The bad news is that, due to the processing overhead of the prefetch routines, activating the 30-second-skip hack actually s l o w s d o w n the playback for 30 seconds.
The pricing of Macs is really pretty simple to explain: Apple doesn't make cheap computers. That's "cheap" in the sense of "low price" and in the sense of "low quality". The have a wide range of performance specs available, but none of them are built like crap, which puts a floor on the product pricing. But at just about every level of quality, the price is pretty comparable to equal machines from the competition.
As for Apple's RAM upgrade pricing... well... yeah, that's a technophobia tax (or an I-can't-be-bothered-to-comparison-shop tax). If you're afraid to DIY, you pay some pretty inexplicable prices for them to upgrade it for you. About the only thing I can say in their defence on this point is that if you go to the Apple Store and you want to buy a machine with more RAM than the units they stock, they'll upgrade it there in the store, and they'll give you full credit (at Apple RAM prices) for the chips they pull out to replace with bigger ones.
I wonder if the benefits of audio-tactile feedback are lost on those who learned to type on later mushboards. I cut my typing teeth on manual typewriters,* where the vertical travel and the "clack" are an inherent part of what it means to register a keystroke. If you're used to having the appearance of a character on a screen as your only feedback, those other forms are little more than arbitrary bells and whistles.
*That's the kind that doesn't have an electric motor, kids.
I ran into this kind of situation in my first job. When I included a license for WordPerfect on a PO I wrote for a new system, the exec who had to sign off on it crossed that line item out, with the note "We already have this."
Fortunately, a short time after I started they hired an IT manager who'd previously worked for a software developer, so I got his support. What we did at first was, rather than trying to bring the whole company into compliance all at once (which would have been a large chunk of money), he insisted on including software with every new hardware purchase, and we got that. In those days software came with manuals, so we were able to use that as a selling point to the execs who didn't grasp licensing or legal vulnerability. The next step was to offer existing users an upgrade to the latest version... which they had to pay for by buying a full license. After a while of this, the cost of fixing all of the remaining unlicensed software got small enough (and the execs had been educated enough) that we got approval to make it all (or at least mostly) legit.
Given the fact that this is Sports, I suspect you'll find that using a closed, proprietary technology was spec'ed as a business requirement for this. The streams are probably wrapped in some kind of DRM, which is something that (as a practical matter) you'll only get by going with a single-vendor solution.
Microsoft has a native Silverlight plug-in for OS X. It's how Netflix was able to include OS X support for their streaming-video service, which is requires the kind of DRM that Silverlight offers.
Do you think that farming is due for another boom? Do you honestly believe that manufacturing is going to bounce back in the US? There have been and continue to be changes in both the U.S. and global economies that will be permanent.
You can't get through a single news item or political speech on the subject of the current job market without the reporter/politician saying something about how people need to be retrained for jobs in "health care" or "high tech", because that's where the jobs will be. Of course this doesn't mean that we'll have a surplus of job openings in IT... only that most other fields (especially manufacturing and farming) are contracting like an old red supergiant.
(The only field that really looks good for the foreseeable future is nursing. With the Boomers already starting into their 60s and lifespans reaching into the medically-dependent 90s, there is going to be a persistent need for lots of nurses in the decades to come, and that's something that simply cannot be "off-shored". How we'll pay them all a living wage is a good question, but at least they'll have jobs.)
That's because economist-bureaucrats have defined a certain level of unemployment as "full employment". They figure you're always going to have some people who are out of work... so they don't count that many of them.
No... that's an amateur lawyer's deliberate misreading of plain language. Most people recognize that in English, "you" and "your" can be plural pronouns, which apply just as easily to a family unit as to a single person.
That's a stretch that would do Plastic Man proud. I know I don't obsess over how the employees of business I patronize spend their paychecks, especially employees whose pay is not directly related to how much I spend.
I've avoided buying anything at Office Despot since I walked into one years ago and they had a sign boasting that they test their employees for drugs. Even aside from the fact that I find that invasion of employees' privacy troublesome on principle, why would I - as a customer - care whether the guy ringing up my sale smokes a little weed once in a while, or even if the girl restocking the shelves does a line of coke every night? What kind of business brags about how worker-unfriendly an employer they are?
ST:Voyager was carried in my city by a station that scheduled it right after their Sunday afternoon sports programming, which meant it was always being delayed/pre-empted. But probably for contractual reasons, they also rebroadcast each episode in full at a predictable hour in the middle of the night, so I just set my VCR (and later TiVo) to record it. Problem solved. The whole notion of "scheduling" TV shows is rapidly becoming irrelevant.
When it comes to what's done by the government, I have only one vote. But that's one more vote than I have when it comes to what's done by private businesses, and it guarantees me a right to participate in the process.
This article is a poorly written, useless rant. It contains little information about what pisses the writer off, and even less about what should be done instead. I'd love to read a thoughtful, informative article about the subject, since I've recently started an IT job in the health care field, but this isn't it. Any suggestions?
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The bad news is that, due to the processing overhead of the prefetch routines, activating the 30-second-skip hack actually s l o w s d o w n the playback for 30 seconds.
Make that "But at just about every level of performance....
The pricing of Macs is really pretty simple to explain: Apple doesn't make cheap computers. That's "cheap" in the sense of "low price" and in the sense of "low quality". The have a wide range of performance specs available, but none of them are built like crap, which puts a floor on the product pricing. But at just about every level of quality, the price is pretty comparable to equal machines from the competition.
