But the showstopper for me is two-fold: The lack of a dial-up option (not everyone has a cable modem accessibility yet!), and the fact that, by license, it appropriate for use with "kids under 13".
Both of those are show-stoppers for my household.
So, it looks like the Nintendo would have been a better choice for my household in the long-term: 56k dialup option, and more games for everyone (a better mix of "mature" and "everyone" titles).
Oh well, maybe MS will fix these issues before things really get rolling!
On the whole, the USA is a much more violent than any other industrialized country. The statistics are very clear.
And therefore, people have developed real fears. Hense the desire and willingness to own and wield guns.
If a (single) burglar enters my home, I have two resonable choices: run or shoot.
Being not that stupid, I'd first try to run away... I'm not looking for trouble. But if I'm threatened with bodily harm, and I have no other reasonable choice, than I'll shoot.
When I ask to get my phone disconnected, it takes about 5 minutes.
When I ask to get a new passport, it takes about 6 weeks.
When I ask to be put on a do-not-spam list, it takes 3 months???
In this electronic age, where only 20 bytes of information needs to be passed around and nothing physical needs to change hands, and no humans need to be involved in the process, 3 months is lazy and unreasonable.
The industry association has, once again, let everyone down in order to service it's own needs.
Private speech and political speech are fundamentally different than commercial speech.
Yes, this CAN be regulated by the government. Why? Because the industry has be unable to self-regulate. It isn't about speech... it's about giving an industry the right to ring a little bell inside of my house.... and removing that right.
My grandfather is 98 years old. He gets 5 or 6 telemarketing calls a week. He does not need this BS. He asks them to take him off the list, but new players call him back. They try to sell him everything from roofing (for his condo?) tohearing aides.
Please tell me, DMA, how we can stop this without my 98 year old grandfather losing his phone and without costing him $$$ he can't afford.
As I understand it, solar, with fuel cells for power storage for night. Just like satellites.
Of course, there would need to be an electric fan to keep it in position... perhaps much like electric fans used on ultra-high-flying experimental aircraft.
Also, note the high altitude - above cloud cover... so light is plentiful (good!)... but winds are high too (bad!).
This is, hopefully, much cheaper than geosync satellites. PLUS you can bring them down for maintenence (unlike geosync). So therefore, the machines can be less redundant (read "expensive") than satellite technology.
Sounds like a great solution if they can successfully keep them in place. If cheap enough, this technology could replace the need for ALL large radio towers. (Those towers ain't cheap either, you know)
99% of the SPAM I recieve is undesirable and expensive noise. Forged headers of commercial email certainly has nothing to do with "free speech".
And sending commercial email under the guise of someone else (ie - using my email address in the FROM: header) ) should result in very heavy fines (may I suggest to the legislators a punitive fine of US$25000 per email destination)
Some free speech advocates will complain about a loss of their freedom to send commercial information to deserving customers. Happily, there are still countless avenues to communicate to these deserving souls: telephone, personal visits, snail mail, newspaper ads, TV ads, radio ads, pre-movie ads, magazines, movie product placements, tv show product placements, yellow pages, airplane banners, billboards, etc.
Doesn't everyone find it ironic that the most heavily worked and under-appreciated folks at a university, the Teaching Assistants and other staff people, are NOT eligable for the iBook deal?
No, I have never been a TA. And I never want to be one.
1. I -do- support my girlfriend. It's just not on my list of officially supported OSs. Yep, I dicourage it. I'm busy, and they get my support for free. But if they have 98, I support them.
2. I -do- support win98 because that's what most of my users use, enjoy, and use for serious stuff. Plus, I'm not only responsible for OS support, but for software aquisition. I simply can't make the case that they should upgrade. Eash upgrade costs a minumum of $200. And that doesn't include hardware upgrades (necessary for some), and at least 4 hours of time (not including travel time... most of my family lives at least 2 hours away).
3. Serious business use includes: Email, Internet Access, MS-Office, and Adobe products. Plus some kids games. If you can provide me with some compelling arguments that I should upgrade someone/everyone with XP, please do so. Remember, most upgrades mean hardware upgrades too.
I can't merely tell these folks to "check out 2k or XP".
4. I realize that some day I'll have to support other OSs: My dad just got an XP-based laptop. My sister wants to be able to have real user accounts (so maybe 2000 or XP). And my Sister wants to get the kids a new iMac.
Trust me, it's a lot of work. The more consistancy I have, the better I can support my users.
