I buy real Coca-Cola (not Coke Classic) in 16 ounce returnable bottles from the local Mexican bakery.
Smaller, non-returnable 12 ounce bottles have been for sale forever next to the refried beans and tortillas at grocery stores (local and national) since forever, also imported from Mexico.
Go have a look around, and I'm sure you'll find some proper Coca-Cola, made with proper cane sugar, and not sold in a particularly seasonal or promotional fashion.
The issue there was the TV, not any particularly heinous DRM.
My own Samsung set offers the same limitation. Why? Simply: The TV has two speakers. So, to simplify things, it's requesting a stereo mix from the source component.
I worked around problems like this by using the TV as a monitor, not as an audio device, from day 1. As far as I know, the speakers in the TV don't work at all -- I've never heard them.
IANAL, but I think that including the text of the GPL is sufficient to constitute "a written offer."
Otherwise, I've got a lot of things which are GPL violators, from an old Sony TV, to my GPS, to a CD with Ubuntu on it -- none of which came with a written offer for source code, but all of which came with a copy of the GPL.
I imagine that there will be quite a market (black, perhaps) for porch lights from folks in northern states for bulbs in the 310-2600 lumen range.
Simply: CFLs don't start worth a shit when it's cold out, and when it's really cold out, they never begin to produce proper light.
Accordingly, I keep CFLs in my porch lights in the summer, and replace them with incandescents in the winter.
And nevermind the dimming aspects. I'm happy to use CFLs where they're useful, but I'd rather import bulbs directly from China than give up incandescent bulbs that dim properly.
Which leaves the color aspects. I like CFLs, but they're not ever going to be installed in my bathroom, because their CRI generally sucks and that's where my wife puts her face on.
Fortunately, incandescent bulbs are cheap enough that when the time comes, I won't have any problem buying enough for the rest of my life.
LEDs driven by AC flicker more for two reasons: Less persistence (they go dark faster), and the fact that they flicker at 60Hz*.
Fluorescents flicker less for the same two reasons: More persistence (the visible light they produce is entirely produced by converting UV to white using phosphors, which can be designed to be appropriately slow), and the fact any flicker occurs at 120Hz (they aren't diodes, and therefore get to use the whole waveform) on even the cheapest/oldest fixtures. More common modern fixtures use electronic ballasts (ala CFLs and the like) and move the frequency up to a few hundred Hz, which really isn't a problem. However, the shift to electronic ballasts only happened because it was generally cheaper, not because it was better (that it happens to also be better is completely accidental).
*: All of these problems with LEDs are neatly solved by feeding them with DC, or sufficiently high-frequency AC. And: the frequency can be very inexpensively doubled from 60 to 120Hz by feeding them with a simple bridge rectifier. These things are only sometimes done, however, because unlike electronic ballasts on fluorescent fixtures making things cheaper, it's always more expensive to add this stuff to an LED.
I bought some dimmable CFLs recently (and no, I'm not going to mention a brand, because I don't believe that the brand printed on the box makes any difference with CFLs).
I plugged them into my Lutron dimmer switch, and fired 'em up. Lousy. Slow to turn on, horrific color. Actual dimming range went from "bright" to "a bit less bright," and then straight to "completely dark."
So much for trying to be energy-efficient in my office. They do work well enough with a regular light switch in the pantry, but that's about the best use I could come up with for them -- the color of light produced is too unpleasant for any place where people actually spend time.
The experience was bad enough that when I decided (a bit more recently) to install better lighting in my office, I did a complete polar opposite and put up MR16 halogens on a track. They dim just fine, and they're pretty. They're also expensive to run, but the office is almost always just lit by the dim glow of a few LCD screens, so I decided that I didn't need to care about efficiency.
The problem is that in many cases, the do-it-yourselfers are not an addressable market, and so products that hit the marketplace do not cater to their usage patterns. This explains a high percentage of the complaints on Slashdot regarding the Apple/iTunes ecosystem.
Heh.
There is a Lowe's, a Menards, a Home Depot, two good hardware stores, two lumber yards, a specialty woodworking retailer, and a tool store in the small town I live in.
There are also three large chain and three independent auto parts stores.
Obviously, there is a market for DIY stuff.
Even for electronics: The Motorola Droid is easily hacked, even though it would have been simple to make it very hard to do so (as in the case of its otherwise-identical GSM sister device, the Milestone, which is locked down very tightly indeed).
