That's nonsense. You think that iTunes, or OS X, or the iPod, is just packaging? Just a "skin"? There's lot's of innovative architecture and layers of solid coding beneath the surface.
Not to mention the work that they did on the server side to make the buying experience clean and easy.
There's also another part they had to write that we never see, that's the system admin side that let's them add content to the store, monitor and balance the user traffic, and handle the user accounts and credit card and gift certificate transactions.
If that wasn't enough, they did a clean port to windows, wrangle and manage the record company contracts and run a national print and tv ad campaign.
Oh yeah, and designed the market leading iPod.
And after all that, they managed to package things "well". Arguably better than anyone else.
It's just speculation at this point if he'll be announcing it...
If he does, they'll call it the "Space Technology Revitalization Act" and bush will get his Kennedy-esque photo-op for the election. Large amounts of money will be lavished on aerospace campaign contributers. NASA assets will be given away to these companies to plunder. Massive layoffs will ensue from these companies, while large bonuses will be given to the top execs.
And we'll never even get off the ground.
We will announce however, that great progress is being made, but we're still unable to find the Moon.
The 8% is just from playing games with statistics. Things go in the shitter for 3 years, stuff wears out, life goes on, and certain things (including replacement war hardware) have to be replaced. Suddenly =he= gets credit for 8% growth. If you worship those numbers, you probably also buy Powerball tickets.
I hear our chocolate ration is also going up by 8%...
Worse than the actions of terrorism, is the decline or loss of Corporate profits, and corporate profits are what the "war on terror" is protecting/enhancing.
Sure, implement an email tax. But as long as you're going through the trouble to build the infrastructure, construct it so the tax collected goes to the recipient of the email instead of the government. Every citizen would have a mechanism, like a PayPal account, to recieve taxes they wish to levy. The government enjoys this system of collecting money for everyday life activities, why shouldn't average citizens benefit from this wonderful revenue stream as well?
Set an email tax of $.05 a message, but by law, it goes to the recipient of the email. This would still have the desired effect of making email uneconomical for spammers, but directly puts the reward into the hands of those that carry the burden and overhead of the undesired email traffic.
Implementing this new direct reverse-taxation system would give as a clear indication that the intent of these sorts of levies are truly made with good intent and not just another disingenuous grab to extract money from the citizenry.
Such a system might also be used to rectify problems we're seeing with voter fraud and apathy. Every time you vote, you receive a payment. The money for this would come from the same account as the Federal matching funds that candidates get. Vote in the presidential election, get $150 into your account.
The IRS has this huge bureaucracy to suck money from the assignee of a given SSN, we need a comparable agency, the External Revenue Service, that enforces money flow going the other way. Long live the ERS!
This, of course, will never be done. And that makes it clear what the true intent of taxation truly is.
Many, many phone calls and emails to CEG went totally unanswered. Couldn't ever talk to -anyone- there. A total waste of (probably someone else's) money and time.
What? Boone county is liberal? This is Lebanon Indiana. You make it sound like it's the San Rafael of the cornbelt. If you want to see what it looks like, watch the opening minutes of "Hoosiers". Much of it was filmed here.
Boone county is mostly farmland; corn, soybeans, winter wheat, although much of the farmland that borders I-65 is being converted to industrial parks. There are clusters of new home developments, ugly self-similar brownish houses made of styrofoam and pressed wood, packed together with no trees on what used to be soybean fields. They might be considered bedroom communities but that's not representative of the majority.
We've recently gotten a Starbucks at the Shell station up on the Zionsville exit. That's about as liberal as they get. Lebanon High School still has "Drive your tractor to school" day.
You have a choice on most ballots here of Republican, or Republican. The same political structure and families have been in place for as long as I can remember. The voting machines are electronic but not touchscreens. They're those big suitcases on a stand with push buttons and red LEDs. The system has been in place for at least 10 years.
My partner and I run a small game house, TQworld. We publish only one title, the offbeat (and often misunderstood) 3D game 'tranquility'.
Next January will mark our third year. Granted, our game didn't have the 'hit' impact that we had hoped for when we were in development, but we've enjoyed a steady growth in players. We're still in the black, mainly due to keeping expenses low and by not having profits siphoned off by publishers, distributors and investors.