I don't disagree with your facts, only with your conclusion.
1. Win98 is stable and runs well on older hardware (even Pentium 133 hardware) 2. My users are accustomed to Win98 3. The so called "performance issues" don't impact my users.
For all my users care, it could run on top of CP/M.
Yes, I'm confident that aspects of the new Windows OSes (and Lindows and MacOS) are technically BETTER than Win98.
But that doesn't mean that switching away from my current family standard (win98) will make anyone in my family happier. Hey, I have to support my family, being the family sysadmin.
That means I have to know their hardware, software, and have to keep them happy. And I can't ask them to spend tons of $$$ for no perceived benefit.
And FYI, yeah, my family (except my Mom) use their PCs for their home-based businesses, and therefore the operation and availability and stability of these boxes are of the highest importance.
PS- I run Linux at home, W2k at work (corporate standard), Solaris at work (corporate server standard).
By the metric of running it exclusively as a file server. My NT3.51 file servers required a reboot at least once a week. It's GUI would lock up, and nothing but the big bad red button would get it going again.
Also, by the metric of running it as a desktop computer. Again, I'd have to reboot it at least once a week.
NT4 greatly improved it (not that I'm a big NT4 fan... 2000 is much more stable. And of course, these days, for internet services, I use Linux exclusively.)
My Dad, Mom, and Sister all run Windows 98. (I upgraded them from Win95 because it's pretty unstable). And this yea, my Dad and Sister were upgraded from P133 machines to Duron 900mhz machines (kept the drives, printers, and monitors from their old machines - so the upgrade cost was about $225 each!)
There is -no- need for me to upgrade them to anything. They are happy, and I'm happy.
My only mistake was getting my Dad hooked on IE & Outlook. I admit it was an experiment ("let me try out a 100% Microsoft machine"), but I didn't realize the damage it could do to him.
I agree with microsoft... MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, NT 3.51, and Win95 are all unsupportable. They're much too unstable and feature-poor (or useless, in the case of MS-DOS). THey sucked when they were on the market - and they suck even more today.
The newest Windows OS I support is Windows 98. That's right, my sister, my mom, and my dad all run Windows 98, so I support them. My brother-in-law and girlfriend run Windows XP, so they're out of luck. (No, they didn't blow $200-$400 on XP - it came for """free""" on their Dell & Fujitsu laptops.)
This is industry propaganda - they "want" to support the Macintosh, but they "can't" due to the "limited availability of Mac software".
Or, perhaps we could re-phrase their double-speak:
"We don't like Apple's attitude. Therefore, we're going to hose their customers... not by saying that Apple is wrong, but by saying that the Mac platform is poorly supported by the software industry! Heh, that'll learn them".
Again, the customers are in the middle.... between the computer industry, which has a disdain for controlling their customers and industry self-overregulation, and the "DRM" industry, whose only purpose is to control customers.
Since Apple was technically correct in their claims, the DRM folk could only counter by kicking Apple between the legs.
Let's read this article and it's topic as it should be - a power-play by the DRM industry, against Apple's ideal of fully supporting it's customer base.
I found that with Verizon I had crappy quality of service. I don't live in the boondocks - I live about 3 miles from the city limits.
For those who don't know, Boston is one of the top 10 metro areas (in population) in the US. And Verizon is the largest cell phone carrier in the USA.
So due to my quality-of-service issues, I switched from Verizon.
I was going to go for Sprint, but their service was pretty much the same - my girlfriend had lousy service while in my neighborhood.
And so I switched to AT&T Wireless, and now I get good signal (except for a few days this summer, when things were just odd... maybe they had a local infrastructure problem?)
I'm not saying that Sprint or AT&T or Verizon is better or worse in terms of overall quality of service. What I am saying is that at least for me, quality of service is strongly dependent on where you live and the carrier you choose.
Does this suck? Yes. It sucks because instead of having the choice between AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, I only have one real choice. AT&T. They have a monopoly in my neighborhood. Maybe when my contract is up I'll look into T-Mobile or Nextel.
---
As for changing phone numbers - who cares! Tell your friends that you have a new number, and leave all the telemarketeers in the dust!
OK, I expected kind of big losses foir the XBox - new product, tough marketplace, lots of competition... and I'm not sure how much Sony and Nintendo are losing on their consoles.
