I'm inclined to disagree with Newt on this and at the same time I want to do everything possible to get the barbaric bastards who keep killing innocent people. It's tough and it's only going to get tougher. The world is about to get really scary, I'm afraid.seriously... the world has always been very scary. today we have information overload. not to downplay the event, but imagine if something akin to 9-11 happened 25 years ago. if you lived on the west coast, or elsewhere in the world, odds are slim that you would have seen anything like the coverage that was available live. real information would have been given on the evening news and later in newspapers. as is the live feeds were more images than actual information of the causes. there have always been bad things going on around the world and inside the USA. there always will be. i'm not saying people should give up trying to stop mass murder and terrorism, but crime and murder will never be 100% eliminated. it's just not possible.
the government can not say "look how effective our secret methods are because we have not had a terrorist attack since 9-11" and then follow it up with "we can not let people speak freely or bad things may occur". i could also say that eating a fair amount of garlic seems to keep terrorism from happening within a few miles of my location. it hasn't failed yet.
it's a stab in the dark, but if you are going to build super-plants and shave every penny, i am guessing China is cheaper than India for manufacturing. China also is relatively accessible to the western coast of the USA by freighters, and has a billion potential workers that can be paid less than India.
Obviously India *had* a large pool of well educated workers that could be paid less than the USA. if you look at a map, it seems that shipping from India adds some twists and turns that China does not. i don't know how much of an issue that is, but if it's uneasy waters, then i am sure it matters. using India for tech support type work just means you have to run a set of cables there, not move super-freighters in and out.
again, i am just guessing. i am sure the governments themselves are a major issue, but when you deal in those kinds of volume... every little bit counts. China was wise to do this manufacturing. they are brought up to speed with what the world in making. they have their hands in most cutting edge technology, so no matter what their own home grown scientists and engineers can accomplish, they also get a peek at the rest of the world.
i don't know if it is true, but i had heard that the Korean car manufacturers learned a TON about design and manufacturing efficiency from the years they spent building cars for the Japanese companies. that's why they can be so competitive, and then just learn where to shave off some costs to stay cheaper. it's nothing new. a lot of American manufacturing plants have only stayed competitive by adapting to Japanese styles of running a plant. it does not work in some cases, but when it does, it will blow everything else out of the water. there are plenty of books written about converting an old american plant to a new (japanese based) method of manufacturing. it does not *all* come down to labor costs.
i could see a consumer taking a risk on a bootleg CD or DVD. in general it is a digital copy, and unless the movie was film handheld inside a theater, the quality will probably be ok. the cost is low and the risk is low. ethics aside, it's not going to kill you. when you get into the world of pirated automobiles..... um. i don't even know what to think about that. makes you wonder how they can be competitive. that's obviously a massive operation employing a ton of people. i feel like i need to look into what a "pirated/bootleg car" actually means?
i can see that for the emissions software. i believe it was something to do with what would trigger the Check Engine light, resulting in the car going to a service shop. the replacement of a 10 year old catalytic convertor on a car with just a hair under 100,000 miles is what surprised me. i suppose emissions inspections are not uniform country-wide. i would not have passed the PA emissions for Philadelphia if the cat was that far out of spec. i know that from experience. hmm, there may even be parts of PA that don't do an emissions test, or it is a visual test (for modifications or rotten parts). the odd part is that they do just go eventually, at least in my experience. it seemed strange it took 10 years to decide that. i had to replace the one myself on my 1992 Cherokee when it rotted away.
i really think that Microsoft, Apple, Creative, etc etc etc would prefer not to have any DRM on their devices. Apple didn't have much of anything until they started negotiations for the iTMS. iirc the only thing the iPod did was make the/music directory invisible, and there was a VERY simple fix for that. i don't know if that still holds true or not though. i don't 100% understand the Zune DRM (i just don't care enough to research it), but Apple's is really only on the files you buy from iTMS. on the iPod, the files themselves are not encrypted, but the device makes it harder to get them off than a regular HDD. i would think there could be a fix for this, though i never looked. i suppose maybe if Microsoft (or anyone else) dropped any association with an online store (including their own), they could do whatever they want? kind of like MP3 players were 5 years ago. i think that was only pulled off because the music industry didn't really know what MP3 players were. they were not selling in any numbers, and only the Nomad was any kind of threat (in terms of a roving pirate ship). it probably didn't sell enough to be on the radar. other players were what, 32 MB? seriously, they were tiny flash players. my friend would put a gym mix playlist on his and that would pretty much fill it. it was neat, but you paid a lot for that digital mix tape. oh how things have changed.
my jeep cherokee just had a recall issues a few months ago for wonky software and possibly a rotten catalytic convertor. the car is a 1996 model! seems crazy to me, but i took it in and they replaced the catalytic convertor for free after doing the software update. i had been planning on replacing the cat before my inspection, and was expecting to pay a few hundred dollars for it. if it was some failure with the brakes or or some safety issue, i can see a massive recall, but for an exhaust component? seems weird to me, but i'm not complaining.