Another reason why we're still around is due to the design work within the game and it's support system during the development phase. Because we use a client server model for tranquility, we never have had any problem with piracy. We also offer so much of the game for free that there hasn't been a big incentive for players to circumvent our system. We keep scoring and game progress on our servers but all game play resides on the user's machine. If they want to give out account information to others it's fine with us, it only affects the user's score. We also only distribute the game online. We've tried working with publishers but because of our unique un-cheatable commerce model, publishers can't run the show. That seems to turn them off so we've never been able to find a publisher that can deal with us.
We also aren't greedy when it comes to profit. We give away lots of free accounts. Why not? It's just a miniscule load on the servers and it's well worth it just to make somebody happy to play our game. We also haven't been greedy when it comes to updates. Once somebody pays for the game, they can run it on as many machines as they want. We've got a version for Windows, OSX and Mac OS9 and they can run any or all of them. We also never charge for updates. Somebody told me once that you should worry about the customers you have, not the ones you don't that aren't paying you. We liked that approach and so we've ended up using that commerce model. Granted, it's not the money maker model that Apple or Microsoft uses, but when you sell a game called tranquility we want to keep our customers as stress free as possible. Like the Golden rule, we treat them like we would like to be treated.
Another part of the game (that people never see) is the support structure that we built in at the same time as the game itself. The servers let us know who's buying, who's playing, where they are at in the game, what kind of hardware, who's visiting the web site and who is asking for support. It's tied in with the game itself so once we brought everything up a few years ago, it's almost self-supporting. This means that we can be responsive to users that need assistance, we can quickly see the result of special promotions or potential compatibility problems with new releases or new OS releases on the platforms we support, without having to hire a staff to keep our customers happy. Although this was experimental and somewhat radical at the time, because we were not beholden to investors and shareholders at the time, we could take whatever steps were necessary at the time to build things the right way. It took 1 year for two developers to build both the game and the support system and we released it when it was ready and hit the ground running on day one.
Finally there's the game itself. Yeah, we know it's weird and certainly not for everyone, but that's a large part of it's charm.
tranquility started out as a simple demo game that I wrote for the SGI boxes, especially the Indigo ten years ago. I would get fan mail every so often asking for updates etc. so we knew we had something interesting to use as a foundation. After kicking around ideas, when Apple announced plans for OS X, it looked like there was a consistent enough target to write for, with an eclectic enough audience that might enjoy the alternative experience that tra
Except for a qube and PS2 running Linux and a couple Windows PCs for development and testing, everything else here is OS X.
I don't worry about viruses or worms, blue screens, kernel patches, bugs in toy applications, bugs in Microsoft applications, or indecision by company officers if they'll continue to support me or not. There's every class of high-end application available that I'll ever need (most of them best-of-breed) and a real shell that pops up any time I want if I need to apply my unix skills against a problem.
I can't understand why people insist on beating the dead horse of the Linux desktop or getting beaten like a dead horse by Windows. It's not like this is some difficult decision to choose a computing environment that just works.
Not that I -always- suspect M$ of dirty dealing, but perhaps M$ is just promising some biz to IBM so they disclose some info and then M$ can indirectly lay the smack down on Apple's chip supply. Almost everything M$ does is always to leverage Windows in some way.
Google needs to stay clean and as independent as possible until the grow about 10x. At that point, they've got something that's -really- interesting.
If they have even the smallest partnership with M$, it will poison them and they will die, as it has poisoned all of those companies in the past. M$ involvement would only be good for M$, not for Google's users, it's customers, or the company itself.
It will be difficult to resist temptation up to the 10x point, but by then even M$ will be marginalized. Should be fun to watch. Good luck guys. Keep it pure.
You'll glance and a billboard and be microcharged. Dive by another car and hear a bit of their stereo and you'll pay. They inject it into your ears and eyes and it'll be illegal to refuse.
Sick of lawyers. Sick of government. And I'm sick of you telling me that it's their right by law to do what they want.
Seems like someone would be more of a lobotomized primate if they can't handle learning and using more than one OS environment. Back in "the old days", people would constantly learn new things, while retaining knowledge of the past. As reflected in many of the posts here, these days it's "I know what I like and like what I know".
