How do you think it'll bring down Rupert? His business model is failing, and it's the same closed, locked-down model that Apple employs for the iPad and iPhone. The two are, philosophically, linked.
No, the iPhone hasn't failed - yet. But give it time (and the recently-released ad platform for iPhone/Pad).
What are you comparing it to? Surely you don't mean the WWII nukes.
When it comes to environmental sensationalism, it doesn't matter how many lives are lost or how many people are killed. A disaster is determined by man's direct impact on long-term ecological destruction. People are living on the nuked parts of Japan again. People do not even visit Chernobyl with regularity. So, clearly, Chernobyl is more disastrous.
(The irony is that, long-term, Chernobyl has thrived ecologically.)
(Arguably, the WWII bombings weren't disasters, either, since not only are people living there now, but it saved many lives on both sides, shorted the war, and led to less destruction overall and long-lasting international partnership between Japan and the US.)
Re:The iPad is original Apple Redux
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 1
Oh please. There are a lot of platforms which have come and gone (with little attention from anyone who matters), and not for lack of a killer app.
The Newton was cool. It didn't have a killer app (though did have many awesome users), and passed away quickly. Why? Simply, it was too niche.
Something isn't "killer" until it actually is a game changer. the iPhone was a game changer, not only because it was a smartphone made widely available and marketed out the ass to every US urban area, but because it was pretty and did things people's existing phones couldn't do. The AppStore (the iPhone's killer app) wasn't a killer app (which Apple made, coincidentially) for the platform until people started using it. Same for the iPod (via iTunes).
The iPad fills the same basic niche as the Newton: not as good as a full-on computer, not as good as what people traditionally keep in their pocket. But, damn! It was cool! Too bad it wasn't terribly useful for most people.
What it probably comes down to is the learning curve.
If there's a morse code requirement, people will forego getting a (costly) radio until they lean it. Then they never learn it. If they can take their tests and get on the radio right away, there's more incentive: the curve isn't as steep.
What? There is plenty in computing that's interesting now. PLENTY. (And no, most of the hardware surrounding it can't natively run x86 binaries. )
ARM and MIPS systems are not only available for sub-$100 right now in single quantities, but they're available with enough computing power to handle some high-level languages - like perl or python, but many others apply. They're small enough to stick anywhere and (sometimes) run for weeks on a (relatively) small battery. The skies are the limits - or, more appropriately, below the limits, as it would take relatively little to put some of these suckers into space.
I wonder how many of the new ham users are of the survivalist variety. Ham radio is viewed by many proponents of preparedness as the end-all, be-all in cellular communication: when the lights go out, and the infrastructure by which all of our modern toys communicate, ham will be the ultimate communication tool: you can tunnel any number of communication protocols over it, it's versatile (long and short range) and has the spectrum to allow for a fairly large (compared to CB and FRS) number of users at any one time.
I suspect that a large part of the adoption is due to concerns over centralized government and its apparent increasing encroachment upon our freedoms. These weren't such dire concerns 30 years ago, and there wasn't the glaring example of it being done successfully (China) as there is now. Ten years ago, it was thought "there's no way the government could sensor the Internet"; well, things are starting to change...
The "last time" we had a strong surge in survivalist mentality was during the late 1970s when CBs were the hot new thing (within people's price range) - so that's what they got. But CBs are horribly limited compared to ham.
They could have still made all that money off open source had they been non-committal about patents, or for that matter, if they'd remained openly hostile to all sorts of competition (barring their actual interests in OSS projects).
Sorry, this is going to make Scrabble suck. IMO, it's bad enough with all the "scrabble words" which lack definition. Scrabble appeals to a more intellectual player with a large(r) vocabulary. Allowing proper nouns not only floods the game with the hundreds of thousands of (potentially unverifiable) products out there (past and present) but also the name of every person and place on the planet. What a gong show.
Of course, you can always play by the old/proper rules.:)
And if you want a fun/stupid "letters into words with little tiles" game, give Bananagrams a try. It's an awesome drinking game - either to play or to watch, as it devolves pretty quickly into a bunch of insults and racial/sexist slurs (even from some of the more 'liberal'/reverse-racist type folks).
