As for value for money - that's something you consider before you make the purchase, surely.
The game developers are double whammy-ing the value proposition. I used to feel okay about paying $50 for a new game if I knew I could sell it some day for $20 as a pristine used title. But with attempts to kill the used game market and the more recent one-time use DLC that costs $10 to buy if you purchase the game used, I can't be sure to get that $20. I'm also not going to pay $20 for a used game if I have to buy $10 worth of DLC for it or the licensing is a problem.
I'm sure the game developers figured they found a way to make a free $10 off of the used gamer. Way I look at it is they reduced the reasonable new cost by $10.
Here's how that plays out at my house. Usually I buy 3-4 used games every month or two, and sell two old ones. Three or four times a year I'll buy a new major title release. Often I buy a used title from a series and then buy the rest of the series new if the price is right. But I got stung a few times by the $10 DLC needed to play the whole game. That's resulted in buying no games at all for a while until I sorted out that pretty much everything new has that problem.
So I'll start buying games again around the holiday season. Used. Old enough that they don't have the DLC problem. No new releases or other games of any kind that require a DLC purchase.
Once again a business decides that they'd rather have no money on their own terms, instead of making some money on the customers terms. Good luck with that guys!
Well now see, there's the problem. If one is in the camera app and has just taken a photo, why do I have to exit the photo app and open the facebook app? What if I want to take and post a second photo?
Somehow, android made that 'just work' for me by letting me hit a button and post photos to facebook from the photo app, which seems pretty straightforward to me.
I guess Apple just didn't want to embrace facebook into their core apps?
As for your other comment...I restrict the helmet wearing to the bedroom only. Low ceilings.
Reminds me of how as a young lad, I went to work for a jewelry company's "IT Department". I put it in quotes because the department consisted of me, a supervisor who couldn't code, and a department head that had no idea whatsoever as to anything that happened on the company computers. Someones nephew or son that got put on the payroll is my guess.
Anyhow, they had about three billion lines of applications written in Dibol, all spaghetti code, no documentation, last time they had employed anyone who could code was about 2 years prior, so everyone just worked around the bugs in the applications.
I worked there for about 7 months, scrubbing the code and then going home and writing the documentation on the code. Documenting was never anything they had asked for or specified in my goals/objectives. After 7 months when I'd fully documented everything on my own time and the system was working fairly well, they decided that things were going pretty well and they wanted another family member on the payroll, so they let me go. Six months later, the wheels came off of something because one of the monkeys pushed the wrong buttons. I offered to sell them the documentation I'd written and refer them to some other programmers who would then be able to fairly quickly and cheaply fix what they broke. Or they could hire someone full time and maybe in 6-9 months they might fix it.
Didn't have to buy my girlfriend any jewelry that year. Swapping boxes of 3 ring binders for a bag of random jewelry in a parking lot at night is still one of my fondest memories.
See kids, do your documentation and eat your vegetables...they're good for you!
Quite simply if you aren't selling a phone with an ecosystem like google play, itunes, etc...I dont think you have a valid product. Intel doesn't have an ecosystem. Nokia doesn't have an ecosystem. And who the hell would spend billions to knock out a 'me too' android phone. Who would want it?
Further, nobody in management at Intel has an inkling about cell phone level customer service, needs, interests...errr....or much of anything. About the closest they come to that is selling cpu's, motherboards and SSD's through a distribution/reseller channel. Not quite the same thing.
However, these sorts of issues haven't stopped Intel from buying companies with no fit, or bad companies and for too much money.
Those other bad tablet makers screwed up our margins on the hardware, so we'll have to make it on software and services like everyone else. Oh boo hoo!
Funny, but when I worked for Intel, it became obvious to me after a bit that AMD's sole function was to make cpu's less profitable. They never made money, and with intels manufacturing capabilities they clearly never could unless intel stepped on its own dick and then kept stepping. The Pentium 4 was a clear step-on-dick, but we recovered from it. AMD seems to be the serial dick stepper now.
So anyhow, my take on the effects of this were that we used to take our time in releasing new hardware, and it was rock solid when we did. We also had a couple of years between major product releases to line up the drivers/bios/support/software/new instruction integration into applications, etc. Now we didn't.
So the world got faster cheaper cpu's released more quickly...but frankly a lot of the software support to really take advantage of that didn't happen or happened a lot later. This was considered by many to be a plus and that competition had been good for the customer. I'm entirely unsure that actually was the case.
