Let's say it all works just exactly as advertised and is adopted.
It will make things safer for a short time. Then everyone will get less alert, because they'll expect the car to take care of warning them.
People will make their own decisions about whether they are too drowsy or intoxicated to drive, and if driving is a little easier they'll let themselves get a little drowsier or intoxicated than they would have before, and things will be just about as safe as they were before.
Whenever these sorts of phenomena occur, it almost always transpires that an adolescent--for some reason, usually a girl--just happened to present nearby whenever they occurred. The people involved tend not to mention this to authorities, because there are always good reasons why the adolescent (who is usually a model of good behavior) couldn't possibly have had anything to do with it.
The scientists are wasting their time if they're using instruments and looking for an electrical or atmospheric explanation. They need to be looking for a human explanation.
Shout louder, SHOUT LOUDER, **SHOUT LOUDER**
on
Real Problems
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
A lot of companies seem to feel that if people aren't listening to their advertisements, they should make their advertisements louder... if people aren't paying attention to their advertisements, they should make them more intrusive... if people aren't buying the upgrade, they should nag them oftener.
When my son was three years old, he used to act the same way. If you didn't pay attention to him, he thought the answer was to yell. Or pester. Or throw a tantrum.
If we assume that these batteries have a capacity of 1000 mah, which seems like a reasonable figure since they say they can power an MP3 player for 80 hours, then charging it in 30 seconds implies that during the charging process it is accepting 120 watts.
a) That's not going to be any tiny little wall transformer doing the charging.
b)I sure hope they have the safety and quality assurance issues worked out, because if it doesn't shut off at the exact instant when the battery is fully charged, that 120 watts is going to go somewhere.
It might not be much more dangerous than a firecracker but I suspect it could be pretty dramatic.
Perhaps HyperCard's biggest commercial success was the series of games released by Cyan: "The Manhole," then "Cosmic Osmo," and finally "Myst" (based on a much-extended version of HyperCard).
I was in the room in 1987 at MacWorld Expo when BIll Atkinson announced that documentation for the format of Hypercard files was to be publicly released by Apple. He may have even mentioned the number of the technote. (It was in the low two digits back then). Everyone in the room applauded.
And I remember my disappointment a few months later when the technote with that number was, in fact issued--and consisted of a single sentence, to the effect that "The Hypercard file format is not available."
About a decade ago, I believe in Gerald M. Weinberg's The Psychology of Computer Programming, I read about a research study that tested the hypothesis that flowcharting is beneficial. They found that it was of no benefit at all. (If I recall correctly, what they found was beneficial was delineating chunks of code by separating them from each other with blank lines).
If traditional flowcharting isn't beneficial for traditional programming, why would O-O flowcharting be beneficial for O-O programming?
I've been using TurboTax for about six years. I had absolutely no reason to change. All that Intuit needed to do to keep me as a customer was not do anything to tick me off.
Last year, because of the product activation nonsense, I switched to TaxCut. I discovered that the products, while not quite clones, are very, very similar in operation and feature sets. Apart from DRM, there would have been very little reason to choose one over the other.
Now I'm a TaxCut customer, and I have absolutely no reason to change. All H & R Block needs to do to keep me is not tick me off.
Bye-bye, Intuit. It was nice while it lasted, but I'm gone.
Guess the people at Intuit that admired Microsoft's product activation forgot that Intuit doesn't have a monopoly on tax software.
In the early part of the century, automobiles were big, technically complex, unreliable, and needed expertise to run and maintain them. To put it simply, if you wanted to use an automobile, either you needed to be a technically sophisticated hobbyist or you needed the services of a chauffeur and a mechanic.
Now, they're product-like.
Software should be product-like. It is service-like because a) we still haven't figured out how to do it, and b) there is a combination of interests that is well-served by the status quo.
In theory, the quality should have been OK, and perhaps it was in a studio, on a high-quality monitor, via closed circuit.
In practice, the home receivers of the late 1950s and 1960s were lousy. They were very temperamental beasts. They had no built-in degaussers and if you moved them or turned them you'd get color changes due to the earth's magnetic field.