Best Buy sells PC parts.
And nevermind the entire gamut of online retailers specializing in catering to the DIY crowd.
But, anyway, you're begging the question. I wasn't asking "why is there no market for DIY set top box crap," I was asking "why should I pay someone else to assemble this stuff for me, just so it can be useless in a couple of years."
And please realize, too, that all of this stuff these days is build around a general-purpose computer, typically even running a general-purpose OS. They've all got a CPU, RAM, storage (or at least connectivity), along with some special decoding hardware to (hopefully!) unburden the CPU when playing video, whether it is a netbook with XBMC or a black box from Google, Apple, Boxee, Seagate, or whoever.
And when the netbook becomes useless for that role, either due to incompatible hardware or lack of tinkering, I can make it do something else and retain some of my investment. When the black box becomes useless, either due to incompatible hardware or lack of support, I get to throw it away and buy a new one.
TFA talks about doing this with exactly one pre-existing microphone, which is rather unique.
Triangulating touch position using multiple "microphones" (in this case, peizoelectric widgets mounted to the glass surface, but the concept is the same) has been done before, and isn't particularly new. (More info and whitepaper.)
I say this having never configured an existing Skype handset, but, honestly -- really. Folks these days who are accustomed to handling 802.11-ish stuff are also accustomed to handling passkeys and entering them into random devices.
The only other bit of info needed is a Skype username and password.
Does it really make a marketable difference if this stuff is entered in a web browser or on a handset?
And do folks who are already familiar with Wifi really want to buy a new router with their handset just because it is, at best, a few minutes easier than just buying the handset separately?
And does Cisco owning Skype somehow make this any easier for them to implement than it has been for their own Linksys brand?
And I've seen a blue sky on a clear, calm day turn black in a matter of minutes as fronts converge overhead. At an outdoor festival, with lots of folks around and little proper shelter. By the time the official NWS warning happened (and there never was a watch issued), things had calmed.
Fortunately (if you can say that) I was keeping active tabs on the radar at the time. I saw some systems converging overhead on radar that beautiful afternoon, and gave the order to tarp the speakers because it was going to rain.
I was conservative in my estimate. We were very lucky that nobody really got hurt. Things flooded, stuff blew away, properly-installed commercial tents failed.
Next time, I'm bringing a TV, not just a laptop. A little bit of broadcast fear-mongering and forecasting experience would have done a lot to encourage me to order more protection for people and property earlier, instead of too little.
I'm just sayin'. Just because the weather is nice where you are, doesn't mean that just over the horizon it's not raining puppies and raping horses, and those folks are certainly appreciative of "panic mode" weather reporting when that happens.
But whatever the case: If you're relying on what it looks like outside to tell you what's going to happen soon, you're doing it wrong.
The trouble with that is simple: Time marches on, and specialized devices eventually cease being useful. I've had two DVD players that once played everything which have been supplanted by the shift to h.264 and AAC, for instance.
Formats get old. Does-everything black boxes turn into do-nothing black boxes at the same rate.
Whatever specialized box you have will eventually cease to be useful without software maintenance. And while software maintenance is a pain, chasing formats around is even more painful.
And besides, media conversions are lossy. I want more quality, not less, as time moves on (and I'll settle for "as good as it used to be" if that's the best choice I have available).
I'd rather spend a little time maintaining software. If you'd rather spend a little time making money to buy new hardware, while migrating content to new formats (ala LP to cassette/CD/MP3), more power to you.
My money and time are bet on a software fix, not blind reliance on a manufacturer of some random black box to give a shit in about that old hardware in a few years and transferring things to whatever format is currently blessed when it comes time to replace it.
Besides, I do enjoy tinkering with things, even though I have also wife+house+job+kids. It's not the most glorious hobby in the world, but it's mine. I'd so much rather tinker*, than work to pay someone else to tinker on my behalf and deliver the fruits of their efforts in the form of a does-everything (for today!) black box.
(*Yes, I generally get to choose how much I work in a week, or in a day. It makes it easy to justify spending time on personal stuff, and not just with computers. Things like: Gosh, I could pay a carpenter $900 to do that job, or I could take a few days off of work and do it myself. Or: I could pay $1,600 for a new clutch to be installed, or... etc. YMMV, but if you're really just a suburbanite consumer, you're doing it by choice.)
