It's basically been proven that the average person drives better drunk than while trying to operate a cell phone, and that's a pretty simple interface. Now BMW is coming along and giving people more reasons to take their eyes off the road? WTF are they thinking?
I'm all for adding cool features to cars, but let's try to keep it in the realm of the practical, mmmkay? Otherwise, you're just asking for trouble. Having to navigate a complex GUI just to turn on the wipers or the rear defroster = bad idea.
And not all computerization is a good thing-- although the antilock braking system in my '94 Grand Am has saved my ass a couple times over the years, a few years back I was lucky that it did not CAUSE an accident-- the chip that controlled it died in such a way that occasionally I would hit the brakes just to stop normally, or to slow for a turn, and the pedal would go straight to the floor without slowing the car!! Luckily, I quickly discovered that when this happened, lifting my foot from the brake and then stepping on the pedal again would engage the brakes-- and I got that problem taken care of damn quickly, within the car's original warranty period. But every now and then I'll think about how that simple problem could have had very unpleasant or even fatal results, and I'll shudder a little bit.
On the plus side, if someone in their shiny new 745i plows into you because they were fiddling with their iDrive computer, at least you'll be able to sue with confidence that they can pay up.:-)
All around the periphery of the site, shallowly bury a couple thousand tablets with Microsoft's EULAs on them, and random pages from the antitrust trial proceedings.
Future archaelogists will quickly find them and be so busy trying to decipher them, they'll never get back to the site to dig any deeper.:-)
Someone, please write a tool that sends and executes a cable modem uncapper on every Nimda and Code Red infected machine that probes my servers from a cable modem IP address!
It will cut down on unwanted traffic as the cable company gestapo hunts down those ignorant dickheads who are still running unpatched machines, and sends them back to AOL, where they belong if they can't properly maintain a computer.
VPC on x86 seems kind of pointless... why dink around with software emulation to run multiple OSes when you can just get one of those removable HD bays and swap actual hard drives in and out with different OSes on them?
If you're a Mac user, though, VPC is pretty sweet. Newer OSes aren't blazing fast on it, but they're acceptable-- it's probably the best way to test out 'risky' software, because you can make a backup copy of the HD image in no time.
The best use I've found for it currently, though, is as a lightweight Terminal Services client on my iBook... using Windows for Workgroups, a TCP/IP stack for Win 3.11 and the 16-bit version of Microsoft's Terminal Services client software. All of this fits in a 100MB HD image with a ridiculous amount of room to spare-- I just haven't had the time to transfer it all to a smaller one. It's also blazing fast. The Virtual PC boots up from the virtual POST to a Windows desktop in under a minute, and recovers from a saved state in less than half that time.
This stuff has some bizarre properties-- mostly air but a great thermal insulator, ridiculously fragile, water soluble, translucent...
If someone figures out how to make this stuff cheaply and in a form that Joe Sixpack the general contractor can slap into building walls without any special care as a thermal (and acoustic? The article mentioned something about 'low sound speed') insulation material, that person will get ultra rich.
Either that, or find a way to make the stuff transparent enough to be used for windows. Hell, if they can toughen it up somehow, it looks see-through enough now to make a nice skylight that won't leak heat like a sieve in the wintertime.
This is ri-Goddamn-diculous.... it's exactly like when they forced PC manufacturers to pay for a Windows license for every machine they shipped, whether or not Windows was on all the machines. By making anyone pay for Windows where it won't be used, they are effectively levying a financial penalty for the use of a non-Windows computer.
What next, will consumers have to pay for Windows licenses for everyone in their household? Will they include newborn babies who couldn't possibly use the computer? Will two licenses be required if there's a pregnant woman in the house? What about pets? If there's a photo of your dead grandfather on the wall somewhere in the house, will you have to pay for a license for him, too?
How much farther will these shitbags go towards squeezing every penny possible out of multi-celled organism on the planet, before consumers, institutions, and corporations revolt against them?
I'm starting to think that the only government action that could possibly stop these jackals from misbehaving would involve the use of a small tactical nuke, air burst over their headquarters.
If the record industry wants to tell us what we can do with music we pay to download from them, of course we're going to tell them what they can do with their lame-brained, greed-inspired scheme-- mainly, to stick it where only Hilary Rosen's proctologist will be able to find it, assuming there are fresh batteries in his flashlight.:-)
Of course, like others have said, MusicNet is probably just a designed-to-fail operation, so they can say, "But we tried to change our business model, and failed! Obviously, the public does not want to buy its music in downloadable format, so we'll just keep selling these plastic thingies for $20 each, and buy some laws to make it a crime to do anything we don't approve of with what's on them."
