You have a very good point, I concede. If we nominate Farnsworth, then we might as well nominate the guy who first made beige plastic!
Indeed. I think the formulator of the first batch if beige plastic is truly the father of modern computing. After all, they nearly all look like that still...
I vote twice for Woz, and 0 for Jobs. Woz created the Apple computer. Jobs pretty much just provided skillful marketing. Plus Woz is one of the coolest cats alive, and Jobs is a smug prick who cheats his friends(third paragraph).
Perhaps you have never used an Apple ][? an Atari 400, 800, or ST? an Amiga? A Commodore PET, Vic-20, or C-64? a Sinclair/Spectrum? If you remember these, you will remember the television as a very important and ubiqitous peripheral for the computer. The CRT computer monitor is a close-enough relative of the TV to count as "yes, that's Farnsworth too".
My first computer experience was on a 15" print terminal with a 300 baud acoustic coupler via telephone. Should I be lobbying to have A.G. Bell and Johannes Gutenberg added too? Early computers often used incadescent lights as indicators. Should we add Thomas Edison? Most computers use the QWERTY keyboard. Should we be pushing to add Christopher Sholes?
Philo was a smart guy, but he was no computer pioneer.
Reading through the rebuttal-rebuttal, I'm not impressed. The guy seems to think that Moore is responding to him personally, when reading Moore's page makes it clear he's responding to people in general, so naturally he wouldn't have responded to everything this particular person thinks is questionable.
David Hardy's points were brought up by a number of people and organizations, not just him. He was pretty much pointing out that Moore skipped all the really sticky criticisms, and cherry-picked the points he chose to rebut based on how easy they were to weasel out from under.
Further, the tone in the page strikes me as, frankly, quibbling and smarmy.
Heh. And Moore's not quibbling and smarmy? He's practically the poster boy for Smug White Liberalism.
It strikes my loony-senses a lot harder than the nebulous "allegations" Moore responded to the first time.
Really? Huh. I thought Moore came off a LOT more loony. His arrogant, condescending, and self-righteous tone combined with his "rebuttals" being little more than bizarre false dichotomies make him sound like a pretty nutty dude.
When plugged into a computer, which gives you cd audio, mp3 audio, any digital format, PLUS analog from a cassete player on the input then you have what isn't too far of a stretch to call a stereo.
Heh. It is, however, a bit too far of a stretch to claim you built the stereo out of hard drive parts! "Build A Stereo From an Old Hard Disk" should have been "Build A Speaker From an Old Hard Disk and Some Other Things"
> I wonder what kind of deals are being offered right now for him to turn in friends and information?
I wonder whether they're making him wear girls' underwear on his head until he talks.
"Look, kid, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. Either you spill your guts, or we'll march you out to the middle of the playground during recess and pull down your pants so everyone can see your underwear."
Why can't Microsoft settle for allowing people who have not purchased a valid key for XP/Server 2K3 to have the upgrade, but also make any TCP/IP connection drop after a certain time?
Because that's effectively the same thing as not letting them install it. If it "breaks" critical functionality, no one running a non-legit copy will install it. Then, when a virus comes out that exploits unpatched XP/2K3, you'll have thousands more "pwned!" zombie boxes out there making windows look that much worse. It's in their best interests from a PR standpoint to get as many people to plug the security holes as possible.
Yes, but stand alone GPS units cost as little as $90. You can get one with a color screen for ~$180.
Hell, the Garmin GPS watch can be had for as little as $99!
Heh. Damn. All the more proof that they really don't understand the market they're aiming at.
Build a stereo? The guy built a mediocre speaker out of a coil of capper, a magnet, and a sticker. This doesn't even begin to qualify as a two-channel audio playback device, which is what people normally mean when they say "a stereo".
Bullshit, they'd never ever get (successfully) sued. They have no obligation whatsoever to provide a pirate with updates to the pirated software.
You are exactly right. THey have no obligation to non-customers running pirated copies. I think this is more of a "plan for future PR" move, personally. If they left all the pirated copies of XP vulnerable to attack by refusing them updates, think what that'd do to future statistics. They probably don't want windows to look any worse than it is, so anything they can do to keep the number of zombied, "pwned!", or "hax0red" windows machines at a minimum is a good plan. If the media decides to report on which OS is the "most secure" (as they do periodically), they're not going to make a distinction between legit XP installs and pirate ones.
It seems to me that add-on gadgets for PDA's or the GBA should be *CHEAPER* than stand alone versions. They don't have to include the screen, buttons or in some cases a CPU.
Why do add-ons cost *MORE*?