it really does not seem like these cops knew what a stun gun was for. i suppose they may have been caught up in some heat of the moment blind rage where they just lost it, but then obviously they have no business being a cop/security officer. it seemed like there were enough of them around that ONE of them should have remembered their training about what a stun gun does.
again, if it were not for video phones, i guess this situation would have been a local blurb. if it were caught on in-house cameras i am sure we would not have seen the footage on youtube.
now i just have to set it up so i can upload video clips right from my phone. i feel like that may come in handy sometime. the "just in case" situation where my phone may be destroyed, lost or stolen.
did you watch the video? they *randomly* grabbed the guy as he was leaving the building. they zapped him, then zapped him again when he would not stand up. the point of tasers is that they incapacitate the person for a bit of time. you are not supposed to zap somebody to get their attention. you zap them to knock them down. to then zap them again because they can't hop up and comply is crap. those cops/guards should know that. real police use them to knock somebody out of commission enough that they can cuff them or put them in a car or whatever.
i realize we do not see what precedes the situation, but after they start zapping the guy they can not expect him to just hop up and be docile. they also had a crapload of cops around an unarmed student. they could have just as easily picked him up or something if that was a concern. they obviously were not worried about his safety by zapping him 5 times in that few minute span. there is no reason they could not restrain him some other way if they really felt it was that important.
being a cop/guard on a college campus means you signed up to deal with potentially obnoxious students. it might be rough, but how could you not realize that was going to happen? i can't imagine a situation where some rude student that did not have his ID deserved that kind of battery.
a while ago i remember reading Microsoft people said it might take 5 years to catch on. this was before the iPod even hit its 5th birthday.
1) if it will be a supposed hit in 5 years, why buy one today? 2) who knows what iPods, or any MP3 players will be in 5 years.
just for reference take the first iPod (5 GB), jump 5 years to the nano (tiny! 8GB, color screen, lots of battery life etc). if they can not merge a good MP3 player with tons of storage in a cell phone in the next 5 years, then i quit. i am sure some sort of standalone players will exist (for running or whatever), video players, wifi whatever. if iPods still exist, i would guess they have a slow evolution. the simplicity is what makes them so popular.
maybe they can eventually buy a song, or a yo-yo or something.
that Canadian media tax was also put on blank CDs and DVDs iirc. oddly i do not think it applied to HDDs, just plastic media and portable MP3 players. didn't the iPod/MP3 player part of that tax get overturned? i thought there was some sort of rebate. i know the same idea has bounced around in parts of Europe too.
i did know some people that justified the price of the PS2 because it had a DVD player. at the time a DVD player was what, $200+? whatever the price was, people (i knew) thought of it like: (PS2 cost) - (DVD player cost) = acceptable increase if they were going to buy a standalone DVD player anyway. i suppose a test of this is knowing how many of those DVD remotes they sold.
i agree that the PS3 does not have the same bonus appeal. DVDs were so much better than VHS, the jump to the new formats does not seem to have the same upgrade feel. if you dropped the money on a HD flat panel TV etc etc and care that much to upgrade all your movies.... the cost issue is probably insignificant.
i agree that this is going to be the opposite effect..... people will now just happen to have a Blu-Ray compatible player so they may start buying some movies on that format (if there is some special edition or something). i have a feeling the quality issues won't be enough at this point, for this audience at least.
the opinions i heard yesterday during the day (on CNN) was this: the stock market likes stability. if congress is split between two parties, that could lead to a lot of uncertainty. the market likes to have an idea what will happen in the future (duh). having one party controlling everything is somewhat predictable, so is total gridlock. those are things the market likes. i am not sure if this will work out to be gridlock or unpredictable instability. i forget how that is defined. possibly that was a President from one party (with the veto power) and Congress slightly tipped towards the other party (but not enough to overturn a veto). that may be what this shakes out to be?
the idea of market performance under Republican or Democrat control in DC is not really an issue. it may matter with specific industries, but the market overall does not care. things like big oil, defense contractors and pharmaceuticals may have more trouble, but things like alternative energy will get more attention. if your money is invested in some well diversified retirement fund, it will not care what happened yesterday. if you pick and choose individual stocks to make quick (2 years or less) turnarounds.... then you may have to do some more reading on those companies. i am assuming that if you were that kind of short-term investor you would not be asking/. this question, so i am guessing you will be fine at least in the long term.
i realize that's a debatable topic maybe? obviously you had the first CRT iMac, and that's a real Rev A. in a sense isn't the first slot loading CRT iMac (Rev D or whatever it was) subject to some of the issues a Rev A has?
i got the first Core 2 Duo iMac a few weeks after it came out, though it would hardly be considered a Rev A since that case originated with a G5 iMac. it has been tweaked (iSight camera included, innards shuffled) since the G5 version, they have replaced the optical drives, redone the layout a bit. while i share the hesitation of buying a Rev A machine.... buying this machine made me ponder what really counts as a Rev A?
the Mac Pro tower looks the same as the G5 towers, but the insides have been totally redone. they were redone a few times with the G5 chips as well, so any revision to the machine made changes.
