I can't remember where it was reported, but Shaw, Videotron and Cocego are all planning similar moves to Rogers; furthermore, the DSL ISP in my area that I go with has already informed us that since they lease their DSL access from Bell, and Bell will be charging them on a per-useage basis, they will have to pass the same restrictions on to consumers. What's worse, they can't even easily (at this point) made a handy bandwidth counter like Sympatico has.
Rogers hasn't announced because the two major suppliers of high speed internet declaring similar pricing structures and service caps in the same month would bring the Competition Bureau down on them all in a heartbeat, and possibly CRTC oversight (internet access is not regulated yet).
But the kicker is the fear it's instilled in the minds of people so far. Everyone I know who's seen that dreaded bandwidth counter from Sympatico has become concerned that spam with large images will push them over their limit. Many have suggested I not send them any files by email but instead put them on floppy (what's a floppy, seriously?) It's not that they're really going to hit the limit from a few images in an email, it's that they THINK THEY MIGHT. Something like this will severely stunt the growth of the internet culture in Canada.
So I guess the government's initiative to get everyone on broadband will be successful in the number of people with access, but too many people will be too scared to use it.
BTW, if 12 people complain to the Competition Bureau once Rogers announced its structure, they're obliged to launch an investigation into anti-competitive behaviour. So there's hope yet.
Apple is covering themselves, but taking great pains earlier in the note to point people towards a class-action lawsuit of some sort against Sony Music. They're making it clear that a) we won't pay, so it's either you or... b) music companies are doing this to a lot of people, so... c) did we mention that those shiny things aren't LEGALLY proper CDs?
People could try and press a case against Apple or the music industry, but this article is only missing an attachment: "Quick Form for Filing Suit Against Sony Music".
Wonderfully funny stuff, seeing big companies bash each other around.
Having just gone through this recently, I may know some thing that might help. If you install the drivers for your printer on OS X, then reboot, and then try and add a printer the normal way, the printer should show up on the list. If you're using a PS-type printer, you may have to wait for the USB printer sharing in 10.2, or ask HP to get crackin' and make a JetDirect package for X.
Another thing that I discovered recently... many printers that don't work right away in OS X suddenly start working fine when you install Sharity (SMB file sharing app... check versiontracker). oddest thing.
However, from what I understand, most of the printer issues OS X brought will be solved either in 10.1.5 or in 10.2. It's just a matter of being patient (ha!)
I very much agree with you about spending time with family, but speaking from experience, freelance is not the way to go. I and most of my colleagues work freelance/contract and over the past few years have spent almost every major holiday with last-minute crunches destroying our family time. And with freelance, as opposed to a "job" job, you need to do the time whenever it's required, or you don't work anymore.
The worst part is that no matter how hard you try to be available to go out with the kids on Hallowe'en, you'll get a life-or-death call from a client that afternoon which you have to take seriously.
What you gain in theoretical flexibility, you lose in terms of sanity. Not that it's all bad, but it's definitely a lot harder than it seems from the outside.
Sorry, probably better to put it this way: there will not be a dramatic new tax on recordable media. The only reason the current tax works is because no one but the hardcore tech people know it's there in the first place. Politicians will not sponsor the (mostly foreign) music industry at the expense of their high tech industry. The original tax took a lot of dealing to pass at its current level, so this current proposal is probably for show only.
This legislation will not pass. There aren't enough big media organizations in Canada to buy something like this, and Industry Canada has been trying for some time to push a high-tech agenda, which this would more directly hurt. Most Liberal MPs come from areas of the country where high tech is important, so they wouldn't risk their seats over something like this. They've probably leaked this information so CTV and CBC get hold of it, the public goes nuts, and they have an excuse to kill it.
There will be no tax on recordable media.
Statistically, small new media businesses earn Canada more tax dollars than big entertainment companies. The reason the existing CDR tax is so low is because Industry Canada studies said anything higher would cripple the high tech industry. The government has a long track record of supporting a lot of smaller businesses against a few (mostly foreign) big ones. Plus when you think of it, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver... they're all big cities with lots of high tech (who are opposed to taxes like this) where the Liberals would want to clean house. Industry-type laws never pass unnoticed in Canada.
I've done some checking on this... there's about a snowball's chance in hell of it being made into law. On top of the obvious hits to a lot of industries, there are far more important things to do this year than pass something like a levy on blank media. From sources in Industry Canada, this is likely never going to get to first reading.