But I'd think that Microsoft had a huge advantage - after all, they own MS-Windows and can leverage that technology within the internals of the X-Box. Furthermore, the X-Box should be a great game box, because there are so many software vendors that already produce software for Windows.
So where did Microsoft go wrong? Is the X-Box just grossly mismanaged, with a seemingly unlimited budget? Or is this something that is "expected", and therefore was part of the grand plan, and therefore will ultimately result in the glowing profits and new markets for Microsoft?
The only other thing I know is that I bought a PS2. I thought of going with the X-Box - heck, it is a sweet game console. But I stuck it out with the PS2 because of game availability - after all, the PS2 has already been proven. Not sure if I made the right choice, but I don't think I made a bad choice.
Happily, this appears to be simply an error on the part of Bill Wyman's attorney (the former Rolling Stone).
It looks like his attorney totally failed to do any research into Bill Wyman (the Writer) - a very big shame, especially given that many attorneys charge significant amounts of money to do research into such matters.
I wonder what the bill rate was for this letter. Maybe $6? Or maybe $1000? Perhaps $5000?
Well, I certainly have a large volume of SPAM that I plan to use for training purposes. I'm not a big user of personal email, but somehow about 70% of all my incoming personal mail is SPAM. My Dad is much worse off.
I'm glad to see that the software industry is taking the SPAM problem seriously. And it's great to hear that more and more states, like Massachusetts, are enacting laws to curb the abuse of email systems.
I've been dependent on some static rules to curb SPAM (about 90% effective), but I think now it's time to implement more serious anti-spam measures.
Slashdot Mirror
I do own an X-Box... a good gaming console.
But the showstopper for me is two-fold: The lack of a dial-up option (not everyone has a cable modem accessibility yet!), and the fact that, by license, it appropriate for use with "kids under 13".
Both of those are show-stoppers for my household.
So, it looks like the Nintendo would have been a better choice for my household in the long-term: 56k dialup option, and more games for everyone (a better mix of "mature" and "everyone" titles).
Oh well, maybe MS will fix these issues before things really get rolling!
True.
On the whole, the USA is a much more violent than any other industrialized country. The statistics are very clear.
And therefore, people have developed real fears. Hense the desire and willingness to own and wield guns.
If a (single) burglar enters my home, I have two resonable choices: run or shoot.
Being not that stupid, I'd first try to run away... I'm not looking for trouble. But if I'm threatened with bodily harm, and I have no other reasonable choice, than I'll shoot.
Why is it dangerous ground? Why is it so hard to classify?
Classifications work both ways you know.
And we have the people to decide what is what.
Why?
When I ask to get my phone disconnected, it takes about 5 minutes.
When I ask to get a new passport, it takes about 6 weeks.
When I ask to be put on a do-not-spam list, it takes 3 months???
In this electronic age, where only 20 bytes of information needs to be passed around and nothing physical needs to change hands, and no humans need to be involved in the process, 3 months is lazy and unreasonable.
The industry association has, once again, let everyone down in order to service it's own needs.
I don't buy it.
Private speech and political speech are fundamentally different than commercial speech.
Yes, this CAN be regulated by the government. Why? Because the industry has be unable to self-regulate. It isn't about speech... it's about giving an industry the right to ring a little bell inside of my house.... and removing that right.
My grandfather is 98 years old. He gets 5 or 6 telemarketing calls a week. He does not need this BS. He asks them to take him off the list, but new players call him back. They try to sell him everything from roofing (for his condo?) tohearing aides.
Please tell me, DMA, how we can stop this without my 98 year old grandfather losing his phone and without costing him $$$ he can't afford.
Hey, I tried that a few weeks ago and it hasn't worked yet. I get even MORE junk mail now!
Airport Security was a airline industry-regulated business, because "government regulation wasn't necessary" and was "too expensive".
Looks like THAT didn't work either.
Ya, and sub-geosync satellites move!
Oh, and one more thing - these things are 1000s of times closer to you than a geosync satellite... And therefore the latency is greatly reduced.
That's great for voice and data communications.
As I understand it, solar, with fuel cells for power storage for night. Just like satellites.
Of course, there would need to be an electric fan to keep it in position... perhaps much like electric fans used on ultra-high-flying experimental aircraft.
Also, note the high altitude - above cloud cover... so light is plentiful (good!)... but winds are high too (bad!).
This is, hopefully, much cheaper than geosync satellites. PLUS you can bring them down for maintenence (unlike geosync). So therefore, the machines can be less redundant (read "expensive") than satellite technology.