So I guess apple will have to dig into the profit chunks they're leaving in other countries to avoid paying US corporate taxes and use some of that money to keep spiffing up itunes while amazon and google polish theirs up and offer a new line of hardware that will be very price and feature competitive with ipads/touches/iphones...
You can't fault me for not trying, I own an iPhone and iPad because they just work
Funny because my wife and son both wanted ipads, when the refurb 2's dropped to under $300 I got them for them. They don't just work. We have all sorts of stupid little things that won't work. Since I'm a windows guy and never used an apple product, I can't help them. I'm reminded of Jerry Pournelle saying "Apple stuff is set up such that what you want to do is either tremendously obvious or what you need to make it happen is so buried in something that you'll never find it."
Last time it was something stupid. She took a picture with it and wanted to post it on facebook. No option to do that. But she found in some other app someplace else that she was able to do it, but it was 20 minutes of trial and error. Hmm, my android devices have a 'post to facebook' option right from the gallery, and it just works.
So since I'm asked 3 times a week to try and figure out why something should 'just work' and its not...I'm going to go with the sentiment that the "it just works" thing is another way to justify paying that much for a product.
For what its worth, last year I bought a $150 chinatab that was pretty much the same inside as an ipad 1, with a faster cpu closer to the ipad 2. I did hack it for a larger internal microsd which took 5 minutes. Other than that it runs everything I throw at it and does everything my wife and son do on the ipad. Apps are a little different, os looks a little different, but to me both have "just worked" at about the same level. We spend 98% of our time in a browser, game or some app anyhow, and android/ipad apps pretty much look the same.
And when something doesn't work on android, I know how to fix it...
, it was had enough opening an iTunes account without a credit card.
This is pretty easy. Whenever I get a prepaid visa/amex card for a rebate (or you can buy one in a store), I use it to activate something like an apple ID account that requires a credit card. It places a $1 temp charge on it to satisfy that its a valid card. About a week or 10 days later, thats released and you can spend the money, cut it up and throw it out. Ta da!
In fact, I have one in my desk that only has $1 left on its balance, and I've used that a million times on sites that require a card for something but you don't want to give it to them...
I thought I'd seen every cart put before every horse, or the cause and effect screwed up as badly as possible, but this is definitely it.
Lets see. Apple makes an expensive tablet, has a complete ecosystem, has a huge installed customer base of macs and ipods and phones tied to the ecosystem with often thousands of dollars worth of purchases in it, the same well heeled mac buyers who willingly pay twice as much for apple goods as comparable products pony up the $600 for an ipad because they can and because they want to show off their cool toy to their friends so as to gain their adoration.
Press sits back and congratulates apple on making the only tablet that anyone wanted. Its still also the only one with an ecosystem and gigantic ready installed base.
The tablet they made is nothing special. There were others before it. There will be others after it. But the success criteria had absolutely nothing whatsoever with the tablet itself. Had Microsoft/google/amazon been successful in creating a usable ecosystem, gathering millions in installed base, feed them phones and pods for years until they were bought in, and then released any sort of reasonable tablet as a follow on, it'd have been an equal success.
However, I see amazon and google getting their hardware out, its decent and its cheap. Their ecosystem isnt quite done, but it won't take long. Microsoft looks like a donkey with a stick and a photo of a carrot with a windows logo on it hanging in front of its face. They'll keep shoving phone features into an OS nobody wants and they and nokia will go down in flames together.
And I think they understand it about as well as you do. I guess my experiences over several decades running marketing for a fortune 50 company might leave me a little shy in experience regarding human behavior.
The core problem with these sorts of studies is that when a person knows they're being tested, they behave differently. Since you cannot establish a reasonable baseline, you cannot effectively measure benefits or changes.
A popular study done a few years ago illustrates this quite well. A group of people were tested in a driving machine, then tested again while talking on the phone and after having consumed enough alcohol to achieve a.08 BAC, the legal limit in most states. The punchline for the study was "Using a cell phone is as bad as driving drunk!". In reading the actual study, neither the phone nor BAC led to a significant change in response time behind the wheel, but they were in fact about the same.
