Yes! I've read a lot of comments that talk about how Apple is a hardware company over and over again. Well, they may be today, but IMHO this is the begin of a concious move to make Apple an IP/Software/Digital Media company.
IBM ditched the PC business, because it's not strategic. They are right. PCs are commodities now, not where the future lies. I'll bet anything that you'll see IBM ditch their bigger machines eventually too, as they slowly move everything to commodity hardware.
Apple's future is in controlling the desktop. Store all your media with Apple software. Buy all your media from Apple software. Apple will consume Tivo, will sell movies and video programming, will convert iTunes to a truly profitable module iPod nonwithstanding.
Within five years, we'll all be talking about Apple like we do Microsoft - the company that is trying to control what you do on a computer, what you watch, how you watch it, how you buy it, what you listen to, how you buy it, how you encode your life and share it with your friends. Apple hardware will be vapor.
The move to intel is a move to commodity hardware. At first, they will lock you out. Once they get more hooks in people, they will jettison the hardware business. Going Intel makes this more possible - it opens the door to outsourcing their hardware, which is the first step to bailing on it totally.
That, or all this will backfire and they'll implode.
And you take no advantage of this same government's services, right? Be sure to thank your neighbors for making up your share of the burden. I'm sure they have willingly decided to to that for you...
I disagree - there are two reasons why regulation is necessary. The first is as you say - because someone always tries to abuse the system. The second reason, though, is that we, as consumers, don't want the responsibility of having to determine which corporations are good and which aren't.
Corporations abuse the "system", and the "system" includes the act of regulation. If regulation solely did what it was intended to do, great, but what happens in practice is that regulation becomes a tool of the (wealthy lobbying) corporation to limit consumer choice in their favor.
I can not buy an extremely low-emmission, 50mpg Volkswagen TDI in my state any more (NY) thanks to regulation, but I can buy a 7MPG heavy polluting American made SUV. How did regulation help me?
The real abusers of the system - the "original sinners", if you like - are the consumers who willing give up responsibility and decision making.
If consumers acted with responsibility and social awareness, then regulation wouldn't be needed, but everyone doesn't do that, do they?
You are counting the entire population of the world as potential Microsoft users. This includes infants and children, prisoners, the infirm elderly, and hosts of others categories of people that are not in any way, shape, or form currently potential users.
By any measure, a product in use by 1 out of every 10 people in the population of the *entire world* is an amazing penetration, especially for a high-tech product that is financially out of the reach of a majority of the worlds population.
Would you trust that person to be a custodian? Maybe they make partial sense if and only if they job has some fiscal component, but by and large... What if you bought a home, the company you worked for went under, and you got late on your mortgage payments? Should you now be discriminated against future employment?
I don't buy it. Like all this information, it presents only one very limited piece of the puzzle. In and of itself, it really tells very little about the person. And I question if it really adds much in the overvall view of information being obtained.
Does anyone here know the reason why potential employers care about credit checks? A credit check is part of the "employee screening" product from these guys, and I know that employers do it, but I can't think of any reason for a prospective employer neededing that info.
Any reason, that is, other than pure discrimination. No, my credit history isn't the best, but yes, I'm a damn good employee. The two just aren't related in any meaningful way that I can see.
Yeah... and wasn't it already covered that ( at least some versions of) Windows has BSD networking code in it? Or is MS okay because they already paid their blood money?
Yeah, and how about ephedra? Remember that one? The wonder, all in one "energy boost / weight loss / excercise enhancer / concentration enhancer" drug that, oh, yeah, causes heart failure in some and what appears like it might be irreperable heart damage in others?
I agree with the parent poster; for some reason, people seem to tend towards a "safe until proven otherwise" mentality towards these "nutritional" supplements.
And Smarter??? Not more focused, but smarter? Right.
Instead of striving for the best possible compiler and tools for the open source community, it's better to engage in a pissing match with SCO? Wouldn't it, perhaps, be better just to keep things moving forward?