Besides, most Linux desktops (to me) appear to have a Windows fixation and the goal is to emulate Windows as closely as possible... "see, we can do that too! M$ has got nothing on us! ". The rest of it doesn't seem much different than the Unix V7 I used back in 1979. Other than the concept of "we did it, we own it", I just can't see the big deal about Linux. For the most part, it's just a clunky, cranky subset of what's in OS X. Sure, there's some people that would like to tweeze the source of iTunes or iMovie or the Finder, but I'd rather have other experts (that know and love the code) doing that for me while I concentrate on other things. For the $130 a year that Apple charges, it's a bargain. Based on a 2000 hour work year, they are doing the work for 6.5 cents an hour. That's not "free" like Linux, but it's close.
Computer/car analogies are lame, but cars these days don't have controls on the dash that let you control the fuel-air ratio or ignition timing. With Linux, you need to know these controls or the car won't run as well as it could. With Windows, the dash has lots of these controls and they have to be manipulated to make the car go, yet provide no feedback as to what the settings actually are and what you are changing. Often, they change themselves or continually revert back to random settings without rhyme or reason.
With OS X, you just get in and drive to your destination quickly and efficiently. That may seem lobotomized, but not everyone has the desire or time to be a mechanic.
Yeah know, when you put it that way, it makes sense. I'm gettin' me a PC, loadin' it up with Windows, and living the rest of my life in pure cumputing satisfaction. Thanks for pointing all of this out. Where can I get one of these wonderfull machines?
Slashdot Mirror
when they should be saying congartualions to the collation....
I don't think anyone will be saying that, and if they did, nobody would understand what they said.
Although this post does point out how articulate Bush's core supporters are.
It's like they have their own secret language.
No, Apple just packages things well.
That's nonsense. You think that iTunes, or OS X, or the iPod, is just packaging? Just a "skin"?
There's lot's of innovative architecture and layers of solid coding beneath the surface.
Not to mention the work that they did on the server side to make the buying experience clean and easy.
There's also another part they had to write that we never see,
that's the system admin side that let's them add content to the store, monitor and balance
the user traffic, and handle the user accounts and credit card and gift certificate transactions.
If that wasn't enough, they did a clean port to windows,
wrangle and manage the record company contracts
and run a national print and tv ad campaign.
Oh yeah, and designed the market leading iPod.
And after all that, they managed to package things "well". Arguably better than anyone else.
Pretty good for that little "hardware" company.
Microsoft has also announced that it has exclusive and first use rights on the words "shit" and "fucked".
It's just speculation at this point if he'll be announcing it...
If he does, they'll call it the "Space Technology Revitalization Act" and bush will get his Kennedy-esque photo-op for the election.
Large amounts of money will be lavished on aerospace campaign contributers.
NASA assets will be given away to these companies to plunder.
Massive layoffs will ensue from these companies, while large bonuses will be given to the top execs.
And we'll never even get off the ground.
We will announce however, that great progress is being made, but we're still unable to find the Moon.
That's no Moon, it's a campaign ploy!
The 8% is just from playing games with statistics.
Things go in the shitter for 3 years, stuff wears out, life goes on,
and certain things (including replacement war hardware) have to be replaced.
Suddenly =he= gets credit for 8% growth.
If you worship those numbers, you probably also buy Powerball tickets.
I hear our chocolate ration is also going up by 8%...
A thinly supported, ugly bastard child of OS X and X11, with semi-usable Windows support.
I know it took a lot of work but why bother?
Worse than the actions of terrorism, is the decline or loss of Corporate profits,
and corporate profits are what the "war on terror" is protecting/enhancing.
Sure, implement an email tax. But as long as you're going through the trouble to
build the infrastructure, construct it so the tax collected goes to the recipient
of the email instead of the government. Every citizen would have a mechanism,
like a PayPal account, to recieve taxes they wish to levy. The government
enjoys this system of collecting money for everyday life activities, why shouldn't
average citizens benefit from this wonderful revenue stream as well?
Set an email tax of $.05 a message, but by law, it goes to the recipient of the email.
This would still have the desired effect of making email uneconomical for spammers,
but directly puts the reward into the hands of those that carry the burden and overhead
of the undesired email traffic.
Implementing this new direct reverse-taxation system would give as a clear indication
that the intent of these sorts of levies are truly made with good intent and not just
another disingenuous grab to extract money from the citizenry.
