Or you can find a country that, like China, does not overcharge high rip-off prices, but unlike China, has better enforcement on this. Then you neither pay now nor pay later.
In other news, North Pole granted accession to the WTO; attempts at elf unionization fail.
I agree it doesn't make sense. Plus, when you load the truck up with fake goods, it means that the contents won't be written off as quickly as a loss and passed on to the insurance company, which if you're into cargo theft, is exactly what you want to happen. The faster the load is just written off, the sooner people forget about it.
A load of stuff that just gets stolen happens all the time; the police probably aren't even going to investigate it that hard. (If anything, they'll look hard at the driver, because the way cargo theft normally works is that somebody gets their hooks into the driver and 'encourages' him to park his truck somewhere and go eat lunch.) If you swap the stolen goods out for fakes, then the crime might take a little longer to uncover, but it's going to stay alive for significantly longer. It's an anomalous crime as well, meaning it'll attract more attention.
A bright blip on the radar screen which fades away fast, is far preferable to a dimmer blip that stays up there for longer.
I'm not saying it couldn't happen -- criminals sometimes do bizarre, illogical things (but usually only once) -- just that it seems really unlikely.
I've heard stories that a lot of the off-brand clothing and shoes that you can buy in Asia are actually produced in the same factories that make name-brand stuff. At the end of the day, after finishing a run of $US_BRAND, they'll bring in the third-shifters and run another production cycle and just not put the logos on. (And depending on who you ask, use lower quality raw materials, etc. etc.)
I wonder if the contract electronics assemblers are doing similar stuff? Seems like it would be pretty easy. If you're assembling network cards for Cisco, you know where all the parts are coming from, and how to put them together. Chances are, all the parts suppliers are also going to be Chinese; not too difficult to call them up and request an extra 1,000 widgets, and just pay for it out-of-pocket. Then you just keep assembling parts until the supplies are exhausted, package up whatever you've promised to deliver to the foreign company (Cisco), and sell the remainder to a local distributor who makes sure they disappear into basically untraceable Asian markets.
As foreign companies outsource more and more of not only the production and assembly, but also the supply-chain-management and procurement functions to "one stop shops," this becomes easier and easier. There are plenty of companies who would be happy to manufacture your widget for you, and handle all the parts sourcing -- allowing Western companies to avoid all the unpleasantness that sometimes involves. But that means there's very little way to verify whether the company is ordering more components than are actually needed to complete the run. In fact, it's nearly impossible -- without intimate knowledge of the part's defect rate and of manufacturing errors, you have no idea how many extra parts need to be ordered. Are they buying 5% more ICs than necessary because they know the factory tends to produce crummy ones (but is still the cheapest available), and are looking out for you? Or are they padding the order so they can overproduce and sell the excess on the side?
Like you, I have little sympathy for American companies who get bitten by this. If they wanted control over the manufacturing process, they could keep it here in the States. If counterfeiting is what happens when you outsource everything to a country with cheap labor and little respect for foreign intellectual property, you made your bed and now you can sleep in it.
Did you examine or keep any of the fake ones around?
I'm really curious to see a "fake" one right next to an "authentic" Cisco part. Are they duplicates? Or just some other network card that they stamped a phoney Cisco logo on?
It would make a pretty big difference. In the latter case, they're nothing more than counterfeits, like the fake Rolexes that you can get from guys in Battery Park.
But if they're actual Cisco parts, being sold "unauthorized" (perhaps the factory they're outsourcing the assembly to decided to run an extra production shift or something, make a little money on the side), then the situation could be a lot different.
So which is it? A fake Rolex that actually has a $0.25 quartz movement inside? Or the real deal in terms of functionality and hardware, being made somehow without Cisco's approval and without going through their distribution chain?
I definitely agree with you; what I don't understand is what part of U.K. law Sony used to go after Lik-Sang and other importers.
It's pretty clear that grey-market importation is legal in the United States (heck, companies like B&H Photo do it all the time; sometimes you can even choose between the Grey and U.S. version of the same item), so I don't think the same thing could happen here unless Sony really wanted to buy Congress. Not that we didn't get close -- the USSC decision was 5-4 in favor of the gray market's "parallel importation," so it could have been different.
What's very odd to me is that people in the U.K. seem to tolerate their laws being used against them in such a self-defeating fashion. I was stunned when I went to England last, how much everything cost there even compared to Europe. It's bizarre that such a situation is allowed to exist given the ease of moving goods across the Channel. It's only through the tacit approval of a lot of people in the U.K. that this situation remains. If I were a U.K. politician, this seems like it would be a no-brainer issue to jump on. Nobody likes knowing that they're getting screwed by a bunch of foreigners, but yet as a country they're practically bending over and asking for it.