just a guess, but personally i think the laptops are where the real Rev A issues can come out? real world use may reveal issues with a hinge assembly or some durability that doesn't hold up. as for desktops, i would think it is more an issue of quality control on the components, and those can change with every revision. i am sure there are exceptions, but in general a desktop machine is pretty basic. i suppose Apple could completely screw up a desktop machine, like if the G4 iMac (the sunflower looking one) had an arm that just flopped over after a few months, but that's the risk of thinking outside the box. i can only assume those CRT iMacs were tested extensively without fans, and seeing how most of them held up fine, i am going to blame quality control. the G4 cube lacked a fan, but had an external display and power supply, so that was a relative cakewalk. it is interesting that the eMac had a fan. i wondered if it was a response to the FBT issues, or something else in the components they knew would heat up. one issue i saw with iMacs in cluttered settings was people putting crap on top of the machine (blocking the vents on top). i can't imagine that was good for it.
you obviously have not seen the movie, unless something about Jewish heritage gives people the power to shape-shift? i don't think there is much truth to that nonsense.
it's all so over the top that, to me, it comes across more as commentary. i realize that some of the movie is staged, but some of the most amazing thing that Ali G/Borat/Bruno pulls off is the reaction people have to him. Borat is interesting because a lot of people gloss over things he says and write it off as poor English, or some cultural gap..... but the things people say to him are shocking at times. you can see how it plays out in the trailer.
Borat's country of origin is almost unimportant because nobody seems to know where it is or anything about it. his 'language' is a mix of random eastern european vocab (from what i can tell). i know some of it is Polish, and i am pretty sure it's not words that are the same inn other languages. i suppose if somebody caught him on it, that would not make it to air.... unless it got really funny.
all that being said.... the movie was funny as hell.
that link says it is an issue with Rev A-D CRT iMacs. while i won't disagree that there is an issue with those machines..... i wonder how long they should work before failure can be considered a design issue? i work at a college radio station that had 2 older CRT iMacs. they were running 24/7 in the DJ control rooms and lasted 5 or 6 years. we have another that is from that same purchase time that still works 100% fine (just kind of slow now). of the 2 that we no longer use, one may have the FBT issue, and the other seemed to just be a dead HDD. they were replaced with core duo iMacs earlier this year, so they were never totally diagnosed and repaired. we needed something faster to run some newer software, so they were on the way out anyway....
my point being, if those 3 machines made it 6+ years before *something* failed... is that acceptable? i am not trying to defend big business or anything, but why did those (and countless others) not suffer from lack of cooling, when they all had the same ventilation design. with no fan, it was all convection cooling. that would make me thing *some* of the FBTs were not to spec. should Apple fix that? sure, if it happened in a reasonable time frame, and if it comes down to it they should fire the company that is producing their machines. i would assume there is a contract that Apple puts the cost on them for not meeting specs, assuming that's what it was. i'm sure a business major or lawyer could come up with a really crappy way to defend the whole process.
i'm not saying there are not problems, but i am not sure how rampant they really are. i am not sure if it is a major design flaw considering the people i know with the Rev A iMacs have no problems. i wonder if some of it is a problem with quality control of the parts. they may have been designed to handle the amount of cooling the machine has, but there are some machines/parts that really are out of spec and unable to handle normal operating conditions. when everything is outsourced so many times over it is hard to nail down what's happening. that's the same with any computer manufacturer. same way it is hard to blame Apple/Dell/etc for the faulty batteries that were produced under the Sony flag. it was not a case of those manufacturers providing inadequate cooling or something, it was a defective part made by a 3rd party not living up to design spec. a lot of people seem to have no issue with the batteries, or they work ok for a certain number of years...... but there is a (hopefully) small amount of defects that slipped past Sony's quality control. most Joe 6-Pack consumers will remember that their Apple or Dell or ????? laptop had an issue, and not that Sony had a problem making a batch of batteries a few years ago. it could be some part in your iMac that is technically defective related to the design specs. the blame will fall on Apple because it's an Apple product in the end, but when most computers are made by a handful of super manufacturing plants, then it gets harder to pinpoint the definite cause of the problem (in terms of troubleshooting... not consumer happiness).
i think i have this right...... basically he is calling for a tax on every internet connection (including cell phones etc). that tax going into a giant pot, and some magical piece of software decides what artists deserve what cut of that pot.
he compared it to the licensing schemes for radio etc, but the radio one is kind of based on radio station submitting lists of what songs get spun however many times. if the station drops the ball reporting, or the artist is not registered, then they get nothing.
i am not sure what magic software will know how many times certain songs are downloaded? he didn't call for a central government run P2P site, or something that monitors all net traffic to figure out what songs are being transferred. i could see some small artist with a computer hacker friendly fan base becoming very very profitable if they could make it looks like a lot of people are downloading their songs.
he seems to gloss over the technical difficulties, and the odd fact that, say, my mother, would pay as much as a 16 year old kid with 500 GB of hard disks to fill. i guess that's how blanket taxes work though. great. i don't see a need for world governments to unite and go through all this crap to save the music industry as we know it. even if they wanted to, i bet it would take years and years to hash it out.