The standards for "intersting article" seem to have gotten lower. This is a very brief writeup of a customer satisfaction survey. There is very little information on how the survey was taken, and the scoring on the survey ranks in the range of 0-104, with all services being ranked right next to each other at the top of the spectrum (with only a few % difference between each).
In other words, a short article vaguely describing a survey with largely insignificant differentiation in results. Whoo hoo!
Most of the outsourcing or moving of jobs overseas that I've seen (and what happened where I used to work) is not to a bunch of people sitting at home. It's opening up a whole office there, that functions just like an office anywhere, with managament in place, etc.
I think the typical "telecommuting" sense is that people are working in isolation, typically from their home. I see that as only marginally more acceptable now than it was before. Some companies embrace it, some don't, some do a little.
Jobs flowing overseas is something different. It's not just telecommuting on a grand scale.
The market for gaming would explode if game publishers consciously took the time to embed learning scenarios into games.
The market for gaming already exploded without this, and I think that's likely why we'll see little change. Publishers have already found a gaming business model that works. I doubt many of these publishers would want to gamble on introducing something like "edutainment" into an already successful business.
There is a lot of "educational" software out there. Most of it is crappy, from my experience (I have three kids, all of which I've bought educational software for and, in turn, witnessed a lot of dissapointment). Most of it retails for much less then non-educational, mainstream games. I think the educational software market has kind of established itself already as a bit of a loser by comparison.
So... to make the point again... I don't see it as being likely that a publisher is going to want to incorporate concepts from a lower profit, lower sale market into their existing non-educational first person shoot 'em up massive online cash cows.
I think the quality, depending on one's equipment, could vary wildly; The signal reaching the amplifier wouldn't be identical, and could be very different, unless the person was using a pure digital connection between all devices (e.g. SPDIF).
The reason one might sound better / worse / different than the other is that the Mac and the CD Player have different quality Digital-Analog converters. The process of rendering digital audio to analog audio is not an exact science - there are several variables that the manufacturer has control over, such as the process of bandwidth limiting to prevent aliasing, etc., they can ultimately affect the resulting signal.
The DACs also feed a small pre-amp stage, and again, the quality of this on both the Mac and the dedicated CD player could be different.
So, again, unless the Mac and the CD player are connected to the amplifier stage in a completely digital fashion, the liklihood of the signal being the same is going to be amazingly small, and if the sourcesignal is not the same, the resultant sound is not going to be the same. Whether or not this will be audible is going to depend a lot on the source material, the amplifier, speakers, room, listener, etc.; what this person is reporting is certainly valid and possible.
Well, if it says so in the article, and everyone has read the article, then they wouldn't need you to point out that I was restating part of it for emphasis, would they? Did you actually think about that, or are you trying to awe us all with your keen sense of sarcasm?
Even more impressive, for me, was that I'm pretty sure the guy has no clue what this stuff is designed to be used for, even though he quotes an expert that is trying to explain it to him.
This stuff is designed to control acoustics within a room, and requires a double wall / airspace barrier to be effective. I would wager you'd get the same, if not more, sound absorption from throwing a doubled up blanket around the case - hey, you'd still even get the equally dumb reduction in thermal transfer and increase in overheating.
Kroupware? There is an Open Source product whose that is going head to head against major proprietary mail server packages, and someone actually thought to call it 'Kroupware'?
Is that like 'HackingCoughWare' or, perhaps, the more subtle 'ScreamingInfantWare'? Ok, perhaps this is a troll, but I've historically had a hard enough time selling open source stuff into various enterprises. ("MySQL? Aww, what a cute name. Now go get us something that sounds professional." I've heard that. Literally. Twice.) I realize we're all smart enough to know better.
Selling a product is as much (if not more) selling an image than it is selling features, reliability, etc. At least for the PHBs I've had to sell to in the past. Trying to bring a mission critical piece of software in that's named after an anoying childhood malady will, before anything else, elicit a bunch of laughs from the powers that be, and then there's that much more of a hole to dig out of.
Oh, well, there goes what little karma I had, but I had to say it.