Maybe there's some benefit to the laws that are being (ab)used this way that I'm not seeing, but really it just seems like the U.K.-ers get hosed as a result of their own legal system.
Is there some sort of benefit to the U.K. of the laws prohibiting parallel importation? Or is the government there even more thoroughly bought by the multinational corporations than it is here?
I wear prescription sunglasses, which cost a small fortune, stand up to anything, and have to be comfortable because I can't see shit without them.
Just out of curiosity, where do you get them, or what brand are they? (The frames, particularly, but lenses also if they're not from the same company and you know.) Do you know the manufacturer or anything else?
I'm in the market for Rx sunglasses and I've been holding off because I just don't know how to make sure that I get good ones. One of the reasons people continue to buy brand-name goods is because it's a known quantity (and quality). Oakleys probably aren't great, but they're not total crap either; in the absence of any other information I'd probably end up buying them because at least I know they're "better than the spinny rack."
I have been thinking of WileyX frames and lenses because they have a decent reputation among the Rx-wearing police and military folks I've talked to (they've been described to me as "Oakleys, but with balls"), but I'd be interested to hear what some other people's experiences are.
this hardware limitaion is the same no matter what os
Wouldn't the way to get past the 4GB limit be to just use a 64-bit arch and OS, which Merom is?
As far as I understand it, the 4GB limitation (which leads to the 3GB application maximum, since 1GB is mapped by the kernel) is basically inherent in 32-bit architectures. There are hacks, of which PAE is the largest, that allow the processor to address more than 4GB of RAM, but even then you can only have 4GB per process. (Or is it 3GB per process? I don't really understand that. It can't be more than 4, that's for sure.) The processor uses extended memory addresses when it is "talking" to the RAM, in order to use the stuff that's in excess of 4GB, but it translates those addresses into fake 32-bit addresses that it presents to running processes, so each one thinks that it's just got 4GB (or less) to itself.
PAE is basically just a hack that shoehorned a larger address space into a 32-bit architecture; if you're in 64-bit-land (as Mac OS X is), then there's no reason for PAE to exist. All processes running in 64-bit mode should see the whole address space and thus you ought to not only be able to address huge quantities of physical memory from the processor, you should be able to give 4+GB chunks to individual processes.
Apple saw this limit coming up and switched from 32 to 64 bits, at a time when a lot of people derided them for this. They took a step backward with the early Intel Macs, but now they're getting most of their product line back there. Even if it is technically a hardware limitation and not software that creates the 3GB/4GB limit, since Windows' lackluster support for 64-bit is one of the reasons why ia32 is still "standard," it should get some portion of the blame.
Plenty of PC notebooks offer that and they all leave an Apple notebook in the dust for that application.
Not if you use Final Cut, they don't.
Without even getting into a Final Cut vs. Avid holy war over the relative merits of each, asking a video editor to change from FCP to Avid in order to save a few hundred bucks on hardware is ridiculous; the phrase "penny wise and pound foolish" comes to mind. A few hours of a good editor's time would more than make up for the difference in cost, and the retraining necessary to switch is going to be far more than that.
I know it's bad form to reply to myself, but I just thought I'd put it out there that FF 2.0 does, indeed, have real inline (underline-as-you-type) spell checking. I'm looking at it right now; it uses a straight horizontal red line underneath unknown words rather than the squiggles of Konqeror or the heavy dashes of Safari/OS X, but overall it looks pretty good.
Right-clicking on a "misspelled" word yields suggested corrections (e.g., "Konqueror" is suggested as 'Conquerors,' 'Conqueror,' etc.), as well as an option to disable checking for that field.
All in all, looks to be pretty well done. For anyone who spends any time on an online forum, it's a significant advantage over IE (which I am told will not have inline checking in v.7 -- odd, considering they popularized the feature in Word), and cause to upgrade from earlier Firefox versions.
Due to intense lobbying by the Coca-Cola corporation, I believe it counts as your choice of either a serving of vegetables, or 20 minutes of cardiovascular exercise.
As far as I can tell, that's not an inline spell checker. (I just installed SpellBound 0.7.3 onto my work machine running FF 1.0.7 -- yeah I know it's old, but I haven't had a compelling reason to upgrade.) It just gives you an option when you right-click in a text input box, to open a dialog that shows you your misspelled words. It doesn't actually change the behavior of the input field that's on the page, or give you highlight-as-you-type checking.
On FF 1.5, does it actually underline misspelled words as you type, in the field on the page? Or is it just the same thing, a separate dialog box that shows up, which you have to trigger manually? If the latter is the case, then I'm very disappointed. Safari and Konqueror 3.5 both have as-you-type checking like basically like any decent word processor. (I think both use the integrated spell checking of their respective OSes, OS X and KDE.)
Dialog-box driven spell checkers are rather 1992. I sure hope that's not the state-of-the-art in Firefox spell checking.