The tube circuits were unstable and drifted. They had no ability to compensate for any signal variation, so colors shifted from program to commercial, from program to station break, from program to program, and sometimes from camera to camera within a program. You were constantly leaping up to fiddle with the contrast, brightness, saturation, and hue adjustments.
The tubes were never properly converged (and had about seventeen tweaks needed to converge them).
The picture tubes were circular rather than rectangular and cut off significant parts of the picture. The phosphors couldn't deliver much brightness, so they couldn't put the usual neutral tint in the CRT face; a set when turned off looked pale grey rather than dark. When turned on, room light washed out the colors (and if you turned the brightness up the picture looked even worse).
They were trophies and icons of conspicuous consumption, but it wasn't much fun watching them. I've often suspect that at least part of the reason for the popularity of the Disney show is that animated cartoons were relatively unharmed by slight color distortions.
In the 1970s, solid-state circuits and the introduction of various AGC and other automatic-adjustment features finally brought home receivers to the point where they were worth watching.
Junk mailers, spammers, purveyors of popup ads, and advertisers in general are always asserting that many people enjoy their ads.
The whole business model for Internet banner ads, popups, etc. is based on the assumption that you will welcome ads for product categories of interest to you. So was the Prodigy online service (in the days before it became an ordinary ISP).
The failure of this business model should be proof, if proof were needed, that most people, most of the time, detest being interrupted or distracted by advertising. With very, very, very few exceptions, nobody likes ads that are pushed at them.
Most advertisers probably hate to acknowledge this, even to themselves, so Tivo's pitch may be briefly effective ("of course people will want to watch your ads, they're not like all the others..."), but eventually advertisers will notice that very, very few viewers are accepting their pushy little invitations.
The real brilliance of Google is that they discovered the only way in which ads really are acceptable: when they are the result of a user-initiated search for a specific product (note: a "pull" model rather than a "push" model).
Huh. If you have "a team of creative, engaged, disciplined professionals working together" you will get good results no matter what methodology is alleged to be in use.
Get good people who can work together and let them work, and you'll get good results.
I bought a Nuvomedia Rocket eBook in the year 2000. This is essentially the same device (and is content-compatible with) the Gemstar REB1100. I have bought approximately $400 worth of content for it.
All of its technical and usability characteristics are quite good. I can read for pleasure on it for extended periods of time and get lost in an immersive reading experience.
Gemstar has folded their eBook operation and pulled the plug on their servers. The DRM-protected content is keyed to a hardware serial number. When the device finally fails (and its battery life is now down to about half what it was originally), I believe that to all intents and purposes I will lose all access to that paid content.
Meanwhile, I have 25-year-old paperbacks that continue to be perfectly accessible.
What is needed to make eBooks popular is not any technology breakthroughs, but something that will hit greedy publishers over the head with a clue-by-four. When strangers see me reading on this thing it is often a conversation-starter. The conversation usually ends when they ask me what eBooks cost. I say "About the same as a hardbound for books that are only out in hardbound, and about the same as a paperback for books that in paper," they stare at me in disbelieve and the conservation ends right there.
And that doesn't even speak to the issue that I can't lend these books to my wife or my son, and couldn't even if they owned compatible eBook readers.
Sorry for such a boring post, but I have to say this is the best news I've heard in a long time. Hopefully this will reconcile those who understand the importance of a layperson-visible, inspectable, monitorable, open, recountable system, and those who are concerned about the rights of the disabled.
The clear presentation of a working alternative should make a real difference in the political dialog surrounding the issue.
...I will least you any requested domain name that meet my approval for the period 2700-2800 AD inclusive for just $229.95. That's less than $2.28 per year! And, of course, what with inflation, who knows what GoDaddy may be charging by then?
I will not actually register the domain names now, of course. I will only accept domain names I think are unlikely to get taken. As the year 2700 approaches I, or, um, rather, my company, will research the status of your domain name and either register it or buy it from whomever owns it.
And for just $108 more, I'll throw in a free Star Registration. That's right, I'll have the International Star Registry name a star after your URL! That... almost like... getting two registrations for the price of one!
But wait, there's more. Act now and also get a 100% valid title deed for one square inch of land zoned residential on planet Smegma, I mean Sedna. Now how much would you pay?
...this is a another sad case of Apple regressing to the mean.