do you realize they are thinking of the computers as educational tools... like e-books kind of? they are not concerned with those kids getting on ebay or myspace
seriously, if you are not just trying to start a flame war, i wonder if it is just the abundance of people's complaints being heard louder than before. i only one Apple portable (an ibook) that's worked flawlessly for the last 5 years. i have never had a serious issue with my desktops (going back to before the Macintosh). out of people i directly know with Apple computers, nobody has had a serious issue that Apple did not resolve in a decent way. i know somebody that knows somebody that had some terrible story about tech support or some wonky product, but nobody i personally know. even people i know that run out an buy Rev A products seem to do fine.
i'm typing this on a core 2 duo iMac, and while this basic form factor goes back to the G5 iMac, it is slightly revised when they popped in the CPU upgrade. no problems here. my iPods have worked a-ok. my G4 tower is 6.5 years old and it still chugs along. i also work in an university edu environment that is 100 percent Mac and we have not had any significant Mac failures in the last 14 years that i have been there. i think about 10 years ago we have a power supply go bad on a machine under 2 years old. that's really about it. it really makes me wonder if you just hear more about people's issues. is it law firms hoping for class action cases? just angry consumers with a lot of bottled up anger? i have no idea. no matter what it is, i have not been scared off of Apple hardware. because of the university setting (a radio station) i have sworn off a lot of manufacturers of audio gear, but nothing like that with Macs.
i guess there are no actual statistics available for how many people have issues, just some survey over consumer satisfaction?
maybe this is not intended for the children you see on TV that you can feed for the cost of a cup of coffee a day (or whatever it is). there is a large leap from that to the relatively stable learning environment of the western world. there are places in the world that have somewhat stable food and housing. if they are rural and the central government is a mess.... does it matter that much to a remote village?
in terms of offering "a stable democracy".... who is supposed to create that? i don't think the MIT Media Lab or the OSS community have much experience in that. heck, even the UN is not doing such a great job there either.
the article said they need orders from at least five countries at 1,000,000 units each to make the price breaks. it implied that at 5,000,000 - 10,000,000 units the cost would actually be more like $140/unit. none of the $ includes distribution costs either. it's a lofty goal to get to the $100/unit level.... but they think it's possible. i am assuming part of the reason they need 1,000,000 minimum per country is that the specific keyboards/software for the location. the main guts will be universal, but obviously the keyboards and software have to be location/language specific.
the 100,000 donation thing is something else i think? there is no intention to commercially sell these in the US or other countries, so maybe that group of people struck a deal to offer a sale to the general public if they were going to pay for the production of 300,000 of them. i guess at initial startup costs it is really more like buy 2, get to keep one and send on to a needy kid.
i think it's quite possible a percentage of your donation would be eligible for tax write off. i am speaking about the USA btw. i am pretty sure the organization would have to set up some of that nonsense first, and when you donate/buy you would get a form and receipt for your donation. groups have to apply to get/give those tax break incentives. has to do with being a non-profit and whatever else. it's quite possible that you can not apply all $300. as somebody else said, when you donate to a group, like PBS or NPR, you may get a tote bag or some CDs and at least a portion of that donation is eligible as a tax write off.
basically if you had given them $300, it might not actually be $300 less you owe the government.
this is not like trying to westernize India, this is giving people a tool. nobody is insulting their cultural beliefs, making them change their clothes, eating habits etc etc.
i think the laptops are designed to work without a stable infrastructure? maybe that is the point? some places that have constant turmoil at the government level mean the infrastructure is going to be a mess. the last thing we need is the UN or USA to go "fix it". if the more rural places get these laptops, and they work out, then it is giving them a chance to survive through the turmoil periods and still have some functioning educational system. they do not require internet access to work. they were to be pre-loaded with educational materials. that's a lot cheaper than textbooks and workbooks, and completely reusable as long as the machine is functional.
honestly, the people really behind the $100 laptop program are pretty much computer nerds, right? they are not the UN, or a nation's government. they are a group of people that happened upon this idea and got some help to try to make it happen. these are not the same people that would otherwise be teaching villagers sustainable farming techniques or passing out malaria vaccines. they are applying their own expertise to help out people less fortunate than them. in a way it's not so unlike Dean Kamen working on that simple to maintain water pump + purification device. i am sure somebody else could say that he should be spending his time and money to fight (insert disease), but that's something he chooses to do.
the $100 laptop obviously won't help the people in the world's worst conditions, but when people have food and shelter and a somewhat stable life, i don't see harm in giving them tools for an education.
as a long-time Mac user i remember some fallout of the clones. if i remember right, Apple hired a lot of key engineers from the clone makers. one of those clone companies was making a sub-$1000 clone Macintosh that wasn't too bad. that had been unheard of until then. was it Umax? anyway, i had heard a rumor that some of those people were brought in to make the original iMac as (relatively) cheap as it was back then. the impact of the iMac was based on its design as much as its cost and decent computing power. if it had cost $3,000 it would have failed miserably. it was powerful enough that people upgraded their older beige Macs to them if they did not need the power/size of the G3 tower.