As for Apple's RAM upgrade pricing... well... yeah, that's a technophobia tax (or an I-can't-be-bothered-to-comparison-shop tax). If you're afraid to DIY, you pay some pretty inexplicable prices for them to upgrade it for you. About the only thing I can say in their defence on this point is that if you go to the Apple Store and you want to buy a machine with more RAM than the units they stock, they'll upgrade it there in the store, and they'll give you full credit (at Apple RAM prices) for the chips they pull out to replace with bigger ones.
This has been my answer for years, any time someone tries to ridicule my subcompact car:
"You know how some guys get big SUVs or sports cars to compensate for their sexual inadequacy? I'm doing the same thing, just the other way 'round."
Probably because there are countless porn movies in which HIV transmission has been captured on video: at the macroscopic scale.
What really sucks is the fact that the touchscreen means you can't install a cassette deck in the dash!
I wonder if the benefits of audio-tactile feedback are lost on those who learned to type on later mushboards. I cut my typing teeth on manual typewriters,* where the vertical travel and the "clack" are an inherent part of what it means to register a keystroke. If you're used to having the appearance of a character on a screen as your only feedback, those other forms are little more than arbitrary bells and whistles.
*That's the kind that doesn't have an electric motor, kids.
It's the kind that uses a metaphor... apparently instead of proper punctuation.
They have JPS: Jungle Positioning System
I ran into this kind of situation in my first job. When I included a license for WordPerfect on a PO I wrote for a new system, the exec who had to sign off on it crossed that line item out, with the note "We already have this." Fortunately, a short time after I started they hired an IT manager who'd previously worked for a software developer, so I got his support. What we did at first was, rather than trying to bring the whole company into compliance all at once (which would have been a large chunk of money), he insisted on including software with every new hardware purchase, and we got that. In those days software came with manuals, so we were able to use that as a selling point to the execs who didn't grasp licensing or legal vulnerability. The next step was to offer existing users an upgrade to the latest version... which they had to pay for by buying a full license. After a while of this, the cost of fixing all of the remaining unlicensed software got small enough (and the execs had been educated enough) that we got approval to make it all (or at least mostly) legit.
Given the fact that this is Sports, I suspect you'll find that using a closed, proprietary technology was spec'ed as a business requirement for this. The streams are probably wrapped in some kind of DRM, which is something that (as a practical matter) you'll only get by going with a single-vendor solution.
Microsoft has a native Silverlight plug-in for OS X. It's how Netflix was able to include OS X support for their streaming-video service, which is requires the kind of DRM that Silverlight offers.
"because things always run in cycles."
Um... no.
No, they don't.
Do you think that farming is due for another boom? Do you honestly believe that manufacturing is going to bounce back in the US? There have been and continue to be changes in both the U.S. and global economies that will be permanent.
You can't get through a single news item or political speech on the subject of the current job market without the reporter/politician saying something about how people need to be retrained for jobs in "health care" or "high tech", because that's where the jobs will be. Of course this doesn't mean that we'll have a surplus of job openings in IT... only that most other fields (especially manufacturing and farming) are contracting like an old red supergiant.
(The only field that really looks good for the foreseeable future is nursing. With the Boomers already starting into their 60s and lifespans reaching into the medically-dependent 90s, there is going to be a persistent need for lots of nurses in the decades to come, and that's something that simply cannot be "off-shored". How we'll pay them all a living wage is a good question, but at least they'll have jobs.)
That's because economist-bureaucrats have defined a certain level of unemployment as "full employment". They figure you're always going to have some people who are out of work... so they don't count that many of them.
I just turned... um... 44!
That's not DRM. Whose digital copyrights are being managed by preventing you from installing third party software? "Closed system" != "DRM"
No... that's an amateur lawyer's deliberate misreading of plain language. Most people recognize that in English, "you" and "your" can be plural pronouns, which apply just as easily to a family unit as to a single person.
That's a stretch that would do Plastic Man proud. I know I don't obsess over how the employees of business I patronize spend their paychecks, especially employees whose pay is not directly related to how much I spend.
I've avoided buying anything at Office Despot since I walked into one years ago and they had a sign boasting that they test their employees for drugs. Even aside from the fact that I find that invasion of employees' privacy troublesome on principle, why would I - as a customer - care whether the guy ringing up my sale smokes a little weed once in a while, or even if the girl restocking the shelves does a line of coke every night? What kind of business brags about how worker-unfriendly an employer they are?
If this is how he reacts to imprisonment, I can't wait to see what his reaction is now to being castrated. (I know what mine would be.)
Um... apparently you're not listening.
Or at least you have now.
ST:Voyager was carried in my city by a station that scheduled it right after their Sunday afternoon sports programming, which meant it was always being delayed/pre-empted. But probably for contractual reasons, they also rebroadcast each episode in full at a predictable hour in the middle of the night, so I just set my VCR (and later TiVo) to record it. Problem solved. The whole notion of "scheduling" TV shows is rapidly becoming irrelevant.
When it comes to what's done by the government, I have only one vote. But that's one more vote than I have when it comes to what's done by private businesses, and it guarantees me a right to participate in the process.
This article is a poorly written, useless rant. It contains little information about what pisses the writer off, and even less about what should be done instead. I'd love to read a thoughtful, informative article about the subject, since I've recently started an IT job in the health care field, but this isn't it. Any suggestions?