And don't even get me started on Magazines, which TOTALLY could be printed without ads for those people who choose to pay. Heck, it'd be almost as easy to have as many or as few ads as you liked.
Most magazines these days are more ad than content, it's just spread out so much that you don't really notice.
I don't mind the ads so much as those stupid fucking blow-in cards. I'd gladly pay a few extra bucks for magazine subscriptions where I could flip through an issue without those damn things flying out at me.
And just to keep things on topic, this Kellner guy is a moron and an asshole... he's like the Dan Quayle of AOL/TW. If I'm gonna pay an extra ~$20/month to not have to watch commercials, I want programs that are 30 or 60 minutes long to fill in that space. Unless they do that, fuck 'em... I'll just keep using the 'jump ahead 30 seconds' button on my TiVo remote.
Previously in history, mega-wealth like this was built on the backs of slaves--the railroads, for instance. But not Gates'. There were no slaves...merely consumers.
From what I've read, the work environment that Microsoft promotes for its employees is pretty close to being a slave-- sure they pay you, but you work long hours, and anything that would keep you from the office such as marriage, children, or socializing with people who aren't co-workers is implicity frowned upon.
And you could make the argument that consumers ARE slaves in this case. When Microsoft changes file formats from version to version, creates "upgrade treadmills," and pulls other tricks to "encourage" upgrading to the latest and greatest, they might as well be hooking up a yoke and plow to people.
Just look at what they're pulling now with these volume licensing changes for their corporate customers... it's a pay-now-or-pay-much-more-later scheme designed to shore up their income until they can get.NET out the door and we're all just paying a monthly Microsoft bill the same way we pay for gas and electric and phones.
Sure, the argument could be made that one could cast off the chains and switch to Linux or something else, but for non-techie consumers and huge corporations whose clients and vendors are all locked into Microsoft products, that's not an option.
There was also more information on viewing and listening by young males -- a key demographic group for advertisers -- who are notoriously sloppy about recording their habits in diaries, Mocarsky said.
Maybe once this thing comes into wide use, geek-oriented shows will get the ratings they should be getting and we won't constantly have to bemoan their cancellation.
So, let's see... when Nike misrepresents itself to the public about how it really abuses human rights according to its own internal audit, they say that that's just them exercising free speech.
But just try to exercise your constitutional right of free speech by creating a website critical of Nike (or most other megacorporations, these days), and their lawyers will try and in most cases succeed at crushing you, leaving nothing but a smoking crater in their wake.
I guess in addition to yelling "Fire!" in a theater full of people, it's also wrong to yell "Sweatshop!" in a factory in Thailand full of orphans sewing the "Swoosh" on shitty sneakers at midnight.:-)
On the plus side, at least I don't have to change my spending habits-- since I prefer plain, black sneakers and Nike only sells shoes that, if they were cars, would have been driven by pimps in the 70's.
According to the artivle, the Xbox project was originally called project Midway????
I don't remember the details exactly, and came up empty after 5 minutes of Googling, but...
Years ago, a WWII veteran either sued or just caused a big stink because he bought a VCR made by a Japanese company (Panasonic, I believe). What upset him so was that the manual's example for setting the date and time showed the date being set to December 7 (Pearl Harbor Day, for the especially dense), and this offended him.
Thank God this deal didn't go through. The combined evil of Microsoft and Nintendo would have reached critical mass, collapsed inward on itself and formed a black hole that would surely have destroyed us all.
Years ago, after reading about all the shifty crap that Nintendo pulled in this book, I started thinking of them as the Microsoft of Japan. Price fixing, exclusivity deals with retailers to lock out competitors, the lockout chip feature in their carts, lots of different stuff. Nintendo and Microsoft already have a lot of similar pages in their respective playbooks.
Microsoft was probably salivating at the thought of having a viselike grip on people's lives from the time they fire up their first video game as a kid, until the final time they turn off their PC before going on to die in their sleep later that night. Luckily for us, the X-Box is proving to be an also-ran, so we won't have to worry about it.