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I'm inclined to disagree with Newt on this and at the same time I want to do everything possible to get the barbaric bastards who keep killing innocent people. It's tough and it's only going to get tougher. The world is about to get really scary, I'm afraid.seriously... the world has always been very scary. today we have information overload. not to downplay the event, but imagine if something akin to 9-11 happened 25 years ago. if you lived on the west coast, or elsewhere in the world, odds are slim that you would have seen anything like the coverage that was available live. real information would have been given on the evening news and later in newspapers. as is the live feeds were more images than actual information of the causes.
there have always been bad things going on around the world and inside the USA. there always will be. i'm not saying people should give up trying to stop mass murder and terrorism, but crime and murder will never be 100% eliminated. it's just not possible.
the government can not say "look how effective our secret methods are because we have not had a terrorist attack since 9-11" and then follow it up with "we can not let people speak freely or bad things may occur". i could also say that eating a fair amount of garlic seems to keep terrorism from happening within a few miles of my location. it hasn't failed yet.
it's a stab in the dark, but if you are going to build super-plants and shave every penny, i am guessing China is cheaper than India for manufacturing. China also is relatively accessible to the western coast of the USA by freighters, and has a billion potential workers that can be paid less than India.
Obviously India *had* a large pool of well educated workers that could be paid less than the USA. if you look at a map, it seems that shipping from India adds some twists and turns that China does not. i don't know how much of an issue that is, but if it's uneasy waters, then i am sure it matters. using India for tech support type work just means you have to run a set of cables there, not move super-freighters in and out.
again, i am just guessing. i am sure the governments themselves are a major issue, but when you deal in those kinds of volume... every little bit counts. China was wise to do this manufacturing. they are brought up to speed with what the world in making. they have their hands in most cutting edge technology, so no matter what their own home grown scientists and engineers can accomplish, they also get a peek at the rest of the world.
i don't know if it is true, but i had heard that the Korean car manufacturers learned a TON about design and manufacturing efficiency from the years they spent building cars for the Japanese companies. that's why they can be so competitive, and then just learn where to shave off some costs to stay cheaper. it's nothing new. a lot of American manufacturing plants have only stayed competitive by adapting to Japanese styles of running a plant. it does not work in some cases, but when it does, it will blow everything else out of the water. there are plenty of books written about converting an old american plant to a new (japanese based) method of manufacturing. it does not *all* come down to labor costs.
i could see a consumer taking a risk on a bootleg CD or DVD. in general it is a digital copy, and unless the movie was film handheld inside a theater, the quality will probably be ok. the cost is low and the risk is low. ethics aside, it's not going to kill you.
when you get into the world of pirated automobiles..... um. i don't even know what to think about that. makes you wonder how they can be competitive. that's obviously a massive operation employing a ton of people.
i feel like i need to look into what a "pirated/bootleg car" actually means?
i can see that for the emissions software. i believe it was something to do with what would trigger the Check Engine light, resulting in the car going to a service shop. the replacement of a 10 year old catalytic convertor on a car with just a hair under 100,000 miles is what surprised me.
i suppose emissions inspections are not uniform country-wide. i would not have passed the PA emissions for Philadelphia if the cat was that far out of spec. i know that from experience. hmm, there may even be parts of PA that don't do an emissions test, or it is a visual test (for modifications or rotten parts). the odd part is that they do just go eventually, at least in my experience. it seemed strange it took 10 years to decide that. i had to replace the one myself on my 1992 Cherokee when it rotted away.
i really think that Microsoft, Apple, Creative, etc etc etc would prefer not to have any DRM on their devices. Apple didn't have much of anything until they started negotiations for the iTMS. iirc the only thing the iPod did was make the /music directory invisible, and there was a VERY simple fix for that. i don't know if that still holds true or not though.
i don't 100% understand the Zune DRM (i just don't care enough to research it), but Apple's is really only on the files you buy from iTMS. on the iPod, the files themselves are not encrypted, but the device makes it harder to get them off than a regular HDD. i would think there could be a fix for this, though i never looked. i suppose maybe if Microsoft (or anyone else) dropped any association with an online store (including their own), they could do whatever they want? kind of like MP3 players were 5 years ago. i think that was only pulled off because the music industry didn't really know what MP3 players were. they were not selling in any numbers, and only the Nomad was any kind of threat (in terms of a roving pirate ship). it probably didn't sell enough to be on the radar. other players were what, 32 MB? seriously, they were tiny flash players. my friend would put a gym mix playlist on his and that would pretty much fill it. it was neat, but you paid a lot for that digital mix tape. oh how things have changed.
my jeep cherokee just had a recall issues a few months ago for wonky software and possibly a rotten catalytic convertor. the car is a 1996 model! seems crazy to me, but i took it in and they replaced the catalytic convertor for free after doing the software update. i had been planning on replacing the cat before my inspection, and was expecting to pay a few hundred dollars for it. if it was some failure with the brakes or or some safety issue, i can see a massive recall, but for an exhaust component? seems weird to me, but i'm not complaining.
