I urge for the day i can use my iPod as a clicker device to go to the next slide in a presentation, or when i can set my iPod next to my laptop and automatically sync it.
I bet you're not urging for the kind of battery drain that would go hand in hand with your iPod's wireless sync capability. Or the length of time the sync would take if you were moving a reasonable number of songs onto it.
And if you want a presentation clicker and a proximity sensor today, get a Mac and one of the phones supported by Salling Clicker. I haven't integrated it into my home automation setup yet, but the possibilities are practically endless.
When you don't enable it, all that button seems to do is skip right to the end of a recording, which always seemed pretty useless to me. Whenever I need to reboot my TiVo, the first thing I do is set that button back to 30 second skip.
And unlike bypassing subscriptions, it's not something that is going to cost TiVo money, so I don't see why they would be concerned by it.
It could cost TiVo plenty, if the greedy-bastard "content producers" sued them. If TiVo weren't so afraid of those litigious dinosaurs, ethernet would've been standard on the Series 1 boxes, and there would be TiVo-sanctioned/produced software that let you pull any recording off the TiVo with a mouse click or two, and put it on your computer's hard drive in an easily-editable format. Computer companies would probably be selling their own branded TiVos, and would be fighting tooth and nail to develop the best software with which to extract and manipulate the video. Frankly, I think easy recording extraction directly into iMovie or iDVD is the missing link from the Home Media Option that TiVo has cooked up with Apple.
You wonder why video extraction is verboten, you can thank people like Jack "The VCR is the Boston Strangler" Valenti and Jamie "Going to the bathroom during commercials is stealing" Kellner-- and their lawyers.
...because unless you don't value your time at all, buying is much cheaper.
Buy the cheapest one you can find on eBay, get the lifetime subscription if it's not already included, hack/mod as desired. Or don't. It will work right out of the box, no dicking around with it necessary.
I bought a 20 hour Series 1 TiVo on eBay in January of '02. I put a 120GB drive in it the day it arrived and paid for the lifetime subscription, and a couple months ago finally decided to add ethernet so I could extract recordings for archival purposes. The TiVo has worked flawlessly the entire time I've had it. I have not had to think about it at all, and IMHO that is the mark of a good system.
I have a Sony Ericsson T68i, and I love it. The navigation seems okay to me. While the buttons are indeed small, their size is dictated by the overall small size of the phone. I think the buttons are aligned just fine.
Even if the buttons were subpar, the phone supports voice dialing-- why don't you use it? Practically the only time I use the buttons on my phone are when I power it on and turn on the keypad lock in the morning. Then it stays in my pocket all day, and I just use my Plantronics Bluetooth headset to make and receive calls, and I input my contacts by syncing wirelessly with the copy of Microsoft Entourage on my Mac.
My only gripe with the phone is that the area around the joystick gets dusty and it's a pain to clean. Plus the joystick should be sealed a little better to keep dust/pocket lint from getting inside the phone.
As for some of the new Nokias, I agree that they do suck. Nokia is putting too much stupid crap in their phones, and I don't understand how they can leave out Bluetooth at this point. Being able to sync my contacts with my computer and use the phone as a modem without some expensive proprietary cable/software, and being able use a wireless headset were the primary reasons I ditched my Nokia 8260 and got the T68i. Now that I've had a phone with them and found out how truly useful they are, those are features I will never give up.
~Philly
Re:If anyone's into alternate military history...
on
A Good Summer Read?
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the post, I just ordered the Cold War Hot title along with another book Amazon was offering in a "buy both and save" deal.
If you like the doomsday stuff, check out Branch Point, by Mona Clee. I found it to be a fast, engaging read, with the historical point of divergence being the Cuban Missile Crisis.
That sounds exactly like how SpeedPass works, but losing a SpeedPass is not as big a deal as you make it seem. AFAIK, you can only use it to buy gas and whatever the Mobil/Exxon mini-mart is selling, though I think in some areas McDonald's is testing its use in their drive-thru.