From 1984 through, say, 1998, Apple documentation was some of the best documentation I've ever used. (And I've used the VAX/VMS documentation that came in thirty-or-so China-red binders). Apple documentation accurate, well-written, well-organized, thorough, complete, and written in a down-to-earth developer-to-developer tone of voice.
Meanwhile, my colleagues developing for Windows were struggling with DDK components that were "documented" only with sample code, getting hints and tips from magazine articles, or reading "official" MS material that mixed an enormous amount of propaganda with the technical information.
Unfortunately, one of the things that appears to have come in with the NeXT subculture is a more casual attitude toward documentation. Perhaps they were too much in a hurry to release OS X (did I actually say perhaps?) Perhaps it's a not-so-benign influence of open-source development. I still find all too often that the header files are as good or better documentation than the documents.
OS X documentation is much, much better than it was, say, a year-and-a-half ago, so hopefully this is being addressed. But it really is a pity to journey from superb documentation to inadequate documentation, then climb slowly up to sorta-OK documentation.
The release of the hardbound Inside Mac volumes 1-3 had a tremendous impact within a certain now-defunct Fortune 500 minicomputer company. One director was running around slamming it down on peoples' desks and saying "Look at this! What does it say about Apple? They expect their software to be around forever!"
...well, I don't know... it sounds like a nice idea, but it seems to me that it is important particularly in the lower grades to have direct physical content with examples and objects. This seems to me to be part of a disturbing trend to replace everything real in the classroom with animated computer simulations (yes, I understand that the bugs and the electron microscope are real, but it is going to feel like watching an animation on a computer screen).
I have to think viewing a bug through a good 25-power stereo microscope, or even a decent hand lens, might be more educational. I hope that science teachers can still pry enough money out of school boards for microscopes.
Not only do you get to view the bug, but you get to see how a microscope is put together, assuming the teacher is wise enough to let you remove the eyepieces and fiddle around with the thing. Biology and physics at the same time!
You can buy a very capable stereo microscope for about half the price of a computer.
"I'm not expert and I haven't plugged it in..."
on
eBay Fraud Vigilantes
·
· Score: 1
The ones I love are the descriptions of old electrical items, phonographs, wire recorders, whatnot, that say "I haven't plugged it in" while vaguely implying that it sort of looks as if it ought to work.
No problems with lawnsale-ish junk.
on
eBay Fraud Vigilantes
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I've been buying and selling low-value items on eBay for some time with nothing but good results. It's fun.
The other day, I remembered an LP I found fascinating when I was a kid, called "Hearing is Believing." RCA put it out--I believe they gave it away for free--in the early fifties. It was an introduction to hi-fi. I suddenly "I'd get a kick out of hearing that again." I went on to eBay, there was a copy up for bid at a starting bid of $3.00, nobody else bid, I got it for $3.00 plus $3.50 shipping, and experienced a intense burst of pleasurable nostalgia at hearing it again.
Nobody can make a fortune scamming people $3 at a time, so most of the low-value weird junk items are legit. And if they aren't--so you're out a few dollars, who cares?
I won't say there are easy answers, but by far the largest number of horror stories seem to all be about one specific category: people that believe they can get new or practically new electronic gadgets for substantially below the new price. Indeed, no doubt you sometimes can, but that is the kind of item where the risk is high.
Of course, trading junk doesn't appeal to everyone, but I think it is one of eBay's highest and best uses.
Columbia introduced the 33-1/3 RPM LP in 1948. RCA deliberately introduced the incompatible 45. During the "war of the speeds," both companies saw sales fall sharply. RCA's fell more and in 1950 they capitulated. By that time, the damage was done and users of turntables were saddled for five decades with the extra costs of multi-speed turntables and a variety of clumsy, awkward, expensive spindle adapters.
Just wait, any day now some DVD "standards" group is going to suggest changing the size of the hole. They've dicked around with almost everything else, it's about all that's left.
Intermingling of fact and definition
on
Sedna May Have A Moon
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It is always interesting to watch science being created. In this case, you see the nexus of a) actual facts (the discovery of a celestial object) with b) the completely artificial process of trying to name and classify things.