No, not a big deal, as long as you have $60-80 to spend on it every few years since...as far as I can tell...the "new" assemblies use the same failure-prone design as the old one. And the parts market for this stuff seems so...grey. A lot of these things look like Chinese rebuilds, except for a few completely flakey-looking sellers who seem to have the same thing but whom state "No, ours is newly-manufactured. Really! Trust us! We really mean it! You get what you pay for!!@!"
With all that grey, I don't trust any of 'em. I read it all like this: "Here's a widget. It might be new, used, or rebuilt. We may have even actually tested it, or not. And we may be lying to you about all of those things. Plus, we don't think it'll really work long-term, so there's no proper warranty for you, sucker."
I'm not afraid of buying cheap Chinese goods; in fact, I often buy random things from dealexteme. But at least with Dealextreme, I know what I'm getting into and only risk a few dollars. The PS3 parts suppliers? Feh.
Maybe if Sony had proper channels for distributing console parts to the public, the market would appear to be very different. AFAICT, they aren't doing this at all.
Meanwhile, there is a very different dual-lens design used on slightly newer models that is apparently a lot better, but no way to upgrade to it without upgrading the whole console.
Which, frankly, seems like the best bet anyway. I see no particular harm in having one PS3 for streaming, audio, homebrew, and DVD media, plus another to wear out doing disc-based games, PSN, and Blu-Ray...except it's expensive. But to be honest, if this were a perfect world, I'd be able to just plug a random external USB Blu-Ray reader into it and call it done.
(And all of this is assuming that the diode, not the controller, is fucked. If the controller is fucked, then the fix is some SMD soldering fuckery that I'd rather neither perform nor pay for.)
The rest of the PS3 owners bought it to play games, so when some obscure option that less than one percent users even tried, it's no surprise no one cares.
"The rest of the PS3 owners"?
I bought a PS3 specifically to play Gran Turismo 5. Years went by, during which time I discovered that the PS3 is a very fine player for all manner of media. It was such a nice media player, in fact, that my brother-in-law would frequently comment about it after he'd finished up a game of Forza on his new 360 (the old one having succumbed to the Red Ring of Death). I didn't mind his chiding, though -- I always knew that GT 5 would be out soon enough, and that it would be just awesome. And, in the meantime, the PS3 did make a very fine media player, indeed well worth the purchase price just for that group of functions. I was never disappointed by it.
So fine, in fact, is the PS3's ability to regurgitate media into an HDMI cable that we used it all the time. It played Netflix streams with splendid quality, and Blu-Ray movies like none other, and DVD rips over the network -- all without a single complaint.
Until, that is, when the laser diode for the Blu-Ray drive recently died from use and lo, no amount of disassembly and careful cleaning would cure it.
In what is one of the greater ironies that I have ever experienced with a bit of electronics, this failure came within 2 months of the expected actual fucking release date of Gran Turismo 5. And since all PS3 games are published on Blu-Ray, it won't be able play it.
The seem cute but having spoken to people who invested MASSIVE cash in them, their users seldom if ever adjust them. I asked their management for an opinion and they were adamant that they were a waste of money.
In my experience with them (law enforcement communication centers), folks are glued to them for the better part of 8 hours and don't fidget with them much -- if at all -- during that time.
However, at shift change, the next person in pretty much always spends a few seconds adjusting the chair, and the desk, to suit. They seldom do raise things up to standing height (I've only ever seen them used like that a few times), but everyone seems to have a very clear preference as to what height their monitors, writing surface, keyboard, and mice are at. They'll then adjust the lighting and the airflow, and then get on with work.
I dare say that these folks would be less comfortable with non-adjustable furniture, but perhaps being able to hot-desk would help a lot where it could be used (it really isn't an option in a small dispatch center).
Everyone seems to talk about all the benefits of standing, vs. sitting, or more importantly the ability to do either one, but nobody ever bothers to propose something that does both at the discretion of the operator.
Xybix does both. Motorized desks that move up and down (desk surface and monitor platform independently), foot warmers (keeps people from fighting over the thermostat), air circulation, etc. I don't work for them, and I don't sell them, but I have worked at a few installations that have them and they're worth every penny (even if they are difficult to cable due to the moving-around nature of the thing). In my experience, they've been very able to meet custom demands, as well, and behave like a small build-to-order shop that happens to produce high-quality furniture that fits together properly as if it were one-size-fits-all (even though it's not).