Sounds like a great solution if they can successfully keep them in place. If cheap enough, this technology could replace the need for ALL large radio towers. (Those towers ain't cheap either, you know)
10 airships is (hopefully, according to business plan) a shitload cheaper than 14,000 towers or 1 geosync satellite.
No a bad idea... help the internet community by hitting spammers where it hurts... AND making your institution better.
99% of the SPAM I recieve is undesirable and expensive noise. Forged headers of commercial email certainly has nothing to do with "free speech".
And sending commercial email under the guise of someone else (ie - using my email address in the FROM: header) ) should result in very heavy fines (may I suggest to the legislators a punitive fine of US$25000 per email destination)
Some free speech advocates will complain about a loss of their freedom to send commercial information to deserving customers. Happily, there are still countless avenues to communicate to these deserving souls: telephone, personal visits, snail mail, newspaper ads, TV ads, radio ads, pre-movie ads, magazines, movie product placements, tv show product placements, yellow pages, airplane banners, billboards, etc.
Where I work, non-executives got a 10% "holiday/end-of-year" bonus, because we made the numbers we were expected to make.
Not too bad.
Executives did not get the 10% holiday bonus.... but then again, they get a lot of hidden bonuses and perks.
Doesn't everyone find it ironic that the most heavily worked and under-appreciated folks at a university, the Teaching Assistants and other staff people, are NOT eligable for the iBook deal?
No, I have never been a TA.
And I never want to be one.
You ARE kidding, right?
We're all citizens (I'm talking about US citizens here... sorry everyone else!).
YOU might conclude that some citizens are stupid. But your neighbor may not agree with your conclusion.
This is a democracy "for the people". Not "for the smart", not "for the rich", not "for everyone but the idiots".
Easy:
1. I -do- support my girlfriend. It's just not on my list of officially supported OSs. Yep, I dicourage it. I'm busy, and they get my support for free. But if they have 98, I support them.
2. I -do- support win98 because that's what most of my users use, enjoy, and use for serious stuff. Plus, I'm not only responsible for OS support, but for software aquisition. I simply can't make the case that they should upgrade. Eash upgrade costs a minumum of $200. And that doesn't include hardware upgrades (necessary for some), and at least 4 hours of time (not including travel time... most of my family lives at least 2 hours away).
3. Serious business use includes: Email, Internet Access, MS-Office, and Adobe products. Plus some kids games. If you can provide me with some compelling arguments that I should upgrade someone/everyone with XP, please do so. Remember, most upgrades mean hardware upgrades too.
I can't merely tell these folks to "check out 2k or XP".
4. I realize that some day I'll have to support other OSs: My dad just got an XP-based laptop. My sister wants to be able to have real user accounts (so maybe 2000 or XP). And my Sister wants to get the kids a new iMac.
Trust me, it's a lot of work. The more consistancy I have, the better I can support my users.
I don't disagree with your facts, only with your conclusion.
1. Win98 is stable and runs well on older hardware (even Pentium 133 hardware)
2. My users are accustomed to Win98
3. The so called "performance issues" don't impact my users.
For all my users care, it could run on top of CP/M.
Yes, I'm confident that aspects of the new Windows OSes (and Lindows and MacOS) are technically BETTER than Win98.
But that doesn't mean that switching away from my current family standard (win98) will make anyone in my family happier. Hey, I have to support my family, being the family sysadmin.
That means I have to know their hardware, software, and have to keep them happy. And I can't ask them to spend tons of $$$ for no perceived benefit.
And FYI, yeah, my family (except my Mom) use their PCs for their home-based businesses, and therefore the operation and availability and stability of these boxes are of the highest importance.
PS- I run Linux at home, W2k at work (corporate standard), Solaris at work (corporate server standard).
By the metric of running it exclusively as a file server. My NT3.51 file servers required a reboot at least once a week. It's GUI would lock up, and nothing but the big bad red button would get it going again.
Also, by the metric of running it as a desktop computer. Again, I'd have to reboot it at least once a week.
NT4 greatly improved it (not that I'm a big NT4 fan... 2000 is much more stable. And of course, these days, for internet services, I use Linux exclusively.)
You betcha.
My Dad, Mom, and Sister all run Windows 98. (I upgraded them from Win95 because it's pretty unstable). And this yea, my Dad and Sister were upgraded from P133 machines to Duron 900mhz machines (kept the drives, printers, and monitors from their old machines - so the upgrade cost was about $225 each!)