Is Sedna "really" a planet? Sedna is what it is, of the size and composition that it is, in the orbit that it is in. Sedna does not know or care whether it is "really" a planet or a minor planet or a dwarf planet or a comet.
Naming disputes are interesting because they always reflect the relative influence and authority of the people giving the names. Not being an astronomer, I can't identify who exactly is jockeying for positioning. Naming and classifying are part of the prescientific process. In a few decades we will probably have a better idea of how real these groupings of similar objects really are.
There's still something wrong with this, though. Spam is what I say it is. How can any algorithm know whether the message I received is unsolicited or not?
If I say it's SPAM, it's SPAM. If I say it's not SPAM, it's not SPAM. No filter can possibly be better than I am, and I don't want any filtering software claiming that it knows better than I. A personal message from a friend is still a personal message from a friend even if the subject line is "Hi" or "I love you."
You really have to wonder. Not one robot vehicle could drive 150 miles over terrain where the challenges were purely passive... nothing was actively trying to stop them, nothing was trying to evade them, nothing was shooting at them, no decoys were trying to confuse them. And not one of them got more than seven miles.
Does anyone really believe that missile defense is a much easier challenge? If not, does anyone really believe that it can succeed in the foreseeable future?
...my wife, who is a careful reader of manuals and a good learner, but not a techie or a computer geek, set out to buy herself a computer a couple of years ago. It was very important to her to do everything by herself without my looking over her shoulder. (You know how annoying it can be when you have a problem and someone sits down at your keyboard, click click type type magic magic and says "works now." Well, it does work, but you have no idea what was changed or why or how to deal with similar problems in the future).
She bought a Gateway specifically because of retail stores where she could look at the stuff, try it, and talk to real, helpful retail salespeople. Plus she liked the idea of her computer coming in a box that looks like a cow.
I don't know what the answer is, but the computer industry is still in a state of self-denial about how difficult and intimidating computer purchases are for the average person. PCs are actually harder to buy, install, and use then they were five years ago. Mail-order is not the answer for everyone, nor are "warehouse" clubs or computer superstores.
I don't know why retail hand-holding isn't working out for Gateway. But I know without it, they would have had one less sale.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say it all works just exactly as advertised and is adopted.
It will make things safer for a short time. Then everyone will get less alert, because they'll expect the car to take care of warning them.
People will make their own decisions about whether they are too drowsy or intoxicated to drive, and if driving is a little easier they'll let themselves get a little drowsier or intoxicated than they would have before, and things will be just about as safe as they were before.
Whenever these sorts of phenomena occur, it almost always transpires that an adolescent--for some reason, usually a girl--just happened to present nearby whenever they occurred. The people involved tend not to mention this to authorities, because there are always good reasons why the adolescent (who is usually a model of good behavior) couldn't possibly have had anything to do with it.
The scientists are wasting their time if they're using instruments and looking for an electrical or atmospheric explanation. They need to be looking for a human explanation.
A lot of companies seem to feel that if people aren't listening to their advertisements, they should make their advertisements louder... if people aren't paying attention to their advertisements, they should make them more intrusive... if people aren't buying the upgrade, they should nag them oftener.
When my son was three years old, he used to act the same way. If you didn't pay attention to him, he thought the answer was to yell. Or pester. Or throw a tantrum.
My three-year-old was wrong.
If we assume that these batteries have a capacity of 1000 mah, which seems like a reasonable figure since they say they can power an MP3 player for 80 hours, then charging it in 30 seconds implies that during the charging process it is accepting 120 watts.
a) That's not going to be any tiny little wall transformer doing the charging.
b)I sure hope they have the safety and quality assurance issues worked out, because if it doesn't shut off at the exact instant when the battery is fully charged, that 120 watts is going to go somewhere.
It might not be much more dangerous than a firecracker but I suspect it could be pretty dramatic.
Perhaps HyperCard's biggest commercial success was the series of games released by Cyan: "The Manhole," then "Cosmic Osmo," and finally "Myst" (based on a much-extended version of HyperCard).
I was in the room in 1987 at MacWorld Expo when BIll Atkinson announced that documentation for the format of Hypercard files was to be publicly released by Apple. He may have even mentioned the number of the technote. (It was in the low two digits back then). Everyone in the room applauded.