If employers have a hard time keeping their employees, who's fault is that? The employers or the employees?
Consider that not long ago, people were working the same job for their entire career. People, by their nature, prefer stability (that's why many go through all that effort of getting a good degree, and why government job preference has been on the uptick for some time).
If employers don't want employees to jump ship they need to make their employees feel like their jobs aren't in danger and provide them competitive pay. People don't leave a good job for 5% more: they leave for significant lumps of cash; they leave due to business instability; they leave for (inter)personal reasons. They also leave because they know the company doesn't hold them in high esteem as a person, more than likely, and that if push comes to shove, the company's going to dump them.
Ultimately, it's a cycle - but a cycle which companies started. God bless the Business Management types.
I was thinking much the same thing. However, it is a good "omg I'm not making enough" benchmark, particularly for those in urban areas.
For instance, I'm currently making 15k+ less than my job description (or a half dozen variations of the description) make - and I'm at the intersection of their Mountain and North Central parts of their survey. That's a substantial discrepancy.
They'd have been better served with a larger sample size as well as a metro-size sub-categorization as well.
Wow, seriously? Do you know anything about nursing?
If you're female there is no reason to go into IT... nursing pays better, comes with better benefits, better hours, way less stress, no bullying from male coworkers, no worries about your job going offshore to Inida, more respect from the general community, just a better future period.
There are plenty of reasons to not go into IT. Nursing pays worse (IT 5 years experience = 50k; nursing 15 years experience = 50k), the hours are usually worse (no such thing as 9-5s or holidays, and everyone is "on call" almost all the time), constant bitchiness and "office politics" cattiness (if you want to hear someone lie about someone else, listen to an orderly...), and (very likely) increased hours + shifts with decreased pay in the very near future (on account of the increased burden that will be put on healthcare due to recent legislation).
Nurses get no respect, either. Orderlies get more, from what I've observed. It's a similar situation to IT (not programming, IT), where you're in the position to have responsibility but often have no ability to do anything about it. Doctors treat nurses like shit, typically. Administrators are similar to IT management: they haven't a clue what's going on but damn it, they're going to tell you what to do. Except with nursing (unlike computing) the balance of life (or health) and death often hangs in the balance, and stupid mistakes made by others often do directly fall on your shoulders.
In fact males should also go into nursing, but constantly being made fun of (such as being called Gaylord Focker) might be too much to take for most men.
No, the biggest problem would be having a predatory and/or inherrently bitchy (female, not that it matters) jerking you around for stupid political reasons.
There's a good reason why nurses have the highest percentage of illicit drug use in the country by career. Their jobs suck. I'd rather go into law enforcement.
How is that an unacceptable joke (or even a joke, necessarily - it's an extrapolated guess based off of disjointed but related data)? I know of a guy who left IT to become a Chip'n'Dale stripper because it paid better and was less stress (go figure). Woo, nakedness - big deal! If it's acceptable to say "men are leaving IT for construction jobs" (some are) why is stripping (physical labor for work) any more offensive?
If you want equality, then you better want it equally. People are sick of this "equally better" PC bullshit the women's lib movement has been pushing for the past 50 years. If you can do the work, great: step right in and pull up a chair, etc.
You've got to look at the demographic: people who say things like "If Apple made a toilet, I'd buy it". They're fanatics.
Not only that, but consider that they're likely single. And even if we don't go with that stereotype, they're probably going to at least be male.
The thing is for watching porn, plain and simple. I'm not sure how that's supposed to work on account of lacking youporn.com/flash support and Apple's draconian approach, but what else would you want with a portable hold-with-one-hand computing device that's too large to put in a pocket but has no functional input?
Give the thing a couple months. We'll see huge price drops and bargain-basement hardware on Ebay with descriptions like "awesome Apple product, but I didn't find myself using it that much".