So the real punchline should have been "In an instance where someone knows their driving is being tested and they're watching their P's and Q's, a phone or a couple of drinks barely changes their response time, and if we had measured their usual shenanigans behind the wheel as a baseline instead, there probably would be no difference at all".
Ford is running this so they can advertise that they're doing work and implementing solutions to reduce driving distraction and then get people to buy their cars under the premise that they're safer. Since the accident rates from 1990 to today are about the same in terms of number of accidents and fatalities, I think its safe to say that whatever distractions you add, solve or take away, our smart little brains will find other things to entertain itself. You won't therefore improve on accidents and fatalities until you remove the driver from the equation.
Distraction reduction is impossible without a bunch of duct tape.
That's true as long as you don't mind Amazon's watermarks and intentional glitches in your music.
Interesting information, but basically I suspect that 99.9% of people would gladly trade old double digit rate rips from the 1990's for 256 bit ones, without much concern to watermarks or glitches I cant hear.
Its way better than figuring out which box in the garage has our old cd's in it, and the 3-4 days of work that would ensue if I could find them.
If you RTFA you would know that the participants have no idea they are in a motion simulator, and only know that they are testing a car in a dome-shaped room with a car in it. They don't get to see the crazy robot legs, as they enter from a closed-off jetway.
If you had any idea as to how peoples minds work, you'd realize that when they know they're being tested, they act in a dramatically different manner, which renders any testing results worthless. If you don't have a clean baseline, anything else you derive is meaningless.
You have a gross misunderstanding of how peoples minds work. When people know something is happening, they behave differently. As a result, they have no observable baseline, since the whole thing smells of Schroedingers Cat. The driver is both distracted and not distracted. If you watch and the subject knows you're watching, you have no idea what the state would be if you weren't.
Do you really think the subjects will pick their nose and eat it, scratch that funny thing under their ass cheek, or any of the other 95 million things people do in a car that they'll never do in a simulation with a thousand sensors and cameras on them.
...their baseline will be someone that knows they're being tested in a distracted driving simulator. They sure as hell won't be texting while putting on makeup, eating a cheeseburger, reading the paper and watching tv like they normall do.
This actually turns out to be a real benefit for me. I ripped hundreds of albums over ten years ago into 96 and 128 bit mp3's, and lately I've been nagging myself to drag them out and re-rip them to a better sounding rate. This just did it all for me and I'm downloading the upgraded files now.
Thanks Amazon! You're the best! Apple wants me to pay for this, you gave it to me for freee.
See, I just bought a house with four floors and I have stuff all over the house so I put on a lot of miles and steps just walking around the house. Also bought in a ridiculously hilly area (as one could imagine since the town name has the word 'hills' in it). According to my fitbit, I average about 15,000 steps and 20 stories worth of steps per day, and I'm in excellent condition without using a bike or walking in traffic.
As it turns out, the vast majority of your prediction already happened. With a fair amount of it implemented by the prior republican president and the long time republican congress. Not that that has anything to do with anything, but I figured I'd try to counter some of the crazy.
Chances are pretty good you're already in a facial recognition database and you've been recorded 100 times by cameras every day.
The funny thing is that almost none of this will matter at all. Over the last 4 decades we've employed a variety of engineering improvements like air bags, anti lock brakes, better tires and suspensions, backup cameras, crush zones and so forth. This reduced the accident and death rates through around 1990-1995. Since 1990, those rates have remained almost exactly the same, year on year.
This means a couple of things. One is that cell phones had no effect on accident rates, because they've remained the same from 1990-2010. It also means that the crusade on drunk driving had no results as far as reported accidents. It also means that this system will have no beneficial effect until the driver is removed from the equation and the technology is perfected to a level where its significantly better than the driver it replaces.
Driving is boring to most people that have been doing it for a while, so they seek distractions from the boredom. Doesn't matter what distraction or tool you add to or remove from the equation, we'll fix our boredom somehow. In the 70's when I almost got run over by someone in a parking lot, you couldn't scream "Put down the %$@#ing phone!", it was "Damn woman driver!" or some such.
Further most people are simply unaware of the simplest rules of the road like right of way, proper turning, safe following distance and so forth.
So if you don't know what you're really supposed to be doing and you're actively looking for escape from the primary activity, adding some iffy technology that can't do much better than 70-80% in effectiveness will simply further reduce our interest in paying attention to driving.
And $10 says we'll get the same exact accident rate if and when this technology is deployed.
