Furthermore, netbooks offer superior functionality at a superior price.
If you believe that, then I think you have yet to use a tablet (any tablet, not just an iPad).
With a tablet, I can sit in a chair, recline in a lazy-boy, and generally use it in a way that the traditional clam shell laptop/netbook just doesn't really work. I can lay in a hammock, or sit in my back yard in a lawn chair, or lay down in bed. I really don't use it the same way I would a laptop or a netbook.
You fundamentally use and interact with a tablet differently that you do something with a traditional keyboard. You end up holding it more like a book than a computer, and you do a different set of tasks with it, and in different places. I've used mine laying flat on my back on my sofa.
I have an iPad, and I know a couple of people with Playbooks -- and regardless of brand, tablet owners uniformly feel that the form factor of the tablet is just different. You're not sitting and typing for the most part, you're surfing the web, or reading email, or playing videos or reading books -- things which don't require you to be sitting upright at a desk.
Trust me, the tablet form factor cannot be replaced with a netbook... and just because the tasks that you want to do with it leave you with the same old keyboard and mouse paradigm, doesn't mean that all of those people buying tablets are getting inferior functionality. They're getting an entirely different kind of device that gets used entirely differently -- no matter if it's made by Apple, RIM, or HP.
If you can't see that getting away from the keyboard/monitor/mouse paradigm is actually a shift in the way people interact with computers, then you suffer from a lack of imagination, or you still only use computers in the way we've used them for the last several decades and can't imagine why someone would want to do something differently.
It's not an unfounded assertion, that's the marketing campaign that Apple's been running for at least a decade now.
I must have missed the "only trendy people buy Apple" part of the ad campaign. In fact, the only thing I really remember about the marketing campaign is a bunch of shadows with white headphones, but I don't pay close attention to marketing so I really have no idea.
They have a history of making inferior products, the iPods were never as good as the competition failing to support the same DRM that everybody else supported and not including a user replaceable battery for instance.
*laugh* I've had iPods for the last 10 years... and, if you think that the product is 'inferior' because it doesn't support the same DRM as everybody else... well, that's your opinion. I've always used it to play non-DRM MP3s I rip from my own CDs (most of which were ripped on FreeBSD) -- so it's not like I've needed to support DRM. The competition was what... the Zune? Where is it now? And, I've never once needed to replace a battery in an iPod (though I do understand it has come up).
Go ahead, tell me it doesn't support Ogg Vorbis... so I can have another laugh -- someone always whines there's no support for Ogg Vorbis despite the fact that I have only every known one person who cared about it as a file format (and even he gave up and starting using MP3). The vast majority of people have no idea of WTF it is, let a lone why they could possibly care.
You're entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. You're more or less asserting that your opinions are facts... to you it was an inferior product, to me it was a superior product... these are both subjective opinions, not facts. Though, one might argue that actual sales numbers might back up my opinion more than yours. But, I'm sure you'll discount the sales figured on the sole basis that it was clearly the trendy people buying them and they don't count.
Tell you what, walk up to the next 50 year old you see with an iPhone and tell them all of the reasons why you think their product of choice is wrong. See where that gets you. By all means, hate Apple all you want... but don't act all smug and pretend that you are in on some objective reality that the rest of the world isn't. Preference for consumer products is about as subjective as you get.
No, it means that 35% are fanbois that care more about being seen as well off than with the quality of the product.
So, that's an assertion, and a biased one at that.
As someone who doesn't own a smart phone, but who knows tons of people who have them... I'm more inclined to think that these people are exceedingly satisfied with their phones, and expect that a new generation will continue to be more of the same.
I actually don't know a single person who owns an iPhone (or iPod, or iPad) who owns it to "be seen as well off" -- in fact, they own them because of a perceived quality of the product and the overall user experience.
Do you have anything that actually objectively supports the notion that people buying these devices are more concerned with the perceptions of other people than they are of their own perceptions of quality? Because I can tell you for a fact that I like my iPod and my iPad because, in part, I like the consistency of iTunes across these devices... I sync the same data to these devices using the same tool. (And I've used the Palm Pre my wife's work bought her... quite frankly, I'm underwhelmed.)