One of the great things about being the Woz is that you don't have to give a shit what anyone thinks of you because you're so rich you know you could buy their house, burn it down, hire hit men to kill them, and sell their children into slavery in an iPod factory, anytime you damn well want to.
If he was working 4PM-to-close at Taco Bell, an attitude like that probably wouldn't go far.
I have worked in an organization with a similar "idea bank" system, and it's not always that bad.
In a large organization, it can provide a forum for people 'in the trenches' to pitch their ideas to manager-types, who they might otherwise never run into.
A key part of the idea bank that I saw, was that people were given credit for the idea; if you suggested a good way to do something, and you made your pitch (the suggestion on the idea bank) well so that it piqued someone powerful's interest, then you stood a chance of getting pulled up to work on its implementation.
There was a definite "lottery" aspect to it -- 'watch desperate peons attempt to win recognition for their crazy idea!' -- but it wasn't as if just by submitting an idea, you were shooting yourself in the foot.
It also served as a big bitch-session for internal policies that folks hated; I'm not sure whether that was really an intended purpose or not.
"They" are the millions of people who don't read Slashdot and have no idea who Lik-Sang is. "They" are the people who only heard about the rootkit when it was on CNN. "They" are the millions of people who probably have a vague idea that their Gap t-shirt and Nike shoes were made by an underpaid child laborer, and don't really care; or that the $199 bargain PC they bought was probably made at a factory that dumps toxic waste into the environment, and buy it anyway. They are the people who keep Wal-Mart in business, even if the result is the elimination of local jobs or stores.
Most people do not care about ethical dilemmas if taking the 'high road' costs more than a few dollars extra. If you want to get them involved in a boycott, there either has to be some tangible goal that will benefit them, or the boycott can't cost them anything.
The free market value of a "warm, fuzzy feeling" is virtually nil.
The only thing I've bought from Sony recently (within the past 3 years) is a MiniDV camcorder. I thought "no way they can possibly fuck that up," right? I mean, it's a standard format.
Well, they tried; it uses the most bizarre power cord design I've ever seen. Sure, they could have used a regular barrel-and-pin connector like everyone else in the world does, but no. They have to go with this hideous E-shaped abortion of a plug, which only works with Sony gear and of course isn't compatible with generic DC converters and whatnot.
I also noticed that on the new "Minolta" cameras (Sony A100), they've gone the same route. Pity Konica didn't sell the Minolta division out to Panasonic instead.
I can sum up Sony in one word: control.
They want to control everything. Any opportunity they have to own a particular niche or distribution channel, even if it's something as dumb as power adaptors, they'll take. Even when it's control that any rational person would agree they have no right to have (say, over your computer), they try to take it. The issue with Lik-Sang is similar; Lik-Sang challenged Sony's absolute, iron-fisted control over product distribution, and Sony destroyed them for it. There are really few companies who can compete with Sony in terms of arrogance and disrespect for their customers.
You are aware they were based out of Hong Kong, right? At least that's my understanding.
I'm not sure where they should move to, if they want to sell Asian video games to the Western market. I would have thought they were safe there. Sony probably has enough political heft in Japan to make that a non-starter, and I assume that the Chinese would probably happily make life miserable for a "foreign" company in order to score points with the West during the run-up to the Olympics (in the same way that they occasionally crack down on piracy). Russia is busy giving sucky-sucky to everyone and their cousin in order to get admission to the WTO...
Maybe they could put their servers in Sealand, handle the financial transactions through the Cayman Islands or Switzerland, and drop-ship the packages from anonymous storefronts in major cities in Southeast Asia?
Cripes, at that point it seems more like operating a terrorist cell than a videogames exporter. Course, if Sony ran the world, there wouldn't be a difference.
They were bypassing Sony's "official" channels and hurting their ability to price discriminate.
The 'grey market' is an equalizer; it's a basically unified marketplace that defies the attempts of the monopolists to charge different prices for the same thing in different places, by taking advantage of the cheap global transportation that we're blessed with today.
Boycotts don't work because consumers don't like giving stuff up.
In this case, you could always just pirate it instead of buying. Still gives them mindshare, but no profits. Seem to me that's the only way you'd ever accomplish a Sony boycott.
Consumers are sheep; unless provided an equally-attractive alternative, they'll never really give anything they enjoy up, no matter how repugnant its production might be.
Not a biggie if you don't use online forums, but with the increase in the number of websites that let you write as well as read (think MySpace, Facebook, various forums, Writely/Google Docs, etc.), people are going to come to expect more advanced editing capabilities in their browser. Having spent some time using browsers that have inline (red underlining) spell checkers, such as Safari and Konqueror 3.5, going back to Firefox is always painful.