If you lost it, all the finder could really do to abuse it would be to call up all his/her buddies and meet somewhere to go fill their tanks up, en masse. Anyway, the thing is supposed to be kept on your keyring, and if you lose your keys you tend to notice that pretty quickly. You just have to call Exxon/Mobil and give them the code number imprinted on the SpeedPass (you did write it down and keep it somewhere, right?) and they'll kill it and give you a new one.
Hmmm. Are you sure that was a software failure? It sounds to me more like a hydraulic failure in the master cylinder, in which case you should have had at least one warning light and probably a very loud buzzer.
Only going by what they told me. And there was never a buzzer or warning light indicating any kind of failure.
Even if the pump fails you would still have unassisted braking - the pedal would be rock solid.
That's what I thought until they told me otherwise. The first few years I owned that car, there were so many stupid things wrong with it that I didn't question that the failure of ABS had the potential to take out the whole system.
In the US at least, the ink is 'raised' on even a new bill
The technique is called "Intalgio," IIRC-- the type of printing press that does that sort of printing is insanely expensive. In light of this and due to a large number of extremely high-quality counterfeit bills floating around, the Secret Service believes that an unfriendly foreign power may be counterfeiting US currency.
This link I just found claims that North Korea is actually doing this.
Currencies that have hologram components to them......are incredibly difficult to counterfeit... On that note, Singapore easily has the coolest banknotes...
From context, I'd guess the Singpore currency has holograms on it. But apparently it's not as tough to counterfeit as you think-- on the bottom of the page you link to is this blurb:
A fake S$50 note dispensed by an automated teller machine (ATM) belonging to the United Overseas Bank (UOB) was detected when the customer tried to deposit it into her account with another bank.
So the fake S$50 was apparently pretty good, if it was able to make a trip through the banking system and wind up being dispensed by an ATM.
But the strip is in a different place on each denomination, and has the denomination spelled out on it. You'd just have to hold it up to the light or (IIRC) under a blacklight to see "USA TWENTY USA TWENTY USA TWENTY" the length of the strip.
Plus the face in the watermark in the paper would not be Ben Franklin.
IMHO, you'd have to be a complete dolt to not notice a bleached bill.
Do they actually recognize that currency is being copied and prohibit the operation, or add watermark stuff like "void".
They copy the bills, but some do stuff to make the copied bills unusable, like make a perfect copy of a bill but make the entire page hot pink. The Ricoh printers we had at my last job did that. Other copiers make the copy, but insert a code number somewhere on the bill unbeknownst to the counterfeiter. When the bill makes its way to the Secret Service, they find the code, contact the company, and find out where that copier is located, which speeds up the investigation quite a bit. IIRC, a few years back they nailed some idiot Cornell students this way. Unfortunately I can't find the story on Google, and I don't quite remember where I heard it-- possibly from one of the Discovery Channel or History Channel documentaries concerning the U.S. Mint or the Secret Service or counterfeiting.
I actually had a little trouble with an ABS system a few years back, on a '94 Pontiac Grand Am. The system failed in such a way that once in a while when I would apply the brakes, the pedal would sink all the way to the floor without doing anything to slow the vehicle... the brakes were just plain not there. I would immediately let up on the pedal and reapply the brakes, and then they would work.
Luckily, the first time this happened I was slowing from about 25mph to turn into a parking lot, with no other traffic around-- otherwise things might have been more, shall we say, interesting.
I was stunned when the service people told me that the failure of the ABS could take out the brakes entirely. One can just imagine the kind of lawsuit that could have been unleashed, had my brakes gone out at a truly inopportune time-- like if a little kid ran out in front of my car, or I were unable to stop at an intersection and ended up getting t-boned by a speeding 18-wheeler as a result.
If the Columbia crew had adopted some serious resource-conservation procedures PDQ, NASA could've had Atlantis prepped and ready to go in time to get them out alive (theoretically, anyway, since a shuttle-to-shuttle rescue is unprecedented).