Maybe they should sell replica plates with that on it to anyone, whether they live in Nevada or not-- like those ones from Universal Studios that read "OUTATIME" like the one on the DeLorean in Back to the Future.
Yeah, that bugged me too when I first got my TiVo. But then I realized that it's dumb to just keep flipping channels looking for something interesting, when I can merely hit a button and summon an onscreen program guide that lets me see what shows are on and read encapsulated episode descriptions. When they say TiVo will change the way you watch TV, they don't just mean by timeshifting shows. The thing really gets its hooks into ya-- A few weeks ago I was watching a movie in a theater, didn't quite catch a bit of dialogue, and found myself reflexively reaching for the TiVo remote to hit the 'instant replay' button.:-)
You forget that stupid people are now the majority in America. If they buy into this DataPlay crapola, it will become a new standard, CDs will be put out to pasture as quickly as the RIAA can manage it (hell, maybe they'll buy a few more Congressmen to have CDs made illegal), and those of us who can see this 'new, improved format' for the blindside-consumers-with-DRM scam that it is will have no other choice if we ever want to purchase music again.
Heh, I had a LiteOn 52X that would do exactly as you ask (occasionally). It is really kind of scary to see the disk spinning at 52X in the tray...hover for a moment, drop down and scuff the hell out of itself upon touchdown in the tray.
Reminds me of a Zip drive that was in a Power Mac one of my friends had years ago. It had an overly-enthusiastic eject mechanism that, while only ejecting disks when it was asked to, did so with such force that it reminded me of the killer soda machine in Maximum Overdrive.
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It's basically been proven that the average person drives better drunk than while trying to operate a cell phone, and that's a pretty simple interface. Now BMW is coming along and giving people more reasons to take their eyes off the road? WTF are they thinking?
:-)
I'm all for adding cool features to cars, but let's try to keep it in the realm of the practical, mmmkay? Otherwise, you're just asking for trouble. Having to navigate a complex GUI just to turn on the wipers or the rear defroster = bad idea.
And not all computerization is a good thing-- although the antilock braking system in my '94 Grand Am has saved my ass a couple times over the years, a few years back I was lucky that it did not CAUSE an accident-- the chip that controlled it died in such a way that occasionally I would hit the brakes just to stop normally, or to slow for a turn, and the pedal would go straight to the floor without slowing the car!! Luckily, I quickly discovered that when this happened, lifting my foot from the brake and then stepping on the pedal again would engage the brakes-- and I got that problem taken care of damn quickly, within the car's original warranty period. But every now and then I'll think about how that simple problem could have had very unpleasant or even fatal results, and I'll shudder a little bit.
On the plus side, if someone in their shiny new 745i plows into you because they were fiddling with their iDrive computer, at least you'll be able to sue with confidence that they can pay up.
All around the periphery of the site, shallowly bury a couple thousand tablets with Microsoft's EULAs on them, and random pages from the antitrust trial proceedings.
:-)
Future archaelogists will quickly find them and be so busy trying to decipher them, they'll never get back to the site to dig any deeper.
~Philly
Someone, please write a tool that sends and executes a cable modem uncapper on every Nimda and Code Red infected machine that probes my servers from a cable modem IP address!
It will cut down on unwanted traffic as the cable company gestapo hunts down those ignorant dickheads who are still running unpatched machines, and sends them back to AOL, where they belong if they can't properly maintain a computer.
~Philly
Yes, I am aware of its water solubility. Reread my post, and you'll see that I list "water soluble" as one of its properties.
Then I qualify the skylight idea with "Hell, if they can toughen it up somehow"
I still primarily use OS 9.x on my iBook, but OS X is on there... I'll have to fool around with rdesktop. Thanks for the tip!
VPC on x86 seems kind of pointless... why dink around with software emulation to run multiple OSes when you can just get one of those removable HD bays and swap actual hard drives in and out with different OSes on them?
If you're a Mac user, though, VPC is pretty sweet. Newer OSes aren't blazing fast on it, but they're acceptable-- it's probably the best way to test out 'risky' software, because you can make a backup copy of the HD image in no time.
The best use I've found for it currently, though, is as a lightweight Terminal Services client on my iBook... using Windows for Workgroups, a TCP/IP stack for Win 3.11 and the 16-bit version of Microsoft's Terminal Services client software. All of this fits in a 100MB HD image with a ridiculous amount of room to spare-- I just haven't had the time to transfer it all to a smaller one. It's also blazing fast. The Virtual PC boots up from the virtual POST to a Windows desktop in under a minute, and recovers from a saved state in less than half that time.