The cost of components is such a small part of the price. Most of the cost is in design and implementation. Also, it looks to me like they're trying to milk it for all they can. Their reasoning is probably "if a stand alone GPS goes for $300, we can sell OURS for $200 and get a profitable segment of the market". Except that the crossover between the GBA crowd and the GPS crowd is already fairly small compared to either crowd by itself.
Re:GPS for the Parent
on
GPS for GBA
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It's 11pm, do you know where your kids are?
Well... now you do!
Global Positioning, not Tracking. GPS units are entirely passive. The only person who knows where a given GPS is located is the person holding the GPS. Unless you're going to also fit the children with a cellular telemetry rig or something, only the kids will know where they are.
Have you ever registered a trademark? (Apparently not.) I have. You have to provide proof of actual interstate commerce before the mark will be granted. You also have to provide renewed proof after 7 years, otherwise the mark is abandoned.
These conditions are outside the scope of the argument. Intel has, I'm sure, engaged in interstate commerce once or twice and could probably find some proof of this.
But recently, in going out with friends and such, I have personally seen people do mental math on, say, $1.79 and $1.89 and come up with "about 2 bucks". I've always had to point out that it's closer to 4 bucks than any other even number of "bucks". They were just adding the dollar amount and essentially ignoring the cents entirely. And not just one person either, but I've seen many people do this at various times, and it's always stood out in my mind as "how could this person possibly come up with that number?!?"
People have some really bizarre reactions to certain numbers. There's the whole "just add the dollars" thing like you mention, which I think is just plain weird. Another one I've noticed in a similar vein is the "single big bill" thing. When I first started working at my current job (10 yrs ago), my boss was charging $45/hr. We got no complaints, really, except from the usual cheapskates who'd complain about anything. Then he raised it to $50/hr. Complaints went through the roof! Every other customer said something like "Fifty bucks? That's a LOT!" This went on for almost a year. Then my boss decided that $50/hr really wasn't cutting it, so he raised it to $65/hr. We were sure people would just go ballistic over that. If $50 seemed like a lot, $65 would seem astronomical, right? What actually happened was quite surprising. The complaints dropped to what they were at the $45 level. I figure That $50 seems like a lot of money because people can picture a $50 bill in their head, and a fifty is a BIG bill. $45 and $65 can't be pictured as any single bill, so the mental picture defaults to two or three twenties and a five. Fives and twenties are SMALL bills, the kind we use every day, so they're no big deal. Today we charge $75/hr and we STILL don't get anywhere near the complaints we got at $50. Fifty bucks must seem "more" than 45, 65, or even 75. Just one of those weird thing, I guess.
They are forbidden by law to collect more than they need and all propsed rate hikes have to go through a long, tedious review process to make sure they're not
-----
I believe that's how the process is written to work but I don't believe for a second that it's not being manipulated.
Aye, the whole thing does indeed hinge upon the definition of "need". In fact, I think they purposely AVOID round numbers to give the appearance that it's all determined by a studied, rational, mathematical formula that only takes things like "projected costs" and "estimated growth" and comes up with a sensible rate plan. For all we know, the estimates are plotted by a junior staffer on a piece of graph paper, then multiplied time the number of beers the Postal Commission drank at the pub the night before.
It was always a boggle as to why the Post Office didn't just go right up to 20 cents a stamp instead of the weird 19 cents.
The post office has to justify, with actual budget numbers, every penny of a rate increase. They are forbidden by law to collect more than they need and all propsed rate hikes have to go through a long, tedious review process to make sure they're not.
Instead of going up to a nice round number like 1.50, they choose a number right smack dab in the middle.
This is Marketing 101. Low number sell better that round ones. The problem with nice, even round numbers is that they're too easy to manipulate mathematically. Two songs at $1.50 is $3.00 and everyone knows it. Two songs at $1.29 is less than that-- only $2.58-- but most people will mentally round the number to "two dollars and something". The idea is to play on people's difficulty in dealing with math and make it HARDER to figure out how much they're really spending.
Actually, they only have to be defended. I can name my own version of vinyl flooring Parpi-Klag Flooring, register "Parpi-Klag" as a trademark and, so long as I defend against others using the term Parpi-Klag to describe their product, the trademark remains mine. I don't have to sell a single square centimeter of vinyl flooring, nor even produce it. I can just dream about it and have just the trademark alone.
Sorry, I was being lazy. It's usually found on some russian or chinese web site. here a link I found via google. Dunno if it's the very latest version (5.02), but even the 5.00 one works still.
For the n-th time, "wattage" isn't a word (perhaps it is, but then only in the M-W). It's called "power".
