Not fast enough. You need flash prices to come down at least and order of magnitude to compete. I'm sorry, but I don't see the costs of a CMOS-based flash chip coming down to lower prices than a single-substance layer of film sandwiched within plastic. The manufacturing hardware alone makes for a significant difference of capital investment, and the input materials add another price difference.
Already you can get a 2 GB memory key for 19 bucks from NewEgg, which is just over the price of a DVD.
That's the cost of a piece of media with no licensed content on it. The majority of the cost of a DVD is not in the media, but in the content. Even if flash memory becomes possible to sell under the cost of of a current DVD movie, it needs to become more profitable than selling on optical media for studios to even consider it.
A single cent difference in the cost of a movie that sells 2 million copies is $20,000 lost. Why do you think manufacturers were up in arms many years ago when Apple talked about charging a small royalty fee for the patents it had on Firewire? If a few cents here and there hadn't meant so much, we wouldn't have USB 2.0 today.
Another important thing to note is that while we're probably a decade or more from flash memory catching up with BluRay's and HD-DVD's capacity, optical media is already getting ready to go to 300 GB and up when Tapestry discs come out. To convince consumers to switch away from DVD & the next-gen formats, there's going to have to be a major quality increase over the already too advanced next-gen formats. That's going to mean a significant increase in the size of content on the media, and your solution of flash memory is playing catch-up too slowly to compete.
The next step up from 1080i/1080p content that people are touting is 2160p. Encoding a movie at this standard will take up 4X the space that a 1080p movie takes up today. The next-gen optical media can handle it, though it won't be cost friendly for a while. So how long until flash catches up and does 100-200 GB in a cost effective manner?
I'm sorry, but that's both the most stridently racist and ridiculous nonsense and the worst abuse of statistical correlation to imply causality I've seen on Slashdot in a long ages, and I cannot believe that some fellow asshat modded it up.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: HD/BR are just bumps in the road. The next turning point in terms of mass media storage will be flash memory.
You are completely out of your mind. DVD media currently costs about 10 cents for over 4 GB. 4 GB of flash memory costs about $50-70. Even 128 KB costs a minimum of $8. BluRay and HD-DVD media will easily reach below $1 per disc for 25-30 GB within a year. At any point that flash memory comes down in price and goes up in storage capacity enough to compete with what we've currently got, optical storage is way out ahead already. The manufacturing costs of optical storage will never be exceeded by an equivalent amount of flash storage.
What possible advantage could going with flash memory have for the studios?
Sounds more like a tool to use on demonstrators who aren't armed, just pesky.
Correct. You would never deploy NLW in a situation where the target is armed with guns. This is meant to be used on peaceful protesters or, at worst, rock-throwers.
This link redirected me to a server named pr0n.encyclopediadramatica.com instead of www.encyclopediadramatica.com. I just hope my job doesn't automatically red-flag employee URLs browsed through the mandatory proxy, or I may soon be out of a job.
Any body without dipole won't heat. The radiation will "flow around" it.
Your point?
You do realize that bacteria are filled with water molecules -- which are dipoles -- right? This is how food heats in a microwave, regardless of whether it's larger than 12 cm or not.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money (X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free (X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
----
In addition, contacting a central STP source for every email would be expensive both computationally and in terms of bandwidth. The STP system would become a huge bottleneck.
I just don't see how politicians, "asshats," blacklists, talking about viagra, sabotage of public networks, email not being free, or killing people has anything to do with the proposal. Did you just random check boxes on yours?
How else did they expect it to work? Of course you need the god-damn water in the sponge. Microwaves have a wave length measured in the centimetre. The size of a bacterial spore is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller The size of a bateria is a lot smaller than this again.
So, are you suggesting that any body shorter than the wavelength of microwave radiation (12 cm) will be left unheated? Neat! That must be why my pizza rolls are still frozen when I get them out.
...Or maybe someone who feels superior to "the masses" need to really review the concept of dielectric heating.