However, Atlantis had already entered preparations for its scheduled March 1 launch-- if that had not been the case, Columbia and its crew would in all likelihood have been SOL. Prepping a shuttle for a launch is a tremendous, time-consuming undertaking, and it's not something you can cut corners on even if there is a "gotta get it up there quick" type situation. Perhaps they could institute round-the-clock operations via multiple shifts, but I don't know if they have enough qualified workers to be able to handle something like that.
Also keep in mind that hastily laying on a rescue launch increases the chance of something going catastrophically wrong on that mission. If NASA lost a second shuttle while trying to save the crew of a stuck-in-orbit first shuttle that would then be destroyed on re-entry, confidence in the space program would plummet. Congress would yank even more funding from NASA, and they might as well just deorbit the ISS a few days later-- maybe we could all get a free taco out of it this time.
If the machines weren't properly locked down, a tiny USB Bluetooth adaptor could be attached to the computer, and the right cellphone could be used (while still in its owner's pocket or bag, out of sight) to establish an alternate internet connection and spread the virus that way.
Admittedly, you'd need some pretty inattentive instructors to not notice someone dicking around with the network settings on their machine, not to mention installing Bluetooth drivers-- but less likely things have happened.
According to the law, I, as an authorized user of a computer that belongs to my employer, have no legal right to privacy concerning files I store on that computer, or e-mail sent from/received by that computer-- the employer, as owner, can monitor it at will.
And now, the law says that I, the owner of a computer system, have no right to monitor or intercept the comings and goings of an UNauthorized user on said system? In fact, I can be sued for doing so?
How is this not a ridiculous double standard? Not counting any "I understand my computer system is subject to monitoring" policy form you may sign at work. Doesn't UNAUTHORIZED computer access trump any kind of claim to privacy that the unauthorized user may make?
Furthermore, would you be covered by putting a disclaimer somewhere on that system? I would imagine that something like "ALL users of this system are subject to monitoring. By continuing to access this system you signal your willingness to be monitored. If you do not agree, disconnect now." would do the trick.
So what happens if a bunch of soldiers in the field die due to a failure of/flaw in a Microsoft product? Will Microsoft get off scot-free because of their "no liability" language in their EULA? Would there suddenly be knee-jerk laws passed concerning software reliability?
And if a company tried to limit how I could decorate my area, I would not work for them. "Two personal items," what a bunch of crapola. I have so much stuff in my office I have to come in one day on a weekend to hang up all the framed posters and photos and stuff when I start a new job or move to a new space.
eMacs and iBooks do not cut it in business, sorry pal.
Gee, that's funny-- one of my clients is a large law firm in downtown Philadelphia who has nothing but eMacs and iBooks, and a G4 tower serving files. Maybe I'd better go tell them to just give up, because "geek" on/. says that their machines don't cut it in business.
I guess they're only able to run the firm on eMacs and iBooks because they don't know their machines aren't good enough for business use-- kinda like how Wile E. Coyote doesn't fall, as long as he doesn't notice he walked off the cliff, huh?
It would open up the world of Apple to new users. Who would in return very likely go to the Mac Hardware...Any other thoughts?
Yeah-- you're wrong, wrong, WRONG!
1) What makes you think the people who buy shitbox $399 PCs will suddenly be willing to pay significantly more for genuine Apple hardware because then they could use Mac OS X on its 'native' hardware? That's how it is now, and the aforementioned cheap bastards are not seeing the light and beating a path to Apple's door, checkbooks and credit cards in hand.
2) Apple tried letting their hardware be cloned in the 90's, and it almost killed them. The cloners were supposed to fill the low-end, entry-level machine niche and leave the high end to Apple. What they did instead was produce cheaper high-end hardware than Apple ever could. They could do this for the same reasons Dell and Gateway do it-- they're just box stuffers, with very limited R&D overhead. Meanwhile, Apple has to charge more to offset the cost of developing the OS, so their prices are naturally higher. People, being the cheap bastards that they are, usually buy according to price, so they started buying clones and stopped buying the real Macs that paid for the OS development. Result: Apple started bleeding. Heavily. Luckily they managed to kill the cloning business before it killed them.