If I could afford it, I'd be sitting at a Xybix desk right now.
Really? I'm hoping they add built in Skype functionality to their routers. Cordless phones with the router as the base. Shit they could even bundle it. The market potential is HUGE.
And this is better than an 802.11 wireless Skype handset and random router... how, exactly?
AppleTV lets me keep functions in separate boxes so that when one fails, I don't have to toss (and replace!) the whole mess.
Just as my stereo is just an audio system and my TV is just a video monitor, AppleTV is just a source device. These things can connect together, but are not dependent on one another in order to operate.
My money would rather buy non-portable things that do one thing well and can be upgraded and replaced easily, than monolithic things that cannot be. I do not ever want to be forced to buy an entirely new television just because streaming formats have evolved, and Sony (or whoever) doesn't care to support them on my older set*, nor do I want to be swayed one direction or another by such features when purchasing devices.
For instance: When I bought my TV a couple of years ago, I didn't care much about what inputs it had, how shitty its speakers were, what stuff I could jack into it with USB, how many digital formats it could support, or how gee-whiz its included remote control was. I only cared that it had an excellent picture and good community support. Adding more features only serves to detract from the goal of selecting a display with best picture quality at a given pricepoint.
YMMV.
*: Obviously I could always buy a Sony with DLNA or whatever, jack it into my network, and add whatever set top box is needed later on down the road, but I'd rather reach the logical conclusion of that straight away and buy separate components to begin with.
I set you up to further espouse your sweeping generalizations, and you did. Congrats.
Here's everything that you got wrong:
I don't suffer queue lines where I'm from; there simply isn't very much traffic, ever, and the traffic that does exist is not the sort that can be bypassed by simple virtue of being on a motorcycle.
I do commute to work, but seldom to the same place twice in a row, and seldom with any sort of predictability. My day job is in technical field service for a large number of customers in various areas of the map, and I generally work alone. There is no carpool headed where I'm going. The 2-seat vehicle, therefore, sees most of the miles (due to its ability to carry tools and cargo), almost always with me driving by myself, and there really isn't any way around that. (I could find a different job, but that'd just shift this fuel-using burden to someone else.)
About the only time I travel alone, outside of work, is when I'm headed to the grocery store. The groceries I buy won't reasonably fit onto a motorcycle, and anyway, the grocery is just a few blocks away. I could drive an H1 Hummer those few blocks every few days, and still not give a shit about the minuscule fuel consumption involved in doing so. (In fairness, I do walk to the store when the weather is reasonable and our needs aren't too heavy.)
I have a family of four. They won't all fit onto a motorcycle. And I'd never expect them to, since much of the year it is rather cold, wet, and/or icy around these parts. So when I take my family with me someplace, I'll be taking them in a car, with seatbelts, windows, four wheels, a roof, proper heat...hell, heated seats, even. (I, myself, would probably tolerate a lot of different weather on a motorcycle, but I'm far too married to expect the rest of the clan to do the same.)
And public transportation? Hah. It doesn't even exist in this area. There are no trains, no buses, nadda, nit, zip, zero, zilch, neither local nor between locales.
Besides, I like driving cars. And I'm not particularly anti-motorcycle; I think I'd enjoy riding one of those, too, and plan to buy one before I'm too old to give a shit. But in terms of needs, a 2-wheeled vehicle just doesn't match what I've got going on right now.
In conclusion, please allow me to state that while I'm glad to see that you're satisfied with your chosen mode of transportation, that it really isn't the right option for everyone. The world is full of a lot of different sorts of folks, who comprise a lot of different situations, and that your idealism matches only a small subset of them (as does mine).
Please be mindful of the notion that not everyone is just like you.
Slashdot Mirror
I buy real Coca-Cola (not Coke Classic) in 16 ounce returnable bottles from the local Mexican bakery.
Smaller, non-returnable 12 ounce bottles have been for sale forever next to the refried beans and tortillas at grocery stores (local and national) since forever, also imported from Mexico.
Go have a look around, and I'm sure you'll find some proper Coca-Cola, made with proper cane sugar, and not sold in a particularly seasonal or promotional fashion.
The issue there was the TV, not any particularly heinous DRM.