I just don't get this unfounded assertion that everybody with something made by Apple has it as purely a fashion statement. In fact, most of the people I know who own these devices fall into one of two categories: 1) people who aren't technology buffs but want something which 'just works', and 2) people who work with technology but have reached an age where endless fiddling with a device is more of a nuisance and want something which 'just works'. I'm afraid I have no samples from the shallow teenager department as my sample is all from people aged 30+.
Hell, the last time I flew on a plane, the old man in the seat in front of me (easily in his 70s) took out his hearing aid (!), and put in the headphones from his iPhone to listen to music for the flight. I'm pretty sure he doesn't have an iPhone to look trendy or cool.
Why is everybody so wedded to this notion of these products being bought only by hipsters who wish to be seen with one? My observations show me as many people with sore hips have them as any other demographic.
But the MBA is a vocational degree, so it doesn't really fit into the traditional college degree format.
Except that as I understand it, there's an increasing trend to do a Commerce degree, immediately followed by an MBA. For some people, this is the new traditional college degree format, it just takes 2 more years for your B. Comm or whatever it is to actually count for anything.
Of course, the problem with this is that an increasing number of MBA's have no real experience in anything but university, so when they get out into the world, they think they know how everything works -- and they think their years in business school have made them Experts.
Not to slag the concept of an MBA, but I am willing to bet more than a few of us have seen what happens when someone who is essentially a fresh college graduate thinks he knows how to run an engineering entity (and, in fact, doesn't know how to do anything).
The engineers and tech people I've known with MBA's at least make sense and fit with the original intent of an MBA in the first place -- to give more formal business rigor to people who came from different disciplines. But if you've basically just spent 6 years getting your MBA, and have never worked on anything, you're going to discover really quick that your stunning lack of experience and domain knowledge makes you a liability. Or, sadly, the management people won't realize it until you've already destroyed something you didn't understand in the first place.
And, given what a Master's has always implied... I really do find it tough to believe that it's becoming the new Bachelor's degree.
No kidding... I have seen two movies in 3D, and will never see another. I had eye strain and a headache for several hours after.
I am not paying more to see the movie if it hurts, but, given that everybody else seems to like it, I question how long before I have no option but 3D.
If I am randomly stopped by a police officer who wishes to take an iris scan, this isn't about me being innocent and 'working with the police to prove my innocence'... This completely violates the assumption that I am innocent in the first place. On what basis have you established that I might not be innocent? Because you don't like my hat?
I seriously don't get people who think it is natural that I should subject myself to being arbitrarily catalogued and identified on the whim of some cop with a shiny gadget.
There used to be a presumption that I was free to go about my business, until a police officer had probable cause. In your version of things, random stops and 'papers please' becomes the norm... This is not what a free society does.
What you are effectively saying is "think of the children"... The mistaken belief that we should allwaive our rights so that the nebulous concept of "the greater good" can be served.
Fuck that.
Police don't get to walk up to me on the street and 'suggest' that I allow myself to be fingerprinted... WTF is different about this just because it s fast and automated?
If you don't get this, you are part of the problem.
Yes, but the publishers and copyright holders have been trying to make sure that they are the only ones who can re-publish public domain works and get a fresh copyright.
Google is muscling in on their business model by trying to more or less keep stuff in the public domain, and then give it away and effectively keep it in the public domain.
They've already bought laws in their favor, if Google beats them to the punch, corporate profits and executive bonuses could be affected.
The commons is something these companies do not want to persist.
And the 'invisible hand' will always be watching our back.... or is it...
Oh, it's watching... but it plans on stealing your wallet.
The 'invisible hand' doesn't do what its worshipers claim it does... the only question is if they know that, or are still deluding themselves that it works.
A person cannot volunteer to be subject to coercion (i.e. physical force or threat thereof), just as a person cannot coerce another person into volunteering.
My, what a highly abstract and idealized world you live in. In your world, these are concrete, immutable principles... but reality doesn't fall into these neat boxes arranged according to your rigid taxonomy of the world. Do you get out much?
People do not behave according to strictly logical, either/or rules... your thesis makes for a good hypothetical abstraction, but it doesn't make it true. It's overly simplified, and ignores behavior you can observe readily.
Ahh, the blind worship in the inherent rationality and logic of mankind... nothing was ever so misplaced as this.
OK, my apologies... I was referring to one of these... it actually was 0.895MHz (I had one of the oldest ones). So that's only 895 KHz, definitely not single digits.