it really does not seem like these cops knew what a stun gun was for. i suppose they may have been caught up in some heat of the moment blind rage where they just lost it, but then obviously they have no business being a cop/security officer. it seemed like there were enough of them around that ONE of them should have remembered their training about what a stun gun does.
again, if it were not for video phones, i guess this situation would have been a local blurb. if it were caught on in-house cameras i am sure we would not have seen the footage on youtube.
now i just have to set it up so i can upload video clips right from my phone. i feel like that may come in handy sometime. the "just in case" situation where my phone may be destroyed, lost or stolen.
did you watch the video? they *randomly* grabbed the guy as he was leaving the building. they zapped him, then zapped him again when he would not stand up. the point of tasers is that they incapacitate the person for a bit of time. you are not supposed to zap somebody to get their attention. you zap them to knock them down. to then zap them again because they can't hop up and comply is crap. those cops/guards should know that. real police use them to knock somebody out of commission enough that they can cuff them or put them in a car or whatever.
i realize we do not see what precedes the situation, but after they start zapping the guy they can not expect him to just hop up and be docile. they also had a crapload of cops around an unarmed student. they could have just as easily picked him up or something if that was a concern. they obviously were not worried about his safety by zapping him 5 times in that few minute span. there is no reason they could not restrain him some other way if they really felt it was that important.
being a cop/guard on a college campus means you signed up to deal with potentially obnoxious students. it might be rough, but how could you not realize that was going to happen? i can't imagine a situation where some rude student that did not have his ID deserved that kind of battery.
a while ago i remember reading Microsoft people said it might take 5 years to catch on. this was before the iPod even hit its 5th birthday.
1) if it will be a supposed hit in 5 years, why buy one today?
2) who knows what iPods, or any MP3 players will be in 5 years.
just for reference take the first iPod (5 GB), jump 5 years to the nano (tiny! 8GB, color screen, lots of battery life etc). if they can not merge a good MP3 player with tons of storage in a cell phone in the next 5 years, then i quit. i am sure some sort of standalone players will exist (for running or whatever), video players, wifi whatever. if iPods still exist, i would guess they have a slow evolution. the simplicity is what makes them so popular.
maybe they can eventually buy a song, or a yo-yo or something.
that Canadian media tax was also put on blank CDs and DVDs iirc. oddly i do not think it applied to HDDs, just plastic media and portable MP3 players. didn't the iPod/MP3 player part of that tax get overturned? i thought there was some sort of rebate. i know the same idea has bounced around in parts of Europe too.
yeah, because wikipedia is never wrong.
i did know some people that justified the price of the PS2 because it had a DVD player. at the time a DVD player was what, $200+? whatever the price was, people (i knew) thought of it like: (PS2 cost) - (DVD player cost) = acceptable increase if they were going to buy a standalone DVD player anyway. i suppose a test of this is knowing how many of those DVD remotes they sold.
i agree that the PS3 does not have the same bonus appeal. DVDs were so much better than VHS, the jump to the new formats does not seem to have the same upgrade feel. if you dropped the money on a HD flat panel TV etc etc and care that much to upgrade all your movies.... the cost issue is probably insignificant.
i agree that this is going to be the opposite effect..... people will now just happen to have a Blu-Ray compatible player so they may start buying some movies on that format (if there is some special edition or something). i have a feeling the quality issues won't be enough at this point, for this audience at least.
the opinions i heard yesterday during the day (on CNN) was this: the stock market likes stability. if congress is split between two parties, that could lead to a lot of uncertainty. the market likes to have an idea what will happen in the future (duh). having one party controlling everything is somewhat predictable, so is total gridlock. those are things the market likes. i am not sure if this will work out to be gridlock or unpredictable instability. i forget how that is defined. possibly that was a President from one party (with the veto power) and Congress slightly tipped towards the other party (but not enough to overturn a veto). that may be what this shakes out to be?
/. this question, so i am guessing you will be fine at least in the long term.
the idea of market performance under Republican or Democrat control in DC is not really an issue. it may matter with specific industries, but the market overall does not care. things like big oil, defense contractors and pharmaceuticals may have more trouble, but things like alternative energy will get more attention. if your money is invested in some well diversified retirement fund, it will not care what happened yesterday. if you pick and choose individual stocks to make quick (2 years or less) turnarounds.... then you may have to do some more reading on those companies. i am assuming that if you were that kind of short-term investor you would not be asking
i realize that's a debatable topic maybe? obviously you had the first CRT iMac, and that's a real Rev A. in a sense isn't the first slot loading CRT iMac (Rev D or whatever it was) subject to some of the issues a Rev A has?
i got the first Core 2 Duo iMac a few weeks after it came out, though it would hardly be considered a Rev A since that case originated with a G5 iMac. it has been tweaked (iSight camera included, innards shuffled) since the G5 version, they have replaced the optical drives, redone the layout a bit. while i share the hesitation of buying a Rev A machine.... buying this machine made me ponder what really counts as a Rev A?
the Mac Pro tower looks the same as the G5 towers, but the insides have been totally redone. they were redone a few times with the G5 chips as well, so any revision to the machine made changes.