My own Samsung set offers the same limitation. Why? Simply: The TV has two speakers. So, to simplify things, it's requesting a stereo mix from the source component.
I worked around problems like this by using the TV as a monitor, not as an audio device, from day 1. As far as I know, the speakers in the TV don't work at all -- I've never heard them.
IANAL, but I think that including the text of the GPL is sufficient to constitute "a written offer."
Otherwise, I've got a lot of things which are GPL violators, from an old Sony TV, to my GPS, to a CD with Ubuntu on it -- none of which came with a written offer for source code, but all of which came with a copy of the GPL.
You mean: So that half of them are on half of the time, while the other half are dark?
All that does is add a spatial aspect to the flicker, which may be even worse for folks who are sensitive to such things.
I imagine that there will be quite a market (black, perhaps) for porch lights from folks in northern states for bulbs in the 310-2600 lumen range.
Simply: CFLs don't start worth a shit when it's cold out, and when it's really cold out, they never begin to produce proper light.
Accordingly, I keep CFLs in my porch lights in the summer, and replace them with incandescents in the winter.
And nevermind the dimming aspects. I'm happy to use CFLs where they're useful, but I'd rather import bulbs directly from China than give up incandescent bulbs that dim properly.
Which leaves the color aspects. I like CFLs, but they're not ever going to be installed in my bathroom, because their CRI generally sucks and that's where my wife puts her face on.
Fortunately, incandescent bulbs are cheap enough that when the time comes, I won't have any problem buying enough for the rest of my life.
I posit: Persistence, and basic electronics.
LEDs driven by AC flicker more for two reasons: Less persistence (they go dark faster), and the fact that they flicker at 60Hz*.
Fluorescents flicker less for the same two reasons: More persistence (the visible light they produce is entirely produced by converting UV to white using phosphors, which can be designed to be appropriately slow), and the fact any flicker occurs at 120Hz (they aren't diodes, and therefore get to use the whole waveform) on even the cheapest/oldest fixtures. More common modern fixtures use electronic ballasts (ala CFLs and the like) and move the frequency up to a few hundred Hz, which really isn't a problem. However, the shift to electronic ballasts only happened because it was generally cheaper, not because it was better (that it happens to also be better is completely accidental).
*: All of these problems with LEDs are neatly solved by feeding them with DC, or sufficiently high-frequency AC. And: the frequency can be very inexpensively doubled from 60 to 120Hz by feeding them with a simple bridge rectifier. These things are only sometimes done, however, because unlike electronic ballasts on fluorescent fixtures making things cheaper, it's always more expensive to add this stuff to an LED.
Dimmable CFLs are expensive, and sucky.
I bought some dimmable CFLs recently (and no, I'm not going to mention a brand, because I don't believe that the brand printed on the box makes any difference with CFLs).
I plugged them into my Lutron dimmer switch, and fired 'em up. Lousy. Slow to turn on, horrific color. Actual dimming range went from "bright" to "a bit less bright," and then straight to "completely dark."
So much for trying to be energy-efficient in my office. They do work well enough with a regular light switch in the pantry, but that's about the best use I could come up with for them -- the color of light produced is too unpleasant for any place where people actually spend time.
The experience was bad enough that when I decided (a bit more recently) to install better lighting in my office, I did a complete polar opposite and put up MR16 halogens on a track. They dim just fine, and they're pretty. They're also expensive to run, but the office is almost always just lit by the dim glow of a few LCD screens, so I decided that I didn't need to care about efficiency.
The problem is that in many cases, the do-it-yourselfers are not an addressable market, and so products that hit the marketplace do not cater to their usage patterns. This explains a high percentage of the complaints on Slashdot regarding the Apple/iTunes ecosystem.
Heh.
There is a Lowe's, a Menards, a Home Depot, two good hardware stores, two lumber yards, a specialty woodworking retailer, and a tool store in the small town I live in.
There are also three large chain and three independent auto parts stores.
Obviously, there is a market for DIY stuff.
Even for electronics: The Motorola Droid is easily hacked, even though it would have been simple to make it very hard to do so (as in the case of its otherwise-identical GSM sister device, the Milestone, which is locked down very tightly indeed).
Best Buy sells PC parts.
And nevermind the entire gamut of online retailers specializing in catering to the DIY crowd.
But, anyway, you're begging the question. I wasn't asking "why is there no market for DIY set top box crap," I was asking "why should I pay someone else to assemble this stuff for me, just so it can be useless in a couple of years."