What are you babbling about? Every store that I've gone to looking for a Wii has had PS3s available. The Best Buy on the way home has at least 20 something in a stack. The Fry's also on the way home has at least 15. Even my local Costco is now selling PS3 bundles ($699 for the 60 Gig version, an extra controller, and Genji).
Meanwhile, no one has a Wii. At my local GameStop, the employees treat the phone with apprehension because of people still calling constantly to ask if they have a Wii.
Everyone I ask about the availability of a Wii says, "No, but we have these..." and gestures over at the PS3s. They are repeatedly unsurprised and often chagrined that nobody wants one, and most will agree that the price is a bit high or try to feebly up-sell you on one with a look that says they know that I'm not going to buy their pitch even as they timidly start into it.
The PS3 is a dog and will be until someone puts out a game that people care about (e.g. Final Fantasy XIII) or the price comes down. Meanwhile, if you've got Wii's everywhere -- put the dang things up on eBay for the rest of us already!!
No offense, but maybe you'd sound less self-righteous if you started talking after you lost the weight. Until then, it kinda sounds like you literally don't know what you're talking about.
Hey. At the peak of my diet and exercise period from two years ago, I got down to about 15 lbs. over what I needed to be completely free of the gut I had left. I've gone back up 45 lbs. since then, but it's purely the result of my lazy and self-indulgent choices not to do what I need to do. However, that doesn't mean that either the original poster or I don't know what needs to be done.
Losing weight really is that simple -- stop consuming more calories than you burn and start burn more calories than you consume. The devil is in the details, though. You've got to find manageable ways to control the amount of food you eat and/or the calorie density of said food and ways to fit more exercise into your day. You've also got to find a way to keep the willpower to not indulge in bad habits again, especially with regards to unhealthy food and eating beyond what's necessary to keep you satiated. (That and getting out of the exercise habit in winter were where I failed.)
I don't think the poster was being self-righteous. The poster was actually being quite the opposite in admitting that he wasn't perfect in exactly that same flaw in people that he's criticizing. To be self-righteous, you have to either be unwilling to admit your flaws or to be unwilling to admit that they're valid points of criticism, and he was explicitly taking steps to avoid that.
Erm no.. It's IBS, my body used to deal with lactose fine:)
Lactose intolerance can develop at any point in your life, not just in youth. It becomes more common the older you are. You could always have yourself checked out by a doctor just to be sure, or you could try drinking lactose-free milk to see if it gives you any problems.
[...] Each time a pump spam comes in, enter the ticker symbol into the app. [...]
I have a better idea. When we invent that magical piece of code that reliably identifies pump spam, we just add it to SpamAssassin and forget about the whole thing.
I find it hard to believe someone can't track those who benefit from these crimes.
What makes you think this government has any interest in running a huge data-mining operation to try and catch white-collar criminals who do nothing but get rich by hurting small businesses and small-time investors?
I can't really think of any kind of crime of lower priority to them unless somehow a foreign government or terrorist organization is behind it.
Obviously, it's because the Zune is unencumbered by a proprietary, consumer-hating DRM scheme unlike the iPod, and you can access music stores that offer a better and cheaper experience than the iTunes store.
If your idea of style and ease of use only comes from Apple, you are already brainwashed...
A straw man and a needless ad hominem attack -- that's not the best way to lead off an argument. Personally, I haven't had much respect for Apple for many years in the ease of use department since Mac OS X came out. I haven't been happy with UI of any sort of personal computer since the mid-90s. However, the iPod and every demo I've seen of the iPhone show that someone at Apple gets it.
Why do people see Apple as the providers of ease and luxury or innovative in these areas?