So, I might have over-stated just how slow it was... not by much though. That was a very long time ago.
I also remember my parents paying to upgrade to 16K of RAM, which means it actually started out with 4KB according to that spec sheet.
It wasn't quite steam powered, but it's getting there.:-P
This analysis of the scientific research on the subject reveals that our brains unconsciously develop an affinity for products we choose over similarly attractive alternatives.
People in general have an affinity to belong to groups... Tribes, religions, sports teams, Coke or Pepsi, vi or emacs, KY or Astroglide...
People invest their self worth into these things, and they feel threatened when challenged. Sometimes, they feel motivated to tell everybody else how they should also sign up for this exclusive club.. because it further validates their self image.
I think the reverse is also true, some people have invested just as much into disliking something... oh, for example, the almost irrational hatred of Apple you see here on Slashdot (which, if I remember correctly, is about what it was for Microsoft about 8-10 years ago).
That the 'other guy is a doodie head' is part of the us/them image you build up. He simply has to be a doodie head, because he disagrees with you on a topic on which You Are Right(tm).
I suspect from an evolutionary perspective, this is probably indicative of a broader range of how people have affinities for group membership as a whole.
Or, I'm talking completely out of my ass... it could go either way really.:-P
It's like watching all of the scariest bits of 1984 and Brave New World all coming together.
A world in which citizens have no liberties, and think that's how it should be. The state controls everything and tells you what to think. McCarthyism meets the Keystone Kops.
If the Americans are voluntarily giving up all of their liberties for this farce of security... then the rest of the world us screwed. Because governments which have slightly less compunction about running roughshod over their citizens will be quite willing to do this as well... in fact, they'll be required to in order to allow a flight into the US. Give it time, and the US will require these like the other heightened security measures.
So, the great bastion of personal liberties is essentially leading the charge to stripping them away from themselves and dragging everybody else along with them. All in the name of protecting those very liberties they're giving up.
I grieve for what America used to stand for. I also grieve for how it bodes for the rest of us.
Remember, everything was text. No fancy graphics or sounds (except for the single beep tone)... so a terminal wired right into the mainframe at 9600 baud on a serial line was an absolutely screaming connection. Most people couldn't read at the scroll rate of 9600 baud anyway.
Hell, in 1988 when I started university, we still used line editors... oddly enough, I think it actually was on a VAX 11/780. With a line editor, a 300 baud modem was a usable speed. My connection from home on dialup was every bit as good as the VT52's in the lab, which was good.
Back then, a 360K floppy held a lot of data, and nobody could figure out what you'd do with the 650MB of a CD. Docs were smaller, and the total amount of data we owned was a tiny fraction of what is now one or two MP3s.
I routinely chuckle at the fact that I've personally paid $700 for 16MB of RAM and $350 for a 325MB hard drive... now I've got 8GB of RAM and a total of 6TB of disk space in my home computer. My first computer had 16K of RAM, and a CPU speed measured in kHz (single digit).
I think the fact that Ethernet is still around is a testament to the fact that it was a well designed protocol from the beginning, and it has been able to scale.
I can only wait to see what kind of wacky stuff we'll be running in just a few years... and I'm pretty sure there will still be an 802.x transport layer.:-P
If you had Windows Backup and Restore lacks the ability to restore individual files without restoring the whole save point. At it did when I last used it.
I'm getting close to ditching the Windows Backup and Restore because it's so damned limited.
My "Vista Home Ultimate" only allows me to have one backup scheduled... I can't schedule one drive to back up to one place, and another to back up to another. It's got almost no granularity of anything, and generally seems like it was so crippled to give you something which was "almost adequate" as a backup solution. Because heaven forbid Microsoft give me something functional... they want the extra money from the Vista Ultimate Super Duper Edition.
I didn't realize I couldn't restore individual files... which I think pretty much makes the software useless to me. Time to look into an alternative I guess.
I've got truck loads of disk space, but I think now I need to find better software for this kind of thing.
If you saw a man professing to follow the teachings of the Buddha sitting in Burger King, tapping out a quadruple cheeseburger, you'd say to yourself, "Hmm... I don't think he's really Buddhist."
You know, I've read a lot of books on Buddhism... and, oddly enough, cheeseburgers don't really come up much in the literature.:-P There is no actual rule against meat (or cheeseburgers)... though, the burger might indicate some attachment. Or, he could be really hungry.