Hey modulators, I tend to do a fair bit of that around here as well, so let me offer a little advice. Moderation is about raising things up that lots of people would find interesting and funny, and suppressing stuff that adds no value or serves only to anger/frustrate/mislead a majority of readers.
What it isn't is a position to air your personal grievances, express your fanboi-ism, or any other horseshit. I suppose thats why they don't have fixed moderators in great numbers here.
My OP was a well formed opinion worthy of discussion. Its disappointing to see it turned into a tug of war between the fanboy moderator of the hour and the more reasonable.
You might also be interested in finding out what happens when your moderation efforts are frequently undone by offsetting moderation...
I suspect that Steve had very little to do with day to day operations during the last six months, and he was officially on leave of absence for large portions of his final year and a half. While I'm sure he had say on a lot of things, my original comment had to do with the fact that previously, apple could really do no wrong as far as its customers and a large chunk of the press went. That no longer seems to be the case.
This may be a bogus article, but in the last year apple got whacked with a lot of bad PR around their manufacturing and profit/tax schemes, they're getting nicked on malware hitting their machines and app store, their developers are displeased with some things, and they may have a couple of bad quarters while everyone waits for the iphone 5, which better be freaking awesome to make up for the waiting game.
Be interesting to see how this malware thing works out. Among my friends who (IMO) waste a lot of money buying apple equipment, the reason why they parted with so much money is because they thought the machines were virus and malware proof. Of course, anyone who has any inkling about how computers work would know that there is no such thing as proofing against viruses and malware. So now that kimono is gone, see what they want to buy the next go-round...a $2000 laptop that can be attacked by viruses and malware just as easily as a $1000 ultrabook.
Slashdot Mirror
As for value for money - that's something you consider before you make the purchase, surely.
The game developers are double whammy-ing the value proposition. I used to feel okay about paying $50 for a new game if I knew I could sell it some day for $20 as a pristine used title. But with attempts to kill the used game market and the more recent one-time use DLC that costs $10 to buy if you purchase the game used, I can't be sure to get that $20. I'm also not going to pay $20 for a used game if I have to buy $10 worth of DLC for it or the licensing is a problem.
I'm sure the game developers figured they found a way to make a free $10 off of the used gamer. Way I look at it is they reduced the reasonable new cost by $10.
Here's how that plays out at my house. Usually I buy 3-4 used games every month or two, and sell two old ones. Three or four times a year I'll buy a new major title release. Often I buy a used title from a series and then buy the rest of the series new if the price is right. But I got stung a few times by the $10 DLC needed to play the whole game. That's resulted in buying no games at all for a while until I sorted out that pretty much everything new has that problem.
So I'll start buying games again around the holiday season. Used. Old enough that they don't have the DLC problem. No new releases or other games of any kind that require a DLC purchase.
Once again a business decides that they'd rather have no money on their own terms, instead of making some money on the customers terms. Good luck with that guys!
Well now see, there's the problem. If one is in the camera app and has just taken a photo, why do I have to exit the photo app and open the facebook app? What if I want to take and post a second photo?
Somehow, android made that 'just work' for me by letting me hit a button and post photos to facebook from the photo app, which seems pretty straightforward to me.
I guess Apple just didn't want to embrace facebook into their core apps?
As for your other comment...I restrict the helmet wearing to the bedroom only. Low ceilings.
Reminds me of how as a young lad, I went to work for a jewelry company's "IT Department". I put it in quotes because the department consisted of me, a supervisor who couldn't code, and a department head that had no idea whatsoever as to anything that happened on the company computers. Someones nephew or son that got put on the payroll is my guess.
Anyhow, they had about three billion lines of applications written in Dibol, all spaghetti code, no documentation, last time they had employed anyone who could code was about 2 years prior, so everyone just worked around the bugs in the applications.
I worked there for about 7 months, scrubbing the code and then going home and writing the documentation on the code. Documenting was never anything they had asked for or specified in my goals/objectives. After 7 months when I'd fully documented everything on my own time and the system was working fairly well, they decided that things were going pretty well and they wanted another family member on the payroll, so they let me go. Six months later, the wheels came off of something because one of the monkeys pushed the wrong buttons. I offered to sell them the documentation I'd written and refer them to some other programmers who would then be able to fairly quickly and cheaply fix what they broke. Or they could hire someone full time and maybe in 6-9 months they might fix it.