3) What makes Macs special is the ultra-tight integration of software and hardware-- THAT is why they work so well. Sell a copy of OS X that can run on commodity PC hardware, and it's not going to work that well, period. How do I know this? Because Microsoft has already been laboring for 20 years trying to get thousands of commodity PC hardware components to play nice together, every time and in any combination. They have more people and way more money to throw at the problem than Apple does, and still they have failed. And, if you missed all the news from the WinHEC conference a week or two ago, they are now trending toward doing sort of what Apple does-- working with OEMs so there will be hardware designed from the start to work with future versions of Windows, as opposed to just being on some Hardware Compatibility List that only means "it *should* work, we've *seen* it work, but it might not work when *you* try it-- and that's *your* problem."
If it was warez or something else basically innocuous, I'd let it slide. But for kiddie porn, I would definitely report the guy to the cops. The law of the land ranks higher than the law of the company or the need to protect the company's good name.
If I got fired for it, I would sue the hell out of the company for wrongful termination. Terminating me for disclosing felonious behavior on the part of a fellow employee is definitely dangerous ground-- IANAL, but it seems to me that a case could be made that by apparently encouraging all of its employees to look the other way concerning an egregious breach of the law, the company is promoting illegal behavior and could be subject to some criminal liability of its own.
...of the Architect's conversation with Neo for further study? Maybe if I can read through it a couple dozen times, I'll get more than just the barest gist of it. I mean, it was well after midnight when that scene took place in the movie-- and between me being tired and the Architect's droning voice, I could feel what he was saying just whizzing by over my head. My friends had the same complaint.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it, therefore, that we don't see a combination smartphone/pda/wallet?
Because identity theft is enough of a problem already, without some pickpocket being able to get your wallet, keys, and phone with one deft move.
~Philly
I urge for the day i can use my iPod as a clicker device to go to the next slide in a presentation, or when i can set my iPod next to my laptop and automatically sync it.
I bet you're not urging for the kind of battery drain that would go hand in hand with your iPod's wireless sync capability. Or the length of time the sync would take if you were moving a reasonable number of songs onto it.
And if you want a presentation clicker and a proximity sensor today, get a Mac and one of the phones supported by Salling Clicker. I haven't integrated it into my home automation setup yet, but the possibilities are practically endless.
~Philly
When you don't enable it, all that button seems to do is skip right to the end of a recording, which always seemed pretty useless to me. Whenever I need to reboot my TiVo, the first thing I do is set that button back to 30 second skip.
~Philly
And unlike bypassing subscriptions, it's not something that is going to cost TiVo money, so I don't see why they would be concerned by it.
It could cost TiVo plenty, if the greedy-bastard "content producers" sued them. If TiVo weren't so afraid of those litigious dinosaurs, ethernet would've been standard on the Series 1 boxes, and there would be TiVo-sanctioned/produced software that let you pull any recording off the TiVo with a mouse click or two, and put it on your computer's hard drive in an easily-editable format. Computer companies would probably be selling their own branded TiVos, and would be fighting tooth and nail to develop the best software with which to extract and manipulate the video. Frankly, I think easy recording extraction directly into iMovie or iDVD is the missing link from the Home Media Option that TiVo has cooked up with Apple.
You wonder why video extraction is verboten, you can thank people like Jack "The VCR is the Boston Strangler" Valenti and Jamie "Going to the bathroom during commercials is stealing" Kellner-- and their lawyers.
~Philly
...because unless you don't value your time at all, buying is much cheaper.
Buy the cheapest one you can find on eBay, get the lifetime subscription if it's not already included, hack/mod as desired. Or don't. It will work right out of the box, no dicking around with it necessary.
I bought a 20 hour Series 1 TiVo on eBay in January of '02. I put a 120GB drive in it the day it arrived and paid for the lifetime subscription, and a couple months ago finally decided to add ethernet so I could extract recordings for archival purposes. The TiVo has worked flawlessly the entire time I've had it. I have not had to think about it at all, and IMHO that is the mark of a good system.
