I watch a reasonable amount of TV, maybe 3 or 4 shows a week that I routinely watch, and then stuff if I'm just bored.
I do watch a lot of European Soccer, particularly English Premiere League. Soccer's a great way to show how to work around an advertising problem: The game is played for two continuous 45 minute halves. No TV Time-outs like (american) football/basketball, no injury time-outs. It just goes for 45 minutes, then stops for ~15 for half time, then goes again for another 45. So Advertisers have a few problems: no commercial breaks in-game, and the big-ol' 15 minute break in the middle is enough time for me to go grill myself a hamburger, grab a beverage, go to the bathroom, change the oil, etc. (although not at the same time).
So there're a couple of strategies employed. First, the obvious, that "this game is brought to you by so-and-so: slogan". You'll also find that the score display in the upper-right of the screen is "brought to you by so-andso", who just display their logo under the score constantly. Then, of course, the teams have logos on their jerseys, something which I am amazed American companies/sports teams haven't jumped on.
But as I ramble, I come to the ACTUAL idea. I started noticing that company logos are displayed in the center circle and corners of the field, in a manner that makes them appear to have been mowed/rolled into the grass. Of course, it isn't mowed/rolled in, it's digitally added, which makes it appear as though, say, budweiser has mowed the center of the pitch, when in reality it was simply added in later.
Let's take a couple of examples, which would be wildly easy to insert: 1) The friend's appartment has some poster on the wall, which, say changes week to week. Maybe it's a movie poster this week, maybe a pseudo-vintage coke ad. 2) The TV in a scene is playing some sort of advertisement. This would be especially amusing. 3) More mention of stores, and in particular, cars. Outside of the Seinfeld Black Saab, and Joe Suburbs shining up his vintage 60's muscle car while chatting with his neighbor, cars don't get a lot of play on your average sitcom or drama (knight rider/Viper excluded). For example, I know that in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cordelia drives a Chrysler Sebring, but that's only because I'm a geeky car guy. She never mentions it by name, but does indicate an attachment to it and how cool it is. Why not a few exterior shots as character X gets into his new Subaru, or as Jane Doctor on Medical Drama Du Jour pulls up to the hospital. Car Geeks like me can identify the car by the look of a fender, but if the public knew that Jane Doctor drove the new Toyota Camry, maybe that's a good motivating reason for them to own it. Heck, they make the Acura NSX look cool as hell in Pulp Fiction, and they don't ever even tell you what it is.
So, to summarize: product placement, but in different methods than are currently used. Instead of a stupid pepsi billboard, have the characters order a pepsi at the amusement park's drink stand. Instead of a commercial about the new Buick Rendezvous, make it obvious that the wholesome soccer mom love interest drives a Buick Rendezvous. Instead of "movie guy" telling us in 30 seconds about X-Men 2, make it seem that X-Men 2 is so cool that Joe Cool-Character would want to have the movie poster in his apartment. Creative integrity isn't really spoiled, instead of a character at the bar saying "lemme have a beer" he says "gimme an MGD". What's changed? Nothing really. Frame up a shot so that Suzy is walking toward the screen, with the rear of the new BMW Z4 visible on the right side and Suzy on the left. What's changed? One camera angle, which an assistant director would likely have taken care of anyway. Then maybe dump a solid five minutes worth of advertisements in between shows, so that people watching it "live" still catch some other ads. Not exactly a 'problem solved' but it does implement the ad in a different manner entirely.
China-brand electronics maker may release one with a digital out, but even a $2,500 receiver wouldn't know what to do with it.
Let's take an Onkyo 989 receiver as example. It can decode PCM, DTS, and Dolby Digital, none of which an SACD uses. The DSD format that it is recorded in was specifically designed to skirt the tinny sound of PCM audio. Of course, there was the added benefit of "thwarting" "pirates". SACDs and DVD-Audio disc players output their music audio in analog, predecoded. That way, there's no issue for the receiver to understand it. Really the only way to handle it would be to acquire a pre-decoder as people did in the early days of the 5.1 era, and patch it in over a DB-25 connection.
So we'd run into a bit of a chicken and egg issue. If I don't have a receiver that can decode a DSD signal, I would have no reason to buy china-brand SACD player. If there's no market for people looking for such a player, then china-brand isn't going to squander its measley per-unit profits on a processor to output such a signal. You'd also be dealing with a market ("audiophiles") which would take one look at China-brand and pass on by to the $1,000 SACD player. The non-audiophile public might buy it, but they'd buy them for the same reason they buy china-brand nowadays: price, not the unique features.
I don't doubt it might happen, but it would have to be a long ways off. The audio world has already established that it's willing to pay large amount of money for patch cables to sustain analog signals. There would need to be a more serious desire in the audiophile world to make them dump existing equipment in order to accommodate the digital output of the new format.
I usually don't try to get into arguments over "good" vs. "Bad" music, but I'd simply like to voice my opinion on the subject. As the old adage goes, opinions are like assholes, blah blah
When one talks about good vs. bad music, one isn't speaking in the same manner as they are about good vs. bad software o good vs. bad electronics or so forth. It's a matter of opinion.
Who am I to say that, for example, The Ramones are better than Britney Spears. I'm just one guy who prefers the former to the latter. Now, I could have a hojillion music critics and punk fans support me in my opinion, but it means naught to the next fella, if he prefers upbeat pop lyrics.
Perhaps this person enjoys top 40 electronica. I enjoy it too, sometimes. Just as I sometimes prefer a 90 minute Action movie to a 3 hour long Oscar-winning period drama, I sometimes prefer some Daft Punk to DJ Esoteric So-and-So (note how I omit the name, as you probably think DJ esoteric so-and-so is crap compared to This other DJ So-andso. It's not you personally, it's simply the rules of discussing music online). Even though I might readily admit that the former pales in comparison to the latter, sometimes I'm just not in that mood.
Your points on international shipping, though, are quite valid. Ditto for the song issues, although I have a friend who insists on driving to the huge-ass record store to purchase his imports at ~$30/cd prices because he considers it part of the "experience". To each his own.
What I meant to continue on was the fact that you have to have a starting point. It's like asking where to find info about rock. Do you want radio-play alternative, less-mainstream alternative, punk, classic, hair-metal, or what?
Find artists that you like. Try to pin down their dance genre. Trance = circular, repeating beats, usually without a lot of lyrics. Diva = Trance+Vocoder+Soprano singer, etc. Check out Amazon, and see what "people who liked X also liked". Read reviews or webpages about certain artists, and see what names and so forth that people mention. But really, don't discount actually going out and looking.
Or any chain-type music store. Electronic music, outside of big names like Moby, Daft Punk, and so forth, are not going to be commonly found in those stores. It'd be the same as if you were searching for local, small-time rock or rap artists. It's simply not the market they're targetting. Or, to put it in/. terms, it'd be like walking into Circuit City and asking to see a selection of motherboards and cases; it just isn't their market.