just a guess, but personally i think the laptops are where the real Rev A issues can come out? real world use may reveal issues with a hinge assembly or some durability that doesn't hold up. as for desktops, i would think it is more an issue of quality control on the components, and those can change with every revision. i am sure there are exceptions, but in general a desktop machine is pretty basic. i suppose Apple could completely screw up a desktop machine, like if the G4 iMac (the sunflower looking one) had an arm that just flopped over after a few months, but that's the risk of thinking outside the box. i can only assume those CRT iMacs were tested extensively without fans, and seeing how most of them held up fine, i am going to blame quality control. the G4 cube lacked a fan, but had an external display and power supply, so that was a relative cakewalk. it is interesting that the eMac had a fan. i wondered if it was a response to the FBT issues, or something else in the components they knew would heat up. one issue i saw with iMacs in cluttered settings was people putting crap on top of the machine (blocking the vents on top). i can't imagine that was good for it.
you obviously have not seen the movie, unless something about Jewish heritage gives people the power to shape-shift? i don't think there is much truth to that nonsense.
it's all so over the top that, to me, it comes across more as commentary. i realize that some of the movie is staged, but some of the most amazing thing that Ali G/Borat/Bruno pulls off is the reaction people have to him. Borat is interesting because a lot of people gloss over things he says and write it off as poor English, or some cultural gap..... but the things people say to him are shocking at times. you can see how it plays out in the trailer.
Borat's country of origin is almost unimportant because nobody seems to know where it is or anything about it. his 'language' is a mix of random eastern european vocab (from what i can tell). i know some of it is Polish, and i am pretty sure it's not words that are the same inn other languages. i suppose if somebody caught him on it, that would not make it to air.... unless it got really funny.
all that being said.... the movie was funny as hell.
that link says it is an issue with Rev A-D CRT iMacs. while i won't disagree that there is an issue with those machines..... i wonder how long they should work before failure can be considered a design issue? i work at a college radio station that had 2 older CRT iMacs. they were running 24/7 in the DJ control rooms and lasted 5 or 6 years. we have another that is from that same purchase time that still works 100% fine (just kind of slow now). of the 2 that we no longer use, one may have the FBT issue, and the other seemed to just be a dead HDD. they were replaced with core duo iMacs earlier this year, so they were never totally diagnosed and repaired. we needed something faster to run some newer software, so they were on the way out anyway....
my point being, if those 3 machines made it 6+ years before *something* failed... is that acceptable? i am not trying to defend big business or anything, but why did those (and countless others) not suffer from lack of cooling, when they all had the same ventilation design. with no fan, it was all convection cooling. that would make me thing *some* of the FBTs were not to spec. should Apple fix that? sure, if it happened in a reasonable time frame, and if it comes down to it they should fire the company that is producing their machines. i would assume there is a contract that Apple puts the cost on them for not meeting specs, assuming that's what it was. i'm sure a business major or lawyer could come up with a really crappy way to defend the whole process.
i'm not saying there are not problems, but i am not sure how rampant they really are. i am not sure if it is a major design flaw considering the people i know with the Rev A iMacs have no problems. i wonder if some of it is a problem with quality control of the parts. they may have been designed to handle the amount of cooling the machine has, but there are some machines/parts that really are out of spec and unable to handle normal operating conditions. when everything is outsourced so many times over it is hard to nail down what's happening. that's the same with any computer manufacturer. same way it is hard to blame Apple/Dell/etc for the faulty batteries that were produced under the Sony flag. it was not a case of those manufacturers providing inadequate cooling or something, it was a defective part made by a 3rd party not living up to design spec. a lot of people seem to have no issue with the batteries, or they work ok for a certain number of years...... but there is a (hopefully) small amount of defects that slipped past Sony's quality control. most Joe 6-Pack consumers will remember that their Apple or Dell or ????? laptop had an issue, and not that Sony had a problem making a batch of batteries a few years ago. it could be some part in your iMac that is technically defective related to the design specs. the blame will fall on Apple because it's an Apple product in the end, but when most computers are made by a handful of super manufacturing plants, then it gets harder to pinpoint the definite cause of the problem (in terms of troubleshooting... not consumer happiness).
i think i have this right...... basically he is calling for a tax on every internet connection (including cell phones etc). that tax going into a giant pot, and some magical piece of software decides what artists deserve what cut of that pot.
he compared it to the licensing schemes for radio etc, but the radio one is kind of based on radio station submitting lists of what songs get spun however many times. if the station drops the ball reporting, or the artist is not registered, then they get nothing.
i am not sure what magic software will know how many times certain songs are downloaded? he didn't call for a central government run P2P site, or something that monitors all net traffic to figure out what songs are being transferred. i could see some small artist with a computer hacker friendly fan base becoming very very profitable if they could make it looks like a lot of people are downloading their songs.
he seems to gloss over the technical difficulties, and the odd fact that, say, my mother, would pay as much as a 16 year old kid with 500 GB of hard disks to fill. i guess that's how blanket taxes work though. great. i don't see a need for world governments to unite and go through all this crap to save the music industry as we know it. even if they wanted to, i bet it would take years and years to hash it out.