~Philly
I have a Sony Ericsson T68i, and I love it. The navigation seems okay to me. While the buttons are indeed small, their size is dictated by the overall small size of the phone. I think the buttons are aligned just fine.
Even if the buttons were subpar, the phone supports voice dialing-- why don't you use it? Practically the only time I use the buttons on my phone are when I power it on and turn on the keypad lock in the morning. Then it stays in my pocket all day, and I just use my Plantronics Bluetooth headset to make and receive calls, and I input my contacts by syncing wirelessly with the copy of Microsoft Entourage on my Mac.
My only gripe with the phone is that the area around the joystick gets dusty and it's a pain to clean. Plus the joystick should be sealed a little better to keep dust/pocket lint from getting inside the phone.
As for some of the new Nokias, I agree that they do suck. Nokia is putting too much stupid crap in their phones, and I don't understand how they can leave out Bluetooth at this point. Being able to sync my contacts with my computer and use the phone as a modem without some expensive proprietary cable/software, and being able use a wireless headset were the primary reasons I ditched my Nokia 8260 and got the T68i. Now that I've had a phone with them and found out how truly useful they are, those are features I will never give up.
~Philly
Thanks for the post, I just ordered the Cold War Hot title along with another book Amazon was offering in a "buy both and save" deal.
If you like the doomsday stuff, check out Branch Point, by Mona Clee. I found it to be a fast, engaging read, with the historical point of divergence being the Cuban Missile Crisis.
~Philly
That sounds exactly like how SpeedPass works, but losing a SpeedPass is not as big a deal as you make it seem. AFAIK, you can only use it to buy gas and whatever the Mobil/Exxon mini-mart is selling, though I think in some areas McDonald's is testing its use in their drive-thru.
If you lost it, all the finder could really do to abuse it would be to call up all his/her buddies and meet somewhere to go fill their tanks up, en masse. Anyway, the thing is supposed to be kept on your keyring, and if you lose your keys you tend to notice that pretty quickly. You just have to call Exxon/Mobil and give them the code number imprinted on the SpeedPass (you did write it down and keep it somewhere, right?) and they'll kill it and give you a new one.
~Philly
Hmmm. Are you sure that was a software failure? It sounds to me more like a hydraulic failure in the master cylinder, in which case you should have had at least one warning light and probably a very loud buzzer.
Only going by what they told me. And there was never a buzzer or warning light indicating any kind of failure.
Even if the pump fails you would still have unassisted braking - the pedal would be rock solid.
That's what I thought until they told me otherwise. The first few years I owned that car, there were so many stupid things wrong with it that I didn't question that the failure of ABS had the potential to take out the whole system.
In the US at least, the ink is 'raised' on even a new bill
The technique is called "Intalgio," IIRC-- the type of printing press that does that sort of printing is insanely expensive. In light of this and due to a large number of extremely high-quality counterfeit bills floating around, the Secret Service believes that an unfriendly foreign power may be counterfeiting US currency.
This link I just found claims that North Korea is actually doing this.
~Philly
Currencies that have hologram components to them... ...are incredibly difficult to counterfeit... On that note, Singapore easily has the coolest banknotes...
From context, I'd guess the Singpore currency has holograms on it. But apparently it's not as tough to counterfeit as you think-- on the bottom of the page you link to is this blurb:
A fake S$50 note dispensed by an automated teller machine (ATM) belonging to the United Overseas Bank (UOB) was detected when the customer tried to deposit it into her account with another bank.
So the fake S$50 was apparently pretty good, if it was able to make a trip through the banking system and wind up being dispensed by an ATM.
~Philly
But the strip is in a different place on each denomination, and has the denomination spelled out on it. You'd just have to hold it up to the light or (IIRC) under a blacklight to see "USA TWENTY USA TWENTY USA TWENTY" the length of the strip.
Plus the face in the watermark in the paper would not be Ben Franklin.