There are a couple of good ways to find electronic music you like: 1) local, privately-owned music shops. Be they one-off or franchises, these places have a lot more lee-way in what they order, and especially, the market they want to target. If you live in a particularly large city, you can probably find a shop that specializes in electronic music, or at least one that keeps a large stock of it. 2) This is an especially useful technique: go clubbing. Seriously. Go to a club that plays more electronic-type dance music and just listen. Talk to the DJ if it's a small club (but not while he's working). Alternately, flip on your local Top 40/Alternative rock station around midnight on a Saturday, as most of them have live club feeds, and they'll typically announce names of artists being played. It may not be an authoritative list, but it's a good place to get started and to learn what genres of electronic music you like/dislike.
It's perfectly reasonable for them to expect to be able to assemble their computer without spending five minutes reading the manual. I'm serious. If you go to a car dealership to test-drive a car, do you expect to have to spend five minutes reading the manual in order to figure out where the ignition is, and how to operate the seatbelts?
Actually, people really would learn a lot. A lot of the more esoteric features on a car are somewhat obscure, and hell, if someone's driving a Saab or an Audi, they might have to read the manual to find out where the ignition is. Alternately, if they own a Subaru they would do well to read the manual, as they would realize that if their car is ever towed on anything other than a flatbed, it will destroy their differentials and cost them one hell of a repair.
Not only that, but this isn't really a manual, it's an oversized single glossy page, frequently without any text at all. Nothing but illustrations that basically indicate "plug the damned speaker in here. Plug the monitor in over there..."
Definitely, it's simple with an Apple. Anytime anyone ever asks me what the best computer is for their video editing work, I always answer "a Mac.". I bought my first one for that purpose, then picked up an iBook because of the light weight and nice features/price. Now, try to do the same with a Windows user:
No one else really advertises their products as being supposedly as simple as a computer. Let's take Dell for example:
What is their tagline? Something like "easy to own, Easy to use, Easy as Dell", with some other stuff thrown in. What makes a Dell running XP any simpler than an HP running XP or a whitebox running XP? Dell's cases are certainly easy and convenient to work in, but anyone who's heavily interested in the "easy to use/own" aspect probably isn't poking around inside.
Maybe they're referring to the buying process. Again, a lot of novice users (the ones who create the biggest tech support issues) are probably intimidated by the online/phone buying process. Hell, I run into people all the time who think that the local Best Buy or CompUSA must be the place to start looking for Dell.
If I were my mother (computer knowledge-wise), I wouldn't know what the hell to make of Dell's site. Desktop-wise, I have three tiers of systems, each of which is configurable. What benefit does this RDRAM have over that DDR-SDRAM? Do I need a 64MB video card? Why is this 7200RPM drive better, and what is the standard speed? I heard those Celerons were "bad"... and so forth.
Computers really need to be advertised less as electronic hubs or personal empowwerment devices and more as tools. I can't call craftsman when I'm having trouble building my deck, so why should Dell concern themselves with my solitaire playing issues. Don't scream "price" because if I'm talking about a quality set of power tools that I'd need to build a deck, I can dump just as much as I could on a mid-range home PC.
It makes me shudder when I see computers advertised as e-mailing home vides. How many home users have enough mastery to understand that they'll need to import DV, edit it down, then compress it to a size halfway workable enough for e-mail, when in reality the file SHOULD be uploaded to a website/FTP server and a link e-mailed?
In the industry's push to portray PCs as "must-have", heavily important "educational", "information devices" they have created a legion of consumers that seem to expect highly-trained "support specialists" to assist them when they can't get their picture to print out in the insane manner they seem to think it should. On the flipside, Craftsman has created a legion of users who have faith in the fact that this 150-year-old company can make a solid power-tool, and if you have questions about how to begin cutting the 2x4s, you should've hired a contractor. In reality, the two pieces of equipment are very, very similar, it's merely the perception that makes a customer feel one way about one and another about the other.
1) Lack of basic knowledge or incentive to acquire it. I sell computers in your basic retailer setting, and consumers really are the dumbest, laziest people out there (in general, there are always exceptions). Nine times out of ten, a customer would rather complain that something is too difficult than take the extra five minutes to simply read a short section from a manual. I have people call and ask me how to connect, say, the line level plug to their speakers on the computer they just bought. Anyone who has opened a retail computer in the last two years knows that there is a big, glossy fold out "poster-size" page with a color illustreation of the three steps necessary to plug in basic cables. Square peg in square hole, blue trapezoid in blue trapezoid-al hole. Things 4-year-olds have already mastered. It also never ceases to entertain me when customers will readily spend an extra $200 to get a machine with four features they don't need just so they can have more RAM. "But," I'll say, "You can walk right over there and get an additional X MB and pop it in. Do you really want to spend another $200?".
Problem 2: Easy-to-use is obviously subjective. I prefer a heavily hierarchical organization in everything. On windows machines, I'll typically have only 4 categories under "programs", each with sub-categories and sometimes sub-sub-categories, ie. Entertainment->Games->FPS->Q3. It makes sense to me and allows me to launch programs more quickly. It frustrates the hell out of my girlfriend, who prefers the "Giant alphabetical order list" of programs. Of course, her method is far more suitable on my iBook.
So, to summarize: Ease of use still requires a little bit of education/effort in learning. What's easy to use for you or the interface designer may not be easy to use for Grandpa or my girlfriend or me. Allow a good degree of customization and configuring, but make those options obvious and easy to locate.
Simulation is nothing in the autmotive world, particularly the aftermarket. You have to test and test and re-test. Sure, I suppose a competent mechanical engineer could come up with some formulas to reasonably estimate what modification X might produce. In fact, a lot of drag guys will run simulations that reasonably calculate, based on their current weight, what kind of power they need to do a 1/4 mile at a certain time. That's a reasonably simple calculation.
The catch is going to be getting the actual specs for a given car.
Let's say I want to bolt on a simple turbocharger and intercooler setup. It's a reasonably good quality turbo with minimal lag. Now let's say I bolt the same turbocharger onto the following three cars:
Older model Honda ('98) Honda Civic LX: My turbo and the accompanying modifications make, say, 400 hp at the wheels. My car is now close to undriveable because torque steer is ridiculous when the turbo starts to pull, and the necessary suspension mods will either make the car fast but unable to steer (too stiff a rear) or negate most of the power gain (rear is too soft and the front wheels hop).
97' Camaro SS: My turbo add-in is basically worthless unless I do a lot of engine work. The higher compression pistons on the Camaro mean that unless I knock the boost down to about 6 PSI, I'm going to be knocking my engine apart with detonation. For the same $5,000, I could've stroked the engine, ported and milled the heads, and upgraded the intake and exhaust.
'97 Toyota Supra: My intercooler is too big to work with the factory radiator, and thus, the car constantly overheats (not good). Either I need to get a bigger radiator or a smaller intercooler.