Such a system might also be used to rectify problems we're seeing with voter fraud
and apathy. Every time you vote, you receive a payment. The money for this would
come from the same account as the Federal matching funds that candidates get.
Vote in the presidential election, get $150 into your account.
The IRS has this huge bureaucracy to suck money from the assignee of a given
SSN, we need a comparable agency, the External Revenue Service, that enforces
money flow going the other way. Long live the ERS!
This, of course, will never be done. And that makes it clear what the true intent of
taxation truly is.
Well, if it was an Apple printer, it was AppleTalk or mini-din serial.
That's pretty much ancient pre-iMac history then.
As far as app compatibility, I've got an archive on my OSX box from
an old Mac Plus and lots of the stuff still runs.
Many, many phone calls and emails to CEG went totally unanswered.
Couldn't ever talk to -anyone- there.
A total waste of (probably someone else's) money and time.
What? Boone county is liberal? This is Lebanon Indiana. You make it sound like it's the San Rafael of the cornbelt.
If you want to see what it looks like, watch the opening minutes of "Hoosiers". Much of it was filmed here.
Boone county is mostly farmland; corn, soybeans, winter wheat, although much of the farmland that borders I-65
is being converted to industrial parks. There are clusters of new home developments, ugly self-similar brownish houses
made of styrofoam and pressed wood, packed together with no trees on what used to be soybean fields.
They might be considered bedroom communities but that's not representative of the majority.
We've recently gotten a Starbucks at the Shell station up on the Zionsville exit. That's about as liberal as they get.
Lebanon High School still has "Drive your tractor to school" day.
You have a choice on most ballots here of Republican, or Republican.
The same political structure and families have been in place for as long as I can remember.
The voting machines are electronic but not touchscreens. They're those big suitcases on
a stand with push buttons and red LEDs. The system has been in place for at least 10 years.
Almost half of the registered tranquility players are women.
A women also holds the game record for highest score and number of hours/levels played.
yeah, but you'd do it till you were unconcho,
then wake up and ask "ugh... you wanna play a video game or somethin'?"
I'm addicted to Windows Updates. Does that count?
...enter the light lunch.
My partner and I run a small game house, TQworld.
We publish only one title, the offbeat (and often misunderstood) 3D game 'tranquility'.
Next January will mark our third year. Granted, our game didn't have the 'hit' impact that we
had hoped for when we were in development, but we've enjoyed a steady growth
in players. We're still in the black, mainly due to keeping expenses low and by not having
profits siphoned off by publishers, distributors and investors.
Another reason why we're still around is due to the design work within the game and it's
support system during the development phase. Because we use a client server model
for tranquility, we never have had any problem with piracy. We also offer so much of the
game for free that there hasn't been a big incentive for players to circumvent our system.
We keep scoring and game progress on our servers but all game play resides on the user's
machine. If they want to give out account information to others it's fine with us, it only affects
the user's score. We also only distribute the game online. We've tried working with publishers
but because of our unique un-cheatable commerce model, publishers can't run the show.
That seems to turn them off so we've never been able to find a publisher that can deal with us.
We also aren't greedy when it comes to profit. We give away lots of free accounts. Why not?
It's just a miniscule load on the servers and it's well worth it just to make somebody happy
to play our game. We also haven't been greedy when it comes to updates. Once somebody
pays for the game, they can run it on as many machines as they want. We've got a version
for Windows, OSX and Mac OS9 and they can run any or all of them. We also never charge
for updates. Somebody told me once that you should worry about the customers you have,
not the ones you don't that aren't paying you. We liked that approach and so we've ended
up using that commerce model. Granted, it's not the money maker model that Apple or
Microsoft uses, but when you sell a game called tranquility we want to keep our customers
as stress free as possible. Like the Golden rule, we treat them like we would like to be treated.
Another part of the game (that people never see) is the support structure that we built in at the
same time as the game itself. The servers let us know who's buying, who's playing, where
they are at in the game, what kind of hardware, who's visiting the web site and who is asking
for support. It's tied in with the game itself so once we brought everything up a few years ago,
it's almost self-supporting. This means that we can be responsive to users that need assistance,
we can quickly see the result of special promotions or potential compatibility problems with
new releases or new OS releases on the platforms we support, without having to hire a staff to
keep our customers happy. Although this was experimental and somewhat radical at the time,
because we were not beholden to investors and shareholders at the time, we could take whatever
steps were necessary at the time to build things the right way. It took 1 year for two developers
to build both the game and the support system and we released it when it was ready and hit the
ground running on day one.