What the heck are you talking about? Wattage is a word, and it means "power". I'm an electrician. We use the term "wattage" rather than "power" because the latter is too ambiguous. A watt is a unit of measurement, so asking "what's the wattage on that bulb" will get you an answer in watts. Asking "what's the power on that bulb" will get you either puzzled stares or an answer in watts. It is always preferential to speak about quatities using their units of measure. That means amps, volts, and watts. "Power" is not a unit in ANY system.
Uhhh, you can still download updates with a pirated version of Windows Xp. There are many programs that anyone can easily download, that will generate, and put to use a new serial number that will allow you to use Windows Update.
Even better than that is "Reset5". Updates are allowed for unactivated XP installs that are still in the first 30 days. Reset5 is a little service that runs at startup and magically keeps that 30 day grace period timer set at 30 days. This is actually more than just a handy tool for pirates. I personally use it on my legitimate copy of XP Pro because the stupid piece of crap DE-ACTIVATES ITSELF if I change more than a couple pieces of hardware (something I do with remarkable frequency).
Care to explain how a dumb, bug-like, six-wheeled rover has any resemblence to something that appears to be, but is not quite, human-like?
Read the whole blurb. There's more than just the rover story. There's the link to the story about anthropomorphic product design, and the link to the one about life-like children's toys. The Uncanny Valley theory is entirely relevant to those.
Slashdot Mirror
Response: "Aha! He's hiding them! Now you will die."
More like-
Saddam: "They are all destroyed"
Response: "How? When? Where are the empty shells? The incionerators?"
Saddam: "I don't remember"
Response: "bullshit!"
Indeed. I think the formulator of the first batch if beige plastic is truly the father of modern computing. After all, they nearly all look like that still...
I vote twice for Woz, and 0 for Jobs. Woz created the Apple computer. Jobs pretty much just provided skillful marketing. Plus Woz is one of the coolest cats alive, and Jobs is a smug prick who cheats his friends(third paragraph).
My first computer experience was on a 15" print terminal with a 300 baud acoustic coupler via telephone. Should I be lobbying to have A.G. Bell and Johannes Gutenberg added too? Early computers often used incadescent lights as indicators. Should we add Thomas Edison? Most computers use the QWERTY keyboard. Should we be pushing to add Christopher Sholes?
Philo was a smart guy, but he was no computer pioneer.
David Hardy's points were brought up by a number of people and organizations, not just him. He was pretty much pointing out that Moore skipped all the really sticky criticisms, and cherry-picked the points he chose to rebut based on how easy they were to weasel out from under.
Further, the tone in the page strikes me as, frankly, quibbling and smarmy.
Heh. And Moore's not quibbling and smarmy? He's practically the poster boy for Smug White Liberalism.
It strikes my loony-senses a lot harder than the nebulous "allegations" Moore responded to the first time.
Really? Huh. I thought Moore came off a LOT more loony. His arrogant, condescending, and self-righteous tone combined with his "rebuttals" being little more than bizarre false dichotomies make him sound like a pretty nutty dude.
Heh. It is, however, a bit too far of a stretch to claim you built the stereo out of hard drive parts! "Build A Stereo From an Old Hard Disk" should have been "Build A Speaker From an Old Hard Disk and Some Other Things"
Safe deposit box. It's box, deposited in a safe.
I wonder whether they're making him wear girls' underwear on his head until he talks.
"Look, kid, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. Either you spill your guts, or we'll march you out to the middle of the playground during recess and pull down your pants so everyone can see your underwear."
Because that's effectively the same thing as not letting them install it. If it "breaks" critical functionality, no one running a non-legit copy will install it. Then, when a virus comes out that exploits unpatched XP/2K3, you'll have thousands more "pwned!" zombie boxes out there making windows look that much worse. It's in their best interests from a PR standpoint to get as many people to plug the security holes as possible.
Heh. Damn. All the more proof that they really don't understand the market they're aiming at.
Build a stereo? The guy built a mediocre speaker out of a coil of capper, a magnet, and a sticker. This doesn't even begin to qualify as a two-channel audio playback device, which is what people normally mean when they say "a stereo".
You are exactly right. THey have no obligation to non-customers running pirated copies. I think this is more of a "plan for future PR" move, personally. If they left all the pirated copies of XP vulnerable to attack by refusing them updates, think what that'd do to future statistics. They probably don't want windows to look any worse than it is, so anything they can do to keep the number of zombied, "pwned!", or "hax0red" windows machines at a minimum is a good plan. If the media decides to report on which OS is the "most secure" (as they do periodically), they're not going to make a distinction between legit XP installs and pirate ones.
And here is the rebuttal to his attempt to debunk the first set of claims.