I wonder if the driver's foot well is particularly small on these cars. I've been driving an older E150 lately and it's got a foot-activated high-beam switch right where the clutch would be on a similar pickup. I've drained the battery twice so far by hitting that damn switch as I pull in to park and not realized it.
Are you sure you played Mechwarrior 2? It was the most customizable of the lot, by far. It was also the Mech game with the best gameplay, single and multiplayer.
A big part of the problem for Java was that it came out too soon: at the time, it was ahead of the pack by quite a bit. It was, for all intents and purposes, the first mainstream CLR, giving it performance issues that its immediate competitors (mainly C++ and VB) didn't have.
Combine that with the fact that they really did release it "too soon" (the development tools were seemingly pretty glitchy, from what I recall) and that general stability was likewise poor (whether it was due to the platforms it ran on or the Java platform itself, I don't know).
I'd argue that the other major part of Java's problem is that Java was largely targeted (though not exclusively) at browser-borne applications. Having non-native windowing elements likely didn't help either. Combined with the previous issues, this all led to a very significant "poor user experience": programmers and users alike had written off Java by the time.NET rolled around, and people didn't look back or realize it's a comparable language.
It's not so much the expressions themselves which fall flat - it's the valleys between the expressions.
The human face is very, very rarely "expressionless", even on the most stoic of people. Even when someone is asleep, they're emoting. There are little ticks and gestures all the time. The face would need to be in constant realistic motion to be convincing, I think.
The way technology is moving, I think it's more realistic to expect holo-mesh projections than it is to expect mechanical android faces. Synthetic muscle, maybe, if you need to touch it. But mechanics aren't likely suited for it.
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How do you think it'll bring down Rupert? His business model is failing, and it's the same closed, locked-down model that Apple employs for the iPad and iPhone. The two are, philosophically, linked.
No, the iPhone hasn't failed - yet. But give it time (and the recently-released ad platform for iPhone/Pad).
What are you comparing it to? Surely you don't mean the WWII nukes.
When it comes to environmental sensationalism, it doesn't matter how many lives are lost or how many people are killed. A disaster is determined by man's direct impact on long-term ecological destruction. People are living on the nuked parts of Japan again. People do not even visit Chernobyl with regularity. So, clearly, Chernobyl is more disastrous.
(The irony is that, long-term, Chernobyl has thrived ecologically.)
(Arguably, the WWII bombings weren't disasters, either, since not only are people living there now, but it saved many lives on both sides, shorted the war, and led to less destruction overall and long-lasting international partnership between Japan and the US.)
Which is exactly why the iPad will fail.
Oh please. There are a lot of platforms which have come and gone (with little attention from anyone who matters), and not for lack of a killer app.
The Newton was cool. It didn't have a killer app (though did have many awesome users), and passed away quickly. Why? Simply, it was too niche.
Something isn't "killer" until it actually is a game changer. the iPhone was a game changer, not only because it was a smartphone made widely available and marketed out the ass to every US urban area, but because it was pretty and did things people's existing phones couldn't do. The AppStore (the iPhone's killer app) wasn't a killer app (which Apple made, coincidentially) for the platform until people started using it. Same for the iPod (via iTunes).
The iPad fills the same basic niche as the Newton: not as good as a full-on computer, not as good as what people traditionally keep in their pocket. But, damn! It was cool! Too bad it wasn't terribly useful for most people.
Now mix that with a bunch of Perl or PHP and you've got a dyslexic's dream.
What it probably comes down to is the learning curve.
If there's a morse code requirement, people will forego getting a (costly) radio until they lean it. Then they never learn it. If they can take their tests and get on the radio right away, there's more incentive: the curve isn't as steep.
What? There is plenty in computing that's interesting now. PLENTY. (And no, most of the hardware surrounding it can't natively run x86 binaries. )
ARM and MIPS systems are not only available for sub-$100 right now in single quantities, but they're available with enough computing power to handle some high-level languages - like perl or python, but many others apply. They're small enough to stick anywhere and (sometimes) run for weeks on a (relatively) small battery. The skies are the limits - or, more appropriately, below the limits, as it would take relatively little to put some of these suckers into space.