Finally there's the game itself. Yeah, we know it's weird
and certainly not for everyone, but that's a large part of it's charm.
tranquility started out as a simple demo game that I wrote for the SGI boxes, especially the
Indigo ten years ago. I would get fan mail every so often asking for updates etc. so we knew
we had something interesting to use as a foundation. After kicking around ideas, when Apple
announced plans for OS X, it looked like there was a consistent enough target to write for, with
an eclectic enough audience that might enjoy the alternative experience that tra
Except for a qube and PS2 running Linux and a couple Windows PCs for development
and testing, everything else here is OS X.
I don't worry about viruses or worms, blue screens, kernel patches, bugs in
toy applications, bugs in Microsoft applications, or indecision by company
officers if they'll continue to support me or not. There's every class of high-end
application available that I'll ever need (most of them best-of-breed) and a real
shell that pops up any time I want if I need to apply my unix skills against a problem.
I can't understand why people insist on beating the dead horse of the Linux
desktop or getting beaten like a dead horse by Windows. It's not like this is
some difficult decision to choose a computing environment that just works.
Not that I -always- suspect M$ of dirty dealing, but perhaps
M$ is just promising some biz to IBM so they disclose some info
and then M$ can indirectly lay the smack down on Apple's chip supply.
Almost everything M$ does is always to leverage Windows in some way.
but it needs a tie-in with Google.
the PPC fucks YOU!
Google needs to stay clean and as independent as possible until
the grow about 10x. At that point, they've got something that's
-really- interesting.
If they have even the smallest partnership with M$, it will poison
them and they will die, as it has poisoned all of those companies in the past.
M$ involvement would only be good for M$, not for Google's users,
it's customers, or the company itself.
It will be difficult to resist temptation up to the 10x point, but by
then even M$ will be marginalized. Should be fun to watch.
Good luck guys. Keep it pure.
Won't be long and everything will be illegal.
You'll glance and a billboard and be microcharged.
Dive by another car and hear a bit of their stereo and you'll pay.
They inject it into your ears and eyes and it'll be illegal to refuse.
Sick of lawyers.
Sick of government.
And I'm sick of you telling me that it's their right by law to do what they want.
Seems like someone would be more of a lobotomized primate if they can't handle
learning and using more than one OS environment. Back in "the old days", people
would constantly learn new things, while retaining knowledge of the past.
As reflected in many of the posts here, these days it's "I know what I like and like what I know".
Besides, most Linux desktops (to me) appear to have a Windows fixation and the goal is to emulate
Windows as closely as possible... "see, we can do that too! M$ has got nothing on us! ".
The rest of it doesn't seem much different than the Unix V7 I used back in 1979.
Other than the concept of "we did it, we own it", I just can't see the big deal about Linux.
For the most part, it's just a clunky, cranky subset of what's in OS X. Sure, there's some
people that would like to tweeze the source of iTunes or iMovie or the Finder, but I'd rather
have other experts (that know and love the code) doing that for me while I concentrate on other
things. For the $130 a year that Apple charges, it's a bargain. Based on a 2000 hour
work year, they are doing the work for 6.5 cents an hour. That's not "free" like Linux, but
it's close.
Computer/car analogies are lame, but cars these days don't have controls on the
dash that let you control the fuel-air ratio or ignition timing. With Linux, you need
to know these controls or the car won't run as well as it could. With Windows,
the dash has lots of these controls and they have to be manipulated to make
the car go, yet provide no feedback as to what the settings actually are and what
you are changing. Often, they change themselves or continually revert back to
random settings without rhyme or reason.
With OS X, you just get in and drive to your destination quickly and efficiently.
That may seem lobotomized, but not everyone has the desire or time to be a mechanic.
Yeah know, when you put it that way, it makes sense.
I'm gettin' me a PC, loadin' it up with Windows, and living the rest of my life in pure cumputing satisfaction.
Thanks for pointing all of this out. Where can I get one of these wonderfull machines?
So what your saying is:
"In the former Soviet Union, power lines kill YOU!"