Now, I could probably have predicted that the Honda would torque-steer like a mother, given a basic knowledge of its drivetrain. I would have selected a supercharger and been content to put 250 or 300 horsepower to the wheels and call it a day. Any reasonably well-written program would predict the same torque-steer. But it might not have been able to tell you about the suspension issues, as it would likely assume a purely physics approach to the suspension, while I would recognize that things like gravel on the road, short inclined exits from fast-food places, and crappy roads would mean that my car would lose traction all the time.
As for the Camaro, any reasonably intelligent program could tell you that the compression ratio was too high too feed heavy boost to. It would likely recommend the same Natural Aspiration tuning.
Now for the Supra, that would be the hardest to predict. Without a lot of raw data on engine bay heat buildup in various areas, I couldn't see any program reasonably predicting such an occurence. So, while the '97 Supra would've been the ideal recipient for such an upgrade, the computer would probably fail to recognize the terrible amounts of heat such an upgrade might generate.
Blah Blah... let me shorten the long story: Tuning a car is not an easy process, and it certainly isn't like a lot of tuning mags will have you believe ("Joe had this and this and this done. He rolls on these type of tires and posts this timeslip. Joe hopes to add these modifications in order to acheive this lower time"). There's a reason professional shops charge about 3X what reasonable part and labor costs for a given complete upgrade might be. If you're running straight lines all day long and rebuilding at the end of the day (as in drag), a pick-a-part approach is somewhat suitable as long as you have a good idea of what you're doing. For turning a reliable, daily-driven car into a much faster, reliable, daily-driven car, it's a hell of a lot harder. Open source or no, there's a lot more that a computer needs to know beyond basic physics and math calculations in order to accurately predict what a given upgrade might do.
The inspiron 8200 (which is the "desktop replacement" equipped with the GF 440) has an SXGA screen (1440x1200, I believe, certainly higher than the XGA 1024x768 you imply). Believe it or not, a lot of high-end notebooks are now sporting UXGA (1600x1200) LCDs, which is why they are becoming lousy for gaming, although an 800x600 interpolation for that resolution is fine.
Belive it or not, as long as you fiddle with desktop fonts and such, 1600x1200 is not terrible on a 15" display. That, and the 15" display is not going to be the default high-end display for long, as Gateway offers a 15.7" and Sony offers a 16.1" display (both in ~8.5 lbs. notebooks, but that's why they call them desktop replacements).
Currently, 1024x768 is the native resolution on low-range celeron and duron notebooks and the 12.1" micro notebooks like the Toshiba 2200 series and Sony's R-series notebooks, but anything sporting a P4 and plenty of higher-end PIII units have at least SXGA resolution.
The GeForce 4 440 that most of these high-end P4 notebooks sport has full MPEG-2 decoding built-in. So, outside of drawing to the screen, every function is done by a processor purpose built for DVD playback. While it's a good example of a feature laptop users are looking for, it's a terrible way to "demonstrate" the power of speedstep, as the P4 itself has very little to do with the battery life increase. They go on and on about the GF4's PowerMizer technology and the P4's Speedstep, and fail to realize that this battery life increase is likely due to having a dedicated decoding processor.
While they're at it, I might suggest the following purpose-built vs. software-simulated tests:
Pentium 4 running Quake 2 in software mode vs. Pentium 4 running Quake 2 with hardware acceleration: Which is faster?
$20 TI-30 solar calculator vs. $1,500 PC running calculator.exe under WindowsXP: Which is cheaper for basic mathematical functions?
MPEG-2 Encoder card vs. 1 Ghz Athlon: Which encodes quicker?
Incidentally, I noticed that they ran most of their framerate tests at 1024x768 (considered by most gamers, obviously, to be the optimal trade-off between quality and performance). Of course, this notebook (and most like it) has a native resolution of 1600x1200, and every 1600x1200 notebook I've ever seen has a terrible blurriness to it at anything other than the native resolution (obviously). I wonder how Quake 3 fares at a non-blurry resolution?
There seems to be a prevailing attitude of "I paid for TIVO, this is mine, blah blah blah" on this subject. Let me clue you in on a fact: companies have to make money. Before you go off on a tangent about the evil corporation selling out the consumer, consider this:
SonicBlue makes models very comparable to TiVO. NO Monthly fee. It's yours. Seriously, do with it as you please. Oh, wait, you don't want to pay $500? Well, here's a TiVO. But they're gonna make their money up somewhere.
PVR manufacturers aren't looking to turn their systems into a razor margin PC; if they want to turn a profit, they have to make it somewhere, and that somewhere all comes down to pay me now or pay me later. I guarantee that if UK users check their EULA, TiVO reserved the right to do this. I don't hear a lot of people complaining about the ~$300 they save when they choose a subscription-based business model TiVO over a pricier, hardware-profit based unit.
Think about it this way: I can pay ~$400 a month and get a Honda Accord (assuming a decent down-payment and decent options), or I can find one of those car wrap companies and get them to pay my note in return for plastering my car with advertisements. Either way, I get a car, but I don't think I have a lot of room to bitch about those gaudy ads on the trunk of my Accord.
For mobile service, I can sign a 1-year contract with Sprint and get X amount of minutes for $Y/month. Or, I can pay $10 additional, and that same plan requires no contract. Pay me now or pay me later.
TiVOs are a great deal, but if you want complete control over your PVR, look somewhere else. Just be prepared to shell out.
I work retail, so I hear people complaining all the damned time about the cost of ink refills. Here's an easy way to figure it out: The cheaper the printer, the more expensive the cartridge. Simple as that.
Go buy a cheapie Lexmark z23 and marvel at the ~$33 cost for the black ink. Now buy an HP 900-series, and notice how the price drops to ~$30. Now buy their D135 all-in-one unit and (HOLY SHIT!) the price for the black is $22. Is anyone else surprised, because I'm not.
Is it an honest way to do business? That depends on your perspective. I always try to show a customer the fact that the $20 they're saving here is going right out the window when they replace the ink for the first time.
I have a laser that I use for 95% of my printing. You can snag a good quality home-oriented laser in the $250 range if you shop it. I have a couple of old color units that I use if I NEED color. I might pick up one of the photo-type units if for some reason the SO decided she wanted more of the digital pics printed out. Under no circumstances would I ever try to print the volume of papers that I routinely print (I'm an english major... typical Sunday evening has about 50 pages worth of printing in its future) on an inket. You wouldn't try to run a DNS on a Win95 box, and you wouldn't try to go off-road in your Cavalier, so why do so many people insist on using an el-cheapo inkjet for a job that a laser is so much better suited (and cheaper) for.
So are we complaining when the free cell phone requires a two-year contract? Two cliches come to mind: "Pay me now or pay me later", and "you get what you pay for".
Exactly how much of the extra footage is "closeup of ring" or "closeup of Frodo in awe".
Somebody walking out of the movie suggested that a good drinking game would be to take a shot every time there was a closeup of the ring. We decided that any viewer, Boris Yeltsin included, would be dead before a single RingWraith had ever appeared.