The barrier of entry it pretty low... just four things. That's it. If you believe in those four things, you're a Buddhist.
I realize you were likely joking, but your example actually is completely unrelated to if that person would be a Buddhist or not. Now, like anything else, you can be a Buddhist to varying degrees. Cheeseburgers, however, wouldn't strictly be obstacles to enlightenment unless you couldn't live without them.:-P
Moral or not, justified or not, the decisions of the group of people calling themselves the government are enforced by armed men that are willing to use deadly force to compel obedience. If you try tell me that they won't use deadly force to compel obedience then you are lying, not disagreeing.
Name me one example of laws not being applied under authority and eventually under threat of enforcement and therefore force? Otherwise, they'd be suggestions and guidelines.
You're advocating for either a hypothetical abstraction which has never existed because everyone makes nice nice... or a society in which things are 'self regulating' because everybody is carrying a gun and will 'take care of their own problems'. Sounds like the wild west to me -- lawlessness reaching equilibrium.
How exactly do you think laws get applied? Or, do you think in your utopia that there would be no such need because we'd all play by the same rules that you seem to think are natural facts?
In your system, how are criminals handled? How are laws enforced? What keeps the strong from preying on the weak? I suspect very likely your responses to these will be vague hand-wavy ideals of how things would work in a perfect (and unattainable) society, but will be somewhat lacking in practical details.
You like to focus on how you're under duress to continue living in a society... and, you don't seem willing to let go of this particular bone... so, get it out of your system... how do you think this would all work? How do you implement laws and protect people? Or have you thought this through beyond your own personal relationship with this notional government? As I said, your way comes down to "screw everybody else".
I'm not the one holding the gun. As long as you assert that one group of people have the right to use violence to force another group of people to purchase a service that they do not choose voluntarily I will continue to point out the gun in the room. If you want a truce then all you need to do is put the gun away.
Whatever... melodramatic... tired old arguments... irreconcilable points of view... bored now.
You're not a martyr in my eyes, but obviously are in your own.
"Caused by the flatulence of sauropods"... if that isn't real latin, then it's the best faux latin I've seen in a long time. And, if it is latin, bravo for knowing it.
SauroflatulogenicExpialidocious... oh, that's just funny.
Slashdot Mirror
And, possibly landing someplace you didn't expect.
That would be bad. :-P
If you believe that, then I think you have yet to use a tablet (any tablet, not just an iPad).
With a tablet, I can sit in a chair, recline in a lazy-boy, and generally use it in a way that the traditional clam shell laptop/netbook just doesn't really work. I can lay in a hammock, or sit in my back yard in a lawn chair, or lay down in bed. I really don't use it the same way I would a laptop or a netbook.
You fundamentally use and interact with a tablet differently that you do something with a traditional keyboard. You end up holding it more like a book than a computer, and you do a different set of tasks with it, and in different places. I've used mine laying flat on my back on my sofa.
I have an iPad, and I know a couple of people with Playbooks -- and regardless of brand, tablet owners uniformly feel that the form factor of the tablet is just different. You're not sitting and typing for the most part, you're surfing the web, or reading email, or playing videos or reading books -- things which don't require you to be sitting upright at a desk.
Trust me, the tablet form factor cannot be replaced with a netbook ... and just because the tasks that you want to do with it leave you with the same old keyboard and mouse paradigm, doesn't mean that all of those people buying tablets are getting inferior functionality. They're getting an entirely different kind of device that gets used entirely differently -- no matter if it's made by Apple, RIM, or HP.
If you can't see that getting away from the keyboard/monitor/mouse paradigm is actually a shift in the way people interact with computers, then you suffer from a lack of imagination, or you still only use computers in the way we've used them for the last several decades and can't imagine why someone would want to do something differently.
I must have missed the "only trendy people buy Apple" part of the ad campaign. In fact, the only thing I really remember about the marketing campaign is a bunch of shadows with white headphones, but I don't pay close attention to marketing so I really have no idea.
*laugh* I've had iPods for the last 10 years ... and, if you think that the product is 'inferior' because it doesn't support the same DRM as everybody else ... well, that's your opinion. I've always used it to play non-DRM MP3s I rip from my own CDs (most of which were ripped on FreeBSD) -- so it's not like I've needed to support DRM. The competition was what ... the Zune? Where is it now? And, I've never once needed to replace a battery in an iPod (though I do understand it has come up).