The fact that it's appeared anywhere at all is probably only to appease the music industry. A levy like this would seriously cripple most of the small mid-tech business around the country.
Content vs. functionality is probably the wrong way to put it. design vs. application or whatnot. In physical terms, a magazine is an application used for viewing various kinds of content. There is a standard way of navigating the content of a magazine with minimal integration into the actual content of the page. You don't spend most of your time gawking over the corners of the pages the way you would the menu on a website. the way you interact with your content tends to be more important than the content itself on the web, only because there is no real standard yet. It's like buying a book with round pages simply because it's got round pages, not because the book is interesting.
One of the big goofs of the browser companies in the past few years is that they didn't keep trying to make things better in this respect. You can make a website more visually exciting than print (via Flash, even, with real honest-to-goodness content), and it's far more extensible that way, but most of the innovation in the functionality and application-type area tends to be done by overexcited web designers. When you make your website, try something like this: make the functionality basic, out of the way, and unessential to the design. Make the design itself as dramatic as you can, but approach it like it's super-paper.
Maybe I'm just getting sick of making beveled buttons for clients. I really hope the role of "web designer" gets broken up and eaten by "web programmers" and "graphic designers" soon.
Not that it's morally right or anything, but the gist of this would be that if you were an amateur doing video, you would probably broadcast without paying the licensing fee. If your amateur work got really popular, you'd be paying more in fees, but you'd hopefully be making money off your work, in which case the $1000 (probably) in fees would be trivial. People do this kind of thing all the time now with (off the top of my head) Adobe products. Security through obscurity (in a different sense).
Actually, that was always a criticisms of Macs over the past 10 years... Windoze friends always said my Mac hadn't had any major updates in a year or two and how stupid was that? And Apple's support has had patchy spots, but it has always been much better than (hmm, well, let's pick someone at random...) Microsoft's.
Also: iPhoto only being available in OS X is not that big a deal, because if you really wanted to do serious digital photography, you'd be using Photoshop, and anyone else has probably upgraded to OS X already because there's no good reason not to (Photoshop is the only thing holding me in Classic right now).
People have never trusted Macs. I don't know why. It's always been that way, it's just that people keep looking for new reasons to justify their distrust.
Ever since the new iMac came out, a good comparison to cars has been surfacing more and more: mainly that iMacs are like BMWs (slick, cool and over-priced); while PCs are like Honda Civics (cheap, affordable, but if you sit in them the wrong way it can break your tailbone). And I wonder, given the premise that people feel their computers are obsolete in 18 months, if perhaps the new iMac is planning ahead in a smart way.
The big uses for computers for the average folk these days would be email, web browsing, word processing. For that, you can live on less than a gigahertz of speed. Things aren't going to improve that much with a top-of-the-line Athlon as compared to a discontinued PII. So if you don't need the extra speed, what differentiates the computers? RAM, HD, video card... style maybe.
What differentiates cars? Why don't car manufacturers spend gobs of cash throwing the newest "maximum speed notched up by 10 mph!" engines for their vehicles? Why do they, instead, focus on styling, CD players, automatic this-and-thats? Probably because you could make a car that can go 500 mph in the shape of a Civic, but honestly no one would need the extra speed (mainly because of traffic laws, but you know...)
So maybe the iMac's push for style (and very good specs, given its intended audience) is just Apple moving into the next arena of computers as stuff-of-life: the basic concept stays the same, but it's what you add in details that matters.
In that way, Apple is definitely ahead of the game.
Re:That's a revolution in a nut shell
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New iMac Announced
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I think that's the exactly the argument for iPhoto, too.
The real challenge in the whole concept is figuring out how to make the regionalized content accessible in such a way that people in the USA don't get more content than those in Australia. Basically avoiding the DVD region problems. You want to make sure that people can communicate about the show online (through the website) in such a way that no one is held back for being from a different country.
Also, the ability to override the controls is essential for those who want to. It's useless trying to keep smarter people from checking spoilers, but I wouldn't think it's that offensive to try and filter them out as a default.
I'll let y'all know how it goes:)
Nothing's wrong with the user selecting it themselves, but if you're aiming entertainment at the web, you need to assume the people accessing it are not very clever, so the more work you can do for them, the better.