And I remember my disappointment a few months later when the technote with that number was, in fact issued--and consisted of a single sentence, to the effect that "The Hypercard file format is not available."
About a decade ago, I believe in Gerald M. Weinberg's The Psychology of Computer Programming, I read about a research study that tested the hypothesis that flowcharting is beneficial. They found that it was of no benefit at all. (If I recall correctly, what they found was beneficial was delineating chunks of code by separating them from each other with blank lines).
If traditional flowcharting isn't beneficial for traditional programming, why would O-O flowcharting be beneficial for O-O programming?
I've been using TurboTax for about six years. I had absolutely no reason to change. All that Intuit needed to do to keep me as a customer was not do anything to tick me off.
Last year, because of the product activation nonsense, I switched to TaxCut. I discovered that the products, while not quite clones, are very, very similar in operation and feature sets. Apart from DRM, there would have been very little reason to choose one over the other.
Now I'm a TaxCut customer, and I have absolutely no reason to change. All H & R Block needs to do to keep me is not tick me off.
Bye-bye, Intuit. It was nice while it lasted, but I'm gone.
Guess the people at Intuit that admired Microsoft's product activation forgot that Intuit doesn't have a monopoly on tax software.
In the early part of the century, automobiles were big, technically complex, unreliable, and needed expertise to run and maintain them. To put it simply, if you wanted to use an automobile, either you needed to be a technically sophisticated hobbyist or you needed the services of a chauffeur and a mechanic.
Now, they're product-like.
Software should be product-like. It is service-like because a) we still haven't figured out how to do it, and b) there is a combination of interests that is well-served by the status quo.
In theory, the quality should have been OK, and perhaps it was in a studio, on a high-quality monitor, via closed circuit.
In practice, the home receivers of the late 1950s and 1960s were lousy. They were very temperamental beasts. They had no built-in degaussers and if you moved them or turned them you'd get color changes due to the earth's magnetic field.
The tube circuits were unstable and drifted. They had no ability to compensate for any signal variation, so colors shifted from program to commercial, from program to station break, from program to program, and sometimes from camera to camera within a program. You were constantly leaping up to fiddle with the contrast, brightness, saturation, and hue adjustments.
The tubes were never properly converged (and had about seventeen tweaks needed to converge them).
The picture tubes were circular rather than rectangular and cut off significant parts of the picture. The phosphors couldn't deliver much brightness, so they couldn't put the usual neutral tint in the CRT face; a set when turned off looked pale grey rather than dark. When turned on, room light washed out the colors (and if you turned the brightness up the picture looked even worse).
They were trophies and icons of conspicuous consumption, but it wasn't much fun watching them. I've often suspect that at least part of the reason for the popularity of the Disney show is that animated cartoons were relatively unharmed by slight color distortions.
In the 1970s, solid-state circuits and the introduction of various AGC and other automatic-adjustment features finally brought home receivers to the point where they were worth watching.
Junk mailers, spammers, purveyors of popup ads, and advertisers in general are always asserting that many people enjoy their ads.
The whole business model for Internet banner ads, popups, etc. is based on the assumption that you will welcome ads for product categories of interest to you. So was the Prodigy online service (in the days before it became an ordinary ISP).
The failure of this business model should be proof, if proof were needed, that most people, most of the time, detest being interrupted or distracted by advertising. With very, very, very few exceptions, nobody likes ads that are pushed at them.
Most advertisers probably hate to acknowledge this, even to themselves, so Tivo's pitch may be briefly effective ("of course people will want to watch your ads, they're not like all the others..."), but eventually advertisers will notice that very, very few viewers are accepting their pushy little invitations.
The real brilliance of Google is that they discovered the only way in which ads really are acceptable: when they are the result of a user-initiated search for a specific product (note: a "pull" model rather than a "push" model).
Huh. If you have "a team of creative, engaged, disciplined professionals working together" you will get good results no matter what methodology is alleged to be in use.
Get good people who can work together and let them work, and you'll get good results.
hear my tale of woe.
I bought a Nuvomedia Rocket eBook in the year 2000. This is essentially the same device (and is content-compatible with) the Gemstar REB1100. I have bought approximately $400 worth of content for it.