After reading the repeated posts on the lame resolution, I decided to see what Samsung has to say on their site. Well, basically, they DON'T advertise this thing as monitor. It's not even listed as a product on their site with other monitors.
It's a TV; they market it as the "Bedroom Home Theater" unit. So, the fact that the review keeps refering to it as a "Monitor" or a "Monitor/PC", and listed it on the Monitor section, is a little misleading. Sure, you can USE it as a monitor. I could also drag race a Winnebago, I suppose.
The PC Monitor market is not what the the manufacturer is targeting, so this whole "resolution is too crappy for a Monitor" thing is kinda irrelevant.
It usually depends, actually, on the number of workers as well. So if you have no commercial traffic (no customers walking in) AND less than X employees, where X is some number like 3, no one typically cares.
I think it may have something to do with parking / nuisance to neighbors.
However, if you intend to hire people as employees, then you should get some basic business insurance to protect yourself, since your home is typically NOT exempt from safety standards, and you could be sued by an employee falling down your stairs / slipping in your driveway / etc.
Done all this in New York State, in case this helps to qualify my experience at all. YMMV depending on where you live.
Although this is kinda funny in one isolated case, what also has to be considered is the effect on the Postal Service. Sure, they get paid to deliver this mail, but it's not that easy.
Catalogs and Magazine subscriptions ship at cheaper rates. The rural carriers that deliver mail to people's homes aren't set up to carry mass amounts of this type of mail to people; economically, the post office is set up to run with a balance of junk and first class mail on any given route.
Overload this with a hugh amount of bulk-rate junk mail, and you're putting a burden on the capacity of the carrier routes, which in turn will force the Postal Service to modify fees and/or service.
I would be highly suprised if they pass this charge on to the business customers that generate the bulk mail; this would meet with too much resistance and put pressure on the business relationship. Instead, I wager we'll see the fees passed along to first class, consumer mail either through an increase in postage fees and/or fees for home delivery of mail.
In short - The Postal Service is not the Internet. It is one orginization that can and will respond to this type of abuse, and the end result will be less service / increased cost.
The "who was fooled by this factor" seems a more reasonable complaint than the whole job thing. Do listeners really think this Carson dude was actually "servicing" their area personally? Like he cared or something?
About one in every 10 or so station breaks on the local classic rock station is some celebrity telling me I'm listening to the "the home of classic rock, W???". Do I think they give a shit? Is the station legitimately trying to pull the wool over my eyes and make me think that Ozzy or Mick Jagger came to my area, drove around, saw the sites, fell in love, bought a summer home, listened to the "home of classic rock", and decided to go lend their whole-hearted support?
Radio is artificial, like all media. They provide local news, weather, and topics of local interest. But the people who deliver this could be anyone, anywhere, and may or may not give a rats ass.
And no one is confused by this, at least no one with half a brain. "Servicing the local area" is just noise. It's money, somehow, this whole thing is that someone ain't getting money they think they should.
From my own humble experience, they way we converse with people has a lot to do about how we emotionally feel about them. I know (from years of doing it) that pencil-and-paper, face to face RPGs with my friends always ended up being more satisfying, because this was part of building a realtionship with these people, and I had some level of emotional investment in them.
It's like small talk - those semi-uncomfortable, marginally meaningful conversations you have with someone you don't really know and have no emotional investment in. It's totally different talking to someone you know and care about.
My point here being that this advancement in games doesn't really make much difference to me. A good book can make me sort of feel that attachment for the characters, and there's no reason why a good game can't too. Increasing the level of technical interaction does not really do much except provide a momentary "gee whiz" factor. Not that I'm expecting to become emotionally attached to a fictional character, but if the authorship of the story is not good, then I won't end up caring anymore about the narrative and how flexible it is, and if the authorship is good, and I'm drawn in... well, I probably won't care so much about how flexible the narrative is.
The complexity of the narrative is largely irrelevant, the gameplay and quality of the story is what will immerse you or leave you feeling uninterested.
There's also the whole critical mass thing. I work with a lot of graphic designers because, and they all use Macs because... they all know other graphic designers who all use Macs.. and on and on.