Have you used an iPod recently? They just work, and the interface is both intuitive and quick to navigate compared to products by Creative and others. (Don't know anyone with a Zune yet to compare, though.) Luxury is about comfort. Have you looked at the interface demos for the iPhone on Apple's website? I wasn't really wowed by the idea of a giganto-phone that costs as much as a PS3 and doesn't even do 3G until I saw the use demos. It's incredibly slick, and as a usability obsessed programmer who was let down by Apple years ago and who is irritated by their downturn on intellectual property issues, I don't endorse it lightly.
Apple fought to adapt to color in the 80s, stereo speakers in their laptops in the 90s, and even two button mice, when everyone else is using 5 button mice...
I'll go with you on the first two and with the two-button mice, but five buttons have never impressed me as any sort of improvement over two-buttons and a scroll-wheel. If a five-button mouse is your idea of usability, then you've lost some credibility in my mind.
As for style, sure some of their computers are cute, but there were PC manufacturers that were providing stylish comptuers long before Apple started the iMac fad.
Can you provide an example of a pre-iMac (or even post-iMac) PC that doesn't look like a cheap toy or that doesn't carry off that tacky ricer feel? (Not that the Bondi Blue generation of iMacs didn't look like cheap toys, IMO.) Pretty much the entirety of mass manufacturer "style" in the PC world has been making the case all black. I am glad to see, though, that the simple white design aesthetic has taken off at Nintendo with the Wii. The Wii looks like what Apple wishes they could get a Mac Mini to look like.
As for ease of use, this is highly subjective. MS spends 10x the money on testing people and finding the easiest ways to piece together simple tasks. Sure there are some things on a Mac that are easier if you are already a Mac user, but if you are not, they are just as esoteric as starting with Windows. 99.9% of Windows is all GUI driven and fully accessible with a keyboard or a Mouse, OSX can't even claim either of these simple usuability tests.
I don't care how much money they've spent; their products speak for themselves. Office is still a cruel joke, Explorer 7 is poorly organized and laid-out, personalized menus are as much of a hunt-and-click abomination as the Mac OS X dock, dialogs are inconsistent, etc., etc. All that money hasn't bought them much.
Seriously, go look at the iPhone demos on Apple's website. Pocket PC and Palm phones are a sad joke in comparison.
Also, what part of Mac OS X can't be navigated "with a keyboard or a mouse?" I could understand complaints about the general lack of keyboard navigability, but I can't think of anything that can't be driven my a mouse at least. (Don't expect me to defend Mac OS X, though. I drive the entire system through Terminal.app because the new Finder still irritates me to no end.)
In OSX if you want advanced features you are opening a terminal shell since the GUI doesn't offer a way to change several of the more technical settings of the OS, and certainly the keyboard/mouse issue still plagues Macs to this day. Even the fr
#1. Myself and many others already stated that Windows Pocket PC Phones were just as capable as anything advertised by the iPhone, and have been around for YEARS now.
Yes. They are capable of performing any task that an iPhone is capable of doing, except doing it with style and panache. You can view web pages and check maps with built in GPS units, but you can't do it in as user friendly and smooth of a fashion. You can send email and text messages, but the input method is clumsy. You can listen to music and even organize your collection to a limited extent, but not with as much ease and flair as on an iPhone.
However, what people want the iPhone for is the style. You can get from point A to point B in a Toyota Yaris just fine. You can listen to the radio. You can adjust your seats. However, you don't get the kind of niceties that you get with a Lexus LS 430, and if you don't get why people would prefer a LS 430 to a Yaris or even to a Camry, then you're not the target market for an iPhone.
Apple's in very real danger of killing the goose that laid the golden egg over its stance on intellectual property. Suing enthusiasts who want nothing more than to have an early little taste of their software is a good way to hurt a brand that depends almost entirely emotion and public perception of "coolness."
Now, I can understand Apple's worries about dilution of trademark, but attempting to sue blogs is directly attacking the buzz machine. Apple needs to pay a little more attention to what's happened between Sony & Nintendo as a result of poor vs. excellent management of fanboy buzz.
Slashdot Mirror
Already, the Russians are claiming that it's against their Constitution to allow extraditions. (Read the last paragraph in the article.)