Sorry I'm arguing this point so much... I just spent the last 3 weeks making these same points to media moguls from the other direction, so finding out some of our audience doesn't like it is coming as a bit of a shock to me:)
A mix of a lot of things. Sometimes translation times (but not really often, truly). Mostly the fact that some markets want to see how it does in its native setting before the commit. It's a fundamental flaw of the television broadcast design that's becoming more obvious as the internet's possibilities get clearer. Some of it, of course, has to do with being able to get a better deal in coutnry X when you have a major hit on your hands in country Y, which you can't know until it's been on the air for a few months.
Media moguls are the ones who don't understand the concept. But in a lot of cases, especially in entertainment-like things, you WANT to have information censored when it relates to things you haven't seen yet. If we could broadcast around the world all at the same time, it wouldn't be an issue... sadly, that's just not a possibility yet. Anyway, it's like the theory of nuking banners from all websites because you don't like the annoying ones. On occasion, there are some ads that you'd probably have wanted to see, and you're missing out on some good things when you generalize a technology. Try and keep an open mind, because some of us are trying to do good things for our audience...
This technology (and damn, it's really not perfect yet) is incredibly important for internationally-broadcast shows. We're currently developing a system which will hopefully tune a website to the market the show is playing in, so that the audience gets their language, their teasers (watch XYZ this Thursday at 8) and limits spoilers based on their broadcast schedule. If it worked all the time, it'd be great, which is why you have to introduce the loophole of letting the user override the setting if it's just plain wrong. Some of the things that make the internet great, like big pools of people from all over the world in one place, bring with them bad things (what happened on this episode of X-Files months before it hits Australia). Things like this, when used for noble purposes, are making the whole business work much better.
It's not entirely out of the question. I started my "work life" around 15, working part-time during the school year and then full-time during the summer, doing mainly Director programming and (what I now laughingly refer to as) video work as a contractor for a multimedia shop. That kind of thing really does count for something, especially when compared to recent grads from the "5 weeks of Director and I'm An Expert!" courses.
Most people won't believe you when you say you've had 5 years experience at 20, but it shows when you're better adjusted to real work habits compared to recent-college grads the same age. Also, you have a better chance of buying yourself a kickass system when you're 16, which is definitely worth something at the time:)
I had the same problems starting out as an 18-year-old in IT. Luckily for me I look a little older than my age, so I had some time to spare before anyone caught on.
One particularly nasty moment I had was when I went in for a job interview, then a second, then a third at this company, and at the end of the third they brought me around to meet the people I was going to be working with, get to know people, see my desk etc. And one of the people I met said, "Hey, didn't you go to high school with my brother?"
...
Sure enough, I got the call the next day that they'd given the job to someone else (who they'd already told me wasn't qualified).
But it's how it goes. You get pressured out of jobs because of your age, or get quietly underpaid for the same work, or have managers explain to you "in the workplace, we do not always get full lunch hours like in school".
The thing to look for could be companies that were started by younger people (harder to find these days, admittedly), because they tended to do their thing as a result of being underappreciated at their old jobs.
I myself went into freelance and contract work, because you are sold on your reputation before they meet you. I also find that starting your own company (get lots of credit cards and disconnect your fear mechanism) is a good thing to do, ESPECIALLY when you have a wife and daughter (my situation exactly... it makes you work harder).
A few years from now you'll look back at this time, a second kid on the way, and think "wow, I can't believe almost every one of the companies I worked for that treated me like crap have gone out of business!", and it will all be okay.
The MiniDisc only died in North America. In Japan it's thriving (still, somehow). Sony has even come out with a little cable that connects your MD player to your computer so you can download and play MP3s there (and no copy protection... the Japanese are very lax on copyright issues). I bought my in-laws a super-MD player in Japan a year ago and it was bloody cheap for the whole thing plus 100 MDs to go with it. That technology is, I think, one of the biggest oversights we as N.A. consumers have made in a long time.
The other great technology that they mentioned in the article was 3G, which they failed to mention as existing in Japan already. They said incompatible standards between the U.S. and Europe... but really, incompatible standards between New York and Seattle. By the time 3G finally makes it to most of N.A., the Japanese will have forgotten it's a novelty and come up with some crazy content brilliance for the format. Of course, they have to pay to use land-line phones at home, so I guess it's even.
I have the same problem here... work at home, and because the first thing I do is sit at my computer and start working every day, I tend to lose track of weekends or holidays. The really awful part of it is that for the past four Christmases or so I work straight through the 24th/25th/26th, but then because no one else is working, and no new stuff is coming in, I get bored on the 27th and 28th, and by New Year's I'm so completely hooked on reading a book or playing some game that it takes me close to mid-January to get back into the working habit.