do you realize they are thinking of the computers as educational tools... like e-books kind of? they are not concerned with those kids getting on ebay or myspace
seriously, if you are not just trying to start a flame war, i wonder if it is just the abundance of people's complaints being heard louder than before. i only one Apple portable (an ibook) that's worked flawlessly for the last 5 years. i have never had a serious issue with my desktops (going back to before the Macintosh). out of people i directly know with Apple computers, nobody has had a serious issue that Apple did not resolve in a decent way. i know somebody that knows somebody that had some terrible story about tech support or some wonky product, but nobody i personally know. even people i know that run out an buy Rev A products seem to do fine.
i'm typing this on a core 2 duo iMac, and while this basic form factor goes back to the G5 iMac, it is slightly revised when they popped in the CPU upgrade. no problems here. my iPods have worked a-ok. my G4 tower is 6.5 years old and it still chugs along. i also work in an university edu environment that is 100 percent Mac and we have not had any significant Mac failures in the last 14 years that i have been there. i think about 10 years ago we have a power supply go bad on a machine under 2 years old. that's really about it. it really makes me wonder if you just hear more about people's issues. is it law firms hoping for class action cases? just angry consumers with a lot of bottled up anger? i have no idea. no matter what it is, i have not been scared off of Apple hardware. because of the university setting (a radio station) i have sworn off a lot of manufacturers of audio gear, but nothing like that with Macs.
i guess there are no actual statistics available for how many people have issues, just some survey over consumer satisfaction?
maybe this is not intended for the children you see on TV that you can feed for the cost of a cup of coffee a day (or whatever it is). there is a large leap from that to the relatively stable learning environment of the western world.
there are places in the world that have somewhat stable food and housing. if they are rural and the central government is a mess.... does it matter that much to a remote village?
in terms of offering "a stable democracy".... who is supposed to create that? i don't think the MIT Media Lab or the OSS community have much experience in that. heck, even the UN is not doing such a great job there either.
the article said they need orders from at least five countries at 1,000,000 units each to make the price breaks. it implied that at 5,000,000 - 10,000,000 units the cost would actually be more like $140/unit. none of the $ includes distribution costs either. it's a lofty goal to get to the $100/unit level.... but they think it's possible.
i am assuming part of the reason they need 1,000,000 minimum per country is that the specific keyboards/software for the location. the main guts will be universal, but obviously the keyboards and software have to be location/language specific.
the 100,000 donation thing is something else i think? there is no intention to commercially sell these in the US or other countries, so maybe that group of people struck a deal to offer a sale to the general public if they were going to pay for the production of 300,000 of them. i guess at initial startup costs it is really more like buy 2, get to keep one and send on to a needy kid.
i think it's quite possible a percentage of your donation would be eligible for tax write off. i am speaking about the USA btw. i am pretty sure the organization would have to set up some of that nonsense first, and when you donate/buy you would get a form and receipt for your donation. groups have to apply to get/give those tax break incentives. has to do with being a non-profit and whatever else. it's quite possible that you can not apply all $300. as somebody else said, when you donate to a group, like PBS or NPR, you may get a tote bag or some CDs and at least a portion of that donation is eligible as a tax write off.
basically if you had given them $300, it might not actually be $300 less you owe the government.
this is not like trying to westernize India, this is giving people a tool. nobody is insulting their cultural beliefs, making them change their clothes, eating habits etc etc.
i think the laptops are designed to work without a stable infrastructure? maybe that is the point? some places that have constant turmoil at the government level mean the infrastructure is going to be a mess. the last thing we need is the UN or USA to go "fix it". if the more rural places get these laptops, and they work out, then it is giving them a chance to survive through the turmoil periods and still have some functioning educational system. they do not require internet access to work. they were to be pre-loaded with educational materials. that's a lot cheaper than textbooks and workbooks, and completely reusable as long as the machine is functional.
honestly, the people really behind the $100 laptop program are pretty much computer nerds, right? they are not the UN, or a nation's government. they are a group of people that happened upon this idea and got some help to try to make it happen. these are not the same people that would otherwise be teaching villagers sustainable farming techniques or passing out malaria vaccines. they are applying their own expertise to help out people less fortunate than them. in a way it's not so unlike Dean Kamen working on that simple to maintain water pump + purification device. i am sure somebody else could say that he should be spending his time and money to fight (insert disease), but that's something he chooses to do.
the $100 laptop obviously won't help the people in the world's worst conditions, but when people have food and shelter and a somewhat stable life, i don't see harm in giving them tools for an education.
as a long-time Mac user i remember some fallout of the clones. if i remember right, Apple hired a lot of key engineers from the clone makers. one of those clone companies was making a sub-$1000 clone Macintosh that wasn't too bad. that had been unheard of until then. was it Umax? anyway, i had heard a rumor that some of those people were brought in to make the original iMac as (relatively) cheap as it was back then. the impact of the iMac was based on its design as much as its cost and decent computing power. if it had cost $3,000 it would have failed miserably. it was powerful enough that people upgraded their older beige Macs to them if they did not need the power/size of the G3 tower.