitors, but their customers.
Overall, regardless of my opinions of Windows 2000 and Windows XP, Microsoft is most definitely desrving of a C- grade.
Nevermind that fact that they are grading the company based on (percieved) consumer trust, and not product quality. They are not the same you know...
DVD didn't win out over VHS because of higher picture quality. 90% of DVD player owners can't tell the difference between DVD quality and VHS quality unless the VHS tape is old and worn. DVD replaced VHS for many of the same reasons that CD's replaced VHS- namely random accessibility and durability. DVD is "good enough" for most consumers.
It may be true that most people associate newer==better, but most of the non-tech-obsessed world doesn't really care if they have the "best". Not to mention that the term "High Definition" has been so abused that many people I know stopped caring about it long ago. My parents haven't bought a new TV in at least 15 years. They probably won't buy a new one until this one dies (which admittedly may not be too far off), and whether they get an HDTV at that point is anyone's guess. And I know plenty of other people who are the same way about their TV's.
Bluray or HD-DVD may get more market penetration than DVD-Audio or SACD merely by virtue of XBox/Playstation sales, but outside of that, they are going after roughly the same type of market- A market that is willing to pay more than 5 times more than is neccessary for their TV, and twice as much for their movies (and probably the player too). DVD will still be king for a long time to come, because DVD offered significant advantages over any preceding format to virtually everyone without requiring any upgrade beyond a new player. Bluray and HD DVD cannot offer any advantage over DVD other than picture quality, and often even that only at the expense of a new TV, and that is simply not enough for most people to care.
The only way to prevent this is for both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD to fail in the market
Well, then, problem solved.
Neither of these products will ever go anywhere far. To me, the war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD looks amusingly like the war between DAT and MiniDisk, or DVD-Audio and SACD. To borrow a line from PCU, "It doesn't matter who wins, because they're all losers."
Anyone here remember PointCast? What, never heard of them?
They were going to be the next big thing 10 years ago. If I remember correctly, they were offered something $500 million for their company and turned it down. They said they would be 10 times that amount in a few years. Well, a few years came and went, and suddenly they were worth less than a tenth of that amount.
Way to go, idiots. Newsflash: You're riding on a fad. Sell out when the fad is hot, because when it's gone you'll have nothing.
I'd say that 50% of the time people were playing video games of some sort or another, playing FreeCell or Solitaire, watching DVDs and generally using the laptop to do anything *but* take notes.
As one of the people who tended to do this when I was in college, I would like to point out that I only did this in classes where attendance was required. I much preferred staying in my room, and thus not distracting those around me, whenever it was an option.
Why would I bother to type up something I already wrote once? Most of the time I could hardly be bothered to spend the time re-reading it, much less re-writing it. God, what an awful waste of valuable time.
Mostly I went with the "scribble down notes into a notebook that will never be opened again" strategy, if I took notes at all- enough of my teachers had the powerpoint slides available online that most of the time even that wasn't necessary. I can't tell you how many notebooks I re-used for 3 or 4 classes or more. They usually disintegrated from age before I used them up.
HTML is simply not a rich enough medium to deliver the complex user experience people want.
Nonsense. It may not have started out that way, but HTML 4/XHTML 1 is more than rich enough.
Or rather, it would be, if Internet Explorer rendered it properly. More and more, this is why I am convinced that Microsoft puposefully delayed IE7 until it was no longer relevant. They purposefully held back the entire web development field for over five years with their shoddy implementation of web standards (in fact even IE 7 is still going to be missing a lot of the features really needed to do useful web application development) until they finally had their "HTML killer" ready to take its place.
Hospitals would probably think DRM was a neat idea as well, it would solve the issues with those cheap transcribers in the middle east threatening to post everyone's records when you "forget" to pay them.
Hmm, and I think setting my house on fire might be a good way to dry out my flooded basement...
And of course, we all know how effective Australia's cane toads were at solving their cane beetle problem.
I've read it before, and while I agree that their reasoning makes sense as the default behavior, I prefer to have an active root account. They recommend against unlocking the root account because they prefer the sudo model and they believe that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. For me they do not, and I prefer to have a real root account. There is nothing unique to Ubuntu that makes having an unlocked root account less desirable than any other distro.
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How about minimum driving ages being changed? It shouldn' surprise anyone that kids under the age of 18 account for a HUGELY disporportionate piece of the accident pie. How about something like a learners permit (requiring a licensed driver in the car until 17 instead of 16. How about a restricted license (to work and back, etc...) until 18. Give these kids a chance to learn how to drive before we shove them off on their own. Seriously, now we give them a permit at 15.5 yrs and by 16 we shove em out of the driving nest to fly on their own. Them we get outraged at the damage they cause.