It's not nearly as much of an advantage over IE as tabbed browsing was, so there's little doubt that the gap between the two has narrowed somewhat, but it's still something.
Does anyone know whether Google Browser Sync is compatible with 2.0?
I'm planning to get the release when it goes public this afternoon (finally, an inline spell-checker!), but I'm not going to start using it as my primary browser until GBS supports it.
I was figuring that the "price" for a novel would require that it be submitted in digital form, so that's why I was thinking something like $50; having the rights to $RANDOM_NOVEL isn't worth much until you have that novel typed in and stored in a database somewhere. I'd offer to buy both the rights and a digital copy of the work in a package, requiring a larger payout, but probably less than the cost of having to do the digitization yourself.
So while the rights to something might be worth very little, the rights plus a digitized copy in some sort of standard format (straight ASCII, etc.) might well be worth considerably more.
But you're right, it would be good to find some way of establishing the "market price" of such old works, and then if offering that didn't bring in many submissions, tacking on a few dollars to encourage people to go to the effort of going through their attic for an old manuscript and typing it all in.
As long as it's a voluntary rating system, I'm with you. But as soon as it becomes a mandatory rating system, then I think you've crossed the line, and I'm not willing to give the folks running the rating system that much control over society, for the sake of your or anybody else's kids. Sorry. (Particularly since a mandatory rating system would never work -- what would we do, use our nuclear arsenal to threaten to annihilate countries that don't make webmasters flag exposed nipples? At best, you'd have to fracture the net and create some sort of Great Firewall to block traffic from countries that didn't want to enforce ratings, or which used different ratings systems.)
If there really are that many people who are worried about what their kids see on the internet, then I think there will be (and is, demonstratably) a market for censored access. Webmasters who wanted their sites to be accessible to people on censored connections could apply to the rating agency to be added to the whitelist, which would require basically promising that your site was free of various types of adult material. If a site did have adult material, then it would be a straightforward breach of contract civil suit (or potentially fraud). This avoids the time consuming process of having to actually inspect each site for content, which has always been the bane of whitelists. Really ultra-paranoid parents, or those with particularly emotionally sensitive or disturbed children, could choose to buy additional levels of restriction, perhaps onto to hand-inspected sites, if they wanted to protect against even the occasional fradulent submission.
The analogy to buying cable TV with all the adult channels is an apt one. Any intelligent person these days ought to know that there is a lot of porn -- and other "adult themes" -- on the internet. If you choose to get uncensored internet access (which today is all internet access), and allow your kids to use it, then you are making a determination that it's worth the risk. If it's not, just don't get internet access. It's not like it's coming into anyone's house automatically, like broadcast TV or radio; it takes a conscious effort to sign up and pay every month for a connection.
I would rather that families which children just stayed unplugged until ISPs realize that there is a market for censored internet and provide it, then try and turn everyone's internet into some sort of "family friendly zone," which it both will not and can never be; trying to make it so using heavy-handed legislative tactics can only have the effect of driving internet business out of the U.S. or perhaps fragmenting the Internet completely.
You should be able to toss your laundry down a chute, and have it automatically sorted, washed, dried, and returned to you, ready to wear again. I don't want a TV or house that acts like a naggy mother.
It's ironic, however, that a "naggy mother" is the only system currently known which does all the functions you specify in one unit.
We need a new killer feature to replace tabs, now that they've become mundane. I'm not sure that an inline spell-checker is it, but it seems to be the best thing going at the moment.
Yeah, can't really come up with a good excuse for making that error. It's Monday; let's go with that.
Tabs are definitely nice, but they're hardly a selling point anymore. There comes a time when it doesn't matter if you invented a feature or not, everybody's now using it, and if you don't keep developing new cool features, you'll be nothing but a subsection in a Wikipedia article somewhere.
Everybody and their cousin now has tabs. It may have taken them more a seriously embarrassing long time, but even Microsoft has seen the light. Therefore, it's no longer worth talking about. Tabs are here; stick a fork in them, because they're dead. At least from a selling-point perspective.
What is FF2.0 going to offer the average person that's going to make them care, now that IE7 has tabs as well? I don't see many features that are as slick as tabs were. The best thing I've seen is inline spell checking. Microsoft still hasn't figured out that it's not just for word processors anymore (and you'd really think that they would; seeing as Word basically popularized the whole red-underline-means-you're-wrong thing). But at least based on what I've read, IE7 isn't going to do it, and that gives FF a small advantage, at least for people that use online forms. As more and more Web 2.0 / interactive stuff comes out, this becomes a nicer and nicer feature to have. (Heck, it's why I use Safari instead of Firefox right now.)
We need a new killer feature to replace tabs, now that they've become germane. I'm not sure that an inline spell-checker is it, but it seems to be the best thing going at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you can find a country that, like China, does not overcharge high rip-off prices, but unlike China, has better enforcement on this. Then you neither pay now nor pay later.