It's going to require education, leadership from Washington and true diligence to help our fans - that would be you - to embrace this life and death[my own empahsis here] issue and support our artistic community by only downloading your music from legal Web sites
Geez, can't the music folks go back to "raising awareness" about other life and death issues like HIV and Breast Cancer? Seriously, life and death? Has this guy been reading too much of The Onion? A statement like this completely undermines all of the actual life and death situations in the world, ones which Greene mentioned at the beginning of his speech.
The only thing seriously in jeopardy is Mr. Greene's ability to continue payments on his Porsche as he watches his 1950's-era business model crumble under the weight of 80's-era technology that's finally come of age.
HP was the last half-way decent retail computer a consumer could buy. No, I'm not talking about Dell, because a lot of less technically experienced people don't feel comfortable ordering their computer over the phone/internet.
I sell computers at Circuit City. It's a pretty good way to pay my way through school. If you walk into any retail store (Circuit City, Best Buy, CompUSA, etc.), you'll see four major desktop brands: HP, Sony, Compaq, and E-Machines. Most stores will usually have one or two more laptop brands (usually Toshiba and possibly Fujitsu). For desktops, HP is the only one of those brands listed that's even halfway decent. Compaq's Presarios are heavily integrated, cut-$2-off-this-win-modem-price pieces of crap. A lot of semi-savvy customers refuse to buy Compaq because of their previous experiences with them (it didn't help that their Presario line used to use proprietary RAM upgrades, either). E-Machines are shoddily assembled completely integrated computers with one thought in mind: Price. Which works well for folks who need a $400 or $500 computer package, but it won't do much for them. Sony's build quality is at least decent, but their occasional use of proprietary equipment, and their (usually) higher price relative to similarly equipped Desktops usually precludes them from the running. And don't get me started on the fact that they phased out last year's models (SDRAM-based P4 units) in mid-November and haven't supplied their retail partners with 845 chipset-based units yet.
That leaves good ol' reliable HP. Their PCs always use industry standard equipment, and the build quality on their desktops is very nice. Yeah, they charge a little bit too much for their monitors, but their inkjets are the best in the business (yeah, we techs sneer at inkjets, but you'd be surprised how much most folks like them).
Well, here's to hoping that this doesn't happen. Pavillion PCs will be sorely missed at my store.
I find it exceedingly interesting that this discussion is being posted EXACTLY 18 years after the landmark supreme court case (Sony Corp. vs. Universal City Studios, Inc.) was settled.
I noticed the circular for my local Fry's advertised a desktop (w/o monitor) for $299 this morning. 900Mhz Celeron, 128MB RAM, 20GB HDD. When I looked closer, it said it was linux 1.3-based (whatever the hell that means, aren't we on the 2.4x kernel now?). The ad declared that it supported "e-mail, web browsing, and word processing", and that "Windows [was] available for additional charge". So it really does appear that these sorts of machines are being sold retail.
I work at a Circuit City, and I can attest to the fact that I doubt this could be too hard.
I had a guy come in and pay for an LCD monitor and some other things with 20(!) $50 gift cards. It got me thinking:
We have (like most stores) two types of gift cards. There are cards which are pre-printed with a given amount (in that case, $50). We then have cards which have any given amount attached to them, and that number is generated at the register. We THEN have what are called "Merchandise" cards, which are issued as store credit for returns (or those wretched AOL/Compuserve/MSN deals). All of these cards are treated exactly like any other type of plastic. They have a 12-digit number on the back of them (unlike the sixteen digit on most plastic). The "make your own quantity" cards are all tracked in our backend system (a centralized SCO-UNIX server in our back office, which routes to a big honking server via satellite). But the "given quantity" cards (like the aforementioned stack 'o' $50 cards) are not (I can tell because of the lack of processing time when they are sold, versus the "create your own").
My guess is that the number scheme for those $50 cards is already embedded in our system. It's a simple case of using a scanner/programmer to see which digits differ between active and inactive units. The fun part comes from the fact that any purchase over $100 requires that we enter a telephone number and address for an individual. All returns and exhanges are handled from this address, and we can track everything any person has bought or returned since the beginning of our central-server implementation (~13 years ago). If a person purchases an inordinately large amount of things with gift cards, the system will tag it, and Loss Prevention at Corporate will be alerted. The further fun aspect comes from the fact that the digits on the gift cards are tied to a given store location when they are shipped out, so I don't think it would be too hard to figure out a) which store they're coming from and b) which employee is "hooking" people up.
I burned a DVD-R movie using a Pioneer DVD-R/RW Drive. Popped it in the PS2, and it played away. So yeah, stright up out of the box, it plays just fine.
Don't believe me? Head up to your local Circuit City and ask to record a "Message From America". They'll tape you with a Digital 8 tape, and 20 minutes later you'll have a DVD-R with your message on it that'll work just fine in your PS2.
But, if Maine wanted to go with a laptop solution, I'd have to say that the iBook was a wise choice. I own an iBook, and I can say that this thing would be my primary choice for a situation like this (except for maybe Panasonic's Toughbook, but those cost far too much). Take note school districts:
1) Durability - While I haven't actually dropped my iBook, it does live in my backpack when it isn't in use. I have dropped the whole backpack (no damage), and it has flown off the passenger seat when idiots pull out in front of my car (still no damage). I have walked with it under my arm in a hard rain (no damage).
2) Heavily integrated - yeah, this isn't a good idea most of the time, but broken dongles will no longer be an issue. Neither will stolen NICs/Wireless NICs.
3) Lightweight - As far as I know, the iBook has the lowest weight for a laptop in its price range. $1,299 retail for a 4.9 lbs. laptop is a helluva deal.
4) Sort of bastardized security through obscurity - 95% of these 1337 7th and 8th graders don't know enough about Mac OS/mac hardware to cause serious damage. I can just see some jerk setting BIOS passwords or messing with clock frequencies or IDE device settings on little Suzy's PC laptop when she got up to go to the bathroom.
5) Useable UNIX - escape the MS tax AND teach the kiddies some UNIX all at the same time (that was my requisite karma whoring). I could actually see this being fairly useful, though. Only give the kids user privileges in OS X, and make them find someone with root access in order to install programs. "Okay little Billy, tell me again why you need Starcraft for school use...". This also solves any problems that might stem from some jerk trying to erase important parts of the system.
Overall, I think buying laptops is a waste of money, but I'd say that iBooks are probably the way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
I watch a reasonable amount of TV, maybe 3 or 4 shows a week that I routinely watch, and then stuff if I'm just bored.
I do watch a lot of European Soccer, particularly English Premiere League. Soccer's a great way to show how to work around an advertising problem: The game is played for two continuous 45 minute halves. No TV Time-outs like (american) football/basketball, no injury time-outs. It just goes for 45 minutes, then stops for ~15 for half time, then goes again for another 45. So Advertisers have a few problems: no commercial breaks in-game, and the big-ol' 15 minute break in the middle is enough time for me to go grill myself a hamburger, grab a beverage, go to the bathroom, change the oil, etc. (although not at the same time).