Hate to burst your bubble, but several states already do this or are considering it. And while many teenagers don't like it, they also don't vote. The real opposition is the suburban parents who don't want to drive their kids everywhere, which is why such legislation often has caveats for driving to school or school related activities.
There was also a study some time ago showing that people who drive while talking on cellphones have the same penalty to their reaction time as someone 40 years older not talking on their cellphone, yet we don't ban driving while elderly.
Also, at least the study that I recall, compared talking on a cell phone to driving while just under the legal limit, although at the time and place that the study was done, the legal limit was 0.10, not 0.08 as it is pretty much everywhere now.
BTW, in some states 65mph limit freeways have also 45mph lower limit.
In California I had to resort to surface streets when I had one of the wheels temporarily replaced with the smaller wheel from the trunk.
From what I remember of California, you were lucky to ever reach 45mph on a 65mph freeway unless you are driving at 1:00am...
Side sensors on the car's side, for example, gauge if the car is about to roll over, and then activate the roll-over bar, which breaks through the glass of the back windshield.
Great, so now as well as trusting that I'm not going to have a built-in pyrotechnic device explode in my face if I brake too hard, I also have to worry about the car blowing out the rear window if I corner too sharply? To be honest, I'd rather not have too many of these devices be mandatory.
as well as cars which can parallel park themselves
Sure, if you can find a parking spot that's one and a half times the length of your car. If I had a car that could automatically find a parking spot one and a half times the length of the car, I wouldn't even need it to park for me.
Ahhh, how I miss tripmines. I remember how thrilled i was when I discovered that you could put them on the door tracks so that they would trigger immediately when somebody opened the door. Pipe bombs were fun, too.
WTF is a shirt pocket??
More seriously, yes, I realize that some nice shirts have pockets, but I always assumed they were just decorative. I can't imagine using them to hold anything bigger than a business card. I certainly wouldn't ever consider keeping something as expensive and drop-sensitive as a PDA or cell phone in one.
Are we sure that this is being released under the GPL? I don't see any mention of the GPL on the press release or the product page. According to the licensing page (http://www.eiffel.com/licensing/licensing.html) it is only free if you agree to release all software written using it under a free license. If you intend to develop any commercial software, you still have to buy the commercial version. That doesn't sounds at all like the GPL to me. GCC certainly doesn't have that restriction. Moreover the GPL doesn't allow adding additional restrictions to the license either, so I don't think he has any ground to say that you can only distribute it under the GPL if you only use it to write free software.
Not that I am opposed to the guy who wrote the software choosing whatever licensing model he sees fit, but let's not be misleading about this announcement, shall we?
However, it's important to understand that without public backlash over this, the folks behind these machinations will continue forward
Backlash or no, if the idea tanks in the maket, it will go away. As far as I can tell, this is nothing more than a lot of people (or maybe only one?) making a mountain out of a molehill. This $2.50 add-on doesn't change the gameplay in anyway whatsoever. Yeah, go ahead, scream "slippery slope" all you want. If nobody buys this, then the publishers are looking at a decidedly uphill slippery slope.
I cannot believe that. Power for power's sake? Why?
Of course not. It's not power for power's sake, it's power for money's sake. Power of any kind, but especially power to control a consumer market, is easily translated into money.
Has anybody heard of any positive effects it would have had?
The US anti-trust trial was a joke from the start. Nothing would ever have come from it. I know Slashdotters love to complain about how the Bush administration dismantled the ruling and gave Microsoft a free pass, but it would have happened anyway (and was already starting to happen well before Bush took office). The trial was all show and bluster from start to finish.
You have to evaluate their whole product line and their behavior as a company, not just one product. I'd give XP a B as well, or maybe even an A-, but then you have to consider Internet Explorer (D if I'm felling generous), Windows Media Player (C-/D+), Office (C), their server products (mostly in the B to C range, but they do have a few standouts on either end of the spectrum), not to mention all of the methods they use to badger and bully not only their competitors, but their customers.
Overall, regardless of my opinions of Windows 2000 and Windows XP, Microsoft is most definitely desrving of a C- grade.
Nevermind that fact that they are grading the company based on (percieved) consumer trust, and not product quality. They are not the same you know...
Excellent. .sig (altered slightly to fit in 120 characters)?