Go ahead, tell me it doesn't support Ogg Vorbis ... so I can have another laugh -- someone always whines there's no support for Ogg Vorbis despite the fact that I have only every known one person who cared about it as a file format (and even he gave up and starting using MP3). The vast majority of people have no idea of WTF it is, let a lone why they could possibly care.
You're entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. You're more or less asserting that your opinions are facts ... to you it was an inferior product, to me it was a superior product ... these are both subjective opinions, not facts. Though, one might argue that actual sales numbers might back up my opinion more than yours. But, I'm sure you'll discount the sales figured on the sole basis that it was clearly the trendy people buying them and they don't count.
Tell you what, walk up to the next 50 year old you see with an iPhone and tell them all of the reasons why you think their product of choice is wrong. See where that gets you. By all means, hate Apple all you want ... but don't act all smug and pretend that you are in on some objective reality that the rest of the world isn't. Preference for consumer products is about as subjective as you get.
So, that's an assertion, and a biased one at that.
As someone who doesn't own a smart phone, but who knows tons of people who have them ... I'm more inclined to think that these people are exceedingly satisfied with their phones, and expect that a new generation will continue to be more of the same.
I actually don't know a single person who owns an iPhone (or iPod, or iPad) who owns it to "be seen as well off" -- in fact, they own them because of a perceived quality of the product and the overall user experience.
Do you have anything that actually objectively supports the notion that people buying these devices are more concerned with the perceptions of other people than they are of their own perceptions of quality? Because I can tell you for a fact that I like my iPod and my iPad because, in part, I like the consistency of iTunes across these devices ... I sync the same data to these devices using the same tool. (And I've used the Palm Pre my wife's work bought her ... quite frankly, I'm underwhelmed.)
I just don't get this unfounded assertion that everybody with something made by Apple has it as purely a fashion statement. In fact, most of the people I know who own these devices fall into one of two categories: 1) people who aren't technology buffs but want something which 'just works', and 2) people who work with technology but have reached an age where endless fiddling with a device is more of a nuisance and want something which 'just works'. I'm afraid I have no samples from the shallow teenager department as my sample is all from people aged 30+.
Hell, the last time I flew on a plane, the old man in the seat in front of me (easily in his 70s) took out his hearing aid (!), and put in the headphones from his iPhone to listen to music for the flight. I'm pretty sure he doesn't have an iPhone to look trendy or cool.
Why is everybody so wedded to this notion of these products being bought only by hipsters who wish to be seen with one? My observations show me as many people with sore hips have them as any other demographic.
Except that as I understand it, there's an increasing trend to do a Commerce degree, immediately followed by an MBA. For some people, this is the new traditional college degree format, it just takes 2 more years for your B. Comm or whatever it is to actually count for anything.
Of course, the problem with this is that an increasing number of MBA's have no real experience in anything but university, so when they get out into the world, they think they know how everything works -- and they think their years in business school have made them Experts.
Not to slag the concept of an MBA, but I am willing to bet more than a few of us have seen what happens when someone who is essentially a fresh college graduate thinks he knows how to run an engineering entity (and, in fact, doesn't know how to do anything).
The engineers and tech people I've known with MBA's at least make sense and fit with the original intent of an MBA in the first place -- to give more formal business rigor to people who came from different disciplines. But if you've basically just spent 6 years getting your MBA, and have never worked on anything, you're going to discover really quick that your stunning lack of experience and domain knowledge makes you a liability. Or, sadly, the management people won't realize it until you've already destroyed something you didn't understand in the first place.
And, given what a Master's has always implied ... I really do find it tough to believe that it's becoming the new Bachelor's degree.
No kidding ... I have seen two movies in 3D, and will never see another. I had eye strain and a headache for several hours after.
I am not paying more to see the movie if it hurts, but, given that everybody else seems to like it, I question how long before I have no option but 3D.
Public domain? How quaint ... Do we still have that? Or will they reassert copyright over it as a result of publishing it? :(
I have little faith in this (but I applaud anybody who actually left this in the public domain).
You pre-suppose that I did anything.
If I am randomly stopped by a police officer who wishes to take an iris scan, this isn't about me being innocent and 'working with the police to prove my innocence' ... This completely violates the assumption that I am innocent in the first place. On what basis have you established that I might not be innocent? Because you don't like my hat?