And please realize, too, that all of this stuff these days is build around a general-purpose computer, typically even running a general-purpose OS. They've all got a CPU, RAM, storage (or at least connectivity), along with some special decoding hardware to (hopefully!) unburden the CPU when playing video, whether it is a netbook with XBMC or a black box from Google, Apple, Boxee, Seagate, or whoever.
And when the netbook becomes useless for that role, either due to incompatible hardware or lack of tinkering, I can make it do something else and retain some of my investment. When the black box becomes useless, either due to incompatible hardware or lack of support, I get to throw it away and buy a new one.
Maybe you two should go read TFA. And then, maybe, you wouldn't have so much uncertainty about what is being claimed to have been accomplished.
TFA talks about doing this with exactly one pre-existing microphone, which is rather unique.
Triangulating touch position using multiple "microphones" (in this case, peizoelectric widgets mounted to the glass surface, but the concept is the same) has been done before, and isn't particularly new. (More info and whitepaper.)
I really think that it'd not that big of a deal.
I say this having never configured an existing Skype handset, but, honestly -- really. Folks these days who are accustomed to handling 802.11-ish stuff are also accustomed to handling passkeys and entering them into random devices.
The only other bit of info needed is a Skype username and password.
Does it really make a marketable difference if this stuff is entered in a web browser or on a handset?
And do folks who are already familiar with Wifi really want to buy a new router with their handset just because it is, at best, a few minutes easier than just buying the handset separately?
And does Cisco owning Skype somehow make this any easier for them to implement than it has been for their own Linksys brand?
And I've seen a blue sky on a clear, calm day turn black in a matter of minutes as fronts converge overhead. At an outdoor festival, with lots of folks around and little proper shelter. By the time the official NWS warning happened (and there never was a watch issued), things had calmed.
Fortunately (if you can say that) I was keeping active tabs on the radar at the time. I saw some systems converging overhead on radar that beautiful afternoon, and gave the order to tarp the speakers because it was going to rain.
I was conservative in my estimate. We were very lucky that nobody really got hurt. Things flooded, stuff blew away, properly-installed commercial tents failed.
Next time, I'm bringing a TV, not just a laptop. A little bit of broadcast fear-mongering and forecasting experience would have done a lot to encourage me to order more protection for people and property earlier, instead of too little.
I'm just sayin'. Just because the weather is nice where you are, doesn't mean that just over the horizon it's not raining puppies and raping horses, and those folks are certainly appreciative of "panic mode" weather reporting when that happens.
But whatever the case: If you're relying on what it looks like outside to tell you what's going to happen soon, you're doing it wrong.
The trouble with that is simple: Time marches on, and specialized devices eventually cease being useful. I've had two DVD players that once played everything which have been supplanted by the shift to h.264 and AAC, for instance.
Formats get old. Does-everything black boxes turn into do-nothing black boxes at the same rate.
Whatever specialized box you have will eventually cease to be useful without software maintenance. And while software maintenance is a pain, chasing formats around is even more painful.
And besides, media conversions are lossy. I want more quality, not less, as time moves on (and I'll settle for "as good as it used to be" if that's the best choice I have available).
I'd rather spend a little time maintaining software. If you'd rather spend a little time making money to buy new hardware, while migrating content to new formats (ala LP to cassette/CD/MP3), more power to you.
My money and time are bet on a software fix, not blind reliance on a manufacturer of some random black box to give a shit in about that old hardware in a few years and transferring things to whatever format is currently blessed when it comes time to replace it.
Besides, I do enjoy tinkering with things, even though I have also wife+house+job+kids. It's not the most glorious hobby in the world, but it's mine. I'd so much rather tinker*, than work to pay someone else to tinker on my behalf and deliver the fruits of their efforts in the form of a does-everything (for today!) black box.
(*Yes, I generally get to choose how much I work in a week, or in a day. It makes it easy to justify spending time on personal stuff, and not just with computers. Things like: Gosh, I could pay a carpenter $900 to do that job, or I could take a few days off of work and do it myself. Or: I could pay $1,600 for a new clutch to be installed, or... etc. YMMV, but if you're really just a suburbanite consumer, you're doing it by choice.)