~Philly
This stuff has some bizarre properties-- mostly air but a great thermal insulator, ridiculously fragile, water soluble, translucent...
If someone figures out how to make this stuff cheaply and in a form that Joe Sixpack the general contractor can slap into building walls without any special care as a thermal (and acoustic? The article mentioned something about 'low sound speed') insulation material, that person will get ultra rich.
Either that, or find a way to make the stuff transparent enough to be used for windows. Hell, if they can toughen it up somehow, it looks see-through enough now to make a nice skylight that won't leak heat like a sieve in the wintertime.
~Philly
This is ri-Goddamn-diculous.... it's exactly like when they forced PC manufacturers to pay for a Windows license for every machine they shipped, whether or not Windows was on all the machines. By making anyone pay for Windows where it won't be used, they are effectively levying a financial penalty for the use of a non-Windows computer.
What next, will consumers have to pay for Windows licenses for everyone in their household? Will they include newborn babies who couldn't possibly use the computer? Will two licenses be required if there's a pregnant woman in the house? What about pets? If there's a photo of your dead grandfather on the wall somewhere in the house, will you have to pay for a license for him, too?
How much farther will these shitbags go towards squeezing every penny possible out of multi-celled organism on the planet, before consumers, institutions, and corporations revolt against them?
I'm starting to think that the only government action that could possibly stop these jackals from misbehaving would involve the use of a small tactical nuke, air burst over their headquarters.
~Philly
Is anyone really surprised?
:-)
If the record industry wants to tell us what we can do with music we pay to download from them, of course we're going to tell them what they can do with their lame-brained, greed-inspired scheme-- mainly, to stick it where only Hilary Rosen's proctologist will be able to find it, assuming there are fresh batteries in his flashlight.
Of course, like others have said, MusicNet is probably just a designed-to-fail operation, so they can say, "But we tried to change our business model, and failed! Obviously, the public does not want to buy its music in downloadable format, so we'll just keep selling these plastic thingies for $20 each, and buy some laws to make it a crime to do anything we don't approve of with what's on them."
~Philly
And don't even get me started on Magazines, which TOTALLY could be printed without ads for those people who choose to pay. Heck, it'd be almost as easy to have as many or as few ads as you liked.
Most magazines these days are more ad than content, it's just spread out so much that you don't really notice.
I don't mind the ads so much as those stupid fucking blow-in cards. I'd gladly pay a few extra bucks for magazine subscriptions where I could flip through an issue without those damn things flying out at me.
And just to keep things on topic, this Kellner guy is a moron and an asshole... he's like the Dan Quayle of AOL/TW. If I'm gonna pay an extra ~$20/month to not have to watch commercials, I want programs that are 30 or 60 minutes long to fill in that space. Unless they do that, fuck 'em... I'll just keep using the 'jump ahead 30 seconds' button on my TiVo remote.
~Philly
aol is playing nice with apple, since they realize the official AIM client sucks rocks.
:-)
And the fact that this will probably chap Microsoft's ass is just a nice little bonus for AOL.
~Philly
Previously in history, mega-wealth like this was built on the backs of slaves--the railroads, for instance. But not Gates'. There were no slaves...merely consumers.
.NET out the door and we're all just paying a monthly Microsoft bill the same way we pay for gas and electric and phones.
From what I've read, the work environment that Microsoft promotes for its employees is pretty close to being a slave-- sure they pay you, but you work long hours, and anything that would keep you from the office such as marriage, children, or socializing with people who aren't co-workers is implicity frowned upon.
And you could make the argument that consumers ARE slaves in this case. When Microsoft changes file formats from version to version, creates "upgrade treadmills," and pulls other tricks to "encourage" upgrading to the latest and greatest, they might as well be hooking up a yoke and plow to people.
Just look at what they're pulling now with these volume licensing changes for their corporate customers... it's a pay-now-or-pay-much-more-later scheme designed to shore up their income until they can get
Sure, the argument could be made that one could cast off the chains and switch to Linux or something else, but for non-techie consumers and huge corporations whose clients and vendors are all locked into Microsoft products, that's not an option.
~Philly
There was also more information on viewing and listening by young males -- a key demographic group for advertisers -- who are notoriously sloppy about recording their habits in diaries, Mocarsky said.