These guys - the guys I know, at least, are a close knit community. And technology just isn't that important to most of them. So they use a Mac because they know that if they get stuck, there's a whole host of other people trying to use the SAME exact software the SAME way on the SAME platform that will help them out.
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Yes! I've read a lot of comments that talk about how Apple is a hardware company over and over again. Well, they may be today, but IMHO this is the begin of a concious move to make Apple an IP/Software/Digital Media company.
IBM ditched the PC business, because it's not strategic. They are right. PCs are commodities now, not where the future lies. I'll bet anything that you'll see IBM ditch their bigger machines eventually too, as they slowly move everything to commodity hardware.
Apple's future is in controlling the desktop. Store all your media with Apple software. Buy all your media from Apple software. Apple will consume Tivo, will sell movies and video programming, will convert iTunes to a truly profitable module iPod nonwithstanding.
Within five years, we'll all be talking about Apple like we do Microsoft - the company that is trying to control what you do on a computer, what you watch, how you watch it, how you buy it, what you listen to, how you buy it, how you encode your life and share it with your friends. Apple hardware will be vapor.
The move to intel is a move to commodity hardware. At first, they will lock you out. Once they get more hooks in people, they will jettison the hardware business. Going Intel makes this more possible - it opens the door to outsourcing their hardware, which is the first step to bailing on it totally.
That, or all this will backfire and they'll implode.
And you take no advantage of this same government's services, right? Be sure to thank your neighbors for making up your share of the burden. I'm sure they have willingly decided to to that for you...
I second that thought. Does the submittor really think AMD takes their engineers and sends them out in the field to do legal and investigative work?
I *think* AMD has more than one department.
Is editorializing necessary on every darn news story?
I disagree - there are two reasons why regulation is necessary. The first is as you say - because someone always tries to abuse the system. The second reason, though, is that we, as consumers, don't want the responsibility of having to determine which corporations are good and which aren't.
Corporations abuse the "system", and the "system" includes the act of regulation. If regulation solely did what it was intended to do, great, but what happens in practice is that regulation becomes a tool of the (wealthy lobbying) corporation to limit consumer choice in their favor.
I can not buy an extremely low-emmission, 50mpg Volkswagen TDI in my state any more (NY) thanks to regulation, but I can buy a 7MPG heavy polluting American made SUV. How did regulation help me?
The real abusers of the system - the "original sinners", if you like - are the consumers who willing give up responsibility and decision making.
If consumers acted with responsibility and social awareness, then regulation wouldn't be needed, but everyone doesn't do that, do they?
You are counting the entire population of the world as potential Microsoft users. This includes infants and children, prisoners, the infirm elderly, and hosts of others categories of people that are not in any way, shape, or form currently potential users.
By any measure, a product in use by 1 out of every 10 people in the population of the *entire world* is an amazing penetration, especially for a high-tech product that is financially out of the reach of a majority of the worlds population.
Or you rollback one day and remove the dormant virus before it "wakes up".
Would you trust that person to be a custodian? Maybe they make partial sense if and only if they job has some fiscal component, but by and large... What if you bought a home, the company you worked for went under, and you got late on your mortgage payments? Should you now be discriminated against future employment?
I don't buy it. Like all this information, it presents only one very limited piece of the puzzle. In and of itself, it really tells very little about the person. And I question if it really adds much in the overvall view of information being obtained.
Any reason, that is, other than pure discrimination. No, my credit history isn't the best, but yes, I'm a damn good employee. The two just aren't related in any meaningful way that I can see.
Yeah... and wasn't it already covered that ( at least some versions of) Windows has BSD networking code in it? Or is MS okay because they already paid their blood money?
Yeah, and how about ephedra? Remember that one? The wonder, all in one "energy boost / weight loss / excercise enhancer / concentration enhancer" drug that, oh, yeah, causes heart failure in some and what appears like it might be irreperable heart damage in others?
I agree with the parent poster; for some reason, people seem to tend towards a "safe until proven otherwise" mentality towards these "nutritional" supplements.