So there're a couple of strategies employed. First, the obvious, that "this game is brought to you by so-and-so: slogan". You'll also find that the score display in the upper-right of the screen is "brought to you by so-andso", who just display their logo under the score constantly. Then, of course, the teams have logos on their jerseys, something which I am amazed American companies/sports teams haven't jumped on.
But as I ramble, I come to the ACTUAL idea. I started noticing that company logos are displayed in the center circle and corners of the field, in a manner that makes them appear to have been mowed/rolled into the grass. Of course, it isn't mowed/rolled in, it's digitally added, which makes it appear as though, say, budweiser has mowed the center of the pitch, when in reality it was simply added in later.
Let's take a couple of examples, which would be wildly easy to insert:
1) The friend's appartment has some poster on the wall, which, say changes week to week. Maybe it's a movie poster this week, maybe a pseudo-vintage coke ad.
2) The TV in a scene is playing some sort of advertisement. This would be especially amusing.
3) More mention of stores, and in particular, cars. Outside of the Seinfeld Black Saab, and Joe Suburbs shining up his vintage 60's muscle car while chatting with his neighbor, cars don't get a lot of play on your average sitcom or drama (knight rider/Viper excluded). For example, I know that in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cordelia drives a Chrysler Sebring, but that's only because I'm a geeky car guy. She never mentions it by name, but does indicate an attachment to it and how cool it is. Why not a few exterior shots as character X gets into his new Subaru, or as Jane Doctor on Medical Drama Du Jour pulls up to the hospital. Car Geeks like me can identify the car by the look of a fender, but if the public knew that Jane Doctor drove the new Toyota Camry, maybe that's a good motivating reason for them to own it. Heck, they make the Acura NSX look cool as hell in Pulp Fiction, and they don't ever even tell you what it is.
So, to summarize: product placement, but in different methods than are currently used. Instead of a stupid pepsi billboard, have the characters order a pepsi at the amusement park's drink stand. Instead of a commercial about the new Buick Rendezvous, make it obvious that the wholesome soccer mom love interest drives a Buick Rendezvous. Instead of "movie guy" telling us in 30 seconds about X-Men 2, make it seem that X-Men 2 is so cool that Joe Cool-Character would want to have the movie poster in his apartment. Creative integrity isn't really spoiled, instead of a character at the bar saying "lemme have a beer" he says "gimme an MGD". What's changed? Nothing really. Frame up a shot so that Suzy is walking toward the screen, with the rear of the new BMW Z4 visible on the right side and Suzy on the left. What's changed? One camera angle, which an assistant director would likely have taken care of anyway. Then maybe dump a solid five minutes worth of advertisements in between shows, so that people watching it "live" still catch some other ads. Not exactly a 'problem solved' but it does implement the ad in a different manner entirely.
China-brand electronics maker may release one with a digital out, but even a $2,500 receiver wouldn't know what to do with it.
Let's take an Onkyo 989 receiver as example. It can decode PCM, DTS, and Dolby Digital, none of which an SACD uses. The DSD format that it is recorded in was specifically designed to skirt the tinny sound of PCM audio. Of course, there was the added benefit of "thwarting" "pirates". SACDs and DVD-Audio disc players output their music audio in analog, predecoded. That way, there's no issue for the receiver to understand it. Really the only way to handle it would be to acquire a pre-decoder as people did in the early days of the 5.1 era, and patch it in over a DB-25 connection.
So we'd run into a bit of a chicken and egg issue. If I don't have a receiver that can decode a DSD signal, I would have no reason to buy china-brand SACD player. If there's no market for people looking for such a player, then china-brand isn't going to squander its measley per-unit profits on a processor to output such a signal. You'd also be dealing with a market ("audiophiles") which would take one look at China-brand and pass on by to the $1,000 SACD player. The non-audiophile public might buy it, but they'd buy them for the same reason they buy china-brand nowadays: price, not the unique features.
I don't doubt it might happen, but it would have to be a long ways off. The audio world has already established that it's willing to pay large amount of money for patch cables to sustain analog signals. There would need to be a more serious desire in the audiophile world to make them dump existing equipment in order to accommodate the digital output of the new format.
I usually don't try to get into arguments over "good" vs. "Bad" music, but I'd simply like to voice my opinion on the subject. As the old adage goes, opinions are like assholes, blah blah
When one talks about good vs. bad music, one isn't speaking in the same manner as they are about good vs. bad software o good vs. bad electronics or so forth. It's a matter of opinion.
Who am I to say that, for example, The Ramones are better than Britney Spears. I'm just one guy who prefers the former to the latter. Now, I could have a hojillion music critics and punk fans support me in my opinion, but it means naught to the next fella, if he prefers upbeat pop lyrics.
Perhaps this person enjoys top 40 electronica. I enjoy it too, sometimes. Just as I sometimes prefer a 90 minute Action movie to a 3 hour long Oscar-winning period drama, I sometimes prefer some Daft Punk to DJ Esoteric So-and-So (note how I omit the name, as you probably think DJ esoteric so-and-so is crap compared to This other DJ So-andso. It's not you personally, it's simply the rules of discussing music online). Even though I might readily admit that the former pales in comparison to the latter, sometimes I'm just not in that mood.
Your points on international shipping, though, are quite valid. Ditto for the song issues, although I have a friend who insists on driving to the huge-ass record store to purchase his imports at ~$30/cd prices because he considers it part of the "experience". To each his own.
Argh... Clicked wrong button.
What I meant to continue on was the fact that you have to have a starting point. It's like asking where to find info about rock. Do you want radio-play alternative, less-mainstream alternative, punk, classic, hair-metal, or what?
Find artists that you like. Try to pin down their dance genre. Trance = circular, repeating beats, usually without a lot of lyrics. Diva = Trance+Vocoder+Soprano singer, etc. Check out Amazon, and see what "people who liked X also liked". Read reviews or webpages about certain artists, and see what names and so forth that people mention. But really, don't discount actually going out and looking.
Or any chain-type music store. Electronic music, outside of big names like Moby, Daft Punk, and so forth, are not going to be commonly found in those stores. It'd be the same as if you were searching for local, small-time rock or rap artists. It's simply not the market they're targetting. Or, to put it in /. terms, it'd be like walking into Circuit City and asking to see a selection of motherboards and cases; it just isn't their market.
There are a couple of good ways to find electronic music you like:
1) local, privately-owned music shops. Be they one-off or franchises, these places have a lot more lee-way in what they order, and especially, the market they want to target. If you live in a particularly large city, you can probably find a shop that specializes in electronic music, or at least one that keeps a large stock of it.