Do you mind if I make this my new
It's about time I changed it to make all the posts replying to my sig look ridiculous.
DVD didn't win out over VHS because of higher picture quality. 90% of DVD player owners can't tell the difference between DVD quality and VHS quality unless the VHS tape is old and worn. DVD replaced VHS for many of the same reasons that CD's replaced VHS- namely random accessibility and durability. DVD is "good enough" for most consumers.
It may be true that most people associate newer==better, but most of the non-tech-obsessed world doesn't really care if they have the "best". Not to mention that the term "High Definition" has been so abused that many people I know stopped caring about it long ago. My parents haven't bought a new TV in at least 15 years. They probably won't buy a new one until this one dies (which admittedly may not be too far off), and whether they get an HDTV at that point is anyone's guess. And I know plenty of other people who are the same way about their TV's.
Bluray or HD-DVD may get more market penetration than DVD-Audio or SACD merely by virtue of XBox/Playstation sales, but outside of that, they are going after roughly the same type of market- A market that is willing to pay more than 5 times more than is neccessary for their TV, and twice as much for their movies (and probably the player too). DVD will still be king for a long time to come, because DVD offered significant advantages over any preceding format to virtually everyone without requiring any upgrade beyond a new player. Bluray and HD DVD cannot offer any advantage over DVD other than picture quality, and often even that only at the expense of a new TV, and that is simply not enough for most people to care.
Next time it will not be a first offence.
So next time they'll get a slightly larger slap on the wrist?
The only way to prevent this is for both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD to fail in the market
Well, then, problem solved.
Neither of these products will ever go anywhere far. To me, the war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD looks amusingly like the war between DAT and MiniDisk, or DVD-Audio and SACD. To borrow a line from PCU, "It doesn't matter who wins, because they're all losers."
Of course, he's totally wrong. Professional webmasters wouldn't use FTP or MySQL either.
Anyone here remember PointCast? What, never heard of them?
They were going to be the next big thing 10 years ago. If I remember correctly, they were offered something $500 million for their company and turned it down. They said they would be 10 times that amount in a few years. Well, a few years came and went, and suddenly they were worth less than a tenth of that amount.
Way to go, idiots. Newsflash: You're riding on a fad. Sell out when the fad is hot, because when it's gone you'll have nothing.
Oh well, their loss.
Today, most families don't have the money to spend on another $1500-$2500 PC...
Have you looked at PC prices lately? You can buy a PC that would be more than capable of acting as a media PC for $300.
Of course it is. Because every single time somebody quotes it, seriously or not, somebody has to point it out one more time.
I'd say that 50% of the time people were playing video games of some sort or another, playing FreeCell or Solitaire, watching DVDs and generally using the laptop to do anything *but* take notes.
As one of the people who tended to do this when I was in college, I would like to point out that I only did this in classes where attendance was required. I much preferred staying in my room, and thus not distracting those around me, whenever it was an option.
Why would I bother to type up something I already wrote once? Most of the time I could hardly be bothered to spend the time re-reading it, much less re-writing it. God, what an awful waste of valuable time.
Mostly I went with the "scribble down notes into a notebook that will never be opened again" strategy, if I took notes at all- enough of my teachers had the powerpoint slides available online that most of the time even that wasn't necessary. I can't tell you how many notebooks I re-used for 3 or 4 classes or more. They usually disintegrated from age before I used them up.
HTML is simply not a rich enough medium to deliver the complex user experience people want.
Nonsense. It may not have started out that way, but HTML 4/XHTML 1 is more than rich enough.
Or rather, it would be, if Internet Explorer rendered it properly. More and more, this is why I am convinced that Microsoft puposefully delayed IE7 until it was no longer relevant. They purposefully held back the entire web development field for over five years with their shoddy implementation of web standards (in fact even IE 7 is still going to be missing a lot of the features really needed to do useful web application development) until they finally had their "HTML killer" ready to take its place.
Hospitals would probably think DRM was a neat idea as well, it would solve the issues with those cheap transcribers in the middle east threatening to post everyone's records when you "forget" to pay them.
Hmm, and I think setting my house on fire might be a good way to dry out my flooded basement...
And of course, we all know how effective Australia's cane toads were at solving their cane beetle problem.
I've read it before, and while I agree that their reasoning makes sense as the default behavior, I prefer to have an active root account. They recommend against unlocking the root account because they prefer the sudo model and they believe that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. For me they do not, and I prefer to have a real root account. There is nothing unique to Ubuntu that makes having an unlocked root account less desirable than any other distro.