In other news, North Pole granted accession to the WTO; attempts at elf unionization fail.
I agree it doesn't make sense. Plus, when you load the truck up with fake goods, it means that the contents won't be written off as quickly as a loss and passed on to the insurance company, which if you're into cargo theft, is exactly what you want to happen. The faster the load is just written off, the sooner people forget about it.
A load of stuff that just gets stolen happens all the time; the police probably aren't even going to investigate it that hard. (If anything, they'll look hard at the driver, because the way cargo theft normally works is that somebody gets their hooks into the driver and 'encourages' him to park his truck somewhere and go eat lunch.) If you swap the stolen goods out for fakes, then the crime might take a little longer to uncover, but it's going to stay alive for significantly longer. It's an anomalous crime as well, meaning it'll attract more attention.
A bright blip on the radar screen which fades away fast, is far preferable to a dimmer blip that stays up there for longer.
I'm not saying it couldn't happen -- criminals sometimes do bizarre, illogical things (but usually only once) -- just that it seems really unlikely.
I've heard stories that a lot of the off-brand clothing and shoes that you can buy in Asia are actually produced in the same factories that make name-brand stuff. At the end of the day, after finishing a run of $US_BRAND, they'll bring in the third-shifters and run another production cycle and just not put the logos on. (And depending on who you ask, use lower quality raw materials, etc. etc.)
I wonder if the contract electronics assemblers are doing similar stuff? Seems like it would be pretty easy. If you're assembling network cards for Cisco, you know where all the parts are coming from, and how to put them together. Chances are, all the parts suppliers are also going to be Chinese; not too difficult to call them up and request an extra 1,000 widgets, and just pay for it out-of-pocket. Then you just keep assembling parts until the supplies are exhausted, package up whatever you've promised to deliver to the foreign company (Cisco), and sell the remainder to a local distributor who makes sure they disappear into basically untraceable Asian markets.
As foreign companies outsource more and more of not only the production and assembly, but also the supply-chain-management and procurement functions to "one stop shops," this becomes easier and easier. There are plenty of companies who would be happy to manufacture your widget for you, and handle all the parts sourcing -- allowing Western companies to avoid all the unpleasantness that sometimes involves. But that means there's very little way to verify whether the company is ordering more components than are actually needed to complete the run. In fact, it's nearly impossible -- without intimate knowledge of the part's defect rate and of manufacturing errors, you have no idea how many extra parts need to be ordered. Are they buying 5% more ICs than necessary because they know the factory tends to produce crummy ones (but is still the cheapest available), and are looking out for you? Or are they padding the order so they can overproduce and sell the excess on the side?
Like you, I have little sympathy for American companies who get bitten by this. If they wanted control over the manufacturing process, they could keep it here in the States. If counterfeiting is what happens when you outsource everything to a country with cheap labor and little respect for foreign intellectual property, you made your bed and now you can sleep in it.
Did you examine or keep any of the fake ones around?
I'm really curious to see a "fake" one right next to an "authentic" Cisco part. Are they duplicates? Or just some other network card that they stamped a phoney Cisco logo on?
It would make a pretty big difference. In the latter case, they're nothing more than counterfeits, like the fake Rolexes that you can get from guys in Battery Park.
But if they're actual Cisco parts, being sold "unauthorized" (perhaps the factory they're outsourcing the assembly to decided to run an extra production shift or something, make a little money on the side), then the situation could be a lot different.
So which is it? A fake Rolex that actually has a $0.25 quartz movement inside? Or the real deal in terms of functionality and hardware, being made somehow without Cisco's approval and without going through their distribution chain?
I definitely agree with you; what I don't understand is what part of U.K. law Sony used to go after Lik-Sang and other importers.
It's pretty clear that grey-market importation is legal in the United States (heck, companies like B&H Photo do it all the time; sometimes you can even choose between the Grey and U.S. version of the same item), so I don't think the same thing could happen here unless Sony really wanted to buy Congress. Not that we didn't get close -- the USSC decision was 5-4 in favor of the gray market's "parallel importation," so it could have been different.
What's very odd to me is that people in the U.K. seem to tolerate their laws being used against them in such a self-defeating fashion. I was stunned when I went to England last, how much everything cost there even compared to Europe. It's bizarre that such a situation is allowed to exist given the ease of moving goods across the Channel. It's only through the tacit approval of a lot of people in the U.K. that this situation remains. If I were a U.K. politician, this seems like it would be a no-brainer issue to jump on. Nobody likes knowing that they're getting screwed by a bunch of foreigners, but yet as a country they're practically bending over and asking for it.
Maybe there's some benefit to the laws that are being (ab)used this way that I'm not seeing, but really it just seems like the U.K.-ers get hosed as a result of their own legal system.