I wonder how many of the new ham users are of the survivalist variety. Ham radio is viewed by many proponents of preparedness as the end-all, be-all in cellular communication: when the lights go out, and the infrastructure by which all of our modern toys communicate, ham will be the ultimate communication tool: you can tunnel any number of communication protocols over it, it's versatile (long and short range) and has the spectrum to allow for a fairly large (compared to CB and FRS) number of users at any one time.
I suspect that a large part of the adoption is due to concerns over centralized government and its apparent increasing encroachment upon our freedoms. These weren't such dire concerns 30 years ago, and there wasn't the glaring example of it being done successfully (China) as there is now. Ten years ago, it was thought "there's no way the government could sensor the Internet"; well, things are starting to change...
The "last time" we had a strong surge in survivalist mentality was during the late 1970s when CBs were the hot new thing (within people's price range) - so that's what they got. But CBs are horribly limited compared to ham.
placated with their cable tv. Fat dumb and happy is the American way.
I'm American. I'm skinny, smart, and generally pretty angry. I also watch (DVR'd) cable TV. How do you explain that?
They could have still made all that money off open source had they been non-committal about patents, or for that matter, if they'd remained openly hostile to all sorts of competition (barring their actual interests in OSS projects).
Give Bananagrams a try. It's like scrabble, but unstructured. "Anything goes" if you make up your own rules.
In all likelihood, yes.
Sorry, this is going to make Scrabble suck. IMO, it's bad enough with all the "scrabble words" which lack definition. Scrabble appeals to a more intellectual player with a large(r) vocabulary. Allowing proper nouns not only floods the game with the hundreds of thousands of (potentially unverifiable) products out there (past and present) but also the name of every person and place on the planet. What a gong show.
Of course, you can always play by the old/proper rules. :)
And if you want a fun/stupid "letters into words with little tiles" game, give Bananagrams a try. It's an awesome drinking game - either to play or to watch, as it devolves pretty quickly into a bunch of insults and racial/sexist slurs (even from some of the more 'liberal'/reverse-racist type folks).
Your '77 had a foot toggle? Huh. My '78 Olds (Delta 88) didn't. I miss that car; it was quite a luxury.
And yes, this van is a bit of an oddity. It's been rewired and whoever did it didn't do this right; there are two independent circuits for lights.
If employers have a hard time keeping their employees, who's fault is that? The employers or the employees?
Consider that not long ago, people were working the same job for their entire career. People, by their nature, prefer stability (that's why many go through all that effort of getting a good degree, and why government job preference has been on the uptick for some time).
If employers don't want employees to jump ship they need to make their employees feel like their jobs aren't in danger and provide them competitive pay. People don't leave a good job for 5% more: they leave for significant lumps of cash; they leave due to business instability; they leave for (inter)personal reasons. They also leave because they know the company doesn't hold them in high esteem as a person, more than likely, and that if push comes to shove, the company's going to dump them.
Ultimately, it's a cycle - but a cycle which companies started. God bless the Business Management types.
I was thinking much the same thing. However, it is a good "omg I'm not making enough" benchmark, particularly for those in urban areas.
For instance, I'm currently making 15k+ less than my job description (or a half dozen variations of the description) make - and I'm at the intersection of their Mountain and North Central parts of their survey. That's a substantial discrepancy.
They'd have been better served with a larger sample size as well as a metro-size sub-categorization as well.
Wow, seriously? Do you know anything about nursing?
If you're female there is no reason to go into IT... nursing pays better, comes with better benefits, better hours, way less stress, no bullying from male coworkers, no worries about your job going offshore to Inida, more respect from the general community, just a better future period.
There are plenty of reasons to not go into IT. Nursing pays worse (IT 5 years experience = 50k; nursing 15 years experience = 50k), the hours are usually worse (no such thing as 9-5s or holidays, and everyone is "on call" almost all the time), constant bitchiness and "office politics" cattiness (if you want to hear someone lie about someone else, listen to an orderly...), and (very likely) increased hours + shifts with decreased pay in the very near future (on account of the increased burden that will be put on healthcare due to recent legislation).