There is -no- need for me to upgrade them to anything. They are happy, and I'm happy.
My only mistake was getting my Dad hooked on IE & Outlook. I admit it was an experiment ("let me try out a 100% Microsoft machine"), but I didn't realize the damage it could do to him.
I agree with microsoft... MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, NT 3.51, and Win95 are all unsupportable. They're much too unstable and feature-poor (or useless, in the case of MS-DOS). THey sucked when they were on the market - and they suck even more today.
The newest Windows OS I support is Windows 98. That's right, my sister, my mom, and my dad all run Windows 98, so I support them. My brother-in-law and girlfriend run Windows XP, so they're out of luck. (No, they didn't blow $200-$400 on XP - it came for """free""" on their Dell & Fujitsu laptops.)
This is industry propaganda - they "want" to support the Macintosh, but they "can't" due to the "limited availability of Mac software".
Or, perhaps we could re-phrase their double-speak:
"We don't like Apple's attitude. Therefore, we're going to hose their customers... not by saying that Apple is wrong, but by saying that the Mac platform is poorly supported by the software industry! Heh, that'll learn them".
Again, the customers are in the middle.... between the computer industry, which has a disdain for controlling their customers and industry self-overregulation, and the "DRM" industry, whose only purpose is to control customers.
Since Apple was technically correct in their claims, the DRM folk could only counter by kicking Apple between the legs.
Let's read this article and it's topic as it should be - a power-play by the DRM industry, against Apple's ideal of fully supporting it's customer base.
"Can you hear me?" "No"
That was me in the metro Boston region.
I found that with Verizon I had crappy quality of service. I don't live in the boondocks - I live about 3 miles from the city limits.
For those who don't know, Boston is one of the top 10 metro areas (in population) in the US. And Verizon is the largest cell phone carrier in the USA.
So due to my quality-of-service issues, I switched from Verizon.
I was going to go for Sprint, but their service was pretty much the same - my girlfriend had lousy service while in my neighborhood.
And so I switched to AT&T Wireless, and now I get good signal (except for a few days this summer, when things were just odd... maybe they had a local infrastructure problem?)
I'm not saying that Sprint or AT&T or Verizon is better or worse in terms of overall quality of service. What I am saying is that at least for me, quality of service is strongly dependent on where you live and the carrier you choose.
Does this suck? Yes. It sucks because instead of having the choice between AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, I only have one real choice. AT&T. They have a monopoly in my neighborhood. Maybe when my contract is up I'll look into T-Mobile or Nextel.
---
As for changing phone numbers - who cares! Tell your friends that you have a new number, and leave all the telemarketeers in the dust!
OK, I expected kind of big losses foir the XBox - new product, tough marketplace, lots of competition... and I'm not sure how much Sony and Nintendo are losing on their consoles.
But I'd think that Microsoft had a huge advantage - after all, they own MS-Windows and can leverage that technology within the internals of the X-Box. Furthermore, the X-Box should be a great game box, because there are so many software vendors that already produce software for Windows.
So where did Microsoft go wrong? Is the X-Box just grossly mismanaged, with a seemingly unlimited budget? Or is this something that is "expected", and therefore was part of the grand plan, and therefore will ultimately result in the glowing profits and new markets for Microsoft?
The only other thing I know is that I bought a PS2. I thought of going with the X-Box - heck, it is a sweet game console. But I stuck it out with the PS2 because of game availability - after all, the PS2 has already been proven. Not sure if I made the right choice, but I don't think I made a bad choice.
Happily, this appears to be simply an error on the part of Bill Wyman's attorney (the former Rolling Stone).
It looks like his attorney totally failed to do any research into Bill Wyman (the Writer) - a very big shame, especially given that many attorneys charge significant amounts of money to do research into such matters.
I wonder what the bill rate was for this letter. Maybe $6? Or maybe $1000? Perhaps $5000?
Well, I certainly have a large volume of SPAM that I plan to use for training purposes. I'm not a big user of personal email, but somehow about 70% of all my incoming personal mail is SPAM. My Dad is much worse off.
I'm glad to see that the software industry is taking the SPAM problem seriously. And it's great to hear that more and more states, like Massachusetts, are enacting laws to curb the abuse of email systems.
I've been dependent on some static rules to curb SPAM (about 90% effective), but I think now it's time to implement more serious anti-spam measures.