Is there some sort of benefit to the U.K. of the laws prohibiting parallel importation? Or is the government there even more thoroughly bought by the multinational corporations than it is here?
I wear prescription sunglasses, which cost a small fortune, stand up to anything, and have to be comfortable because I can't see shit without them.
Just out of curiosity, where do you get them, or what brand are they? (The frames, particularly, but lenses also if they're not from the same company and you know.) Do you know the manufacturer or anything else?
I'm in the market for Rx sunglasses and I've been holding off because I just don't know how to make sure that I get good ones. One of the reasons people continue to buy brand-name goods is because it's a known quantity (and quality). Oakleys probably aren't great, but they're not total crap either; in the absence of any other information I'd probably end up buying them because at least I know they're "better than the spinny rack."
I have been thinking of WileyX frames and lenses because they have a decent reputation among the Rx-wearing police and military folks I've talked to (they've been described to me as "Oakleys, but with balls"), but I'd be interested to hear what some other people's experiences are.
this hardware limitaion is the same no matter what os
Wouldn't the way to get past the 4GB limit be to just use a 64-bit arch and OS, which Merom is?
As far as I understand it, the 4GB limitation (which leads to the 3GB application maximum, since 1GB is mapped by the kernel) is basically inherent in 32-bit architectures. There are hacks, of which PAE is the largest, that allow the processor to address more than 4GB of RAM, but even then you can only have 4GB per process. (Or is it 3GB per process? I don't really understand that. It can't be more than 4, that's for sure.) The processor uses extended memory addresses when it is "talking" to the RAM, in order to use the stuff that's in excess of 4GB, but it translates those addresses into fake 32-bit addresses that it presents to running processes, so each one thinks that it's just got 4GB (or less) to itself.
PAE is basically just a hack that shoehorned a larger address space into a 32-bit architecture; if you're in 64-bit-land (as Mac OS X is), then there's no reason for PAE to exist. All processes running in 64-bit mode should see the whole address space and thus you ought to not only be able to address huge quantities of physical memory from the processor, you should be able to give 4+GB chunks to individual processes.
Apple saw this limit coming up and switched from 32 to 64 bits, at a time when a lot of people derided them for this. They took a step backward with the early Intel Macs, but now they're getting most of their product line back there. Even if it is technically a hardware limitation and not software that creates the 3GB/4GB limit, since Windows' lackluster support for 64-bit is one of the reasons why ia32 is still "standard," it should get some portion of the blame.
Plenty of PC notebooks offer that and they all leave an Apple notebook in the dust for that application.
Not if you use Final Cut, they don't.
Without even getting into a Final Cut vs. Avid holy war over the relative merits of each, asking a video editor to change from FCP to Avid in order to save a few hundred bucks on hardware is ridiculous; the phrase "penny wise and pound foolish" comes to mind. A few hours of a good editor's time would more than make up for the difference in cost, and the retraining necessary to switch is going to be far more than that.
I know it's bad form to reply to myself, but I just thought I'd put it out there that FF 2.0 does, indeed, have real inline (underline-as-you-type) spell checking. I'm looking at it right now; it uses a straight horizontal red line underneath unknown words rather than the squiggles of Konqeror or the heavy dashes of Safari/OS X, but overall it looks pretty good.
Right-clicking on a "misspelled" word yields suggested corrections (e.g., "Konqueror" is suggested as 'Conquerors,' 'Conqueror,' etc.), as well as an option to disable checking for that field.
All in all, looks to be pretty well done. For anyone who spends any time on an online forum, it's a significant advantage over IE (which I am told will not have inline checking in v.7 -- odd, considering they popularized the feature in Word), and cause to upgrade from earlier Firefox versions.
Due to intense lobbying by the Coca-Cola corporation, I believe it counts as your choice of either a serving of vegetables, or 20 minutes of cardiovascular exercise.
As far as I can tell, that's not an inline spell checker. (I just installed SpellBound 0.7.3 onto my work machine running FF 1.0.7 -- yeah I know it's old, but I haven't had a compelling reason to upgrade.) It just gives you an option when you right-click in a text input box, to open a dialog that shows you your misspelled words. It doesn't actually change the behavior of the input field that's on the page, or give you highlight-as-you-type checking.
On FF 1.5, does it actually underline misspelled words as you type, in the field on the page? Or is it just the same thing, a separate dialog box that shows up, which you have to trigger manually? If the latter is the case, then I'm very disappointed. Safari and Konqueror 3.5 both have as-you-type checking like basically like any decent word processor. (I think both use the integrated spell checking of their respective OSes, OS X and KDE.)
Dialog-box driven spell checkers are rather 1992. I sure hope that's not the state-of-the-art in Firefox spell checking.