Didn't have to buy my girlfriend any jewelry that year. Swapping boxes of 3 ring binders for a bag of random jewelry in a parking lot at night is still one of my fondest memories.
See kids, do your documentation and eat your vegetables...they're good for you!
Quite simply if you aren't selling a phone with an ecosystem like google play, itunes, etc...I dont think you have a valid product. Intel doesn't have an ecosystem. Nokia doesn't have an ecosystem. And who the hell would spend billions to knock out a 'me too' android phone. Who would want it?
Further, nobody in management at Intel has an inkling about cell phone level customer service, needs, interests...errr....or much of anything. About the closest they come to that is selling cpu's, motherboards and SSD's through a distribution/reseller channel. Not quite the same thing.
However, these sorts of issues haven't stopped Intel from buying companies with no fit, or bad companies and for too much money.
Those other bad tablet makers screwed up our margins on the hardware, so we'll have to make it on software and services like everyone else. Oh boo hoo!
Funny, but when I worked for Intel, it became obvious to me after a bit that AMD's sole function was to make cpu's less profitable. They never made money, and with intels manufacturing capabilities they clearly never could unless intel stepped on its own dick and then kept stepping. The Pentium 4 was a clear step-on-dick, but we recovered from it. AMD seems to be the serial dick stepper now.
So anyhow, my take on the effects of this were that we used to take our time in releasing new hardware, and it was rock solid when we did. We also had a couple of years between major product releases to line up the drivers/bios/support/software/new instruction integration into applications, etc. Now we didn't.
So the world got faster cheaper cpu's released more quickly...but frankly a lot of the software support to really take advantage of that didn't happen or happened a lot later. This was considered by many to be a plus and that competition had been good for the customer. I'm entirely unsure that actually was the case.
So I guess apple will have to dig into the profit chunks they're leaving in other countries to avoid paying US corporate taxes and use some of that money to keep spiffing up itunes while amazon and google polish theirs up and offer a new line of hardware that will be very price and feature competitive with ipads/touches/iphones...
You can't fault me for not trying, I own an iPhone and iPad because they just work
Funny because my wife and son both wanted ipads, when the refurb 2's dropped to under $300 I got them for them. They don't just work. We have all sorts of stupid little things that won't work. Since I'm a windows guy and never used an apple product, I can't help them. I'm reminded of Jerry Pournelle saying "Apple stuff is set up such that what you want to do is either tremendously obvious or what you need to make it happen is so buried in something that you'll never find it."
Last time it was something stupid. She took a picture with it and wanted to post it on facebook. No option to do that. But she found in some other app someplace else that she was able to do it, but it was 20 minutes of trial and error. Hmm, my android devices have a 'post to facebook' option right from the gallery, and it just works.
So since I'm asked 3 times a week to try and figure out why something should 'just work' and its not...I'm going to go with the sentiment that the "it just works" thing is another way to justify paying that much for a product.
For what its worth, last year I bought a $150 chinatab that was pretty much the same inside as an ipad 1, with a faster cpu closer to the ipad 2. I did hack it for a larger internal microsd which took 5 minutes. Other than that it runs everything I throw at it and does everything my wife and son do on the ipad. Apps are a little different, os looks a little different, but to me both have "just worked" at about the same level. We spend 98% of our time in a browser, game or some app anyhow, and android/ipad apps pretty much look the same.
And when something doesn't work on android, I know how to fix it...
, it was had enough opening an iTunes account without a credit card.
This is pretty easy. Whenever I get a prepaid visa/amex card for a rebate (or you can buy one in a store), I use it to activate something like an apple ID account that requires a credit card. It places a $1 temp charge on it to satisfy that its a valid card. About a week or 10 days later, thats released and you can spend the money, cut it up and throw it out. Ta da!
In fact, I have one in my desk that only has $1 left on its balance, and I've used that a million times on sites that require a card for something but you don't want to give it to them...
I thought I'd seen every cart put before every horse, or the cause and effect screwed up as badly as possible, but this is definitely it.
Lets see. Apple makes an expensive tablet, has a complete ecosystem, has a huge installed customer base of macs and ipods and phones tied to the ecosystem with often thousands of dollars worth of purchases in it, the same well heeled mac buyers who willingly pay twice as much for apple goods as comparable products pony up the $600 for an ipad because they can and because they want to show off their cool toy to their friends so as to gain their adoration.