I seriously don't get people who think it is natural that I should subject myself to being arbitrarily catalogued and identified on the whim of some cop with a shiny gadget.
There used to be a presumption that I was free to go about my business, until a police officer had probable cause. In your version of things, random stops and 'papers please' becomes the norm ... This is not what a free society does.
What you are effectively saying is "think of the children" ... The mistaken belief that we should allwaive our rights so that the nebulous concept of "the greater good" can be served.
Fuck that.
Police don't get to walk up to me on the street and 'suggest' that I allow myself to be fingerprinted ... WTF is different about this just because it s fast and automated?
If you don't get this, you are part of the problem.
Yes, but the publishers and copyright holders have been trying to make sure that they are the only ones who can re-publish public domain works and get a fresh copyright.
Google is muscling in on their business model by trying to more or less keep stuff in the public domain, and then give it away and effectively keep it in the public domain.
They've already bought laws in their favor, if Google beats them to the punch, corporate profits and executive bonuses could be affected.
The commons is something these companies do not want to persist.
Oh, it's watching ... but it plans on stealing your wallet.
The 'invisible hand' doesn't do what its worshipers claim it does ... the only question is if they know that, or are still deluding themselves that it works.
My, what a highly abstract and idealized world you live in. In your world, these are concrete, immutable principles ... but reality doesn't fall into these neat boxes arranged according to your rigid taxonomy of the world. Do you get out much?
People do not behave according to strictly logical, either/or rules ... your thesis makes for a good hypothetical abstraction, but it doesn't make it true. It's overly simplified, and ignores behavior you can observe readily.
Ahh, the blind worship in the inherent rationality and logic of mankind ... nothing was ever so misplaced as this.
Read me another story.
I believe in all things in life there is a happy middle ground.
All categorical statements are wrong and over-simplified. ;-)
OK, my apologies ... I was referring to one of these ... it actually was 0.895MHz (I had one of the oldest ones). So that's only 895 KHz, definitely not single digits.
So, I might have over-stated just how slow it was ... not by much though. That was a very long time ago.
I also remember my parents paying to upgrade to 16K of RAM, which means it actually started out with 4KB according to that spec sheet.
It wasn't quite steam powered, but it's getting there. :-P
People in general have an affinity to belong to groups ... Tribes, religions, sports teams, Coke or Pepsi, vi or emacs, KY or Astroglide ...
People invest their self worth into these things, and they feel threatened when challenged. Sometimes, they feel motivated to tell everybody else how they should also sign up for this exclusive club .. because it further validates their self image.
I think the reverse is also true, some people have invested just as much into disliking something ... oh, for example, the almost irrational hatred of Apple you see here on Slashdot (which, if I remember correctly, is about what it was for Microsoft about 8-10 years ago).
That the 'other guy is a doodie head' is part of the us/them image you build up. He simply has to be a doodie head, because he disagrees with you on a topic on which You Are Right(tm).
I suspect from an evolutionary perspective, this is probably indicative of a broader range of how people have affinities for group membership as a whole.
Or, I'm talking completely out of my ass ... it could go either way really. :-P
It's like watching all of the scariest bits of 1984 and Brave New World all coming together.
A world in which citizens have no liberties, and think that's how it should be. The state controls everything and tells you what to think. McCarthyism meets the Keystone Kops.
If the Americans are voluntarily giving up all of their liberties for this farce of security ... then the rest of the world us screwed. Because governments which have slightly less compunction about running roughshod over their citizens will be quite willing to do this as well ... in fact, they'll be required to in order to allow a flight into the US. Give it time, and the US will require these like the other heightened security measures.
So, the great bastion of personal liberties is essentially leading the charge to stripping them away from themselves and dragging everybody else along with them. All in the name of protecting those very liberties they're giving up.
I grieve for what America used to stand for. I also grieve for how it bodes for the rest of us.
Somehow, I'm forced to suggest an alternative.
The fact that they're releasing Rise of The Planet of the Apes in a couple of weeks seems apropos here. :-P
That 10Mbps Ethernet was hella fast at the time.
Remember, everything was text. No fancy graphics or sounds (except for the single beep tone) ... so a terminal wired right into the mainframe at 9600 baud on a serial line was an absolutely screaming connection. Most people couldn't read at the scroll rate of 9600 baud anyway.