This year I hope to avoid that by erasing half my work at the end of every day, so that I'll always have something to do tomorrow.
Either that or go back to my university days and continue reading books and playing games year-round.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't remember where it was reported, but Shaw, Videotron and Cocego are all planning similar moves to Rogers; furthermore, the DSL ISP in my area that I go with has already informed us that since they lease their DSL access from Bell, and Bell will be charging them on a per-useage basis, they will have to pass the same restrictions on to consumers. What's worse, they can't even easily (at this point) made a handy bandwidth counter like Sympatico has.
Rogers hasn't announced because the two major suppliers of high speed internet declaring similar pricing structures and service caps in the same month would bring the Competition Bureau down on them all in a heartbeat, and possibly CRTC oversight (internet access is not regulated yet).
But the kicker is the fear it's instilled in the minds of people so far. Everyone I know who's seen that dreaded bandwidth counter from Sympatico has become concerned that spam with large images will push them over their limit. Many have suggested I not send them any files by email but instead put them on floppy (what's a floppy, seriously?) It's not that they're really going to hit the limit from a few images in an email, it's that they THINK THEY MIGHT. Something like this will severely stunt the growth of the internet culture in Canada.
So I guess the government's initiative to get everyone on broadband will be successful in the number of people with access, but too many people will be too scared to use it.
BTW, if 12 people complain to the Competition Bureau once Rogers announced its structure, they're obliged to launch an investigation into anti-competitive behaviour. So there's hope yet.
Apple is covering themselves, but taking great pains earlier in the note to point people towards a class-action lawsuit of some sort against Sony Music. They're making it clear that
a) we won't pay, so it's either you or...
b) music companies are doing this to a lot of people, so...
c) did we mention that those shiny things aren't LEGALLY proper CDs?
People could try and press a case against Apple or the music industry, but this article is only missing an attachment: "Quick Form for Filing Suit Against Sony Music".
Wonderfully funny stuff, seeing big companies bash each other around.
Having just gone through this recently, I may know some thing that might help. If you install the drivers for your printer on OS X, then reboot, and then try and add a printer the normal way, the printer should show up on the list. If you're using a PS-type printer, you may have to wait for the USB printer sharing in 10.2, or ask HP to get crackin' and make a JetDirect package for X.
Another thing that I discovered recently... many printers that don't work right away in OS X suddenly start working fine when you install Sharity (SMB file sharing app... check versiontracker). oddest thing.
However, from what I understand, most of the printer issues OS X brought will be solved either in 10.1.5 or in 10.2. It's just a matter of being patient (ha!)
I very much agree with you about spending time with family, but speaking from experience, freelance is not the way to go. I and most of my colleagues work freelance/contract and over the past few years have spent almost every major holiday with last-minute crunches destroying our family time. And with freelance, as opposed to a "job" job, you need to do the time whenever it's required, or you don't work anymore.
The worst part is that no matter how hard you try to be available to go out with the kids on Hallowe'en, you'll get a life-or-death call from a client that afternoon which you have to take seriously.
What you gain in theoretical flexibility, you lose in terms of sanity. Not that it's all bad, but it's definitely a lot harder than it seems from the outside.
Sorry, probably better to put it this way: there will not be a dramatic new tax on recordable media. The only reason the current tax works is because no one but the hardcore tech people know it's there in the first place. Politicians will not sponsor the (mostly foreign) music industry at the expense of their high tech industry. The original tax took a lot of dealing to pass at its current level, so this current proposal is probably for show only.
This legislation will not pass. There aren't enough big media organizations in Canada to buy something like this, and Industry Canada has been trying for some time to push a high-tech agenda, which this would more directly hurt. Most Liberal MPs come from areas of the country where high tech is important, so they wouldn't risk their seats over something like this. They've probably leaked this information so CTV and CBC get hold of it, the public goes nuts, and they have an excuse to kill it. There will be no tax on recordable media.
Statistically, small new media businesses earn Canada more tax dollars than big entertainment companies. The reason the existing CDR tax is so low is because Industry Canada studies said anything higher would cripple the high tech industry. The government has a long track record of supporting a lot of smaller businesses against a few (mostly foreign) big ones. Plus when you think of it, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver... they're all big cities with lots of high tech (who are opposed to taxes like this) where the Liberals would want to clean house. Industry-type laws never pass unnoticed in Canada.