Press sits back and congratulates apple on making the only tablet that anyone wanted. Its still also the only one with an ecosystem and gigantic ready installed base.
The tablet they made is nothing special. There were others before it. There will be others after it. But the success criteria had absolutely nothing whatsoever with the tablet itself. Had Microsoft/google/amazon been successful in creating a usable ecosystem, gathering millions in installed base, feed them phones and pods for years until they were bought in, and then released any sort of reasonable tablet as a follow on, it'd have been an equal success.
However, I see amazon and google getting their hardware out, its decent and its cheap. Their ecosystem isnt quite done, but it won't take long. Microsoft looks like a donkey with a stick and a photo of a carrot with a windows logo on it hanging in front of its face. They'll keep shoving phone features into an OS nobody wants and they and nokia will go down in flames together.
And I think they understand it about as well as you do. I guess my experiences over several decades running marketing for a fortune 50 company might leave me a little shy in experience regarding human behavior.
The core problem with these sorts of studies is that when a person knows they're being tested, they behave differently. Since you cannot establish a reasonable baseline, you cannot effectively measure benefits or changes.
A popular study done a few years ago illustrates this quite well. A group of people were tested in a driving machine, then tested again while talking on the phone and after having consumed enough alcohol to achieve a .08 BAC, the legal limit in most states. The punchline for the study was "Using a cell phone is as bad as driving drunk!". In reading the actual study, neither the phone nor BAC led to a significant change in response time behind the wheel, but they were in fact about the same.
So the real punchline should have been "In an instance where someone knows their driving is being tested and they're watching their P's and Q's, a phone or a couple of drinks barely changes their response time, and if we had measured their usual shenanigans behind the wheel as a baseline instead, there probably would be no difference at all".
Ford is running this so they can advertise that they're doing work and implementing solutions to reduce driving distraction and then get people to buy their cars under the premise that they're safer. Since the accident rates from 1990 to today are about the same in terms of number of accidents and fatalities, I think its safe to say that whatever distractions you add, solve or take away, our smart little brains will find other things to entertain itself. You won't therefore improve on accidents and fatalities until you remove the driver from the equation.
Distraction reduction is impossible without a bunch of duct tape.
That's true as long as you don't mind Amazon's watermarks and intentional glitches in your music.
Interesting information, but basically I suspect that 99.9% of people would gladly trade old double digit rate rips from the 1990's for 256 bit ones, without much concern to watermarks or glitches I cant hear.
Its way better than figuring out which box in the garage has our old cd's in it, and the 3-4 days of work that would ensue if I could find them.
If you RTFA you would know that the participants have no idea they are in a motion simulator, and only know that they are testing a car in a dome-shaped room with a car in it. They don't get to see the crazy robot legs, as they enter from a closed-off jetway.
If you had any idea as to how peoples minds work, you'd realize that when they know they're being tested, they act in a dramatically different manner, which renders any testing results worthless. If you don't have a clean baseline, anything else you derive is meaningless.
You have a gross misunderstanding of how peoples minds work. When people know something is happening, they behave differently. As a result, they have no observable baseline, since the whole thing smells of Schroedingers Cat. The driver is both distracted and not distracted. If you watch and the subject knows you're watching, you have no idea what the state would be if you weren't.
Do you really think the subjects will pick their nose and eat it, scratch that funny thing under their ass cheek, or any of the other 95 million things people do in a car that they'll never do in a simulation with a thousand sensors and cameras on them.
Cars of the 1960s with great big toggle switches on wooden dashboards were easier to drive than this.
I flew into quite a few of those dashboards as a child, since seatbelts weren't in half the cars then. Plus if they were, we never wore them.
...their baseline will be someone that knows they're being tested in a distracted driving simulator. They sure as hell won't be texting while putting on makeup, eating a cheeseburger, reading the paper and watching tv like they normall do.
This actually turns out to be a real benefit for me. I ripped hundreds of albums over ten years ago into 96 and 128 bit mp3's, and lately I've been nagging myself to drag them out and re-rip them to a better sounding rate. This just did it all for me and I'm downloading the upgraded files now.
Thanks Amazon! You're the best! Apple wants me to pay for this, you gave it to me for freee.