You missed a part:
One of the great things about being the Woz is that you don't have to give a shit what anyone thinks of you because you're so rich you know you could buy their house, burn it down, hire hit men to kill them, and sell their children into slavery in an iPod factory, anytime you damn well want to.
If he was working 4PM-to-close at Taco Bell, an attitude like that probably wouldn't go far.
I have worked in an organization with a similar "idea bank" system, and it's not always that bad.
In a large organization, it can provide a forum for people 'in the trenches' to pitch their ideas to manager-types, who they might otherwise never run into.
A key part of the idea bank that I saw, was that people were given credit for the idea; if you suggested a good way to do something, and you made your pitch (the suggestion on the idea bank) well so that it piqued someone powerful's interest, then you stood a chance of getting pulled up to work on its implementation.
There was a definite "lottery" aspect to it -- 'watch desperate peons attempt to win recognition for their crazy idea!' -- but it wasn't as if just by submitting an idea, you were shooting yourself in the foot.
It also served as a big bitch-session for internal policies that folks hated; I'm not sure whether that was really an intended purpose or not.
"They" are the millions of people who don't read Slashdot and have no idea who Lik-Sang is. "They" are the people who only heard about the rootkit when it was on CNN. "They" are the millions of people who probably have a vague idea that their Gap t-shirt and Nike shoes were made by an underpaid child laborer, and don't really care; or that the $199 bargain PC they bought was probably made at a factory that dumps toxic waste into the environment, and buy it anyway. They are the people who keep Wal-Mart in business, even if the result is the elimination of local jobs or stores.
Most people do not care about ethical dilemmas if taking the 'high road' costs more than a few dollars extra. If you want to get them involved in a boycott, there either has to be some tangible goal that will benefit them, or the boycott can't cost them anything.
The free market value of a "warm, fuzzy feeling" is virtually nil.
The only thing I've bought from Sony recently (within the past 3 years) is a MiniDV camcorder. I thought "no way they can possibly fuck that up," right? I mean, it's a standard format.
Well, they tried; it uses the most bizarre power cord design I've ever seen. Sure, they could have used a regular barrel-and-pin connector like everyone else in the world does, but no. They have to go with this hideous E-shaped abortion of a plug, which only works with Sony gear and of course isn't compatible with generic DC converters and whatnot.
I also noticed that on the new "Minolta" cameras (Sony A100), they've gone the same route. Pity Konica didn't sell the Minolta division out to Panasonic instead.
I can sum up Sony in one word: control.
They want to control everything. Any opportunity they have to own a particular niche or distribution channel, even if it's something as dumb as power adaptors, they'll take. Even when it's control that any rational person would agree they have no right to have (say, over your computer), they try to take it. The issue with Lik-Sang is similar; Lik-Sang challenged Sony's absolute, iron-fisted control over product distribution, and Sony destroyed them for it. There are really few companies who can compete with Sony in terms of arrogance and disrespect for their customers.
You are aware they were based out of Hong Kong, right? At least that's my understanding.
I'm not sure where they should move to, if they want to sell Asian video games to the Western market. I would have thought they were safe there. Sony probably has enough political heft in Japan to make that a non-starter, and I assume that the Chinese would probably happily make life miserable for a "foreign" company in order to score points with the West during the run-up to the Olympics (in the same way that they occasionally crack down on piracy). Russia is busy giving sucky-sucky to everyone and their cousin in order to get admission to the WTO...
Maybe they could put their servers in Sealand, handle the financial transactions through the Cayman Islands or Switzerland, and drop-ship the packages from anonymous storefronts in major cities in Southeast Asia?
Cripes, at that point it seems more like operating a terrorist cell than a videogames exporter. Course, if Sony ran the world, there wouldn't be a difference.
They were bypassing Sony's "official" channels and hurting their ability to price discriminate.
The 'grey market' is an equalizer; it's a basically unified marketplace that defies the attempts of the monopolists to charge different prices for the same thing in different places, by taking advantage of the cheap global transportation that we're blessed with today.
This is why it's so hated.
Boycotts don't work because consumers don't like giving stuff up.
In this case, you could always just pirate it instead of buying. Still gives them mindshare, but no profits. Seem to me that's the only way you'd ever accomplish a Sony boycott.
Consumers are sheep; unless provided an equally-attractive alternative, they'll never really give anything they enjoy up, no matter how repugnant its production might be.
3) Inline spell-checking.
Not a biggie if you don't use online forums, but with the increase in the number of websites that let you write as well as read (think MySpace, Facebook, various forums, Writely/Google Docs, etc.), people are going to come to expect more advanced editing capabilities in their browser. Having spent some time using browsers that have inline (red underlining) spell checkers, such as Safari and Konqueror 3.5, going back to Firefox is always painful.