2) This is an especially useful technique: go clubbing. Seriously. Go to a club that plays more electronic-type dance music and just listen. Talk to the DJ if it's a small club (but not while he's working). Alternately, flip on your local Top 40/Alternative rock station around midnight on a Saturday, as most of them have live club feeds, and they'll typically announce names of artists being played. It may not be an authoritative list, but it's a good place to get started and to learn what genres of electronic music you like/dislike.
It's perfectly reasonable for them to expect to be able to assemble their computer without spending five minutes reading the manual. I'm serious. If you go to a car dealership to test-drive a car, do you expect to have to spend five minutes reading the manual in order to figure out where the ignition is, and how to operate the seatbelts? Actually, people really would learn a lot. A lot of the more esoteric features on a car are somewhat obscure, and hell, if someone's driving a Saab or an Audi, they might have to read the manual to find out where the ignition is. Alternately, if they own a Subaru they would do well to read the manual, as they would realize that if their car is ever towed on anything other than a flatbed, it will destroy their differentials and cost them one hell of a repair. Not only that, but this isn't really a manual, it's an oversized single glossy page, frequently without any text at all. Nothing but illustrations that basically indicate "plug the damned speaker in here. Plug the monitor in over there..."
Definitely, it's simple with an Apple. Anytime anyone ever asks me what the best computer is for their video editing work, I always answer "a Mac.". I bought my first one for that purpose, then picked up an iBook because of the light weight and nice features/price. Now, try to do the same with a Windows user:
No one else really advertises their products as being supposedly as simple as a computer. Let's take Dell for example:
What is their tagline? Something like "easy to own, Easy to use, Easy as Dell", with some other stuff thrown in. What makes a Dell running XP any simpler than an HP running XP or a whitebox running XP? Dell's cases are certainly easy and convenient to work in, but anyone who's heavily interested in the "easy to use/own" aspect probably isn't poking around inside.
Maybe they're referring to the buying process. Again, a lot of novice users (the ones who create the biggest tech support issues) are probably intimidated by the online/phone buying process. Hell, I run into people all the time who think that the local Best Buy or CompUSA must be the place to start looking for Dell.
If I were my mother (computer knowledge-wise), I wouldn't know what the hell to make of Dell's site. Desktop-wise, I have three tiers of systems, each of which is configurable. What benefit does this RDRAM have over that DDR-SDRAM? Do I need a 64MB video card? Why is this 7200RPM drive better, and what is the standard speed? I heard those Celerons were "bad"... and so forth.
Computers really need to be advertised less as electronic hubs or personal empowwerment devices and more as tools. I can't call craftsman when I'm having trouble building my deck, so why should Dell concern themselves with my solitaire playing issues. Don't scream "price" because if I'm talking about a quality set of power tools that I'd need to build a deck, I can dump just as much as I could on a mid-range home PC.
It makes me shudder when I see computers advertised as e-mailing home vides. How many home users have enough mastery to understand that they'll need to import DV, edit it down, then compress it to a size halfway workable enough for e-mail, when in reality the file SHOULD be uploaded to a website/FTP server and a link e-mailed?
In the industry's push to portray PCs as "must-have", heavily important "educational", "information devices" they have created a legion of consumers that seem to expect highly-trained "support specialists" to assist them when they can't get their picture to print out in the insane manner they seem to think it should. On the flipside, Craftsman has created a legion of users who have faith in the fact that this 150-year-old company can make a solid power-tool, and if you have questions about how to begin cutting the 2x4s, you should've hired a contractor. In reality, the two pieces of equipment are very, very similar, it's merely the perception that makes a customer feel one way about one and another about the other.
1) Lack of basic knowledge or incentive to acquire it. I sell computers in your basic retailer setting, and consumers really are the dumbest, laziest people out there (in general, there are always exceptions). Nine times out of ten, a customer would rather complain that something is too difficult than take the extra five minutes to simply read a short section from a manual. I have people call and ask me how to connect, say, the line level plug to their speakers on the computer they just bought. Anyone who has opened a retail computer in the last two years knows that there is a big, glossy fold out "poster-size" page with a color illustreation of the three steps necessary to plug in basic cables. Square peg in square hole, blue trapezoid in blue trapezoid-al hole. Things 4-year-olds have already mastered. It also never ceases to entertain me when customers will readily spend an extra $200 to get a machine with four features they don't need just so they can have more RAM. "But," I'll say, "You can walk right over there and get an additional X MB and pop it in. Do you really want to spend another $200?".
Problem 2: Easy-to-use is obviously subjective. I prefer a heavily hierarchical organization in everything. On windows machines, I'll typically have only 4 categories under "programs", each with sub-categories and sometimes sub-sub-categories, ie. Entertainment->Games->FPS->Q3. It makes sense to me and allows me to launch programs more quickly. It frustrates the hell out of my girlfriend, who prefers the "Giant alphabetical order list" of programs. Of course, her method is far more suitable on my iBook.
So, to summarize: Ease of use still requires a little bit of education/effort in learning. What's easy to use for you or the interface designer may not be easy to use for Grandpa or my girlfriend or me. Allow a good degree of customization and configuring, but make those options obvious and easy to locate.
Simulation is nothing in the autmotive world, particularly the aftermarket. You have to test and test and re-test. Sure, I suppose a competent mechanical engineer could come up with some formulas to reasonably estimate what modification X might produce. In fact, a lot of drag guys will run simulations that reasonably calculate, based on their current weight, what kind of power they need to do a 1/4 mile at a certain time. That's a reasonably simple calculation.
The catch is going to be getting the actual specs for a given car.
Let's say I want to bolt on a simple turbocharger and intercooler setup. It's a reasonably good quality turbo with minimal lag. Now let's say I bolt the same turbocharger onto the following three cars:
Older model Honda ('98) Honda Civic LX: My turbo and the accompanying modifications make, say, 400 hp at the wheels. My car is now close to undriveable because torque steer is ridiculous when the turbo starts to pull, and the necessary suspension mods will either make the car fast but unable to steer (too stiff a rear) or negate most of the power gain (rear is too soft and the front wheels hop).
97' Camaro SS: My turbo add-in is basically worthless unless I do a lot of engine work. The higher compression pistons on the Camaro mean that unless I knock the boost down to about 6 PSI, I'm going to be knocking my engine apart with detonation. For the same $5,000, I could've stroked the engine, ported and milled the heads, and upgraded the intake and exhaust.
'97 Toyota Supra: My intercooler is too big to work with the factory radiator, and thus, the car constantly overheats (not good). Either I need to get a bigger radiator or a smaller intercooler.
Now, I could probably have predicted that the Honda would torque-steer like a mother, given a basic knowledge of its drivetrain. I would have selected a supercharger and been content to put 250 or 300 horsepower to the wheels and call it a day. Any reasonably well-written program would predict the same torque-steer. But it might not have been able to tell you about the suspension issues, as it would likely assume a purely physics approach to the suspension, while I would recognize that things like gravel on the road, short inclined exits from fast-food places, and crappy roads would mean that my car would lose traction all the time.