Maybe once this thing comes into wide use, geek-oriented shows will get the ratings they should be getting and we won't constantly have to bemoan their cancellation.
~Philly
So, let's see... when Nike misrepresents itself to the public about how it really abuses human rights according to its own internal audit, they say that that's just them exercising free speech.
:-)
But just try to exercise your constitutional right of free speech by creating a website critical of Nike (or most other megacorporations, these days), and their lawyers will try and in most cases succeed at crushing you, leaving nothing but a smoking crater in their wake.
I guess in addition to yelling "Fire!" in a theater full of people, it's also wrong to yell "Sweatshop!" in a factory in Thailand full of orphans sewing the "Swoosh" on shitty sneakers at midnight.
On the plus side, at least I don't have to change my spending habits-- since I prefer plain, black sneakers and Nike only sells shoes that, if they were cars, would have been driven by pimps in the 70's.
~Philly
While our fearless leaders would have been riding out World War III in the comfort and safety of places like the shelter under the Greenbriar resort in WV, the Joe and Jane Taxpayers of the country were mostly left with the "duck and cover" method.
~Philly
According to the artivle, the Xbox project was originally called project Midway????
I don't remember the details exactly, and came up empty after 5 minutes of Googling, but...
Years ago, a WWII veteran either sued or just caused a big stink because he bought a VCR made by a Japanese company (Panasonic, I believe). What upset him so was that the manual's example for setting the date and time showed the date being set to December 7 (Pearl Harbor Day, for the especially dense), and this offended him.
~Philly
Thank God this deal didn't go through. The combined evil of Microsoft and Nintendo would have reached critical mass, collapsed inward on itself and formed a black hole that would surely have destroyed us all.
Years ago, after reading about all the shifty crap that Nintendo pulled in this book, I started thinking of them as the Microsoft of Japan. Price fixing, exclusivity deals with retailers to lock out competitors, the lockout chip feature in their carts, lots of different stuff. Nintendo and Microsoft already have a lot of similar pages in their respective playbooks.
Microsoft was probably salivating at the thought of having a viselike grip on people's lives from the time they fire up their first video game as a kid, until the final time they turn off their PC before going on to die in their sleep later that night. Luckily for us, the X-Box is proving to be an also-ran, so we won't have to worry about it.
~Philly
So I see I'm not the only one who wants that...
Maybe they should sell replica plates with that on it to anyone, whether they live in Nevada or not-- like those ones from Universal Studios that read "OUTATIME" like the one on the DeLorean in Back to the Future.
~Philly
Just so I can get one of these plates, with "DUKNCVR" on it. :-)
~Philly
If you can pick out the meat of the article through the errors, here's how one guy did it.
~Philly
Yeah, that bugged me too when I first got my TiVo. But then I realized that it's dumb to just keep flipping channels looking for something interesting, when I can merely hit a button and summon an onscreen program guide that lets me see what shows are on and read encapsulated episode descriptions. When they say TiVo will change the way you watch TV, they don't just mean by timeshifting shows. The thing really gets its hooks into ya-- A few weeks ago I was watching a movie in a theater, didn't quite catch a bit of dialogue, and found myself reflexively reaching for the TiVo remote to hit the 'instant replay' button. :-)
~Philly
If Vegas gets a monorail, will we have HBO's "Monorail Confessions" to look forward to?
~Philly
You forget that stupid people are now the majority in America. If they buy into this DataPlay crapola, it will become a new standard, CDs will be put out to pasture as quickly as the RIAA can manage it (hell, maybe they'll buy a few more Congressmen to have CDs made illegal), and those of us who can see this 'new, improved format' for the blindside-consumers-with-DRM scam that it is will have no other choice if we ever want to purchase music again.
Heh, I had a LiteOn 52X that would do exactly as you ask (occasionally). It is really kind of scary to see the disk spinning at 52X in the tray...hover for a moment, drop down and scuff the hell out of itself upon touchdown in the tray.
Reminds me of a Zip drive that was in a Power Mac one of my friends had years ago. It had an overly-enthusiastic eject mechanism that, while only ejecting disks when it was asked to, did so with such force that it reminded me of the killer soda machine in Maximum Overdrive.
~Philly
car thefts will drop (and car insurance will drop).
Sadly, you're probably only half-right. Those fscking greedy insurance companies will find another BS reason to keep rates high.
~Philly