Why when I think of this combination is the outcome an accidental picture of someones weener on a phone?
See, I just bought a house with four floors and I have stuff all over the house so I put on a lot of miles and steps just walking around the house. Also bought in a ridiculously hilly area (as one could imagine since the town name has the word 'hills' in it). According to my fitbit, I average about 15,000 steps and 20 stories worth of steps per day, and I'm in excellent condition without using a bike or walking in traffic.
The choice seems pretty obvious then...hang up the sneakers and the bike and get into a car where you'll be safe.
As it turns out, the vast majority of your prediction already happened. With a fair amount of it implemented by the prior republican president and the long time republican congress. Not that that has anything to do with anything, but I figured I'd try to counter some of the crazy.
Chances are pretty good you're already in a facial recognition database and you've been recorded 100 times by cameras every day.
The funny thing is that almost none of this will matter at all. Over the last 4 decades we've employed a variety of engineering improvements like air bags, anti lock brakes, better tires and suspensions, backup cameras, crush zones and so forth. This reduced the accident and death rates through around 1990-1995. Since 1990, those rates have remained almost exactly the same, year on year.
This means a couple of things. One is that cell phones had no effect on accident rates, because they've remained the same from 1990-2010. It also means that the crusade on drunk driving had no results as far as reported accidents. It also means that this system will have no beneficial effect until the driver is removed from the equation and the technology is perfected to a level where its significantly better than the driver it replaces.
Driving is boring to most people that have been doing it for a while, so they seek distractions from the boredom. Doesn't matter what distraction or tool you add to or remove from the equation, we'll fix our boredom somehow. In the 70's when I almost got run over by someone in a parking lot, you couldn't scream "Put down the %$@#ing phone!", it was "Damn woman driver!" or some such.
Further most people are simply unaware of the simplest rules of the road like right of way, proper turning, safe following distance and so forth.
So if you don't know what you're really supposed to be doing and you're actively looking for escape from the primary activity, adding some iffy technology that can't do much better than 70-80% in effectiveness will simply further reduce our interest in paying attention to driving.
And $10 says we'll get the same exact accident rate if and when this technology is deployed.
Enjoy your unwillingness to accept that others are motivated and inspired by something other than advertising.
Also, lack of influence invincibility.
I'm guessing you're 25 years old, fresh out of school, and you work in advertising. I'm so sorry...
And its still going on!
Hey modulators, I tend to do a fair bit of that around here as well, so let me offer a little advice. Moderation is about raising things up that lots of people would find interesting and funny, and suppressing stuff that adds no value or serves only to anger/frustrate/mislead a majority of readers.
What it isn't is a position to air your personal grievances, express your fanboi-ism, or any other horseshit. I suppose thats why they don't have fixed moderators in great numbers here.
My OP was a well formed opinion worthy of discussion. Its disappointing to see it turned into a tug of war between the fanboy moderator of the hour and the more reasonable.
You might also be interested in finding out what happens when your moderation efforts are frequently undone by offsetting moderation...
I suspect that Steve had very little to do with day to day operations during the last six months, and he was officially on leave of absence for large portions of his final year and a half. While I'm sure he had say on a lot of things, my original comment had to do with the fact that previously, apple could really do no wrong as far as its customers and a large chunk of the press went. That no longer seems to be the case.
This may be a bogus article, but in the last year apple got whacked with a lot of bad PR around their manufacturing and profit/tax schemes, they're getting nicked on malware hitting their machines and app store, their developers are displeased with some things, and they may have a couple of bad quarters while everyone waits for the iphone 5, which better be freaking awesome to make up for the waiting game.
Be interesting to see how this malware thing works out. Among my friends who (IMO) waste a lot of money buying apple equipment, the reason why they parted with so much money is because they thought the machines were virus and malware proof. Of course, anyone who has any inkling about how computers work would know that there is no such thing as proofing against viruses and malware. So now that kimono is gone, see what they want to buy the next go-round...a $2000 laptop that can be attacked by viruses and malware just as easily as a $1000 ultrabook.
Quite hilarious watching my original comment being modded up to 4 and back down to 1. Perhaps these threads should be exiled to a political forum?
I figured a year or two before Steve being gone would doom the Appleistas. Happened a lot faster than I thought.
Perhaps they'll have less profits to hide in tax structures in other countries so they don't have to pay Uncle Sam.