The cost of components is such a small part of the price. Most of the cost is in design and implementation. Also, it looks to me like they're trying to milk it for all they can. Their reasoning is probably "if a stand alone GPS goes for $300, we can sell OURS for $200 and get a profitable segment of the market". Except that the crossover between the GBA crowd and the GPS crowd is already fairly small compared to either crowd by itself.
Global Positioning, not Tracking. GPS units are entirely passive. The only person who knows where a given GPS is located is the person holding the GPS. Unless you're going to also fit the children with a cellular telemetry rig or something, only the kids will know where they are.
These conditions are outside the scope of the argument. Intel has, I'm sure, engaged in interstate commerce once or twice and could probably find some proof of this.
People have some really bizarre reactions to certain numbers. There's the whole "just add the dollars" thing like you mention, which I think is just plain weird. Another one I've noticed in a similar vein is the "single big bill" thing. When I first started working at my current job (10 yrs ago), my boss was charging $45/hr. We got no complaints, really, except from the usual cheapskates who'd complain about anything. Then he raised it to $50/hr. Complaints went through the roof! Every other customer said something like "Fifty bucks? That's a LOT!" This went on for almost a year. Then my boss decided that $50/hr really wasn't cutting it, so he raised it to $65/hr. We were sure people would just go ballistic over that. If $50 seemed like a lot, $65 would seem astronomical, right? What actually happened was quite surprising. The complaints dropped to what they were at the $45 level. I figure That $50 seems like a lot of money because people can picture a $50 bill in their head, and a fifty is a BIG bill. $45 and $65 can't be pictured as any single bill, so the mental picture defaults to two or three twenties and a five. Fives and twenties are SMALL bills, the kind we use every day, so they're no big deal. Today we charge $75/hr and we STILL don't get anywhere near the complaints we got at $50. Fifty bucks must seem "more" than 45, 65, or even 75. Just one of those weird thing, I guess.
-----
I believe that's how the process is written to work but I don't believe for a second that it's not being manipulated.
Aye, the whole thing does indeed hinge upon the definition of "need". In fact, I think they purposely AVOID round numbers to give the appearance that it's all determined by a studied, rational, mathematical formula that only takes things like "projected costs" and "estimated growth" and comes up with a sensible rate plan. For all we know, the estimates are plotted by a junior staffer on a piece of graph paper, then multiplied time the number of beers the Postal Commission drank at the pub the night before.
The post office has to justify, with actual budget numbers, every penny of a rate increase. They are forbidden by law to collect more than they need and all propsed rate hikes have to go through a long, tedious review process to make sure they're not.
Instead of going up to a nice round number like 1.50, they choose a number right smack dab in the middle.
This is Marketing 101. Low number sell better that round ones. The problem with nice, even round numbers is that they're too easy to manipulate mathematically. Two songs at $1.50 is $3.00 and everyone knows it. Two songs at $1.29 is less than that-- only $2.58-- but most people will mentally round the number to "two dollars and something". The idea is to play on people's difficulty in dealing with math and make it HARDER to figure out how much they're really spending.
Actually, they only have to be defended. I can name my own version of vinyl flooring Parpi-Klag Flooring, register "Parpi-Klag" as a trademark and, so long as I defend against others using the term Parpi-Klag to describe their product, the trademark remains mine. I don't have to sell a single square centimeter of vinyl flooring, nor even produce it. I can just dream about it and have just the trademark alone.
stupid tag. try this
Please. I don't need it, but I'd download it.
Sorry, I was being lazy. It's usually found on some russian or chinese web site. here a link I found via google. Dunno if it's the very latest version (5.02), but even the 5.00 one works still.
What the heck are you talking about? Wattage is a word, and it means "power". I'm an electrician. We use the term "wattage" rather than "power" because the latter is too ambiguous. A watt is a unit of measurement, so asking "what's the wattage on that bulb" will get you an answer in watts. Asking "what's the power on that bulb" will get you either puzzled stares or an answer in watts. It is always preferential to speak about quatities using their units of measure. That means amps, volts, and watts. "Power" is not a unit in ANY system.
Even better than that is "Reset5". Updates are allowed for unactivated XP installs that are still in the first 30 days. Reset5 is a little service that runs at startup and magically keeps that 30 day grace period timer set at 30 days. This is actually more than just a handy tool for pirates. I personally use it on my legitimate copy of XP Pro because the stupid piece of crap DE-ACTIVATES ITSELF if I change more than a couple pieces of hardware (something I do with remarkable frequency).
Read the whole blurb. There's more than just the rover story. There's the link to the story about anthropomorphic product design, and the link to the one about life-like children's toys. The Uncanny Valley theory is entirely relevant to those.