IMHO, you'd have to be a complete dolt to not notice a bleached bill.
~Philly
Do they actually recognize that currency is being copied and prohibit the operation, or add watermark stuff like "void".
They copy the bills, but some do stuff to make the copied bills unusable, like make a perfect copy of a bill but make the entire page hot pink. The Ricoh printers we had at my last job did that. Other copiers make the copy, but insert a code number somewhere on the bill unbeknownst to the counterfeiter. When the bill makes its way to the Secret Service, they find the code, contact the company, and find out where that copier is located, which speeds up the investigation quite a bit. IIRC, a few years back they nailed some idiot Cornell students this way. Unfortunately I can't find the story on Google, and I don't quite remember where I heard it-- possibly from one of the Discovery Channel or History Channel documentaries concerning the U.S. Mint or the Secret Service or counterfeiting.
~Philly
I actually had a little trouble with an ABS system a few years back, on a '94 Pontiac Grand Am. The system failed in such a way that once in a while when I would apply the brakes, the pedal would sink all the way to the floor without doing anything to slow the vehicle... the brakes were just plain not there. I would immediately let up on the pedal and reapply the brakes, and then they would work.
Luckily, the first time this happened I was slowing from about 25mph to turn into a parking lot, with no other traffic around-- otherwise things might have been more, shall we say, interesting.
I was stunned when the service people told me that the failure of the ABS could take out the brakes entirely. One can just imagine the kind of lawsuit that could have been unleashed, had my brakes gone out at a truly inopportune time-- like if a little kid ran out in front of my car, or I were unable to stop at an intersection and ended up getting t-boned by a speeding 18-wheeler as a result.
~Philly
If the Columbia crew had adopted some serious resource-conservation procedures PDQ, NASA could've had Atlantis prepped and ready to go in time to get them out alive (theoretically, anyway, since a shuttle-to-shuttle rescue is unprecedented).
However, Atlantis had already entered preparations for its scheduled March 1 launch-- if that had not been the case, Columbia and its crew would in all likelihood have been SOL. Prepping a shuttle for a launch is a tremendous, time-consuming undertaking, and it's not something you can cut corners on even if there is a "gotta get it up there quick" type situation. Perhaps they could institute round-the-clock operations via multiple shifts, but I don't know if they have enough qualified workers to be able to handle something like that.
Also keep in mind that hastily laying on a rescue launch increases the chance of something going catastrophically wrong on that mission. If NASA lost a second shuttle while trying to save the crew of a stuck-in-orbit first shuttle that would then be destroyed on re-entry, confidence in the space program would plummet. Congress would yank even more funding from NASA, and they might as well just deorbit the ISS a few days later-- maybe we could all get a free taco out of it this time.
~Philly
If the machines weren't properly locked down, a tiny USB Bluetooth adaptor could be attached to the computer, and the right cellphone could be used (while still in its owner's pocket or bag, out of sight) to establish an alternate internet connection and spread the virus that way.
Admittedly, you'd need some pretty inattentive instructors to not notice someone dicking around with the network settings on their machine, not to mention installing Bluetooth drivers-- but less likely things have happened.
~Philly
Easy- when you own the people that make the laws, the laws don't apply to you.
~Philly
According to the law, I, as an authorized user of a computer that belongs to my employer, have no legal right to privacy concerning files I store on that computer, or e-mail sent from/received by that computer-- the employer, as owner, can monitor it at will.
And now, the law says that I, the owner of a computer system, have no right to monitor or intercept the comings and goings of an UNauthorized user on said system? In fact, I can be sued for doing so?
How is this not a ridiculous double standard? Not counting any "I understand my computer system is subject to monitoring" policy form you may sign at work. Doesn't UNAUTHORIZED computer access trump any kind of claim to privacy that the unauthorized user may make?
Furthermore, would you be covered by putting a disclaimer somewhere on that system? I would imagine that something like "ALL users of this system are subject to monitoring. By continuing to access this system you signal your willingness to be monitored. If you do not agree, disconnect now." would do the trick.