But, the price of Flash memory is dropping. Fast.
Not fast enough. You need flash prices to come down at least and order of magnitude to compete. I'm sorry, but I don't see the costs of a CMOS-based flash chip coming down to lower prices than a single-substance layer of film sandwiched within plastic. The manufacturing hardware alone makes for a significant difference of capital investment, and the input materials add another price difference.
Already you can get a 2 GB memory key for 19 bucks from NewEgg, which is just over the price of a DVD.
That's the cost of a piece of media with no licensed content on it. The majority of the cost of a DVD is not in the media, but in the content. Even if flash memory becomes possible to sell under the cost of of a current DVD movie, it needs to become more profitable than selling on optical media for studios to even consider it.
A single cent difference in the cost of a movie that sells 2 million copies is $20,000 lost. Why do you think manufacturers were up in arms many years ago when Apple talked about charging a small royalty fee for the patents it had on Firewire? If a few cents here and there hadn't meant so much, we wouldn't have USB 2.0 today.
Another important thing to note is that while we're probably a decade or more from flash memory catching up with BluRay's and HD-DVD's capacity, optical media is already getting ready to go to 300 GB and up when Tapestry discs come out. To convince consumers to switch away from DVD & the next-gen formats, there's going to have to be a major quality increase over the already too advanced next-gen formats. That's going to mean a significant increase in the size of content on the media, and your solution of flash memory is playing catch-up too slowly to compete.
The next step up from 1080i/1080p content that people are touting is 2160p. Encoding a movie at this standard will take up 4X the space that a 1080p movie takes up today. The next-gen optical media can handle it, though it won't be cost friendly for a while. So how long until flash catches up and does 100-200 GB in a cost effective manner?
I'm sorry, but that's both the most stridently racist and ridiculous nonsense and the worst abuse of statistical correlation to imply causality I've seen on Slashdot in a long ages, and I cannot believe that some fellow asshat modded it up.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: HD/BR are just bumps in the road. The next turning point in terms of mass media storage will be flash memory.
You are completely out of your mind. DVD media currently costs about 10 cents for over 4 GB. 4 GB of flash memory costs about $50-70. Even 128 KB costs a minimum of $8. BluRay and HD-DVD media will easily reach below $1 per disc for 25-30 GB within a year. At any point that flash memory comes down in price and goes up in storage capacity enough to compete with what we've currently got, optical storage is way out ahead already. The manufacturing costs of optical storage will never be exceeded by an equivalent amount of flash storage.
What possible advantage could going with flash memory have for the studios?
Sounds more like a tool to use on demonstrators who aren't armed, just pesky.
Correct. You would never deploy NLW in a situation where the target is armed with guns. This is meant to be used on peaceful protesters or, at worst, rock-throwers.
But, hey, maybe if we hand it to certain allies it might mean less children killed by stray stun grenades and rubber bullets.
This link redirected me to a server named pr0n.encyclopediadramatica.com instead of www.encyclopediadramatica.com. I just hope my job doesn't automatically red-flag employee URLs browsed through the mandatory proxy, or I may soon be out of a job.
So, thanks. Thanks for sharing that.
Any body without dipole won't heat. The radiation will "flow around" it.
Your point?
You do realize that bacteria are filled with water molecules -- which are dipoles -- right? This is how food heats in a microwave, regardless of whether it's larger than 12 cm or not.
Your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
----
In addition, contacting a central STP source for every email would be expensive both computationally and in terms of bandwidth. The STP system would become a huge bottleneck.
I just don't see how politicians, "asshats," blacklists, talking about viagra, sabotage of public networks, email not being free, or killing people has anything to do with the proposal. Did you just random check boxes on yours?
How else did they expect it to work? Of course you need the god-damn water in the sponge. Microwaves have a wave length measured in the centimetre. The size of a bacterial spore is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller The size of a bateria is a lot smaller than this again.