Nurses get no respect, either. Orderlies get more, from what I've observed. It's a similar situation to IT (not programming, IT), where you're in the position to have responsibility but often have no ability to do anything about it. Doctors treat nurses like shit, typically. Administrators are similar to IT management: they haven't a clue what's going on but damn it, they're going to tell you what to do. Except with nursing (unlike computing) the balance of life (or health) and death often hangs in the balance, and stupid mistakes made by others often do directly fall on your shoulders.
In fact males should also go into nursing, but constantly being made fun of (such as being called Gaylord Focker) might be too much to take for most men.
No, the biggest problem would be having a predatory and/or inherrently bitchy (female, not that it matters) jerking you around for stupid political reasons.
There's a good reason why nurses have the highest percentage of illicit drug use in the country by career. Their jobs suck. I'd rather go into law enforcement.
How is that an unacceptable joke (or even a joke, necessarily - it's an extrapolated guess based off of disjointed but related data)? I know of a guy who left IT to become a Chip'n'Dale stripper because it paid better and was less stress (go figure). Woo, nakedness - big deal! If it's acceptable to say "men are leaving IT for construction jobs" (some are) why is stripping (physical labor for work) any more offensive?
If you want equality, then you better want it equally. People are sick of this "equally better" PC bullshit the women's lib movement has been pushing for the past 50 years. If you can do the work, great: step right in and pull up a chair, etc.
You've got to look at the demographic: people who say things like "If Apple made a toilet, I'd buy it". They're fanatics.
Not only that, but consider that they're likely single. And even if we don't go with that stereotype, they're probably going to at least be male.
The thing is for watching porn, plain and simple. I'm not sure how that's supposed to work on account of lacking youporn.com/flash support and Apple's draconian approach, but what else would you want with a portable hold-with-one-hand computing device that's too large to put in a pocket but has no functional input?
Give the thing a couple months. We'll see huge price drops and bargain-basement hardware on Ebay with descriptions like "awesome Apple product, but I didn't find myself using it that much".
I can verify that it doesn't impact Lynx. :) I can also verify that it's a PDF, so it likely impacts Windows and Apple computers.
I wonder if the driver's foot well is particularly small on these cars. I've been driving an older E150 lately and it's got a foot-activated high-beam switch right where the clutch would be on a similar pickup. I've drained the battery twice so far by hitting that damn switch as I pull in to park and not realized it.
Are you sure you played Mechwarrior 2? It was the most customizable of the lot, by far. It was also the Mech game with the best gameplay, single and multiplayer.
A big part of the problem for Java was that it came out too soon: at the time, it was ahead of the pack by quite a bit. It was, for all intents and purposes, the first mainstream CLR, giving it performance issues that its immediate competitors (mainly C++ and VB) didn't have.
Combine that with the fact that they really did release it "too soon" (the development tools were seemingly pretty glitchy, from what I recall) and that general stability was likewise poor (whether it was due to the platforms it ran on or the Java platform itself, I don't know).
I'd argue that the other major part of Java's problem is that Java was largely targeted (though not exclusively) at browser-borne applications. Having non-native windowing elements likely didn't help either. Combined with the previous issues, this all led to a very significant "poor user experience": programmers and users alike had written off Java by the time .NET rolled around, and people didn't look back or realize it's a comparable language.
It's not so much the expressions themselves which fall flat - it's the valleys between the expressions.
The human face is very, very rarely "expressionless", even on the most stoic of people. Even when someone is asleep, they're emoting. There are little ticks and gestures all the time. The face would need to be in constant realistic motion to be convincing, I think.
The way technology is moving, I think it's more realistic to expect holo-mesh projections than it is to expect mechanical android faces. Synthetic muscle, maybe, if you need to touch it. But mechanics aren't likely suited for it.
You laugh at him, but you need to realize something: most of your girlfriends are likely being served up to you via a Linux machine already.
Audacious* is a pile of crap. It's better than XMMS2, but I've found it's not only unstable but glitchy in other regards (eg. adding/removing files).