I've done some checking on this... there's about a snowball's chance in hell of it being made into law. On top of the obvious hits to a lot of industries, there are far more important things to do this year than pass something like a levy on blank media. From sources in Industry Canada, this is likely never going to get to first reading. The fact that it's appeared anywhere at all is probably only to appease the music industry. A levy like this would seriously cripple most of the small mid-tech business around the country.
Not to seem like I'm out of the loop, but was that HoloNetNews.com URL at the end of the trailer something known, or is it new?
:)
Nice idea, but you'd think they coulda made more content what with $2B in the Lucasfilm coffers...
The website for Odyssey's pictures is here. New desktop images for my 1600x1200...
Content vs. functionality is probably the wrong way to put it. design vs. application or whatnot. In physical terms, a magazine is an application used for viewing various kinds of content. There is a standard way of navigating the content of a magazine with minimal integration into the actual content of the page. You don't spend most of your time gawking over the corners of the pages the way you would the menu on a website. the way you interact with your content tends to be more important than the content itself on the web, only because there is no real standard yet. It's like buying a book with round pages simply because it's got round pages, not because the book is interesting. One of the big goofs of the browser companies in the past few years is that they didn't keep trying to make things better in this respect. You can make a website more visually exciting than print (via Flash, even, with real honest-to-goodness content), and it's far more extensible that way, but most of the innovation in the functionality and application-type area tends to be done by overexcited web designers. When you make your website, try something like this: make the functionality basic, out of the way, and unessential to the design. Make the design itself as dramatic as you can, but approach it like it's super-paper. Maybe I'm just getting sick of making beveled buttons for clients. I really hope the role of "web designer" gets broken up and eaten by "web programmers" and "graphic designers" soon.
Not that it's morally right or anything, but the gist of this would be that if you were an amateur doing video, you would probably broadcast without paying the licensing fee. If your amateur work got really popular, you'd be paying more in fees, but you'd hopefully be making money off your work, in which case the $1000 (probably) in fees would be trivial. People do this kind of thing all the time now with (off the top of my head) Adobe products. Security through obscurity (in a different sense).
Also: iPhoto only being available in OS X is not that big a deal, because if you really wanted to do serious digital photography, you'd be using Photoshop, and anyone else has probably upgraded to OS X already because there's no good reason not to (Photoshop is the only thing holding me in Classic right now).
People have never trusted Macs. I don't know why. It's always been that way, it's just that people keep looking for new reasons to justify their distrust.
The big uses for computers for the average folk these days would be email, web browsing, word processing. For that, you can live on less than a gigahertz of speed. Things aren't going to improve that much with a top-of-the-line Athlon as compared to a discontinued PII. So if you don't need the extra speed, what differentiates the computers? RAM, HD, video card... style maybe.
What differentiates cars? Why don't car manufacturers spend gobs of cash throwing the newest "maximum speed notched up by 10 mph!" engines for their vehicles? Why do they, instead, focus on styling, CD players, automatic this-and-thats? Probably because you could make a car that can go 500 mph in the shape of a Civic, but honestly no one would need the extra speed (mainly because of traffic laws, but you know...)
So maybe the iMac's push for style (and very good specs, given its intended audience) is just Apple moving into the next arena of computers as stuff-of-life: the basic concept stays the same, but it's what you add in details that matters.
In that way, Apple is definitely ahead of the game.
I think that's the exactly the argument for iPhoto, too.
The real challenge in the whole concept is figuring out how to make the regionalized content accessible in such a way that people in the USA don't get more content than those in Australia. Basically avoiding the DVD region problems. You want to make sure that people can communicate about the show online (through the website) in such a way that no one is held back for being from a different country. :)
Also, the ability to override the controls is essential for those who want to. It's useless trying to keep smarter people from checking spoilers, but I wouldn't think it's that offensive to try and filter them out as a default.
I'll let y'all know how it goes
Nothing's wrong with the user selecting it themselves, but if you're aiming entertainment at the web, you need to assume the people accessing it are not very clever, so the more work you can do for them, the better.
:)
Sorry I'm arguing this point so much... I just spent the last 3 weeks making these same points to media moguls from the other direction, so finding out some of our audience doesn't like it is coming as a bit of a shock to me
A mix of a lot of things. Sometimes translation times (but not really often, truly). Mostly the fact that some markets want to see how it does in its native setting before the commit. It's a fundamental flaw of the television broadcast design that's becoming more obvious as the internet's possibilities get clearer. Some of it, of course, has to do with being able to get a better deal in coutnry X when you have a major hit on your hands in country Y, which you can't know until it's been on the air for a few months.