...Or maybe someone who feels superior to "the masses" need to really review the concept of dielectric heating.
So, are you suggesting that any body shorter than the wavelength of microwave radiation (12 cm) will be left unheated? Neat! That must be why my pizza rolls are still frozen when I get them out.
What are you babbling about? Every store that I've gone to looking for a Wii has had PS3s available. The Best Buy on the way home has at least 20 something in a stack. The Fry's also on the way home has at least 15. Even my local Costco is now selling PS3 bundles ($699 for the 60 Gig version, an extra controller, and Genji).
Meanwhile, no one has a Wii. At my local GameStop, the employees treat the phone with apprehension because of people still calling constantly to ask if they have a Wii.
Everyone I ask about the availability of a Wii says, "No, but we have these..." and gestures over at the PS3s. They are repeatedly unsurprised and often chagrined that nobody wants one, and most will agree that the price is a bit high or try to feebly up-sell you on one with a look that says they know that I'm not going to buy their pitch even as they timidly start into it.
The PS3 is a dog and will be until someone puts out a game that people care about (e.g. Final Fantasy XIII) or the price comes down. Meanwhile, if you've got Wii's everywhere -- put the dang things up on eBay for the rest of us already!!
Being in the presence of someone else while you're both ignoring each other to stare at the TV does not count as "spending time with them" in my book.
No offense, but maybe you'd sound less self-righteous if you started talking after you lost the weight. Until then, it kinda sounds like you literally don't know what you're talking about.
Hey. At the peak of my diet and exercise period from two years ago, I got down to about 15 lbs. over what I needed to be completely free of the gut I had left. I've gone back up 45 lbs. since then, but it's purely the result of my lazy and self-indulgent choices not to do what I need to do. However, that doesn't mean that either the original poster or I don't know what needs to be done.
Losing weight really is that simple -- stop consuming more calories than you burn and start burn more calories than you consume. The devil is in the details, though. You've got to find manageable ways to control the amount of food you eat and/or the calorie density of said food and ways to fit more exercise into your day. You've also got to find a way to keep the willpower to not indulge in bad habits again, especially with regards to unhealthy food and eating beyond what's necessary to keep you satiated. (That and getting out of the exercise habit in winter were where I failed.)
I don't think the poster was being self-righteous. The poster was actually being quite the opposite in admitting that he wasn't perfect in exactly that same flaw in people that he's criticizing. To be self-righteous, you have to either be unwilling to admit your flaws or to be unwilling to admit that they're valid points of criticism, and he was explicitly taking steps to avoid that.
Patents expire in 20 years. I really hope that their technology lasts longer than that, or it wasn't worth sweating over to begin with.
Erm no.. It's IBS, my body used to deal with lactose fine :)
Lactose intolerance can develop at any point in your life, not just in youth. It becomes more common the older you are. You could always have yourself checked out by a doctor just to be sure, or you could try drinking lactose-free milk to see if it gives you any problems.
[...] Each time a pump spam comes in, enter the ticker symbol into the app. [...]
I have a better idea. When we invent that magical piece of code that reliably identifies pump spam, we just add it to SpamAssassin and forget about the whole thing.
I find it hard to believe someone can't track those who benefit from these crimes.
What makes you think this government has any interest in running a huge data-mining operation to try and catch white-collar criminals who do nothing but get rich by hurting small businesses and small-time investors?
I can't really think of any kind of crime of lower priority to them unless somehow a foreign government or terrorist organization is behind it.
I buy stocks based on what shows up on http://www.spamnation.info/ , then sell them quick.
Thanks. Your quick buying and selling helps contribute to the spammer getting rich too.
You're officially helping spammers profit.
Anybody got a rope?
He probably moderated multiple people and didn't want to undo their mods.
Why is the Zune becoming more attractive?
... ... What? Why are you looking at me like that?
Obviously, it's because the Zune is unencumbered by a proprietary, consumer-hating DRM scheme unlike the iPod, and you can access music stores that offer a better and cheaper experience than the iTunes store.