As for the Camaro, any reasonably intelligent program could tell you that the compression ratio was too high too feed heavy boost to. It would likely recommend the same Natural Aspiration tuning.
Now for the Supra, that would be the hardest to predict. Without a lot of raw data on engine bay heat buildup in various areas, I couldn't see any program reasonably predicting such an occurence. So, while the '97 Supra would've been the ideal recipient for such an upgrade, the computer would probably fail to recognize the terrible amounts of heat such an upgrade might generate.
Blah Blah... let me shorten the long story: Tuning a car is not an easy process, and it certainly isn't like a lot of tuning mags will have you believe ("Joe had this and this and this done. He rolls on these type of tires and posts this timeslip. Joe hopes to add these modifications in order to acheive this lower time"). There's a reason professional shops charge about 3X what reasonable part and labor costs for a given complete upgrade might be. If you're running straight lines all day long and rebuilding at the end of the day (as in drag), a pick-a-part approach is somewhat suitable as long as you have a good idea of what you're doing. For turning a reliable, daily-driven car into a much faster, reliable, daily-driven car, it's a hell of a lot harder. Open source or no, there's a lot more that a computer needs to know beyond basic physics and math calculations in order to accurately predict what a given upgrade might do.
The inspiron 8200 (which is the "desktop replacement" equipped with the GF 440) has an SXGA screen (1440x1200, I believe, certainly higher than the XGA 1024x768 you imply). Believe it or not, a lot of high-end notebooks are now sporting UXGA (1600x1200) LCDs, which is why they are becoming lousy for gaming, although an 800x600 interpolation for that resolution is fine.
Belive it or not, as long as you fiddle with desktop fonts and such, 1600x1200 is not terrible on a 15" display. That, and the 15" display is not going to be the default high-end display for long, as Gateway offers a 15.7" and Sony offers a 16.1" display (both in ~8.5 lbs. notebooks, but that's why they call them desktop replacements).
Currently, 1024x768 is the native resolution on low-range celeron and duron notebooks and the 12.1" micro notebooks like the Toshiba 2200 series and Sony's R-series notebooks, but anything sporting a P4 and plenty of higher-end PIII units have at least SXGA resolution.
The GeForce 4 440 that most of these high-end P4 notebooks sport has full MPEG-2 decoding built-in. So, outside of drawing to the screen, every function is done by a processor purpose built for DVD playback. While it's a good example of a feature laptop users are looking for, it's a terrible way to "demonstrate" the power of speedstep, as the P4 itself has very little to do with the battery life increase. They go on and on about the GF4's PowerMizer technology and the P4's Speedstep, and fail to realize that this battery life increase is likely due to having a dedicated decoding processor.
While they're at it, I might suggest the following purpose-built vs. software-simulated tests:
Pentium 4 running Quake 2 in software mode vs. Pentium 4 running Quake 2 with hardware acceleration: Which is faster?
$20 TI-30 solar calculator vs. $1,500 PC running calculator.exe under WindowsXP: Which is cheaper for basic mathematical functions?
MPEG-2 Encoder card vs. 1 Ghz Athlon: Which encodes quicker?
Incidentally, I noticed that they ran most of their framerate tests at 1024x768 (considered by most gamers, obviously, to be the optimal trade-off between quality and performance). Of course, this notebook (and most like it) has a native resolution of 1600x1200, and every 1600x1200 notebook I've ever seen has a terrible blurriness to it at anything other than the native resolution (obviously). I wonder how Quake 3 fares at a non-blurry resolution?
There seems to be a prevailing attitude of "I paid for TIVO, this is mine, blah blah blah" on this subject. Let me clue you in on a fact: companies have to make money. Before you go off on a tangent about the evil corporation selling out the consumer, consider this:
SonicBlue makes models very comparable to TiVO. NO Monthly fee. It's yours. Seriously, do with it as you please. Oh, wait, you don't want to pay $500? Well, here's a TiVO. But they're gonna make their money up somewhere.
PVR manufacturers aren't looking to turn their systems into a razor margin PC; if they want to turn a profit, they have to make it somewhere, and that somewhere all comes down to pay me now or pay me later. I guarantee that if UK users check their EULA, TiVO reserved the right to do this. I don't hear a lot of people complaining about the ~$300 they save when they choose a subscription-based business model TiVO over a pricier, hardware-profit based unit.
Think about it this way: I can pay ~$400 a month and get a Honda Accord (assuming a decent down-payment and decent options), or I can find one of those car wrap companies and get them to pay my note in return for plastering my car with advertisements. Either way, I get a car, but I don't think I have a lot of room to bitch about those gaudy ads on the trunk of my Accord.
For mobile service, I can sign a 1-year contract with Sprint and get X amount of minutes for $Y/month. Or, I can pay $10 additional, and that same plan requires no contract. Pay me now or pay me later.
TiVOs are a great deal, but if you want complete control over your PVR, look somewhere else. Just be prepared to shell out.
I work retail, so I hear people complaining all the damned time about the cost of ink refills. Here's an easy way to figure it out: The cheaper the printer, the more expensive the cartridge. Simple as that.
Go buy a cheapie Lexmark z23 and marvel at the ~$33 cost for the black ink. Now buy an HP 900-series, and notice how the price drops to ~$30. Now buy their D135 all-in-one unit and (HOLY SHIT!) the price for the black is $22. Is anyone else surprised, because I'm not.
Is it an honest way to do business? That depends on your perspective. I always try to show a customer the fact that the $20 they're saving here is going right out the window when they replace the ink for the first time.
I have a laser that I use for 95% of my printing. You can snag a good quality home-oriented laser in the $250 range if you shop it. I have a couple of old color units that I use if I NEED color. I might pick up one of the photo-type units if for some reason the SO decided she wanted more of the digital pics printed out. Under no circumstances would I ever try to print the volume of papers that I routinely print (I'm an english major... typical Sunday evening has about 50 pages worth of printing in its future) on an inket. You wouldn't try to run a DNS on a Win95 box, and you wouldn't try to go off-road in your Cavalier, so why do so many people insist on using an el-cheapo inkjet for a job that a laser is so much better suited (and cheaper) for.
So are we complaining when the free cell phone requires a two-year contract? Two cliches come to mind: "Pay me now or pay me later", and "you get what you pay for".
Exactly how much of the extra footage is "closeup of ring" or "closeup of Frodo in awe".
Somebody walking out of the movie suggested that a good drinking game would be to take a shot every time there was a closeup of the ring. We decided that any viewer, Boris Yeltsin included, would be dead before a single RingWraith had ever appeared.
It's going to require education, leadership from Washington and true diligence to help our fans - that would be you - to embrace this life and death [my own empahsis here] issue and support our artistic community by only downloading your music from legal Web sites
Geez, can't the music folks go back to "raising awareness" about other life and death issues like HIV and Breast Cancer? Seriously, life and death? Has this guy been reading too much of The Onion? A statement like this completely undermines all of the actual life and death situations in the world, ones which Greene mentioned at the beginning of his speech.