All of its technical and usability characteristics are quite good. I can read for pleasure on it for extended periods of time and get lost in an immersive reading experience.
Gemstar has folded their eBook operation and pulled the plug on their servers. The DRM-protected content is keyed to a hardware serial number. When the device finally fails (and its battery life is now down to about half what it was originally), I believe that to all intents and purposes I will lose all access to that paid content.
Meanwhile, I have 25-year-old paperbacks that continue to be perfectly accessible.
What is needed to make eBooks popular is not any technology breakthroughs, but something that will hit greedy publishers over the head with a clue-by-four. When strangers see me reading on this thing it is often a conversation-starter. The conversation usually ends when they ask me what eBooks cost. I say "About the same as a hardbound for books that are only out in hardbound, and about the same as a paperback for books that in paper," they stare at me in disbelieve and the conservation ends right there.
And that doesn't even speak to the issue that I can't lend these books to my wife or my son, and couldn't even if they owned compatible eBook readers.
...I spotted a factoid I hadn't known in the referenced Wikipedia article
"The transition [from diamond] to graphite at room temperature is so slow as to be unnoticeable."
So, diamonds aren't forever, diamonds are just a really long time.
Sorry for such a boring post, but I have to say this is the best news I've heard in a long time. Hopefully this will reconcile those who understand the importance of a layperson-visible, inspectable, monitorable, open, recountable system, and those who are concerned about the rights of the disabled.
The clear presentation of a working alternative should make a real difference in the political dialog surrounding the issue.
...I will least you any requested domain name that meet my approval for the period 2700-2800 AD inclusive for just $229.95. That's less than $2.28 per year! And, of course, what with inflation, who knows what GoDaddy may be charging by then?
I will not actually register the domain names now, of course. I will only accept domain names I think are unlikely to get taken. As the year 2700 approaches I, or, um, rather, my company, will research the status of your domain name and either register it or buy it from whomever owns it.
And for just $108 more, I'll throw in a free Star Registration. That's right, I'll have the International Star Registry name a star after your URL! That... almost like... getting two registrations for the price of one!
But wait, there's more. Act now and also get a 100% valid title deed for one square inch of land zoned residential on planet Smegma, I mean Sedna. Now how much would you pay?
...this is a another sad case of Apple regressing to the mean.
From 1984 through, say, 1998, Apple documentation was some of the best documentation I've ever used. (And I've used the VAX/VMS documentation that came in thirty-or-so China-red binders). Apple documentation accurate, well-written, well-organized, thorough, complete, and written in a down-to-earth developer-to-developer tone of voice.
Meanwhile, my colleagues developing for Windows were struggling with DDK components that were "documented" only with sample code, getting hints and tips from magazine articles, or reading "official" MS material that mixed an enormous amount of propaganda with the technical information.
Unfortunately, one of the things that appears to have come in with the NeXT subculture is a more casual attitude toward documentation. Perhaps they were too much in a hurry to release OS X (did I actually say perhaps?) Perhaps it's a not-so-benign influence of open-source development. I still find all too often that the header files are as good or better documentation than the documents.
OS X documentation is much, much better than it was, say, a year-and-a-half ago, so hopefully this is being addressed. But it really is a pity to journey from superb documentation to inadequate documentation, then climb slowly up to sorta-OK documentation.
The release of the hardbound Inside Mac volumes 1-3 had a tremendous impact within a certain now-defunct Fortune 500 minicomputer company. One director was running around slamming it down on peoples' desks and saying "Look at this! What does it say about Apple? They expect their software to be around forever!"
...well, I don't know... it sounds like a nice idea, but it seems to me that it is important particularly in the lower grades to have direct physical content with examples and objects. This seems to me to be part of a disturbing trend to replace everything real in the classroom with animated computer simulations (yes, I understand that the bugs and the electron microscope are real, but it is going to feel like watching an animation on a computer screen).
I have to think viewing a bug through a good 25-power stereo microscope, or even a decent hand lens, might be more educational. I hope that science teachers can still pry enough money out of school boards for microscopes.
Not only do you get to view the bug, but you get to see how a microscope is put together, assuming the teacher is wise enough to let you remove the eyepieces and fiddle around with the thing. Biology and physics at the same time!