A straw man and a needless ad hominem attack -- that's not the best way to lead off an argument. Personally, I haven't had much respect for Apple for many years in the ease of use department since Mac OS X came out. I haven't been happy with UI of any sort of personal computer since the mid-90s. However, the iPod and every demo I've seen of the iPhone show that someone at Apple gets it.
Have you used an iPod recently? They just work, and the interface is both intuitive and quick to navigate compared to products by Creative and others. (Don't know anyone with a Zune yet to compare, though.) Luxury is about comfort. Have you looked at the interface demos for the iPhone on Apple's website? I wasn't really wowed by the idea of a giganto-phone that costs as much as a PS3 and doesn't even do 3G until I saw the use demos. It's incredibly slick, and as a usability obsessed programmer who was let down by Apple years ago and who is irritated by their downturn on intellectual property issues, I don't endorse it lightly.
I'll go with you on the first two and with the two-button mice, but five buttons have never impressed me as any sort of improvement over two-buttons and a scroll-wheel. If a five-button mouse is your idea of usability, then you've lost some credibility in my mind.
Can you provide an example of a pre-iMac (or even post-iMac) PC that doesn't look like a cheap toy or that doesn't carry off that tacky ricer feel? (Not that the Bondi Blue generation of iMacs didn't look like cheap toys, IMO.) Pretty much the entirety of mass manufacturer "style" in the PC world has been making the case all black. I am glad to see, though, that the simple white design aesthetic has taken off at Nintendo with the Wii. The Wii looks like what Apple wishes they could get a Mac Mini to look like.
I don't care how much money they've spent; their products speak for themselves. Office is still a cruel joke, Explorer 7 is poorly organized and laid-out, personalized menus are as much of a hunt-and-click abomination as the Mac OS X dock, dialogs are inconsistent, etc., etc. All that money hasn't bought them much.
Seriously, go look at the iPhone demos on Apple's website. Pocket PC and Palm phones are a sad joke in comparison.
Also, what part of Mac OS X can't be navigated "with a keyboard or a mouse?" I could understand complaints about the general lack of keyboard navigability, but I can't think of anything that can't be driven my a mouse at least. (Don't expect me to defend Mac OS X, though. I drive the entire system through Terminal.app because the new Finder still irritates me to no end.)
'Serious games' seems to be used to describe job training exercises, exercise games, games with political messages ...
Well, that's a relief. I was worried that they might be terrible and boring, like educational games were!
#1. Myself and many others already stated that Windows Pocket PC Phones were just as capable as anything advertised by the iPhone, and have been around for YEARS now.
Yes. They are capable of performing any task that an iPhone is capable of doing, except doing it with style and panache. You can view web pages and check maps with built in GPS units, but you can't do it in as user friendly and smooth of a fashion. You can send email and text messages, but the input method is clumsy. You can listen to music and even organize your collection to a limited extent, but not with as much ease and flair as on an iPhone.
However, what people want the iPhone for is the style. You can get from point A to point B in a Toyota Yaris just fine. You can listen to the radio. You can adjust your seats. However, you don't get the kind of niceties that you get with a Lexus LS 430, and if you don't get why people would prefer a LS 430 to a Yaris or even to a Camry, then you're not the target market for an iPhone.
It's a luxury toy, pure and simple.
Apple's in very real danger of killing the goose that laid the golden egg over its stance on intellectual property. Suing enthusiasts who want nothing more than to have an early little taste of their software is a good way to hurt a brand that depends almost entirely emotion and public perception of "coolness."
Now, I can understand Apple's worries about dilution of trademark, but attempting to sue blogs is directly attacking the buzz machine. Apple needs to pay a little more attention to what's happened between Sony & Nintendo as a result of poor vs. excellent management of fanboy buzz.
Then you're going to hate Tor.
Only if you run an exit node. Now Freenet on the other hand...