Hell, in 1988 when I started university, we still used line editors ... oddly enough, I think it actually was on a VAX 11/780. With a line editor, a 300 baud modem was a usable speed. My connection from home on dialup was every bit as good as the VT52's in the lab, which was good.
Back then, a 360K floppy held a lot of data, and nobody could figure out what you'd do with the 650MB of a CD. Docs were smaller, and the total amount of data we owned was a tiny fraction of what is now one or two MP3s.
I routinely chuckle at the fact that I've personally paid $700 for 16MB of RAM and $350 for a 325MB hard drive ... now I've got 8GB of RAM and a total of 6TB of disk space in my home computer. My first computer had 16K of RAM, and a CPU speed measured in kHz (single digit).
I think the fact that Ethernet is still around is a testament to the fact that it was a well designed protocol from the beginning, and it has been able to scale.
I can only wait to see what kind of wacky stuff we'll be running in just a few years ... and I'm pretty sure there will still be an 802.x transport layer. :-P
I'm getting close to ditching the Windows Backup and Restore because it's so damned limited.
My "Vista Home Ultimate" only allows me to have one backup scheduled ... I can't schedule one drive to back up to one place, and another to back up to another. It's got almost no granularity of anything, and generally seems like it was so crippled to give you something which was "almost adequate" as a backup solution. Because heaven forbid Microsoft give me something functional ... they want the extra money from the Vista Ultimate Super Duper Edition.
I didn't realize I couldn't restore individual files ... which I think pretty much makes the software useless to me. Time to look into an alternative I guess.
I've got truck loads of disk space, but I think now I need to find better software for this kind of thing.
You know, I've read a lot of books on Buddhism ... and, oddly enough, cheeseburgers don't really come up much in the literature. :-P There is no actual rule against meat (or cheeseburgers) ... though, the burger might indicate some attachment. Or, he could be really hungry.
The barrier of entry it pretty low ... just four things. That's it. If you believe in those four things, you're a Buddhist.
I realize you were likely joking, but your example actually is completely unrelated to if that person would be a Buddhist or not. Now, like anything else, you can be a Buddhist to varying degrees. Cheeseburgers, however, wouldn't strictly be obstacles to enlightenment unless you couldn't live without them. :-P
I get the impression that the Time Capsule is actually keeping versions ... so every time you modify a file, you have the backup.
Rsync is basically just doing a copy.
I'm not 100% sure, but I get the impression that the actual Apple product is doing something more complicated than a simple rsync.
Name me one example of laws not being applied under authority and eventually under threat of enforcement and therefore force? Otherwise, they'd be suggestions and guidelines.
You're advocating for either a hypothetical abstraction which has never existed because everyone makes nice nice ... or a society in which things are 'self regulating' because everybody is carrying a gun and will 'take care of their own problems'. Sounds like the wild west to me -- lawlessness reaching equilibrium.
How exactly do you think laws get applied? Or, do you think in your utopia that there would be no such need because we'd all play by the same rules that you seem to think are natural facts?
In your system, how are criminals handled? How are laws enforced? What keeps the strong from preying on the weak? I suspect very likely your responses to these will be vague hand-wavy ideals of how things would work in a perfect (and unattainable) society, but will be somewhat lacking in practical details.
You like to focus on how you're under duress to continue living in a society ... and, you don't seem willing to let go of this particular bone ... so, get it out of your system ... how do you think this would all work? How do you implement laws and protect people? Or have you thought this through beyond your own personal relationship with this notional government? As I said, your way comes down to "screw everybody else".
Oh, in order to be good faux Latin, it needs at least some grammar elements of actual Latin.
Which is why Sauroflatulogenic is so brilliant ... you can actually deduce it's meaning. It could actually be close to valid Latin, but I have no idea.
You say there is, I disagree. We've covered this already. Enjoy your martyrdom if it helps define you.
Whatever ... melodramatic ... tired old arguments ... irreconcilable points of view ... bored now.
You're not a martyr in my eyes, but obviously are in your own.
I bid you peace.
Expialidocious?
"Caused by the flatulence of sauropods" ... if that isn't real latin, then it's the best faux latin I've seen in a long time. And, if it is latin, bravo for knowing it.
SauroflatulogenicExpialidocious ... oh, that's just funny.