Media moguls are the ones who don't understand the concept. But in a lot of cases, especially in entertainment-like things, you WANT to have information censored when it relates to things you haven't seen yet. If we could broadcast around the world all at the same time, it wouldn't be an issue... sadly, that's just not a possibility yet. Anyway, it's like the theory of nuking banners from all websites because you don't like the annoying ones. On occasion, there are some ads that you'd probably have wanted to see, and you're missing out on some good things when you generalize a technology. Try and keep an open mind, because some of us are trying to do good things for our audience...
This technology (and damn, it's really not perfect yet) is incredibly important for internationally-broadcast shows. We're currently developing a system which will hopefully tune a website to the market the show is playing in, so that the audience gets their language, their teasers (watch XYZ this Thursday at 8) and limits spoilers based on their broadcast schedule. If it worked all the time, it'd be great, which is why you have to introduce the loophole of letting the user override the setting if it's just plain wrong. Some of the things that make the internet great, like big pools of people from all over the world in one place, bring with them bad things (what happened on this episode of X-Files months before it hits Australia). Things like this, when used for noble purposes, are making the whole business work much better.
It's not entirely out of the question. I started my "work life" around 15, working part-time during the school year and then full-time during the summer, doing mainly Director programming and (what I now laughingly refer to as) video work as a contractor for a multimedia shop. That kind of thing really does count for something, especially when compared to recent grads from the "5 weeks of Director and I'm An Expert!" courses.
:)
Most people won't believe you when you say you've had 5 years experience at 20, but it shows when you're better adjusted to real work habits compared to recent-college grads the same age. Also, you have a better chance of buying yourself a kickass system when you're 16, which is definitely worth something at the time
I had the same problems starting out as an 18-year-old in IT. Luckily for me I look a little older than my age, so I had some time to spare before anyone caught on.
One particularly nasty moment I had was when I went in for a job interview, then a second, then a third at this company, and at the end of the third they brought me around to meet the people I was going to be working with, get to know people, see my desk etc. And one of the people I met said, "Hey, didn't you go to high school with my brother?"
...
Sure enough, I got the call the next day that they'd given the job to someone else (who they'd already told me wasn't qualified).
But it's how it goes. You get pressured out of jobs because of your age, or get quietly underpaid for the same work, or have managers explain to you "in the workplace, we do not always get full lunch hours like in school".
The thing to look for could be companies that were started by younger people (harder to find these days, admittedly), because they tended to do their thing as a result of being underappreciated at their old jobs.
I myself went into freelance and contract work, because you are sold on your reputation before they meet you. I also find that starting your own company (get lots of credit cards and disconnect your fear mechanism) is a good thing to do, ESPECIALLY when you have a wife and daughter (my situation exactly... it makes you work harder).
A few years from now you'll look back at this time, a second kid on the way, and think "wow, I can't believe almost every one of the companies I worked for that treated me like crap have gone out of business!", and it will all be okay.
The MiniDisc only died in North America. In Japan it's thriving (still, somehow). Sony has even come out with a little cable that connects your MD player to your computer so you can download and play MP3s there (and no copy protection... the Japanese are very lax on copyright issues). I bought my in-laws a super-MD player in Japan a year ago and it was bloody cheap for the whole thing plus 100 MDs to go with it. That technology is, I think, one of the biggest oversights we as N.A. consumers have made in a long time.
The other great technology that they mentioned in the article was 3G, which they failed to mention as existing in Japan already. They said incompatible standards between the U.S. and Europe... but really, incompatible standards between New York and Seattle. By the time 3G finally makes it to most of N.A., the Japanese will have forgotten it's a novelty and come up with some crazy content brilliance for the format. Of course, they have to pay to use land-line phones at home, so I guess it's even.
I have the same problem here... work at home, and because the first thing I do is sit at my computer and start working every day, I tend to lose track of weekends or holidays. The really awful part of it is that for the past four Christmases or so I work straight through the 24th/25th/26th, but then because no one else is working, and no new stuff is coming in, I get bored on the 27th and 28th, and by New Year's I'm so completely hooked on reading a book or playing some game that it takes me close to mid-January to get back into the working habit.
This year I hope to avoid that by erasing half my work at the end of every day, so that I'll always have something to do tomorrow.
Either that or go back to my university days and continue reading books and playing games year-round.
Hmmm...
sorry, I meant to write $50 million, not $50,000. Credit card bills on the brain, I guess...