It's not nearly as much of an advantage over IE as tabbed browsing was, so there's little doubt that the gap between the two has narrowed somewhat, but it's still something.
Does anyone know whether Google Browser Sync is compatible with 2.0?
I'm planning to get the release when it goes public this afternoon (finally, an inline spell-checker!), but I'm not going to start using it as my primary browser until GBS supports it.
I was figuring that the "price" for a novel would require that it be submitted in digital form, so that's why I was thinking something like $50; having the rights to $RANDOM_NOVEL isn't worth much until you have that novel typed in and stored in a database somewhere. I'd offer to buy both the rights and a digital copy of the work in a package, requiring a larger payout, but probably less than the cost of having to do the digitization yourself.
So while the rights to something might be worth very little, the rights plus a digitized copy in some sort of standard format (straight ASCII, etc.) might well be worth considerably more.
But you're right, it would be good to find some way of establishing the "market price" of such old works, and then if offering that didn't bring in many submissions, tacking on a few dollars to encourage people to go to the effort of going through their attic for an old manuscript and typing it all in.
As long as it's a voluntary rating system, I'm with you. But as soon as it becomes a mandatory rating system, then I think you've crossed the line, and I'm not willing to give the folks running the rating system that much control over society, for the sake of your or anybody else's kids. Sorry. (Particularly since a mandatory rating system would never work -- what would we do, use our nuclear arsenal to threaten to annihilate countries that don't make webmasters flag exposed nipples? At best, you'd have to fracture the net and create some sort of Great Firewall to block traffic from countries that didn't want to enforce ratings, or which used different ratings systems.)
If there really are that many people who are worried about what their kids see on the internet, then I think there will be (and is, demonstratably) a market for censored access. Webmasters who wanted their sites to be accessible to people on censored connections could apply to the rating agency to be added to the whitelist, which would require basically promising that your site was free of various types of adult material. If a site did have adult material, then it would be a straightforward breach of contract civil suit (or potentially fraud). This avoids the time consuming process of having to actually inspect each site for content, which has always been the bane of whitelists. Really ultra-paranoid parents, or those with particularly emotionally sensitive or disturbed children, could choose to buy additional levels of restriction, perhaps onto to hand-inspected sites, if they wanted to protect against even the occasional fradulent submission.
The analogy to buying cable TV with all the adult channels is an apt one. Any intelligent person these days ought to know that there is a lot of porn -- and other "adult themes" -- on the internet. If you choose to get uncensored internet access (which today is all internet access), and allow your kids to use it, then you are making a determination that it's worth the risk. If it's not, just don't get internet access. It's not like it's coming into anyone's house automatically, like broadcast TV or radio; it takes a conscious effort to sign up and pay every month for a connection.
I would rather that families which children just stayed unplugged until ISPs realize that there is a market for censored internet and provide it, then try and turn everyone's internet into some sort of "family friendly zone," which it both will not and can never be; trying to make it so using heavy-handed legislative tactics can only have the effect of driving internet business out of the U.S. or perhaps fragmenting the Internet completely.
You should be able to toss your laundry down a chute, and have it automatically sorted, washed, dried, and returned to you, ready to wear again. I don't want a TV or house that acts like a naggy mother.
It's ironic, however, that a "naggy mother" is the only system currently known which does all the functions you specify in one unit.
We need a new killer feature to replace tabs, now that they've become mundane. I'm not sure that an inline spell-checker is it, but it seems to be the best thing going at the moment.
Yeah, can't really come up with a good excuse for making that error. It's Monday; let's go with that.
Tabs are definitely nice, but they're hardly a selling point anymore. There comes a time when it doesn't matter if you invented a feature or not, everybody's now using it, and if you don't keep developing new cool features, you'll be nothing but a subsection in a Wikipedia article somewhere.
Everybody and their cousin now has tabs. It may have taken them more a seriously embarrassing long time, but even Microsoft has seen the light. Therefore, it's no longer worth talking about. Tabs are here; stick a fork in them, because they're dead. At least from a selling-point perspective.
What is FF2.0 going to offer the average person that's going to make them care, now that IE7 has tabs as well? I don't see many features that are as slick as tabs were. The best thing I've seen is inline spell checking. Microsoft still hasn't figured out that it's not just for word processors anymore (and you'd really think that they would; seeing as Word basically popularized the whole red-underline-means-you're-wrong thing). But at least based on what I've read, IE7 isn't going to do it, and that gives FF a small advantage, at least for people that use online forms. As more and more Web 2.0 / interactive stuff comes out, this becomes a nicer and nicer feature to have. (Heck, it's why I use Safari instead of Firefox right now.)
We need a new killer feature to replace tabs, now that they've become germane. I'm not sure that an inline spell-checker is it, but it seems to be the best thing going at the moment.