~Philly
So what happens if a bunch of soldiers in the field die due to a failure of/flaw in a Microsoft product? Will Microsoft get off scot-free because of their "no liability" language in their EULA? Would there suddenly be knee-jerk laws passed concerning software reliability?
Discuss.
~Philly
And if a company tried to limit how I could decorate my area, I would not work for them. "Two personal items," what a bunch of crapola. I have so much stuff in my office I have to come in one day on a weekend to hang up all the framed posters and photos and stuff when I start a new job or move to a new space.
~Philly
eMacs and iBooks do not cut it in business, sorry pal.
/. says that their machines don't cut it in business.
Gee, that's funny-- one of my clients is a large law firm in downtown Philadelphia who has nothing but eMacs and iBooks, and a G4 tower serving files. Maybe I'd better go tell them to just give up, because "geek" on
I guess they're only able to run the firm on eMacs and iBooks because they don't know their machines aren't good enough for business use-- kinda like how Wile E. Coyote doesn't fall, as long as he doesn't notice he walked off the cliff, huh?
~Philly
Anyone who complains about 555- numbers in movies should be forced to live in a home with two phone lines:
8675309
8535937
~Philly
It would open up the world of Apple to new users. Who would in return very likely go to the Mac Hardware...Any other thoughts?
Yeah-- you're wrong, wrong, WRONG!
1) What makes you think the people who buy shitbox $399 PCs will suddenly be willing to pay significantly more for genuine Apple hardware because then they could use Mac OS X on its 'native' hardware? That's how it is now, and the aforementioned cheap bastards are not seeing the light and beating a path to Apple's door, checkbooks and credit cards in hand.
2) Apple tried letting their hardware be cloned in the 90's, and it almost killed them. The cloners were supposed to fill the low-end, entry-level machine niche and leave the high end to Apple. What they did instead was produce cheaper high-end hardware than Apple ever could. They could do this for the same reasons Dell and Gateway do it-- they're just box stuffers, with very limited R&D overhead. Meanwhile, Apple has to charge more to offset the cost of developing the OS, so their prices are naturally higher. People, being the cheap bastards that they are, usually buy according to price, so they started buying clones and stopped buying the real Macs that paid for the OS development. Result: Apple started bleeding. Heavily. Luckily they managed to kill the cloning business before it killed them.
3) What makes Macs special is the ultra-tight integration of software and hardware-- THAT is why they work so well. Sell a copy of OS X that can run on commodity PC hardware, and it's not going to work that well, period. How do I know this? Because Microsoft has already been laboring for 20 years trying to get thousands of commodity PC hardware components to play nice together, every time and in any combination. They have more people and way more money to throw at the problem than Apple does, and still they have failed. And, if you missed all the news from the WinHEC conference a week or two ago, they are now trending toward doing sort of what Apple does-- working with OEMs so there will be hardware designed from the start to work with future versions of Windows, as opposed to just being on some Hardware Compatibility List that only means "it *should* work, we've *seen* it work, but it might not work when *you* try it-- and that's *your* problem."
~Philly
If it were me--
If it was warez or something else basically innocuous, I'd let it slide. But for kiddie porn, I would definitely report the guy to the cops. The law of the land ranks higher than the law of the company or the need to protect the company's good name.
If I got fired for it, I would sue the hell out of the company for wrongful termination. Terminating me for disclosing felonious behavior on the part of a fellow employee is definitely dangerous ground-- IANAL, but it seems to me that a case could be made that by apparently encouraging all of its employees to look the other way concerning an egregious breach of the law, the company is promoting illegal behavior and could be subject to some criminal liability of its own.
Anyone here who IAL, feel free to correct me.
~Philly
...of the Architect's conversation with Neo for further study? Maybe if I can read through it a couple dozen times, I'll get more than just the barest gist of it. I mean, it was well after midnight when that scene took place in the movie-- and between me being tired and the Architect's droning voice, I could feel what he was saying just whizzing by over my head. My friends had the same complaint.
~Philly