No, not a big deal, as long as you have $60-80 to spend on it every few years since...as far as I can tell...the "new" assemblies use the same failure-prone design as the old one. And the parts market for this stuff seems so...grey. A lot of these things look like Chinese rebuilds, except for a few completely flakey-looking sellers who seem to have the same thing but whom state "No, ours is newly-manufactured. Really! Trust us! We really mean it! You get what you pay for!!@!"
With all that grey, I don't trust any of 'em. I read it all like this: "Here's a widget. It might be new, used, or rebuilt. We may have even actually tested it, or not. And we may be lying to you about all of those things. Plus, we don't think it'll really work long-term, so there's no proper warranty for you, sucker."
I'm not afraid of buying cheap Chinese goods; in fact, I often buy random things from dealexteme. But at least with Dealextreme, I know what I'm getting into and only risk a few dollars. The PS3 parts suppliers? Feh.
Maybe if Sony had proper channels for distributing console parts to the public, the market would appear to be very different. AFAICT, they aren't doing this at all.
Meanwhile, there is a very different dual-lens design used on slightly newer models that is apparently a lot better, but no way to upgrade to it without upgrading the whole console.
Which, frankly, seems like the best bet anyway. I see no particular harm in having one PS3 for streaming, audio, homebrew, and DVD media, plus another to wear out doing disc-based games, PSN, and Blu-Ray...except it's expensive. But to be honest, if this were a perfect world, I'd be able to just plug a random external USB Blu-Ray reader into it and call it done.
(And all of this is assuming that the diode, not the controller, is fucked. If the controller is fucked, then the fix is some SMD soldering fuckery that I'd rather neither perform nor pay for.)
The rest of the PS3 owners bought it to play games, so when some obscure option that less than one percent users even tried, it's no surprise no one cares.
"The rest of the PS3 owners"?
I bought a PS3 specifically to play Gran Turismo 5. Years went by, during which time I discovered that the PS3 is a very fine player for all manner of media. It was such a nice media player, in fact, that my brother-in-law would frequently comment about it after he'd finished up a game of Forza on his new 360 (the old one having succumbed to the Red Ring of Death). I didn't mind his chiding, though -- I always knew that GT 5 would be out soon enough, and that it would be just awesome. And, in the meantime, the PS3 did make a very fine media player, indeed well worth the purchase price just for that group of functions. I was never disappointed by it.
So fine, in fact, is the PS3's ability to regurgitate media into an HDMI cable that we used it all the time. It played Netflix streams with splendid quality, and Blu-Ray movies like none other, and DVD rips over the network -- all without a single complaint.
Until, that is, when the laser diode for the Blu-Ray drive recently died from use and lo, no amount of disassembly and careful cleaning would cure it.
In what is one of the greater ironies that I have ever experienced with a bit of electronics, this failure came within 2 months of the expected actual fucking release date of Gran Turismo 5. And since all PS3 games are published on Blu-Ray, it won't be able play it.
The seem cute but having spoken to people who invested MASSIVE cash in them, their users seldom if ever adjust them. I asked their management for an opinion and they were adamant that they were a waste of money.
In my experience with them (law enforcement communication centers), folks are glued to them for the better part of 8 hours and don't fidget with them much -- if at all -- during that time.
However, at shift change, the next person in pretty much always spends a few seconds adjusting the chair, and the desk, to suit. They seldom do raise things up to standing height (I've only ever seen them used like that a few times), but everyone seems to have a very clear preference as to what height their monitors, writing surface, keyboard, and mice are at. They'll then adjust the lighting and the airflow, and then get on with work.
I dare say that these folks would be less comfortable with non-adjustable furniture, but perhaps being able to hot-desk would help a lot where it could be used (it really isn't an option in a small dispatch center).
Xybix. They make desks.
Everyone seems to talk about all the benefits of standing, vs. sitting, or more importantly the ability to do either one, but nobody ever bothers to propose something that does both at the discretion of the operator.
Xybix does both. Motorized desks that move up and down (desk surface and monitor platform independently), foot warmers (keeps people from fighting over the thermostat), air circulation, etc. I don't work for them, and I don't sell them, but I have worked at a few installations that have them and they're worth every penny (even if they are difficult to cable due to the moving-around nature of the thing). In my experience, they've been very able to meet custom demands, as well, and behave like a small build-to-order shop that happens to produce high-quality furniture that fits together properly as if it were one-size-fits-all (even though it's not).