You can buy a very capable stereo microscope for about half the price of a computer.
The ones I love are the descriptions of old electrical items, phonographs, wire recorders, whatnot, that say "I haven't plugged it in" while vaguely implying that it sort of looks as if it ought to work.
I've been buying and selling low-value items on eBay for some time with nothing but good results. It's fun.
The other day, I remembered an LP I found fascinating when I was a kid, called "Hearing is Believing." RCA put it out--I believe they gave it away for free--in the early fifties. It was an introduction to hi-fi. I suddenly "I'd get a kick out of hearing that again." I went on to eBay, there was a copy up for bid at a starting bid of $3.00, nobody else bid, I got it for $3.00 plus $3.50 shipping, and experienced a intense burst of pleasurable nostalgia at hearing it again.
Nobody can make a fortune scamming people $3 at a time, so most of the low-value weird junk items are legit. And if they aren't--so you're out a few dollars, who cares?
I won't say there are easy answers, but by far the largest number of horror stories seem to all be about one specific category: people that believe they can get new or practically new electronic gadgets for substantially below the new price. Indeed, no doubt you sometimes can, but that is the kind of item where the risk is high.
Of course, trading junk doesn't appeal to everyone, but I think it is one of eBay's highest and best uses.
Columbia introduced the 33-1/3 RPM LP in 1948. RCA deliberately introduced the incompatible 45. During the "war of the speeds," both companies saw sales fall sharply. RCA's fell more and in 1950 they capitulated. By that time, the damage was done and users of turntables were saddled for five decades with the extra costs of multi-speed turntables and a variety of clumsy, awkward, expensive spindle adapters.
Just wait, any day now some DVD "standards" group is going to suggest changing the size of the hole. They've dicked around with almost everything else, it's about all that's left.
It is always interesting to watch science being created. In this case, you see the nexus of a) actual facts (the discovery of a celestial object) with b) the completely artificial process of trying to name and classify things.
Is Sedna "really" a planet? Sedna is what it is, of the size and composition that it is, in the orbit that it is in. Sedna does not know or care whether it is "really" a planet or a minor planet or a dwarf planet or a comet.
Naming disputes are interesting because they always reflect the relative influence and authority of the people giving the names. Not being an astronomer, I can't identify who exactly is jockeying for positioning. Naming and classifying are part of the prescientific process. In a few decades we will probably have a better idea of how real these groupings of similar objects really are.
...with plans for sequels entitled "Die Walkure," "Siegfried," and "Gotterdammerung."
There's still something wrong with this, though. Spam is what I say it is. How can any algorithm know whether the message I received is unsolicited or not?
If I say it's SPAM, it's SPAM. If I say it's not SPAM, it's not SPAM. No filter can possibly be better than I am, and I don't want any filtering software claiming that it knows better than I. A personal message from a friend is still a personal message from a friend even if the subject line is "Hi" or "I love you."
You really have to wonder. Not one robot vehicle could drive 150 miles over terrain where the challenges were purely passive... nothing was actively trying to stop them, nothing was trying to evade them, nothing was shooting at them, no decoys were trying to confuse them. And not one of them got more than seven miles.
Does anyone really believe that missile defense is a much easier challenge? If not, does anyone really believe that it can succeed in the foreseeable future?
...my wife, who is a careful reader of manuals and a good learner, but not a techie or a computer geek, set out to buy herself a computer a couple of years ago. It was very important to her to do everything by herself without my looking over her shoulder. (You know how annoying it can be when you have a problem and someone sits down at your keyboard, click click type type magic magic and says "works now." Well, it does work, but you have no idea what was changed or why or how to deal with similar problems in the future).
She bought a Gateway specifically because of retail stores where she could look at the stuff, try it, and talk to real, helpful retail salespeople. Plus she liked the idea of her computer coming in a box that looks like a cow.
I don't know what the answer is, but the computer industry is still in a state of self-denial about how difficult and intimidating computer purchases are for the average person. PCs are actually harder to buy, install, and use then they were five years ago. Mail-order is not the answer for everyone, nor are "warehouse" clubs or computer superstores.
I don't know why retail hand-holding isn't working out for Gateway. But I know without it, they would have had one less sale.