The only thing seriously in jeopardy is Mr. Greene's ability to continue payments on his Porsche as he watches his 1950's-era business model crumble under the weight of 80's-era technology that's finally come of age.
WTF get over it look busch said (i am not who usually listens to him) to go back to our regular lives and we are so go fuck a dog
You know you've had too much beer when it starts telling you to get back to your regular life.
HP was the last half-way decent retail computer a consumer could buy. No, I'm not talking about Dell, because a lot of less technically experienced people don't feel comfortable ordering their computer over the phone/internet.
I sell computers at Circuit City. It's a pretty good way to pay my way through school. If you walk into any retail store (Circuit City, Best Buy, CompUSA, etc.), you'll see four major desktop brands: HP, Sony, Compaq, and E-Machines. Most stores will usually have one or two more laptop brands (usually Toshiba and possibly Fujitsu). For desktops, HP is the only one of those brands listed that's even halfway decent. Compaq's Presarios are heavily integrated, cut-$2-off-this-win-modem-price pieces of crap. A lot of semi-savvy customers refuse to buy Compaq because of their previous experiences with them (it didn't help that their Presario line used to use proprietary RAM upgrades, either). E-Machines are shoddily assembled completely integrated computers with one thought in mind: Price. Which works well for folks who need a $400 or $500 computer package, but it won't do much for them. Sony's build quality is at least decent, but their occasional use of proprietary equipment, and their (usually) higher price relative to similarly equipped Desktops usually precludes them from the running. And don't get me started on the fact that they phased out last year's models (SDRAM-based P4 units) in mid-November and haven't supplied their retail partners with 845 chipset-based units yet.
That leaves good ol' reliable HP. Their PCs always use industry standard equipment, and the build quality on their desktops is very nice. Yeah, they charge a little bit too much for their monitors, but their inkjets are the best in the business (yeah, we techs sneer at inkjets, but you'd be surprised how much most folks like them).
Well, here's to hoping that this doesn't happen. Pavillion PCs will be sorely missed at my store.
I find it exceedingly interesting that this discussion is being posted EXACTLY 18 years after the landmark supreme court case (Sony Corp. vs. Universal City Studios, Inc.) was settled.
Just a little food for thought.
I noticed the circular for my local Fry's advertised a desktop (w/o monitor) for $299 this morning. 900Mhz Celeron, 128MB RAM, 20GB HDD. When I looked closer, it said it was linux 1.3-based (whatever the hell that means, aren't we on the 2.4x kernel now?). The ad declared that it supported "e-mail, web browsing, and word processing", and that "Windows [was] available for additional charge". So it really does appear that these sorts of machines are being sold retail.
I work at a Circuit City, and I can attest to the fact that I doubt this could be too hard.
I had a guy come in and pay for an LCD monitor and some other things with 20(!) $50 gift cards. It got me thinking:
We have (like most stores) two types of gift cards. There are cards which are pre-printed with a given amount (in that case, $50). We then have cards which have any given amount attached to them, and that number is generated at the register. We THEN have what are called "Merchandise" cards, which are issued as store credit for returns (or those wretched AOL/Compuserve/MSN deals). All of these cards are treated exactly like any other type of plastic. They have a 12-digit number on the back of them (unlike the sixteen digit on most plastic). The "make your own quantity" cards are all tracked in our backend system (a centralized SCO-UNIX server in our back office, which routes to a big honking server via satellite). But the "given quantity" cards (like the aforementioned stack 'o' $50 cards) are not (I can tell because of the lack of processing time when they are sold, versus the "create your own").
My guess is that the number scheme for those $50 cards is already embedded in our system. It's a simple case of using a scanner/programmer to see which digits differ between active and inactive units. The fun part comes from the fact that any purchase over $100 requires that we enter a telephone number and address for an individual. All returns and exhanges are handled from this address, and we can track everything any person has bought or returned since the beginning of our central-server implementation (~13 years ago). If a person purchases an inordinately large amount of things with gift cards, the system will tag it, and Loss Prevention at Corporate will be alerted. The further fun aspect comes from the fact that the digits on the gift cards are tied to a given store location when they are shipped out, so I don't think it would be too hard to figure out a) which store they're coming from and b) which employee is "hooking" people up.
I burned a DVD-R movie using a Pioneer DVD-R/RW Drive. Popped it in the PS2, and it played away. So yeah, stright up out of the box, it plays just fine.
Don't believe me? Head up to your local Circuit City and ask to record a "Message From America". They'll tape you with a Digital 8 tape, and 20 minutes later you'll have a DVD-R with your message on it that'll work just fine in your PS2.
I posted regarding this story back when it was first announced. I still stand by my assertion that this money could be better spent to pay teachers/repair schools (but that might just be because I'm majoring in English with plans to teach).
But, if Maine wanted to go with a laptop solution, I'd have to say that the iBook was a wise choice. I own an iBook, and I can say that this thing would be my primary choice for a situation like this (except for maybe Panasonic's Toughbook, but those cost far too much). Take note school districts:
1) Durability - While I haven't actually dropped my iBook, it does live in my backpack when it isn't in use. I have dropped the whole backpack (no damage), and it has flown off the passenger seat when idiots pull out in front of my car (still no damage). I have walked with it under my arm in a hard rain (no damage).
2) Heavily integrated - yeah, this isn't a good idea most of the time, but broken dongles will no longer be an issue. Neither will stolen NICs/Wireless NICs.
3) Lightweight - As far as I know, the iBook has the lowest weight for a laptop in its price range. $1,299 retail for a 4.9 lbs. laptop is a helluva deal.
4) Sort of bastardized security through obscurity - 95% of these 1337 7th and 8th graders don't know enough about Mac OS/mac hardware to cause serious damage. I can just see some jerk setting BIOS passwords or messing with clock frequencies or IDE device settings on little Suzy's PC laptop when she got up to go to the bathroom.
5) Useable UNIX - escape the MS tax AND teach the kiddies some UNIX all at the same time (that was my requisite karma whoring). I could actually see this being fairly useful, though. Only give the kids user privileges in OS X, and make them find someone with root access in order to install programs. "Okay little Billy, tell me again why you need Starcraft for school use...". This also solves any problems that might stem from some jerk trying to erase important parts of the system.
Overall, I think buying laptops is a waste of money, but I'd say that iBooks are probably the way to go.
The plane crashed shortly after 9 a.m. and thick, black smoke could be scene in televised reports.
/. effect goes further than just bandwidth... looks like Taco's writing for Yahoo.
Apparently, the
Please note: I am not trying to be disrespectful in the face of death; I simply find that a little humor can cheer everyone up.
[sarcasm] ;-)
If it just assembled itself into a beowulf cluster of multiple instances of itself
[/sarcasm]
Yes, that WAS lame...