If I could afford it, I'd be sitting at a Xybix desk right now.
Agreed, completely, except for one point:
Speeding, driving fast, and driving too fast are all different things.
Who are you to say what "most people" are about?
Really? I'm hoping they add built in Skype functionality to their routers. Cordless phones with the router as the base. Shit they could even bundle it. The market potential is HUGE.
And this is better than an 802.11 wireless Skype handset and random router... how, exactly?
Depends on the concentration.
I use 96% alcohol as a firestarter. It works fast and burns hot.
Lesser grades are slower and lower in temperature.
AppleTV lets me keep functions in separate boxes so that when one fails, I don't have to toss (and replace!) the whole mess.
Just as my stereo is just an audio system and my TV is just a video monitor, AppleTV is just a source device. These things can connect together, but are not dependent on one another in order to operate.
My money would rather buy non-portable things that do one thing well and can be upgraded and replaced easily, than monolithic things that cannot be. I do not ever want to be forced to buy an entirely new television just because streaming formats have evolved, and Sony (or whoever) doesn't care to support them on my older set*, nor do I want to be swayed one direction or another by such features when purchasing devices.
For instance: When I bought my TV a couple of years ago, I didn't care much about what inputs it had, how shitty its speakers were, what stuff I could jack into it with USB, how many digital formats it could support, or how gee-whiz its included remote control was. I only cared that it had an excellent picture and good community support. Adding more features only serves to detract from the goal of selecting a display with best picture quality at a given pricepoint.
YMMV.
*: Obviously I could always buy a Sony with DLNA or whatever, jack it into my network, and add whatever set top box is needed later on down the road, but I'd rather reach the logical conclusion of that straight away and buy separate components to begin with.
And you, sir, win the Bullshit of the Day award.
Congrats!
Fail, fail, fail.
I set you up to further espouse your sweeping generalizations, and you did. Congrats.
Here's everything that you got wrong:
I don't suffer queue lines where I'm from; there simply isn't very much traffic, ever, and the traffic that does exist is not the sort that can be bypassed by simple virtue of being on a motorcycle.
I do commute to work, but seldom to the same place twice in a row, and seldom with any sort of predictability. My day job is in technical field service for a large number of customers in various areas of the map, and I generally work alone. There is no carpool headed where I'm going. The 2-seat vehicle, therefore, sees most of the miles (due to its ability to carry tools and cargo), almost always with me driving by myself, and there really isn't any way around that. (I could find a different job, but that'd just shift this fuel-using burden to someone else.)
About the only time I travel alone, outside of work, is when I'm headed to the grocery store. The groceries I buy won't reasonably fit onto a motorcycle, and anyway, the grocery is just a few blocks away. I could drive an H1 Hummer those few blocks every few days, and still not give a shit about the minuscule fuel consumption involved in doing so. (In fairness, I do walk to the store when the weather is reasonable and our needs aren't too heavy.)
I have a family of four. They won't all fit onto a motorcycle. And I'd never expect them to, since much of the year it is rather cold, wet, and/or icy around these parts. So when I take my family with me someplace, I'll be taking them in a car, with seatbelts, windows, four wheels, a roof, proper heat...hell, heated seats, even. (I, myself, would probably tolerate a lot of different weather on a motorcycle, but I'm far too married to expect the rest of the clan to do the same.)
And public transportation? Hah. It doesn't even exist in this area. There are no trains, no buses, nadda, nit, zip, zero, zilch, neither local nor between locales.
Besides, I like driving cars. And I'm not particularly anti-motorcycle; I think I'd enjoy riding one of those, too, and plan to buy one before I'm too old to give a shit. But in terms of needs, a 2-wheeled vehicle just doesn't match what I've got going on right now.
In conclusion, please allow me to state that while I'm glad to see that you're satisfied with your chosen mode of transportation, that it really isn't the right option for everyone. The world is full of a lot of different sorts of folks, who comprise a lot of different situations, and that your idealism matches only a small subset of them (as does mine).
Please be mindful of the notion that not everyone is just like you.
Thanks!
I have a car that seats 5, a car that seats 4, and a car that seats 2.
I have a family of four.
The 5-seat car gets the best mileage of the bunch. The 4-seater a bit less so. And the 2-seater is abysmal.
Tell me, Mr. Motorcycle: If I were traveling alone, which one of these would you rather see me using?