And Smarter??? Not more focused, but smarter? Right.
Instead of striving for the best possible compiler and tools for the open source community, it's better to engage in a pissing match with SCO? Wouldn't it, perhaps, be better just to keep things moving forward?
The standards for "intersting article" seem to have gotten lower. This is a very brief writeup of a customer satisfaction survey. There is very little information on how the survey was taken, and the scoring on the survey ranks in the range of 0-104, with all services being ranked right next to each other at the top of the spectrum (with only a few % difference between each).
In other words, a short article vaguely describing a survey with largely insignificant differentiation in results. Whoo hoo!
Most of the outsourcing or moving of jobs overseas that I've seen (and what happened where I used to work) is not to a bunch of people sitting at home. It's opening up a whole office there, that functions just like an office anywhere, with managament in place, etc.
I think the typical "telecommuting" sense is that people are working in isolation, typically from their home. I see that as only marginally more acceptable now than it was before. Some companies embrace it, some don't, some do a little.
Jobs flowing overseas is something different. It's not just telecommuting on a grand scale.
Hey... someone mod this post's parent up. The AC is right, this is nearly a verbatim post from the apple forum, and is obviously a troll.
The market for gaming already exploded without this, and I think that's likely why we'll see little change. Publishers have already found a gaming business model that works. I doubt many of these publishers would want to gamble on introducing something like "edutainment" into an already successful business.
There is a lot of "educational" software out there. Most of it is crappy, from my experience (I have three kids, all of which I've bought educational software for and, in turn, witnessed a lot of dissapointment). Most of it retails for much less then non-educational, mainstream games. I think the educational software market has kind of established itself already as a bit of a loser by comparison.
So... to make the point again... I don't see it as being likely that a publisher is going to want to incorporate concepts from a lower profit, lower sale market into their existing non-educational first person shoot 'em up massive online cash cows.
The reason one might sound better / worse / different than the other is that the Mac and the CD Player have different quality Digital-Analog converters. The process of rendering digital audio to analog audio is not an exact science - there are several variables that the manufacturer has control over, such as the process of bandwidth limiting to prevent aliasing, etc., they can ultimately affect the resulting signal.
The DACs also feed a small pre-amp stage, and again, the quality of this on both the Mac and the dedicated CD player could be different.
So, again, unless the Mac and the CD player are connected to the amplifier stage in a completely digital fashion, the liklihood of the signal being the same is going to be amazingly small, and if the sourcesignal is not the same, the resultant sound is not going to be the same. Whether or not this will be audible is going to depend a lot on the source material, the amplifier, speakers, room, listener, etc.; what this person is reporting is certainly valid and possible.
Well, if it says so in the article, and everyone has read the article, then they wouldn't need you to point out that I was restating part of it for emphasis, would they? Did you actually think about that, or are you trying to awe us all with your keen sense of sarcasm?
This stuff is designed to control acoustics within a room, and requires a double wall / airspace barrier to be effective. I would wager you'd get the same, if not more, sound absorption from throwing a doubled up blanket around the case - hey, you'd still even get the equally dumb reduction in thermal transfer and increase in overheating.
Is that like 'HackingCoughWare' or, perhaps, the more subtle 'ScreamingInfantWare'? Ok, perhaps this is a troll, but I've historically had a hard enough time selling open source stuff into various enterprises. ("MySQL? Aww, what a cute name. Now go get us something that sounds professional." I've heard that. Literally. Twice.) I realize we're all smart enough to know better.
Selling a product is as much (if not more) selling an image than it is selling features, reliability, etc. At least for the PHBs I've had to sell to in the past. Trying to bring a mission critical piece of software in that's named after an anoying childhood malady will, before anything else, elicit a bunch of laughs from the powers that be, and then there's that much more of a hole to dig out of.
Oh, well, there goes what little karma I had, but I had to say it.
It's a TV; they market it as the "Bedroom Home Theater" unit. So, the fact that the review keeps refering to it as a "Monitor" or a "Monitor/PC", and listed it on the Monitor section, is a little misleading. Sure, you can USE it as a monitor. I could also drag race a Winnebago, I suppose.
The PC Monitor market is not what the the manufacturer is targeting, so this whole "resolution is too crappy for a Monitor" thing is kinda irrelevant.
It usually depends, actually, on the number of workers as well. So if you have no commercial traffic (no customers walking in) AND less than X employees, where X is some number like 3, no one typically cares.
I think it may have something to do with parking / nuisance to neighbors.
However, if you intend to hire people as employees, then you should get some basic business insurance to protect yourself, since your home is typically NOT exempt from safety standards, and you could be sued by an employee falling down your stairs / slipping in your driveway / etc.
Done all this in New York State, in case this helps to qualify my experience at all. YMMV depending on where you live.
Although this is kinda funny in one isolated case, what also has to be considered is the effect on the Postal Service. Sure, they get paid to deliver this mail, but it's not that easy.
Catalogs and Magazine subscriptions ship at cheaper rates. The rural carriers that deliver mail to people's homes aren't set up to carry mass amounts of this type of mail to people; economically, the post office is set up to run with a balance of junk and first class mail on any given route.
Overload this with a hugh amount of bulk-rate junk mail, and you're putting a burden on the capacity of the carrier routes, which in turn will force the Postal Service to modify fees and/or service.
I would be highly suprised if they pass this charge on to the business customers that generate the bulk mail; this would meet with too much resistance and put pressure on the business relationship. Instead, I wager we'll see the fees passed along to first class, consumer mail either through an increase in postage fees and/or fees for home delivery of mail.
In short - The Postal Service is not the Internet. It is one orginization that can and will respond to this type of abuse, and the end result will be less service / increased cost.
The "who was fooled by this factor" seems a more reasonable complaint than the whole job thing. Do listeners really think this Carson dude was actually "servicing" their area personally? Like he cared or something?
About one in every 10 or so station breaks on the local classic rock station is some celebrity telling me I'm listening to the "the home of classic rock, W???". Do I think they give a shit? Is the station legitimately trying to pull the wool over my eyes and make me think that Ozzy or Mick Jagger came to my area, drove around, saw the sites, fell in love, bought a summer home, listened to the "home of classic rock", and decided to go lend their whole-hearted support?
Radio is artificial, like all media. They provide local news, weather, and topics of local interest. But the people who deliver this could be anyone, anywhere, and may or may not give a rats ass.
And no one is confused by this, at least no one with half a brain. "Servicing the local area" is just noise. It's money, somehow, this whole thing is that someone ain't getting money they think they should.
From my own humble experience, they way we converse with people has a lot to do about how we emotionally feel about them. I know (from years of doing it) that pencil-and-paper, face to face RPGs with my friends always ended up being more satisfying, because this was part of building a realtionship with these people, and I had some level of emotional investment in them.
It's like small talk - those semi-uncomfortable, marginally meaningful conversations you have with someone you don't really know and have no emotional investment in. It's totally different talking to someone you know and care about.
My point here being that this advancement in games doesn't really make much difference to me. A good book can make me sort of feel that attachment for the characters, and there's no reason why a good game can't too. Increasing the level of technical interaction does not really do much except provide a momentary "gee whiz" factor. Not that I'm expecting to become emotionally attached to a fictional character, but if the authorship of the story is not good, then I won't end up caring anymore about the narrative and how flexible it is, and if the authorship is good, and I'm drawn in... well, I probably won't care so much about how flexible the narrative is.
The complexity of the narrative is largely irrelevant, the gameplay and quality of the story is what will immerse you or leave you feeling uninterested.
There's also the whole critical mass thing. I work with a lot of graphic designers because, and they all use Macs because... they all know other graphic designers who all use Macs.. and on and on.
These guys - the guys I know, at least, are a close knit community. And technology just isn't that important to most of them. So they use a Mac because they know that if they get stuck, there's a whole host of other people trying to use the SAME exact software the SAME way on the SAME platform that will help them out.